Chương 527: 251. Misdirection

Maki's Perspective The metal footplate gave an unhelpful little clank as Maki Kushima stepped into the drop pod. Not loud. Just precise enough to cut the mood clean in half. A second earlier, the ship had still been holding that particular grade of tension reserved for the moment before a decisive engagement, or a doctor turning to the last page of a chart, or a teacher holding up an exam and saying Hoshino, I'll only go through a few problems.

A second later, the pod sounded like an overworked security guard clearing his throat, proving, with some reluctance, that he was still technically alive. Maki paused half a step and looked up at the curved display inside the pod. White light swept across her irises. Leg-nine deployment sequence confirming. Remaining houses: two. House Shinomiya. House Kushima. House Kushima, leg nine: Maki Kushima. The font on the display delivered all of this with the flat calm of a weather report.

All it lacked was a footnote reading: localized toxicity expected outside — please remember your umbrella. She tightened her gloves. Not her first time in a drop pod. Still hated the specific sensation of being swallowed whole by machinery. The moment the hatch sealed, all sound would retreat somewhere very far away, as if the world had reached in, lifted you out, and dropped you onto an exam paper stamped please resolve the consequences yourself. What she hated wasn't the danger.

It was danger with a spec sheet attached. Because that meant someone had known this would happen — and had gone ahead and assigned it a reference number. A comms window lit on the right wall. No video. Just audio. Shimo.

"Maki." Filtered through the internal system, her voice came out colder than usual — like mint water that had sat in a metal cup overnight. Clean. Not particularly warm. Maki tilted her head, the corner of her mouth already curving. She didn't answer right away. She secured the harness first, then said, in the tone of someone negotiating with a moody piece of premium hardware: "Say my name in that voice again and it'll sound like you're about to read a will." Half a second of silence on the other end.

Then Shimo answered: "Relax. House Kushima currently has no surplus assets to distribute. At best we're dividing debt — with post-race trauma thrown in for free." Maki laughed. Not loud enough to break the rhythm — just a short pull at the corner of her mouth, enough to push the pre-launch tension back an inch. She looked forward again and dropped the next question like it was an afterthought. It wasn't.

"You're watching the live feed." Shimo's Perspective"I am." I stood at the monitoring station, holding a cup of water that had gone cold but hadn't yet qualified as an instrument of torture, eyes locked on the pod's external camera. Under the white cabin lights, Maki's silhouette had gone knife-clean — a few seconds, and she looked exactly like a blade freshly drawn. Unfortunately, this particular blade talked. And usually said too much.

Emily leaned against the back wall, her prosthetics throwing a dull, cold sheen. She didn't chime in — just watched the screen. The way she watched wasn't the way most people watched. Most people saw someone about to drop. She looked more like she was estimating how many pieces this one comes back in. Deeply team-spirited. If you defined team spirit loosely enough to pass a coroner's review. I kept my eyes on the feed and said, low: "Four houses left. Yagi will try to force it. Nanase's good at mobility.

Shinomiya's the real problem. They're already running the numbers on who breaks first." Maki's voice came back through the comms, even at the tail end, like she was reviewing a line of thought she'd already filed once.

"Shinomiya won't rush. They like letting everyone else bleed first, then walking in with clean shoes."

"That's a very polite way to describe an upper-class parasite."

"Too polite. I had a more accurate word in mind."

"Save it for after you land. At least the first three minutes." On the feed, Maki blinked once, then laughed outright. Light. Quiet. Enough to loosen something in my chest anyway. Pathetic. I took a sip of water with a flat expression and blamed it on the dry cabin air. Maki's fingers tapped the side rail once.

"Shimo." When she said my name this time, her tone drew in — not soft. Maki never let herself go soft. More like she'd set aside all the wit, the jabs, the probing she usually wore on the outside, and left only the one sentence that actually carried weight.

