Chương 201: 76. Temporary Labor 2

I'd originally assumed that middle school observation group boarding meant a somewhat noisier batch of children, lined up in rows, poured from the boarding hatch into the Yukikaze like canned goods by teachers and NCOs. It turned out my model of a hundred-plus middle schoolers was still operating in civilized-world assumptions. A hundred-plus middle schoolers in reality wasn't a number. It was a phenomenon.

A live event sitting somewhere between localized heavy rainfall and mass avian disturbance at the harbor on the disaster-warning scale. I stood behind the upper deck boundary line, watching a tide of students in consistent uniform colors but entirely inconsistent movement patterns surge toward us from the access corridor, and my first thought wasn't that's a lot — it was: This ship is about to get messy. Not physically messy. Order-messy.

The first few rows were still presentable — visibly held in formation by teachers applying direct cervical pressure.

By the middle section, the natural developmental patterns of young human beings had already asserted themselves: someone walking while staring up at the hull and nearly walking into the person ahead; someone poking the person beside them; someone attempting to record video on their terminal; someone who, from the first step onto the boarding corridor, had I am going to cause an incident today written across their entire body.

"... I understand now what it means to be responsible for the nation's future," D said beside me, hands in pockets, tone carrying the gravity of someone observing the early signs of imperial collapse.

"It's just that this future is quite loud."

"This isn't the future," Jess said, without expression.

"This is retribution."

"On what basis do you call other people retribution?" I turned to look at her.

"Because I have self-awareness. I'm boutique retribution. They're mass-produced."

"That's quite a detailed taxonomy." Maki didn't respond, just swept her gaze over the corridor, and her brow had already drawn in slightly — not in contempt, more the look of someone watching a batch of incoming headaches arrive in scheduled waves. Aida, Evelyn, and Ash had been called to the front by then, joining us. Aida still had that particular presence she carried — arms crossed, expression like she was evaluating which angle of the disaster would be most efficient to address first.

Evelyn stood beside her, smiling, but the smile had a dangerous kind of steadiness to it, the look of someone who would, if anyone lost control in her vicinity, smile them back into order. Ash was already looking down at his terminal, as if the practicum plan he'd submitted yesterday was about to become his personal judgment day. Sure enough, Sergeant Major Takenaka gave no one time to breathe. He stepped forward. His voice cut through the morning mist like a blade.

"Class 144, attention!" All eleven of us straightened, nearly in unison.

"From this point, you are not visitors. You are temporary auxiliary supervisors. The job is simple — guide, count, watch, and contain." Takenaka's gaze moved across each of our faces, cataloguing, the way you'd inventory a toolbox.

"I don't care how well you slept last night or whether there was meat in your soup this morning. Once this group boards, the formation does not scatter, the headcount does not drop, the noise can be whatever it is, but the feet do not run loose." Jess's eye twitched.... Right. He already had breakfast intelligence. Takenaka continued.

"Assignments. Aida, Evelyn — front guidance, female student column. Roy, Lan — mid-section order. Harvey, Akari — rear, watch for stragglers. D and Jess — left-side corridor junction, hold the line. Hoshino, Maki — with me, center-line blind spots. Ash — stay here, take the clipboard, count with me." Ash looked up.

"Me?"

"Any objection?"

"... No."

"Then hold it right. If the count comes out wrong, that's on you first." I almost laughed right there. Of course. The person who submitted the plan always ends up as the on-site secretary. There are no documents written for free — only consequences that arrive ahead of schedule. Jess had strong opinions about her assignment.

"Hold on — why am I paired with D?" D spread her hands, naturally.

"Because the universe requires balance."

"Because I look like a babysitter?!" Takenaka didn't turn his head.

"McCallow. You're not a babysitter. You're the net. The fastest ones who break containment — you're the first thing they hit." D laughed immediately.

"I like that job title." Jess's mouth twitched twice. She swallowed it, and muttered, low:"... Should've had a second bowl of rice."

"Too late now," I said. Maki glanced at me.

"You still have energy for commentary. Don't be the first one scattered by the kids."

"Excuse me, how fragile do you think I am?" Maki didn't pause.

"Yesterday in the cabin you jammed your hand moving a box."

"That was terrain."

"You were also part of the problem."... Right. Same as always. Ship not fully out of port, and Maki had already conducted her daily routine dismantling of my dignity. Takenaka didn't give us any more time to chat. He raised one hand.

"Everyone to position. Once the students board — form up first, then route. Repeating: form up first, then route. Anyone who lets the formation scatter in the main corridor will find out what it means to write incident reports as a group." We broke apart immediately. Maki and I followed Takenaka to the center-line position, directly facing the first major junction inside the boarding hatch.

