Chương 522: 248.Zero Casualties 2

Shimo's Perspective I was still cradling my cooling cup, trying to convince myself some part of my life still qualified as warm, when the main screen lit up again. Cold white text appeared, and the whole control room went quiet for a beat. Leg four: no eliminations. Leg five, please prepare. I stared at that for two seconds, then let out a long, slow breath. No eliminations. On Orpheia, that wasn't just good news anymore. It was a miracle — this rotten planet briefly forgetting to bite someone.

And at this point, only five houses were still standing. Ichinose. Yagi. Nanase. Shinomiya. And us — Kushima. Everyone else was gone. Swallowed by the environment. Ground down by the rules. Or personally escorted off the course by Emily and an axe with real enthusiasm behind it. Whoever was still breathing out there had already grown teeth of their own.

"Leg five," I said quietly, to no one in particular. The man over in the prep bay looked up. Dwight "D" Barkley. He'd never looked especially saintly to begin with. Under the lights, snapping his gloves tight, he looked like a stray dog that had just heard the dinner bell ring. Not an insult — genuinely accurate. That particular disregard for appearances, that single-minded focus on who was still standing at the end, suited this tournament with disturbing precision.

"That expression," Jess said beside me, glancing over her tea.

"Doesn't look like you're watching a teammate."

"I'm watching to see how much of the surface he takes apart."

"Reasonable," Lan said.

"Very reasonable," Hedwig added. Maki didn't join in. She was looking at leg four's remaining route data, one finger tapping the panel lightly, pulling up the terrain and signal maps for Irena's current sector — the motion small, but carrying the particular quality of someone who wanted to cross-examine the ground itself. I followed her gaze, and the faint discomfort the hot water had just pressed down began to float back up. Because the back half of Irena's route had started to warp.

Irena's Perspective After clearing the spore-membrane rift, Irena had already pulled her rhythm back. Breathing steady. Cadence steady. Nav line true again. Estimated handoff time back inside a workable range. By rights, all she needed to do from here was hold the pace, deliver leg four cleanly into the leg-five window, and quietly bury a little more of the smell Emily's red card had left on the team's record. That was assuming this race still operated on any kind of logic. Orpheia, unsurprisingly, didn't.

And people, as a rule, were even worse than Orpheia. She'd just crested a north-tilted shelf of fungal rock when the nav arrow in her HUD shifted by one degree. Just one. Most competitors wouldn't have registered it at all — in a place like this, a little signal drift is about as natural as the ground occasionally trying to eat someone. Irena wasn't most competitors. Her fully mechanical frame had sharpened her sense of angle, distance, frequency, and error into something close to a disorder.

One degree was enough to make her suspicious. She didn't stop. She held speed and let the line keep stretching ahead. Three seconds later, the arrow drifted another degree and a half. This time it eased her toward a low, shadowed stretch of fungal growth. It looked flat. Too flat.

No large-animal tracks, no acid-runoff scarring, even the fungal pillar spacing looked regular to the point of being deliberate — as if someone had taken a ruler to the wilderness and laid out a stage reading perfectly safe, please step right in. Her eyes went cold. Bad navigation. Not natural drift. Someone's hand on the signal. She kept moving, running the official track and her backup map side by side in her vision. A moment later, she caught it — a very brief pulse reflection from a low cluster of growth ahead.

Not an official marker. A cheap lure beacon, low-power, calibrated just precisely enough to skew bearing a few degrees inside the local haze and spore refraction. Clever. Because the best traps never drag you straight into the pit. They only nudge you — just enough that you believe the direction was your own idea. She didn't destroy it. She followed the false line twelve seconds further instead. Then she heard it. Front-left: low-frequency friction. Rear-right: a single, very faint metal click.

Underground, dead ahead: the short, pressurized tremor that only happens when a pre-set mechanism arms itself. More than one point. At least two people, plus a pre-positioned trap.

