Chương 224: 87. Punitive Evaluation 1

By the next morning, I knew: Sergeant Takenaka wasn't just the type to hold a grudge. He was the kind of adult who could grind "educational value" down to a fine powder, stir it into your breakfast, and make you swallow it along with what was left of your dignity. The reason was simple enough.

Yesterday's bloodbath in the training room — the farce where I pinned that middle-school tyrant to the floor and kept hitting him until a tooth came loose, and D and Maki physically hauled me back from the edge of "two more punches and you're writing a discharge report" — had apparently used up whatever thin reserve of patience Takenaka still had for the eleven of us. And it hadn't been much of a reserve to begin with. So when Security Division started the next morning, he didn't even bother with the whiteboard.

He just walked in with a stack of handouts and test papers tucked under one arm. Nothing about it looked dramatic. Which was exactly why it was terrifying. Because sometimes the most dangerous weapon in an adult's hand isn't a gun, or an axe. It's paper. Especially a thick stack of it. Everyone in the training room was a lot better behaved than yesterday. Not that anyone had much of a choice. After yesterday's spectacle, all eleven of us walked in carrying the same unspoken understanding: nobody detonates today.

Even D said about two fewer things than usual, which alone told you how serious things had gotten. Takenaka walked to the front and slapped the stack down on the desk. It wasn't even that loud. The room went dead silent anyway. He looked us over, one by one. His face wasn't angry. He wasn't raising his voice. If anything, he looked remarkably calm. Which, for some reason, made me want to drop to my knees right there and start drafting a letter of confession before he'd even said a word. Then he spoke.

"Give you an inch," Sergeant Takenaka said, "and you take the whole ship."... Here we go. That particular tone — the one where an adult has stopped trying to reason with you and moved straight to settling accounts — has a very distinct flavor. He lifted the stack of papers and gave it a slow wave in front of us, like he was showing off a trophy.

"Since you don't want to drill live," he said, and smiled, "fine. This close-combat assessment is going written. One person fails, everyone retakes." Half a second of silence. Then he twisted the knife.

"Hee-hee. Do your best." I swear, in that exact moment, every soul in that room died a little. Captain Tobita's brand of terror is throwing you into high-velocity airspace and watching to see if you can roll and stay alive. Takenaka's brand is a grade above that. First he teaches you to hold a shield. Then he teaches you to hold an axe.

Then, right when you've convinced yourself that today you can at least sweat and brawl your way through, he calmly pulls out a written test and says: Now let's kill each other with knowledge. D broke first.

"You've got to be kidding me!" He nearly launched out of his seat.

"Turning hand-to-hand into a written exam?! What kind of Federal-issue black humor is this?!" Harvey dragged a hand down his face. His voice was pure despair.

"I'd rather take three hits from Jess's shield than write 'briefly describe the shield angle and pressure-stepping principle for a standard Mark-6 combat axe in a narrow compartment.'""Three's not enough," Jess said, arms crossed, her face uglier than yesterday's.

"I'll throw in two more for free right now if it cancels the written."

"That's genuinely moving," D said.

"Moving enough that I'd write your eulogy. Just not your exam." Lan flipped open the first page of the handout beside him, read exactly one line, and let one eyebrow twitch with real feeling.

"He's turned 'five prohibited responses to a vaporizing-explosive release' into a short-answer question," she said.

"This isn't an assessment. This is revenge."

"No," Maki said, sitting next to me, already paging calmly through the handout.

"This is institutionalized revenge." I turned to look at her.

"How are you always this calm when you say things like that?"

"Because emotion doesn't help you answer questions."

"... You're really not suited to comforting the living."

"I'm not comforting you," Maki said.

"I'm reminding you that under a collective-retake system, if you fail today, everyone kills you first." I looked down at the handout in my hands. The title on the first page was neat and formal. Fundamentals of Close-Quarters Shipboard Defense and Countermeasures. Underneath, a subtitle. —Tactical Application with Survival as the Primary Objective. I wanted to swear right there.

Under normal circumstances I might've actually enjoyed this, flipping through it while mocking how much the Federal military loves dressing up "hitting people" as an academic conference. But this wasn't normal circumstances. This wasn't "I fail, I embarrass myself." This was "I fail, everyone goes down with me." One of the things the Federal military does best is design collective pressure that's simultaneously reasonable and disgusting.

Takenaka looked thoroughly pleased with our collective constipated expressions. He dealt the test papers out with an almost gentle tone.

"Relax. The scope's not big," he said.

"I printed the handouts for you myself. Just memorize them. People like you — so full of energy yesterday, so good at improvising, so good at making a scene — I'm sure you'll bring the same enthusiasm to studying today." Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. D muttered in a dying voice:"I'm starting to think that if I'd just let Hoshino put me through the wall yesterday, I'd be happier right now."

