Chương 39: 17.Skybound Overdrive 17-3

The five-minute break wasn't for recovery. It was the Federal system's polite way of saying: Congratulations. That was just the greeting. I sat on the metal chair beside the pod—cold enough to be a morgue accessory—working through military-issue electrolyte drink in small swallows, trying to negotiate with my stomach: don't rush to make a statement; at least wait until the instructor's further away before we embarrass ourselves. J. J., naturally, had no interest in giving me and my digestive system time to bond.

"Time's up, little fish." I looked up. He was standing by the sim pod, helmet in hand, smiling like someone who'd just thought of something particularly rotten.

"Round two," he said.

"Main course this time." I stared at him.

"Round one wasn't the main course?"

"Round one?" J. J. tilted his head, picture of innocence.

"Round one was just checking if you had kitchen privileges." …Wonderful. Now I didn't just want to puke. I wanted to bite someone. He ignored the last distress signals my eyes were broadcasting and pushed new parameters onto the main display. G-load ceiling: increased. Three-axis variation frequency: increased. Basic neural link: engaged. Single-Seat Zero-G Combat Craft Type-0 — Simulation Flight Pretest Mode. I stared at the last line for two seconds.

"Sir."

"Yeah?"

"Is it too late to request reassignment to Karl for mutual combat?" J. J. smiled brilliantly.

"Way too late." He knocked the helmet against the pod hull—a sharp, clean clack.

"Besides, you're worth more now. Karl's blunt force. What I do here is precision work." … Thank you. Being treated like premium livestock awaiting processing is really doing wonders for my morale. I climbed back into the sim chair. This time the harness was tighter, head stabilizer drawn in closer. Neural contact points snapped onto the back of my neck, shoulder blades, base of my spine, inside of both forearms. Not pain. Something worse—like a column of very cold, very polite ants marching into my nervous system.

I flinched without meaning to. J. J. stood outside watching, not dimming that excessive brightness in his eyes.

"Don't worry," he said.

"It's not reading your thoughts." I looked at him, face flat.

"Thank you. That did absolutely nothing to improve this."

"It wasn't meant to." J. J. smiled, pulling the hatch down.

"It was a notification." The hatch sealed. Darkness lasted one heartbeat. Then the entire cockpit interface came alive. Not just tactical projection this time—actual Type-0 pilot perspective. Forward arc screen unfolding: attitude data, auto-balance indicators, thrust vectors, IFF brackets, local heat signatures, orbital debris, inertial correction lines—layer after layer surfacing, beautiful the way a very expensive space collision is beautiful when it's waiting for your signature. J. J.'

s voice came through the earpiece.

"One rule for round two." I stared at the cold, bright virtual stars.

"Go ahead."

"Don't try to fly," he said. I blinked.

"Sorry?"

"Don't try to fly well, don't try to fly clean, don't try to fly like those immaculate officers in the training videos who never sweat." J. J.'s pace was fast, smile clear in every word.

"Right now your job is learning not to get thrown out of this tin coffin." … Right. Aggressively practical. Practical enough that I almost wanted to applaud. Countdown. Three. Two. One. The world didn't spin. It snapped. The instant the pod cut hard up-left, I felt my inner ear and dignity get yanked out together. The G didn't stack—it was someone pressing battleship armor into my chest while simultaneously deciding the floor was optional. Five. Five-point-five. The back of my head was welded to the headrest.

My chest was heavy enough to contain a small planet. But worse than the weight was what happened when the neural link engaged—the sim's intent started pushing directly into my body. Not mind-reading. Something blunter and more precise. Every cut the Type-0 wanted to make, every attitude correction, every thruster micro-adjustment—things that should have been learned slowly through instruments were now being jammed into my spine, forcing me to feel them directly. Too fast. Too close.

I couldn't tell anymore whether I was piloting a simulation, or whether the simulation was using me as a temporary nervous system.

"Breathe, Hoshino," J. J.'s voice cut in.

