Chương 514: 244.First Leg 2

Five hours. On a clock, that's just five hours. In the body, it felt more like the Federation had taken a rusted length of wire and threaded it slowly through my nervous system, patient enough that by the end I half-believed I'd aged fifty years aboard this ship. Outside the viewports, starlight had been stretched into cold, narrow lines by FTL transit — as if someone had grabbed the entire universe and dragged it backward until nothing kept the shape it was supposed to have.

My patience, unluckily, had gotten yanked along with it. Stretched first. Ground thin after that. What was left was a single frayed strand, barely holding, ready to snap at the wrong sound. Honestly, I genuinely wanted to know which diseased corner of the Federation they'd dug this institution out of to design this event. Calling it a tournament was already generous. Linguistic beautification, extended purely out of civilized courtesy. If I were choosing the word myself, I'd go with— Murder.

And not the clean, efficient kind. The kind with procedures. With forms. With the full, patient spirit of bureaucracy behind it. Rules released in batches. Notices patched in one at a time. As if the committee itself hadn't fully decided either — as if they'd lured us onto the ship first, and were now watching our faces while they filled in the rest of the torment at their own pace. That was the worst part. Not the danger by itself. The specific malice of a preview that says: you think it's bad enough now? No.

There's more after this. What made it worse was that we hadn't wasted those five hours at all. We'd held the meeting. Worked through assignments. Broken down every risk. Drops, handoffs, verification, margin of error — Maki had walked us through every line of it. And still, the intelligence gap sat there. Not because we'd been lazy. Not because we'd skipped a page. Because we already knew this course would bite, and we still hadn't seen the shape of its teeth.

Even after I'd worn the corners soft on the data Shinomiya Hyouka had slipped me, the holes were still sitting there in plain sight — an unpatched section of deck plating. Step wrong, and you don't stumble. You go straight through. So when the ship finally began bleeding off FTL speed, my first feeling wasn't nerves. It wasn't anticipation either. It was the feeling of being let out of a cell. Not freedom. Just the relief of finally seeing the shape of whatever was about to make my life hell.

Outside the observation window, the universe folded itself back into something human eyes could parse. The stretched lines of starlight contracted into distant, cold points again. And there, dead center in all that black, Orpheia finally showed its full face. It wasn't a planet you could call beautiful. Or not the kind of beautiful you'd say out loud without flinching. It hung in the dark like a massive lesion that had refused to finish dying.

The dominant palette was a suffocated dark violet, ash-grey, and a shade of pink with a toxic undertone. A bleeding halo wrapped the planet's rim, like inflamed tissue ringing a necrotic wound. The surface wasn't the clean texture of rock. It was split, decayed, tangled together — a dried-out spiderweb, or the sketch of a nervous system that refused to fully die. Cracks in the crust pulsed faintly with violet and blue light, as if fluids with no business existing in nature were running beneath the surface.

It looked as much like a single enormous cell as it did a cosmic parasite egg — quiet, swollen, and dangerous with real patience. As the ship slid deeper into orbit, the wrongness only sharpened into detail. From low orbit, Orpheia's cloud deck lay thick as a pink-purple shroud, churning, heaping, clinging to the surface and refusing to lift. Through the breaks in the cloud sea there were no mountains, no cities — just a surface entirely claimed by fungal growth.

Massive ring-shaped structures scattered across it glowed like caps from a distance and like breathing organs up close, their surfaces threaded with strange radial patterns and translucent ribs, surrounded by rings of smaller glowing patches spreading outward like colonies gone feral in a petri dish. It was spectacular to the point of feeling divine. It was nauseating to the point of feeling like a physical attack. This wasn't simply a dangerous planet. This was mold, grown large enough to become a celestial body.

"... I want whoever wrote Mega-Fungal Death World dragged out here," I said quietly, staring out at it.

"So they can see for themselves how polite that phrase actually was." Jess stood beside me, arms crossed, her color not great.

"Now I understand why the file said prolonged surface visual exposure not recommended."

"Because it makes you want to be sick?"

"No." She paused, entirely sincere.

"Because you start wondering if the universe broke somewhere." I was about to say bit late to start wondering that, when the comms chimed first. Maki answered.