"If you'd been half a beat slower yesterday," Harvey said, "you wouldn't need to take this test at all. You'd be in Medical reciting doctrine off a drip."

"That's not the point! The point is how Takenaka can smile and say 'hee-hee, do your best' like that!" D looked genuinely traumatized.

"That tone is scarier than him chasing me with the axe!" Akari, very honestly, kept her head down over the handout.

"Objectively speaking, from a knowledge-systems standpoint, this material is actually organized quite well."

"Whose side are you even on?" I couldn't help asking.

"The side that doesn't want a retest."... Fine. That answer was airtight. Takenaka didn't give us any more time to squirm. He set the papers down, put his hands behind his back, and struck the exact pose of a man who'd just lobbed a grenade and was preparing to exit with style.

"One period of self-study. Quiz after," he said.

"I'm going to check the other groups. Take your time, and think about what it really means that the first step of defense is learning to use your head." Then he actually turned and walked out. The door shut. The room held its breath for half a second. The next second, it detonated — everyone started cursing Sergeant Takenaka's ancestors in unison.

"This is inhuman!" D slammed the desk.

"I take back everything I said yesterday about him being gentler than Tobita," Harvey said.

"They're just demons from different departments."

"I'd like to formally apologize to Captain Tobita," Jess said darkly, flipping through the handout.

"At least he tortures people with thrusters. Not multiple choice." The vein at Roy's temple looked ready to relocate.

"Why does hand-to-hand combat need 'list three common misuses of a standard riot shield at close range'?!" he demanded.

"Isn't this supposed to be something you hit people with, not memorize?!" Lan added, flat as ever:"Because yesterday you looked like a walking compilation of all three."

"... Could you be accurate at a less painful moment?" Ash leaned back in his chair, tone as even as always.

"At least now we know what Takenaka actually meant yesterday, when he said 'let's just get some practice in,'" he said.

"He wasn't letting us off. He was postponing the execution."

"Don't make it sound so logical," I said, pressing my palm to my forehead.

"It just makes it worse." Maki had already started marking up the margins of her handout. She read fast — that particular kind of efficiency that's annoying on principle, since she somehow manages to be more productive than the rest of us even under active psychological torture. I glanced at her page.

"Already taking notes?"

"What else would I be doing?"

"You're not angry?"

"Anger doesn't lower the retest probability," Maki said.

"And I have no interest in retaking this with D a second time." D's head snapped up.

"Why single me out?" Maki's tone was flat as a duty roster.

"Because you're exactly the type to answer a short-response question with 'just hit them first.'""... That's a legitimate combat philosophy."

"It's also a mass-casualty philosophy," Jess said, with a cold smile. I watched all of them — cursing, flipping pages, tearing into each other in ways that were nowhere near regulation — and felt something close to reluctant admiration for the Federal military. Taking a group that had been throwing punches yesterday, and was still furious at Takenaka today, and compressing them into a state of complaining nonstop but not daring to stop studying — that was institutional design with a genuinely sick kind of elegance.

And I was, unfortunately, sitting right at the center of the disease. Part two was a different strain of the same sickness. The kind that grows its own legs, walks over to you, and somehow learns manners on the way. To this day I don't know who started it. All I know is some bastard went through my personal file without authorization. After that, it spread the way a pressure leak spreads through a hull — completely uncontainable. At first it was just a few middle-school kids looking at me wrong.

Not yesterday's "oh, this senior looks fun to provoke" kind of look. Something subtler — a mix of curiosity, wariness, and a bit of "wait, is that actually true?" Then the rumors grew legs. The early versions were fairly conservative. Things like: "That Hoshino Shimo girl's apparently actually seen the front line." Or: "Heard she's not a normal student." Or: "The kid who lost his tooth yesterday basically stepped on a live mine." Then the versions started compounding.

By the time they were done snowballing, I honestly wanted to applaud whoever was doing the embellishing. Because half of it was true, and the other half was true the way a novel is true.

"She stormed an Imperial warship."

"No — she rammed it, with her own ship!"

"I heard she drove the whole thing in herself!"

"Seriously?!"

"Why else do you think that guy got beaten like that yesterday?" No. Wait a second. That last line wasn't entirely wrong, actually. But the real problem was that these frontline records — the kind that were supposed to stay locked in paper files, visible only to cleared adults — were now circulating through the middle-school wing like urban legend. Was that reasonable? Not remotely. But the one thing the Yukikaze never runs short of is things that aren't reasonable.

So the middle-schoolers' attitude toward me underwent a genuinely dramatic shift. The day before, some of them had still been sizing me up with their eyes, trying to work out if I was safe to mess with. By day two, the second I showed up in a corridor, near the mess hall, or anywhere near the training deck, those same loudmouthed brats snapped straight.