Left and right from that point branched to the main interior corridor and the lift section — the exact location most likely to produce a what's over there / can we go look moment, followed by an entire batch of students dispersing like startled pigeons. I'd just taken my position when the first group of middle schoolers came up. Within thirty seconds I understood completely why Takenaka's first word had been hold the line. Because they really would scatter on their own.

The front rows were still following the teacher. The back rows already had two boys walking with their heads tilted back at the hull, nearly walking into the starboard rail. Three girls spotted the supply operations equipment on the far side of the deck and immediately produced a collective "wait wait wait is that a mech" sound. One particularly thin student, barely across the threshold, already had his terminal up and was filming. Takenaka didn't move his feet. He just said, low and final:"Terminals down.

Formation right. Front rows keep moving, back rows don't crowd. Move." That voice didn't sound like speech. It sounded like a large iron rule being used to straighten bent air. It actually worked. Those students blinked like they'd been tapped on the back of the head, fumbled their terminals away, shifted right. The front rows started moving again. The whole group was still restless, but it at least maintained the minimum dignity of this is technically a formation.

"... Wow," I said, quietly. Maki, beside me, added flatly:"Now you know what professional looks like."

"No, I just think he could shout a stray dog back into its kennel from fifty meters."

"If he hears you say that, you'll be in the kennel." While we were talking, the second row went wrong. One stocky student saw something, and suddenly shouted:"Is that a gun turret?!" Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation. Three others immediately turned, and one of them was already trying to slip out of the formation from the side, making for the rail for a closer look. My brain got exactly one thought — here we go — before my feet moved.

"Hey — get back, you can't—" Before I finished, Maki was already half a step ahead, stepping directly in front of the three students. She didn't touch anyone. She just stood there, voice cold enough to freeze a layer onto the deck wind.

"Back in formation." Three middle school boys stopped dead. Honestly, Maki deployed against middle school boys was highly effective. Because she wasn't the teacher's please don't do that, students approach, and she wasn't the parent's that's dangerous warning. She was more like the ship's rules briefly taking human form and standing in front of you, telling you: try one more move. The boldest one, not entirely self-preserving, pushed back:"Why? I was just looking—""Because this isn't a zoo," Maki said.

"But—""And not your backyard." The student choked on whatever he'd been about to say. I stepped in with something slightly more human.

"That area's an operations zone — still in pre-departure prep. If you wander in, lightest outcome is you get yelled at, worst case you end up wedged in a hatch door and become today's safety demonstration. Your call." The boy looked at me, then at Maki, then retreated into formation with a reasonable degree of dignity. The next second, the left side went off. Not our column — the junction. I turned to see Jess with both arms spread across the corridor mouth, exactly like a living net.

Four or five students were trying to slide past her from the side, two of them wearing the expression of people who genuinely believed it's fine, just one look. D was helping hold the line, but not without commentary.

"Don't try to push through during the chaos — this isn't a dungeon entrance. If you want to court death, take a number."

"We just want to see what's over there!" one student called out, indignant.

"It says 'restricted access.' Either you can't read it, or you can and you're testing your luck," Jess said, without mercy.

"You're not even a soldier!"

"No," Jess said, chin going up, "but I have more authority to send you back than you have to keep going." That line had barely landed when a larger disturbance broke out on the left. A tall, thin boy — impossible to say which row he'd come from — had taken advantage of the crowd density to slip under the temporary safety line and step onto the outer side of the yellow boundary near the lift section. Two words. That was all my brain had time for. Oh no. That area was right beside the operations lift platform.

Currently stopped — but nobody knew when it would cycle. The supervising teachers were still at the back, nowhere near fast enough. Akari and Harvey were at the rear watching stragglers. Roy's group was separated by the crowd. Then Takenaka moved. Not the get there fast kind of movement. More like someone who had already calculated distance, angle, and every gap in the crowd before they started. Three steps. Two. One. No wasted motion.

He simply arrived at the inner side of the yellow line, and his voice came down like an artillery strike.

"Everyone freeze!" The whole junction went still, like something heavy had pressed down on it.

"Front rows down! Back rows right! Hands off the rails! Nobody moves!" The students — in the middle of full chaos — actually went mostly quiet within two seconds. The front rows startled into crouching. The back rows pressed right on instinct. The boy who'd crossed the line went rigid, face draining of color. Takenaka didn't shout again. He walked to the boy, reached out, and — not grabbed, exactly — lifted him back inside the line, then stood him upright.

