Chương 506: 240.Individual Events Concluded 2

Five minutes to the Vice-Captain's match. Coming out of the broadcast, that should have been a routine scheduling reminder. In my ear, it landed a lot closer to: please select your preferred method of dignified death within five minutes. The reason was simple. Our Vice-Captain was nowhere to be found.

"You look terrible, Hoshino." Irena sat on the bench, flexing her knuckles, delivering the observation in the same detached, faintly irritated tone she used for most things.

"Relax. Emily will show up." I looked at her.

"Every time you say 'relax' in that tone, the thing you're telling me to relax about is never actually fine."

"That's you borrowing trouble." She said it easily — easily enough that our Vice-Captain might as well have been temp labor borrowed from the next booth over. And the worst part was that it wasn't an act. Irena's faith in Emily had reached a level that would make a sane person wonder if she'd left her judgment at the cybernetics shop for maintenance along with everything else. Unfortunately, I wasn't Irena. The theory that she'll turn up on her own gave me exactly zero comfort. I stood.

"I'll go find her."

"Quick trip." Irena tipped her chin, a faintly insufferable smile at the corner of her mouth.

"Bring our problem child back in one piece." I didn't bother answering. I walked straight out. A pre-match rest room at Vice-Captain level shouldn't have been this quiet. Gear checks, controlled breathing, someone double-checking tactical parameters on a datapad. Instead, all I got was the low hum of the air conditioning and the dry sound of my own footsteps — dry in a way that felt like a bad omen. The room was empty.

I stood in the doorway, staring at the row of empty lockers and the empty bench, and felt my stomach drop a clean notch. Of course. I knew it. Irena's she'll be fine was exactly like a free drink in a casino — sounds considerate, but it's really just there to keep you from noticing how badly you're about to lose. I was turning to leave when a soft sound came through the wall from the smoking room next door. Metal knuckles against plaster. Or a heel lazily kicking a doorframe. I stopped.... No way.

I walked over and pushed the door open. Guessed right. She was leaning against the wall. Not the exaggerated scene I'd half-pictured — no carpet of cigarette butts, no ventilation system pushed hard enough to trip an alarm. She was just parked there, indifferent, like this wasn't a pre-match smoking room but exactly the corner she was always meant to occupy. A black tank top kept her frame clean — nothing decorative, nothing but function and impatience.

The shorts were the same, doing their job as long as they didn't restrict movement. From the shoulder down, her left arm was matte black military prosthetic, joints and plating never designed to look good, only expensive, thick, and industrial enough to make you wonder if the engineer had any intention of letting the user live comfortably. Both legs matched — intimidating even standing still, worse once they moved.

Her right arm was still flesh, covered shoulder to hand in old black-and-grey tattoos, the lines like bad temper pressed under skin. A rolled cigarette was caught at the corner of her mouth. Flaxen hair tied back carelessly. When her blue eyes came up, they moved like she'd already priced you before deciding whether you were worth a sentence. Emily Smith. Not the kind of student the school put on a recruitment poster.

The kind the school knew better than to put on one — and refused to leave off the roster the second it actually needed to win. She glanced at me. The first thing to react wasn't her mouth. It was a lazy breath through her nose.

"Huh." She moved the cigarette aside.

"Model student Hoshino, showing up in a place like this?" I stayed in the doorway.

"I'm here to get you."

"Figured." She took a slow drag, the smoke drifting thin in front of her face, thin like a form of courtesy that couldn't be bothered to try harder.

"Otherwise you'd have to be here to pick up bad habits."

"I don't have time for this. Under five minutes."

"Then we've still got five." I nearly grabbed her by the collar right there. The strange thing was, she wasn't the type who simply made you angry. Her expression never once treated you as a joke while she talked — and precisely because it didn't, the way she caught other people's urgency and lobbed it back, careless and slow, was somehow worse.

"Emily." I didn't bother with the surname. She must have heard how close I was to the edge, because she finally smiled — not warm, just the smile of someone confirming a hypothesis. Then she straightened, pressed the cigarette out on the metal tray in one crisp motion, like she'd never intended to finish it. She walked past me without slowing, dropping one line on the way out.

"I can tell. You and I used to be the same kind of person." I froze for half a second.

