Chương 509: 242.Susanoo 1

Maki didn't get angry on the spot. She just gave me a look — one that landed close to reproach. It was light. Too light to count as a real scolding, which somehow made it worse than being yelled at outright. Then, without adding anything else, she said, flatly, that she was tired and needed to rest, and turned and went upstairs. The moment she left, the sitting room dropped into a silence that had nothing natural about it. Not the kind of silence where no one has anything to say.

The kind where everyone knows exactly what they want to say, and exactly why they can't say it right now. Jess opened her mouth, closed it, and settled for two dry, aimless laughs — clearly trying to prop the air up with harmless noise until it could hold its own weight again. D leaned against the sofa, arms crossed, wearing the exact expression of I knew this wasn't going to be that simple. Akari stared down at the data on the table.

Her eyes were technically moving across the words; her soul had evidently relocated somewhere much safer. Charles needed no further description. He sat bolt upright, the picture of a first-year who'd wandered onto the set of an upperclassman disaster film and concluded that the only thing left within his control was how quietly he breathed. Irena glanced at me once. She didn't smile, and she didn't step in to bail me out.

She just wrote you are not getting out of this tonight very clearly in her eyes, and, with what passed for kindness, chose not to say it out loud. In the end, the living-room meeting broke up in a hurry. Jess read out the committee's notice — assemble at the spaceport in two days — with all the warmth of a funeral announcement. Akari said, with the last of her energy, that she'd run through her suit's checklist again tonight. Charles asked, very earnestly, whether he could help organize the environmental data.

Emily didn't say much. She just copied the files to her own terminal, looking less like a houseguest and more like a contractor who'd just been handed a job brief. Hedwig and Lan stayed just as quiet as each other — quiet in a highly efficient way. By the time everyone had drifted off, all that was left in the room were half-finished glasses of water and a table full of problems that weren't going to shrink on their own by morning. Back in my room, the first thing I did was send Dr.

Steiner the planetary data on Orpheia. I kept the message direct. No sentiment, no complaining — just the key points laid out one by one, with the Spore Mutation Surge flagged specifically. I highlighted that section: atmospheric radiation spikes within seconds; airborne spores undergo rapid growth and adhere to suit and vehicle surfaces, initiating acidic corrosion. At the end, I added one line. —Please prioritize countermeasures for the Spore Mutation Surge. My instinct says this will be the deciding factor.

I stared at the sent-confirmation prompt for two seconds. I couldn't have said exactly why, but I was certain this wasn't just an environmental hazard. It felt more like a fault line, built to drop at the worst possible moment and reshuffle everything laid down before it. Once we hit that planet, whoever made it through that storm would be the only ones left with the right to talk about what came after. I was about to scroll down through the rest of the planetary file when someone knocked on my door. Not urgently.

Knock. Knock. Even spacing. The kind of knock made by someone entirely certain the door would open, regardless of whether I was currently alive on the other side. I crossed the room and opened it. Maki was standing there. She was in her sleepwear, a pillow held against her chest. Her hair was looser than usual; her eyes carried more pressure than usual. The whole of her radiated something hard to name, which boiled down, essentially, to: If I don't let her in tonight, I probably don't leave this room alive either.

I held the door handle, silent for two seconds.

"... Maki."

"Move." She said it without weight. But with absolutely no room to negotiate. I stepped aside. She walked in, pillow in her arms, moving with the natural ease of someone who owned the room. It wasn't until she'd set the pillow at the edge of the bed and turned slowly back to face me that I fully understood: that look downstairs hadn't meant she wasn't angry. It had just meant a delayed execution. She looked at me. Let the quiet sit for a moment. Then she spoke.

"Shimo. Do you think it makes you look impressive — betting yourself against other people like that?" I froze.

"I didn't think that."

"Then why did you do it?" Maki didn't raise her voice. The calmer she got, the harder it was to hold ground against her.

"Because she had intel," I said.

"And?"

"So I needed it."

"I'm not asking why you wanted the intel." She stepped closer, her voice still steady but carrying a thin edge now.

"I'm asking why, every single time something like this comes up, the first thing you reach for is yourself." I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. Maki kept looking at me. Her gaze wasn't harsh — it just made lying feel pointless.

"You can charge. You can gamble. You can go head-on with people. I know all of that." She said it.

