Chương 520: 247.Predator 2

Shimo's Perspective I'd been sleeping fairly well against the chair back — not soft, not safe, just the specific short disconnect that hits after a body's been stretched past its limit and exhaustion finally kicks it over the edge. In the dream, I was still being chased by reports that had grown legs. One of them started beeping. Then the real alarm woke me up for real. I jolted upright, nearly cracking my skull on the table. Maki, dozing beside me with her arms folded, lifted her head at the same moment.

Her bangs still carried a faint crease from being pressed against her sleeve — the kind of detail I would rather not have noticed, mostly because noticing it meant I had to watch it disappear the second she snapped back into the version of herself who could balance anyone's accounts on command. Across the room, Jess froze mid-hand in the card game she'd been running with Lan and Hedwig.

Honestly, waking up to that tableau, my first thought was: so our team's idea of decompression during high-stakes standby is putting the medical division, the nobility, and the violence division at the same card table. Educational, in its way. Then the text on the main screen burned away whatever goodwill I had left for human civilization.

"Eric Jones, deceased. Itsuwa Heavy Ordnance Academy, disqualified." I went blank. Before I could process it, the second line landed.

"Shizuka Watanabe, deceased. Seikan Academy, disqualified." The third came faster.

"Elisa Tanaka, deceased. Sanjo Special Warfare Directorate, disqualified." The cabin held a beat of silence. I blinked, then found my breath.

"... Three at once?" That pattern was too tight to be coincidence, too concentrated to be independent bad luck. It read like someone had opened a list down on the surface and drawn a clean line through three names in a row. Then I understood why. The referee ship's warning came through — a red marker slapped over the main screen, like a conscience that had shown up late and wanted credit for finally speaking.

"UIMA. Malicious PvP. One red card." I stared at that for half a second. Then turned, slowly, toward Maki. She was already on her feet. Whatever sleep she'd been carrying was gone. Her fingers moved fast enough to blur, dragging the committee's comms channel open by main force. They tried, at first, to hide behind the usual script — for the sake of fairness, surface footage cannot be released at will — dressed up to sound like law, functioning more like cotton stuffed in someone's mouth. Maki started polite.

That specific House Kushima politeness — voice level, words precise, even her impatience pressed flat. The committee clearly hadn't understood one thing: she had no patience left to spend on their procedure. I watched the color drain out of her expression, degree by degree. Not fury. Not losing control. The specific look of someone genuinely dangerous finally deciding not to leave the other side any dignity.

"If your committee cannot provide me with a reasonable explanation right now," she said, still perfectly level, level enough to chill the back of your neck, "then please prepare to explain yourselves to my grandfather in person." The whole cabin went quiet. I watched the nearest operator sit up straighter without meaning to. Kushima Seigen. President of Kushima Heavy Industries. Famous for overprotecting his own — protective enough to qualify for cultural-heritage status.

That name, in the ears of anyone in business, defense contracting, or any field that still wanted a Kushima part on their invoice, produced roughly the same effect: someone shoving a live fuse into your mouth and reminding you, politely, not to bite. The committee went silent. Short silence. Full of survival instinct. After some scrambling, they sent the footage anyway. Maki opened it. At first, it was fine. Emily in the footage — reading position, firing, ambushing, closing, going hand-to-hand. Clean.

No rule on the books said competitors couldn't attack each other. This was never a field trip, never some galaxy-wide friendship jog. Dropping someone on the surface usually just earned a cold log entry and a flat announcement of disqualification. Up to a point, everything stayed in the arguable, but defensible range. Then the mood shifted. The footage rolled through Emily catching up to the Sanjo student. He was already down. And then— I watched her deliver the final stroke. The beheading.

Not to stop a counterattack. Not to save time. Not a split-second tactical call. That strike was too deliberate. Deliberate enough that my stomach twisted. I stared at the screen for a long moment before I managed to say:"... Yeah. I can't defend that." No one answered. So I kept going.