"What—" She didn't look back. Metal feet on tile, one step at a time, as steady as a countdown on someone else's patience. She walked out, leaving no obligation to explain. I stood in the last thin trace of smoke, and it felt less like an irritant than a bad premonition. It was the fastest I'd ever decided I didn't like someone. Not because of the smoking. Not the carelessness. Not even because she could hide in here looking freshly woken up minutes before her own match.

Because that line had sounded too much like she'd actually seen something. Five minutes later, I understood something else. Not liking Emily and Emily being frighteningly good were two facts with no conflict between them whatsoever. The entrance broadcast for the Vice-Captain's match hadn't even finished before she was already on the field. No wave to the stands. No glance at the cameras.

She just stood there, clean and unbothered, looking even more bored than she had in the smoking room — like she'd been called out to clear a job that didn't require much thought. Her opponent clearly didn't share that opinion. The opposing Vice-Captain's entrance was textbook. Textbook enough to be beautiful — weight distribution, arm angle, weapon deployment sequence, all standard enough to earn applause. The trouble with being that standard is that you start to look like a model answer.

And model answers die fast the moment they meet someone with no interest in showing their work. The start light came on. Emily moved. No wind-up. No probing contact. Not even the usual courtesy of look twice before deciding where to take someone apart. It was as if she'd already picked her opponent's cause of death before setting foot on the field. Her left prosthetic arm cut into the weapon's trajectory at a ruthless angle; her mechanical legs bit the floor and released, and the distance was simply gone.

She wasn't pressuring her opponent. She was erasing the very idea that the woman had been entitled to any rhythm at all. The commentary booth was still reaching for a sentence when the first exchange was already over. The opponent fell back, shifted axis, raised a counter. The movement wasn't wrong. The judgment wasn't slow. Emily just cared even less about clean form than she did. On the second collision I actually heard a teeth-aching grind of metal on metal.

Her left arm absorbed the guard point head-on, her right hand wrenched the balance off, and the drive from her legs put mass and momentum straight through — like someone had converted the word unreasonable into a military-grade demonstration and field-tested it live. Thirty seconds. First loss of balance. One minute twelve. Second weapon node stripped away. Under two minutes, and what remained was resistance in name only. She wasn't brutalizing her opponent.

She was informing the whole arena that once the skill gap gets wide enough, the word resistance starts to sound almost polite. The crowd went quiet for a beat, as if even the audience needed a moment to process a Vice-Captain's match ending up looking nothing like one. When the final score light came on, her breathing hadn't even changed. I finally understood why Irena had said she'll show up with such total certainty. Because the real headache was never whether Emily would take the field.

It was whether, once she did, she'd casually stomp the whole concept of "competition" flat on her way through. As she walked off, the sideline cameras naturally followed her. She was already halfway to the exit when — as if deciding the psychological damage on offer today still wasn't quite enough — she turned and looked straight into the lens. The same look she'd given me in the smoking room. The kind of unhurried contempt that couldn't be bothered explaining itself.

Then she said:"Next time, send someone who can actually fight. Don't waste my warm-up." The arena held its breath for one full second. Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings. Then it exploded. I pressed two fingers into my brow. Wonderful. Not just good at fighting. Professionally good at starting fires, too. The Vice-Captain's match ended, and the finale — the Captain's match — followed right on its heels. Irena Dubois against their captain.

Unlike the last match, this one had no give in it from the first second. Both fighters were full-body cyberized — from a distance, less like two people and more like two tactical platforms that had kept "human pride" around purely as decorative trim. Comparable strength class. Comparable output windows. Defensive architecture thick enough on both sides that cracking it quickly wasn't going to happen through effort alone. So this one couldn't be won on momentum. Only on technique.

The crowd noise turned strange during this fight. Not the usual rise-and-fall roar — every collision snapped every spectator's attention tight and held it there until the next exchange, because anyone watching could see: at this level, the outcome isn't decided by who's willing to commit harder. It's decided by who, on the thirteenth exchange, the seventeenth, the twenty-first, can still correct the smallest error and bring it back. Irena was exactly that kind of fighter.

Her style was the mirror opposite of Emily's. Emily dismantled other people's rhythm. Irena let the rhythm exist, then took it away, inch by inch. She didn't look like she was fighting. She looked like she was solving an equation where one wrong step voided the whole attempt. Her opponent was strong — strong enough that I could understand exactly how she'd earned that seat.