"Don't make that first time the universe slapped me face. Even though it is." I forced a slow exhale through my teeth.

"If you were actually trying to comfort someone…"

"I'm not."

"…Knew it." The display flashed. Scenario loaded: Fragmented low orbit. Half-destroyed escort. Two hostiles. One friendly decoy. And in the distance, a mid-class warship adjusting its main battery arc.

"Basic neural link assessment commencing," the system announced.

"Trainee is to maintain attitude analysis and real-time path selection." J. J. added, delighted:"Translation: think while you're trying not to puke." …This man really does have a gift for summary. The centrifuge changed axis again. Not pure compression this time—a twist. The whole world slid hard to the right, then snapped back to center. The starfield in front of me nearly got flung into a glowing suicide note.

"Question one," J. J. said.

"Friendly's got a tail, you're in the rear-lateral position. Standard play?" I stared at the display, throat tight.

"Move in and clear the tail."

"Perfect. Textbook answer, doctrine loves you." J. J.'s tone was cheerful in the way of someone about to use that textbook as kindling.

"So where's it wrong?" I looked at the enemy, the friendly, the distant warship's relative positions. My brain ran it fast. Five-point-eight. Approaching six. The G-load was pressing blood downward, like someone holding my face down while making me sit an exam. But right at the edge of being compressed into pure reflex, I could see clearly.

"It's too obvious," I said.

"The hostile knows I'm going to help. The moment I commit, I become the most predictable element in a two-on-one."

"Good," J. J. said.

"So how do you make it nastier?" I looked at the friendly's escape vector, then raised my hand and traced a badly angled arc across the virtual display.

"I don't save them first."

"I cut wide on the outside, make it look like I'm giving up."

"Let the tail-chaser decide I'm too far to matter, push him to lean in harder." J. J. laughed once.

"And then?"

"Then I don't shoot him," I said, watching the capital ship's main battery adjust its angle.

"I cut across his projected path, force him to over-press for half a second longer."

"That half-second is enough for the friendly to swing their nose into the edge of the battery arc."

"At that point he's not chasing. He's delivering himself." If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. Half a beat of silence on the comm. Then J. J. let out a short, quiet whistle.

"You're really not likable."

"Thank you. I work at it." The pod yanked up again. Six-point-three. My vision blacked out for a fraction of a second. Not a blackout—more like the edges of my visual field politely informing me: Miss, your blood pressure would prefer not to participate in this exercise. The neural contact points sent a light, irritating pulse through at the same time. Like the Type-0 reminding me in its own way: attitude, attitude, attitude—lose it again and I'll take us both into the wall. Sweat on my temples.

Jaw aching from clenching. This time J. J. didn't drop a question immediately. He spoke first.

"What you're feeling right now isn't the airframe. It's the airframe's tendency." I blinked and dragged my focus back.

"…Tendency?"

"Yeah." His pace picked up, but the pure mockery was dialed back slightly.

"The Type-0 is small, fast, and vicious with its attitude. It won't absorb your mistakes the way a big frame does. You try to muscle through a correction, it'll die hard with you." On the display, a Type-0 simulation was executing a rapid roll directly ahead. And I could actually feel it—that drive to cut, to press, to push forward. Not words. Instinct. J. J. gave a low laugh.

"Get it now? This thing isn't for well-behaved people." …Great. Even the aircraft is encouraging personality disorders. Second question dropped.

"Primary weapons overheated, left thruster damaged, hostile is faster than you." The display cut to something closer, messier.

"Debris cloud ahead, two hostiles behind, friendly capital ship's secondary fire grid directly above." J. J.'s voice was bright enough to be illegal.

"Tell me how to make this situation even uglier." I stared at the debris cloud. Breathing getting heavier. Normal people would dodge. Or at least perform dodging convincingly. But these past days, these insane instructors had pushed me to a place I really didn't like. My first thought wasn't how do I get through safely. It was how do I make those two behind me have a terrible time.