"My Lady." The captain's voice came through the ship system, formal and even as always.

"We have reached the designated sector. This vessel will transition to sub-light speed and hold position while the remaining competitor ships complete assembly and synchronize entry into Orpheia orbit. The first wave of drop pods is ready."

"Understood. Thank you." She cut the line, crisp, no wasted words — just turned and swept her gaze across the room. That single look carried no weight of its own, and still landed like a silent countdown. Whatever had still been drifting between the view and low-grade complaining snapped straight back to the present. First leg. Akari Flak.

The one who usually looked slight and small in ordinary clothes, but who, the second she had a sniper rifle on her back, looked more than anyone like she'd nailed herself to the far end of a firing line — she'd already changed into House Kushima's AS. The ASURA. I'd seen the armor before. Seeing someone actually inside it was something else entirely. The ASURA was matte black pushed to its lowest possible sheen, only the joints, sensor modules, and a handful of guide nodes glowing faint blue-white.

The silhouette hugged the human frame, long-limbed and economical, modular plating and tactical storage laid across the chest, thin light-channels running down the shoulders, forearms, and outer thighs. The helmet was fully sealed, the visor cut into hard, cold geometry, leaving no room to identify age, expression, or even gender. This wasn't protecting a student.

It was folding Akari — the actual person — into an anonymous, standardized, military-regulation shell, leaving only the function behind: first-leg competitor. Once she was inside it, it was genuinely hard to say who was standing there. All you knew was: fully armed ASURA. With a sniper inside. About to be thrown down onto a planet that looked like a rotting nerve cluster, to run the opening leg. Just thinking about it was absurd enough on its own. Akari didn't waste words.

She lifted her rifle, checked the strap and magnetic-lock positions, and walked toward the drop bay. Not fast enough to look like bravado. Not slow enough to look like hesitation. The walk of someone who, once she knew she was going first, had decided not to spend one extra unit of energy on feelings she didn't need. I watched her back and, eventually, followed. The drop pod bay carried a completely different atmosphere from the rest of the ship.

If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. Brighter. Colder. Technicians, crew, and tournament officials all held their assigned positions. Someone cross-checked serial numbers. Someone confirmed the deployment sequence. Someone verified pod pressure and biometric feeds. Every motion was fast; no one looked rushed.

That overtrained sense of order was, if anything, more unsettling — proof this exact process had run enough times to smooth throwing living people out of orbit into routine business. A tournament official was already waiting at the pod hatch.

"Akari Flak?" He confirmed the name with all the emotional weight of checking a shipping manifest. Akari nodded. He produced an envelope — specialized casing material, official verification strips and ID codes printed across the surface. Even from a short distance I could tell it was built far tougher than a standard document pouch. It didn't look like something meant to hold paper. It looked like something meant to hold whatever couldn't afford to be touched by water, acid, or fate.

"This is the relay recorder," he said.

"It may only be unsealed and removed at the official handoff. Please note: this planet carries a risk of strongly acidic weather. Damage to the casing may directly affect device verification and invalidate the handoff." Listen to that. That's exactly why I keep saying murder is the more accurate word. A normal person, standing in front of a first-leg runner about to drop onto a high-radiation fungal planet, might say be careful. These people were different.

They calmly reminded you — Don't let the acid ruin the baton. Akari offered no reaction to the friendly advisory. She took the envelope, opened the storage compartment on her outer thigh, slid it in, and locked it down. The whole sequence ran clean enough to look like she'd done it a hundred times. I knew she hadn't. None of us had. There just wasn't room, right now, for anyone to admit it. I stepped in front of her. Through the ASURA's fully sealed visor, I couldn't read her face at all.

That was uncomfortable in a very specific way. Once a person gets folded into hardware that clean and that merciless, every small tell that would normally make you reach out and ask are you okay disappears with it. What's left is only the mission. I looked at her visor and said:"Don't push past your limit." The helmet tilted, just slightly, as if looking back at me. I kept going.

"If it really isn't happening, drop it. You hear me?" She was quiet for three seconds. Not long. But in the drop bay, surrounded by metal echo, procedure chatter, the click of locks, and the low hum of the hull, three seconds stood out with unusual clarity. Then Akari's voice came through the helmet comms.

