Chương 518: 246.Return and Departure 2

Shimo's Perspective I'd always known Orpheia was garbage. It was in the files. In the reports. Everyone who'd ever set foot here and survived had gone out of their way to warn the next fool in line not to bother. Knowing it and watching it happen are two different things. Especially watching someone you know come within a breath of dropping into acid mud — close enough that you don't dare finish exhaling. It was only then that I fully understood: the committee hadn't underestimated the risk.

This wasn't sloppy tournament design. They — no, sorry, I nearly upgraded the committee to the status of a living organism just now. My mistake. That's an insult to organisms. Those people knew perfectly well this would kill someone, and they'd packaged the dying as entertainment.

"Can we adjust the second-leg drop to land closer to her?" I asked. Even to my own ears, my voice sounded wrong.

"No." SUSANOO answered immediately.

"If I intervene directly in the deployment system, it leaves a complete trace. Not just the two of them — our entire team would be disqualified for technical interference."

"So we just watch."

"Yes." I ground my molars together. He didn't try to comfort me. Didn't tell me to calm down. Honestly, that made me want to hit him slightly less. What he'd said was fact, and facts are usually more offensive than encouragement. Maki watched the screen, her profile unreasonably calm. But I knew she wasn't indifferent. She was just very good at keeping the knife tucked in her sleeve.

If anyone from the committee had been standing in front of her right then, I have no doubt they'd have received a perfectly formatted, exquisitely worded, socially lethal letter of protest before the day was out.

"She'll make it," Maki said.

"How do you know?"

"Because she isn't running a handoff anymore." Her eyes stayed on Akari in the feed.

"She's stealing him back." I went still. Then I understood. Right. Akari wasn't executing procedure anymore. She was racing this garbage planet and this garbage tournament to rip the second leg out of death's hands before it could close. Thinking about it that way, the cold rage sitting in my chest suddenly came into sharp focus. I hated this committee.

Hated them enough that, if the rules allowed it, I'd happily submit a post-tournament Feasibility Study on Kidnapping the Entire Organizing Committee and Forcing Them to Run the Course Themselves. On the screen, Akari already had her rifle up. The acid haze rolled. Heat signatures shifted. The second-leg pod's hatch began to unlock. I stared at the display, my fingers curling without my noticing, knuckles going white. Please. Just this leg. Come back alive first.

Akari's Perspective The drop pod at the edge of the acid haze was still shedding heat. Akari didn't approach right away. She finished off the last lunging Mycelium Stalker first, pinning it to a half-melted fungal root. It managed to peel open that layered, degraded-drain-fitting of a mouth one last time, spraying a thin line of sweet-smelling adhesive before the ASURA's tactical blade cut clean through it sideways.

In the mud pit behind her, the Caustic Mud-Behemoth's corpse was still twitching, its ruptured cysts burning a wide, sincerely disgusting scorch pattern into the surrounding mud. She pulled the blade free, flicked the fluid off the spine, and finally turned toward the pod. The hatch stuck for a second, then let out a deeply unpromising metallic groan. No one came out right away. Akari raised the rifle and tapped the hull.

"If you're alive, move." Silence for half a beat. Then a male voice, clearly working hard to sound composed:"... I'd like to confirm first — is the outside currently the kind of environment where I can put my feet down without immediately being eaten?" Akari paused. She'd meant to say no. Out of consideration for the handoff window, the rules, and whatever was left of her own conscience that hadn't yet rotted on this planet, she settled for:"For the moment, yes. Provided you move fast."

The hatch finally kicked free. When Charles Bingham emerged, he looked a shade worse than composed. The landing impact had clearly drained his color; sweat had plastered the hair at his forehead flat. One hand stayed braced on the hull, like if anyone said good work to him right now, he'd sit down on the spot and start reconsidering every life choice he'd ever made. But he stood up. Fast. Akari's gaze lingered on him for half a second.... Acceptable. At least he wasn't the type who'd drag the handoff down with him.

She pulled the sealed envelope from her thigh compartment and pressed it into his hands.

"Charles Bingham, second leg. Physical handoff complete. Run the verification yourself." His fingers tightened visibly around the casing, but his movements didn't falter. He pressed his palm to the reader and switched the leg authentication over — the sequence came out cleaner than his voice had. The verification light inside the pod blinked twice and settled to a steady blue. Second-leg handoff confirmed. The system's tone was as flat as calling out a number at a canteen counter. Akari found it deeply punchable.

"Listen." She wasted no time on pleasantries.

