Chương 21: 11.Warm Welcome with a Fist 11-1

The Federation's honesty is genuinely nauseating.

"Let's hear it."

"If you participate in actual combat now, you'll be classified as external testing personnel," he said, tone level as a weather report.

"No formal support allocation. No priority extraction rights. Mission abort criteria will not prioritize your preservation." I closed my eyes and took a slow breath. In plain language: You can go. We won't stop you. But if you die, that's just a cost-effective test failure. I opened my eyes and looked at him.

"So Option Two is essentially live-deployment human experimentation."

"That's one way to understand it."

"And Option One?"

"Higher-intensity training. Delayed field deployment. In exchange for more complete equipment, clearance, and survival odds." I went quiet for a moment. Right. One: straight into the meat grinder. The other: get sharpened first, then into the meat grinder. Looks like a fork in the road. Really just asking whether you want to die cheap now or expensive later. I couldn't help laughing. Not because anything was funny.

Because the institutional design was so comprehensively rotten it looped back around to something almost worth admiring.

"Sir," I said, "this system is genuinely impressive. There's no real choice here, but you've managed to phrase it like you're respecting personal autonomy."

"It's a necessary procedure."

"Necessary how?"

"Necessary," Wiesland said, grey eyes calm as frozen water, "because you have to admit it to yourself. That you don't want to die yet." The room went quiet for a beat. Shit. That sentence was irritating. Irritating precisely because it was accurate. I can talk back. Roll my eyes. Curse the Federation down to ash. But I genuinely don't want to die right now. Not because I'd suddenly developed a profound love of living.

Because I know exactly what happens if I get thrown into external testing at my current level—dying wouldn't be heroic or meaningful. It would just be one cold line in the doctor's report: Sample terminated. Data recovery complete. Too pathetic. I looked down at the two options on the table. Option One. Option Two. Like a visual novel branching menu—except every path leads to a bad ending. I was quiet for a few seconds, then tapped Option Two.

"If I were stupid enough to pick this right now, would you stop me?"

"No."

"The doctor?"

"He'd be pleased."

"Of course." That answer was damnably complete. I stared at those two lines and suddenly thought of Warehouse 6A. The smell of dirty socks. The shower ceasefire negotiations. Those days that were terrible and loud and aggressively alive. If I chose field deployment now and died in some external operation nobody would even number—I wouldn't even get the chance to go back and complain about those people. No. At least not like that. I reached out and pulled Option One toward me on the light screen.

"Fine," I said.

"I choose One." Wiesland didn't speak. Just watched me, like he was waiting for me to finish the sentence myself. I knew exactly what he was waiting for. Annoying. I exhaled, pulling my mouth into a dry smile.

"Not because I enjoy training," I said.

"And not because I've suddenly decided to be a model soldier." The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

"I know."

"I just don't want to die this cheaply." Wiesland nodded.

"That's enough." That phrase again. But this time I understood it. In this place, you don't need to be noble. You don't need to be great. You don't need to be patriotic. You just need to know clearly why you're still holding on. That's enough. I looked at Option One, now pulled in front of me, and felt a strange urge to laugh. So-called choices. So-called futures. So-called opportunities.

In the end, it's just the Federation putting a blade to your throat and asking, very politely: Would you prefer to walk forward yourself, or shall we give you a small push? I raised my hand and pressed confirm. Option One / Confirmed. The screen flashed, then populated with a new schedule. Earlier wake-up. Longer training hours. More special-category markers. And at the bottom, a line short enough to read like a curse: Phase One Extended Training. Effective tomorrow, 0500. I stared at that 0500 for two seconds.

Then looked up slowly.

"…You want me suffering before the sun has even clocked in?"

"You'll adjust."

"I hope you come back as an alarm clock in your next life."

"At least I'd be punctual." …Fuck. This man has a genuine talent for making you want to hit him with a slipper. He picked up the datapad and turned toward the door. Just as it opened, I spoke.

"Sir." He stopped without turning around.

"What." I leaned against the sofa, watching his back, keeping my tone as obnoxious as usual.

"Next time you want to give me a multiple-choice question, at least hide the wrong answer a little better." The figure at the door was still for half a second. Then I clearly saw his shoulders shift—barely. Like he was laughing. Or maybe I imagined it.

"Noted," he said.

"Next time I'll package it more attractively." Then he left. The door closed in front of me. The room settled back into quiet—just the low hum of the refrigerator and the new schedule glowing cold on the table. I stared at that 0500 for a long time. Then finally reached for the cherry cola I hadn't gotten around to opening. The tab cracked with a sharp click. I tipped it back. Cold sweetness slid down my throat, briefly pressing down whatever rotten thing had been sitting in my chest.

Then I looked down at my reflection in the black aluminum and let out one slow conclusion.

"…Right."

"Looks like the price of staying alive is learning to live a little more like hell first." Outside, Dunan's pure white skyline still gleamed. Twelve Skyshields cast silver-blue light in the distance—like divine rings that would always hang too high above to bother looking down. When the transport pod touched down, I already knew something was wrong. Not the oh, today's going to be tiring kind of wrong.

