Chương 181: 69. First Taste 1

Captain Tobita smiled and dropped his little bombshell about "students from the Federal Military Officers' Affiliated Secondary School being on board today," and for one very real moment, I wanted to put my helmet back on and pretend I'd never come to the port at all. Not because I'm fragile. Because this universe has a genuine talent for taking whatever small romantic mood you've managed to build and feeding it directly into the high-difficulty content grinder. I'd been thinking—what was today, exactly?

First time officially taking Maki somewhere on the bike. First time riding my own vehicle to the port district. First time standing in front of the Yukikaze and letting "we're actually boarding that ship" stop being words on a screen and become several thousand tons of steel reality. And now the system had thrown in a bonus pack of secondary school students. Perfect. This wasn't a standard escort mission anymore. This was the kind of raid that gets flagged on strategy wikis: Full party recommended.

Bring crowd control. Beware of unpredictable NPC behavioral incidents. I stared at Captain Tobita's retreating back for two seconds, then managed exactly one sentence:"Maki."

"Mm."

"I have a very strong urge right now."

"To go home?"

"To drag the entire Yukikaze into a comprehensive risk assessment." She went quiet for a beat, then laughed—short, quiet, not the kind that means everything's fine. Just enough to loosen whatever was starting to tangle up in my head.

"Too late," she said.

"The ship's already there."

"I know." I pressed my fingers against my temple.

"But I can at least observe a moment of silence for my future self." Wind came off the water, cold and insistent. The Yukikaze sat exactly where it had been—heavy, still, indifferent in the way only very large steel things can be. It didn't care whether there were secondary school students on its deck or a hundred of them. Compared to that, me standing here mentally drafting my own eulogy felt very small and very loud. Maki watched the ship for a moment, then turned to me.

"Going back now?" Perfectly normal question. Except she didn't say it like let's wrap this up. She said it like—if I wanted to go back, she'd go back. And if I didn't, she already knew exactly where my eyes were about to drift. And unfortunately, they drifted. The high point. Up the mountain. That route she'd been packaging as "supplementary visual reconnaissance" from the start, which had never sounded innocent for a single day. I was quiet for two seconds, then asked honestly:"If I say we go straight back to No.

22 right now, I'm going to spend the whole ride imagining how those secondary school kids are going to turn our escort mission into a live-fire field trip..." Maki looked at me.

"Mm."

"Then shouldn't we go up to the high point first? Get the dungeon soundtrack out of my head?" Her gaze stayed perfectly calm. Like she'd known I'd say this.

"We can."

"You agreed way too fast."

"It was already on the route."

"Oh." I looked at her.

"So Kushima never actually intended to let me go straight home today."

"I'm just completing an efficient itinerary."

"Does your conscience ever hurt when you package flirting as 'efficiency'?" She answered without blinking:"No." Perfect. Completely on brand. If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. We put our helmets back on, got on the bike, started the engine. When the low rumble came up through the frame, I felt something strange—like the breath that the Yukikaze had pressed flat was slowly finding its rhythm again. I took her out of the port district.

Not back to Platinum Bridge Street. Along the outer perimeter, cutting into the city's evening, following that route that had never been just reconnaissance—up toward the ridge. Once we cleared the port, the sky collapsed quickly into night. This city becomes something different after dark. Daytime is order. Nighttime is light. And where there's too much light, things you meant to keep hidden have a way of surfacing anyway.

When I hit the outer ring road, the high-rise facades on both sides had already lit up—neon panels, skybridges, hanging signage, the distant elevated loops all tangled into one wet, luminous skeleton. The road surface held just enough moisture—not quite rain, but enough to stretch every light into long streaming ribbons. The whole city seemed determined to add unnecessary dramatic effect to the night. Maki sat behind me, and this time she settled in more naturally than she had on the way to the port.

Maybe because we'd already ridden together once. Or maybe because stepping back from the Yukikaze—from that particular brand of tension that tightens your nerves without asking permission—makes anyone instinctively reach for something that doesn't feel like a mission. Her hands weren't just resting tentatively at my sides anymore. She was holding on properly now. Steadier. Not quite an embrace. But definitely more than casual contact. The pressure was calibrated.

Precise enough that through every curve, every lane change, every slight deceleration at a signal, I was acutely aware she was there. This was a problem. When you ride alone, your attention goes to the road. When Maki Kushima is on the back seat and holding onto you like that, you have to watch the road and work very hard at pretending you're not tracking every small shift of her weight, every breath that brings her fractionally closer through a lean. Nearly impossible.

