Chương 28: 13.Breathing Blood in Heavy Gravity 13-3

Genuinely toxic. But genuinely her. I tipped my head back, closed my eyes, and let my brain do what it was going to do anyway—run both sessions back to back. Karl taught me: Don't lead with your face. Steal space. Steal rhythm. Stay alive first. Mira taught me: Don't chase the target. Read the wind. Read the path. Get there before it does. One taught me timing in close range. The other taught me timing at distance. Annoyingly, they connected. I opened my eyes and looked down at my hands resting on my knees.

The bruises were still coming in. Calluses would follow. Muscles would ache. My shoulder would stiffen. My brain was being trained into shapes that had nothing to do with what a normal fourteen-year-old should look like inside. But then—I was never a particularly normal girl. I was Hoshino Shimo. Private First Class. Cannon fodder. Mouthy. And, somewhat inconveniently, a fast learner. That last quality had not, so far, brought anything resembling happiness into my life.

But at least today it meant I hadn't just been unilaterally destroyed. I took another sip of cola, looked down at my own distorted reflection in the side of the can, and reached a conclusion.

"... Fine."

"If I'm going to be ground into a weapon, I'd rather be the kind that's hard to break." I heard myself say it and immediately felt slightly ill. That sounded like a character arc line. Deeply gross. So I added, immediately:"But the Federation can still go to hell." Much better. The wind system in the range was winding down in stages, the resonance of the metal rails fading note by note into silence. Under the cold white lights, Mira leaned against the metal wall outside the observation zone and lit another cigar.

The ember flared. From down the corridor came the sound of heavy footsteps. Karl. His stride was the same as always—deliberate, weighted, like a war machine that had never needed a stealth setting. His alloy left arm caught the cold light. The electronic undertone in his voice carried a faint low hum.

"You poached my session." Mira exhaled a slow breath of smoke, not bothering to lift her eyes.

"If you could've kept her functional past the first close-combat class, I wouldn't have needed to." Karl stopped beside her. His gaze moved to the wind field inside the range, now still.

"She can still fight."

"Of course she can still fight." Mira's voice was flat.

"That kid is a stray dog that'll turn around and bite the tire that just ran her over. Whether she can take it has never been the question." She turned her head and looked at him.

"The question is that you like breaking people too much." The red light in Karl's left eye pulsed once, faint.

"You have to break something to find out what can be rebuilt."

"That's exactly your problem." Mira made a sound that was almost a laugh—no warmth in it at all.

"You close-combat types always think tearing someone apart and putting them back together counts as education."

"And you shooting types always think standing back and pulling a trigger means you get to keep your brain."

"At least the people I train still own their minds before their shoulders give out." Karl turned to look at her.

"She was performing today. On the floor."

"I know," Mira said.

"When she wants to prove herself, she'll shift her weight early, press in early, commit early."

"I know that too."

"And you still pushed the wind speed up." Mira tapped ash off her cigar with one finger, her tone calm to the point of cruelty.

"Because if she doesn't learn to overheat under pressure, she'll never figure out how badly that habit gets in her way." She paused, then added:"And you saw it yourself. She's not just grinding through on stubbornness." Karl was quiet for two seconds.

"She learns fast."

"Too fast," Mira corrected.

"That's not pure talent. That speed means she's been reading environments and finding the rules in the shortest possible time—probably in conditions that weren't kind."

"Survival type."

"Exactly," Mira said.

"Not the clean reflexes you get out of a military academy. The kind that grows itself out of a garbage heap." Karl's alloy fingers contracted once, producing a faint metallic click.

"She has problems in close range."

"I know," Mira said.

"The moment she gets angry, the punch goes before she does. Her emotions hit the target before she arrives."

"And on your end." Mira exhaled smoke.

"Same problem with her shooting. That last shot was beautiful—but not because she was calm. Because she wanted me to see it." Karl turned toward the observation window. The wall inside was still marked with scorch burns from the thermal fusion rifle.

"So."

"So she has real potential and a real talent for getting herself killed," Mira said bluntly. Karl didn't argue. Because it was true. The corridor went quiet for a moment. Only the low hum of the ventilation system remained. Mira brought the cigar down and looked straight ahead. Her voice was flatter than before.

"The most valuable thing about her isn't speed."

"What is it?" Karl asked.

"She retains," Mira said.

"She doesn't just absorb a hit and move on. She files every single one away, takes it back, digests it, and brings it out the next day." The red light in Karl's left eye pulsed faintly.

"High plasticity."

"Yes," Mira nodded.

"Which is also the problem."

"Explain."

"She's too young," Mira said evenly.