"I'm handing you the anchor leg. I have no intention of handing you a mess." I looked at her. The pod's glass threw her profile back at me, my own shadow laid thin over it. For a second the framing made it look like we were standing close. Unreasonably close. The kind of close that would end up on a poster titled Please Refrain From Developing Non-Performance-Enhancing Personal Attachments During High-Pressure Competition. Maki would probably critique the poster's font first.

I'd probably ask who signed off on the printing budget. Unhealthy, but stable. Call it a working arrangement.

"The board was never going to look clean," I said.

"Your job isn't to polish it. It's to take it back out of someone else's hands."

"So strict, Miss Guardian."

"I never signed up for that title."

"Miss Creditor, then."

"That one's closer to accurate." Behind me, Emily let out one short, low sound. Not quite a laugh. Close enough. She looked at the screen, tone flat.

"If she's still got the energy for trash talk before a drop, she's fine." I didn't turn around.

"Your standard for human wellness remains reliably barbaric."

"Thank you."

"That wasn't a compliment."

"I know." On the comms, Maki laughed low.

"This ship really does warmth the House Kushima way."

"Wrong," I told her.

"House Kushima doesn't offer this service. This is a premium add-on." The pod's alert chimed three times in quick succession. Altitude calibration complete. External wind-shear correction complete. Surface deployment countdown: thirty seconds. Maki looked up. Something in her shifted in that instant. A moment ago she'd still been the girl who traded barbs, needled people, and was exceptionally good at folding her own nerves down small enough to fit in a pocket.

When the countdown started, none of that vanished — it just sank deeper, exposing the part of her actually built for the ground. Quiet. Precise. Like snapping every bone back into alignment before the storm arrives. Maki's Perspective She listened to the countdown and ran the gear check one more time. Weapons secured. Lines secured. Short-range comms nominal. Biometric link nominal.

A simplified map hovered in the lower left of her vision — relay zone, known safety corridors, suspected interference points, each in a different color. At this stage of the race, safety corridor was really just a polite fiction. A sign planted at the edge of a battlefield reading: dying here may proceed at a marginally slower pace. She looked at the map and asked, out of nowhere: "Shimo. Don't you think I look like a can of coffee about to be launched off a vending rail right now?" The answer came back fast.

"Not really." She raised an eyebrow.

"Oh?"

"Canned coffee at least lists its ingredients. You're more like a hazardous substance the committee refuses to publish the formula for." She blinked once, then laughed properly.

"That's high praise."

"Not high. Just hard to clear customs." The countdown hit its final ten seconds. Maki let a breath out, and the smile settled with it. She knew Shimo was tightening the bolt for her. Shimo knew she knew. Say it out loud and it becomes stupid. Some things go cheap the instant you name them — confessions, last words, come back alive, a phrase carrying particularly bad luck right now. So what she said instead was purely Maki.

"Then I'll go down first and remind everyone House Kushima's still standing." On the other end, Shimo's throat went dry for a fraction of a second. Annoying. This wasn't the first time she'd known Maki Kushima, wasn't the first time watching her step into a pod, wasn't even the first time watching someone drop into this absurd race to risk their neck. And still, at moments like this, feeling behaved like an undisciplined student — standing straight up the second the teacher turned to the board.

Shimo set the cup aside, voice held level.

"Maki." She looked up.

"Don't overpay on that reminder. House Kushima doesn't have spare personnel to come collect your wreckage." She kept her eyes forward, but smiled.

"Received." A pause, then one more line.

"So wait until I've got the baton home. Don't hold a memorial for me with that cold face of yours before I'm even back on the line." Shimo went quiet for a second. Then: "Relax. I'm not that efficient." This time even Emily actually laughed. Short. Low. Like the back of a blade tapping glass. The countdown hit zero. Inside the pod, the warning light flipped from white to red, then died. The next instant, the whole frame dropped hard.

Maki's silhouette fell out of frame on the feed — like someone had finally loaded a round too clever, too much trouble, and entirely too reliable, and chambered it into this race for good. The comms fractured into static for a moment under the reentry noise. Shimo stood where she was, watching the snow on the screen, not one unnecessary breath out of place. Maki's Perspective The first second Maki Kushima touched ground, she was already braced to take a hit straight to the face from House Shinomiya. Not pessimism.