Several times she pressed Irena toward the boundary line through sheer output density, plating fragments and sparks scattering off the containment field like someone had turned the whole arena into a grinding wheel. Irena didn't rattle. She never did. There were plenty of things about her that made you want to strangle her off the field — but the second she stepped onto one, that same infuriating composure became the single most reliable thing in the room. She held.

Held through the opponent overcommitting on a chase and giving up half a step. Held through a second weight correction landing a fraction of a second late. Held until, on the third weapon switch, the opponent's shoulder line rose just a fraction higher than the round before. Just a fraction. Irena went in. Clean. Precise. Nothing wasted. When the confirmation light came up, it felt almost unreal — like all that suffocating deadlock had somehow resolved into something this clean. She won.

Not by rolling over her opponent. Not by luck. By technique, ground out point by point. The arena lighting shifted. The board refreshed. And the crowd finally broke the tension it had been holding since the first exchange. With that, the individual events of Operation Nine Stars were over. The rankings came in. No surprise: the United Interstellar Military Academy took the overall individual title.

Applause, cheering, broadcast noise, commentary, camera flashes — all of it arrived at once, as if the world were in a hurry to remind everyone this page could be turned now. It couldn't. I watched the lights and felt quieter than I had all morning. Because I knew perfectly well that today's wins, the rankings, the applause — even Emily's sideline comment, obnoxious enough to warrant a formal complaint — none of it was an ending. It was only the start.

I pushed open the door to the post-match rest room and hit a smell I couldn't quite name. Not sweat. Not machine oil. Closer to: a group of people who just finished competing, are all still alive, and none of whom think today is actually over. Almost everyone was already there. Maki sat at the center table, datapad open, posture straight enough that the room felt less like a rest area and more like her personal command post. Hedwig stood just behind her shoulder, as quiet and unreadable as always.

D leaned against the wall, long legs crossed, his whole face broadcasting I won my match and I'm still getting dragged into a meeting. Jess sat on the corner of the table, spinning a stylus. Akari had folded herself completely into a chair, looking like her soul had only just been scraped off the shooting range floor. Irena looked entirely at ease, as if she'd come to watch a show rather than sit through a meeting. As for Emily — She'd beaten me here. Same black tank top and shorts.

Same military prosthetics on her left arm and both legs, existing without apology. The tattoos ran from her right shoulder to the back of her hand, like don't test me had been converted into a totem and driven straight under the skin. She sat at the far end, lazy enough to disqualify herself from decent posture and still somehow oppressive about it. No cigarette this time, which was a relief — at least the United Interstellar Military Academy wasn't about to relocate its smoking room into the team space.

I'd barely stepped through the door when Maki looked up.

"Shimo. Good timing." She tapped the datapad lightly with one knuckle, her tone as flat as if she were announcing a change to the cafeteria menu.

"We're going over the roster for the Long-Range Endurance Obstacle Course." I shut the door.

"Now?"

"Would you rather wait until everyone's slept?" Irena answered before Maki could, flashing me a smile that deserved a slap.

"Relax. We're very thoughtful. We didn't hand you the anchor leg before telling you."

"If you were actually thoughtful, I'd already be in bed."

"What a waste that would be." D drawled it from the wall.

"A face like yours is best appreciated when you've just been dragged into an emergency strategy meeting against your will."

"Thanks. I'll take that as a compliment on my composure."

"No. I'm complimenting how much you look like you want to kill someone."

"Enough." Maki reeled the room back in without raising her voice at all.

"Look at the list first." She turned the datapad so everyone could see.

"First leg: Akari Flak."

"I knew it." Akari tipped her head back, wearing the expression of someone who'd stopped being curious about her own fate a long time ago.

"Every single time there's a job that means eating the first mouthful of dirt, it lands on me. Does this academy think I'm built to be expendable scouting material?" Jess glanced over.

"You're still first leg. First leg at least sounds like it has some standing."

"You take it, then."

"No thanks. I have plenty of virtues. Knowing what not to pick up off the floor is one of them." Maki had clearly braced for this. Not even her eyebrows moved.

"Second leg: Charles Bingham." Charles wasn't in the room. The table went quiet for a beat.

"He'll be notified separately," Maki added.

"Convenient." D snorted.

"The ones who aren't here are always the safest. At least he doesn't have to sit through hearing what leg he's stuck with."

