Chương 78: 32.Late-Notice Attachment 32-1

Three days until Forest School. The next morning, I woke up on the Lower House mixed dorm's broken balcony. Strictly speaking, I didn't literally wake up there. My body woke up in bed; my soul got dragged out onto the balcony by cold wind and reality working in tandem. The early air carried a trace of dampness. Someone was already running laps on the distant field, footsteps as regular as a funeral march for youth.

I stood on the balcony in athletic shorts, no shirt, arms raised toward the sun just cresting behind the academic buildings.

"Praise the sun…" I muttered while stretching my legs, feeling like a cultist in a questionable mental state. Couldn't be helped. Too much had happened these past few days — rumor explosions, failed appeals, negotiations with Linde, team restructuring — and now only three days left before being packaged up and shipped to a tropical rainforest planet that got firestormed clean every seventy-two hours.

If you didn't find your own entertainment, this school would eventually train you into an emotionally evacuated instructional prop. I'd just finished my second set of stretches when rapid knocking erupted from the dorm door. Bang. Bang-bang. Bang-bang-bang. Less knocking, more like someone conducting psychological warfare with their knuckles. I frowned and glanced back inside.

"Who's delivering death notices at this hour…" The knocking stopped. A voice that had been reliably spiking my blood pressure lately came through the door.

"H— Hoshino Shimo. Are you in?" I froze. Shit. Linde. I looked down at myself and remembered I still wasn't wearing a shirt — just a towel over one shoulder and hair that looked like it had survived a small explosion. The bastard actually has manners? My expression went flat. I grabbed the T-shirt off the chair back, pulled it on while walking to the door, and yanked it open.

There was Linde Hoffmann, holding a tablet, uniform mostly intact except for one collar button clearly fastened wrong, sweat at his temple like something had chased him all the way from the faculty offices to the first-year mixed dorms. The General Affairs Officer showing up at a first-year dorm door at dawn was absurd enough. More absurd was that he looked slightly afraid of me.

"You'd better have a sufficiently reasonable explanation," I said, leaning against the doorframe and staring at him.

"Otherwise I'll be delighted to help you file for medical leave today." Linde's jaw twitched. He tried to compress his expression back into that standard bureaucratic death mask and failed.

"Your… your teammate. Cyrus. There's been a change." I went blank for a second.

"What?" Then the anger came up clean and fast.

"Say that again, motherfucker." I stepped forward. Linde instinctively stepped back, nearly dropping his tablet. I genuinely thought he had nerve — just yesterday he'd conceded on the grouping and functional annotations, and now he was at my door before sunrise to announce another problem. Did he really think I was some emotionally stable model cadet? A bedspring creaked behind me.

"Hoshino, don't cripple him yet." This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work. Jess's head appeared over the edge of the upper bunk, hair in complete chaos, eyes only half-online, voice somehow perfectly clear.

"Ask first. Hit later." …This woman was more ruthless than I was. Linde's Adam's apple jumped. He forced himself to continue.

"Cyrus had a recurrence of a prior condition last night. He was hospitalized in the early hours. He's confirmed unable to participate in this Forest School cycle." I stared at him for two seconds.

"Great timing," I said coldly.

"Fine all year, picks this exact moment to collapse." That was unkind, but my mood was terrible and I wasn't performing decency. Three days to departure and a teammate suddenly hospitalized — nothing about that sounded like normal bad news. This school had a particular quality where things going wrong at precisely the worst moment were rarely coincidences. I crossed my arms and narrowed my eyes.

"So?"

"So…" Linde hesitated.

"If you're willing to proceed with a three-person configuration—""Feeling brave, are we?" I reached out and patted him on the head, tone as gentle as comforting a small animal about to be euthanized.

"Why don't you just split the three of us into separate solo assignments? More efficient. Saves time we'd otherwise spend dragging each other down."

"In theory…" Linde actually started considering it. My fist nearly clenched on the spot.

"In theory it's not entirely—""Excellent." I turned to look at Jess, gestured at the door.

"Close it. Release the hound."