"Can't do that." Not loud. Steady.

"Because I still want to be your friend." I went still. Not because the line was dramatic. Because of how completely she meant it. No rallying cry. No I'll definitely come back — the kind of flag-planting that makes you want to roll your eyes. She just laid the reason out, plainly. She wanted to live. Wanted to come back. Wanted whatever this was between us to outlast the finish line. Coming from Akari, that carried more weight than any speech could have. Something caught in my throat.

In the end, all I managed was an unfair, ungraceful snap back.

"... Saying that right now is genuinely dirty of you."

"If it works, it doesn't count as dirty."

"That's even dirtier." Something like a laugh came through the helmet. Very short. Short enough that I half doubted I'd heard it at all. The next second, she turned and stepped into the drop pod. The hatch closed behind her with a dense, solid bite of metal on metal. Not loud. Final — sealing those last few lines of conversation inside with her, in the steel box about to be thrown out of orbit. The pod began to move. The rail carried it out toward the deployment ring, one pod after another, falling into line.

Through the observation slit, the other houses' ships were sliding into their own assigned positions — every style clashing, every crest gleaming, engine nozzles built expensive enough to be an insult, now ringing Orpheia like a circle of premium, slightly deranged spectator boxes. At the center of that ring, the referee ship sat like an overly calm nail, pinning every competing team to the rulebook. Then the whistle sounded. Not the kind that fires people up at a sports meet.

The kind that marks the start of a very carefully documented execution.

"All drop pods — release." For one moment, it genuinely looked like stars. Pod after pod detached from the mother ships, released from launch rails all around the ring, falling toward Orpheia. Small points of light traced arcs through deep space, dropping toward that diseased, glowing fungal world. From this distance they were almost beautiful, almost quiet — as if someone had scattered a handful of artificial stars across the body of a rotting god. I knew better. Those weren't stars. They were the first legs.

Living people. Competitors. The first piece of proof that this "tournament" had officially begun. I stood at the window and watched one point of light — Akari's — fall toward Orpheia along with all the others. My hand curled into a fist at my side without my noticing. And the last thing that surfaced in my mind wasn't the dense wall of regulations, or the five hours of tactical meetings that had nearly driven all of us to slam our heads on the table. It was that one short line of hers.

Because I still want to be your friend. Damn it. That kind of thing was more infuriating than any official rulebook had any right to be. Akari's Perspective The moment the drop pod separated from the mother ship, Akari didn't feel the fall. What came first was quiet. An unnaturally clean quiet, clean enough to make her ears itch.

The vacuum outside the hull swallowed every sound, leaving only the low-frequency vibration of the restraint frame, the steady rhythm of life support cycling air, and the stable glow of the ASURA's interface inside the helmet. She was locked into the drop seat, black armor and harness fitted tight, even her own breathing feeling sorted and organized — too orderly for a human body. In the storage compartment on her outer thigh, the sealed envelope rested quietly against the armor's inner wall. A thin object.

Its presence entirely out of proportion to its weight. Akari glanced down once, then pulled her eyes forward again. No need for a second look. It wasn't a document. It wasn't a pass. It was the period at the end of one sentence and the capital letter opening the next — the thing that decided whether the whole team got to run this race and come out the other side alive. She was the one holding it now, which meant she couldn't afford to be the first to come apart. The cabin indicator shifted from blue to white.

Deployment sequence initiated. One second later, the pod dropped hard. This time, there was nothing quiet about it. A massive spike of weightlessness gutted her stomach first. Then the attitude thrusters fired to correct, and the force slammed back through her chest from the opposite direction — a hand reaching straight through the ASURA's shell and pinning her into the seat.

The hull began to bite against the thin upper atmosphere, fine tremors climbing up through the seat back, the arm restraints, the knee plating, joint by joint. The warning lights stayed steady, which meant everything was still, officially, within tolerance. In moments like this, the system's calm was its own kind of aggravating — like being told: yes, we know this is uncomfortable. It's also completely standard. The HUD bloomed open inside her helmet. Altitude. Attitude. Hull temperature. Wind-shear variance.

