Chương 525: 250.By Any Means Necessary 1

Shimo's Perspective The moment the leg-seven standby call went out, the whole ship somehow went quieter than before. Not because anyone was relaxing. Because everyone understood that from here on, there was no more room for let's see how this plays out. Only four houses were still on the board. Yagi Heavy Industrial Defense Academy — House Yagi. Aquila Aerospace Technical School — House Nanase. Shinomiya Advanced Defense Academy — House Shinomiya. And us — House Kushima.

Everything the terrain had swallowed, the rules had ground down, or other competitors had cut away no longer mattered. Whoever was still breathing out there had already grown teeth. The only difference was in the biting — some like stray dogs, some like vipers, and some who smiled first and then ran you through with impeccable manners. Like Hedwig. On the main feed, she'd already cleared the Perpetual Night Fungal Pillars and stepped onto the Singing Clay Barrens. It barely looked like the same planet.

No suffocating canopy overhead. Nothing trying to haul itself out of the mud for a bite. No red storm burning the sky raw. Instead: an expanse so open it felt almost empty. Dark red-violet clay, as if some enormous hand had kneaded it, pinched it, and left it out to dry in the vacuum. The surface was laced with fine cracks and shallow rolling ridges, glowing pink veins threading across the ground like a half-visible nervous system.

In the distance, massive columnar formations stood like over-weathered towers, or hollow monuments grown straight up out of the crust. A few pale blue orbs drifted along the horizon — like water drops, or eyes someone had left hanging in the sky and forgotten to collect. The whole place was quiet, and wrong in a way that offered no explanation. Worst of all, it sang. Whenever the wind crossed it, the plain answered. Not loudly.

A low, distant, dry resonance — as if countless thin shells lay buried beneath the surface, and the wind was slowly dragging across the gaps between them. The whole plain let out a fine, continuous hum, and if you listened long enough, it started to feel like the ground was patiently waiting for someone to make a mistake.

"Disgusting terrain," Jess said.

"That's the polite version." I kept my eyes on the feed.

"I'd call it the Singing Rotten Mudflat."

"Very poetic, Hoshino," Emily drawled from behind us.

"Shut up. Don't drag the word poetry into this." Maki ignored both of us. She'd already pulled Hedwig's current route, the Barrens' resonance frequencies, and the projected leg-eight handoff window onto the auxiliary panel — a dense tangle of lines and numbers she read as calmly as if everyone else were watching a race and she alone were closing a ledger. Lan was already standing at the deployment bay. That was exactly who she was. None of Emily's obvious, trouble-making danger.

None of Hedwig's elegance that had no business existing on a battlefield. None of Irena's pressure of a person who'd turned her own body into a precision weapon. Lan was more like a standard surgical instrument. Clean. Stable. Functioning correctly. The kind that saves your life when it has to, and almost nobody stands up to applaud how well the scalpel cut. Anyone who's actually been on the operating table knows: the tool you truly cannot afford to fail is usually the one that looks the least dramatic.

On the feed, Hedwig's progress was smooth — smooth, not mindless. The Barrens weren't nearly as flat as they looked. Sections near the glowing veins sank half a finger under her weight without warning; others rippled with fine concentric rings the moment the wind pitched higher. The instant she caught a wrong shade of clay or a note that dragged too long, she corrected her line. The corrections were small, almost quiet — and precisely because they were quiet, it was obvious she wasn't strolling.

She was reading the entire plain, tile by tile. If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

"Her Highness's speed just dropped by point seven," Lan murmured, half to herself.

"She's testing a resonance zone," Maki said.

"Mm." Lan nodded.

"Left side of that bright vein ahead looks more stable." The two of them traded lines back and forth, neither raising her voice, and somehow that steadied the whole room. Listening to them, I had the strange sense that all the blood-pressure-shattering chaos of the earlier legs had, for the moment, been handed back to something cold, technical, and — roughly — human. Roughly. We were still a long way from normal.

When Hedwig reached the designated handoff point, she even paused to check the cut in her left-side plating — the scar from her duel with the Orion assassin. The way she looked at it wasn't I nearly died. It was how much work is this going to take to fix before it looks presentable again. Honestly, people like her were exhausting. Exhausting enough that even admiring them came with a little irritation attached. When the drop countdown started, Lan said only one thing:"I'm going down." No declaration. No posturing.

