Chương 204: 78. Night Duty 1

Lunch was simple. Simple enough that the moment I sat down and looked at the tray — clean, efficient, entirely without feeling, the kind of meal clearly built to refuel a body rather than remind it that existence could be enjoyable — I almost decided breakfast had been a one-time lapse of conscience from the Yukikaze's galley, and this was the ship reverting to standard rations.

"Isn't this gap a little extreme?" I turned my spoon over the tray, staring at a meal so aggressively regulation it made me want to salute it.

"Breakfast was still living in old-Earth Japanese civilization. Lunch just regressed straight into a logistics-rationalist society." Jess sat across from me, wearing the exact expression of someone betrayed by reality itself.

"I really thought we'd get that meat miso soup one more time." D set his tray down. His tone stayed perfectly level, which made the content crueler.

"You mistook this morning's happiness for a baseline. That's the kind of mistake people make in life."

"That line has zero credibility coming from a man on his second bowl of rice," I told him.

"This isn't greed." He tapped his fork against the tray.

"This is pre-loading calories against whatever disaster's waiting this afternoon."

"You talk like they're going to throw us onto the outer deck to run laps naked," Jess said, rolling her eyes.

"Anything's possible on this ship," Lan said from beside her, flat and matter-of-fact. She said it with such certainty that I genuinely couldn't find anything to argue back with. By the time the first and second rounds of the morning tour wrapped, our whole trainee batch was hovering somewhere near structural collapse.

Not physical exhaustion, exactly — more the specific mental state you reach after a hundred-plus middle schoolers have spent hours sanding down your patience, until you hit the point where if one more kid asks, Senpai, is that the reactor?, you might just file them straight into the roll sheet as missing. And of course, before we'd even finished lunch, Security and the relieving Marine detail walked into the mess. The whole student section went quiet for a solid two seconds. I'm fairly sure it was involuntary.

Not fear. Contrast. All morning we'd been operating under Sergeant Major Takenaka's security framework — plenty of pressure, but it was still the orderly kind of intimidating. The men walking in now were drawn in an entirely different art style. Tall. Dense. Dark-uniformed. Shoulders wide enough to double as bulkhead reinforcement. Even their boots hit the deck a full layer heavier than a normal person's.

These weren't men who looked good because they trained for it — these were the kind who could charge into a live shipboard firefight under full kit, drag someone out, and not even breathe hard. On them, the uniforms didn't look like fabric. They looked like tactical warnings. One of them passed our table and dropped a heavy-looking equipment case on the floor. Thud.

The sound made me glance down at my tray, seized by a sudden, entirely sincere urge to light incense for every middle schooler currently aboard this ship.

"... I kind of want to pay my respects to those kids," I said, meaning it completely. Beside me, Maki didn't look up.

"Too early. Wait until they start running loose this afternoon. Plenty of time then."

"That's a slightly terrifying thing to say."

"It's practical." Jess was already propped on one hand, watching the Marines take over the roster and route assignments, her face a mix of awe, dread, and deep, unsympathetic satisfaction.

"I finally get how Sergeant Major Takenaka managed to stay human-shaped before noon. He had this coming to relieve him." D chewed a bite of his side dish, unhurried.

"The way you say that makes them sound like heavy machinery rotating in for night shift."

"Problem?"

"No. Dead accurate." Aida and Evelyn arrived with their trays not long after. Aida sat, took a clean sip of soup, then looked across the hall at the handover in progress.

"Afternoon shift for the middle schoolers goes to a mixed Security-Marine detail. We're off point escort." I nearly ascended on the spot.

"So does that mean we get to res—""No." Not Aida. Akari, from the far end of the table, eating with the same methodical precision she brought to everything — including the demolition of hope.

"Major Elena had the afternoon schedule locked before noon." My spoon stopped halfway to my mouth.

"... I have a very bad feeling about this." This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"You're catching up to Jess's rate on that line today," Roy murmured.

"Because this ship works very hard to validate the whole concept of bad feelings," I said. Akari finished delivering the verdict without a flicker of expression.

"This afternoon, the student group splits. Some to Logistics observation. Some to the Engineering perimeter, standby. As for you—" She looked at me.

"You and Maki Kushima are assigned to the Marine training ground." Two seconds of silence. I set my spoon down very carefully.

"... I'm sorry, what?" Jess was the first to laugh, and she did it with zero remorse.

"Wow, Hoshino. Congratulations. Officially promoted from high-risk-child retrieval specialist to high-risk-self retrieval specialist."

"That's not funny. Genuinely not funny." I glared at her.

"Why me?"

"Because you ran faster than the rest of us this morning." Maki finished her last bite at her own unhurried pace, wiped her hands with a napkin.

"Major Elena probably figured that since you're so good at chasing people toward the edge of danger, she might as well send you to learn how not to die there."

"And you?" I wasn't ready to let it go.

"Why are you in it too?" Maki looked at me.

"Because I've been assigned to watch you." My brain stalled completely. Jess let out a long, drawn-out "Ohhh" that begged, aggressively, for someone to hit her. D dutifully bent over his tray and kept eating, pretending he wasn't laughing, shoulders shaking like a supply boat catching a light crosscurrent. I stared at Maki, hunting for even a trace of I said that on purpose to make people misread it. Nothing.

