Chương 523: 249.Elegant Victory 1

Shimo's Perspective The referee ship's broadcast wasn't finished yet. The screen still held the leg-five handoff confirmed banner when the feed cut over to the judges. Every time I saw that group sitting there with their practiced gravity, I got the same deeply unhealthy mental image — a panel of Senpai bureaucrats who'd turned other people's lives into a slide deck, about to announce the latest installment of civilization's running joke in the most bloodless tone available.

"We're at the halfway point. Here are the current standings." The chief judge spoke — a heavyset man, his nameplate catching the light with more presence than his own expression, wearing the flat look of someone who'd just finished a perfectly mediocre work lunch. Not pleased. Not ashamed. Given that he was presiding over an event that had been dropping students onto Orpheia's surface leg by leg, that particular calm was more unsettling than outright malice would have been. He cleared his throat and read.

"Fifth place: Yagi Heavy Industrial Defense Academy."

"Fourth place: Aquila Aerospace Technical School."

"Third place: Orion Iron Guard."

"Second place: Shinomiya Advanced Defense Academy."

"First place: United Interstellar Military Academy." No one in the control room made a sound. Not even Jess. Because everyone knew the real news hadn't come yet. Sure enough, the judge coughed once more and added the line everybody had been dreading.

"Due to the red card issued to UIMA during leg three, UIMA and Shinomiya Advanced Defense Academy are currently tied for first."

"That concludes the report." Then, silence. Not a peaceful silence, and not a dead one — the kind where everyone's holding a breath in their chest and no one wants to fire the first shot, because whoever did, whether at the judges, the rules, or Emily, would almost certainly turn it into another meeting nobody wanted to sit through.

I held my cup of water and watched the judge's face vanish from the screen, fighting the urge to ask how exactly a person learns to say currently first and currently tied out of the same mouth with that much composure. Nobody asked. Not from our side. The other houses were probably biting their tongues too. Into that strange, storm-before-thunder quiet, Hedwig walked over, already suited up. Her stride was exactly as steady as always — neither rushed nor slow.

The silver-white and deep-blue armor lines followed her frame, only sharpening that particular quality she carried, the one with no business belonging on a battlefield and yet somehow pinning the whole room down anyway. Most absurd of all: she was carrying a woven lunchbox.... Yes. A lunchbox. I was past the point of being surprised by things like this.

After Emily's red card, after Irena functioning as a self-contained AS, after D running leg five with a shield and a bat like riot control on the wrong street, the Third Imperial Princess of the Galactic Empire bringing a packed lunch down to a planetary surface had somehow become — more or less — within operating parameters. Hedwig stopped in front of the main display and looked up at the leg-five tracking feed, still pushing forward.

"Don't worry." Her voice wasn't loud. It was very clean.

"We'll win this round back." I glanced at her sideways. Coming from anyone else, that line would have sounded like comfort, or bravado, or a hot-blooded idiot forcing a brave face on a bad situation. Coming from Hedwig, it sounded like a conclusion already written into formal paperwork, waiting only to be executed. Genuinely infuriating. Because she said it with such certainty that I almost believed it before I'd decided to.

Hedwig's Perspective When Hedwig von Wittelsbach touched down on Orpheia's surface, the drop pod's outer hull still carried the heat scars of atmospheric entry. The frame had barely settled when something slammed the hatch from outside. Not an attack. Someone had simply grabbed the door with both hands and hauled it open. Dwight "D" Barkley stood outside, looking like he'd just walked out of a demolition job that hadn't gone entirely to plan.

Shield still on his back, bat on his shoulder, armor scored and caked with dried mud — and still standing with the solidity of a man this planet had tried and largely failed to inconvenience. Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

"Your Highness." No preamble. D tore the envelope open, pulled out the recorder, held it out.

"Watch yourself down there. I kept getting the feeling something's been trailing me." Hedwig took the recorder, fingers moving with clean restraint. She ran the full sequence — leg verification, stowing, resealing — in one continuous motion, precise to the point of elegance. Even standing on a surface thick with spores, acid haze, and the smell of hot mud, there wasn't a trace of clumsiness in it.

"Thank you, D." She looked up, calm as ever.

"I'll keep that in mind." Once the verification light settled to a steady color, she secured the sealed envelope, then held out the woven lunchbox. D blinked.

"This is...?"

"Your lunch. Or dinner." Hedwig considered it a moment.

"Though I suppose debating the name is a little pointless right now. In any case, there's a bottle of tea in the pod. Please drink it." D took the box, looked inside — sandwiches, packed with a neatness that bordered on insulting. He seemed like he wanted to say something. By the time he looked up, Hedwig had already turned and walked away. No lingering. No extra instructions. No parting glance.

Exactly like a noblewoman who'd finished her courtesies at a formal reception and moved on to the actual business of the evening. Hedwig kept moving for nearly two hours. Her pace was never frantic — if anything, precisely restrained. Every step looked chosen; every change of direction carried a certain measured ease. It wasn't so much crossing a wasteland as passing, with something close to formal grace, through everything this planet had ever wished on civilization. The terrain opened ahead.