"But Shimo — have you ever considered that you don't have to put yourself on the table every single time?" You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

"I—""Do you think that as long as we win in the end, it doesn't matter what you trade away to get there?" My first instinct was to push back. But by the time the words reached my throat, all that was left was a flat, tired kind of helplessness. Because that was the worst part — she wasn't entirely right. She just wasn't wrong enough for me to deny it with a straight face. I looked away.

"I'm sorry," I said quietly.

"I went too far this time." The room settled into silence. Somewhere outside, a car passed, too distant to be more than noise. The wall projection was still open to the Orpheia data page. The whole world felt like it was waiting to see whether Maki intended to carry the sentence through. After a few seconds, she let out a slow breath. The moment I heard it, I knew the hardest part was over. She stepped up and reached out, straightening my collar where it had gone slightly crooked.

The touch was light — nothing like the near-interrogation from a minute ago. It felt like she'd finally stepped down from the president's chair and gone back to being just herself.

"I'm not afraid you'll lose," she said quietly.

"I don't like watching you use yourself to test other people's limits." I looked at her. That landed heavier than anything she'd said before it. Because it wasn't about what I'd done. It was about whether I was worth being wagered like that in the first place. I was quiet for a moment, then slowly closed my hand around her wrist.

"There won't be a next time." She said nothing. I made myself add one more line.

"And we're not losing this one, either." Her lashes flickered.

"Is that a promise?"

"Yes." I held her gaze.

"I promise. We're winning this Long-Range Endurance Obstacle Course." She studied me for a long moment, as if weighing whether I was just being stubborn or actually meant it. Eventually, her shoulders came down.

"You always do this," she murmured.

"Kill me first. Then coax me back."

"Am I coaxing you?"

"Yes." She said it with total unreasonableness.

"And badly." I couldn't help laughing. Seeing that, something in her expression eased too. The shift from hard to soft was slow — ice giving way an inch at a time. Whatever composure she'd still been holding onto finally had nothing left to stand on. She glanced down at the pillow on the bed, then back up at me.

"I don't want to sleep alone tonight." Out of her mouth, that sentence was basically cheating. The same person who'd just been cross-examining me like a tribunal was now standing in my room with a pillow, saying that in that voice. There was nowhere left to go. I pulled her in closer.

"If you'd said that first, I wouldn't have had to stand here getting lectured for so long."

"No." She leaned in, forehead against my shoulder, voice muffled.

"Scolding first. Being spoiled after. In that order."

"You keep that line very clean."

"Of course I do." I ran my hand through her hair. She didn't pull away — if anything, she let her weight settle into me further, entitled about it in a way the clean, sharp council president everyone else saw would never allow herself to be. That was exactly the side of her only I ever got to see. Which made it the most dangerous one. I bent down and kissed her forehead.

Maki went still for a second, then — as if remembering she was allowed to push her luck too — raised a hand, hooked it around the back of my neck, and closed the last of the distance herself. What happened the rest of that night wasn't anything dramatic on paper. Just the lights going off, and her not letting go. Just her, leaning into me, finally setting down all the exhaustion she'd kept folded too neatly through the day.

Just the two of us kissing — her starting out refusing to give ground, ending with her breathing gone ragged while still trying to act like she was the one keeping time. Just her saying my name low against my ear, and me realizing, with total clarity, that whatever hellscape Orpheia turned out to be, I had no intention of losing. It was a long night. Neither of us was in any hurry to end it. The first thing I felt when I woke the next morning wasn't light. It was weight.

Maki had both arms wrapped around me, deep asleep, one hand still pressed against my side — as if she were afraid I might slip off in the night to press some second, lethal red button. The edge she carried while awake had almost entirely dissolved in sleep. All that was left was her breath, falling soft against my shoulder, quiet enough that waking her felt like something I owed an apology for. Unfortunately, I didn't have the option not to. We had a full day of trouble still ahead of us.

"Maki." I called her, quietly. She frowned, didn't open her eyes, and held on tighter instead.

"Time to get up."

"... Five more minutes." I almost laughed.

"The Seitokai president says things like that too?"

"Not the president right now." Her voice came out rough with sleep, which somehow made it more unfair.

"Right now I'm the person you kept up too late."

