Chương 521: 248.Zero Casualties 1

Irena's Perspective The first fungal mat Irena stepped on gave slightly under her weight, slick with moisture. In the next instant she was already airborne — pushing off a slanted root, body cutting a thin arc through the air, landing on a strip of crumbling rock twenty meters ahead. Clean. Light. Fast. Less like running than like a thin blade flicked forward by an invisible hand. The nav line stretched north through her vision.

The tempo loss from the red card sat in her throat like a splinter — not fatal, nowhere near comfortable. Emily hadn't just bought the team a committee warning. She'd bought every leg after her a very real debt: run steadier, clean enough to bury that card, clean enough to leave the committee no second excuse to reach in. Irena dropped her profile and slipped between two hollow fungal trunks. The terrain ahead fell away without warning.

The forest opened onto a basin that looked like something had peeled the world back along a seam. No mud at the bottom. No water. Just layer upon layer of translucent spore membrane, thin as ice and stacked deep, sealing the whole rift into a single tightly-stretched drumhead with bad intentions. Dozens of slender fungal stalks rose from the floor, grey-white sacs hanging from their tips. Whenever the air shifted, the whole valley let out a faint, wrong shiver of sound.

Like someone, very far away, dragging a fingernail slowly down glass. The nav line cut straight through the basin. For the first time, her speed came down.

"... Trouble." She let the word go under her breath. A judgment, not a complaint. This wasn't terrain solved by raw speed. She could read it clearly enough — the membranes weren't decoration. They were sensors, the nervous system of some enormous fungal colony. Anything too heavy, too abrupt, too rhythmically consistent would ripple outward layer by layer and wake every sac at once.

Judging by how swollen those sacs already looked, whatever they discharged wasn't going to be the kind of harmless pollen fit for a school ecology lesson. Worse: she was entirely metal. Not plating bolted on — metal from spine to limb, joint to neural interface, the real structural kind. To a valley that read intruders by vibration, frequency, and echo, her body was essentially a large tuning fork that had learned to run. Faster, here, would only mean dying louder.

She stopped at the rift's entrance and swept her eyes left. Half a punctured armor panel sat wedged in the rock — some unlucky competitor's leftovers. Riddled with fine holes, as if a sheet of needles had been driven straight through it. Further right, a half-dissolved fungal beast lay dead at the center of the membrane, its belly long since dried out, still glued to the translucent surface — a specimen that had failed to preserve itself. Not ground she could force. She reached that conclusion fast.

Then she raised a hand and cut the active output compensation in her lower body. A warning flashed at the edge of her vision: Output reduced. She ignored it. She dropped the active feedback in her foot dampers to bare minimum next, leaving only the most basic load correction. Every step from here would ride almost entirely on her own control — one small error, and her center of gravity would tip straight into the rift. For a normal person, that would amount to gambling with her own life.

Irena wasn't a normal person. She hated losing control, and precisely because of that, she held near-obsessive command over every joint and artificial muscle fiber in this body. She picked up a fragment of broken rock. Threw it forward and left. It landed on the outermost membrane layer with a soft tap. The whole basin responded at once. The grey-white sacs overhead shivered in unison, swelling — a restless sleeper turning over. Just a turn. No full detonation.

Irena tracked the wave outward until it finally died against the outermost ring of stalks. She counted the beat in her head. Not enough. She threw a second piece. This one struck a deeper layer — the sound longer, the amplitude bigger. The sacs shuddered harder; a few near the edge had already started weeping thin yellow mist. She narrowed her eyes, tracked the tremor running from near to far, and caught the very brief gap it left behind, right at the third row of stalks on the right. There. She moved.

Not a sprint. Something closer to a deliberately broken rhythm — an advance that looked wrong on purpose. One step, stop. Two steps, cut sideways. One more, up onto a jutting fungal rib. Toe-touch, off again immediately, never letting her full weight settle. Her whole body moved like a piece flicked forward with precision, always landing exactly where the last tremor had passed and hadn't yet rebounded. Ugly.

Next to the near-too-clean blur of her earlier movement, this stutter-step looked fragmented, strange, almost clumsy. But only someone who genuinely understood what she was doing would know: this kind of ugly was harder than fast. Speed could run on output, on hardware, on treating your own body like a burning arrow. This needed something else — forcibly flattening her own gait while fighting the natural excess resonance a full-metal body couldn't help producing.

