Chương 64: 26.Off-Base Supply Run 26-4

The diner's air conditioning was half-dead, pushing out air that smelled like cooking oil and disinfectant doing their best impression of something fresh. The faded plastic fish hung crooked beside the sign, like a former employee who'd quit years ago but was still being forced to stand one last watch. We picked a table toward the back. When D sat down, the chair seemed to contemplate its fate for a couple of seconds. Harvey set his bags by his feet and checked the table surface for unidentified sauce residue.

Jess scanned the menu and reached her conclusion.

"This place is honest." I unwrapped the disposable utensils.

"How so?"

"It doesn't pretend to taste good," she said.

"It only pretends it won't kill you." Honest establishments were rare these days. I ordered the safest combination on the menu: pan-fried salt pork, synthetic mashed potatoes, two boiled eggs, and a cup of something that looked like tea but performed more like hot brown water. D ordered with great enthusiasm, working through the high-calorie section from top to bottom.

Harvey got the cheapest set meal and a bowl of thick soup, with the expression of someone for whom only the caloric load mattered — whether his taste buds lived or died was a secondary issue. While we waited, I ran through the day's purchases in my head. New gear, cola, snacks, books, and that old offline recorder.

Complete enough that I had to finally admit: surviving this Academy wasn't going to run on just stubbornness and a sharp mouth — sometimes it needed fabric quality, sugar content, and a few things that didn't belong to the standard-issue system. Jess rested her chin on her hand, watching me.

"What are you calculating?"

"How much I spent today. How many steps to bankruptcy."

"Don't bother," she said, crisp.

"People like us go spiritually bankrupt first, then financially. It's a fixed sequence." Too accurate to argue with. At the next table sat two Upper House female students, white uniforms pressed sharp, cuffs clean in a way that suggested they'd never encountered the real world. Their voices were pitched at that precise volume — low enough to seem careful, loud enough for the whole restaurant to hear. I tuned them out at first.

Upper House conversations generally serve one of two purposes: proving someone spent real money on elocution, or making everyone else want to jam a fork into their own ears. But after a while, a name drifted over on its own.

"…that Hoffmann senior from General Affairs." I looked up. Jess had clearly caught it too. Her eyes made a brief trip to that table, then came back, like she was afraid staying focused would incur a subscription fee.

"You were saying it was impossible just yesterday," the other white uniform said quietly.

"I thought so too. But I really did see it."

"See what?" A pause. The voice dropped even lower, almost savoring the warmth of the information it was holding.

"I saw him with that one from the Disciplinary Committee. They were — close." The other girl drew a breath.

"You mean Nikaido?"

"Shh, keep it down." My fork stopped for a second. Nikaido. Linde. If the diner's air conditioning had been working any better, I might have suspected heat stroke — that I was starting to hear tomorrow's problems ahead of schedule. But those two names just sat there in the air, like components that had no business being placed on the same workbench, forced into the same assembly anyway.

"No way," the other girl said.

"Someone like that would actually—" She didn't finish. The second half was easy enough to fill in. Someone like that would actually what? Have an affair? Fall for someone? Break regulations? Simply admit to having a functioning heart? A soft laugh from the white-uniform table.

"The more that type, the better the story, right? Always walking around like they're above everyone, and then turns out—" She cut herself off again, letting imagination do the rest. Harvey was drinking his soup, didn't look up, voice flat as if he were discussing bolt specifications.

"If you're going to eavesdrop, don't make it so obvious."

"Nobody was eavesdropping," Jess shot back immediately.

"They delivered the gossip to our table themselves." D slowly cut a large piece of meat, apparently having tracked none of the entertainment value of this exchange. After three seconds of silence, he asked the most D question possible.

"Linde's General Affairs. Nikaido's Disciplinary. Does that get you a discount?" This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it. I nearly choked on my hot brown water. Jess laughed hard enough to shake her shoulders.

"No," she said, wiping the corner of her mouth, "that usually just gets you disciplinary action. No discount." Harvey finally looked up and regarded D.

"If there were, you'd want to confirm which side it comes off. General Affairs can throttle your equipment. Disciplinary can throttle you."

"Both annoying," D concluded. The first uncontested truth of the meal. I looked down and cut my egg, but I was rearranging those two names in my head. Linde. Nikaido. General Affairs. Disciplinary Committee. Two roles that theoretically had no business overlapping in private, and yet here they were in someone else's whisper, threaded onto the same line. Rumors like this weren't unusual at the Academy. What was unusual was that this one almost sounded plausible.

Jess looked at me like she'd already traced my thought process.

"Don't make that face."

"What face?"

"The one where you're disassembling gossip for component parts."

"I'm just thinking — if it's real, the Disciplinary Committee's code of conduct manual deserves a very educational new appendix."

"I've already got the title for you," she said, entirely straight-faced.

"That Time the Disciplinary Enforcement Division Personally Demonstrated That Regulations Only Ever Apply to the Lower House." I looked at her.

"Too short. Doesn't sound like a light novel."

"Add a subtitle then."

"—With a Supplementary Inquiry Into Whether the General Affairs Window Offers an Alternative Private Fast-Track Application Process." Even Harvey made a sound above his soup bowl. Whether it counted as a laugh was debatable. After lunch, we didn't rush back. We drifted along the main street and through the open-air market. The sun was fully up, the whole district bright and hard, though scraps of shade still clung under the old metal awnings.

