Chương 79: 32.Late-Notice Attachment 32-2

"Linde," she said slowly, "I'd strongly suggest you choose your next words more carefully. Hoshino hasn't had breakfast yet, so her emotional state is highly unstable. And while I have eaten, I'm on her side."

"I'm just here to deliver the notification."

"See?" I told Jess.

"That's the whole art of being a General Affairs Officer. They hand you the bomb, then tell you they were just the courier."

"Beautifully put." Jess nodded.

"I'm writing that down. Might come in handy for my will." Linde closed his eyes for a moment—either exercising patience or regretting why he'd bothered to come in person. But in the end, he lowered his voice and added one more line:"She wasn't placed here." Jess and I both looked at him. Linde adjusted the tablet that was about to slide out of his grip. His expression was worse than before.

"She requested Group 144 specifically." The room went quiet for a second. Even Jess didn't come back with anything right away. I frowned.

"…What?"

"The intent field on the application form. She filled in your group number directly," Linde said.

"The reason field was left blank." Now I didn't even know which end to start cursing at. Upper House. Kushima family. Fleet Management track. Voluntarily enrolled in the live-deployment drill. And she'd specifically requested our Group 144. This was well beyond rich girl wants to experience how the other half lives. This was aimed at us. Deliberately. No—to be precise about it— This was aimed at me.

I stared at the black screen of the powered-down terminal and felt the morning sun suddenly lose whatever it had going for it.

"Linde."

"…Yeah?"

"If this turns out to be some brainless stunt cooked up by whatever department had a bad week," I said, lifting my head and giving him a very polite smile, "I promise you'll be the first to find out what happens next." Linde went pale.

"This one genuinely isn't me."

"It better not be." The words were barely out of my mouth before Jess added, perfectly calm, from beside me:"Hoshino. Don't throw any punches yet." I turned to look at her. She had her arms crossed, eyes fixed on the data on my terminal, and they were slowly narrowing.

"Wait until the Kushima girl actually shows up. See what she's after first." She paused, and the corner of her mouth lifted.

"Get your answers. Then decide who to hit." … Fair point. An extremely fair point. Good. Three days until the live-deployment drill. And my team had already started growing new problems. After Linde fled, the corridor returned to its version of normal.

Normal, in the Lower House mixed dorms first thing in the morning, meant a very specific kind of chaos: someone in one room hunting for a missing sock, someone in another reciting theory notes like they were reading a eulogy, and from the laundry room downstairs, the sound of someone running a spin cycle so hard it was threatening to achieve liftoff. I closed the door and leaned against it, looking down at the name on my terminal one more time. Maki Kushima.

Every time I read it, that feeling—what the actual fuck kind of joke is this—added another layer. Jess settled back onto the edge of her bed, raking her hair back with her jacket in hand, not fully awake yet, but already wearing her full this is going to be entertaining expression.

"So," she said, watching me.

"You look like someone just told you the cafeteria is switching to toothpaste-flavored soup starting today."

"I'd rather drink toothpaste soup." I tossed the terminal onto my bed.

"At least toothpaste soup doesn't voluntarily apply to join my team."

"You can't be sure of that." Jess propped her chin in her hand, delivering this with complete sincerity.

"What if the toothpaste soup also wants to do the live-deployment drill? Upper House, open enrollment—skip the fleet internship, come down and experience the common people's suffering."

"Are you asking to get hit?"

"Get in line. Lot of people might want to hit you today." I was about to fire something back when there was another knock at the door. Unhurried. Even. Knock. Knock. Knock. Three times. Evenly spaced. Like someone had measured it. Jess and I both went quiet at the same moment. She looked at me. I looked at her. Then she mouthed it, no sound at all: —She's here. Shit. She was actually here. I took a slow breath and glanced down at myself.

At least I'd put my shirt on this time—no repeat of the General Affairs Officer getting an early-morning view of a Lower House girl on the balcony praising the sunrise while doing topless calisthenics, leaving some kind of strange cultural impression on the school's administrative record. This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

"Want me to open the door for you," Jess said, perfectly even, "so you're less likely to throw a punch the second it's open?"

"Thanks, very considerate of you." I put my hand on the handle.

"My bigger concern is opening it and getting flash-blinded by all that white."