"G-good morning, senior."

"Morning, Senior Hoshino."

"After you, please!" I stood in the middle of the passage holding my tray, genuinely wondering for a second if I'd boarded the wrong ship. D's first reaction, watching this, was to nearly choke his soup back into the bowl.

"No way," he said, laughing and coughing at once.

"You've got a built-in bloodshed filter now?"

"That's not a filter," Jess said, leaning on the table with a smile that had no good intentions in it whatsoever.

"That's an urban legend given flesh." Harvey rubbed his forehead, sounding completely sincere.

"Honestly," he said, watching the middle-schoolers practically trip over each other clearing a path for me, "I never would've guessed yesterday that the single most effective educational outcome of that whole mess would be you turning into a shipboard ghost story."

"The Bloody Senior of the Federal Fleet," D chimed in immediately.

"Rumor has it she once stormed an Imperial warship, rammed the enemy to scrap, and can knock a man's teeth out bare-handed—""Shut up," I said.

"See," he said, looking genuinely moved, "even telling people to shut up carries more weight on you now." Maki, across from me, calmly turned to the next page of her handout.

"At least it's better than everyone crowding around to stare at you like yesterday," she said.

"That statement assumes I'm currently some kind of vengeful spirit that patrols the ship at night."

"It's effective, though," Maki said.... Damn it. I couldn't fully argue with that. And the most extreme case, of course, was the former tyrant. Former being the key word. His whole reign had probably gone flying off along with that tooth. Anywhere on the ship — corridor, mess hall, supply point, or even just my silhouette down a passage — he'd freeze first. Then his face would go white. Then he'd scream. Yes. Scream. Not a figure of speech. An actual scream.

"AAAAAAAH—!" Then he'd turn and run. Once I just came around the corner outside the washroom, hand gel still in hand. The second he saw me, he flinched like he'd seen something that shouldn't exist, stumbled back three full steps, knocked over a recycling bin, and bolted, screaming the whole way, nearly losing a shoe. Everyone in the corridor stopped to stare at me.

I stood there, hand still mid-pump on the gel dispenser, and wondered exactly when the Federal military had started breeding live specimens of trauma aboard its ships. D laughed so hard he had to lean on the wall.

"I can't," he wheezed.

"I actually can't. You're not even a person to him anymore. You're a tactical disaster." Jess stood with her arms crossed, one corner of her mouth curled dangerously high.

"Isn't that a good thing?" she said.

"At least he's finally learned to run when he sees people."

"Can you two show a little sympathy?" I said.

"We do," Harvey said.

"We have a lot more of it for you than for him."

"Significantly more," Akari added, with total sincerity. I pressed two fingers to the bridge of my nose and thought, with a kind of tired clarity, that my life was turning into some genuinely hard-to-explain warship legend. The worst part was that it actually worked. The middle-schoolers used to be like a nest of small, fast, constantly boundary-testing creatures. Now, the second they caught a whiff of whatever "bloody frontline legend" scent had grown around me, their whole behavior leveled up three notches.

Before, it was: "Hey, that's the one from yesterday—" Now it's: "Excuse me, senior, please go first." Before, it was: "Seriously, is she really that mean?" Now it's: "Hoshino's here. Keep it down." Even the supervising instructors' expressions shifted — from this-person-knocked-a-student's-tooth-out-yesterday to a grudging... at least the middle-schoolers behave themselves near her now. Hard to say whether to laugh or cry at that outcome. Maki's only comment on the whole thing:"Good," she said.

"What's good about it?"

"Management overhead is down."

"You'd make a great no-empathy duo with Sergeant Takenaka."

"No," Maki said, glancing at me.

"I, at least, know not to go through someone else's file."... Okay. That one landed. I turned my head away and, before I could stop it, smiled a little. D shoved his face in immediately.

"Oh, she smiled, she smiled," he announced.

"Everyone take note — the Bloody Senior has just unlocked a Kushima-exclusive expression."

"D," I said, with real sincerity, "if you ever actually die, it won't be in combat. It'll be because Jess and I buried you together." Jess nodded beside me.

"I'll testify to that." D clutched his chest, wounded.

"You two doing this to me is giving me a serious sense of exclusion." Harvey took a calm sip of soup.

"That's not a sense," he said.

"That's just fact." The whole table laughed again. I sat there, watching the cluster of middle-schoolers in the distance go quiet and start walking more carefully the second they noticed me, and arrived at a genuinely stupid conclusion. Turns out there are two kinds of education on the Yukikaze. The first is Sergeant Takenaka's handouts and exams. The second is pinning the local tyrant to the floor and grinding him down until a tooth comes loose. Unfortunately, the second one's clearly far more effective.