Chương 532: 254.First Spark 1

The morning was gray. Not the misty kind of gray that makes literary types sigh over the fleeting nature of youth. Just plain gray, the kind that drains any urge to get up. Outside, the sky looked like an old negative nobody had bothered to wash, and the whole dorm was quiet in a way that didn't sit right. I rolled over and reached out beside me. Empty. I pushed myself up and looked around. Sure enough, not a soul in the room. There was a note on the desk, though. I picked it up.

Two lines, scrawled so fast it looked like whoever wrote it hadn't had time to be reasonable.

"Hoshino, morning classes are canceled. If you're awake, get to the Student Council office." No signature. I stared at it for two seconds. The first thought that surfaced wasn't something's wrong. It was— If you were all awake anyway, you could've woken me. Abandoning a teammate to sleep in and then leaving a note to fake a little team spirit — strictly speaking, that crossed a line.

Maki had gone back to the family estate with her grandfather last night, so she'd probably come straight to school today; that part I understood. But the others? Surely they hadn't all had a collective crisis of conscience and decided to let me sleep in.... Not a chance. I slapped the note back onto the desk and swung out of bed.

"What a bunch of goddamn wonderful classmates." I cursed them very sincerely as I changed. Sincere meaning every word came straight from the heart, no decoration. By the time I grabbed my bag and rode to school, the sky was still overcast, and the wind on my face felt like someone dragging a wet rag slowly across the world. When I got to school, I understood why the note had been written in such a hurry. The mood across campus was oppressively wrong. How to describe it? It wasn't quiet, and it wasn't loud.

It was a strange sense that everyone had deliberately dropped their voice half a notch. People talked in the corridors; clusters had formed by the training field. But every glance, every pause, seemed to say the same thing: something's off today. Very off. The strangest part was that one person was missing from the school gate.

Freya Nikaido, who stood there every day no matter the wind, rain, or snow — who I suspected would ask whether the gate inspection had been completed even if a meteor came down — wasn't there today. I stopped dead. It was hard to explain. Roughly like an NPC who spawned in the same spot every day, with a presence close to a system announcement, suddenly failing to appear. No normal person's first reaction would be ah, how peaceful. It would be—is the server down?

I hitched my bag higher on my shoulder, didn't bother looking toward the classroom building, and turned straight for the Student Council office. The oddness only grew on the way. It wasn't that no one spoke. Everyone spoke with restraint. The makeup exam list was already posted proudly at the gate, as though afraid people wouldn't know someone was in for it today, and yet everyone wore the same fake consideration, the I'd rather not discuss this in front of the person concerned kind.

I never appreciated that atmosphere, because it usually meant one thing— They'd already finished talking about it behind your back. Great. The academy was running as smoothly as ever, and the rumor mill was in excellent health. When I pushed open the door to the Student Council office, the scene inside stopped me for a full half second. Every word I might have used to describe it lined up in my head, then collectively refused to work.

Maki sat in the Student Council President's chair as always, back straight, expression so composed that nothing in this room, whatever happened, seemed likely to escape the calculations behind those eyes. I hated that posture. It gave everyone else the illusion that as long as Maki was sitting there, the situation couldn't spiral out of control. Too often, though, that seemed-fine atmosphere was exactly how things slid all the way into the abyss. Emily was there. Irena was there. Roy was there. Even D was there.

And most important— This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. Curled up on the sofa, practically folded into Lan's arms, was Freya Nikaido. Nikaido was crying. Not a faint reddening at the corners of her eyes, not that high-class-human version of I'm merely experiencing a slight fluctuation of emotion. She was genuinely crying. Shoulders trembling, breathing unsteady, tears falling in a broken line.

Lan didn't speak; one arm around Nikaido's shoulders, the other patting her back slowly. The sight was absurd, grotesque, and carried a reality I couldn't digest all at once. I'd once made a vicious remark about Freya Nikaido. I'd said that even if she watched her whole family get purged, she'd probably keep a straight face, mark off the bloodstains by zone, list a cleaning order, and ask bystanders not to block the traffic flow. I now formally retract that. Quickly, too. I swung the door shut behind me.

It landed with a dull thud, neither loud nor soft.

"... What happened?" I genuinely had no idea. Maki looked up at me, her voice held so steady it was somehow more unsettling.

"The Galactic Empire launched a surprise attack on the Federation's logistics base in Pegasus." The room went even quieter. Maki continued.

"According to cross-checked intelligence from House Totoki of Andromeda and House Sanjo of Cygnus, the situation there is catastrophic. The supply line was punched clean through, and the base had almost no time for an orderly evacuation. From what's been compiled so far... the odds of survivors are low." I opened my mouth and found nothing to say for a moment. That was when a voice I hadn't noticed cut in, flat and cool, from the far side of the office.

