Chương 507: 241.Bet 1

I'd spent the entire previous night on the official website. Not because I'd suddenly developed some civic enthusiasm for the Operation Nine Stars organizing committee. Not because I'd finally decided to become the kind of upstanding student who respects regulations, honors procedure, and trusts institutions. The exact opposite.

I was combing through those rules — written like legislation, reading like a curse — with something close to tragic determination, looking for one single clause that might spare the Seitokai Vice President from walking onto a stage to be publicly executed. There wasn't one. More precisely: it wasn't that there was nothing. It was that the committee had written this particular section with an unnaturally deliberate vagueness.

Vague in a way that felt designed to hand you a little hope, just so they could personally strangle it afterward. Every word in the clause looked official. The tone was so upright it practically convinced you the organizers genuinely believed in their own transparency. But the moment you tried to find the answer to the one question that actually mattered— What exactly are we drawing? Nothing.

The committee had written it up with the same confidence as a law of nature — the kind of attitude that made me want to throw boiling water at the screen. Because the terrifying part was never the draw itself. It was that I still had no idea what I was drawing for. It felt exactly like being a prisoner who already knows she's going to die, who already has the execution date circled — and then the warden walks up, offers a perfectly kind smile, and says: Time to draw lots. Draw what? No idea. How do I die? No idea.

But draw first. This wasn't procedural justice. This was psychological torment repackaged as an event itinerary. So the next morning, when I walked into the Operation Nine Stars venue, my mood had already sunk low enough that I was one good luck away from taping a sign to my forehead reading: Anyone who tells me to do my best today is getting into a fight with me. The atmosphere was different from yesterday's individual matches.

Probably because today wasn't direct combat, the venue had picked up the air of a large public ceremony instead. The lights were bright enough for an interrogation. The stands were even fuller than yesterday. Even the air felt scrubbed clean, specifically to set off the organizers' sacred solemnity. The most obvious change was the host.

Gone was the woman from the individual events — the one in the revealing outfit, generous chest, and a smile so fake it looked welded onto her face out of a different material entirely. Standing on stage today was a man. Crisp suit, clean hair, a nameplate on his chest reading something like Chair or Committee Director. He radiated the exact energy of I personally may not be frightening, but the process I represent absolutely is.

He glanced down at the terminal in his hand, then looked up, and read in a tone that was neither warm nor cold — just words being delivered:"As per established practice, the venue for the Long-Range Endurance Obstacle Course will be drawn by a representative from the winning school." Something in my chest dropped. Here it comes.

"The winner is the United Interstellar Military Academy." He paused, as if double-checking.

"Is your representative, Hoshino Shimo, present?" The next second, every set of eyes in the room snapped onto me with the crisp precision of a morning formation command. I didn't even have time to play dead. What made it worse was that Jess McCallow gave me a shove from behind. A very natural one. Not the kind that would send someone stumbling out of pure force.

The kind that looked, on the surface, like a friendly your turn — but functionally amounted to shoving a comrade into the line of fire with a practiced hand. I lurched half a step forward and nearly turned around to curse her out on the spot. Damn it. A traitor. Jess, you traitor. I'm remembering this. She flashed me a smile that deserved zero trust, her mouth shaping something that looked suspiciously like fired up. Fired up for what. The furnace?

I had no choice but to walk toward the stage under the full weight of every eye in the room. Every step felt less like representing the winning school, and more like representing the entire United Interstellar Military Academy in voluntarily climbing into some beautifully packaged, unidentified execution device. The stairs weren't long. The distance wasn't far. But I still managed to walk it with the exact heaviness of someone en route to press a self-destruct button. Stolen story; please report.

A table stood at the center of the stage. On the table sat a red button. Round. Bright. Clean. Clean enough that someone had clearly polished it just yesterday, specifically so that whichever unlucky fool climbed up today could leave her fingerprints on it. I stopped in front of it and stared at the red button. My internal commentary switched on automatically. What is this. This is it? Did the organizing committee have some bizarre private definition of the word draw?

Normal people, when they say "draw lots," expect a lottery box, cards, spheres, a digital panel — something that makes you feel like you're actually participating in a process. This wasn't a draw. It was the kind of button that, in a movie, launches a missile, opens a gas chamber, or drops a test subject into another dimension. I even started to suspect they'd made it red on purpose.

Because if you're planning to inflict real psychological trauma on someone, you'd better make sure the visual cues are doing their job. The man in the suit stepped up beside me, gesturing between me and the table with the exact posture of a third-rate variety show host.

"We'll now draw the venue. The computer will randomly select one planet from nine star systems to serve as the exam site." That was it. Nothing more. He genuinely gave me nothing more than that. My scalp went numb. Nine star systems. Random. One planet. Exam site. He delivered it as lightly as announcing which flavor of synthetic nutrient block the cafeteria would serve for lunch. Except the worst-case scenario for a nutrient block is that it tastes awful.