"Name." The boy flinched.

"... T-Takuya Hayashi."

"Class."

"Second year... Class B."

"Good, Takuya Hayashi. Look up. Look at the line." The boy looked up, obediently. Takenaka tapped the yellow-and-black warning line with two fingers. His voice was quiet now — quieter than the shout, and colder.

"This line isn't decorative. Beyond it is the operations zone. Lift platform, hatch mechanisms, overhead load points, power junctions — any one of them can send you to the medical bay. Unlucky, and you go home with parts missing." The entire group went silent. Even the ones who'd been the loudest weren't breathing too audibly. Takenaka let his gaze move across the whole formation.

"Clear. The Yukikaze is not an amusement park. It is not an exhibition hall. This ship moves. It closes. It burns. And it bites. You are here to observe, not to test. Anyone who crosses a line again loses their tour clearance on the spot. Supervising teachers, the student's class, the whole group — all of it." The effect was immediate, and almost cruel to watch.

I watched a full batch of middle schoolers who'd been craning and nudging and looking for angles become a group of very self-contained small quail in approximately two seconds. D, standing to the left, murmured:"Impressive. That's what professional suppression looks like." Even Jess didn't argue. She just made a low sound.

"I'm starting to understand why ship security reports to him." Aida came back from the front guidance section at that point, swept the scene, and reached her assessment quickly.

"Anyone hurt?"

"No." Evelyn had come over too, voice soft, content anything but.

"But if we let these kids develop freely for another five minutes, someone will try to take an emergency fire extinguisher home as a souvenir."

"I'd believe someone already has a ranked list worked out in their head," Harvey said, coming up from the rear.

"Not just their head," Lan added, with a cold cut.

"It was written all over their faces." Roy was helping reform the ranks at the far end. That face of his, which already carried a natural air of authority, worked surprisingly well on middle schoolers. Any student who looked up and found Roy standing there immediately remembered how to behave. Ash was trailing Sergeant Major Takenaka with the clipboard, looking like someone who had just been forced to understand, in real time, the gap between a plan on paper and hell on the ground.

"Count checks out," Ash said, glancing down at his terminal.

"Everyone accounted for." Takenaka nodded once. No wasted words.

"Reform. Front guidance unchanged. Add one to mid-section — Hoshino, move up. Maki Kushima, hold the center line. D and Jess, keep the left junction blocked. Roy, Lan, spread out — don't let the rear rows compress. Aida, Evelyn, take the female students forward. Harvey, Akari, rear seal. Ash, count while you walk."

"Yes, sir." We answered almost in unison. Moving forward to my new position, I passed the student who'd been introduced earlier — Takuya Hayashi. He was well past any impulse to wander now, just looking up at me sideways, wearing the expression of someone who'd done something bad and very much wanted to know whether it was going on a permanent record. I kept my voice low.

"You're lucky. Today you ran into Sergeant Major Takenaka before you ran into the lift platform." The kid went another shade paler.

"I — I'm sorry..."

"Next time, don't pick something that bites back for your courage test." He nodded hard. Then the girl beside him — ponytail, watching me with quiet intensity — asked:"Senior... that black-haired senior, the one who looks scary — is she your friend?" I blinked, and followed her gaze. Maki was standing at the center line, watching the formation come back together without any expression.

The deck wind lifted the ends of her hair slightly, but everything else about her was as still and unmovable as a black boundary marker.

"... More or less," I said. The girl looked at me, then at Maki, then back at me, and said:"She seems like your girlfriend." I nearly choked on my own spit.

"Cough — what are you people your age even watching?!" She looked startled, but didn't back down.

"Because she's been standing next to you the whole time. And when you were about to run, she moved faster than you did."

"That's called mutual support! Not girlfriend!"

"Oh..." She said oh with her mouth. Her face said something else entirely. I was about to add a follow-up when Maki turned her head from the center line.

"Hoshino. What are you stalling for?"

"N-nothing!" The ponytail girl immediately produced an I told you so expression.... I'm doomed. These kids weren't just loud. Their observational skills were also annoyingly sharp. Once the formation was back in order, we finally began moving the first group of middle school students properly into the ship. And I discovered very quickly that what it meant to be a reluctant part-time babysitter was considerably more draining than I'd anticipated. Because they weren't simply chaotic.

They were chaotic and asking questions.

"Senior, does this ship actually jump to other star systems?"

"Senior, is the reactor down below?"

"Senior, do military officers really barely sleep?"

"Senior, will that big guy actually throw someone overboard?"