"Don't forget, I'm the one who coordinated that intelligence." The voice wasn't loud, but it was cold enough. I looked toward it. The handle of the lounge door turned gently. I'd been wondering what troublesome character Maki had fished up this time. Then the door opened, and half my prepared theories died on the spot. A girl stepped out. Wearing a Lower House uniform. A dark stand-collar jacket, pressed sharp, silver piping running down the shoulder line and front.

Gray trousers tucked cleanly into black ankle boots. The uniform already ran cold; on her it looked more like a teaching example of how to wear distance in human form. Add the violet-to-lavender hair falling all the way to her waist, and she was immaculate to the point of excess — pretty enough to have walked straight out of some prestigious academy's brochure. The problem was— I knew that face. So I said it out loud.

"Shit — Shinomiya Hyouka?" I forgot to control my volume.

"What are you doing here? And what's with the outfit?" Shinomiya Hyouka stood by the door, wearing the standard Shinomiya brand of coldness. But she wasn't in that machine of hers, black enough to swallow light, and this wasn't the face she'd worn at the rift — the save me or don't, whatever, I'm finishing my sentence first expression. The overall impact had slid off in a different direction. Simply put.

Right now Shinomiya Hyouka looked exactly like the sort of high-grade troublemaker who had excellent grades, an excellent family, and excellent manners — and specialized in causing problems anyway. The kind teachers couldn't handle and classmates didn't dare cross. Shinomiya ignored the shock in my voice. Her gaze landed on me, and her first line went straight down the middle.

"Remember our bet?" I nodded. Then immediately shook my head.

"Wait, that's not right." I frowned.

"We ended up co-champions. Strictly speaking, that doesn't count as either of us beating the other." Shinomiya was silent for a moment. Then, in the tone of someone working through a mathematical proof who wouldn't concede so much as a decimal place, she said calmly:"But if you'd let go back then, you would have won." I blinked.

"What do you mean?"

"Exactly what I said." She looked at me, her voice still level.

"If you hadn't saved me, I'd have fallen into the rift. House Shinomiya loses the anchor leg, and the flag stops being contested. By the logic of victory and defeat, the advantage was in your hands at that moment. You're the one who let the win go." My first reaction wasn't to be moved. It was that the argument sounded skewed no matter how I heard it.

"That's a pretty twisted way of keeping score."

"It holds."

"Like hell it does."

"To me, at least, it holds." I looked at Shinomiya. Shinomiya looked at me. For a few seconds, the air between us was stiff enough to sharpen a knife on. Honestly, more than why Shinomiya had suddenly shown up here in a Lower House uniform, what occupied me was Nikaido, sobbing on the sofa. However outrageous Shinomiya's arrival was, it still fell under campus weirdness. Nikaido crying like that had already exceeded the statistical range of today's anomalies. Maki must have read my gaze, because she spoke.

"Linde-senpai was killed in action." No one answered. But the name clicked into place in my head at once. The one who'd always gone everywhere with Nikaido, whose stride was measured as if with a ruler, and who'd once had a midnight rendezvous in the greenhouse that I'd walked in on and helpfully photographed. He was a decent guy, really. Just a little too rigid. Rigid enough that you easily assumed someone like that couldn't die — that the rulebook would simply seal him in place.

Except now the rules hadn't sealed him. The war had taken him first. I'd meant to say something appropriate. The standard line human society had evolved to produce automatically in the face of a death; then to pretend I felt a touch of grief too and discreetly wipe away a few tears that theoretically didn't exist. But before I could open my mouth, the Student Council office door slammed open. A bang. The door nearly thought it was going to die in the line of duty again. Jess came charging in.

Not the usual Jess, the one with the punchable grin who seemed to spend every day plotting where to plant a prank bomb next. This Jess had none of that playing-with-the-world ease. Her breathing was fast, her expression wild, and even her bangs had come loose from running. It wasn't an act. She was genuinely rattled. Jess braced a hand on the doorframe and looked up, her face so grim I straightened up on the spot.

"Something huge just happened." My stomach dropped. Honestly, if anyone else had said it, I could at least have sorted out whether this was Student-Council-scale trouble, academy-scale trouble, or one of those cosmic crises some people treated as the lunch menu being changed. But this was Jess saying it. In other words, anything that put that expression on Jess's face was usually past ordinary trouble — enough to make you wonder whether some doomsday prophecy had finally decided to drop the act.

Looking at Jess, I suddenly felt that this gray morning was still far from done rotting. The truly worse part was only just beginning.