"Keep one eye closed, just in case." I pulled the door open. A girl was standing outside. More precisely: a girl who very clearly did not belong here. White Upper House uniform, the cut so clean it looked like someone had taken a blade directly to paper. Jacket buttoned to the top, collar perfectly flat, not a single unnecessary crease. Dark hair pulled back neatly, exposing a face that was almost aggressively clean.

Not the kind of striking looks that make people gasp she's gorgeous—more quiet, composed, her proportions precise enough that you found yourself wondering if she'd been calibrated before release. Behind her: one suitcase, one regulation-issue military pack. … Right. She'd brought her gear. Not here to ask for directions. Here to move in. Down the hallway, a few Lower House heads had already started poking out. Understandable.

An Upper House student appearing at a Lower House mixed dorm was roughly as incongruous as spotting a cruiser outside a chicken coop. And that was before you factored in the Kushima name. She looked at me. Her gaze was steady—none of the Upper House brand of high-minded sympathy, the kind that watches you like you're a traffic accident, and none of the performed warmth either. She simply confirmed, directly:"Hoshino Shimo?"

My first instinct was to say no, wrong room, this unit only contains one emotionally unstable problem child and one roommate whose specialty is finishing blows. I held it back.

"What do you want?" She gave a single nod, like completing a step in a checklist.

"I'm Maki Kushima." Her voice was quiet, each word cleanly articulated, flat to the point of being almost stripped bare.

"Transfer applicant for Group 144. As of today, assuming your group hasn't filed a formal rejection, I should be your new member." She said it like she was reading from a handover document. Not a trace of please take care of me warmth. No oh, it's my first time in the Lower House fragility. Not even the basic human social scaffolding of sorry to bother you. That alone revised my first impression of her from Upper House princess to high-specification problem entity.

Jess leaned out from behind my shoulder, took one look, pulled a breath, and her mouth did something honest and involuntary.

"Huh," she said.

"She's actually real. In person."

"Hello." Maki Kushima gave her a small, precise nod. Jess immediately retreated half a step and murmured in my ear:"She greets people. The ones who do that are always harder to deal with than the ones who don't." I agreed completely. I crossed my arms, leaned against the doorframe, and looked her over.

"Let's get one thing straight," I said.

"If you're lost, or if this is some Upper House experience the underprivileged for a day program, you can still turn around. Left at the end of the hallway takes you to the stairs. Straight from there, about ten minutes, and you'll be back in your world—the one with the better lights and the more expensive air." Maki Kushima listened to all of that without interrupting. No anger. No smile. She simply answered, without inflection:"I'm not lost."

"That makes it worse."

"And it's not an experience program."

"Even worse." Jess, behind me, added helpfully:"What Hoshino means is, if you say two more sentences, she might start charging admission."

"Jess."

"Right. Shutting up." A beat.

"Temporarily." I pressed my fingers to my temple and looked back at Maki Kushima.

"Do you know what kind of group we are?"

"First-year mixed survival group. Group 144." Fast answer.

"Do you know where we're going in three days?"

"Seventh external training zone. Tropical rainforest planet. Firestorm every seventy-two hours, peak wind speeds approaching 300 km/h, extreme forward heat flux up to 1900 degrees. Three-week assessment period. Primary objective: survival, not engagement." No hesitation. No pause. I'd been trying to trip her up, and she'd come back with a full recitation—I was the one who ended up looking like I'd just been cold-called and blanked on the material.

Jess blinked, then quietly swallowed whatever she'd been about to say, letting only the tail end of it leak out.

"…Shit. She actually did her homework." I narrowed my eyes.

"So. Knowing all that, you still applied to join us?"

"Yes."

"Why?" This time, Maki Kushima paused. Just briefly—barely a beat, short enough that it felt less like hesitation and more like she was quietly sliding an answer she hadn't planned to give yet a little further back.

"Because I have reason to be here."

"Reason?" I gave a short, cold laugh.

"Upper House reasons tend to be pretty expensive."

"That's a biased statement," she said.

"I'm fourteen. A little bias is normal."

"Noted."

"What kind of response is that?"

"I'm recalibrating my expectations." I nearly choked on that. This person wasn't passive-aggressive. She wasn't straightforwardly arrogant. She was more like someone who pre-sorted every sentence in her head and only produced the most compact, least time-wasting version. It sounded reasonable. It was reasonable. Which was exactly why it was infuriating. Like a knife that had been sharpened too clean.