"Young enough that she's still carrying something inconvenient." Karl looked at her. The corner of Mira's mouth curved slightly. Cold.

"Pride." The electronic undertone in Karl's voice dropped half a beat.

"That's not a flaw."

"Not in the right circumstances," Mira said.

"But this kid's pride isn't the clean kind. It's not honor. It's not discipline. It's not what they teach at the academy. What she has is survival pride. Filthy, hard, and very easy to use as kindling." Karl was quiet longer this time. When he finally spoke, it was one sentence:"That's exactly why you break it." Mira laughed—thin, carrying the faint smell of gunpowder.

"There it is," she said, tilting her head at him.

"You always think shattering something solves the problem." This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

"Usually does."

"Usually doesn't," Mira said.

"Some things don't get stronger when you shatter them. They just bleed out." Karl's gaze settled on her face. Cold.

"And your method." Mira crushed the cigar out. The ember left one last dim red point in the alloy ashtray.

"Push her. Drive her. Make her fast. Make her accurate. Make her recognize the exact moment she starts losing control," she said.

"But don't beat her down until instinct is all she has left."

"Instinct keeps you alive."

"Pure instinct can't lead anyone," Mira shot back immediately. That landed in the air and stayed there. Karl's training philosophy was simple— Stay alive. Hold on. Don't break. Everything else is secondary. Mira's was different. She didn't just want survival. She wanted judgment intact under maximum pressure. Karl looked at her. The voice behind the mask didn't shift.

"You think she can lead?"

"Not now," Mira said.

"But she has the spark for it."

"All I see is a stray dog that bites." Mira looked up.

"That's because you always look at the teeth first," she said.

"I'm watching whether she lets go after she locks her jaw." Karl went quiet. This silence lasted longer than the ones before it. Finally, the electronic voice came back.

"With me, she learns to endure." Mira straightened her gloves and turned to leave.

"Then with me, she learns not to mistake enduring for winning." Two steps out, she stopped. Didn't turn around. Just dropped one last line into the corridor behind her.

"And tomorrow afternoon—she's mine." The red light in Karl's left eye flickered.

"I didn't agree to that." Mira raised one hand and waved it dismissively, like brushing away uninteresting smoke.

"Then learn to accept reality, tin can." And she was gone. Leaving behind a straight, cold silhouette at the end of the corridor, and a faint trace of cigar smoke that hadn't quite cleared. Karl stood where he was, watching the direction she'd gone. Several seconds passed before he turned back to the range—to the wall inside, blackened where the thermal fusion rifle had burned through. Inside the electronic pupil, the red light contracted once. The way a system does when it finishes logging a new entry.

—Sample: viable. —Stability: insufficient. —Assessment: worth continued refinement. At 0500 the next morning, I was woken up by my own body. Not the cute kind of sore you get from overdoing it at the gym. No. The kind where every muscle group had submitted a formal resignation letter, and the Federal HR department had rejected all of them. I lay there staring at the ceiling for three seconds and seriously considered playing dead. The medical infrastructure here was too good for that.

They'd resuscitate me and add extra sessions. So I got up. The face in the mirror looked fresh in the way a small animal looks fresh when it's just been retrieved from an accident site. Faint shadows under the eyes. A thin line at the corner of my mouth where Karl's alloy knuckles had caught me yesterday. Silver hair wrecked like something had breathed a shockwave through it. I stared at myself for two seconds and arrived at one conclusion. Fourteen. Young. Cute.

Currently on a high-gravity garbage planet, preparing to fight monsters who are at least sixty percent rebuilt. My life trajectory was genuinely inspiring enough to make a person tear up. The moment the close-combat training hall opened, heat and the smell of iron came at me together. Karl was already standing in the center of the floor. Two meters of him, like a mobile alloy wall. Metal mask locked over the left half of his face. Dark red sensor light blinking in the hollow of the eye socket.

It didn't feel like a person standing there. More like a large industrial accident that had learned to walk and picked up a part-time teaching position. He saw me. No greeting. No warmup pleasantries. Not even the performative human decency of rough day yesterday, kid. The electronic voice came at me directly.

"Hoshino. Step out."... Great. Not even a warmup. The Federation valued efficiency above all things. When I stepped forward, the cadets beside me looked at me the way people look at someone who just drew the short straw at a ritual. I wanted to give them the finger, but I still needed my hands to eat lunch, so I held off. Karl crooked one finger at me.

"What did you learn yesterday?" I stood across from him. Shoulder still quietly aching. Mouth already moving.

"I learned the Federation has very little interest in minor protection laws." A few people in the back row nearly laughed, then swallowed it back hard. Karl didn't laugh. The metal half of his face wasn't really built for it.

