Chương 513: 244.First Leg 1

We were in the middle of breaking down the first-wave sequence and the ten-leg handoff order when the comms unit on the tactical room wall chimed. Not an alarm. A short, clean tone — the kind used for high-priority internal communication. Whatever attention had still been resting on data and risk distribution split clean in half the instant it sounded. Maki raised a hand and took the call. No visual feed. Just audio.

"My Lady." The voice on the other end was formal in the way that only comes from genuine discipline — steady enough that you knew immediately this wasn't a routine update.

"This is the captain. We are about to enter FTL transit." I kept my eyes forward, watching Maki from the corner of mine. She didn't so much as move an eyebrow.

"Understood." Just that. She cut the comms in the same motion, clean as flipping a page in a document she'd already read. Then she looked up, swept her gaze across the room, and spoke in a tone that was disturbingly calm.

"Harnesses." Not one person asked a follow-up question. Honestly, that almost made me want to laugh. Normally, sitting together, there was no shortage of sarcasm, cold commentary, and people taking small jabs at each other's patience. But the instant Maki used that particular tone, everyone flipped straight into comply first mode in the same second. Call it Seitokai presidential pressure. Or, in more practical terms — No one wanted to bet their own spine against whatever House Kushima's captain meant by about to.

The storage slots on the chair frames popped open almost simultaneously. Safety hooks and tethers were already rigged in — clearly, this was nothing new for the ship's regular crew. Everyone pulled their lines out with practiced ease, clipping to the metal rails along the tactical room walls and the doors leading into the corridor, moving with the ease of a habit drilled into them under duress.

Clipping my own hook, I couldn't help thinking: House Kushima's ship looked like a premium mobile fortress from the outside, but at its core it was exactly what it claimed to be — a working vessel. The fact that everyone hold on, the universe is about to fold us had been drilled into a procedure this natural was almost like being reminded to return your breakfast tray to the collection slot. Akari was fastest — locked in almost before Maki finished speaking, her expression the tightest in the room.

Jess buckled in while muttering under her breath.

"I swear, no matter how upscale this ship gets, I will never get used to someone calmly informing me that the laws of physics are about to correct me."

"Then get off now." Emily sat diagonally ahead of her, not even turning her head, clipping in with a precision that bordered on insulting.

"If you can jump back to the spaceport before FTL, I'll respect you."

"I'd rather not become orbital debris, thanks." Irena clicked her harness home, then reached over and adjusted Freya Nikaido's strap angle without a word, her tone as light as ever.

"At least this proves this ship's safety briefing is more thorough than the committee's."

"Isn't the sarcasm content on that a little high?" Lan checked her own lock, flat.

"Not sarcasm," Hedwig said, giving her line a short, sharp tug to test it.

"Fact." Roy said nothing, just clipped his restraint with unusual care. Harvey, who'd been staring at the segmented route diagram, had his train of thought derailed by the interruption — and wore, absurdly, a flicker of excitement. He looked exactly like someone watching the start button being pressed on a very expensive piece of machinery.

Looking at his face, I had the sudden conviction that if Kushima Heavy Industries ever dragged him into a product launch as an audience member, he'd applaud out of genuine emotion, unprompted. Maki herself buckled in last. She stood at the projection wall, clipped her line to the side rail in one clean motion, nothing wasted.

For a second, watching her, I had the completely absurd thought that — This person, even dropped into vacuum, would probably confirm formation spacing before deciding whether she needed to breathe. A short alarm chirped through the cabin. Very short. Short as someone tapping metal once beside your ear. The next second, my body learned exactly what about to meant. First, forward. Not the usual sway.

An invisible hand slammed into my back and drove straight through my chest and shoulders, my stomach lagging half a beat behind. The instant I clenched my jaw on reflex, the whole thing reversed — yanked backward hard, as if the safety hook and my spine had just been put through an unfriendly alignment correction by the universe itself. Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!

If I hadn't already been strapped in, I'd have left the chair in a way that wouldn't have been dignified. Jess sucked in a gasp.

"This is worse than I—" She didn't finish. A second, finer vibration rolled up from the floor, and the whole cabin felt like it had been picked up firmly, then set carefully down onto a different track. Not weightless chaos. Not a catastrophic impact. Something worse: the flat certainty that the ship was completing some enormous state change, and all we could do was sit there and let our skeletons learn the romance of engineering firsthand. I frowned and forced my breathing to stay even.

SUSANOO's voice slid onto my private channel.

"Lieutenant. Your vestibular response is nominal. Heart rate spiked briefly and is trending down. If you'd like, I can offer three breathing patterns to reduce dizziness." I closed my eyes. Even now, completely unbothered, still finding ways to be helpful and infuriating at once.

"The most helpful thing you can do is shut up."

"Received. Suspending advisory protocol." To his credit, he picked a good moment to stay quiet. A few seconds later, the vibration began to die down. The sensation of being dragged bodily into a different current of reality faded into a tolerable, steady pressure.

