Chương 167: 63. Motorbike 1

After Aki finished speaking, she didn't linger. She was exactly the kind of person who places a bomb in the center of a living room, confirms the fuse is lit, then politely closes the door behind her on the way out. Freya shot me one last vicious glare before leaving—the kind that promised she'd be filing "pot calling the kettle black" away until graduation.

Linde didn't say much, just glanced back at the notifications on the table with the expression of someone watching gears she'd calculated long ago finally begin to turn. Aki was the last to leave. Maki stood by the entryway—not walking her to the door, not asking her to stay. The atmosphere between them was hard to describe.

Not ordinary familial warmth, not simple distance either, but something like two people who were both too intelligent and knew each other too well, so neither was willing to take the first step. The door closed quietly. But when it settled, the living room went still in a way that felt excessive. All the absurdity from moments before—two Kushimas, ghosts, mass production jokes—had been yanked clean out of the air.

What remained was the stack of formal notifications on the table, and one sentence, said lightly, that weighed considerably more than it sounded: A lot of them are conscripts. I looked down at the envelope in my hands. It didn't feel like paper anymore. More like a thin piece of metal designed to push you forward. D was the first to speak. Not surprising. He wasn't talkative under normal circumstances, but the worse things started to smell, the less likely he was to leave a room empty.

"If most of the new intake below us are conscripts," D said, spreading his notification flat, voice steady and controlled, "then execution capacity in the ship's non-core sections will be inconsistent. Command transmission will lag. Contingency response will be worse." He wasn't expressing shock or processing grief. He was translating that sentence, quickly and practically, into survival language. That was the most reliable thing about D.

While everyone else was still absorbing so they're not trained regulars, he was already mapping where things would break, where people would die, where someone would need to fill gaps. Ash leaned against the other side of the table, notification still in hand but eyes not quite on the page. He rarely showed much expression, which made the change visible now. That usual composure—the sense that everything was still within manageable range—had drawn inward slightly. Not panic, not guilt.

A cold, unwelcome understanding. He probably knew better than most of us what that statement meant inside a military structure. Not everyone standing under a supply line was ready to be there. Not everyone wearing a uniform had walked into it by choice. Jess was the third to speak. She smiled first—of course she did, anything else would have been out of character.

"So," she said, leaning back, that familiar insufferable curve still at her mouth, "we thought we were student interns, and it turns out once we board we might end up teaching people how not to blow themselves up first, just because we look more functional than average." Nobody took that line. She didn't laugh at it a second time either. Because this wasn't the two-Kushima situation—that kind of absurdity you could laugh through and leave behind. This kind, once you understood it, cut the laughter short on its own.

She looked down at the notification, tapped the corner twice with one finger, and after a moment said: "... That's disgusting." Three words from Jess, and they landed harder than a full string of profanity would have. Because she treated almost everything like a joke, which meant when she genuinely found something disgusting, the words came out clean and direct. Ash finally set his notification on the table.

"Disgusting or not, this kind of configuration isn't unusual on the front line." Jess looked up at him.

"I know," she said.

"That's exactly why it's disgusting." Ash didn't argue. He went quiet for a brief moment—the kind of quiet that pays an unglamorous acknowledgment to something you've known existed since you were young. I looked around the table and noticed everyone was holding their notification differently. D was treating it as a problem. Ash was treating it as reality. Jess was treating it like something foul she couldn't swallow.

And me—I was treating it like an answer I'd assumed was still far away, suddenly dropped at my feet. Maki hadn't said anything. Since the moment Aki mentioned conscripts, she'd been quiet in a way that went past her usual quiet—not the stillness of someone who didn't know, but the stillness of someone whose mind was moving in a different direction and wasn't ready to share it yet. She opened her notification and read through it line by line, stopping at the vessel designation and boarding time.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. I watched her profile and felt irritation settle in. Not at her. At that expression. Because I knew it too well—every time she was genuinely worried about something, she pressed the surface flat first, as if staying calm enough could keep the thing from happening. I spoke before I'd decided to.

"Did you already know something like this was coming?" Maki looked up at me. She didn't deny it immediately, didn't confirm it either. She just said, evenly: "I knew front-line formations would be mixed. I didn't know how far the mixing would reach into our ship's structure." Very Kushima. No pretending not to know, no giving more than asked. But I could hear what she was actually thinking—not so there are conscripts, but this means once we board, we can't assume anyone else will have things handled.

She looked back down at the notification.

"If the captain actually issues us formal crew uniforms," she said, "then at minimum, he's not treating us as pure observers in every position." D nodded.

"Right." Ash nodded too.

"And on a ship with a large influx of temporary fill-ins, the people who get pulled to plug gaps first are usually the ones who still look functional." Jess made a short, sharp sound.

"Fantastic. So everything we've done to stay alive until now earns us the system deciding you look like you can hold up, go patch that hole over there."

"That's roughly it," I said.

"I hate how fast you agreed with that."

