Chương 383: 172.Operations

The coffee smell in the Seitokai office still wasn't enough to disguise this place as some civilized morning outpost. The reason was simple. This room contained Maki Kushima, a stack of paperwork taller than anyone's conscience, and a group of people who'd all been dragged into a meeting at an hour that should honestly be illegal. In that configuration, coffee only ever serves one function — keeping you awake enough to fully register how miserable you are.

I leaned against the desk with my half-finished bento and watched Maki stand. She spread the documents from the manila envelope across the table with the clean, final motion of someone laying out an execution roster. Morning light slanted in through the window and struck the oversized, aggressively cheerful text on the page — United Interstellar Military Academy — Capital District Representative Team Selection Maki's knuckles tapped the desk once.

"Meeting." Two words. Plenty of impact. Jess, who'd been enjoying the show a second ago, flinched. Roy pulled his files up against his chest. Lan sat up straight, with excellent instincts. Hedwig stood near the desk, looking like she'd planned to sit in quietly from the start. I set my bento aside and let my brain slide automatically into okay, here we go. Maki looked around the room, voice level.

"This is the first official meeting. By procedure, we should start with introductions." She paused, scanning us once more.

"But I doubt anyone here doesn't already know everyone."

"I do." I raised a hand and pointed at Jess.

"There's an unidentified lifeform present." Jess glared.

"Excuse me. I'm completely harmless."

"No. Your existence is the hazard."

"You—" She didn't get to finish. Without changing expression, Maki pulled a blank minute book from the side and dropped it in front of Jess with a flat thap.

"Then you have something to do." Jess looked at the book, then at Maki.

"... Meaning?"

"Minutes," Maki said.

"You're taking them."

"Huh? Why me?"

"Because you have the most energy." Her tone was mild enough to be cruel.

"If you'd rather not write, the door's right there." I nearly laughed out loud. Jess looked at me, then at Maki, then down at what might as well have fallen out of the sky as an official conscription notice. Her expression cycled through several stages, landing on the very specific grief of someone who'd come to watch chaos and somehow become part of it. In the end, she picked up the pen.... Perfect. There really is no such thing as a natural predator in this world. Just higher-grade administrative suppression.

I crossed my arms and gave her three full seconds of sincere, silent applause. Jess's natural enemy turns out not to be the school code, not the Disciplinary Committee. It's the President. Once Maki had confirmed the room was at least performing controllability, she brought her attention back to the desk.

"The year's nearly over, so what I'm covering now concerns next year." She turned the flyer face-up.

"First item: the Capital District Representative Team Selection." She paused, as if the official title was too long and too much like the kind of heading that ages you ten years by the third clause, and translated it into something human.

"In plain terms: the Upper House–Lower House Rivalry." The room went quiet for a beat. Roy spoke first, frowning at the paper, tone practical.

"The two Houses don't even study the same things. How's this supposed to work?" Fair question. Upper House and Lower House shared a school crest, but their teaching methods, focus, even the direction of their training were different enough that the school itself seemed to have quietly given up on the word fair a long time ago. Maki had clearly seen it coming. She didn't even pause.

"Common subjects." She pulled the event summary out and laid it in the middle of the table.

"Close combat. Marksmanship. Bladed combat. Team coordination." With every item she read out, I lit another small candle in my head for whatever was left of my peaceful life. This wasn't a selection tournament. This was the school pulling out an entire exactly how hard are you to kill assessment matrix and repackaging it as a spirited youth campus event. Lan leaned forward slightly, eyes on the sheet.

"How's it scored?"

"Points system," Maki said, fast.

"Ten per event. One's the floor, ten's the ceiling. Total tallied at the end."

"Meaning," Roy said, pushing the file a fraction, tone starting to sour, "this isn't single-elimination. It's an aggregate evaluation."

"Yes."

"In other words," I said, naming the actual heart of the disaster, "this format is perfectly designed to torture the Seitokai. Lots of events, lots of sessions, lots of manpower needed, and it still manages to look entirely legitimate." Maki glanced at me. There was something faint in that look — roughly: finally caught up to the point. Then, level: "Correct." Her pen tapped the stack.

"Outside of not fielding a team ourselves, we're touching almost everything else." Jess, who'd only just resigned herself to writing line one of the minutes, looked up.

"Everything else meaning—""All of it." Maki said it cleanly, like shutting a coffin lid.

"From pre-event planning, scheduling, venue management, routing, group coordination, records consolidation, all the way to on-the-day staffing — the Council handles it." She finished, then added, entirely objectively:"Simply put: whatever the administration can't be bothered to do themselves, they've handed to us." I closed my eyes. Of course. My bad sleep last night hadn't been for nothing. Human premonitions of disaster are sometimes uncannily accurate. Unfortunately, being accurate never once helps.