The kind where even the metal seat under you is sending a message: you're about to get punched in the face by an entire planet. The hull hadn't fully settled when the structure started groaning—not a malfunction, but that specific ominous sound of metal under compression, like someone had taken the whole transport and was slowly wringing it into the ground. The indicator lights overhead cycled from white to yellow to red, finally settling on a deep amber that made you want to write a will.

I sat in my restraint harness, the safety strap digging into my ribs, and checked the cabin display. Surface gravity: 1. 52G External atmosphere: restrictively survivable Particulate density: hazardous Recommendation: respiratory filtration required at all times … Right. This wasn't a training center. This was what you'd get if the Federation Ministry of Defense co-developed an employee education campus with hell. I reached to the side and picked up the respirator they'd issued.

The mask was hard, cold as a dead man's forehead, and smelled inside of new plastic mixed with antiseptic. I stared at it for a second and suddenly missed the communal bath in Warehouse 6A—the one so biologically hostile it could have qualified as chemical warfare. At least that air wouldn't grind your alveoli into metal paste in ten minutes. The cabin announcement came on.

"All personnel, attention. We have arrived at the Federal Special Operations Training Center, Outer Ring Landing Pad Three. Repeat: Outer Ring Landing Pad Three. Personnel without respiratory filtration are prohibited from disembarking. Inhalation injuries resulting from personal negligence will not receive priority medical response from this base." … Wow. Even the welcome speech has that Federation flavor. Really makes you feel at home. I snapped the mask into place.

The seal locked with a clean click, and a ring of pale blue readout indicators lit up along my peripheral vision. When the filtration system activated, the first breath that came through was dry, cold, and carried the metallic aftertaste of industrial equipment fresh from a maintenance cycle. The transport finally settled fully. The impact wasn't violent. It was heavy. Not a jolt. A press. Like the ship didn't so much land as get grabbed by the planet's gravity and shoved, impatiently, into the ground.

The forward hatch began unlocking. Red lights slid down both sides of the door as the metal latches popped open one by one. Outside pressure was equalizing—a low hiss moved through the hull, like something massive drawing breath. Then the door opened. The first gust hit me like sandpaper dragged across my face. Even through the mask, I felt the texture of it. Particulate. Iron-rust smell. Sulfur.

And something else—the scorched reek of an entire industrial wasteland being slow-cooked by a sun that had no interest in being gentle. I looked out. The sky was lead-grey. Not overcast grey. Metal grey. Like someone had re-welded the entire sky with slag steel—heavy, low, the light pressed flat and dead, the whole world looking like cooling scrap that hadn't finished hardening. On the distant horizon, a black wall was slowly moving. I stared at it for two seconds before I understood. That wasn't a mountain range.

That was a storm. A metallic tempest carrying iron shards and electrical arcs, pushing across a basalt wasteland. Occasionally a blue-white discharge would flash at the base of the cloud layer, like someone drawing a thin line across the sky with a blade. The ground was worse than the sky. The landing pad was a fusion of black alloy and basalt, its surface covered in scratches, impact craters, and the stress fractures left by thermal expansion and contraction.

Beyond it: a dark-grey desert with no visible end, no grass, no trees, nothing that looked like civilization had ever found reason to stay. Just black rock formations, crevasses that dropped into nothing, and in the distance, a lake that glowed a sick green—like a piece of glass in the early stages of rot. I looked at that landscape and arrived at exactly one thought. Fuck. The Federation isn't here to train me. It's planning to bury me first and see what grows. The people ahead were already disembarking.

I unclipped my harness, grabbed my bag, stood, and walked toward the hatch. The moment my boot hit the surface of this planet for the first time, I nearly went down. Heavy. Not ordinary heavy. The kind where your body—the one you've taken for granted your entire life—has apparently had lead poured into every bone while you weren't paying attention, and now simply standing upright feels like arm-wrestling the planet's core. My shoulders dropped. My knees buckled.

My spine felt like an invisible hand had just pressed it several centimeters closer to the ground. The bag in my right hand plunged, my arm muscles locked hard, and my stomach dropped half an inch with it. I clenched my jaw and forced my knees back up before I could make my entrance as new recruit collapses at hatch door. … Right. Very good. First step and the planet almost turned me into a dog. Now I understood. When Wiesland, that bastard, said more brutal, more demanding training—he wasn't speaking rhetorically.

He meant the geography. I let out a slow breath. Through the mask, my own breathing sounded close. Every inhale felt like a reminder: the air here doesn't want you, the gravity here doesn't want you, the scenery here doesn't want you. The only thing this planet welcomes is lunatics who want to turn other people into weapons.

And I—Hoshino Shimo, Private First Class, fourteen years old, one week out of the First Special Operations Division's cult altar—was now dragging my not-quite-fully-repaired skeleton and what remained of my dignity into the Federation's next layer of hell. … Bright future ahead.