"Senior, do you really eat fish for breakfast every day?"

"Senior, is that scary senior really good at school?"

"Senior, did you just blush?" I genuinely felt that last one should be classified as a violation.

"Last question is overruled," I said, face blank.

"Why?"

"Because it will negatively impact the quality of your tour today."

"Aww—" On the other side of the formation, D had already started feeding several boys a mixture of fact and complete fiction in a tone that made neither distinguishable.

"That's right — the doors on this ship have moods. Touch them wrong and they remember your face."

"No way?!"

"False. But you're welcome to test it. Sergeant Major Takenaka will definitely remember your face." Jess rolled her eyes beside her.

"Stop making things up. Someone's going to turn that into a shipboard urban legend."

"A warship should have a little folklore," D said, with great conviction.

"Shut up, you're already adding to my workload."

"You could hand that line back to Sergeant Major Takenaka word for word." What surprised me most was Evelyn. When Evelyn was guiding the female students, she seemed to have switched into an entirely different mode. Her voice was still warm, she was still smiling, but that group of girls who'd been chattering non-stop was somehow completely under control in her hands. Not because they were afraid — because Evelyn had an uncanny sense of timing.

She knew exactly when to go soft and when to cut it off, and a single look where you're going for now, questions when we stop was enough to shut down an entire thread. Aida was the opposite. Aida didn't coddle anyone. She delivered don't block the path, close up the formation, anyone who looks back walks it again like they were official regulations, and it worked just as well. Some people are simply born to anchor a room. As for Maki — Maki wasn't the babysitter type at all. Maki was more like a walking rulebook.

Strangely, the kids responded to that too. Especially the boys. That age group seemed to have a particular instinct: the more someone looked like trouble to provoke, the shorter their answers, the colder their eyes — the more those boys somehow couldn't bring themselves to act up. At one point, a fairly bold second-year boy — clearly trying to perform for his classmates — walked past Maki and asked, deliberately:"Senior, do you ever smile?" Maki didn't break stride.

"Does that concern you?" The whole row went silent. A second later, someone's shoulders were shaking trying not to laugh. I nearly lost the ability to walk myself. The boy's ears went completely red. He faced forward and shut up.... Good. Very good. With Maki on board, at least half the unnecessary self-expression from these kids was going to be pre-empted. By the time we'd delivered the first group safely to the designated assembly point and turned back to collect the second, I finally had a moment to breathe.

Sergeant Major Takenaka stood at the center of the junction, watching the corridor operation running. His face was still exactly as unapproachable as before, but at least the I am prepared to execute someone right now pressure had eased by one notch. He looked us over, checking whether this batch of conscripted student assistants was still serviceable. Then he spoke.

"First round. Marginally acceptable." Jess immediately muttered, just loud enough:"Wow. That actually counts as a compliment, doesn't it?" Sergeant Major Takenaka's hearing demonstrated its supernatural range for the second time.

"McCallow. Keep running your mouth, and I'll put you at the front of the next round." Jess shut up on the spot. D laughed beside her, entirely without conscience. I watched all of this, and something settled in me — a strange, specific sense of reality. Last night, lying in the eight-person cabin, I'd felt like I'd simply boarded the ship.

But now, standing in this corridor packed with students and orders and the lingering warmth of breakfast and deck wind and a string of things that had gone wrong and been fixed, I understood something else — We hadn't just boarded. We'd already started working on this ship. Even if the work currently had very little dignity attached to it. Maki walked over and looked at me.

"What's that expression?" I answered honestly.

"I'm thinking about the fact that the official task for our first day of practicum is maintaining galactic order for a group of middle schoolers." Maki was quiet for half a second. Then she let out a soft huff of a laugh. Very short. Short enough that I wondered whether I'd heard it right.

"Then you'd better get used to it early," she said.

"The more a ship looks like a proper military vessel, the less its day-to-day tends to resemble one."

"That sounds like it comes from experience."

"I'm not confiding in you."

"The way you're talking right now already counts." Maki gave me a sideways look.

"Hoshino."

"Okay. Shutting up." I said it. I didn't mean it. Something in my chest was already on the edge of laughing. Because I knew — this was only the beginning. The middle school group had just boarded. Sergeant Major Takenaka had just suppressed the first incident. Class 144 had just been forced to accept that in addition to being cadets, they were also semi-qualified babysitters and corridor security personnel. And the Yukikaze hadn't been underway for long.

What came next was going to be louder, messier, and more trouble than this.... But somehow, for some reason I couldn't entirely explain — I was starting to look forward to it.