Chương 313: 132.Extreme Chromatic Planet 2

The bridge lights shifted into descent mode. It wasn't just white swapped for red. It was the whole Yukikaze folding away its usual "I suppose I pass for a ship" front, letting the thing underneath show through — the weapons platform she'd always been. The main screen dimmed. The auxiliary consoles brought up layers of translucent blue trajectory lines. Alert frames began drifting silently along the edges — a system that never screams, but remembers exactly how every person dies.

Sitting at the center of the bridge, staring at that glowing, sick target planet, I had a strange, treacherous thought. If this were the closing shot of episode one of an anime, the animation budget would look gorgeous. Provided the audience wasn't the one sitting here, responsible for deciding when everyone went down to risk dying.

"Gravity-wave front updated." Akari's voice cut into the channel first. She stood at the main analysis station, fingers moving fast enough to look like she was dismantling the planet's temper one layer at a time. The prediction curve on the left of the main display jumped. Out of the tangled blue-white noise, one thread finally pulled free — hair-thin, brief, but real. I zoomed in. Twenty-three seconds. Great. This planet's idea of breathing room came measured in stopwatch ticks.

"Window confirmed. Low-G rebound period, twenty-three seconds." My voice sounded flatter to my own ears than usual.

"Main vein corridor A-3 to C-1 is passable. Past C-1, gravity spikes to 4. 2G — no lingering. Repeat: no lingering."

"Sounds like you're yelling at somebody already," Jess said from the auxiliary seat, headset on, hands steady like she genuinely intended to behave today.

"Not 'like,'" I said.

"I'm yelling in advance." Jess's mouth curved, and — remarkably — she didn't fire back, just recalibrated the comm-delay column again. Her good behavior today was unsettling. When this woman stopped causing trouble, her presence turned into a different class of hazard entirely. Ash stood at the front of the bridge, hand on the main console, eyes on the full projection, not on any one of us.

"First wave, confirm status." His voice dropped, and the whole ship seemed to hold its breath half an inch higher. D's reply came first. Short, hard, no wasted syllables — same as the man himself.

"Vehicle One. Weapons locked. Restraints normal." Then Maki. The moment her voice came through the field channel, my fingers stalled for less than half a beat. Less than half a beat. Short enough that, in theory, nobody should have noticed. The problem was, this ship was crewed by people with a particular talent for surviving in exactly the wrong moments.

"Vehicle One, co-pilot in position," she said.

"Gravity anchor, drive-mode switch, emergency recovery line — triple redundancy confirmed." Her delivery was the same rigid, almost infuriating precision as always. As if last night had never happened. As if the person who'd smoothed my collar in the cabin that morning hadn't been her. As if, after she'd kissed that scar on my waist, I could genuinely still treat her as just a bunkmate and comrade-in-arms. … Perfect.

Hoshino Shimo, you've officially reached the point where a standard equipment check is enough to send your own brain sideways. Truly impressive. I forced my attention back to the data. The gravity-well map in the lower right was churning — not in clean, predictable waves, but in the kind of chaotic swing that made it obvious this planet had zero intention of cooperating with any human plan. Certain sectors would hold at 0.

6G one second, then flip past 3G the next, like something underground was running an oversized blender, targeting specifically wherever a vehicle might need to pass.

"Gravity particulate density rising," Akari said.

"Still within tolerance. Hoshino, your window may need to move up two seconds." I stared at the model, laying two data layers over each other, blue light creeping steadily up the edges of my vision.

"Copy. First wave, original entry point is scrapped — cut in laterally from A-3. Ash, your window moves up two seconds. Don't wait for the light columns to peak. By the time they're that bright, they're already flipping."

"Understood," Ash said. Maki said nothing. But I knew she was listening. Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon. Not ordinary listening. The kind where, if I paused half a beat too long, she'd be the first one to notice. Infuriating. The Yukikaze's external feed cut into the main display.

That blue-white lunatic of a planet was slowly filling the entire viewport, close enough now that I could see the gravity-shear bands scraping against each other with the naked eye, high in the atmosphere. No clouds. No rain. No weather in any conventional sense. The whole sky looked like stretched glass, threaded through with drifting fractures and blue electric light.

Across the surface, active-indium geysers punched straight up into the dark, bright enough to make the planet look like it was bleeding — except what was pouring out was the kind of light no god should have left lying around for mortals to touch. Then an entire rock plain began to rise. Not a figure of speech. It actually rose. The massive slab shuddered once, then slowly tore free of the surface, lifting along a visibly warped current of gravity.

The next instant a lateral storm cut through it, and the whole stratum was shredded mid-air into glowing debris — a blue avalanche that belonged to no civilization anyone recognized. The bridge went quiet. Not fear. Not even awe, exactly. More like everyone silently agreeing on the same thing: fine. This one earns its place as the final stage.

"Engine room reporting." Borodin's voice cut in, backed by the hiss of a high-pressure valve venting somewhere behind him.

"Old-core teardown at thirty-seven percent. Harvey's still down here with me, alive, and so far has only said 'this design is deranged' twice. Mental state: acceptable." A short, muffled laugh came from the back of the bridge. Harvey's voice pushed into the channel right after, clearly fighting a noisy background to be heard.

"For the record — that wasn't complaining. That was a professional assessment."

"Save the professional assessments for after we're back," Ash said.