Common sense. Only two houses left now — Kushima and Shinomiya. At this stage, the rules had compressed down to something brutally simple: the moment one side's runner couldn't continue, the other side won. If the committee had any honesty left, they'd have rewritten the event description as one line: congratulations, you have now entered the legally sanctioned mutual-elimination phase. So the instant her boots hit, her knees dropped, her shoulders drew in, and even her breathing caught for a beat.

She waited for the ambush. The sniper shot. Some bastard in a blind spot sending Shinomiya's regards through her ribs before her footing had even settled. Nothing came. Nothing at all. The ground ahead lay broken, grey-violet spore dust spiraling in the wind, fractured pillars in the distance leaning like a row of drunk gravestones. In her field of view, aside from Jess — who'd just handed off to her — there was no third person.

Jess confirmed the handoff, gave her a single nod, and withdrew along the exit line without a wasted word. Clean, like shoving the whole package of responsibility onto the next runner and tacking on an unspoken good luck. Maki watched Jess's back vanish and let out a quiet snort in her own head. Fine. Even the pleasantries had been cut. This was the appropriate professional ethic for this race: the one before you hands you a life, and the one after figures the rest out alone.

She confirmed her nav and pushed forward. The opening stretch was far calmer than she'd expected. A few scattered attacks — a pair of fanged brutes bursting out of a crack, a ragged swarm of torn-winged flyers still oddly enthusiastic about biting something, and one thing she genuinely couldn't classify as wildlife or site contamination. She cleared them fast, the way you'd kick trash off a commute route that had no business hosting any. She didn't relax because of it. The opposite.

The calmer things got, the wronger it felt. Shinomiya didn't treat a final round like a picnic. Their absence didn't mean they weren't here — it meant they were here in some more irritating form. That thought stayed with her until the ground simply broke open ahead. She stopped. A rift, bordering on a canyon. The earth looked like it had been pried apart by main force, the cross-section uneven, both walls glistening a damp grey.

No visible bottom — just dark violet fungal mist rolling slowly below, occasionally flaring with strange blue light, as if something down there kept its eyes open, waiting with mild impatience for someone to fall in. This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there. The nav marker showed no sympathy whatsoever. Arrow, straight across. Concise. Clear. Utterly inhuman. As if the system assumed any competitor worth the name arrived pre-equipped with a canyon-crossing function.

Failing that, a will. Maki stood at the edge and eyeballed the distance. Not entirely impossible to clear. Barely. At her current load and launch conditions, forcing it wasn't out of the question — it just shared the defining trait of every technically possible plan: fail once, and you gain an entirely new philosophy of your own life in the process. She stepped back half a pace, scanning both walls for a foothold, or any alternate line that didn't read like a punchline.

Then a corner she'd already confirmed was empty moved. Not a figure stepping out. The air went wrong first — like a pane of glass pushed gently open from the inside, light bending, edges sliding out of true. It lasted barely an instant. Long enough for every muscle in her body to lock, her weapon rising almost entirely on reflex. The next second, an AS stepped out of nothing. Her pupils contracted. A breath ago she'd been one hundred percent certain there was nothing there. Not carelessness. Not a missed angle.

Genuinely nothing. Staring at the frame, what surfaced in her head wasn't fear. It was a word more uncomfortable than fear.

"Quantum Phase Refraction Camouflage..." She said it aloud, half to confirm she hadn't misread her own eyes.

"Shinomiya's already miniaturized it?" The moment it left her mouth, she heard how it sounded. Not admiration. The most honest reaction of someone who'd just been slapped across the face by a spec sheet. The AS didn't fire. Didn't aim. Didn't close the distance. It just stood there, existing, purely to let her know: yes, you didn't see me. Not your fault. I simply never intended to be seen. The roots of Maki's teeth went tight. Very high-end. Also thoroughly punchable.

