Chương 328: 140.Kick Its Ass 1

"I can see its bones—!" The second it was out of my mouth, I regretted it for half a second. That line sounded way too much like the kind of thing someone says right before everything goes wrong. Anyone with even a basic feel for narrative knows that shouting "I see it!" on a battlefield usually ends one of two ways: either you really did see it, or you immediately regret having eyes. Fortunately, this time it was the first one.

The black cross-section, thinner than any blade, flipped out from the tightest intersection of the gravity signature exactly as I'd predicted. It wasn't large. It didn't even qualify as whole. It looked more like a knuckle bone from some enormous creature, showing through a crack in a door — carrying a coldness that had no business existing in this world. One brief flash, and it was enough to send a full-body chill through me.

"Window confirmed!" Akari's voice nearly punched through my eardrums.

"Four degrees lower-left, gravity signature closing fast! Two and a half seconds, maximum!"

"Shimo, don't chase the dark edge." Jess cut in immediately.

"What you're putting it into is the joint it's folding back on, not the tooth it's showing you right now!"

"I know!" I really did know. But knowing was one thing. Putting a Type-0 on its first live flight — along with my own body, which was cooperating only under protest — into a higher-dimensional window with a lifespan measured in seconds, was another. I pushed the throttle up another notch. The Type-0 bit into the outer line immediately, a fine vibration running up through the seat, like a reminder: this isn't the time to look good. This is the time to survive.

The reticle on the HUD began converging on the intersection point I'd calculated. Faster. No — can't go faster. Too fast and I'd overshoot. Too slow and I'd miss. There are many unpleasant things in this world, but one of the worst is when you know exactly where the right answer is, and your body still has to walk through its fear to put a hand on it.

"Hold your attitude." Roy's voice drove into my nearly-drifting consciousness like a nail.

"Your right hand's half a beat ahead of your brain again. Don't let the Type-0 be nervous for you."

"It already looks calmer than I do…!"

"Then copy it." … That made no sense at all. It also worked. I forced down the instinct that wanted to lunge ahead and left only the minimum corrections. The Type-0 followed Roy's attitude line, a straightened needle sliding toward that closing higher-dimensional joint. The dark ahead twisted again. This time I didn't take it straight through my retinas.

I kept my gaze on that blur between the HUD and the external view — like watching a surgery you had no right to witness; the data told you where to look, and every instinct in you screamed to shut your eyes. The slice began to close. Not vanish. It was more like an extra dimension being pulled back by an invisible hand. The black edge folded inward, and the surrounding starlight kinked with it — like the skin of the universe being tugged by a hook. Now.

"Shimo, closer!" Aida cut in, fast and precise.

"The phase-oscillation warhead has to bite into the fold surface. If you drop early you're just going to scrape the outer projection!"

"I know—!" I gritted my teeth and inched the nose forward. Too close. Way too close. No sim ever does this close in this kind of uncertainty. No matter how good the sim is, it never puts your stomach is protesting all of this into the parameters. Right now, my stomach, my inner ear, and my optic nerve were clearly filing a joint complaint to my brain, roughly in the form: that thing doesn't look like anything it is safe for a minor to be near, withdraw immediately. Regrettably, complaint denied.

"One-point-eight seconds!" Akari shouted.

"Shimo, don't go heroic!" Maki's voice cut straight into my private line, cold as a blade shearing off the thought I'd been half-forming about pushing in early.

"Half a second more. Let it flip on its own." I strangled the breath about to jump out of my chest. Half a second. Just half a second. And that half-second stretched like someone had pulled time until it went thin enough to see every lit-up fiber in your nerves. The black joint in front of me twisted, folded, pulled inward — and, exactly as I'd read it, it didn't contract all at once. In the last part of the fold, it briefly flips out something narrower. Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road.

Report any occurrences elsewhere. Not teeth. Bone seam. And it did. Narrower than before. Deeper. Even less like anything that should fit inside three-dimensional space. It didn't open in any way that looked like a mouth, but it still gave the clear impression of something enormous opening its jaws silently. My thumb hit the safety release. The arming chime in my ear was crisp enough to feel cruel.

"Phase-oscillation warhead, drop—!" The instant I hit the trigger, something in me went ice-cold. No rush of triumph, no yelling, not even a got you. Just a single, stripped-down fact: my hand moved by the book, the warhead cleared the rack, the Type-0 lifted a fraction from the weight shift, and that small grey-black piece of hardware flew in an almost insultingly ordinary arc toward a crack that had no business existing. The next second, I hauled the nose out with everything I had. Not stylish. Survival.

Because I had no idea what would happen to anything too close to that kind of insane space if the warhead actually went off where it was supposed to.

"Hit the window!" Akari almost screamed it.

"Shimo, out! Out!" Jess followed, shouting.

"I am—!" I didn't finish the sentence. The space in front of me broke first. Not an explosion. Not the kind I understood, anyway. It felt more like something that had been hiding in a higher-dimensional crease suddenly had a wedge jammed into it, and the entire mechanism let out a scream you couldn't hear but could feel in your bones. Every point of starlight twisted. Not flashed. Not dimmed.

The whole view snapped like a sheet being wrung out from the inside — even the distant, well-behaved stars hanging out at the edge of vision were yanked into thin, trailing afterimages for a heartbeat. The instrument panel spat a chain of warnings; the attitude ring went wild; gravity compensation staggered like it had just taken a kick to the back. My chest dropped. My head went white for a moment. It was worse than launch. Launch was at least honest, physically brutal.

This was like someone taking an invisible knife and burying it in the concept of space itself.