"That's my fault as well?"

"Whose else would it be?" Fine. At times like this, whatever she said, went. It took some doing to get her up. Once we'd both pulled ourselves together — once she'd tied her hair back and her expression had reset into the mode that made people stand up straighter without meaning to — the girl who'd knocked on my door hugging a pillow last night seemed to exist only in my memory. We walked to the door, one after the other. My hand was already on the handle when she pulled me back by the sleeve. I turned.

She didn't explain. She just kissed me — not the slow kind from last night. Short. Precise. The kind that leaves evidence on purpose. I was still catching up to that when the door opened. Across the hall, Emily had just stepped out of her own room. She stopped dead. Not embarrassed. Not offended. More like her brain was processing incoming data and the processing speed hadn't quite kept pace with reality. I almost wanted to laugh. Emily didn't do anything juvenile about it.

No whistle, no exaggerated noise, no theatrical three-step retreat to signal she'd walked in on something she shouldn't have. She just looked at us and said, honestly blank:"So you two are that kind of thing." I raised an eyebrow.

"What kind of thing?" Emily choked on the answer. Maki had already stepped up beside me, composed as if she were correcting a typo in a meeting report.

"Federation law contains no provision against a Seitokai president dating her vice president," she said.

"Nor does it prohibit same-sex relationships." Emily's frown snapped in fast.

"That's not what I said." She fired it back quickly.

"I was just... surprised. That's all."

"Then you'd better get used to it fast," I added, keeping my tone level.

"The Long-Range Endurance Obstacle Course needs all ten of us working as one. Getting surprised only now is a little behind schedule." Emily looked at me, then at Maki. Something crossed that permanently uncooperative face — rare enough that I didn't have a ready label for it. Not disapproval. Not the annoyance of a probe that had failed. More like she'd only just noticed a line running between the two of us that she hadn't accounted for, and that the line had no intention of letting her take it apart.

In the end she said nothing else, just made a short sound through her nose and turned for the stairs. Once her footsteps faded, I couldn't hold the laugh back.

"You did that completely on purpose." The corner of Maki's mouth curved.

"Which part," she asked, "the kiss, or the Federation law?"

"Both." I said it and looped an arm around her, deliberately. She didn't move away — just gave me a look with no real force behind it, more a reminder not to look too pleased with myself. Too late for that.

"All right, you two." A voice, thick with sleep, dragged itself down the hallway, working hard to sound unaffected.

"This much enthusiasm first thing in the morning is deeply unkind to the sleep-deprived." I turned. Jess stood at the far end of the hall, dark circles heavy enough to suggest someone had dragged her out overnight to run an advance test match on Orpheia. Maki smiled at her first.

"Oh, Jess." Her tone was gentle. The content was not.

"Those are quite the circles."

"Glad you asked." Jess said it hollowly.

"Last night, some pair of inconsiderate idiots kept making noise, and for a while I genuinely thought this house was haunted." She looked at me. Then at Maki. Her expression landed somewhere between wounded and eager to drag us both down with her.

"Turns out it was," she said.

"By two ghosts, specifically." Maki and I froze at exactly the same moment. The next second, both of us looked away with equally unconvincing conviction.

"... You're overthinking it," I said.

"Right." Maki, incredibly, backed me up, deadpan.

"The insulation in this house is probably just poor."

"President, that landed worse than Shimo's excuse."

"Jess."

"Fine, fine." She raised both hands, still visibly smiling.

"I'll drop it. But if there's no coffee at breakfast, I'm defecting to Shinomiya Advanced Defense Academy on the spot."

"Get in line," I said, deadpan.

"There's already a seat reserved ahead of you." Jess blinked, then laughed hard enough to wake herself up completely. Maki pinched my side, lightly.

"Don't bring that up."

"Understood, President."

"Not the president right now."

"Fine. Maki." Hearing her own name, her expression finally eased another fraction. Morning light was creeping up the hallway; sounds of movement started drifting up from downstairs. None of the trouble had gone anywhere. Orpheia was still out there waiting, and the Spore Mutation Surge wasn't going to get any friendlier just because we'd slept together. But somehow, after that night, part of the weight that had been sitting on my chest had finally found somewhere to settle.

At this point, it wasn't only that I had to win. I genuinely didn't want to lose.