"I go into the debris cloud," I said. J. J. cut in immediately: "Too basic. Next." …This man is genuinely exhausting. I stared at the display. That line in my head surfaced again.

"Not going in to hide," I corrected.

"Going in to fake a propulsion failure."

"Get the more aggressive one behind me to follow first."

"Oh?" J. J. smiled.

"My left thruster's already damaged—ugly attitude is believable," I said.

"I hold position until here—" I cut an angle through the densest section of debris.

"—then kill one attitude correction cluster, make it look like I'm going into a stall-roll. If the chaser's too deep in, he'll instinctively pull inward, trying to grab the last firing angle." J. J.'s amusement was getting more visible.

"And you?"

"I don't correct." I grabbed a breath, throat going bitter again.

"I let the Type-0 keep dropping."

"Drop it to the edge of the secondary fire grid's detection boundary, then use what's left of the right thruster to sling back out." My finger traced the arc—it looked like a bent blade.

"If the chaser's too greedy, he ends up caught between the debris and the secondary grid. Either he hits debris or gets swept as a threat." This time J. J. actually laughed out loud.

"Hoshino. Notice something?"

"What?"

"You really love making people die because they thought one more second and I've got it." I went quiet for a moment. … Shit. Punchable line. Also accurate. Before I could come back at him, the pod hit the third segment. Six-point-eight. For a genuine moment, I nearly handed my soul and my stomach to the Federal government simultaneously. The force slammed me back into the seat; the display went grey; my ears rang like someone had put the entire universe through a high-speed centrifuge. My throat seized.

I came extremely close to being done.

"Bag's on the right, really, no need to be polite about it," J. J. said, with the calm of long experience.

"Shut… up…"

"Good. Still swearing. Cerebral blood flow hasn't completely failed." I genuinely wanted to kill him. Unfortunately, every limb was strapped down, and the only weapon available was language, which at this G-load had become thinner than my future moral standards. The display cut one more time. Not a tactical schematic now—a simplified Type-0 pilot interface. Attitude indicator, thrust levels, vector nozzle correction, hostile brackets all live at once. The neural link pressed another layer deeper.

And I suddenly knew how to correct that left-slip angle. Not thought out. Body first. Like the Type-0 had loaned me a fragment of its own temperament. I made the correction without deciding to. Right hand, slight press. Left shoulder pulled back. Breathing cut short. Not fighting the force trying to drag me into a roll—borrowing it. The airframe's attitude on the display actually stabilized. J. J.' s voice lost two degrees of teasing and gained two of something real.

"That's it."

"Don't fight the airframe."

"You're not riding a horse. You're negotiating terms with a very bad-tempered lunatic." … That metaphor is annoyingly easy to understand. I gritted through the next attitude correction. Second. Third. Not pretty. But alive. The system chime pulsed once, then turned green. Basic neural link sync rate: PASS Attitude correction tolerance: ACCEPTABLE High-G tactical analysis: ANOMALOUSLY ELEVATED I hadn't finished processing pass before the pod started decelerating. Coming down from high-G was worse than going up.

My stomach suddenly remembered it had a lot of opinions and all of them were urgent. When my vision cleared, I had exactly one coherent thought: Don't puke here. That's the entire goal. The hatch opened. Cold air hit me and I nearly had an emotional reaction to it. J. J. stood outside, arms crossed, wearing the expression of someone who'd just found a very interesting new toy.

"Not bad, little fish." He bent down to look at me, eyes bright enough to start fires.

"Still thinking in round two. That's not nothing." I sat back in the chair and spent two seconds reacquainting my tongue with basic function.

"If you keep… smiling like that…"

"Yeah?"

"I'm going to start thinking my suffering… is genuinely entertaining to you…" J. J. blinked.

"Not start thinking," he said cheerfully.

"It is." …Honest to the point of nausea. Very on-theme for today. He unbuckled my harness but didn't move me yet, just stood there watching the pretest data climb on the terminal.

"Sync rate isn't prodigy-tier. G-tolerance still has plenty of room to make you question your life choices." He paused.