"Hold it!" Roy's voice cut through everything.

"Two degrees to port — don't roll with it! You're not inside it, you're beside it!" Right. I was beside it. That line landed like a rope — yanking me out of that nauseating urge to twist along with the distortion. I corrected to match the attitude ring; the Type-0 flicked past the buckling edge of the twist like a taut wire that had just been smacked and somehow hadn't snapped. And then— The Seawolf came out. Not entirely. Enough.

Enough that there was no longer any argument about what it was — a vessel, and a hyperdimensional attack submarine so thick with malice it might as well have been dripping. The dark grey hull looked like some predator half-dragged out of water — long, flat, studded with unnatural angles. The bow was a knife's edge; the lateral structures at the edge of my vision kept slipping a fraction out of alignment, like parts of it still refused to admit it had been caught in three-space.

It didn't have the kind of presence traditional ships did. It was worse. Because it didn't look like something that had come to fight in the open. It looked like something designed specifically to hide where it couldn't be seen and yank you down the second you looked away.

"…Fuck," I said, under my breath. Short. Quiet. The most honest thing I had. Jess went quiet for half a beat, then her voice came back changed. Not the half-teasing, half-metronome tone from earlier. Brighter. Sharper. The voice of a hunter who'd finally seen a submarine break the surface.

"Good. It's up." My chest tightened. Wait. That meant—"Jess, you're not—""Tactical taking second-stage strike," Jess said, voice carrying a dangerous kind of delight. The kind of delight you only hear when the mouthiest person in the room has finally picked up the stick she's best with.

"Roy, pull Shimo off the attack axis. Akari, give me the fattest part of the gravity signature. Lan, open the firing loop. Aida, unlock the hammers." Lan's response was instant: "Loop open." Aida, cold as ever: "Phase-resonance depth charges, one through three. Delayed-detonation sequence primed. Jess, if you screw up the timing on the fuses, I'll delay your dinner too."

"Copy, copy, I can feel Engineering's love," Jess said. I could picture her perfectly in that moment at the tactical station — eyes bright, mouth curving in that familiar, infuriating way, and hands steadier than anyone's. When she used that face to roast classmates or smuggle gossip, it was a menace. Using it now, here, was — annoyingly — reassuring.

"Shimo, break high-right," Maki ordered, voice snapped back to that clean, sharp calm.

"Your part's done. Don't hang around to eat Jess's blast wave for her."

"Copy." I pulled the Type-0 up and right, but I couldn't stop my eyes tracking the Seawolf — stuck at the edge of three-space, half-dragged out, half-trying to slide back into shadow. It was struggling. Not the dramatic, thrashing kind of struggling. Something more nauseating — sections of the hull were misaligning. Some parts looked like they were still here. Some looked like they'd already left.

The whole outline was trying to collapse inward and being bitten by the phase turbulence we'd left in its way, like a wolf with half its body wedged in a doorway, furious and turning back to bite.

"Target gravity cavity flipping outward," Akari said.

"It's trying to sink. Five more seconds — no, four and a half and it drops again!"

"Plenty," Jess said. That tone put a whole sheet of ice up my back. Not because she sounded vicious. Because she sounded sure.

"Yukikaze. Phase-resonance depth charges—" I heard her draw a breath, like some old, very Navy, very unreasonable ritual had finally made it all the way to her and she was the one holding the last step.

"—fire." Far behind me, the Yukikaze's belly flashed. Not the main guns' look-at-me-I-own-this-half-of-space glare. Three short, clean bursts of light with all the beauty of good engineering. Three phase-resonance depth charges left the ship almost silently, dropping along the thickest curves of the gravity signature Akari had marked. Their paths didn't look like torpedoes. More like three iron anchors being deliberately hurled into a deep, invisible current.

I watched them cut into the warped space around the Seawolf and felt something strange twist up in my chest. Dropping the phase-oscillation warhead into the breach had felt like wedging a pin into a door seam. This — Jess's three shots — felt more like: If the seam's jammed open, might as well blow the whole doorframe out while we're at it.

"Jess, isn't that a little excessive?" I couldn't help asking. She laughed in my ear.

"Excessive is the core aesthetic of anti-submarine warfare, Shimo." The first depth charge detonated. No fireball. Just a tight, nearly invisible dark ring slamming down along the twisted layers of space around the Seawolf. It was like someone had rung a bell underwater — no sound, but the aftershock traveled up your bones. The first impact made the Seawolf's outline shudder, the hull that had been forcing itself back into the higher-dimensional seam jerked out sideways another fraction.

The second went a heartbeat after. This time the whole warped region ballooned, like something enormous under an invisible ocean had taken a direct hit. The starlight around it shook. For a moment, one side of the Seawolf's hull actually held still long enough to be read — long, narrow, mean, with a kind of industrialized pettiness built into every line. The third charge detonated just as it tried to slide out of sight again. That one hit the hardest.

The gravity signature around the cross-section shattered like a sheet of ice smashed with a hammer. The Seawolf was forced into the open. Not completely. Enough. Enough for the Yukikaze's sensors to finally get a real bite of its structure. Enough for the tactical station to set up the next strike. Enough to tell everyone on this ship — It wasn't a ghost. It was something that could be dragged out, struck, and blown apart.

Watching the Imperial high-dimensional submarine convulse its way into shape inside that ring of dark shockwaves, my heart slammed once, hard. Not from victory. We weren't there yet. From the realization that, for the first time, I'd understood something on a level below words: We really could kick something like this out of where it thought it was safe.