"... Not bad," she murmured. Any of the five teams still on this course had earned the right to be here. If Emily could turn her leg into a personal hunting ground with an axe, someone else could easily convert the last stretch before handoff into an invitation to walk into their own grave. The only problem — They'd picked the wrong runner. Irena let her step hesitate for just a beat, letting her whole frame tilt forward as if the false line had genuinely caught her mid-decision.

The next instant, the ground blew open. Not explosives — a row of metal spike-posts launching up from beneath the fungal mat, angled to meet her forward path, meant to skewer both pilot and armor at once and force a hard stop. Against a normal target, the plan was sound. Irena had already shifted sideways before the spikes cleared the surface. She hadn't dodged. She'd known they were coming. She'd simply been waiting for them to show themselves.

The first figure broke from behind a pillar on her left, clearly hoping to close in while the spikes still had her rattled — short gun and combat blade, standard configuration, fast. Unfortunately for them, Irena was faster. Fast enough that she needed no wasted motion at all. She didn't even draw a weapon. Her left hand shot up, caught the attacker's wrist mid-lunge, and pulled with the incoming momentum. What had been aimed at her flank became a full-body drag instead.

She turned with it — knee, elbow, the whole sequence compressed into something that read like three pages of a manual folded into a single execution. A dull thud, and the first ambusher went down at the edge of the spike field, out of the fight. The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. The second didn't close. Smarter — a short burst of covering fire from her right rear, not aimed to kill, just meant to herd her back into the trap's arc.

The logic was sound: under a flanking attack, most people's instinct to dodge outruns their ability to think. Irena wasn't running on instinct. She didn't even turn her head. Her heel caught a half-broken fungal rib, and she cut hard along the outer edge of the spike field, close enough to taste the metal. The shooter clearly hadn't expected anyone to deliberately run toward the perimeter of their own trap — his rhythm broke for exactly one beat. One beat was enough.

Irena grabbed one of the spike-posts that had been knocked loose in the first burst and threw it backhanded. No flourish. Just accuracy. The post punched through his shoulder plating and pinned him to the pillar behind him. His breath broke on impact, his barrel drifted upward, and the rest of his rounds went into the canopy and the haze — homeless anger with nowhere left to land. Irena didn't finish him off. Because clearing the false-nav zone had already shown her the real problem.

The official handoff marker ahead was still there. A fake one now sat right beside it. The two were close enough together — color, blink pattern, ID code all near-identical — that a leg-five pilot scanning from above might easily mistake one for the actual exchange point. This wasn't just an ambush anymore. This was an attempt to drop the next leg at the wrong location entirely and blow the handoff window. Dirty. Also effective.

She checked the remaining time, didn't hesitate for a second, pulled the short-range plasma cutter from her hip guard, and threw it at the fake beacon. It wasn't a combat tool. It was more than enough to shred a counterfeit signal post. Blue-white current flared. The fake beacon burst apart at the shaft, its buried pulse unit shorting out with it. The genuine marker's signal cleared immediately, the static noise dropping away. Only then did she push her speed back up to full.

Ahead — if the sickly light of this planet could be called a sky at all — the color had deepened. In the distance, the overlapping roar of recovery craft and drop deployment meant leg five was almost down. Irena didn't look back. No reason to. By the time she cleared the last band of low growth, the drop pod had already slammed into the hardened ground at the edge of the handoff zone, its plating scraping out a trail of hard sparks.

The hatch blew open fast, almost violent, and the man inside stepped out onto the door's edge before it had fully finished opening. Dwight "D" Barkley. He landed without checking his surroundings, without asking for a status report. He looked at her first, then at the wreckage behind her — the sliced-open, blown-sideways trap field, one unlucky ambusher still pinned to a pillar. Then he smiled. Not politely. The smile of someone confirming the kitchen had met his standards.

"Lively spot you've got here." Irena didn't engage with the commentary. She pulled the sealed envelope free and pressed it into his hand.