While she was still working out what it meant to do next, the AS bent and grabbed a broken length of fungal pillar with one hand — thick as a vertebra from something enormous, grey and cracked outside, glowing a cold, damp violet within. It didn't look like bridge material. It looked like someone had pried a piece of the surface's own guts loose. It lifted the thing, turned its wrist, and threw it straight across the rift. The pillar wedged into both walls with a heavy, dull crack. Steady. Level.

Directly in front of her. Like a bridge. Like a slap. Maki froze for a moment, unable to immediately file what she was looking at. Rescue. Provocation. Mockery. Or House Shinomiya suddenly discovering a conscience and branching, briefly, into charity work in the finals. Not likely. The AS finished the motion without a word, without giving her a heartbeat to respond further. The silhouette blurred once — and was gone. As if its appearance had been a mistake all along.

Only the bridged pillar remained, lying quietly across the rift. Maki stood there, genuinely thrown. Not frightened. Blindsided. The first thought that surfaced was unglamorous, and entirely sincere. What the hell. Were they helping her? Ridiculous. The next instant, a sharper, cleaner feeling shoved the confusion aside. Charity. The word landed like a needle. She was Maki Kushima, heir to House Kushima — and she was supposed to walk forward on something Shinomiya had thrown down for her.

What was this supposed to be? They hadn't just read the terrain. They'd paved the road for her. That wasn't help. That was someone standing on higher ground, tossing down a piece of bread, and gesturing, with impeccable manners: after you. Her expression darkened, degree by degree. She knew perfectly well what she should do. Reason was clear on it: cross immediately, keep pushing, log the debt, collect from Shinomiya later. Reason always talks a good game. Unfortunately, pride rarely listens to it.

And once pride gets pulled loose, it tends to drag whatever's left of good judgment out back and make it stand in the corner. That was exactly the state she was in now. She knew she shouldn't. The more she thought about it, the angrier she got. And the angrier she got, the more certain she became that setting foot on that bridge would leave something stuck in her throat for the rest of the race. So she moved. Not forward. After the direction the AS had vanished into.

Rock face, fault line, side passages half-sealed by fungal membrane all blurred beneath her feet. She was fast, and precise, constantly correcting her angle, hunting every unnatural glint, every delayed heat trace, every footprint that might betray where something had recently stood. Of course, there was nothing. No footprints. No air disturbance. No residual ripple. Not even the basic courtesy of a hint that read someone was here.

The other side had left a visible silhouette and then cut off every trailing thread that could be followed — technique clean enough to make you want to swear, except swearing wouldn't have helped. She bit down, vaulted a collapsed ridge, and finally forced herself to slow. Chasing further was pointless. Not because she'd calmed down — because reality had started swinging a stopwatch at her. She stood still, chest rising and falling, eyes sweeping the empty fork and the layered mist.

The fire that had flared a minute ago hadn't fully died, just gotten pressed under something colder and far more uncomfortable. Wrong. They hadn't been helping her. And it wasn't simple mockery, either. If Shinomiya wanted to be unpleasant, they had no shortage of efficient ways to do it — wasting time building infrastructure for an opponent wasn't one of them. People like that never operated on a single layer of meaning. If they'd built a bridge, the bridge itself had value.

That value, nine times in ten, had nothing to do with her. Her eyes cooled, degree by degree. She understood.

"... They were clearing the road for the anchor leg." She said it barely above a whisper, quiet enough to sound like she was cursing herself. They hadn't thrown that pillar to let her cross. They'd thrown it to let whoever came after her cross. And the chase she'd just run had handed the enemy the single most valuable thing on the table — time. Not just time. Her reaction pattern. Her route choices.

A live, voluntarily delivered field test of exactly what bait would move her, how far she'd chase, where she'd get dragged off course. Wonderful. She hadn't just been played — she'd nearly finished the test report for them. If the committee had a sense of humor, they'd hand her a certificate: Most Enthusiastic Contribution to Opposing Team's Process Optimization. Metal finish preferred. Hurts more when thrown.