"Don't look like you're about to expire," Maki said, and the corner of her mouth actually lifted a little.

"This is only the beginning."

"That is not how you talk to someone in hospice care."

"Once the Operation Nine Stars begin," she went on, as if she hadn't heard me, "we'll also be handling admin support, plus serving as backup and on-site coordination."

"I don't want to hear any more!" I groaned, half-collapsing onto the table.

"What happened to joyful learning? Don't the brochures always talk about youth development, balanced growth, honor and friendship? How does all of that translate into unpaid overtime?"

"You're realizing this a little late," Roy said, dry.

"Don't give me that seen-it-all tone." I turned to glare at him, then redirected.

"Lan. You be the judge. Does this sound reasonable to you?" Lan didn't even lift a brow. She just flipped to the second page of her packet.

"Reasonable or not isn't the point," she said, flat.

"The point is, if the Council doesn't take it, it lands back on us anyway. Better to know the bomb's weight now than get handed it later, blind." Damn it. Too logical. It made my complaining sound like pure avoidance. Hedwig had stayed quiet by the desk this whole time, eyes on the event summary, expression still enough that you couldn't tell whether she was simply listening or already running a private cost assessment of the entire institution. I hadn't meant to pay her particular attention right now.

Couldn't help it, for two reasons. First, the breakfast she'd brought had been genuinely too good — it's hard to stay entirely cold toward someone who can cook like that. Second, she was the Council's Secretary, not a decorative houseplant. A mess this size wasn't something she'd get to stand outside of. Sure enough, Maki's next line pulled her straight in.

"Records and consolidation — the Secretary takes part of that." Hedwig looked up and nodded.

"Understood." Flat answer, no follow-up questions — like she'd already accepted that joining the Council and getting off easy were mutually exclusive. But her eyes rested on the selection materials for a beat, then flicked, briefly, over to me. Short. Short enough that anyone else would've called it an eye passing naturally over the room.

Maybe it was the breakfast and the paperwork stacking up on my nerves, but I thought I caught something specific in it — like she was looking at someone who was probably going to get thrown onto the field later. Or looking at a problem half-written, just waiting on the subject's own admission. I decided immediately not to have seen it. One of the more important survival skills in the Council is not interpreting every loaded-looking glance. Otherwise you die faster than the paperwork does.

Jess, mid-minute-taking, couldn't resist chiming in.

"Wait, this doesn't sound like a competition. It sounds like a school-wide forced labor program."

"You can write that in the minutes," I said.

"Can I really?"

"No," Maki said, without looking up.

"But I support you thinking it." Even Lan laughed under her breath at that. I looked at the documents and had a very clear thought. This is what this school does best. Take something inherently violent, exhausting, and inhuman; give it a nicer name; print a respectable flyer. Suddenly it's not called suffering — it's called honor. Not exploitation — development. Not forcing students to learn institutional cruelty ahead of schedule — it's the Representative Team Selection.

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. Federal institutional design is, sometimes, just very elegantly wrapped psychological damage. Once everyone had metabolized the first wave, Maki slid the next document forward.

"One more thing, up front." Her tone hadn't changed. I still sat up a little. Because when she says one more thing in exactly that flatness, whatever follows is never pleasant.

"Right after the Selection wraps, the second-year study trip follows." My fingers paused on the edge of the desk. The room's reactions split immediately. Jess's eyes lit up — her brain already generating finally off-campus tourist fantasies. Roy frowned, clearly calculating how many more times the Council's working hours were about to die. Lan quietly placed both events on the same timeline, probably already drafting an itinerary terrifying enough to make a logistics officer cry.

Hedwig said nothing, just watched Maki, waiting to see how far she'd go right now. And me — I'd spent last night lying in bed while that chip's flat, affectless voice dug Copernicus out of the historical record and lodged it behind my eyes. So when study trip left her mouth, the first thing that surfaced wasn't a hike, or a field excursion, or anything with the word youth attached. It was the moon. The neutral skin over it. The polite buffer zone the Empire had built.

The kind of air that sat under pretty nouns and didn't look, from any angle, like it would let everyone come home in one piece. Maki turned and looked at me. Didn't hold long. Didn't need to. You know what I'm talking about. And I'm not saying the rest of it here. She continued, voice level.

"We'll cover the details once the Selection's finished." A pause.

"Registration closes before the New Year. So — it's going to be busy."

"Hold on." Jess, predictably, bit first.