"Fake nav beacon, right rear. Already destroyed. One disabled ambusher in the left pillar zone. One pinned to a pillar on the right, serious shoulder damage, withdrawal unconfirmed. Route's clear for one hundred eighty meters ahead. Heavy cover resumes at three hundred." D tore the seal open like he was tearing someone's throat out.

"Leg five. Dwight 'D' Barkley." His voice came out low and steady.

"I've got it." The verification device lit. Leg-five handoff confirmed. Only then did Irena finally stop, her breathing still infuriatingly even. D looked her over — no AS at all, and still somehow more weapon than most people running full armor — and let out a low whistle.

"You know, you make this real hard on whoever comes after you." Irena pushed her respirator down a notch, eyes flat.

"That's your problem." D grinned.

"I love it." He didn't waste half a second more. He turned and ran. Not Emily's hunter's stalk, weighting every step like a decision. Not Irena's own precise, near-merciless cutting of angles through the fungal sea. D's run was more direct — almost like he intended to shoulder his way through whatever the world put in front of him by main force. Strangely, it wasn't reckless.

There was something veteran underneath the bluntness — the kind that already knows exactly which pits break legs and which ones just splash you with mud, because he's tested both. Irena watched his back disappear into the fungal forest, then turned toward the recovery zone. Leg four, complete. And the line the red card had nearly dragged crooked — she'd hauled it straight by main force. Shimo's Perspective No one still standing at this point was anyone's idea of harmless.

"Shimo." Jess leaned against the table, cupping her tea, staring at the drone feed cutting between angles on the main screen with an expression of genuine confusion.

"Didn't the committee say no live observation? How are we not just tracking now, but getting a full live feed?" I didn't even bother thinking about it. I just pointed a thumb back over my shoulder.

"Ask her." I didn't need to turn to know who I meant. Emily was leaning against the back wall, arms crossed, wearing that same irresponsible calm — as if she hadn't, twenty minutes ago, personally converted a three-school ambush into a set of kills that would've fit a feudal warlord, and in the process upgraded the whole race from high-pressure relay to simultaneous cardiac event across nine houses' legal and PR departments.

The moment Emily took three heads in one run, the protest wave hit the committee like a tsunami. Nine houses pushing at once, with House Kushima coldly adding its own weight from the side — the committee, wedged between ancestors on both flanks they couldn't afford to offend, chose to compromise with real enthusiasm. The elegant line about no real-time surface observation, in the interest of fairness got kicked into the trash by its own authors within the hour.

The committee's final concession: Standardized drone coverage. Live tracking open to every team. Officially, in the name of fairness. In practice, closer to: distinguished guests, please stop dismantling the venue — we're turning the cameras on right now. A few competitors grumbled. Honestly, I doubted the rules would swing much further after this. If the committee tried playing dead again, the next names added to the complaint list wouldn't be competitors. They'd be the staff.

I pulled my eyes back to the main screen. D's progress was steady in a way that felt almost unfair. Dwight "D" Barkley hadn't turned his leg into a crime scene the way Emily had. He wasn't cutting the ground down to the bone the way Irena was. He ran a different approach entirely — simple, solid, and aesthetically indifferent in a way that felt almost principled. He hadn't even brought a proper primary weapon. Just a large shield. And a baseball bat from god knows where.

I stared at the feed for two seconds and finally gave up holding it in.

"... He looks like a riot cop who wandered into the wrong event." Jess burst out laughing.

"I was going to say minor-league batting coach. Yours is meaner."

"I'm being objective."

"Your relationship with that word has always been very flexible." Wheels rattled across the deck on the other side of the room. I turned and found Hedwig and Lan pushing in a small service cart — a tray of neatly arranged sandwiches, a pot of tea beside it, steam curling gently upward, mixing with the cold light off every screen into something that looked like an apocalypse-themed afternoon tea. Honestly, though, it looked lifesaving.