The referee ship's whistle cut through, high and sharp and clean — a thin blade dropping straight out of the sky. Maki went still. The broadcast followed immediately.

"Anchor leg: beginning descent." The world seemed to hold its breath for a second. Maki stood where she was, fingers slowly curling shut. She'd just chased a ghost and come back with nothing, and the anchor leg was already on its way down. What she'd wasted, at the one moment she couldn't afford to waste anything, wasn't stamina. It was the lead. The buffer that should have belonged to House Kushima's final runner.

She closed her eyes for one brief second, genuinely tempted to drag the version of herself from a minute ago out and hit her. Unfortunately, you can't go back and punch your own past self. And the race doesn't hand out bonus minutes just because a competitor's finally worked something out. She opened her eyes and looked back at the real path. The pillar bridge still lay across the rift, quiet, as if nothing had happened. Maki suddenly found the thing exceptionally hard to look at.

Grating in a very Shinomiya way — no direct insult, no showy display, just placing the one thing you least want to accept exactly where you're going to need it, and letting you discover on your own: resentment or not, you're using it anyway. Enough. She exhaled, pressed the too-late frustration back down, and turned to run back. This wasn't the moment for pride. This was damage control. At least she wasn't stupid enough to make the same mistake twice.

She got back on the correct line, glanced past the bridge, and held onto one clean, thoroughly unkind thought. House Shinomiya had better pray. Pray she didn't actually catch up to them. Because right now, she very much wanted someone's account open. I sighed and got up from my seat. Maki had been played. Not because she was slow, and not because she'd left her brain in the pod. The problem ran the other way — precisely because she was Maki Kushima, Shinomiya had dared to try it at all. They hadn't guessed.

They'd bet — bet on how she'd react, bet that her pride, beautiful and infuriating in equal measure, would step forward at exactly the wrong moment and catch the blade herself. Unfortunately, they'd bet right. I'd barely finished that thought when my terminal chimed. Not an alert. Not a team channel. A new email. Sender: the tournament committee. Just the sender line was enough to make my eyebrow twitch.

When the committee reaches out to a competitor at a time like this, the contents are either unpleasant or specifically unpleasant. I opened it. No disappointment there. The subject line was dressed up in full ceremony: Supplementary Clarification: Anchor Leg Victory Conditions. Supplementary. How generous.

As if this weren't the final round of a race that had already ground people down to component parts, and instead some course TA had suddenly remembered: oh right, there's a bonus question on the final, forgot to mention it earlier. I scrolled through. By the end, I was one keystroke away from writing back to ask after their entire family tree's health. The rule was simple. Beyond disabling the opposing runner, there was now a third path. The committee had hidden a flag somewhere on the surface in advance.

Whoever's anchor leg reached it first also counted as the winner. And — the genuinely malicious part — it wasn't even particularly hard to find. Follow the final nav route to the end, and you'd run right into it. So considerate. Meaning: after everyone had bled and burned their way to this point, the committee had waited for the very last leg to casually add, by the way, there's also a treasure hunt option.

I stared at the screen for two silent seconds, then, with excellent manners, greeted their entire family tree inside my head. The thing this tournament most deserved to eliminate was probably the people running it. I closed the email, synced the win conditions to my HUD, and checked the time. Nearly my turn. Complaining about the committee was cathartic. It had no tactical value. At least not yet. I turned and walked to the changing room. The door closed behind me, cutting off the hangar's dull hum.

The pilot suit hung neat on its rack, dark grey fabric catching a near-indifferent gleam under the lights. I shed my jacket, pulled on the base layer, buckled the suit piece by piece. When the fabric closed around my limbs, that familiar tightness always suggested two things at once: armor, or the noose the committee had legally packaged up and wrapped around everyone. The only difference was that one of them might keep me alive a little longer. I pressed the last fastener shut and looked up at the mirror.

The face looking back was annoyingly calm — like the person in the glass wasn't about to go down to a surface to clean up a mess, but simply to process some mildly inconvenient paperwork. Good. At least this face could still fool someone. I left the changing room and walked straight into the hangar. The metal doors parted, and the familiar smell of machine oil and coolant washed in. At the far end, SUSANOO knelt on one knee at the launch rail, fully deployed.

