Chương 68: 28.Guardian Field Cannot Be Blank 28-1

My head was loud the whole walk to the faculty office. Not the outside. The outside was excessively normal. Morning formation had just broken, and the routes in front of the academic building were doing exactly what they did every day — funneling a bunch of half-awake, not-quite-human cadets toward whichever classrooms they were scheduled to rot in. Grey uniforms streamed left, Upper House whites peeled off to the other side.

Footsteps, low complaints, the rustle of schedule sheets, the light clink of metal fittings — everything moving according to the Academy's preset rhythm. The sun was bright, the wind was cold, the lane markings were sharp, and the thin reflection on the distant glass curtain wall gleamed like someone up there was slowly honing a blade. Everything was normal. Normal enough to pretend last night hadn't happened at all.

I tucked the clipboard under my arm and headed toward the administration wing, keeping my pace at that not-too-fast, not-too-slow sweet spot that said: I heard my name on the announcement, I'm going where I'm told, but I'd prefer not to look like I'm on my way to sentencing. Tricky balance. Walk too fast and you look guilty. Too slow and you look like you're asking for it. One of the Academy's greatest talents is forcing you to calculate political risk just to walk across the yard.

I ran through the possibilities in my head. Follow-up paperwork from off-campus day. Missing signatures on yesterday's forms. Supplementary equipment damage reports. A tactics instructor grabbing someone at random. Or some idiot on my floor having done something last night and someone miscopied the name. I listed them one by one, working hard to shove the one I least wanted to touch all the way to the bottom. The harder I shoved, the clearer it got. Last night's memory card. The old recorder.

The ice-blue light from the greenhouse. And Nikaido's head snapping around, that skin-stripping look. My hand went to my pocket on reflex. Empty. Good. The recorder only held those utterly boring test shots now — the kind that induced yawning on contact. The real card was tucked safely into That Time the Editorial Department Lost Their Minds and Made This Light Novel Title So Long. Unless the Academy suddenly decided to rediscover literature, it should be safe for the moment. Should.

Not a word with a great track record. The administration building wasn't the same species of architecture as the classrooms. The academic blocks, for all their rigidity, at least smelled like students going in and out. Admin was different. It always felt over-clean, like every breath of air had gone through document review — screened for emotion, impurities, and anything capable of giving a superior a headache — before being cleared for circulation. Once inside, even your footsteps changed.

Soles on the floor sounded less like walking, more like filing requests. A duty cadet was standing in the lobby. He glanced up at me, then down at his list.

"Hoshino Shimo?"

"Yeah."

"Second floor, third office. Knock before entering." Like I'd been planning to kick it in. I nodded and headed for the stairs. The metal railing was realistically cold. The stairwell was quiet enough to pass for a morgue before opening hours. A few ancient motivational plaques hung on the walls, neat lettering, hollow content — discipline, honor, order, obedience — lined up like incantations designed to cinch your brain tight. One of them read "Discipline Begins With the Self."

I looked at it and had to swallow a laugh. This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. Discipline Begins With the Self. Slap those words on the greenhouse door last night — now that would've been educational. By the time I hit the second floor, my palms were sweating. Annoying. Not because I was afraid, exactly, but because your body is always more honest than your head.

Your brain can keep muttering: maybe it's nothing, maybe it's paperwork, maybe someone messed up, maybe the Federation has grown a conscience and decided to give you a certificate for Successfully Surviving Heavy Armor Class and Off-Campus Day. Your shoulders, your empty stomach, that light hollowness under the ribs — they all quietly inform you: cut the shit, you know it's not that. The second-floor corridor was even quieter than below. No students. No logistics carts trundling by.

Just the soft rustle of papers from some distant office and the steady, indifferent breath of the air conditioning. Plaques on the doors ticked past: Discipline, Curriculum, Practical Training Management, Student Records. Every word looked civil. Every one hid its own category of problem. I stopped at Office Three. The door was closed. Frosted glass glowed faintly from inside, hiding how many people were in there. This kind of door is the worst. It doesn't let you know nothing, and it doesn't let you know enough.

It just parks you at the exact depth needed for maximum imaginative disaster. I stood there for a couple seconds, slowed my breathing, straightened my cuffs. No panic. At least, keep it off your face. What I'd done last night wasn't stupid. It was dangerous. There's a difference. Stupid people walk in and confess with their posture. Dangerous people take stock of who's in the room before deciding whether their heart rate needs to look human. I counted to three and knocked.

"Come in." I knew that voice. Tactical Theory instructor. The man who could deliver full-ship boarding procedures in a tone suitable for funeral eulogies. When I pushed the door open, he was the first person I saw.

He stood behind the desk, uniform textbook-precise, a few pages spread under his hand, expression as flat as always — the kind of flat that made you suspect he'd use the same tone to announce that someone had just fallen from orbit onto the parade ground: please watch for impact, do not disrupt formation. Seeing it was just him gave me a very brief sense of relief. Very brief. About half a blink. Because the next second, I saw who was sitting in the chair off to the side. Linde Hoffmann.

Glasses on today, uniform as spotless as ever, collar measured to death, a file in his hand. Back to the standard nightmare behind the General Affairs window, the man who could send your forms back for rewrites four times in three sentences. Morning light from the side window hit the edge of his lenses, coldly bisecting his face back into the bureaucratic flatness I knew far too well. If I hadn't seen him differently last night, I might even have let it fool me. My hand was still on the doorknob.

For a split second, the most absurd thing about my morning wasn't the PA saying my name, or missing that blessedly boring tactics class. It was that Linde could sit there like this less than twelve hours after holding the Chair of the Disciplinary Committee in a greenhouse, wearing his best I have absolutely never embraced anyone at night among the plants skin. People don't get to be General Affairs Officer with thin skin. My eyes swept the room on reflex. No Nikaido. That mattered.

It mattered enough to drag my stomach lower. If she was here, this could still feel like some kind of confrontation. She wasn't. Linde was. The Tactical Theory instructor was. Paperwork was spread on the desk. That layout didn't feel like a runtime error from last night. It felt like a different category of trouble. Administrative trouble. Procedural trouble. The kind that looked reasonable on the surface and could hang you up to dry. The instructor looked up at me.

"Hoshino Shimo. Come in and close the door." I shut it, making the motion as ordinary as possible, then stepped forward and stopped in front of the desk. Linde looked up, too. Just once. Short, flat, standard. Like he was simply verifying which Lower House cadet had been called in, box ticked, ready to go back to being a pair of glasses attached to some paperwork. No hesitation. None of the stiffness you'd expect from someone who'd been caught last night. Not even the superficial "have I seen you before" flicker.

It pulled the wire down my spine tighter. Because there were only two real possibilities. One: he genuinely hadn't realized the person outside last night was me. Two: he had, and he was much better at pretending nothing had happened. Option two was worse. By a lot. I adjusted my grip on the clipboard before I cracked it. My heart was still fast, but not so fast I'd trip over my own tongue. That was something. At least some basic human functions remained.