"Don't misalign the new plant's interface."

"Yeah, yeah, Captain," Harvey said.

"Just don't you lot go smashing my active indium into space dust."

"Deeply moving." Jess deadpanned.

"He's more worried about the ore than about us."

"That's engineering's version of romance," Roy put in from the near-orbital standby channel.

"That's a very consistent kind of brain damage," Lan added. Good. Everyone was still capable of insulting each other normally, which meant that, for at least this one moment, the Yukikaze was still the Yukikaze. The alert tone shifted. Not sharp — the low, gut-tightening kind the system only uses once it's actually started counting you down. I looked up. The window had opened. Not that the whole planet had suddenly turned safe. Keep dreaming.

Just that, somewhere inside that raging gravity curve, a seam had finally appeared — barely wide enough for a human to squeeze through. Like a convulsing creature that had, mid-seizure, accidentally let its jaw slacken half an inch.

"Window open," I said.

"All hands, final descent countdown." Ash nodded.

"All teams, to the bay." The external feed switched. The Yukikaze's ventral bay doors began to unfold. Heavy armor plating retracted piece by piece, like some iron creature finally spreading its ribs open, revealing All-Terrain Vehicle One already waiting inside.

It crouched on the launch rail, nose already angled down, its hull wrapped in layered gravity anchors and shear-resistant plating — looking, on the whole, like the offspring of a tank and an escape pod that had fallen in love, and then had that love ruined by military design standards. D took the driver's seat. Maki took the co-pilot's. Ash boarded last, taking the rear restraint position. Three people. Exactly enough. No spare seat for someone extra to die in. No missing hand to drag anyone back.

"Bay pressure stable," Jess said.

"External wind speed climbing. First wave, if you don't move now, this window's going to close on its own."

"Your idea of encouragement would make excellent material for a headstone," I said.

"You're welcome." I watched the window line already starting to tremble, and realized, without noticing when it happened, that a thin sheen of sweat had broken out across my palms. Annoying. Genuinely annoying. Last night still hadn't fully burned off my body. This morning's medbay numbers were still sitting in the back of my skull. And Maki was right now strapped into that vehicle, about to drive headfirst into a glowing gravitational hell, channel open, breathing as steady as if she were headed out for a walk.

I thought of her asking how's your side this morning, and had a sudden, entirely unreasonable urge to reach in, drag her straight back out of that co-pilot's seat, and staple on a completely immature shipboard argument for good measure. Unfortunately, I was on the bridge. Unfortunately, I was the one who put them in — and the one who had to call them back if it came to that. Terrific. Growing up really is one of the least likable things the universe asks of anyone.

"Shimo." Maki's voice dropped into my private channel. Short. Short enough to almost pass for a hallucination. I startled, fingers nearly hitting the wrong field.

"…What." I did my best to make it sound like a functioning commanding officer, not like some idiot who tensed up on reflex the second she heard her own name. Half a beat of silence on the other end.

"We're going down," she said. Just that. No extra words. No last night. No this morning. Nothing with enough weight to blow me apart on the spot. But because it was only that one line, it landed worse, not better. Like she'd simply come to tell me first. Like she knew I'd be listening. Like she knew I'd remember it. I drew a breath and packed every feeling back exactly where it belonged.

"…I know," I said.

"So all of you had better come back in one piece." No immediate answer from the other end. Then, so low it barely registered:"Okay." Damn it. Does this woman have any idea how unreasonably lethal she is, saying things like that with a straight face?

"Ten seconds to drop." Jess's voice cut into the main channel — clean, stripped, without a trace of her usual punchable drift.

"Ten." Every system on the ship synced at once. In the lower right of the main display, the gravity window began to pulse like a heartbeat.

"Nine." The vehicle's restraint brackets released their first layer.

"Eight." An outer storm band scraped past the left edge of the entry path, lifting a sheet of blue-white debris off the ground below.

"Seven." Akari pushed one last real-time correction into my feed. I scanned it and folded it straight in.

"First wave — three degrees right after entry. Do not cut straight across the main fissure line."

"Six." D: "Copy."

"Five." Maki: "Route confirmed."

"Four." Ash said only one thing.

"Brace."

"Three." The launch rail along the Yukikaze's belly lit up — not the standard thruster lights, but a full unbroken line of blue-white impulse, hot enough to look like it could burn through steel, snapping the vehicle out of dead stillness and into something close to a violent sprint.

"Two." I stared at the window line. It was shrinking. Of course it was shrinking. This planet was stingy even about letting people live.

"One." Jess's voice, in that exact instant, went cold as a blade.

"Launch." The next second, the Yukikaze spat the first wave out. The vehicle came off the rail like a shell kicked straight into the eye of something divine, shooting through the bay doors and diving nose-first into that glowing lunatic of a planet.

The external feed lurched hard; the vehicle's forward plating flared blue-white under the wind load in an instant, the high-altitude shear-bands pressing down on it like living things, the whole field of view collapsing into light, static, distortion, and a sky that had stopped keeping any normal sense of scale. The horizon rippled. Mountains drifted. Ore veins bled out into space. And the vehicle drove straight into the middle of all of it.

I kept my eyes locked on the main display, fingers pressed to the edge of the comm key, my heart pounding hard enough that it felt like it was trying to bail out from under my uniform and make a run for it without me.