Jess had clearly caught the same undercurrent of wrongness, and she simply moved to stand beside me—formal combat stance, which for her meant arms folded, half-smile in place, fully prepared to make the situation worse.

"Kushima," she said, very politely—politely enough that the dismantling was already audible—"let me summarize the situation for you. One: our group just lost a member. Two: you applied to fill that slot. Three: you're Upper House, and you're a Kushima. Four: Hoshino is currently allergic to any surprise delivered by any administrative body. Given all of that—do you want to say something that might make this slightly less alarming?" Maki Kushima glanced at Jess, then back at me.

"You can look at the materials I brought." She crouched down and unzipped the outer pocket of the military pack at her feet, drawing out a clear document sleeve. The movement was efficient—no trace of an Upper House girl calculating whether kneeling on a Lower House hallway floor would damage her uniform. Jess and I both went quiet for a moment. … At least she wasn't here for the photo opportunity. Maki held the sleeve out to me. It wasn't an application form. It wasn't some stamped, official-looking document.

It was a list she'd compiled herself. Firestorm cycles. Available shelter conditions. Equipment degradation rates in sustained heat and humidity. Supply weight and distribution recommendations. Minimum resource balance models for a four-person team. And on the last page, a hand-annotated note: If the group already has members covering equipment maintenance and field experience, priority supplementary role should be information integration and supply management. I turned to the last page and stopped.

One line, written there: Group 144 — Current Members: Hoshino Shimo — high-pressure environment adaptation, close-range response Jess McCallow — field management, basic life-support maintenance Harvey Knox — equipment maintenance, logistics correction Gap: information integration / supply load balancing / environmental forecasting I looked up.

"You investigated us?"

"Yes." No hesitation.

"Wow." Jess let out a short sound.

"She doesn't even bother pretending she didn't."

"Then let me ask again," I said, closing the sleeve and holding her gaze.

"Why us?" Maki Kushima looked back at me. Somewhere along the way, the hallway had gone quiet. The few people who'd been watching from a distance had probably figured out by now that this wasn't the kind of scene that would make a cute White Uniform Princess Ventures Into Lower House Dorms piece for the Upper House gossip circuit. She let half a second pass before she spoke.

"Because what Group 144 is missing right now isn't a body count."

"…"

"It's someone who can work out—before you walk into a firestorm—what to drop, what to keep, which route you can't take, and which call will get your entire group killed before day three." Jess didn't cut in. Because even she could hear it. This wasn't someone here to fill a gap. This was someone here to take a position. And she'd made her case so cleanly that if you wanted to argue with it, you'd have to get in line first. I held the silence for two seconds, then slowly handed the sleeve back to her.

"People like you," I said, "are usually pretty easy to dislike, aren't they?" Maki Kushima took the sleeve back. Considered it briefly.

"That's possible."

"Good," I said, nodding.

"At least you have basic self-awareness." Jess finally laughed beside me.

"Hoshino, I think I'm starting to understand why you haven't slammed the door in her face yet."

"You don't know shit."

"I do, actually." She said it like it was obvious.

"Because this one isn't a problem that got dropped on us. She's a problem that came prepared." … Shit. That was too accurate to argue with. Arguing would've been a waste of time, and we both knew it. I looked back at Maki Kushima. White uniform, steady eyes, her own hand-compiled data, and she'd already mapped out our team's gaps.

She was standing in this worn-out hallway like someone had taken a precision component from an upper-tier display case and jammed it into the Lower House's perpetually leaking wreck of a machine. Wrong place entirely. And yet somehow—she fit. I clicked my tongue and stepped aside from the doorway.

"Let's be clear," I said, looking at her.

"I still want to send you back to the Upper House."

"I know."

"And if I find out later that you're here for entertainment, or to collect material, or to run some kind of social experiment on us—" I gave her a very polite smile— "I'll personally walk you to the stairs. By the fastest available method."

"Understandable."

"You say that now," Jess added, unhurried, "but wait until you see the inside of our room. Upper House is a different civilization. Down here, our civilization runs on willpower and spite. Manage your expectations." Maki Kushima glanced past the doorframe.

"That's fine."

"Oh?" I raised an eyebrow.

"Why?" Her answer was flat.

"Because I'm joining a team. Not a floor plan." …Alright. I'm keeping that one.