"Where's the trip going? It's not another survival drill wearing a field-trip costume, is it?"

"That's disrespectful to this school," I said.

"How? I'm extrapolating reasonably from precedent."

"Reasonably enough that I can't argue." Maki didn't answer Jess directly. She just pressed her hand over the study-trip file, like sliding a card back into the deck before it was time to turn it over.

"Deal with what's in front of us first." She looked around at everyone, voice snapping back into full President register.

"Bottom line: from today, the Selection is the Council's top priority. I'll assign individual tasks shortly." Jess sighed and scribbled faster in the minute book.

"Now I get why you two came in so early today."

"You think we love school life?" I leaned back, voice full of genuine bleakness.

"No. We came early to witness the death certificate of our own free time."

"Vice President, watch your phrasing," Maki said, mild.

"Yes, President." I corrected instantly.

"That's not a death certificate. It's an honorable service notice." Roy closed his file and delivered the summary cleanly.

"Translated: nobody's having an easy year next year."

"Write that down," I told Jess, tipping my chin at her.

"Already did," she said, pleased with herself.

"Don't actually put that in the official version," Lan warned.

"Relax. I'm not stupid." I looked at her, held out two seconds, failed.

"Coming from you, that sentence loses most of its credibility."

"Hoshino. Do you have a death wish today?"

"No. I'm just being unusually honest today." The room briefly dissolved into laughter, commentary, and pages turning. But the documents on the desk didn't get any lighter, and the Selection didn't turn into some simple, spirited school event just because we'd laughed a couple of times. We all knew it. Maki knew it. Anyone in that room with a functioning brain knew it. On the surface, this meeting was about an internal school rivalry.

But from this point on, the Council thread, the representative-team thread, and the study-trip thread slowly surfacing in the distance had officially knotted together. I looked at the papers, then at Maki. She'd already settled back into her seat, pen racing across a blank page, sketching out the next three days. The light caught the side of her face, softening the trace of lost sleep, and made something else clearer too — the more that piled onto her, the more she looked like herself. Honestly.

Sometimes I think she isn't a Seitokai president at all. She's more like the type who, the moment a school starts coming apart, moves faster than anyone else to tie the broken pieces back together. The problem is — I usually end up tied in with them. The thought pulled a sigh out of me. Maki didn't look up.

"Objection?"

"No." I reached for the nearest stack.

"Just wondering whether the United Interstellar Military Academy trains officers, or high-grade indentured labor." This time she did look up, the corner of her mouth moving faintly.

"Both, probably." Done for. She actually admitted it. Which meant this was genuinely beyond saving. The miso soup was still steaming. The coffee still smelled good. There was even half a piece of tamagoyaki left in my bento. Unfortunately, once someone lays Upper House–Lower House Rivalry, Representative Team Selection, and full Council support on the same table, anything carrying a hint of happiness stops working automatically. Even the rice started to look like a last meal before overtime.

Maki sat back down and reorganized the stack. She's terrifying when she does that. Not because she's harsh — because the moment she starts aligning pages, layering attachments, pulling out blank sheets to write on, it means her brain has already moved past whether and straight into how do I break this disaster into pieces small enough that no one escapes their share. In other words: hell was about to open by district.

"Assignments first." She tapped the desk once with her pen. Sitting closest to her, hearing those two words, I felt something very calm settle over me. Calm bordering on peaceful. Because resistance was pointless. In the Council, assignments first from the President's mouth is roughly the administrative equivalent of prepare to engage on a battlefield. You don't have to like it. You can't pretend you didn't hear it. Maki spread the master sheet flat.

"This isn't a single-day event. It breaks into seven parts: pre-event planning, event scheduling, venue prep, registration verification, match records, ruling consolidation, and logistics. The school's official phrase for it is Student Governance Support." She paused. Not even her expression moved.

"Translated: aside from not competing for you, everything else is on us." Roy leaned back, flipping through his new packet, frowning first.

"The budget sheet's just a frame."

"Of course," Maki said.

"The full version doesn't exist yet. The Council pulls the requirements first, and then Academic Affairs and General Affairs start doing something other than their default corpse impression."

"Meaning," I translated for the room, "the school threw a rock in the pond to see if we can swim our way into a bridge."

"Odd metaphor. Not inaccurate." She didn't even look at me, moving straight on.

"Roy."

"Yeah."

"Finance and materials requests — yours." She slid a stack toward him.

"I want an itemized breakdown of venue needs, consumables, replacement gear, and emergency reserves for every shared subject. Marksmanship, bladed combat, electronic warfare, ground ops — we can't wait for instructors to remember these things on the fly."