She'd delivered it in the same institutional monotone she used for everything — a plain statement of fact, containing, on her end, exactly zero shades of pink. That was the actual problem. The less she meant it that way, the harder everyone else's brains ran with it. And I, one of the two people actually involved, had to sit there pretending mine hadn't. This ship really did find a way to train you in every direction at once. After lunch, our group formally handed the kids off to Security.

Looking down from the main passage junction, the swarm that had spent the morning shelling the Yukikaze with raw curiosity had already been reorganized into tighter formation. Security stood closer. Marines had slotted into the key points. The shift was unmistakable — if the morning had been soft management, the afternoon was step out of line and get nailed to the deck by eye contact alone.

One Marine — a squad leader, by the look of him — just stood at the junction with his arms crossed, said nothing, and two boys drifting toward the wrong branch quietly turned themselves around. Watching that, I lit another invisible stick of incense in my head. Not mourning their survival. Mourning the thorough, impending death of their free will. Unfortunately, mourning someone else's afternoon doesn't buy you your own.

The Training Ground That afternoon, I really was dragged — there's no gentler word for it — to the Marine training ground, with Maki. The Yukikaze's Marine training facility took up a large modular block toward the mid-aft section. The farther we walked from the living quarters and the main passage, the less the air smelled like anywhere a student would voluntarily go. No mess-hall warmth. No detergent-and-fabric smell of the berths.

Just rubber flooring, metal, sweat, machine oil, and a very blunt undertone that said: if your conditioning isn't there today, you're going to find out in front of everyone. I'd barely cleared the hatch when a shout hit me like a thrown boot.

"Back straight! Feet moving! Are you running or apologizing to the floor?!" I stopped half a step on reflex. Maki walked past me.

"Too late to regret it now."

"How do you know I'm regretting it?"

"Your whole body's broadcasting why am I here." Was it really that obvious? The place was busy — off-rotation Marines, a few petty officers in duty coveralls dropping off training logs, and people like us, clearly here to have reality explained to us physically. The floor split into zones: basic conditioning, close-quarters movement, a low-clearance obstacle lane, gear-donning and carry drills, and off to one side, a suspended rig that looked purpose-built to make you question your life choices.

The man assigned to us went by Kamishiro. His face said he'd never once had his life delayed by meaningless small talk; his voice existed for the sole purpose of kicking people out of their daydreams. He glanced between us, then checked his terminal.

"Student group?"

"Yes," Maki answered first. I caught up half a beat late.

"... Yes." Sergeant Kamishiro's eyes went back and forth between us — a professional, deeply irritating look, because he wasn't assessing us as people. He was assessing whether we'd still be standing by the end of the session. Finally, a short nod.

"Kushima. Baseline solid. You—" His eyes moved to me.

"Don't push it. If you can't keep up, say so. Don't do anything extra." I couldn't help myself.

"Why do I sound like the type who'd accidentally kill herself trying?" Sergeant Kamishiro, strictly business: "Because that's what your eyes look like." Beside me, Maki made a very quiet sound. I turned on her instantly.

"Was that a laugh?"

"No."

"It was."

"Then you earned it."

"I'll remember that line."

"There's no prize for it." We stopped in front of a heavier security hatch. The watch officer checked our names against the roster and confirmed our temporary trainee clearance before releasing the lock. The moment it slid open, my pulse jumped once, for no reason I could explain. Beyond it was a short corridor, quieter than anything we'd passed through so far. Quiet enough to hear my own boots on the deck.

Quiet enough that from somewhere further ahead, I could make out the faint chime of electronic prompts, low spoken confirmations, and a particular rhythm — the rhythm of many things being seen, calculated, and processed all at once. Not a sound that belonged in the living quarters. Not the kind of pressure you got from the training ground, either — that brute-force weight built out of muscle and shouted orders. The pressure here was thinner. Sharper. Like a blade you couldn't see. Something clicked into place.

This was why Captain Tobita, standing on deck that morning, had looked almost casual — right up until the departure orders came down, and every word out of him turned into drawn steel. Because this place didn't let you relax. The bridge stripped the excess away on its own. What remained was decisions, numbers, reports, and judgment. Maki stopped ahead of me. I nearly walked straight into her back.

"Hey—""We're here." She tipped her chin forward. I followed her gaze. The hatch ahead was cleaner than anything we'd passed on the way up, and felt more like an actual boundary than a piece of hardware. No signage beyond the section identifier, the watch marker, and the entry status light. The light bleeding through the seam was colder than the corridor outside — almost transparent. Without deciding to, I let my breathing go quieter.

Maki reached over and straightened my collar — it had gone crooked from walking too fast. Quick, matter-of-fact, done before I had any chance to dodge.

"Don't look like you just crawled out of a disaster zone," she said, flat.

"This is the bridge." I stared at her, and for a moment forgot to talk back. She was standing in front of that hatch, the ship's cold evening light falling across the side of her face, and she was clean and still and straight in a way that was almost unreasonable — like she simply belonged here.

I was standing beside her with the afternoon's training still lodged in my muscles, hair not long dry, head still full of mess-hall noise and training-ground yelling and a hundred-plus middle schoolers — and she'd pulled me, with one sentence, into a completely different register. I cleared my throat and tried to make my heartbeat sound like it was just the stairs.

"... You sound like a senior officer when you talk like that."

"I know this ship better than you do."

"That also sounds like a senior officer."

"Then shut up and learn."

"... Yes, ma'am." She didn't dignify that with a response, just gave the watch officer a short nod. The bridge hatch slid open. And I followed Maki inside.