"Wrong," he said.

"You learned you're slow." The next second, he moved. It wasn't a lunge. It was more like a demolition machine that had decided my particular wall was in the way. I sidestepped on instinct. My foot had barely left the ground when the wind from his fist swept past my ear—heavy enough that the air felt torn. I didn't try to block. Yesterday had already demonstrated that arguing physics with military-grade alloy using my own bones was a deeply immature form of self-destruction.

I dropped low, stepped back, rotated my shoulder. Karl's leg swept through. The 1. 5G nearly pinned me straight back to the floor.

"Hold your ground," he said, cold as ever.

"Stop moving like a piece of paper that can scream." You're paper. Your whole family is industrial-grade sandpaper. I bit down, reset my breathing. Yesterday I'd been thrown around like a rag in a storm. Today was different. Today I at least knew: before Karl committed to a right-hand strike, his right shoulder dropped slightly first. Before he loaded his left leg, his pelvis shifted forward a fraction.

His cybernetic eye was cold as a morgue light—but every time he was about to land something real, that red light flared for just a beat. He was fast in a way that had no interest in being fair. But anything that moved before it arrived wasn't completely unreadable. You just had to survive long enough to read it. I took two more hits. First one landed on the shoulder. My whole arm went numb instantly. Second one grazed my ribs.

My vision went dark at the edges and I nearly concluded my internal organs were filing for external relocation. The whole class had gone quiet. Public execution quiet. I exhaled and cut right—one step in. Not back. In. The moment Karl's fist punched through empty air where my head had been, I didn't freeze and curl.

For the first time, I ran the route I'd rehearsed a hundred times in my head: dropped my center, left hand came up to deflect his forearm, right fist drove straight into the gap between his chest and abdomen where the armor plating didn't quite meet. Thud. Solid like punching a taxed armored door. But I had hit it. In that moment, the red light in Karl's cybernetic eye flared visibly. Not a malfunction. Surprise. Unfortunately, the surprise lasted less than half a second.

The next moment his other hand closed around my wrist and flipped me. The world inverted. My back hit the mat hard enough to drive every cubic centimeter of air out of my lungs at once, and I nearly went to meet every bad decision I'd ever made.

"Too slow," Karl said, looking down at me. Same cold voice.

"But that wasn't zero." I was flat on the mat, chest hammering like someone was playing drums inside it. I laughed anyway.

"Wow, thank you," I said, voice wrecked.

"Should I get that framed? Put it above my bunk?" Karl ignored me and turned to the class.

"Rotate through. Watch how she stays alive. Then watch how you die." The second half of the session became a collective demonstration in getting taken apart. Everyone went up in rotation. Everyone got disassembled in a different way—some thrown, some shoulder-locked, some dropped to their knees by a knee strike before they'd even closed the distance. I sat against the wall catching my breath, one hand pressed to my still-throbbing ribs, watching and filing everything away. Angles. Rhythm. Feints.

Weight distribution. Karl wasn't teaching how to fight. He was teaching how not to get turned into a pile of meat. The difference was roughly the distance between table manners and battlefield scavenging. By the time he called me up the second time, I wasn't the same idiot who'd been grinding through on stubbornness at the start. I was still in pain. Still scared. Still wanted to pack this entire class and its instructor into a cargo pod and launch it into deep space. But I was starting to understand.

Don't meet his force head-on. Watch the shoulder line, not the fist. In 1. 5G, cutting one unnecessary movement meant eating half a punch less. On the third exchange, I actually got one through. Nothing elegant. Just—when he stepped in to close the distance, I deliberately opened my left side, waited for the commitment, pulled inward as his fist grazed my shoulder, and drove my elbow hard into the seam between his lower chest armor plates. The sound was dull, like hitting a munitions crate with a small hammer.

He didn't move back. Of course he didn't. If I could send this man anywhere with a single elbow, the Federation's entire defense budget should go into poultry farming. But he paused. Half a beat. Just that. Karl looked down at me. The red light flicked once.

"... Improvement." Four words, extracted from that mouth, were as rare as the Defense Ministry issuing a genuine apology. I held through the feeling that my shoulder was splitting apart and gave him a smile.

"Thank you for the feedback," I said.

"I'll work hard to survive until graduation so I can fill out your teaching evaluation form." Karl was silent for two seconds. Then he punched me into the air again. When I hit the crash padding this time, I somehow still had enough left to reach a conclusion on the way down. Right. Good. I actually learned something. The tuition was just paid in body parts. In the afternoon, it was Mira's turn. Technically, "turn" wasn't the right word.