"Got it." He flipped a page, then looked up.

"Ceiling?"

"None yet."

"So it'll get cut eventually."

"Yes."

"By how much?"

"Unknown." Roy went quiet for two seconds, settling into that particular stillness only finance people develop — something close to personal offense.

"I'm suddenly starting to understand why some people lose faith in institutions young."

"Congratulations," I said.

"Welcome to adult society." He shot me a look.

"If whatever you get is lighter than this, I'm filing your share under budgetary catastrophe too."

"Don't make this personal."

"Then start praying." The man was actually starting to sound like a Treasurer. Maki ignored our nonsense and turned to the other side.

"Lan."

"Here." Lan was already sitting perfectly straight, a fresh page open — considerably more composed than someone like me, who tends to resist meetings purely with her mouth.

"Venues and routing — yours."

"Zone access, time-slicing, equipment flow, staging and assembly points?"

"And temporary cordons," Maki added.

"Both Houses competing together means shared spaces mean friction. Spectator zones, competitor zones, and logistics zones need clean edges, or we'll be writing thirty pages of incident reports off shouting matches alone." Lan nodded, steady.

"I'll draft a route map first. Anything needing Disciplinary or security cooperation, I'll flag separately." Hearing that, I mourned my future self for half a second. Once Lan starts drawing maps, the suffering has entered mass production. The frightening thing about her isn't that she complains — it's that she finishes the work before she'd even get around to complaining, so you never get the chance to commiserate alongside her. Maki clearly trusted her completely, sliding over several venue layout sheets.

"Good. Start with these." Then she looked at Hedwig. The room went briefly, quietly still. Not from awkwardness — Hedwig's presence in a scene like this simply didn't sit in the same category as everyone else's. She was the Secretary, yes. She was also Hedwig. That name, dropped into any administrative process, carries an unnecessary but impossible-to-ignore weight of its own. She stood by the desk, quiet, like she already knew she wasn't going to be left out.

"Hedwig."

"Yes."

"Standard Secretary duties, plus two new blocks. First, match records and consolidation. Second, external text." I raised a brow. External text. Very Maki of her. Hedwig didn't look surprised.

"What's the scope?"

"Public announcements, registration notices, event descriptions, inter-House correspondence, the public-facing schedule." Maki paused.

"Internal memos and contingency drafts, I'll review myself."

"Understood." She said it evenly, almost like she'd been waiting for exactly that. Then she glanced down at the selection materials and added:"If you'd like the wording polished until it sounds like the school genuinely cares about student honor, I can help with that too." I nearly choked.

"You do sarcasm now?" She looked up, expression as composed as ever.

"I'm simply stating a fact."

"Coming from you, that carries some real bite." Maki took it without blinking.

"Good. It's yours, then." Maybe it was just me, but Hedwig's nod seemed a shade crisper than usual — like what she'd just been handed wasn't only a task, but a more legitimate, more official reason to sit at this table.... Fine. The breakfast was eaten, she was already in the room — it was a little late to be surprised that she'd slotted into the meeting's core this naturally. My turn came next. I didn't need my name called before I sat up. I knew this pattern too well.

The more the assignments before mine sounded like jobs a functioning civilization might actually create, the higher the odds mine would land somewhere no human should have to stand.

"Shimo."

"Here." She pushed an entire stack across. Generous. Generous enough that I wondered if she'd spent the previous night planning her revenge for everything I'd said at the gate.

"You've got Cross-Unit Coordination." I narrowed my eyes.

"... Translation?"

"Translation," she said, unblinking, "the loudest, most contentious, least-likely-to-cooperate-on-its-own piece — that's yours."

"That translation's a little too honest." Maki proceeded as though she hadn't heard, listing off items.

"Confirming Upper and Lower House preliminary rosters, tracking event-by-event participant responses, resolving schedule conflicts, logging absences, emergency contacts, last-minute reshuffles, and—" her fingertip tapped a blank form — "collecting complaints and feedback from every group." I tipped my chair back.

"Why's that last one landing on me?"

"Because you're the most patient."

"Do you have some fundamental misunderstanding of who I am?" I pointed at myself.

"Which part of me looks patient?"

"You don't need to be patient," she said, mild.

"You just need to understand people. And you do — you can tell which complaints are noise, and which ones are actually about to blow up." Damn it. Direct hit. The hardest part of the Council was never the paperwork itself. It was the paperwork that talks — which is to say, people.

Especially once Upper House–Lower House rivalry, representative eligibility, shared-subject rankings, and who gets to compete and who doesn't got mixed in, and every kind of complaint — noise, bitterness, grievance, backdoor scheming — came flooding in together. Sending me was, unfortunately, more reasonable than sending Roy to haggle, or Lan to beat someone over the head with a flowchart. So I resigned myself to it.