"Two things around here are the worst. First: Mycelium Stalkers. They flatten against the ground and mimic it. The second you decide it's just ordinary rotten mud, it takes your lower half off in one bite. Don't step on ground that's too uniform, too quiet — especially anything with a regular rise and fall." Charles went a shade paler.

"Second: Caustic Mud-Behemoths. They hide in rifts and hot mud. If the gular sac swells, it's about to attack. Don't try to outstare one — you'll lose. If you see hot mud bubbling with acid rising off it, go around." She glanced once toward the depths of the Perpetual Night Fungal Pillars. The towering columns looked like an entire sky's worth of night that had grown deliberately crooked, cold blue-violet light drifting through the haze — beautiful in a deeply unlucky way.

The kind of view that belonged on a cult propaganda poster, or at best a committee tourism brochure. Nowhere near which anyone should bring a living body.

"And," Akari added, looking back at him, "get out of the Perpetual Night Fungal Pillars as fast as you can. This isn't a route. It's just a slower meat grinder." Charles gripped the envelope, his throat working once.

"... Are you always this honest when you warn people?"

"What's the alternative — smile and wish you a pleasant trip?"

"I just think," he laughed, a dry, humorless sound, "if you were leg one, I'm starting to understand why we haven't all been wiped out already." Akari didn't touch that — a line that sounded half like a compliment and half like it was quietly stacking the entire team's survival rate onto her shoulders. She just raised a hand, pointing toward a slightly higher fungal ridge to the east.

"Acid scars and impact marks over there, left by another school. Means someone came through and walked out alive. Borrow their path. Don't play hero. You've got forty-five minutes to leg three. Your job isn't to deliver your last words here. It's to show up at that window alive." The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation. Charles looked toward where she'd pointed and drew a long breath. Then said, very quietly:"I don't actually want to deliver my last words."

"Good." Akari's tone stayed flat.

"Then hold onto that motivation all the way to the handoff." Charles gave a thin, crooked smile, turned, and ran. His first step was stiff. His second smoothed out. By the third, Akari could already see it — not a fighter, but fast, and light on his feet.

He looked like the kind of boy who'd double-check the safe before boarding a ship, and yet on the ground he dropped his weight low fast, dodging roots and rot-mat like some overly cautious small animal that had survived precisely because it never stopped being careful. Cowardice wasn't a flaw. On this planet, it counted, more often than not, as a virtue. Akari watched him disappear into the fungal forest and finally let out a long breath. Her job was done.

Right now, all she wanted was to go back and pour everything she'd just seen, unedited, straight into the skull of whoever at the committee was responsible for this. The rules didn't allow it. A pity. Shimo's Perspective Once Charles started running, the atmosphere on the ship was already different from when the first leg had dropped.

Whatever thin hope anyone had still been holding — maybe the rules just sound awful on paper, maybe the ground itself isn't quite this bad — had been thoroughly ground into industrial waste by the footage Akari sent back, by the numbers, by every unadorned line of her report. I stood at the monitoring station, watching the second leg's tracker. The blue dot crept forward on the map. Not fast. Steady. That steadiness mattered.

On Orpheia, simply managing to keep moving in a straight line was already more of a miracle than most flashy tactics.

"Charles's cadence is better than projected," one of the Kushima operators said quietly.

"Heart rate elevated, but under control," a technician added.

"In other words," I said, arms crossed, "he looks like he wants to write his will first. His body just hasn't gotten the memo." Someone stifled a laugh nearby. I turned. Lan had just set her terminal down, her shoulders still shaking a little.

"Shimo. That assessment is rude."

"I'm being objective."

"No. You're being honest. That's usually more offensive than rude."

"Fine, the polite version." I looked back at the screen.

"He looks like someone who has never once, in his entire life, imagined he'd be running a relay through a fungal sea."

"How is that more polite?"

"It comes with empathy." Lan narrowed her eyes at me like she wanted to prove, using medical science, that something in my brain was structurally wrong. In the end she just sighed and pushed a bottle of electrolyte water into my hand.

"Drink."

"I'm not thirsty."

"Your lips are white." I looked at the bottle. Then at her. Her expression was entirely normal. Her tone was entirely normal. But being handed things this way always left me with the faint, unwelcome impression that I'd been reclassified as some troublesome small animal on a feeding schedule. That impression got considerably worse when Maki chose that exact moment to walk over from the other side and set a warm onigiri and a bowl of miso soup down beside my hand.

"Eat something," she said. I looked at her. Then at the rice ball.