As she skimmed past the third stalk, one sac finally triggered early. Hiss. Yellow-white spore powder swept needle-fine across the ground she'd just vacated. Irena didn't look back. Her right hand caught a hollow trunk, let her slide half a body-length down, then flipped her onto the membrane layer below. Her foot arch barely tapped the surface — a touch, not a step — sending out one small ring of ripple before it faded without waking anything else.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. Twenty meters left. Something moved beneath the floor. Not the sacs. Not the membrane. Underneath. A dark shape slid fast along the underside of the transparent layer, long and flat, shifting like something surfacing for air. Irena's eyes dropped for a fraction of a second — long enough to understand why it hadn't already struck. It was waiting for something big enough to bring the whole floor down at once.

She unclipped the small backup oxygen canister from her hip. No hesitation. Threw it backhanded, over her shoulder, to the right rear. It hit the membrane with a sound heavier than anything before it. The whole basin screamed into motion — sacs detonating in a chain overhead, powder slamming down toward the impact point; the shape below punched straight through the membrane in the same instant, lunging for the loudest thing in reach. Irena had already used that single second of chaos to clear the last stretch.

Land. Roll. Absorb. Up. She didn't stop — not for half a heartbeat. Behind her the needle-fog raged, the basin convulsing, rupturing, folding in on itself. None of it could catch her now. She brought her lower-body output back online, and her silhouette snapped back into a thin grey line, vanishing into the shadow ahead. The indicator inside her respirator blinked twice and switched to backup cycling. Irena didn't so much as furrow a brow.

She just wiped a smear of spore residue off the edge of her goggles, her eyes colder than before. Speed wasn't everything. Knowing exactly when not to rely on it — that was what real speed meant. She pressed the red card's penalty, the aftershock Emily had left behind, and this basin's particular brand of malice into a single thought. Take it back. Not just the time. The whole picture. She would run leg four as one clean line — clean enough that no one would find a single thing to complain about.

Even if the whole tournament had been filthy from the start. Shimo's Perspective By the time I got back to the main control area, the smoke smell from the briefing room still hadn't fully cleared out of my head. Emily had looked lighter after dumping that whole ugly backstory on me — like she'd finally coughed something out of her lungs. I'd gone the other way. My stomach felt like it had been packed with unfinished iron shavings, impossible to swallow and impossible to spit out.

The tournament had no interest in waiting for me to sort out my personal philosophy. On the main display, leg four's tracking marker held disturbingly steady.

"Irena's cleared the anomalous terrain sector," an operator reported quietly. I looked up at the route-correction log. The straight line had kinked once in the middle — a small, precise deviation, the kind that only appears when someone hits something that can't be forced through and simply adjusts, without fuss. That was Irena. Not the loudest. Not the fiercest. Not the type who paints the whole scene red just by walking onto it.

More like a scalpel — quiet on the tray, and you only understand how deep it cuts once it's already in. I stood in front of the screen and said nothing. Someone set a cup of hot water down beside me. I didn't need to look to know who. Maki. She placed the cup within reach and didn't immediately turn back to the feed — her gaze rested on my face for half a second, then slid, very naturally, toward Emily, who was standing a little behind us. That glance was brief. Brief enough to pass for nothing at all.

I knew her too well for that. Well enough to feel her mental ledger turning a page. She'd noticed. Not that I was in a bad mood — that was too obvious to count. Not that Emily still carried a faint whiff of violence off the surface — anyone with working eyes could see that. What she'd noticed was that the air had changed. An hour ago, putting Emily and me in the same room would have felt like two guns pressed muzzle to muzzle with the safeties still on — whoever twitched first, bled. It wasn't like that anymore.

I still wanted to hit her. She still looked like she deserved it. But the clean, simple rejection had picked up something else. Like I'd finally understood she hadn't turned out this way for no reason. Like she'd finally confirmed that whatever it was about me that kept making her call me "Senpai" wasn't something she'd invented out of thin air. Maki didn't ask. She never asked, in moments like this. She just watched. Watched how tightly my fingers were still wrapped around the cup.