She had walked in wearing military boots and taken the schedule directly out of Karl's hands. I was leaning against the wall drinking water when the training hall door opened—throat still carrying a faint taste of blood. Mira came in wearing her dark grey tactical jacket, the cybernetic eye lit with a thin blue light, cigar in her mouth as always, moving like a natural disaster with a bad temper and an exceptional hit rate. She swept one look over me and opened with a line that was entirely her.

"Lend her to me." Karl didn't even look over.

"She's still in one piece."

"That's exactly why now." Do you two hear yourselves. I'm a person. Not a freshly machined component. Ten minutes later, I was inside the shooting range. The simulation pod was a massive metal canister specifically engineered to manufacture psychological damage. The wind pressure units around the perimeter were growling low. The overhead rails had already begun feeding in shrapnel rounds. Mira tossed a thermal fusion rifle into my arms, and the weight nearly reintroduced me to gravity on the spot.

"Extra today," she said. I looked at her.

"Can I say no?" She exhaled a slow breath of smoke and looked at me the way you'd look at a creature that had just asked a genuinely stupid question.

"You can," she said.

"I'll log it as insufficient psychological stress tolerance—recommend reassignment to logistics for document folding practice." I stood there holding the rifle—which felt like it had a personal grudge against me—and said nothing for two seconds.

"... Start it up." The corner of Mira's mouth pulled slightly. The smile was faint and entirely mean.

"Wind speed," she said.

"One-eighty." I thought I'd misheard.

"How much?"

"180 km/h," she said, unhurried.

"What—your eardrums filing for discharge too?" The next second, the pod activated. The wind didn't blow. It scraped—like someone dragging a blade directly across skin. Metal dust, fine alloy shards, heat waves, and low-frequency vibration all hit at once. My field of vision was shredded into ragged grey in an instant. I'd barely lifted the rifle when the first wave of high-velocity fragments came in from above and to the side—a swarm of silver hornets with a specific agenda. First shot. Wide. Second shot. Grazed.

Third shot finally connected—the white-hot thermal beam dissolved the fragment into a bright, twisted smear of light.

"Too slow!" Mira's voice hit my ear through the comm.

"Stop chasing the fragment's ass—predict the line! You're not shooting targets, you're racing the wind for your life!" I bit down. My wrists were aching from the shock. Another wave. Faster. I was running almost entirely on instinct now. Not aiming—letting my body decide before my brain caught up. Two high-speed refracted fragments at three o'clock to the right: drop head, rotate wrist, two shots. One fragment pushed off-course by turbulence from the upper left: follow-up shot.

A ricochet near my feet clipped past my shin and took a strip of burning pain with it. Warning lights strobed inside the pod. Mira's voice kept coming.

"Don't trust your eyes. Trust the rhythm."

"Drop your center."

"Wind changed direction—are you a plank of wood?"

"Good. That one was clean."

"One more shot that ugly and I'll nail you and the rifle to the wall together." How did this woman manage to make every single sentence sound like both instruction and a death threat simultaneously. I was breathing hard inside the storm, sweat and grit sticking to my neck, shoulder burning like something was slowly on fire inside it. But somewhere in the middle of all that—in one strange, specific moment—I actually caught the rhythm. Not through courage. Not through talent.

Because I'd been pushed until there was no other direction left to go. The wind-shear started to feel regular. The reflections off the fragments became predictable. The thermal fusion rifle—heavy, mean, relentless—stopped being something dragging me down and became something I'd finally learned to move with. Like a bad-tempered animal I'd figured out how to work alongside. When the final wave of fragments flooded in, I barely thought. Raise the barrel. Step forward. Fire. Three. Five. Seven.

The last one clipped past my ear. I brought the rifle around and caught it with a follow-up shot—the thermal beam hit it mid-air and turned it into a brief white flower that collapsed almost instantly. The alarm cut out. As the pressure inside the pod bled down slowly, my knees nearly went. The rifle stock was still against my shoulder, burning hot. I pulled in air in long, rough pulls, like I'd just been hauled up from underwater. Two seconds of silence from the comm. Then Mira's voice.

"... Better than I expected." Coming from her, that was roughly equivalent to someone else throwing you a graduation party. I wiped the sweat off my jaw and laughed once, still catching my breath.

"The way you compliment people really does feel like slow poisoning."

"Because you haven't earned sugar yet." When the pod door opened, I felt like I'd been run across a grinding wheel. But I knew—I wasn't the same as yesterday. Karl had beaten me until I understood how not to take hits for free. Mira had driven me until I understood how to fire in a storm. The Federal special operations camp's educational philosophy, stripped down to its core, was actually very simple. If we don't damage you a little today, we can't reshape you into what we need tomorrow.