The worst-case scenario for a planet is that it actually kills you. My brain began to spiral. What if we drew a star? Theoretically that shouldn't happen. Theoretically. But after last night's tour through those cursed regulations, I understood exactly what theoretically shouldn't happen meant in this committee's hands — it was just the setup line for whatever disaster came next. What if it was a world of liquid methane, where three seconds on the surface would freeze your lungs and your dignity in the same breath?

What if it was some hellscape scoured down to lab-equipment cleanliness by acid storms? What if there was no continuous ground at all — just floating islands, rift valleys, and a curated selection of natural phenomena that all held a personal grudge against the human body? What if it was some insane pet project the committee slipped into the candidate pool one drunken year, on the theory that recently discovered, data incomplete sounded like a more interesting challenge?

The more I thought about it, the less this felt like a draw. It felt like a public test of whether I could keep my expression under control in front of a live audience.

"All right, without further ado." The man in the suit nudged the button a little closer to me, looking entirely sincere.

"Please, Hoshino." Please my ass. I looked at him. I looked at the button. Then, in full view of the entire arena, I reached out. For a second I genuinely wanted to look back at Maki — no, in this setting, President Kushima — just to catch even a flicker of I know this process is absurd too on her face. There wasn't one. At least, in my peripheral vision, she stood perfectly still. Still enough to suggest this was all standard procedure. Still enough that I couldn't even find an excuse to make a scene. Fine. Great.

If the entire world was going to stay this calm about it, I'd just have to play the part of the person willing to walk herself into the machinery. I pressed it. The button let out an unnaturally cheerful chime. The next second, the massive screen at center stage lit up. Not with a simple result. It lit up in a way clearly designed to make sure nobody forgot how much budget had gone into the visual effects.

The nine star-system markers spun like they'd been thrown into a high-speed roulette wheel — orbital paths, star charts, ID codes, light trails, and prompt boxes exploding outward in layers, bright enough that for a second I thought I wasn't drawing a venue at all, but hosting the grand finale of a galaxy-wide game show. The house lights dimmed to match. The scattered chatter in the stands cut off almost instantly. The wheel accelerated.

Star-system names blurred past too fast to read — blue, white, gold, red — like someone had shredded a star map and thrown it in a blender. Every time a marker flashed by, something in my chest jumped. My rational mind knew this was pre-rendered showmanship. My instincts weren't listening. Don't be terrible. Please, at least don't be terrible enough that the committee put it in specifically for audience entertainment. The wheel spun faster.

Fast enough that I started to wonder if it even had a stop function, or if it planned to just keep spinning while announcing that every competitor was on her own from here. Right as I was starting to seriously suspect the organizing committee moonlighted in psychiatric care and torture design, the display finally began to slow. One tick. Another. And with every fraction of speed it lost, the air in the arena pulled a fraction tighter. Maybe it was my imagination, but I swear I heard someone nearby draw in a breath.

Again. Again. The wheel swept past a string of stellar designations too fast to read, then — as if deliberately built to torture everyone's nerves — shuddered on the boundary line twice before finally locking into place. At the center of the screen, the identification frame lit up. Stellar Designation: NEB-404 — Orpheia Whatever string inside me had been humming this isn't great snapped clean in half.

The man in the suit glanced down at the synchronized readout, then delivered his line with admirable professional dedication:"The result is in. This is a planet located in the Dorado constellation, within a Type-III solar system." His tone stayed level. Level enough that he might as well have been reading a discount travel brochure, not information that would likely decide how many people spent the entire race cursing my name. Then the main screen cut to the basic parameters.

One glance was all it took to know I was finished. Genuinely finished. Not the this could get complicated kind of finished. The kind where you already know someone is about to turn around and look at you, and there will not be gratitude in that look. The screen laid it out with total clarity: Orpheia — Baseline Physical Parameters Planet Type: Mega-Fungal Death World Gravitational Environment: 1.

45G Atmospheric Composition: Spore Haze, high-concentration nitrogen mixture, trace radioactive dust Average Surface Temperature: Constant 28°C Below it, a note: Note: Recently discovered by the survey vessel the Discoverer, last year. Data remains limited. Confirmed as a geologically stable world whose surface has been entirely overrun by organic life. I read those lines. The smile on my face froze first, then simply gave out. Mega-Fungal Death World. 1. 45G. Spore Haze. Trace radioactive dust. Data limited.

Discovered last year. Wonderful. I'd actually been worried we might draw something so ordinary nobody would have grounds to complain. The organizers, ever considerate, had spared me that pointless anxiety entirely. I turned around slowly. Across the arena, aside from the Orion Iron Guard — who showed almost no reaction at all — every other school had already started murmuring. Not loud. Dense. As if someone had taken a hundred variations of you're kidding, what is that place, discovered last year?

, and can you even run on that? and pressed them into one thin layer spread over the whole room. And the worst part was that, from any angle you looked at it, this was probably going to end up landing on me.