"You're welcome to leave. I won't stop you," Maki said, flat.

"No need." D raised a hand in quick retreat, tone unchanged.

"I'm just offering the first-year some early condolences." Maki ignored him and kept reading.

"Third leg: Emily Smith."

"Hm." Emily finally spoke, in the same half-asleep tone that seemed designed to be unpleasant right out of the gate.

"The two ahead of me better not hand me a corpse. I don't like cleaning up a board that's already in pieces." Akari snapped her head around.

"Who's handing anyone a corpse?"

"Relax." Emily didn't even look at her, just draped her right arm over the chair back, voice infuriatingly flat.

"I meant the theoretical you."

"The theoretical me wouldn't either."

"Good." Standing off to the side, watching her deliver even a low-effort jab like it was beneath her, I decided this room wasn't actually much safer than the smoking room had been. Maki went on.

"Fourth leg: Irena Dubois." Irena raised a hand like a model student answering roll call — if the model student's smile also suggested she planned to walk someone behind the gym afterward to explain a few things.

"Holding the middle. Heavy responsibility."

"You're just in the middle of the order. Don't write yourself extra lines," I said.

"Shimo, that's no way to treat a teammate. We need warmth."

"Then try not looking that thrilled about fourth leg — which is obviously the gap-patching position." That only made her smile wider.

"But I genuinely am thrilled. Especially with Emily running before me. She smashes the board apart, and I get to piece together whatever's left into something winnable. Perfectly logical."

"That's not logic," D cut in.

"That's the academy finally learning to use its assets efficiently."

"Thank you for the compliment."

"Wasn't a compliment."

"I heard it just fine." Before reading the next name, Maki let out the faintest sigh — so brief it might have been imagined. I saw it anyway.

"Fifth leg: Dwight 'D' Barkley."

"Fifth?" D tilted his head, and for once something like real irritation surfaced.

"That's an awkward spot. If the runners ahead of me are clean, I look like I'm just collecting the reward. If they run like they're drunk, I'm stuck on cleanup. That's not a relay position. That's a personal insult." Jess couldn't help laughing.

"Your ego is capable of feeling insulted?"

"Sure." D said it with total sincerity.

"Just not very often." Maki gave no one room for a second round.

"Sixth leg: Hedwig von Wittelsbach." Hedwig didn't object, just gave a slight nod. That quiet, dropped into the middle of this crew, had a strange effect. Not soft — more like someone had set a precise, unsentimental blade down beside a pot that was already threatening to boil over.

"Seventh leg: Lan Weiss." Lan had been sitting by the window, quiet enough to nearly blend into the background. Only when her name came up did she loosen her crossed arms.

"Seventh…" She repeated it under her breath. Her expression barely moved — but that stillness itself was an opinion.

"Pressure absorbed up front, ground given at the back. I hate sequences that never let me open up completely."

"So you do hate things," Jess said. Lan looked at her.

"I hate comments like that too."

"Rude." Jess spun her stylus, smiling.

"So eighth leg is me — does that mean I'm rolling out a red carpet for a certain president?" Maki continued.

"Eighth leg: Jess McCallow."

"There it is." Jess spread her hands.

"Knew it. Eighth leg is either mopping up after whoever ran before, or paving the road for whoever runs after. In plain terms: premium manual labor."

"Suits you," Akari said, without much energy.

"Thanks. That might be the cheapest validation I've ever received." Maki scrolled down one line.

"Ninth leg: myself." Nobody commented on that one. Made sense. If Maki was slotted into ninth, the question wasn't whether she was tired. It was how much of the previous eight legs' damage she was planning to absorb. Her expression didn't change as she read the last name.

"Anchor leg: Hoshino Shimo." Every set of eyes in the room landed on me at once. I was quiet for two seconds. Then I sighed.

"... Fine. Looks like you all actually held me to that." Jess grinned immediately.

"Of course we did. You volunteered last time. We're not about to waste a face that looks one inconvenience away from flipping a table."

"Shut up." Akari turned, unusually serious.

"I support this. If you're the one sprinting out at the end, the audience will at least know clearly that our side had someone who genuinely wanted to make it back alive." I looked at her.

"That doesn't sound like support."

"Close enough." D added his piece with the ease of someone who'd been waiting for the opening.

