Chương 95: 37.Departure 37-2

Because once it went up there, it wasn't something I could shrug off with a few curses. Especially now that the live-deployment drill was tied directly to midterms, which connected to finals, which connected to whether Upper House people standing higher up would use these results to decide whether to join, stay, or walk away. Being the one who calls it wasn't a title. It was strapping the target to your own back. And what I hated most was other people setting up the target for me. …

Except this time, even I already knew which way I'd choose. I wrote the last rule. Final field call: Hoshino. The pen scraped across the whiteboard with a harsh sound. Jess immediately applauded—deliberately, insincerely.

"Congratulations. Your bleak life takes another step forward."

"Were you going for frostbitten?"

"I was going to say bleak, then realized both fit." I turned and pointed the pen at her.

"One more word and I'm reclassifying you from comms to bait."

"This group has such flexible role management." Harvey ignored us entirely and went straight to what mattered.

"Rules are set. What about consequences?" I looked at him.

"What consequences?"

"If someone crosses a line. How do we handle it." Right. Rules on paper were administrative romance. Living people still needed to deal with violations. I tapped the pen against my palm twice.

"First offense: correct on the spot. Second: hand off to the responsible primary. Third—""Lose speaking privileges for one hour," Jess cut in immediately.

"Effective on you specifically," I said.

"I would die."

"Then behave." Maki wrote that one up too, handwriting neat enough to be mildly irritating—like our chaotic, barely-functional group had been formatted into something legible. But looking at it, I didn't particularly want to erase it. Annoying. That was probably the current standard state of Group 144: Annoying, but functional. The meeting was still going when footsteps sounded in the hallway, followed by two knocks.

A lower-year General Affairs cadet stuck his head in, face broadcasting I didn't want this job either.

"Group 144?" He looked at the four of us.

"Final coordination meeting, ten minutes, Main Building Conference Room Three. School requires each group to submit squad leader and radio callsign." Jess blinked.

"See? Administration is already rushing your coronation ceremony." I didn't bother responding to her. I just asked the messenger:"Callsign has to be submitted now too?"

"Yes." He nodded.

"Squad leader, team callsign, individual call numbers. Don't submit today, you'll be held back tomorrow before boarding." … There was a certain administrative elegance to that kind of threat. By the time the four of us reached Conference Room Three, it was already packed with a dozen other groups. The air conditioning was running as decoration. The room smelled of paper, sweat, and cheap copy toner.

On the projection screen at the front, a line of very official text: First-Year Live-Deployment Drill — Final Squad Confirmation Looked like a ceremony. Functionally: a bill of sale. Each table had a form. Every field accounted for, thorough enough that you'd half expect them to pre-format your last words into neat columns. Squad Number. Squad Leader Name. Team Radio Callsign. Member Call Numbers. Emergency Succession Order. I stared at the form for three seconds. Jess pressed the pen directly into my hand.

"Go ahead, squad leader."

"You're really asking for it."

"I'm just cooperating with the system." Harvey pulled the form closer, skipped every bureaucratic header without looking, and tapped the first field.

"Fill it." I exhaled and wrote in the squad leader field: Hoshino Shimo This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience. The moment those characters were down, something shifted. Like something that had only ever existed in conversation had just been stamped into the official record. Not a joke, not a casual assumption—from this moment, whenever Group 144 had a problem, my name would be the first one called. Shit. I really hated how solid that felt.

The next field was team radio callsign. All four of us went quiet for two seconds. Jess spoke first.

"If anyone suggests something like Iron Wolf or Crimson Blade, I'm withdrawing from this friendship immediately."

"You'd need a friendship to withdraw from first," I said. Harvey's expression didn't move.

"Callsigns aren't for embarrassing yourself."

"Then you suggest something that isn't embarrassing," Jess shot back.

"Short, clear, easy to distinguish," Harvey said.

"Ideally tied to the squad leader." Maki had been reading the form. At that, she looked up and her gaze landed on me. I didn't like being looked at like that.

"What." She paused for a beat, then said, perfectly evenly:"Frost." I frowned.

"What?"

"Your name." She held my gaze.

"Shimo. Cold, short, high recognition. Clean over radio." Jess blinked first, then her mouth started curving upward.

"Frost." She repeated it once, then actually nodded.

"…Shit. That fits you perfectly. Sounds like someone who'd curse people out while dragging them out of a snowfield."

"I've never been anywhere near a snowfield," I said.

"Your mouth has." Harvey glanced at the form, then at me.

"FROST. Works." I turned to Maki.

"You had that ready."

"No," she said.

"I just thought of it." She said it too evenly for me to want to push further. Especially once I registered that the callsign had come directly out of my name—and that strange feeling surfaced again, faint and persistent, like someone had tapped a fingertip against a nerve. I looked down and wrote: Team callsign: Frost (FROST) Below that: individual call numbers. That part was straightforward.

Frost-01: Hoshino Shimo Frost-02: Jess McCallow Frost-03: Harvey Knox Frost-04: Maki Kushima Jess looked at the sequence and laughed.

"Not bad. If I die out there, at least my final transmission has style. Frost-02 is down sounds significantly better than Jess is screwed."

"Try not to rehearse that," I said.

"Don't worry, I'll pick somewhere with good lighting to collapse."

"I'll drag you into the shade," Harvey said.

"Reduce resource waste."

"You people have no souls." Maki looked at the form and added quietly:"Succession order?" I tapped the last field with my pen.