"... Did you two hold a private meeting about managing me like a life-form on a feeding schedule?" Maki didn't so much as twitch an eyebrow.

"No." Lan added, helpfully, from the side:"I wasn't at the meeting, at least."

"So there was a meeting." Maki calmly tore open the spare nori packet and set it within reach.

"Shimo. Sulking right now won't increase Charles's speed."

"I'm not sulking."

"Mm."

"That mm has zero conviction."

"Eat first." I hated the way she talked sometimes. Not because she was forceful — the exact opposite. She never pushed, and yet she could deliver a line with the weightless authority of an order, one that made arguing back feel childish. Like someone drawing a feather across the most defenseless part of your throat and leaving you no choice but to accept your fate. I bit into the rice ball. Warm. Salmon. Salt exactly right.... Worse.

Because it meant she'd already calculated I couldn't handle anything heavier right now.

"Charles entering the high-pillar zone," the operator reported. I looked up immediately. The main display cut to the terrain ahead. The high-pillar section of the Perpetual Night Fungal Pillars was even denser than before, hanging hyphae stacked like layers of old curtains, sealing what had never really looked like daytime into a twilight with no business existing. Charles's blue dot wound through it, paused, moved on — speed dipping occasionally, then recovering fast. He wasn't calm.

Or he was panicking with unusual efficiency.

"Lieutenant." SUSANOO's voice, in my ear. I turned to his projection on the secondary screen.

"Go."

"Second leg has cleared the first hazard zone. At his current route, he'll reach a relatively stable section in nine minutes. Additionally: Charles Bingham has proactively avoided anomalous heat sources three times, bypassed surface-mimicry zones twice, and once used a fungal pillar's shadow to evade a low-altitude predator's patrol." I raised an eyebrow.

"So his cowardice is generating positive results."

"If you'd like a more precise phrasing," he said, "I'd call it a high-performing survival instinct."

"You're getting better at talking like a person."

"Thank you for the compliment, Lieutenant."

"That wasn't a compliment."

"Then I'll file it as a rare emotional exchange." I glared at the secondary screen. His projected face, of course, stayed exactly the same — unhurried, giving away nothing, leaving me to guess whether he was mocking me. Trying to have a real conversation with a talking white wall was probably exactly this frustrating. Still, Charles was holding. That much was real. Everyone on the ship could feel it.

The tension that had hung over the room since the first leg dropped — the sense that an elimination notice could land at any second — slowly shifted into something heavier. Not relief. The understanding that from here on, every remaining leg would have to drag itself home on nothing but its own merit. I'd stared at the screen too long; my eyes had started to sting. Maybe the rice ball had finally hit my stomach and my body remembered it had been clenched for hours.

Maybe the ship's climate control shared the committee's purely symbolic respect for human comfort. Either way, once Charles's dot entered the stable section, Maki half-persuaded, half-steered me toward the rest bay. Half, in practice, meaning I was still saying I don't need it while she was already dropping a blanket into my hands.

"Twenty minutes."

"I'm not that fragile."

"Call it maintenance, then."

"Am I a chassis?"

"No." She looked at me.

"Machines listen to orders better than you do." This woman really did know how to be infuriating. And I never quite found the leverage to argue back. The rest bay lights were dimmed low, as if the ship knew nobody would actually sleep deeply right now and had settled for the bare minimum of gentleness needed to trick the brain into shutting off.

The engine's low hum bled through the bulkhead, mixing with the distant sound of operations into a background noise that wasn't peaceful, exactly, but somehow let something in my shoulders loosen. I'd only meant to close my eyes for five minutes. When I woke, my first thought was that I'd genuinely fallen asleep. My second—"Lieutenant. You're awake." I opened my eyes onto SUSANOO's projection hovering above the bedside terminal.

"... Why are you at my bedside."

"Scheduled status report."

"That phrase sounds like something out of a ghost story, the way you use it." He ignored the review entirely.

"Second leg continues to advance. No elimination notice received. Official third-leg standby call has been issued. By my calculation, the handoff window is opening shortly." I sat up and rubbed the bridge of my nose.

"Charles?"

"Condition acceptable. Outward presentation remains highly cautious; physical response is good. Simply put: he looks one sentence away from writing a confession, but he's running more credibly than several higher-talking competitors." I paused.

"... You added that last part yourself?"

"Yes."

"Picking up bad habits."

"Proximity to the source."

