Chương 517: 246.Return and Departure 1

Akari's Perspective The second leg's designated landing zone was directly ahead of her. Correction. Directly ahead, diagonally left, diagonally right, and somewhere between every single place on this rotten planet that no one in their right mind would ever want to go. The ASURA's boots sank heavily into the edge of the fungal mat. The wet, decaying ground let out a sickening squelch, like pressing into flesh running a fever. Akari didn't waste focus on being disgusted.

Her eyes were locked onto the blue marker pulsing in the HUD. Distance to second-leg drop zone: 82. 4 km. Estimated time remaining: 11 min 32 sec. Surface acid haze concentration rising. Reroute recommended.

"Shut up." She wasn't cursing a person. She was cursing the navigation system — a voice that always sounded perfectly polite, while every line it delivered felt like a reminder that dying here was, in fact, highly efficient. A rift gaped open ahead. Not a normal terrain break. More like something enormous had clawed the ground apart. The fungal forest leaned inward on both sides; grey-green mud churned at the bottom, bubbles swelling and bursting in sequence, each one throwing up a plume of yellow-tinged acid haze.

The gap looked about forty meters across, and even at its narrowest, gave no reason for optimism. Akari slowed for half a second, sweeping her eyes across it. Claw marks on the rock ridge to the right. Impact scoring on the fungal pillar to the left. Dead ahead, a deployment marker post, corroded down to its bare metal skeleton. Other schools had already come through here. And it hadn't gone well for them.

"Wonderful," she said flatly.

"So we're not the only ones the committee's feeding to the planet today." The ASURA's external sensors swept the rift floor and threw up a string of alerts. High heat signatures in the mud. Irregular biological movement. Akari didn't pull back. She cut along the rim at full speed. Because she was out of time. The second leg was coming down. And those bastards on the committee had clearly designed the "handoff" to double as a legally documented execution.

She'd barely cleared a broken fungal pillar when the bottom of the rift detonated. Not figuratively. Actually detonated. A wave of brown-red mud erupted upward, carrying something that looked like a salamander, a poison toad, and industrial waste thrown into a blender together. Half-caked in boiling sludge, glowing cysts swelled on both sides of its head. It had no real teeth — just ring after ring of contracting fleshy ridges inside its mouth, as if the planet had grown itself a personal complaint department.

Caustic Mud-Behemoth, Threat Level B. Close-quarters engagement not recommended.

"No shit." Akari stepped sideways, driving forward, the ASURA's right arm rising as the sniper rifle deployed mid-sprint. She didn't fire immediately. She watched the angle of the first spit. The acid didn't travel in a straight line. It scattered again mid-air. She watched a second time. The creature braced its forelimbs against the rock wall, gular sac swelling — the cyst on the left contracting visibly half a beat slower than the right. Uneven pressure. The third time, it opened its mouth.

Akari cut right in the same instant, sliding behind a half-melted rock shell. Acid swept through the space she'd just vacated, burning a smoking white groove into the fungal mat. She didn't stop — muzzle down, not aiming for the head, not the mouth, one round straight into the mud beneath the creature's right forelimb. Boom. Not to kill. To break its balance. The rock edge crumbled instantly. The Behemoth's lower half slid sideways, its gular sac still swelling, the fourth charge trapped between mouth and air sac.

That was exactly the moment Akari had been waiting for. Second shot. Through the sac. Third shot. Into the nerve cluster behind the left eye. The massive body convulsed at the rift's edge, internal pressure failing catastrophically, and the head burst like an overstuffed cheap food package. Grey-green and dark red splattered half the rock wall, the smell sweet enough to turn her stomach. The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Akari lowered the rifle without bothering to offer the universe a parting line. Because the real problem was still ahead. A new message flashed on the HUD. Second-leg deployment sequence initiated. Landing zone correction in progress. Deviation: 1. 8 km... 2. 6 km... 3. 4 km... Her pupils contracted.

"... What?" The numbers kept climbing. Not toward anything safe. Toward the exact direction that suggested the committee's ancestral burial grounds deserved to be reclassified as a disaster zone. Shimo's Perspective I'd thought this "unauthorized viewpoint" of ours was just a slightly undignified information shortcut. I was wrong. It was a criminal instrument for inducing premature stomach ulcers. The split-screen tracking feed on the main monitor had no business existing aboard our ship. Not under the rules.

Definitely not under anyone's conscience. SUSANOO had "borrowed" the source with a confidence so total it felt less like hacking an official system and more like opening his own refrigerator. And all I could do was stand there, watching Akari sprint toward the second-leg drop zone, while the committee demonstrated, in real time, exactly how you design "competitive procedure" to look like murder wearing a notary's stamp.

"The deviation's outside the original safety radius." I stared at the numbers, throat dry.

"And that doesn't count as an incident?"

"Per the committee's supplementary clauses," SUSANOO said, perfectly even, "if the deviation is attributable to high-altitude wind shear, acid-haze turbulence, localized thermal convection, and spore-cloud refraction, and the landing point remains within the expanded tolerance radius, it is classified as acceptable risk." I turned toward his white chassis projection on the side display.