"Copy that." Jess sat up, threw off her blanket, and swung her legs toward the ladder with the focused expression of someone genuinely prepared to help dispose of a body.

"Wait wait wait—!" Linde finally broke, flinching back and raising the tablet like a shield.

"That's not what I meant! There's a replacement applicant!" I stopped. Jess held her position with one foot on the ladder rung, eyebrow raised. Linde, apparently afraid we'd start moving again, accelerated:"I only received the medical confirmation this morning, along with a replacement application. The applicant came forward voluntarily, requesting to join Group 144. I came to notify you first."

"Voluntarily?" I frowned.

"What kind of brain-damaged idiot volunteers to jump into our group?"

"Rude question," Jess added from behind, "but I'd also like to know." Linde ignored the commentary, looked down and swiped at his tablet. Too nervous — his hand slipped, the screen tilted, he corrected it, then gave up and just transferred the data directly to my personal terminal. My terminal buzzed. I opened it. One second in, my frown deepened.

"…Seriously?" Linde stood in the doorway looking like an overworked office drone bombed awake by paperwork before dawn, voice dry.

"The file is accurate."

"That's not the issue." I looked up at him.

"I mean, shouldn't a princess like this be exempt from our kind of bullshit exercises?" This time Linde answered fast, like he'd rehearsed the line.

"Upper House students participate in Forest School on a voluntary basis. Most opt for fleet internships, staff observation tours, or short administrative placements. Ground survival courses are not required."

"Which is exactly why I'm asking." I held up the terminal.

"So why the sudden death wish?" Linde went quiet, visibly weighing which answer was least likely to get him hit.

"The application states — interest in Lower House mixed-unit field assessment." Jess had already dropped from the bunk, grabbed a jacket, and come to stand beside me. I angled the terminal toward her. She looked for one second and her head snapped up like she'd been shocked.

"Upper House?" Her voice went up half a pitch.

"The Kushima family? Are you serious?" She looked again, like confirming she was actually awake.

"No, hold on — people from that tier only show up on school newsletter covers, Academy donor lists, and contribution walls that the rest of us will never afford in our lifetimes."

"That's harsh, Jess," I said.

"But accurate," she shot back instantly. I ignored her and looked at the terminal again. White background, black text, standard formatting, cold as a death notice. The name still stood out. Upper House — Fleet Management Division Maki Kushima I stared at that name, and something cold settled in my stomach. Not because of who she was. Because none of this felt right from any angle. The last thing I needed right now wasn't one fewer person.

It was one more person I didn't know at all, almost certainly complicated in ways I couldn't calculate, being forced into my survival radius. Especially someone from the Upper House. Those white-uniform people up in the Upper House have never breathed the same air as us down in the Lower House. They get better classrooms, cleaner dorms, brighter lights—even the sound of their footsteps in the hallway costs more than ours.

And now you're telling me some Kushima family daughter voluntarily applied to transfer into our mixed survival group? Either she's lost her mind. Or this school is screwing with me again. I looked up at Linde.

"You better not be fucking with me." Linde's face went stiff. He shook his head immediately.

"I have no reason to falsify something like this. The transfer application has already cleared procedure. As long as your group doesn't file a formal objection—""We can object?" I cut in immediately.

"…In theory, you can raise a grievance."

"In theory?" Jess gave a thin smile.

"That kind of phrasing usually translates to: you're welcome to write the appeal, and we'll ignore it very politely." Linde's mouth twitched. He didn't deny it. So Jess had translated pretty accurately. I clicked my tongue, shut off the terminal, and leaned back against the doorframe.

"So bottom line: Cyrus is out, you people have stuffed an Upper House princess into our group, and I'm supposed to accept that calmly?"

"It's not 'you people stuffed her in,'" Linde corrected quietly.

"She applied voluntarily."

"Does that make a difference?"

"…Procedurally speaking, yes." I really wanted to kick him. Jess could tell. She stepped forward half a pace, positioning herself naturally at my side—the universal stance for if you throw a punch, I'll handle the hallway.