"Killing, I can live with. With how this tournament's set up, pretending no one can die would be the actual joke. But he was already down, and she still went that far with the follow-through — that's too much. This isn't some tribal ritual." I looked at Maki without meaning to. She didn't answer right away. She rewound the footage. Watched it again. Then again. Her profile, under the screen's cold light, looked pale and very still. Not approval. Not fascination.

More like she was setting a dangerous object on a table, taking it apart piece by piece, weighing it, deciding whether it belonged in the armory or the safe. After a few seconds, the corner of her mouth moved, just barely. Something in me went uneasy.

"... What?" Her eyes stayed on the screen.

"This one's usable." That was all she said. I stood there. I knew she evaluated people roughly the way she evaluated hardware — function first, fit second. Even so, I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and ask exactly where usable had come from, and whether her working definition of viable talent was dangerously close to a disaster film's. I didn't ask. Because I already knew she wasn't praising the brutality itself.

She was reading something else — watching someone who clearly knew exactly where the line sat and chose to step over it anyway; watching the committee get forced to back down the moment she did; watching what that particular flavor of danger could tear open, if pointed in the right direction, that no one else on our side was willing to go near. That thought sent something cold down my spine. Not because of Emily. Because of Maki. I'd always known she was smart.

I was starting to suspect smart was the least interesting thing about her. Not long after, the referee ship sent another message. Following review: competition continues. Proceeding directly to leg four. Leg four: Irena Dubois. Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. I read that and let out a slow breath. Good news: we hadn't been disqualified outright.

Bad news: every runner from here on had to carry a fresh piece of intel with them — that our team included a Senpai capable of earning the tournament's first red card. And, for reasons I didn't want to examine too closely, that intel carried real deterrent weight.... I found myself feeling a very specific, very small amount of sympathy for whoever ran into us next. Emphasis on small. Not long after Irena went down to take leg four, Emily came back. Honestly, I'd expected at least a token show of remorse.

Not everyone manages to earn their entire team a red card at an inter-school tournament, let alone with that much unbothered conviction — like signing her own name in the margin of a conduct report. Nothing. Emily stepped off the recovery shuttle with the same loose-shouldered slouch as always, pace unhurried, a trace of post-workout satisfaction at the corner of her mouth.

The sight of it made the heat in my stomach spike so fast I genuinely considered shoving her back into the shuttle with a note attached: return to sender, reason: excessively punchable.

"Shimo—" Maki had clearly already read if nobody stops me there's going to be blood on this deck off my face and shifted, ready to get between us. She didn't get the chance. Emily spoke first.

"I'm genuinely sorry. This one's on me. I'll take responsibility." I stopped cold. Not because she sounded sincere — because this woman had thrown herself, spiritually, onto her knees before I could detonate, and the string of profanity that had already reached my throat crashed straight into a wall on the way out. It felt exactly like winding up for a punch and having the other person hand you a medical bill and a signed apology before you could throw it. Hitting her would have felt cheap.

Maki looked her over, tone as slow and deliberate as someone paging through a ledger.

"In all the years our school has competed, we've never once received a red card." She let that sit, then slid in the second blade without changing pace.

"This time, the committee only gave us the courtesy because of my family's name. I'll be keeping that account." There it was. Maki Kushima's ledger of favors. The truly dangerous thing about that ledger wasn't that she collected debts. It was that she was never in a hurry to.

She'd cover for you, smile through it, hold the room together — and then, one day, exactly when you'd convinced yourself the crisis had passed and finally reached for your tea, she'd slide the invoice across the table, weightless and inescapable. Once you owed her, you were a lifetime member. Automatic renewal. When she finished, her eyes flicked once between me and Emily — brief, but weighing something. In the end she said nothing more, just had the staff consolidate the records and left with a few operators.

I knew she wasn't walking away from it. She just understood that anyone else stepping into this conversation now would only make it worse. The room dropped into silence. The unhealthy kind. I dropped into a chair, arms crossed, in a posture that said clearly enough: you'd better have something resembling an explanation, or this table isn't for slamming, it's for me to break over your head. Emily looked at me, and something faintly amused crossed her face.

"Sorry, Senpai," she drawled.

"You know how it is. Once it starts, it's hard to pull back." My eye twitched.