The outer shell had opened on both sides, exposing the cockpit and spinal interface — less a machine, more some overly patient beast, waiting quietly for me to feed myself into its mouth. Every time I saw this, my reaction ran genuinely mixed. Half trust. Half if this thing ever stands up and starts choosing its own life direction, the Doctor's getting the first call. I stepped onto the lift and into the open chest cavity. SUSANOO's external speaker lit one notch.

"Please verify."

"Hoshino Shimo. Lieutenant." A short pause, then the system tone dropped clean.

"Confirmed. System online. Welcome back, Lieutenant."

"Drop the ceremony." I was already locking my arm and waist links into place.

"We're going in light. No heavy ordnance."

"Understood." He answered fast.

"One ranged weapon. One close-combat weapon."

"Fine." I settled into the seat, let the spinal connector engage slowly.

"That's enough. We're not tearing down a city wall."

"Received." Panels lit in sequence — power, balance, sensors, weapons, safety limiters, all coming online one after another. The sensation was strange every time, like bones that were only human a second ago suddenly grafted onto a second, larger skeleton. Every time sync completed, I briefly felt my own breathing go heavier, and more complete. Then SUSANOO opened his mouth and killed the mood with real precision.

"According to Dr. Steiner's calculations, this unit is capable of unassisted atmospheric reentry." I blinked, then nearly laughed.

"Don't even," I said.

"I have zero interest in finding out whether I turn into barbecue."

"Theoretically, given the correct entry angle—""Shut up."

"Understood." He answered so cleanly it was as if he'd never said the previous line at all. I couldn't help the twitch at the corner of my mouth. Whatever Steiner had loaded into him, it wasn't a standard support package. A normal assist AI shouldn't have the leisure, thirty seconds before launch, to open a casual discussion of atmospheric-entry barbecue physics with its own pilot. The outer armor began closing.

My vision went fully internal — hangar lights, rails, launch bay, wind and altitude data unfolding all at once. As the lift fed the whole frame into the pod, the sound of metal locking home traveled through the armor and straight into my bones, low and rhythmic, like a gavel tapping once across a desk before a formal proceeding begins. Hatch sealed. Locks engaged. Countdown initiated.

I put both hands on the controls and drew a slow breath, just about to spend the last few seconds flipping fully into combat mode, when SUSANOO spoke again.

"One more thing."

"You'd better not be about to recommend I stretch after exiting the pod."

"When you see Ms. Kushima shortly, please don't be too hard on her." I went quiet for half a second. Then I laughed, helpless.

"Fuck." I let my head drop back against the seat, shoulders actually shaking.

"Are you moonlighting as a relationship counselor now?"

"As a superior support AI, I bear some responsibility for your mental and emotional wellbeing."

"Smartass." I said it, still laughing.

"I'm calling you that from now on."

"Denied." His answer carried no emotional fluctuation whatsoever, and still somehow read as genuinely offended.

"That designation does not conform to protocol."

"Excellent," I said.

"Now I want to use it even more."

"This one — correction, this unit — reserves the right to protest."

"You even learned how to misspeak. The Doctor really did raise you wrong." The countdown kept dropping. Somewhere inside that entirely nutritionless, unexpectedly nerve-settling exchange of nonsense with SUSANOO, the pod finally cleared the ship and began its descent. Pressure came in light at first, then the whole frame shuddered once. External friction values, trajectory corrections, surface wind-shear data washed across my vision like rain.

The cabin lights swung from white to red, then steadied once calibration completed. The amusement faded around the same time. Because once the joking's done, the work's still there. I looked at the surface nav syncing in and knew exactly what I'd be facing first when I stepped out. Not Shinomiya. Not the flag. Maki. More precisely: Maki, who'd already made a mistake, and had already torn a strip off herself for it internally. That was the hardest version of her to deal with.