"Acceptable risk."

"Yes, Lieutenant. To put it plainly: as long as she hasn't hit the ground in pieces, the committee considers itself compliant." I swear, for one full second, I genuinely wanted to put the tactical tablet through the wall. I didn't. Not because I'd suddenly achieved enlightened self-control — because the thing was expensive, and House Kushima would very politely slide the repair invoice under my door. Maki would probably attach a note in beautiful handwriting: Shimo, please manage your emotions. Infuriating.

"How does a landing zone drift this far?" I asked. SUSANOO pulled up an atmospheric cross-section, a turbulence model, and a descent curve immediately, fast enough to suggest he'd known I was going to snap eventually.

"Orpheia's near-surface thermal differential is extreme. There are irregular updrafts above the fungal canopy. Combined with the charged acid-haze band, the guidance system drifted briefly during the final thirty seconds of descent." He paused, then added the knife-twist: "Or, put differently: the committee knew this sector would drift. They simply couldn't be bothered to pick a different venue."

"That isn't laziness," I heard my own voice go cold.

"That's deliberate." Nobody nearby said a word. The Kushima technicians, the comms operators, the crew in coveralls — all of them had gone unnaturally quiet. The screen light hit every face in the room, and not one of them wore an expression that said this is normal. Because anyone who hadn't checked their brain at the committee's front desk could see it plainly — This wasn't a tournament selecting for the strong.

This was a test of which team the planet ate first, followed by a referee blowing the whistle with perfect civility. Maki stood behind my right shoulder. She didn't touch me. She just set a cup of something warm on the edge of the console — someone must have handed it to her — as if she'd calculated exactly when the cold would settle into me. Her fingertips left the cup without a sound.

"Watch her first," she said. Three words. Somehow I swallowed the profanity that had been halfway out of my mouth. Infuriating. Also effective. I dragged my eyes back to the screen. And my heart nearly stopped. Akari's Perspective The moment the second-leg drop pod entered her field of view, Akari didn't feel relief. Because it was coming down too fast. Not a proper approach. More like a piece of metal trash the universe had flicked down casually, curious whether it would kill someone on impact.

The white-hot shell cut a diagonal slash across the sky above the fungal sea, trailing a twisted smoke line. The intended landing zone had been a flat fungal shelf north of the rift. Now the whole trajectory had skewed off course, plunging straight toward the edge of the acid-haze band. Akari pushed her speed up hard. The ASURA's outer plating scraped through hanging hyphae, throwing sparks. She ignored it.

Ground sensors flagged the fungal mat's bearing capacity dropping ahead; she stepped up onto a half-collapsed rock ridge instead and cut diagonally across. Mud churned below. From somewhere in the distance came the wet, dragging scrape of something massive hauling its own body across the ground — like a swamp clearing its throat. When the pod hit, the whole world shuddered. It didn't land on flat ground. It slammed into the edge of the acid-haze band and buried its nose in a half-liquefied mud layer.

The alarms maxed out instantly. Drop pod attitude: abnormal. Hull temperature: critical. Ambient acid-particle density: threshold. Akari's breath thinned. Distance remaining: 1. 6 kilometers. If she followed the current ground route around, she wouldn't make it. If she cut straight through the haze— She hesitated for less than half a second. Then changed course. The ASURA's left leg shattered the rock face, and she dropped from high ground straight into the outer edge of the fog zone.

The pale yellow haze wrapped around the armor's surface like something alive, the outer plating hissing on contact. Visibility collapsed. Heat signatures and radar returns started jumping erratically; even her own footsteps sounded muffled, like they were wrapped in wet cloth. She didn't stop. Stopping meant dying. The ground disappeared ahead of her. Not fog. A pit. A collapsed drainage channel hidden beneath the haze, masked by mud. The ASURA's right foot met nothing, and the whole frame pitched forward.

In the instant of losing balance, Akari threw the rifle, twisted at the waist, and drove her left arm into a slanted fungal pillar. The mechanical hand crushed through the outer skin and bit into the fibrous core beneath. Half the frame hung suspended over the pit — below it, bubbling acid mud and a scatter of skeletal remains that hadn't fully dissolved yet. One of the fragments still had another school's ID strip clinging to it. Her expression didn't change. Her grip just tightened.

The ASURA's shoulder servo screamed under the overload. Using the pillar's rebound, she swung the whole frame across to the far bank. Her right knee nearly went into the mud on landing; the acid haze had already eaten mottled scars into her outer coating. The drop pod sat directly ahead. Except ahead wasn't only the drop pod. Deep in the haze, something moved. Not one. Three. Long, low shapes, nearly the exact color of the mud, slowly raised their heads near the pod's heat signature.

None of them lunged — like a pack of experienced scavengers waiting for the can to finish cooling before bothering to pry the lid open. Akari let out a breath and brought the rifle back up.

"... All right." Her voice was quiet. Almost nothing in it.

"You want the second leg, you go through me first."