"Don't put that on my tab." I threw off the blanket and got up, still carrying the dull weight of someone freshly woken. In a moment like this, if someone handed me hot coffee, I'd theoretically be grateful. Instead, walking back into the control area, what greeted me wasn't coffee — it was the committee's cold, entirely inhuman standard broadcast.

"Third-leg competitor, please prepare. Repeating: third-leg competitor, please prepare." The cabin went quiet in the same second. No one had been eliminated. On paper, that was good news. But precisely because no one had been eliminated, everyone understood more clearly than before: the course hadn't pulled back after two dangerous legs. It was simply, equally, ready to bite the next one. The first leg's official recovery shuttle came back right around then. When the hatch opened, I almost didn't recognize Akari.

Not because she was badly hurt — because the ASURA's exterior made an extremely convincing case on its own. Acid-scar patches covered the shoulder plating, leg armor, and outer guards. Her right forearm still carried a half-dried, dark splash, like someone had thrown a failed chemistry experiment directly at her. She walked out of the hatch steady, expression flat, looking exactly like someone back from a business trip to hell, carrying local souvenirs.

"Welcome back," I said. She glanced at me.

"That sounds considerably friendlier than the surface."

"That's because the surface never received basic etiquette training." Akari didn't smile, but the corner of her mouth moved, just slightly. Maki stepped in immediately, directing the med team to check the external corrosion first. Akari didn't push back — she rattled through everything she'd encountered, one item at a time, no wasted words. The Mycelium Stalker's mimicry range. The Caustic Mud-Behemoth's pre-attack tells. The collapsed drainage channel under the acid haze. The marks left by other schools.

Her route recommendations for Charles's leg. She never wasted language, but right now every sentence landed with real weight, because none of it was theory. It was what she'd bought back with her own body, one step at a time. Emily, not far off, had been leaning against a drop pod with an expression that clearly said don't even think about putting that tin can on me. She genuinely didn't want to wear it.

Not a tantrum, not posturing — just the plain, old-soldier stubbornness of someone who hated the weight, the confinement, the loss of freedom, and firmly believed she could keep herself alive without dressing like a walking safe. Then she saw the scarring on Akari's plating. For one instant, the impatience on her face went quieter. The next instant, she swallowed whatever complaint had been halfway out, and reached for the connector cable a technician was holding out.

"... Lock it in," she said. I was close enough to see it clearly. She hadn't been persuaded by argument. She'd just seen the evidence. Some people argue with words. Some with reports. Akari had used a suit of armor that had nearly dissolved. As far as persuasive power goes, that method was brutally, almost violently effective — a briefing delivered by main force. Emily suited up faster than I expected.

Once connected, she tested her left arm's range, confirmed the leg servo response, then locked an assault rifle onto the primary mount and slung a battle-axe onto the rear bracket. The whole picture carried real weight. It looked, more than anything, like some chain-smoking, short-tempered adult with more than enough field experience to call you a liability on a battlefield had finally decided to share her personal opinion of this planet. At the hatch, she tilted her head.

"Time to go drag that virgin kid back." The room went quiet for a beat. I looked at Maki. Her expression held steady — steady in the specific way of someone drawing a clean line between now is not the moment to correct her phrasing and I will absolutely be settling this later. The next second, Emily actually produced a cigarette.

"Wait," I blurted.

"You are not—" She'd already lit it. A pinprick of flame flared in the gap before the visor sealed, caught neatly at the corner of her mouth. Then the face that already carried its own permanent note of mockery vanished, inch by inch, beneath the black visor. The motion was smooth, the posture clean — the whole thing looked exactly like the kind of image that gets printed with adults, do not attempt in the margin. Honestly, it looked good.

If I hadn't seen Maki's brow drop by half a degree right beside me, I might even have admitted it looked a little too good.

"Emily." Maki spoke. Not loud. But with the unmistakable weight of a bill about to be presented. Emily paused at the hatch, didn't turn.

"Yeah?"

"When you get back, you scrub that AS yourself."

"... What?"

"Until there's no trace of smoke left." I nearly laughed out loud. The technicians clearly wanted to as well, and were holding it back on pure survival instinct. Emily stood there for two full seconds, then let out one thoroughly unconvinced huff through her nose.

"... Got it, Mother." Maki, perfectly calm:"I'll take that as agreement." This time I really did turn my head and cough into my hand, pretending my throat had just decided to act up. The drop pod began to close. Battle-axe on her back, rifle at hand, a cigarette between her teeth that was going to cost her a solid extra half hour of scrubbing armor when she got back — Emily looked exactly like someone heading down to conduct a highly illegal, entirely justified, private debt collection.