"... Fine. I'll do it."

"One more thing." I looked up. She was watching me, tone as level as handing over another blade.

"On-site troubleshooting's also yours."

"What does that mean, exactly?"

"Literally," she said.

"If either side loses someone at the last minute, if a conflict escalates, if the record doesn't match what's happening on the ground, if a ruling needs someone to run and coordinate immediately — you go." Two seconds of quiet. Then, with total sincerity: "You're basically using me as the Council's universal wrench." This time, Maki actually laughed. Small, and a little wicked.

"You're only realizing this now?" Looking at that face — the one that clearly said isn't this obvious — I had a strong urge to upend the empty bento box over her head. Didn't dare, though. Partly because of the audience. Mostly, and more dangerously, because of how naturally she'd said it — natural in the way of someone who'd long since treated Shimo takes the worst of it as a premise not up for discussion. That kind of unspoken understanding is irritating sometimes.

What's worse is knowing you've been seen through and still having no grounds to deny it. I sighed.

"You're going to wear me out eventually."

"Relax." She spun her pen once.

"The Vice President isn't a consumable. She's a high-durability asset."

"That did nothing to comfort me." Beside us, Jess had given up any pretense of composure, folded over the desk, shoulders shaking.

"I can't — I think the President has a point."

"Shut it." I glared at her.

"You're an unaffiliated lifeform. You don't get a vote on my workplace injuries."

"Excuse me, I'm not unaffiliated anymore." She held up the minute book.

"I've been forcibly integrated into the system." Maki looked like she'd been waiting for exactly that line.

"Since you're so self-aware, perfect." Jess's smile froze.

"... I have a bad feeling."

"On top of minutes, you're also temporary liaison."

"Why!"

"Because you run fast, talk a lot, and aren't afraid of awkward situations," Maki said.

"All three happen to be ideal for carrying messages." I nodded immediately.

"Agreed." Lan added the finishing cut: "She's also perfect for inserting herself right when two sides are about to argue and making it worse."

"That's not a compliment!"

"It wasn't," Roy confirmed, fast. Jess clutched her chest, the picture of someone betrayed by her own organization.

"You people are terrifying."

"No," I corrected her.

"We're pathetic. The terrifying ones are whoever keeps dumping this on the Council."

"Is it too late to resign?" Maki looked at her, same line as always.

"Door's right there." Jess shut her mouth and went back to her page, resigned. Wonderful. Order restored, as always, through unambiguous threats. Once the assignments had mostly settled, the mood at the table shifted cleanly from suspiciously cozy breakfast into everyone's been handed their personal method of death. Roy sat with the budget and equipment forms, brow locked, clearly rehearsing next year's first fiscal war. Lan had the venue map spread open, already marking conflict points automatically in her head.

Hedwig quietly pulled the documents she needed, her focus sharpening slightly when her fingers reached the external text column. Jess held the minute book, wearing the expression of someone who'd wandered in to spectate and somehow signed a contract instead. And Maki — She sat at the head of the table, pen racing across a blank page, laying out the next three days with the calm of someone who'd scheduled this before she even got out of bed. Watching her, something close to a laugh rose in me.

"President."

"Hm?"

"Do you actually enjoy this — dragging everyone down with you at once?" Her pen paused. She looked up. Level, quiet, carrying a faint trace of what nonsense are you on about now. But I could still tell. She didn't deny it quickly. Finally, she just said: "I just don't like it when things get out of control."

"Oh?" I drew it out.

"So you handle that by personally taking away everyone's free time instead."

"If you don't want to do this, you can hand the Vice President seat back right now."

"No." The answer left my mouth faster than I expected. This time, she was the one looking at me. I looked back, and, since lying at this point would've been stupid, added the rest.

"Because I don't trust anyone else with the worst of it." The room went briefly quiet. Roy turned a page. Lan drew a line. Jess pretended to be very busy. Hedwig didn't say anything, but I had the sense her eyes lingered on us a beat longer than usual. Maki gave a small sound through her nose and pushed a new sheet toward me.

"Then shut up and get to it, Vice President."... Fine. That's her style. No praise, no sentiment, no room left for self-satisfaction — at most, right before you say something even more foolish, she slides the next stack into your hands. I looked down. Preliminary rosters. Contact sequence. Registration draft. Cross-House shared-subject comparison chart. Beautiful. Genuinely beautiful. Beautiful the way something systematically, deliberately built out of malice is beautiful.