Nothing like leave it to me dressed up as a commercial tagline. She just tightened her gloves, confirmed her gear — probe, emergency kit, folding rifle, nav terminal — and walked into the pod. As clean as a duty officer closing a chart and pushing through the OR doors.

"Lan." I called after her. She turned.

"... Come back safe." I'd meant to add something — don't push it, or go around if the ground feels wrong — but the words felt unnecessary before they left my mouth. Lan wasn't someone who needed reminding of basic sense. Reminding her would have been like reminding rain to fall downward. She looked at me and nodded.

"I know." The hatch closed. The handoff between Hedwig and Lan was clean. Clean to the point of being almost boring. Right now, boring was priceless. On the feed, Hedwig reached the point first, standing on a higher, drier clay ridge, the sky behind her washed in lavender and pink, the distant towers half-dissolved in haze — making her look like a court portrait accidentally spliced into a live combat broadcast. When Lan's pod touched down, Hedwig didn't waste a word.

Envelope, recorder, minimal terrain brief, all at once.

"Three hollow-layer sections within three kilometers ahead."

"Don't step directly on the dense vein clusters. Listen before you move."

"Wind tone distorts near the two floating orbs on the left. Not worth approaching."

"The rest of the route is manageable." That was it. No flourishes. No Senpai-to-junior warmth. Not even a footnote on the duel she'd just walked out of. Lan listened and answered with one word: "Understood." Then she took the baton. Leg-seven handoff confirmed. Hedwig stepped back; the recovery beacon lit. Lan moved immediately. The way she ran looked exactly like her — not impressively fast, not eerily light, not beautiful like a performance. Just steady.

Steady the way something looks when everything unnecessary has already been cut away, leaving only what's needed to get a person to the next handoff point. The Barrens didn't ease up just because she kept a low profile. Within twenty minutes, a wide resonance band opened ahead of her — wind cutting between a cluster of hollow towers, the ground answering with a thin, sharp hum, like countless invisible needles grinding beneath the clay.

The glowing veins brightened a shade; even the pale blue orbs nearby drifted off their lazy paths. I frowned.

"That sound isn't right."

"It amplifies step vibration," Maki said. Lan's response was simple. She didn't force through, and she didn't loop into some elaborate detour — she just dropped her center of gravity, shortened her stride, and broke her cadence into an odd pattern: three short, one long, two short, one pause. It looked like she was being forced through a dance she resented. It worked. The hum stayed, but it never climbed further.

She crossed the band steadily, taking something that could have become an incident and pressing it firmly back into routine work.

"So boring," Jess said, arms crossed.

"That's a compliment, right?" I asked.

"Obviously." She shrugged.

"Right now, boring is expensive." I didn't argue. She was right. For the next hour and more, Lan did essentially one thing on repeat: read the ground, correct, advance, avoid sections where the hum ran too sharp, skirt ridges that glowed on top but sagged underneath, stop half a second here and there to probe soil depth, and keep moving. No ambushes. No beam-edge duels. No tea brewed inside a storm. Nothing worth the referees interrupting the feed.

Strangely, the longer I watched, the more the knot in my chest loosened. Because it meant Lan's leg was doing exactly what it was built to do. She wasn't here to steal the scene. She was here to hold the stage steady. Everything the first six legs had left behind — blood, fire, storm, a red card, a duel, and every off-spec disaster in between — in her hands, all of it got folded down, flattened, and pinned in place, letting the race grow back, just a little, into something you could still call a relay.

Just a little. We still had Jess, Maki, and me left. Thinking about that, I wasn't sure how long grown back to normal was actually going to hold. On the screen, Lan crossed a cracked ridge, the ground rising slightly ahead. Through the haze, the next handoff marker was already visible — pale, almost unreal, a signal that looked unsure anyone would find it. The referee ship's broadcast came earlier than I expected.

"Leg seven: no casualties, no eliminations. Leg eight, please prepare." Jess set her empty cup down on the table and smiled.

"Finally my turn." Not Hedwig's elegance. Not Emily's danger. When Jess smiled, the whole room seemed to feel a pair of fists warming up — as if the last leg's stability had only ever existed so she'd have a proper table to flip. I watched Lan's marker still pushing forward, then Jess already rolling her shoulders, and finally let myself sink back into the chair.

"Good," I said quietly.

"The calm part's over." Now came the part that was actually going to hurt.