"We're both second-years." I looked at her, ice-cold.

"Who exactly are you calling Senpai? And don't give me 'it's a feeling.'" She didn't argue the point — just wore an expression that translated roughly to: keep performing. I've got all day. Then she stood, walked to the door, and locked it. Click. I stared at the door. The first thought through my head was thoroughly uncivilized. Fuck. What is she planning. Silencing a witness? Emily turned and leaned against the door, watching me like she'd found something interesting.

"There it is," she said.

"That's a killer's look." I said nothing. Because a genuinely bad feeling had just landed in the back of my skull. Not the ordinary she's about to say something I don't want to hear kind. Something deeper — like someone was about to press a finger directly into scar tissue I'd personally stapled shut. Sure enough.

"So. Where should we start, Senpai Hoshino?" She weighted those two words deliberately.

"With the accident twelve years ago..." A short pause.

"... or with Dr. Heinrich von Steiner?" The back of my neck went ice-cold all at once. Irena's Perspective Irena Dubois was the only one on the team who'd dropped without an AS. Not because she underestimated anything, and not because she had some personal aesthetic that looked good and functioned badly. For her, an extra layer of armor had never carried much point. A basic hazard suit. A filtered respirator. Nothing else.

That was how she'd dropped into a world saturated with fungal spores, radioactive dust, acid haze, and a curated selection of things that had no business appearing in any travel brochure. Fully cyberized, she was already an AS. The instant she touched down, she didn't waste half a second acclimating. Drive. Redirect. Pivot. Accelerate again. She moved like a thin, silver-grey blur skimming the surface, cutting angle after angle between the towering pillars and hanging hyphae.

The nav route unfolded in her vision; the red card's penalty data ran in a corner of her processing, compressed and constant. Emily hadn't just bought the team a committee warning. She'd bought Irena the obligation to run faster, cleaner, and sharper, and drag the whole rhythm back to where it needed to be. She didn't need the footage to know what Emily had done. She had a fairly precise picture of where that woman would stop, and where she wouldn't. Because she'd looked into it. Not just looked — dug.

Before transferring into the academy, Emily's stretch of juvenile detention had been long enough to make any normal guardian declare the case hopeless. It was only the laxness of her home district's law — loose enough to be lazy — that had filed most of it under at-risk youth behavior instead of recommend indefinite containment. Unlike Hoshino Shimo. At the thought, Irena's eyes went briefly cold. A life sentence for a loaf of bread.

While some people used the world as a punching bag and the same system waved them through, smiling. The world wasn't unfair. It just couldn't be bothered to hide it. Ahead, a towering spore-tree split its sacs open, spraying a cloud of yellow-white powder. Irena's cadence didn't change — she tapped a jutting root, lifted, swung across a hardened strand of hyphae, and kept moving, the whole sequence as clean as taking a few stairs in her own hallway. The dangerous life on the surface had trouble even acquiring her.

Ambush predators rely on waiting for you to get close. Irena's movement had no pattern. Every landing changed her rhythm. Every pivot looked improvised and landed exactly where it needed to. The fungal trees couldn't catch her. The things in the mud couldn't aim. Even other competitors still on the course, tempted by the chaos to try something opportunistic, would have spent longer wondering whether they'd actually seen anything at all. She was too fast.

Fast enough that it stopped reading as running — closer to a glitch that kept folding back on itself, never leaving anyone a second chance to correct their aim. She dropped onto a half-rotted rock shelf and swept her eyes ahead. The nav line bent north. Terrain dropping. Spore density climbing. A brief heat flicker three hundred meters to the left — not a large beast. More like someone passing through. She didn't stop. Because her job wasn't hunting, and it wasn't performance. She was here to correct a deviation.

Emily had used an axe and a red card to pull every nerve in the field taut. Irena's job was to keep running forward along that nearly-snapped wire until the committee, the other teams, and this miserable planet all had no choice but to admit — UIMA didn't just go feral. It also won. Her boot punched through a fungal membrane, and her silhouette dropped back into shadow ahead. No wasted motion. No wasted words. And absolutely no intention of letting anyone catch her. Shimo's Perspective"Say that again."