I took the bike onto the elevated outer loop, the road sweeping into a long right-hand arc. City lights slid backward at the edges of my vision. The cold blue trim on the wheels cast faint streaks across the wet asphalt. The bike moved like it already knew how to carry someone through this kind of night. Then Maki's voice came close to my ear:"You're riding smoother than this afternoon." Wind noise made her voice lower than usual, dropping almost directly against the back of my neck.

I nearly spiked my heart rate past legal limits.

"... Thanks."

"Not a compliment. Just a fact."

"You've been using facts as weapons lately."

"Because you keep trying to dodge." Two seconds of silence.

"I'm not dodging."

"No?"

"I specialize in tactical evasion." She laughed—small, brief, cut short by the wind, but it settled somewhere in my head and stayed. I suddenly realized: if something was losing control tonight, it wasn't the mission difficulty or the secondary school visit group. It was my brain slowly losing the ability to distinguish between passenger making normal conversation and one ordinary sentence is about to dismantle my ability to think. No dignity whatsoever. But I wasn't going to lie about it.

We climbed away from the main arteries onto the winding mountain route. Much quieter up here. Just occasional headlights sweeping past, the illuminated lines of distant bridges, night wind filtering through the trees. The bike climbed steadily, and the city's sea of lights fell back behind us—like someone was patiently dialing down the volume on the reality we'd been handed. I'd expected to spend the whole ride mentally rehearsing How to Handle Unexpected Minor Variables in Active Operations. I didn't.

Mountain roads do something to you. When you're riding a bike you actually like, carrying someone you care about, climbing out of port wind toward higher ground while the city and the bay and the bridges and the lights all spread slowly below—a lot of the noise goes quiet. The mission didn't disappear. The complications didn't either. But they stepped back for a moment. What was left: the engine's low note, the night air, the weight behind me, and my own embarrassingly overheated pulse.

The last stretch narrowed between trees, leading to a small, unremarkable scenic pullout. Beyond the guardrail—the entire city at night. I eased into the empty space and cut the engine. When the vibration dropped away, the silence was almost jarring. Not real silence. The kind you only hear when movement stops and all the buzzing settles back into the ground. The city still burned below, the port still worked, traffic still ran on the bridges. But all of that had been pushed far off. Up here, it was just us.

I took off my helmet. Night air rushed in, scattering some of the heat I'd been stewing in. Maki took hers off too. She held it against her side, black hair slipping down over her shoulders, lifting slightly in the wind. There was a small old-style lamp by the guardrail, and its warm yellow light fell across her profile—a dangerous contrast against the cold blue spread of the city behind her. For a moment I genuinely didn't know whether to look at the view or at her. Stupid thing to think. True, though.

Maki stepped forward to the edge of the overlook. I followed, standing beside her. Below, the city had unfolded like a luminous net—bridge cables drawing clean arcs through the dark, the river and bay cutting the lights into layered tiers of brightness. The moon sat higher up. And at the far edge of the port, just visible, the outline of the Yukikaze. Small from here. But recognizable.

"... You really can see it," I said quietly.

"I told you the sightlines were good." She was looking down too.

"Port district, bridge line, outer approach roads. All visible at once."

"You're getting disturbingly good at rebranding joyrides as tactical reconnaissance." She didn't answer right away. After a moment: "Are you going to call me out on it?" Wind moved between us. I looked from the ship in the harbor to the city that seemed like it would stay lit until the end of everything, and answered honestly:"Not tonight." Maki turned to look at me. Her eyes were always quiet, but at night they got more dangerous—not colder, just more open.

Like whatever she kept compressed under structure and efficiency and that face that managed everything so well had a little more room to show through in the dark.

"Why not?" she asked.

"Because—" I paused, decided honesty was the only viable option.

"Today's difficulty rating was already off the charts. Secondary school visit group, the Yukikaze, Captain Tobita's polite psychological warfare, the full Kushima corporate experience. If I also have to be principled enough to call out the fact that you basically just took me up a mountain on a date, I'll have absorbed too much damage for one day." She was quiet for two seconds. Then she laughed again—clearer than before.

Still controlled, but enough to make me think: oh, this is going to be a permanent weak point, isn't it.