"After me it's Harvey, then Kushima, then Jess." Jess's eyes went wide.

"Why am I last?"

"Because you talk too much."

"That's not a valid reason!"

"It's a group consensus," Harvey said.

"I object to this democracy." Unfortunately for her, nobody was taking votes. When we handed in the form, the Student Council member at the collection desk glanced down and read it aloud.

"Group 144. Frost." Standing there, hearing those two syllables come out of someone else's mouth made them feel more real than they had on paper. Frost. From now on, that wasn't just something we'd said. It was our callsign. And the name we'd be carrying together for the next three weeks.

The remaining twenty-four hours passed with indecent speed. Fast in the way where every time you tried to catch your breath, the next notice slapped you in the face. Equipment re-inspection, ration distribution, injection record confirmation, emergency locator chip calibration, final sleep period allocation—each item looked reasonable on its own. Stacked together, it felt like they were flattening you out before wringing you dry.

By the time I got back to the dorm that night, I barely had enough energy left to curse anyone. Maki had taped the updated shared chart to the inside of the door. The new version had an additional line: Frost-01 through 04 — Night Watch Rotation & Emergency Succession Order Jess took one look and whistled.

"Wow. Official structure vibes are here. I'm really starting to feel like we're actually heading off to die now."

"You didn't before?" I said.

"Before it felt improvised. Now it feels scheduled." Harvey was testing the radio unit, not even looking up.

"Talking nonsense with steady hands—that's progress."

"I'm just hungry," Jess told him. I leaned against my bed and tossed the temporary ID tag they'd issued today onto the desk. Small print across it: FROST-01 I stared at it for two seconds, then flipped it face-down. Too official. It was bothering me. That night, I fell asleep later than usual. Not because I wasn't exhausted—because every time I closed my eyes, my brain started running its own slideshow of things I didn't want to see. The dummy nearly flipping on the rock slope.

Midterm comprehensive assessment echoing across the plaza. Upper House people reviewing these results before finals to decide who to join or withdraw from. That line on the form: Frost-01. I rolled over. The bed frame gave a quiet complaint. Across from me, Maki hadn't quite fallen asleep yet, breathing soft and even. She'd let her hair down partway tonight—it spilled across the pillow, dark as folded night. I moved my gaze away immediately. Shit. I'd been looking at her too much lately. That wasn't a good sign.

Especially when her sister had just rattled my nervous system yesterday, and here I was noticing where her hair fell before sleep. That wasn't vigilance anymore. That was my brain actively looking for trouble. I pulled the blanket higher and forced myself down. Right before I finally drifted off, the last thing in my head wasn't the Student Council, or midterms, or finals. It was four call numbers lined up together on that form. Frost-01. Frost-02. Frost-03. Frost-04. …

It really did sound like a group heading out to do something stupid together. The next morning, the campus was quieter than usual. Not empty. Just—every sound turned down a notch. Like everyone understood that from today on, noise didn't matter. Whether you lived or died depended on other things. The sky was still grey when I stepped out of the dorm with my pack. The plaza in front of the main building had temporary routing lines set up, squad numbers taped to the ground.

General Affairs and Disciplinary Committee people moved back and forth with uniformly official expressions—processing some kind of large-scale outbound shipment. Then, from the distance: engines. Not the light electric hum of campus shuttles. Lower, heavier, carrying real weight—military transport buses. Rolling in formation, one after another from the gate, a line of dark-grey boxes being pushed into the campus.

I stood there watching them come down the still-damp morning pavement, tires pressing rhythmically over the seams in the stone. The windows were half-reflective, throwing back the main building, the plaza, the crowd, and a whole lot of first-year faces that didn't look particularly ready. Jess appeared at my side and said quietly:"Perfect. The hearses are here."

"Could you, just once, let the atmosphere be normal."

"I can't. Normal would make me more scared." Harvey came up from the other side, every strap on his pack cinched tight—like he'd tied his nerves down with the rest of his gear.

"Check the bus numbers," he said. Maki arrived last, stepping up beside us with the boarding confirmation slip folded in her hand. She checked the number stenciled on the bus's side, then looked at me.

"Frost, confirmed." My mouth twitched.

"We're starting already?"

"It counts from boarding," she said. Jess immediately cleared her throat and dropped her voice into deliberate radio protocol.

"Frost-02, morale excellent, currently wishing to flee."

"Frost-03, shut up," Harvey said. I clicked my tongue, pulled my gaze from the convoy, and looked over the three of them. Jess: still wearing that punchable expression. Harvey: still looking like the world was wasting his time. Maki Kushima: standing straight, gaze steady—like whatever was ahead, she'd already filed herself into position. I opened my mouth.

"Frost-01. Form up." The moment the words were out, all three of them actually moved. The feeling was strange. Strange in the way that something which had only existed on forms and whiteboards had suddenly, in this one second, stood up and became real. Across the plaza, instructors began calling squads to board. The crowd shifted—packs knocking together, soles scraping concrete, metal buckles chiming in scattered percussion.

First-years began loading in batches, like a shipment that hadn't quite learned its own value yet, being moved forward by the system with characteristic efficiency. I shouldered my pack and walked toward the bus. The sky beyond the gate was still grey. The spaceport lay somewhere further out, past where we could see. The bus doors opened one by one—an invitation with no particular gentleness in it. And the only thing left in my head was simple: Alright. We're really going now.