"But you've got one very annoying advantage." I managed to lift my eyes.

"Thank you. I've been hearing that a lot lately." J. J. grinned.

"When it gets bad, your brain doesn't get dull." He looked down at me, and for once his tone had less float in it.

"It gets mean." I blinked. J. J. reached out and tapped my forehead lightly.

"Normal people get compressed to the breaking point, they focus on stabilizing, surviving, getting the situation back to something manageable."

"Not you."

"You think—if it's already going wrong, can I make sure the enemy goes wrong with me." He smiled. Punchable. Accurate.

"That's what non-standard air combat is made of." I sat in the chair with a dry throat and a stomach still staging a quiet protest, but I understood exactly what he'd said. Not that I flew well. Not that my reflexes were fast. That when I got pushed to the worst possible place, my first instinct wasn't to follow the rules—it was to pull the rules apart and use the pieces as bait. Not healthy. Also lethal.

I was quiet for a few seconds, then said weakly:"Sir, that assessment sounds like I was born to be the wrong kind of character." J. J. laughed out loud.

"The right kind of character usually dies first," he said, closing the terminal and tilting his head toward me.

"You're more the type who makes it to the end and leaves the writers questioning whether morality education ever worked." … I genuinely couldn't argue with that. After the session, J. J. didn't follow her out. He stood at the observation console and pulled Hoshino Shimo's pretest data from the top. Sync rate, ocular focus drift, vestibular stability, respiratory recovery rhythm, tactical analysis response, real-time path correction. None of the numbers were the prettiest on record—but one line stood out.

Under high-pressure destabilization, tactical cognition showed no conservatism bias. Presented aggressive skew. J. J. looked at that line. The corner of his mouth moved slowly upward.

"What a pain in the ass," he said quietly. He reached up and opened the internal line. It connected fast.

"Leon."

"It's me." J. J. leaned back, voice still carrying that lazy cadence—but behind the amusement was the clean, direct quality of someone who'd finished a real assessment.

"I've run the little silver fish through her paces." Half a beat of silence on the other end.

"Results." J. J. looked at the pretest curves moving on the display and laughed once.

"She's not standard ace material." He paused.

"Don't take that wrong. What I mean is, she won't fly the cleanest, and she won't fly the most by-the-book." Leon didn't interrupt. J. J. kept going:"But under high-G, destabilized, with her inner ear swearing at her in three languages—her brain is still looking for where to borrow a blade, where to herd, where to steal half a second. She's not straight, not clean, and she's not exactly likable—" The smile deepened.

"But she's very good at turning airspace into a crime scene." Two seconds of quiet on the other end. Then Leon, flat: "Your conclusion." J. J. looked down at the small, decisive correction traces Hoshino had made in the third attitude sequence.

"Don't put her in a standard air combat template."

"She's not the kind of pilot who shines on clean kill counts."

"What she's suited for is non-standard engagement." He said it one word at a time, clearly:"Bait-and-lead. Feigned retreat. Drag plays. Borrowed fire. Debris-field kills. Grid herding. Fake stalls. Off-angle counters."

"She'll learn those faster than most, because she's not thinking about how to fly correctly to begin with." J. J. smiled like he was labeling something rare and dangerous.

"She's thinking about how to make the other person die at exactly the right moment." Silence on the other end. Then Leon asked one question.

"Can she fly the Type-0?" J. J. raised an eyebrow.

"Yes."

"But I'd recommend not letting her pick up the habit of flying pretty too early."

"Her value isn't the sky knight routine."

"It's that she'll use the sky as a tool." This time Leon came back fast.

"Understood." The line cut. J. J. looked at the dark terminal screen and laughed quietly to himself.

"Welcome to the program, little fish," he murmured.

"That nasty streak of yours—it's going to look very good up there." I held it together on the walk back to the dorm. Genuinely. I even had enough left over to mentally curse J. J. from head to toe and draft a fairly sincere negative review of the Federal talent development system. Unfortunately, the body has its own timeline. The moment I closed my door—before I'd even gotten my jacket off—the thing that had been simmering in my stomach since the pod first moved threw a hard uppercut straight at my throat.