On a normal day she was stubborn enough already. The moment she genuinely knew she'd slipped, she went quiet in a way that made you want to shake her — a blade that usually rang and clattered, dropped whole into still water, only the cold part left showing. I'd meant to open with something sharp. Not to start a fight — to give her something to swing back at. But SUSANOO's line was stuck in my head now, irritating precisely because it wasn't wrong. Please don't be too hard on her. I clicked my tongue.

"Smartass."

"This unit is standing by."

"Wasn't talking to you."

"Understood."... More annoying by the second. Seconds later, the pod gave its final lock alert.

"Approaching designated landing point."

"Hatch opens three seconds after touchdown." I leveled my breathing and fixed my eyes ahead. The impact was short. The frame jolted once, then held. The hatch opened. Wind rushed in immediately, carrying the dry cold of fungal dust and the mineral reek of scorched earth. I walked SUSANOO out — and on the first step, the rift, the broken walls, and the leaning pillars all filled my view at once.

The improvised bridge still lay across the gap, as irritating as a deliberate footnote left on a blank page, reminding everyone who saw it: someone lost face here recently. Maki wasn't far off. Her back was to me, positioned just right of the bridge, frame still in guard stance — but stiller than usual. Not slack. The specific quiet of someone who'd pressed every last feeling to the bottom and left only function running on top. One look, and I knew SUSANOO hadn't been wrong.

Twisting the knife right now would buy exactly one second of satisfaction and nothing else. I walked forward without softening my step. Metal joints on rock carried through the wind, one beat at a time. Maki turned fast. Her frame locked for an instant when she saw me, then straightened. The channel opened. She spoke first, voice pitched lower than usual.

"... Sorry." Just that. Blunt enough to be hard to look at. I actually stopped for a beat. When Maki apologized, it usually meant she genuinely believed she'd done something stupid. Someone who normally kept a dozen layers running at once — strip all of them away, and what's left is the hardest version to handle, not the easiest. I looked at the bridge, then at the fresh scrape marks on her frame from the chase, and said only:"As long as you can still move." The channel held for half a second.

She'd probably braced for whatever I was going to cut her with, and I hadn't followed the script. She had nowhere to put the reply. Good. Catching Maki Kushima off-balance was rare enough to count as a local attraction. I brought SUSANOO up beside her, stopped at the bridge, and pushed the terrain scan over to her display.

"They used you to gauge a reaction," I said.

"It happened. Log it. Collect with interest later." She didn't answer right away. A few seconds, then a quiet sound.

"Mm." Light. Light enough to be annoying. I glanced at the scrape on her side plating, not fully cooled yet, and thought about how good she usually was at aiming her cleverness outward. Gone this quiet, it was like someone had shaved off the exact layer she normally used to keep herself alive. Irritating. I didn't like seeing her like this. So I kept my tone as ordinary as I could manage.

"Drop that expression."

"... You can't even see my expression."

"I can hear it." She paused on her end, like she wanted to argue, and didn't manage it. I almost laughed. Held it.

"Maki." I used her name.

"You didn't lose the board. Worst case, you gave me an early demo of exactly how infuriating House Shinomiya can be."

"That's a terrible way to comfort someone." There it was. The second that line landed, I knew she'd gotten at least a piece of herself back.

"Thanks," I said.

"I'm not a counselor."

"Right. I half expected you to hand me a pamphlet titled How Not to Get Walked Like a Dog by House Shinomiya."

"If one existed, I'd make the committee hold a copy each until they died." A short laugh from her side. Just once. Enough. I turned my attention forward, let the tactical overlay expand, and pulled the second layer of markers off the synced email — flag position, viable routes, terrain hazards, and the shortcuts Shinomiya might exploit. The pillar bridge still read as the most efficient line on the route. Eyesore or not, useful was still true. That's how the world works.

The things you resent are usually the ones that work. I tapped the grip lightly.

"Listen. The committee just pushed a supplementary rule. Besides disabling the other side's runner, there's a second way to win." Maki snapped back immediately.

"What."

"A flag," I said.