"Besides — compared to all the flashy anchor choices out there, that whole I didn't want to be here, but I showed up anyway, so don't waste my time energy of yours has more credibility at a finish line than most." I wanted to argue. For a second I genuinely couldn't decide where to start.

"Roster's provisional for now," Maki said, closing the pad.

"Charles will be briefed separately." I was about to ask what provisional meant when she dropped the actual bomb.

"Also — tomorrow's draw will be conducted by the Vice President." The air stopped for a beat. Then I went off.

"—What?" That came out louder than I'd planned. Even D, wearing his usual at least someone else's drama today expression, raised an eyebrow. Irena reeled her smile back by about half, clearly aware that laughing outright would make her the next target. I stared at Maki.

"Say that again." She looked back at me, infuriatingly even.

"Tomorrow's draw will be conducted by the Vice President." I nearly took the title Vice President apart letter by letter and handed it back to her one piece at a time.

"You're serious?" I stepped forward.

"Maki, why would something like this even become—""Shimo." She cut me off. Not loud. Just clean, like the flat of a blade coming down on a spark. I bit down on the rest of the sentence, still glaring. This was exactly the part I hated. Maki hadn't done anything obvious — no visible panic, no impatience. But the second she compressed her tone like that, some instinct in me already knew she wasn't here to argue. She'd already thought it through. She was only waiting for me to stop making noise. That was unfair.

What was more unfair was that I knew she rarely did anything without a reason. She set the datapad down, stood, and crossed to stand in front of me — not far, not close, just at the exact distance where one more step would make me start wondering if it was deliberate.

"I know what you're worried about." Her voice stayed low and steady.

"But a draw is a draw. It isn't a decision. She puts her hand in. She doesn't control the result." I kept frowning.

"Then why her, specifically?"

"Because I want her standing there." Maki said it plainly.

"And you'll be there too." I paused.

"... Meaning what?"

"Meaning you're coming with me tomorrow." Her tone stayed even, but there was something under it that made it hard to look away.

"Start to finish, you watch it with your own eyes. You don't trust other people — fine. Then at least trust what you see for yourself." I opened my mouth. Nothing came out right away. Maki didn't give me the room to recover.

"Or is standing next to me already too much?" she asked.

"Shimo." That was a dirty move. Exactly dirty enough. She hadn't forced me into anything, and somehow that left less room to back out than force would have. She hadn't even said trust me — she'd turned the whole question into come and see for yourself. Which meant if I kept pushing back now, I'd only be admitting I knew how to get angry and nothing else. I held onto my temper for two more seconds, then looked away, unwillingly.

"... I'll go." Irena let out a soft whistle beside me.

"Beautifully handled."

"One more word, and you're doing the draw yourself tomorrow."

"Can't." She smiled, clearly enjoying herself.

"I'd much rather stand off to the side and watch the president put you back in your place."

"I wasn't put in my place."

"Oh, really?"

"Irena."

"Fine. Shutting up." Her mouth said done. Her face was still very much alive. Maki looked long since immune to this. She didn't acknowledge it at all — just swept her gaze over the room one more time.

"Roster stands as provisional. Rest tonight. We'll finalize after tomorrow's draw. Charles will be briefed separately. If there are no other questions, that's all for now."

"I've got one." D raised a hand.

"Why is it that every time you say 'that's all for now,' I get the feeling things are actually just getting started?"

"Because your instincts are occasionally useful," Maki said. Jess laughed outright. Akari let her head fall back against the chair a second time, apparently too tired even for commentary. Lan had already turned back to her terminal, clearly running procedures in her head. Hedwig stayed silent — the kind of silence that looked like nothing, and somehow also looked like she'd absorbed every single reaction in the room. I glanced sideways without meaning to. Emily had said almost nothing since the meeting began.

She just sat there, like she was auditing a farce that had little to do with her. But when I looked over, she was already looking back. Blue eyes caught mine. Her mouth moved. Not quite a smile. More the look of someone confirming just as I thought. I remembered the smoking room immediately — that line that had irritated me more than it had any right to. You and I used to be the same kind of person. Damn it.

For the first time in my life, I genuinely wished someone was just being a smart-mouthed asshole instead of an unnervingly good judge of character.

"Shimo." Maki called from ahead. I snapped back.

"Let's go."

"... Got it." I pushed the irritation back down where it belonged and followed her out.