"Everyone, eat a little something," Hedwig said, as naturally as if she were standing in some long-established white palace, arranging the second course for guests, rather than aboard a support ship at a live tournament. As for her tea, I'd long since stopped trying to explain it through skill. Coaxing that quality of flavor out of a cheap tea bag isn't technique anymore. It's magic.

If someone told me tomorrow that the Third Imperial Princess of the Galactic Empire had a side practice in the occult, I wouldn't be terribly surprised. Jess had just reached for a second sandwich when I got there first.

"Save some for D." Jess froze, looking entirely innocent. Hedwig picked it up smoothly.

"Don't worry about that. When I go down, I'll bring him something to eat." I turned and looked at her immediately. She'd said it too naturally — as if she weren't about to drop from orbit onto a high-gravity, spore-saturated world that treated human civilization as a light snack, but heading next door for a slightly delayed afternoon tea. My mouth twitched.

"Your Highness, you're a competitor going down there. Not going on a picnic." Hedwig's eyes widened, faintly offended.

"I know that." She looked at me like I'd just asked something deeply impolite.

"But there's no rule against bringing food for a teammate, is there?"... The terrifying part was that she was right. I was quiet for half a second, then spread both hands.

"Fine. Use your own judgment." Lan stood beside her, tongs and an empty plate in hand, wearing the composure of someone taking a medical record. I was fairly sure her mouth had almost moved a second ago. The single most absurd thing in this whole cabin was probably that everyone had started treating it as normal.

"Oh — D's almost clear of the Perpetual Night Fungal Pillars," Jess said, sandwich in hand, eyes on the screen. On the feed, D's stride hadn't wavered once. Shield on his back, bat on his shoulder — he genuinely looked one breath away from raising a megaphone and shouting please proceed to the exits in an orderly fashion. And somehow the ridiculous loadout made total sense on him. Not because he looked professional.

Because he carried the specific quality of a man who could turn an entire zone into a no-go area with nothing but a single brick. Right then the referee ship cut in again. The cabin audio dropped automatically, leaving only that flat, affectless system voice. Leg five: no casualties, no eliminations. Leg six, please prepare. I looked up before I'd decided to.

"That fast?" No one answered. Because the answer was already sitting right in front of me. Hedwig von Wittelsbach had already set her teacup down, her posture elegant enough to suggest she was about to walk up and accept an award — not drop into a high-gravity death park built entirely out of spores and bad intentions. Leg six. Third Imperial Princess of the Galactic Empire.

I looked at the scene in front of me — genuinely too absurd to defend — and honestly didn't know whether to laugh or hold a moment of silence for the state of cosmic order. On one side, D: shield and bat, a riot cop who'd wandered onto the wrong stage. On the other, an Imperial Princess prepping her leg-six loadout with the exact same calm she'd use to order a second pot of tea.

And me — Hoshino Shimo — sitting in the middle with a cup of lukewarm water, watching a team that got less like a normal roster of competitors with every leg, and somehow kept staying alive anyway. The feeling was strange. Like a perfectly ordinary ship had quietly filled up, without anyone quite noticing, with people who were never in the spec sheet — and now everyone was seriously debating whether to cut a few extra sandwiches for the next meal.

"Shimo." Maki, again. I turned. She was looking at Hedwig, tone perfectly even.

"Don't forget the napkins, either." I blinked. Then very nearly laughed out loud. Hedwig nodded, completely in earnest.

"I know."... That's it. Even Maki had started playing along with this nonsense. I pressed a hand to my forehead. Laughing felt like it would betray whatever gravity this race was supposed to still have. Not laughing felt like it would betray a room full of teammates who were delivering the absurd with the exact precision of professionals. In the end I just took a sip of the water — no longer particularly hot — and let out a long breath.

"Whatever." I watched D closing in on the handoff zone, and beside him, the Third Imperial Princess already running through her leg-six checklist with total calm.

"At this point, being normal would make you the outsider."