Vendors had cases of drinks stacked at their doorways, ice buckets buried with sparkling water and cheap energy drinks. Snack shop fronts hung rows of jumbo bags — jerky, fried bean chips, candied nuts — colors aggressive enough to constitute an open declaration of war against nutritional science. D was quickly pulled off-course by a shop selling dry goods and cured meat. The owner was a middle-aged woman built like half a wall.

When she saw D walk in, her first reaction wasn't caution — her eyes lit up, like her annual big-spender had just walked in on legs.

"Try this, kid," she said, slapping a giant bag of smoked meat strips.

"High salt, high calorie, good chew. Two weeks later you'll still recognize it." D sampled one strip with the gravity of someone conducting a formal audit on behalf of human civilization. Three seconds later, he nodded.

"Good." So he bought another bag. I stood there watching his food haul swell and genuinely suspected D wasn't here to shop — he was establishing a secondary supply line for the dorm. Jess was perfectly satisfied with this development. She even dropped a few packs of salt candy into his bag.

"Take these. Next time you and whoever you're with are getting worked until the lights go out, these'll buy you another twenty minutes." Harvey spent a long time stopped outside a small hardware shop, picking up a few parts. When I walked over, I caught him arguing with the owner over connector specifications, their voices as cold as two calipers having a death match. Eventually the owner backed down and dug the correct model out from the bottom of a drawer.

Only then did Harvey relent, looking like today's greatest waste wasn't time — it was having to speak to the wrong spec. Along the way, we ran into two more rounds of similar whispers. First was outside a beverage wholesaler. Two senior girls were hugging cases of soda, voices dropped low: "heard someone spotted platinum hair behind the Upper House last night." The other snapped back immediately: "are you trying to get yourself killed, saying that out loud?" Platinum hair.

There weren't many people in this Academy who fit that description, and the one who fit it best happened to be precisely the last person anyone should be gossiping about. The second time was at a convenience stand. A guy had his voice pressed down like he was conducting an underground transaction.

"…check who General Affairs has been rubber-stamping special approvals for lately. You'll figure it out."

"Are you insane? You check if you want. I'd like to make it to graduation."

"That's exactly why I only say this outside school." That last line was the most honest thing I'd heard all day. A lot of things weren't forbidden inside the Academy walls — they just required you to decide whether you were willing to spend the rest of your enrollment paying for your mouth. I didn't comment, but the feeling settled in slowly, the way things do when they intend to stay. Rumors rarely grow from nothing.

They distort, exaggerate, sprout branches as they travel through people — but there's usually a core underneath. Small. Not bright. Real. By the time we'd worked our way close to noon, all four of us were loaded down with bags. D had both hands full, like he'd just cleared out half a granary. Jess was juggling drinks and hygiene supplies, plus several discounted snack packs.

Harvey's bag looked the most unremarkable, yet somehow radiated the quiet confidence that every single item inside could save a life at exactly the right moment. As for me — beyond the two dozen cherry colas and a few volumes of That Time the Editorial Department Lost Their Minds and Made This Light Novel Title So Long, Jess had also forced several packs of crackers and candy wafers on me with the warning that "everyone steals these, if you don't buy them now you won't get any."

"We look like we're running away from home," I said. Jess surveyed the four of us and nodded calmly.

"Wrong. We look like a squad of cadets who just raided a supply depot and are heading back to face the apocalypse."

"What's the difference?"

"The first one's romantic. The second one's us." Hard to argue. On the way back, the sun had turned vicious. Even the shadows cast by the dust barriers had an edge to them. As the Academy gate drew closer, everyone's pace naturally pulled back. Not reluctance to leave the outside — more like our bodies remembering on their own: another few dozen meters and it's back to the familiar machinery. Rules, bells, formations, morning roll call, night checks, and physical training that never seemed satisfied.

No inspection at the gate today. Just Student Council members behind tables, collecting the temporary passes, noting the time, waving people through. That level of courtesy felt worse than a search — like someone smiling while holding the door open, already making quiet note of exactly how many bags of junk food you were carrying. I walked in hugging both cases of cherry cola, the bags at my sides clanking with every step. Jess glanced at me.

"You're making too much noise."

"Can't help it," I said.

"Strategic supplies have presence."

"Hope you keep that confidence when you're hiding them tonight."

"Worst case, we split the loot." D immediately looked over.

"I can take some."

"There it is," Jess sighed.

"The supply line has spontaneously developed a socialist conscience." We passed through the gate and back into that excessively organized air. The bags were heavy, my shoulders ached, but somehow my mood wasn't as bad as it should have been. Maybe because today had proven at least one thing: inside this machine designed specifically to grind people into regulation components, it was still possible to quietly smuggle in a few things that didn't belong to it. Like gear that could actually take a beating.

Like bulk snacks and stacks of drinks. Like two dozen cherry colas. Like a light novel with a title long enough to suggest the editorial department had suffered a collective breakdown. And like a handful of whispers that had no business surviving inside these walls, but were apparently doing just fine at street corners and lunch tables. Some things that cross the gate are just supplies. Some things that cross the gate will eventually become knives. I didn't know yet which would prove useful first.

But either way — get it all back to the dorm first.