My own voice came out a little hoarse.

"What accident?" I'd never told anyone about any of that. Not because it mattered much — the opposite, really. It was too ordinary a kind of rotten, the kind you'd find flattened in a corner trash can, ordinary enough that even I couldn't be bothered to dig it back up. But if someone knew— The thought hadn't even finished forming before I detonated.

"Was it you?!" I knew I was shouting. The heat behind it was even more direct than what the red card had produced earlier. Not simple anger — something closer to instinct. Like someone cracking open a door you'd bolted shut, and your first reaction isn't to run. It's to bite.

"Calm down, Senpai." Emily, if anything, went calmer. She stood by the door, not advancing, not retreating — that exact, infuriating distance, as if she knew precisely how to stand so she'd have an answer ready if I actually lunged.

"I don't know what's in your past," she said.

"But judging by that reaction, it's probably close to mine." I held her gaze. She lowered her eyes, like paging back through memory.

"twelve years ago. The Intercontinental Star Incident." The air conditioning was running fine. My lungs disagreed.

"A completely ordinary high-speed maglev run." Her voice stayed flat, like she was telling someone else's bad joke.

"Some god-forsaken idiot forgot to switch a signal. Two trains, head-on. Four hundred-odd unlucky people, gone in the same breath." She didn't even bother darkening her tone for it. Which was exactly why it landed harder. She fished a cigarette out of her pocket, lit it, drew once. The flame wobbled briefly under the flat white light — a small, stubborn bad mood that refused to go out. I said nothing. She didn't look at me either — just glanced at her left hand, then at the two prosthetic legs.

"My parents. My little sister. Gone overnight." Still flat.

"I got pinned under the wreck. The medical team took my left arm and both legs to pull me out alive." She flexed the prosthetic once as she said it. The joints gave a small, quiet scrape. Not loud. More real than a lot of things people cry about. I still didn't answer. I didn't know what to say.

"Sorry. Went off on a tangent." She actually smiled — not the performed kind, more the reflex of someone who'd learned to drop a bad joke into the worst moments, just so she wouldn't look quite so much like something that had crawled out of wreckage.

"Anyway. Dr. Heinrich von Steiner found me." Smoke curled slow under the light.

"Pulled me out of lockup, bolted on the latest military prosthetics, shipped me to the front." Then she scratched the back of her head, looking almost sheepish. Set against the image of her burying an axe in someone's skull twenty minutes ago, the gesture was so absurd I genuinely wondered if this woman was running two separate operating systems on rotation.

"Never did beat your kill count, Senpai, in the end." She had the nerve to add that.

"Forty in a single engagement. That's something else." My eyelid jumped.

"So you were supposed to rot on the front line," I said slowly, my voice cold enough to frost on the way out.

"How'd you end up here, harvesting students?" Emily looked at me and smiled — not kind, not a provocation either. The specific look of someone who'd finally caught the scent of their own kind.

"Aren't you doing the same, Senpai?" she said.

"Running around here playing at romance." Bang. My fist hit the table. The surface gave a dull thud; the stylus beside it jumped.

"Watch your mouth." I looked up, held her stare.

"I'm not playing." She only looked more certain.

"That's the look, Senpai," she said.

"We're both predators."

"I don't accept that."

"Doesn't matter." She shrugged.

"Everyone's the same, hungry enough." I sat quiet for a few seconds, then finally forced out the sentence that had been circling my head.

"So you're another one of that madman's psychiatric experiments." When it came out, I actually laughed a little. Not a broken laugh. The specific kind that happens when the world turns out to be exactly as rotten as advertised, and you can't even fault it for the joke landing badly.

"Number Two?" Emily tilted her head.

"More or less." I fell back and let the chair take my weight.

"Fuck." I stared at the ceiling, my stomach, my head, my past, and my present all apparently in the middle of one large brawl.

"One big happy family reunion." Emily, incredibly, nodded along.

"Well said, Senpai." Another slow drag.

"That was actually pretty funny." I turned and glared at her. She was still smiling. And the most infuriating part was — I already knew she wasn't lying.