The Perpetual Night Fungal Pillars broke into a strange fault line here — the sky-blocking columns thinning out, replaced by a field of warped, columnar formations. Tall and narrow, their surfaces riddled with pores and honeycomb patterning, glowing from within with slow pulses of blue-violet and rose light, like embers still smoldering in diseased bone. Several of the giant columns had toppled, as if bent by an unseen hand, driven at an angle across the horizon, wrapped in dense webs of scarlet fiber.

The whole sky burned red. Clouds churned like smelted flesh, lightning crawling and twitching through them in long gold threads — fractures tearing open across the heavens and stitching themselves shut, over and over. Her HUD flared. Committee notice. Warning. Extreme storm: Spore Mutation Surge incoming. Estimated arrival: three minutes. Hedwig stopped. She didn't look at the sky first. She looked at the ground. Then she saw the signs.

The pale pink haze that had been drifting low over the surface reversed direction — a tide pulling back the instant before the wave comes in. Nearby, slender fungal trees folded their caps inward rapidly, their surfaces breaking out in fine, trembling points of light, as if the whole forest were shuddering in silence.

Small fungal beasts that had been crouched in rock crevices and mud pools abandoned their usual slow, greedy rhythm and scrambled for lower ground, biting at each other in the rush to claim a deeper hiding spot. The sacs clustered along the pillars above swelled one by one, like organs approaching a boil, their fluid churning visibly through translucent walls. Even the wind changed. Not ordinary airflow — a pressure front carrying static and heat. First barely perceptible, like a breath blown from very far away.

Then that warmth grew teeth, crawling along pillar and rock ridge and fiber network, and wherever it passed, the red filaments pulled taut and straight, like a nervous system yanked from both ends of the sky at once. Hedwig quickly picked a pillar that looked sound — thick at the base, rooted deep, porous but showing no signs of imminent collapse. She unstrapped the basic isolation barrier, moving through deploy, anchor, and calibrate with no wasted motion and no visible urgency.

The shield had barely solidified when the sky outside dropped a shade. The storm broke. Atmospheric radiation spiked within seconds. The red canopy reignited as if something denser and more malicious had caught fire inside it. The lightning in the clouds stopped being lines and became a whole tangled sheet of racing gold. The storm's leading edge rolled in, carrying glowing spores and crimson fiber together — nothing like rain.

More like the sky peeling itself apart and falling as an affliction that could grow, corrode, and keep living on whatever it touched. The activated spores hit the shield and produced a dense, rapid crackle — like ten thousand small glass beads thrown at once against a crystal dome, or a storm of acid-tipped sparks, all trying to find a way in. The HUD numbers spiked. Radiation: rising. Surface corrosion: accelerating. Estimated storm duration: one hour.

Hedwig looked at the readings for a moment, expression unchanged. She thought about it. Then reached into the case she'd been carrying and produced a clean ground mat. The composure with which she did this was remarkable.

If not for the surge currently capable of chewing a standard hazard suit to rags on the other side of the shield, one might have mistaken her for someone who'd simply noticed the grass was a touch damp and decided to lay something down before sitting, to avoid dirtying her skirt — though she wasn't, in fact, wearing a skirt, only standard combat gear. She smoothed the mat flat and sat down properly. Then she took out a tea set. Yes. A tea set.

Small, spotless, fully assembled — even the curve of the pot and the thin lip of the cups carried a refinement that had no business existing here, and precisely because of that, felt almost aggressively elegant. Hedwig brewed tea in the middle of the storm. Outside the shield: the surge. Red wind swept the ground; the pillars moaned hollow under the pressure; crimson fiber lashed through the air, sometimes clinging to the shield, sometimes torn free by the next wave of spores.

Blue-violet bioluminescence flickered in the gale, making the leaning giants look like a row of ancient thrones still refusing to fall. Pink ground-haze coiled and piled against the barrier's outer edge, broke apart, gathered again — as if the entire surface were trying to lick its way into this one small pocket of safety. Inside, Hedwig sat with perfect posture. She poured the water, warmed the cup, decanted the tea — each step steady and contained.

The angle of her wrist was restrained to exactly the right degree, like a small ceremony performed for no audience but simply to preserve order itself. Even with a whole field of activated spores hammering the shield outside, her expression stayed unruffled, as if this were nothing more than a slightly windy afternoon in a garden, branches tapping against the glass of a pavilion. The tea's scent was faint. It was also real.

Amid the acid, radiation, spore powder, and scorched air, that thread of aroma was almost arrogant — the arrogance specifically belonging to civilization, upbringing, and imperial order. Hedwig raised her cup and, through the transparent shield, watched the Spore Mutation Surge with quiet appreciation. No panic. No complaint. Not even a flicker of doubt about whether this was too much. She simply sat, perfectly composed, at the center of the storm, as if sitting in her own back garden.

And the whole of Orpheia was left with no choice but to serve as her view.