I didn't even finish the swear word I'd started. I just made it to the bathroom, grabbed the edge of the sink, and bent over it. … Fuck. I actually threw up. And not gracefully. First wave was what remained of breakfast's dignity. Second wave was everything I'd been holding together since the pod first moved—every rotation, every G-load, every moment of being compressed until my soul started packing.

Stomach acid burning all the way up, eyes going hot at the corners, one hand braced on the sink and the other pressed hard against my abdomen. I came up and looked in the mirror. The face looking back was convincingly pale. Eyes red at the rims. Hair stuck to my face with sweat. A textbook portrait of Federal advanced curriculum: actual casualty. I stared at myself for two seconds and said it very quietly.

"J. J., you absolute—" The rest of the sentence was too undignified for official record. I rinsed my mouth and splashed cold water on my face. Face cold. Stomach still unhappy. Head still drifting, like my sense of balance had been disassembled, washed, and not quite put back in the right order. I leaned on the sink for a while, and then, for no reason I could fully explain, I laughed. Not because anything was funny. Because all of it was too absurd to be anything else.

Yesterday I was in a deep-pressure sim pod learning how to make an enemy installation slowly die of its own failures. Today I sat in a centrifuge pod while a comet with a mouth spun me and made me think about how to drag people into gun barrels. And now I was standing in my own very expensive single-occupancy dormitory bathroom, vomiting against the sink until my entire worldview was unsteady. Youth is great. Really great. Like a promotional video for industrial disasters.

I turned the tap back on and let cold water run over my wrists. J. J.' s line from earlier was still stuck in my head, refusing to leave. When it gets bad, your brain doesn't get dull. It gets mean. Damn it. Because it was accurate. Karl had seen it—that I'd steal ground even while taking hits. Mira had seen it—that I'd find rhythm inside the chaos. Renard had seen it—that I'd go looking for where people made mistakes in failing systems. And today J. J.

had peeled back the last layer and shown it to me directly— That when everything was worst, most chaotic, most nauseating, most wrong, my first instinct wasn't to stabilize. It was to find an angle. Not because I liked filth. Because I knew that dirty things tend to survive. I looked at the wrecked, honest face in the mirror, and felt something faint and cold settle in. These instructors weren't giving me anything new. They were excavating, layer by layer, what was already there—and then professionally naming it.

Close-combat adaptation. Rapid-response marksmanship. Behind-the-lines sabotage. Non-standard air combat. Very elegant phrasing. Which, stripped down, meant: taking the survival habits of someone who'd already learned to live ugly, and organizing them into Federal-issue operational categories. I leaned on the sink, closed my eyes, and said it under my breath.

"… Good teachers." Not directed at J. J. specifically. At the whole place. Because it understood too well. Knew where I was useful. Knew where I'd grow crooked. Knew I wasn't material for a clean, regulation blade. It wanted to grind me into something else. Something that could appear from the angle no one was watching, survive in the least dignified way possible, and leave the situation worse on the way out. I exhaled slowly and dried my face with the towel. The churning in my stomach had eased a little.

Temporarily, at least. I went back to the bed and dropped onto it, staring up at the ceiling.

"Single-Seat Zero-G Combat Craft Type-0…" I said it quietly. Then added, with complete sincerity:"Tin coffin. Absolutely a tin coffin." No one answered. Just the ventilation running steady, like nothing had happened at all. But I knew. Something had changed. J. J. had seen through another layer today. And the worst part—I'd started seeing it too. Seeing that when everything flipped upside down, my genuine, unthinking reflex was: If I'm having a bad time, can I make sure they're having a worse one? Not glory.

Not talent. More like a very ugly survival instinct. But in this place, that particular ugliness happened to be worth a great deal. I lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling for a long time. Then, finally, laughed very quietly.