"I hate it too. Doesn't make it less true." The living room went quiet again. Not empty quiet this time. Everyone was recalibrating something internal. The line that had read off-campus practicum was being forcibly rewritten as: prepare to board. Prepare to fill positions. Prepare to enter a ship where not everyone chose to be there. Akari, leaning against the side of the sofa, finally spoke in her usual drawl.

"Then stop thinking of yourselves as students." She said it like she was noting something obvious. Nobody in the room could tell her she was wrong. I looked down at the notification and felt my fingers go slightly cold. The Snowwind—for the first time, those words stopped sounding like a cool ship name in a story. They started sounding like a place. A place where, once you went, you would see things people our age weren't supposed to see yet.

That night, after I'd shut myself in my room, I didn't lie down for a long time. The third floor of twenty-two wasn't exactly quiet at night. Light footsteps in the corridor, the occasional door closing somewhere further down, the pipes in the bathroom still carrying a faint evening echo. Downstairs someone was probably still putting things away. In the basement, Harvey was possibly staring at a cable with personal grievance.

Usually that kind of ambient noise made it easy to pretend the world was still as chaotic and loud as it had been during the day, with no room for thinking too hard about anything. Not that night. I took the formal notification back out and set it on the desk. Beside it was the uniform that had come with it. Not the complete version—not the full crew dress ready to wear aboard—but the preliminary issue pieces and sizing confirmation materials.

Dark fabric folded flat and precise, metal fastenings catching a faint cold gleam under the desk lamp, cuffs and shoulder lines carrying a clean, impersonal institutional quality. I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at it for a long time. Then I understood something. This wasn't a school uniform. A school uniform, however much you hated it, was fundamentally a student's object.

You could wear it wrinkled, complain about how it looked, take out a bad exam result on it, throw it over a chair in the dorm without thinking twice. A ship's uniform was different. It wasn't worn for a classroom. Not for a senior, a teacher, a transcript, or even your own sense of pride. It was worn for orders. For a position. For whether you were considered someone who had the right to stand there. And Aki had made it clear: being issued it doesn't mean it counts. Someone has to approve you first.

A captain has to nod before you get to put it on. I reached out and touched the fabric. Cold—not the cold of something left out too long, but a systemic cold, the kind that made you think immediately of bridge lighting, deck wind, metal handrails, and the eyes of strangers. The notification listed assembly time. Berth location. Vessel designation. Check-in procedure. Every line simple, simple in a way that seemed deliberately designed to leave no space for an emotional response. I read through it again.

And admitted, clearly, for the first time: this wasn't a student practicum. At least not only that. A student practicum wouldn't send formal crew uniforms in advance. Wouldn't emphasize captain's approval. Wouldn't mention that most of the new recruits below us were conscripts, or arrange for a formation like Group 144 to move off-campus before boarding and establish itself as a small operational unit. This entire process, from the beginning, hadn't been designed to produce observers. It was closer to a filter.

Sorting out which people could look like students while being available, when necessary, to do things students weren't supposed to do. I sat there and thought about the sounds twenty-two had made over the past few days. Jess being insufferable in the kitchen. D up first every morning before light. Maki standing beside me, expressionless, telling me to eat breakfast. Harvey losing his mind in the basement. Ash at the long table, discussing the bridge in a calm voice like he'd be on it tomorrow.

And Aki today, standing in the living room, dropping the word conscripts like it was a casual observation. We hadn't started looking like a unit after moving into twenty-two. Some people had been looking at us that way long before. I'd just finally understood it today. I reached over and unfolded the uniform slightly. Dark. Straight. Not one unnecessary line. The kind of thing that seemed designed to make whoever wore it immediately quieter, more compliant, more like a component that could be fed into a system.

I almost laughed. Not because it was funny. Because it was too absurd. A few days ago I'd been in this house with headaches over motorcycles and refrigerator shelves and shower schedules and basement wiring. Now, in the same room, I was looking at a ship uniform I didn't yet have the right to wear and thinking about how many people on the Snowwind might not have chosen to be there. The gap felt like someone had quietly cut two chapters out of my life while I wasn't paying attention. The wind outside was light.

I folded the notification back up and returned it to the envelope, more carefully than usual. Not out of reverence. Because I suddenly didn't want it to crease. Disgusting. Moments like this you catch yourself being ridiculous. I put the uniform back in its case, closed it, left my hand resting on top for a moment, then let out a slow breath. The Snowwind. It had sounded like somewhere distant. Now it was starting to sound like a date. A location. A set of clothes waiting for someone to fill them.

And what bothered me most was that I'd already started to believe—that day was actually coming. Not if. When. When I finally lay down, I didn't turn off the light immediately. The room was quiet enough to hear my own breathing. From the other side of the wall—Maki's room, or the flexible room, it was hard to tell—came a faint sound, like someone passing, then stopping. I looked at the ceiling and thought that twenty-two felt like a very gentle illusion.

It gave us a table, a bathroom, our own rooms, days we could laugh through and argue through. But all of that only existed because the harder thing hadn't officially moved in yet. Today's notification was the first door. And I'd already opened it.