Watched whether Emily, behind me, had pulled back even a little of that all-directions casual mockery she usually radiated. Watched whether I stepped instinctively away when she came closer. I hadn't.... Damn it. I only realized it in that exact instant — that I hadn't moved. Maki had probably realized it first. The very tip of her brow shifted, barely — a shadow smaller than wind, crossing a still lake.

"Shimo. Drink." Her tone stayed as even as ever. But I already knew she'd filed the whole thing away. I took a sip, distracted. The temperature was exactly right — right enough to make me want to ask whether she'd also calculated that my throat was dry. This woman was genuinely dangerous. Dangerous in the specific way that made you want to keep your distance, while some inconvenient part of you already knew that the day these small details stopped showing up, you'd be the first one to feel it missing.

"Leg four's remaining distance is dropping fast," Hedwig said from the secondary screen, calm as ever.

"She doesn't look like she's running," Lan added.

"More like she's deleting the terrain one tile at a time." Jess set her cards face-down and let out a low whistle.

"Finally, a proper monster."

"That description is deeply unfair to the word proper," I said, before I'd decided to say it. Too smooth. Too easy. As if the conversation where someone had just put a knife through me — the Doctor, the accident, the front line, all of it — hadn't happened at all. A quiet laugh came from behind me. Not Jess. Not Lan. Emily. I turned and glared at her. She spread both hands, wearing an expression of pure, unconvincing innocence.

"See, sen—" She stopped herself. Because Maki had glanced at her. Not sharp. Not cold. Just an ordinary glance. Emily actually swallowed the -ior halfway out of her mouth and replaced it, smooth as anything, with:"... Hoshino. You bounce back fast." I nearly choked on the water. Not because the correction was rare — because she'd bothered making it at all. This was the same woman who'd buried an axe in someone's skull without blinking twenty minutes earlier, and she'd never once looked this socially calibrated.

Maki turned her attention back to the display and pulled up another terrain layer, as if nothing had happened. But in that instant I understood clearly: the line between me and Emily — the one that used to run straight from mutual irritation to wanting to hit each other — now had a bend in it. And Maki was watching to see where that bend went. The feeling wasn't great.

More than her actually asking what had happened in the briefing room, I was afraid of this — the version of her that asked nothing and clearly remembered everything. Because once Maki Kushima went quiet and started observing, what followed was never as simple as "I'm a little curious." She would wait. Wait for you to expose your own loose ends. Wait for every thread to wind its way naturally into her hand. And then, wearing an entirely reasonable expression, slowly draw the whole net closed.

"Leg four's back on projected pace," the operator said. Only then did Maki fully return her attention to the race, issuing a few quiet instructions — bring the recovery window forward, update the estimated handoff zone for the next leg. She did it all the same way she always did — clean, precise, steady enough that it was impossible to stay properly angry at her. But I knew that half-second pause hadn't been my imagination. She'd seen it.

And not just that the atmosphere between me and Emily had shifted — she'd probably also seen that the shift might not be a bad thing. That realization annoyed me all over again. Not because she was sharp. I'd surrendered that argument long ago. Because the moment she filed "this might be useful" and "Shimo's off-balance" into the same drawer, there was no telling whether she'd start deliberately engineering chances for Emily and me to "process each other." Just thinking about it gave me a headache.

"Shimo." Maki's voice, suddenly.

"Mm?" She didn't look away from Irena's route, said mildly:"Before this race is over — don't lock yourself in a room alone with Emily for too long again." The cup nearly slipped out of my hand.

"... How did you know we locked the door?" She finally turned her head enough to give me a look. Flat. Completely flat. Very clearly saying: Did you really think you're the only one on this ship who reads the access logs?

"I don't know what was said." She said it plainly.

"I only know the result." I had nothing. Jess was already failing badly at pretending to cough. Lan hid behind her data slate, shoulders shaking once. Hedwig, worst of all, kept her expression perfectly smooth and chose that exact moment to add:"I believe what Kushima means is: please refrain from introducing additional variables while leg four is in progress."

"Yes," Maki said.

"That."... What exactly do you people spend your attention on when I'm not looking? I set the cup down on the table, certain I'd just lost three years off my life expectancy. Not far away, Emily finally gave up holding it in and let out a low laugh. I swear — if she isn't dead by the time this race is over, I'm handling that personally.