"They hid one on the surface in advance. First anchor leg to reach it also wins." This time Maki went quiet. Then, with total sincerity: "I currently have a genuine urge to string the committee up."

"Get in line," I said.

"I've been in it since the second I opened that email."

"Fine. I'll stand behind you."

"No." I looked at her.

"You just made a mistake. That perk goes to the back of the queue."

"That's harsh."

"I'm being generous." The air on the channel finally wasn't as dead as before. Good. If she was answering back, she hadn't buried herself in the mistake. I confirmed the ranged mount, released the melee blade to half-ready, and tipped my chin forward.

"We'll review the rest later," I said.

"First let's finish this absurd race alive." She answered, low: "Received." This time it sounded more like her. Not fully back — but not that quiet, self-burying voice from before, either. I stepped toward the pillar bridge, then paused a beat, and added:"Also."

"... Yeah."

"You didn't wreck this past fixing." I said it flat, like confirming a technical fact.

"So don't start writing your own eulogy." The channel went quiet for a second, then came a low, sharp inhale — half laugh, half choke.

"... Shimo."

"What."

"Your idea of comfort is genuinely strange."

"I know," I said.

"As long as it works." This time she actually laughed — small, but clear. It carried through the wind and finally worked loose the heaviness that had been sitting stuck in the air between us. Good. I didn't need her back to some flawless state right now. I just needed her to stop grinding herself down over one mistake. I switched primary nav authority to my side, reconfirmed the anchor-leg route, the flag coordinates, the terrain ahead.

Every marker lit cold and bright, as if the committee had finally remembered this race was still, in theory, governed by rules. I looked up at Maki.

"I've got it from here." She didn't answer right away. I knew what she was thinking. Not reluctance to let go — the opposite. She probably felt that wasting time earlier meant handing the whole mess to me by default. The quieter she got at moments like this, the more it meant she was already calling herself ugly names inside. So I finished the thought for her.

"You stay here and wait for pickup," I said.

"Once the baton's in my hands, it's not your job anymore." She took longer to answer this time. Finally, low: "... Received." There was still a little reluctance in that received. Good. That was more like her. If even that reluctance had gone, I'd have wanted to grab her and shake her twice, just to confirm her brain was still attached. I took a couple of steps, then looked back. Maki still stood in guard stance, but something about her had settled.

At least she no longer looked one second away from digging her own hole and planting a marker reading: here lies Maki Kushima, cause of death: furious with herself. I clicked my tongue.

"Don't send me off with that die-in-the-line-of-duty energy," I said.

"You're waiting for recovery, not a funeral." She paused, then laughed, very quietly.

"You really do have an ugly way of talking."

"I know," I said.

"I try to keep it consistent."

"... Shimo."

"What now."

"Win it back." I didn't answer right away. Wind rose from the bottom of the rift, crossed the bridged pillar, and stirred the fungal mist ahead. The whole landscape looked like a piece of paper someone had crumpled and smoothed out one too many times — creased through with House Shinomiya's exact, thoroughly punchable calculations. I glanced at her once.

"What else would I do?" She didn't say anything more. Just stood there, watching. The feeling was strange — like what settled after a handoff wasn't responsibility, but something that didn't translate cleanly over an open channel. Say it, and it goes maudlin. Leave it unsaid, and it's still there, caught in the wind, caught between us, caught in exactly the kind of moment where neither of us had time to keep pretending for long. Annoying. So I chose not to touch it. Call it the one virtue of a functioning adult.

At least on a battlefield, it counts as one. I raised a hand and gave a loose wave back over my shoulder — everything worth saying, said. Then, without waiting for her to add anything else, I stepped onto the bridge she'd already learned the hard way she couldn't ignore. The footing was terrible. Dry and hard on the surface, with a faint give underneath that didn't belong to rock — like stepping on something that hadn't quite finished dying.

The committee and House Shinomiya, working together, really did have a gift for cultivating a person's state of mind in the least healthy direction possible. I crossed the bridge, the HUD nav ticking forward one marker at a time.