The cabin indicators shifted from amber back to green, the air conditioning hum reasserted itself, and the ship settled back into its usual cold competence — as if the violent business of yanking everyone from one place to another had just been a minor administrative matter. Then the PA came on. The ship's system voice. Flat. Affectless. Entirely indifferent to whether you'd just had your soul nearly shaken loose through your nose.

"This vessel has departed Dunan and entered FTL transit. Estimated arrival in the Dorado constellation: no later than five hours from now." The room went quiet for two seconds. Those two seconds were strange. Not because anyone was stunned. Not because the acceleration had been that dramatic. Because that announcement had nailed one fact down with no room left to argue. We had actually left. Not preparing. Not on standby. Not staying aboard the ship overnight to keep the meeting running.

We had officially departed Dunan, heading for the stage where this Long-Range Endurance Obstacle Course was going to happen. The spaceport was behind us. Last night's inexcusably comfortable bed was behind us. The miso soup and grilled fish in the mess were behind us. What lay ahead was Dorado, five hours out — and past that, a planet whose name I didn't even want to say a second time. Jess let out a long breath first, then said quietly:"All right. At least now it's really too late to run."

"If you're still planning an escape route," Emily said, unclipping her line, voice flat, "I'd recommend not sprinting too fast once we're on the surface. No point wasting the energy."

"That is the least comforting thing anyone has said to me all day."

"I wasn't comforting you."

"I know. Thanks for the clarity." Irena released her safety line and rolled her shoulders, checking whether the transition had wrenched anything loose — joints, or patience.

"At least this leg of the trip was efficient."

"You mean the part where five hours is all it takes to deliver a batch of students to the candidate death zone?" I asked. She tilted her head toward me, the faintest curve touching her mouth.

"I mean you've still got the energy to say something like that. Which means you're in decent shape."... Infuriating. Why did everyone insist on using my mouth's level of nastiness as a vital sign. Akari released her clip a beat slower than everyone else. She was visibly still steadying her breath, though her expression held.

"I take back what I said yesterday about this ship feeling like a hot spring resort." Hedwig stowed her line neatly back into its slot.

"Good. You've finally accepted this is, fundamentally, a vehicle."

"The kind that presses you into your seat first," Lan added, "and then wishes you a pleasant journey." Harvey finally seemed to surface from whatever high he'd been riding, eyes still bright.

"That transition was smoother than I projected. House Kushima's inertial correction is really something." Roy looked at him.

"That's the first thing you thought of?"

"What else would it be?"

"A normal person checks whether their stomach is still where it belongs."

"That's you people." Harvey looked entirely unbothered.

"I care about the drive and the correction field." I very nearly said that, in that moment, he looked more like a machine than SUSANOO did. Which, from a certain angle, was just as unsettling. Maki waited until everyone had resettled and stowed their lines before speaking again. Her tone hadn't picked up a single ripple from the interruption — as if FTL transit had simply been someone flipping a page in the middle of a meeting.

"Good." She touched the projection, and the segmented route map that the call had interrupted expanded back into view.

"Now. Continuing." Two words. But they carried more weight than the PA announcement had. Because the PA had only told us the ship had left Dunan. Maki's continuing was what actually dragged everyone back from passenger to competitor. She brought up the maps for the first and second legs, dropping the cursor onto the handoff points and terrain hazard zones.

"Five hours to Dorado. Nobody gets a slow warm-up once we drop out. Everything from this point in this room is binding. First wave, handoff nodes, equipment load, environmental error correction — we lock all of it down starting here." I watched the terrain segments and stage markers spread across the projection wall, my finger tapping the desk edge without meaning to. That short, violent snap into FTL had felt like a stamp coming down on the whole trip. No going back. No room left to play dumb.

For the first time, it didn't feel like preparing for a tournament. It felt like being shipped somewhere to pick a serious fight with an entire planet that had no interest in playing fair. The room held its silence a moment. Then SUSANOO's voice dropped back onto my private channel.

"Lieutenant."

"What."

"Your heart rate has risen again."

"If you add one more word of analysis, I will find a way to pull you out of the system myself."

"Understood." A pause — just long enough to notice. When he spoke again, his voice had dropped a fraction lower.

"Then I'll say only this. Please hold together until we arrive. I would strongly prefer you not settle things with the universe at the briefing table." I went still for a fraction of a second. Then almost laughed — the kind that happens when you're too irritated to do anything else.

"... Was that meant as comfort, or provocation?"

"That depends entirely on your interpretation, Lieutenant." Wonderful. These five hours were not going to be boring. And I finally understood something. The most difficult thing on this ship might not be Orpheia. Might not be the ten legs. Might not be the stack of public regulations engineered specifically to break people.

It might be the fact that in these same five hours, I had to lock down an entire operational plan alongside Maki, while simultaneously tolerating a military-brained AI learning, at close range, in my ear, exactly what it meant to be a person. Just thinking about it was already exhausting. There wasn't another option.