Surface visibility. Estimated spore density. Line after line pinned itself to the edge of her vision, precise to the point of indifference. Akari didn't try to read all of it. She locked onto the few numbers that actually mattered. She'd never been the type to fall in love with data. She just needed to know what would keep her alive, and what would kill her. When the pod punched into Orpheia's atmosphere, the outside brightened. Not with the ordinary brightness of sunlight.

With something sicker — light strained one time too many through thick cloud, dust, and high-altitude scatter. The pink-purple cloud layer pressed down from above, and the pod's high-speed descent tore through it layer by layer, as if the whole vehicle were drilling through the innards of some enormous organism. Banks of near-luminous fog swept past the viewport now and then, carrying fine particulate — ash, or spores.

The ASURA's sensor suite immediately flagged a yellow warning at the edge of her vision: high-corrosion aerosol detected in local airspace. Her fingers tightened, just slightly, on the grips. The officials had mentioned Orpheia's strongly acidic weather. Aboard the ship, that had sounded like a checkbox on a risk-disclosure form. Now it was real, and it was running down the outer hull. The descent angle corrected again. The pod rolled hard, and her view tipped sideways with it.

The churning cloud mass tore open for an instant, and she saw Orpheia's surface directly for the first time. It wasn't ground. Not in any sense she'd been raised to understand ground. Below the heavy cloud deck spread a vast, dark, wet organic texture. The surface looked coated in a single enormous, decaying membrane — deep violet, ash-grey, and dim blue light tangled together, spiraling outward in ring after ring of unnatural veining.

Scattered structures rose from it, looking like fungal caps from one angle and translucent organs from another, their edges glowing cold, their centers pulsing faintly. From altitude, the whole planet didn't look like terrain. It looked like a living lesion. She stared at it. Her pupils didn't widen. Her breath didn't catch. She just went quieter. A short tone sounded inside the helmet, marking the designated landing zone.

The cursor dropped onto a darker patch of surface, ringed by irregular heat sources and dense spore clusters. Which meant she probably wasn't going to get much time to ease into the scenery after touchdown. Good. That was actually simpler. If the committee had been kind enough to hand the first leg a pretty, flat welcome lawn, she'd have suspected an even bigger trap hidden underneath. Deceleration engaged.

The thrusters at the pod's base fired in short, heavy pulses, and the whole frame felt like something had grabbed it mid-air and wrenched it violently backward. The counter-force slammed through her all at once. Akari's jaw tightened slightly; her shoulders didn't move. The harness bit into the ASURA's outer layer, and the deep, aching vibration threatened to climb straight up her spine. She knew this wasn't the worst part. The worst part usually came after landing. The altitude readout began dropping in big jumps.

Five hundred. Three hundred. One-twenty. Seventy. Forty. Muddy fog and fine acid rain lashed the hull, dense enough to sound like handfuls of grit thrown against metal. Listening to it, she found herself remembering what Hoshino Shimo had said, standing in front of her before the drop. Don't push past your limit. If it really isn't happening, drop it. Akari's answer, back then, had been calm. Thinking about it now, she still believed it had been the right one. She still wanted to be Shimo's friend.

Which meant she had to land alive. A dull, heavy boom. The drop pod finally hit ground. Not a hero's clean touchdown — a full, weighted slam into Orpheia's surface. The frame sank hard, skidded sideways a half-length, and only then bit down with its anchor claws and attitude correction to finally hold. The impact whited out her vision for an instant, warning frames flashing and clearing in rapid succession.

The ASURA's internal dampers absorbed most of the shock; what got through arrived honestly, straight into her bones. She made no sound. Just waited half a second. Confirmed: not unconscious. Not sick. Nothing broken. Only then did she lift her head toward the fresh green text lighting up in front of her. TOUCHDOWN CONFIRMED ASURA self-check complete. External pressure: abnormal. Spore density: elevated. Acidic precipitation: light to moderate. Surface: traversable. First-leg competitor status: active.

The hatch lock cycled open with a sound like teeth unclenching. Orpheia's air hadn't reached her yet, but Akari could already imagine what it smelled like. Damp. Corrosive. A sweet, faintly rank note of things reproducing too successfully in a closed space — an entire planet waiting patiently on the other side of a metal door for her to let it in. She flexed the fingers of her weapon hand once, slowly. Then lowered her gaze. The race had begun.