Chương 373: 163.Bus

The so-called "winter break" came to an end quickly. That sounds peaceful. It wasn't — not because the days moved fast, but because the timing of our return had never left much room to breathe in the first place. By the time the Yukikaze clawed its way out of the Boötes Void and slammed back into Federal space, the comfortable first half of winter break was long gone. What was left was the part administrative offices love most. Damage control. Rubber stamps. Filing. Liability carving. Narrative revision.

And, quietly, shoving the survivors back into the system. That's what the tail end of a break feels like around here. On the surface, it looks like the last stretch of a holiday. In practice, it feels like an enormous machine slowly restarting at low speed, and we were the ones who'd just been dragged into the gears before we could pull our hands and feet clear. During that stretch, two parties came to No. 22. The first was Aida Rosen.

The afternoon she came, the weather was suspiciously nice — nice enough to make you wonder if the Federal government had deliberately picked a pleasant day for a lease termination, just to keep the scene from looking too much like something out of a coming-of-age novel. She was exactly the same as always. Clothes in order. Tone in order. Even the angle at which she stood in the entryway felt measured in advance.

"I really am sorry about this." She set the rental agreement and a few attached documents on the table, her voice carrying that standard, gentle Upper House register — warm enough, never soft enough to be mistaken for weakness.

"Once third year starts, it's almost entirely off-site placements. There's no way to keep this lease going." Very graceful about it. Graceful enough that, for a second, I actually thought a lease could have a graduation ceremony. No. 22 was never the kind of place meant to hold anyone for a lifetime. It was a transit point. A temporary dock.

The sort of place where people leave behind a mug, a pair of slippers, a broken power strip, and one or two memories they'd rather not explain — and then move on, carrying a new rank, a new posting, a new scar, or a new future. Aida just handled the leaving more ceremonially than most. Jess had been leaning against the stair rail the whole time, wearing the face of someone pretending to be a wise adult. The second the last page was signed, her first line was:"So No. 22's got another empty slot."

A real talent for killing a mood. Annoyingly, she wasn't wrong. Aida smiled. Light. Brief.

"Yes. One more empty slot." Something uncomfortable moved through me in that instant, for no clear reason. Not sadness. Not reluctance. More like — suddenly seeing, in very concrete terms, that this place really does empty out. That people really do keep moving forward, one by one. And that No. 22 doesn't hold still for anyone, no matter who once lived here. Ugly. And real. The second visit was Aki Kushima. That one felt less like a move-out and more like a piece of institutional theater.

The day she came, Maki happened to be sorting documents in the living room. Afternoon light cut in at an angle through the window, and the table was buried under forms, handover checklists, and paperwork that gave me a headache just looking at it. Maki sat there, calm, like she'd always known this moment was on the schedule. Standing off to the side, I thought — the Kushima family must be born with some instinct for turning everything into a succession rite.

When Aki placed the armband — embroidered with the Student Council crest — into Maki's hands, she even smiled.

"Honestly, I should've graduated ages ago." Light tone. Almost a joke. But anyone paying even a little attention knew there was no version of that sentence that was only a joke.

"The school's in your hands for the next year." Maki's hands were steady as she took it.

"Understood." Short. Clean. No excess emotion leaking through. When the Kushimas say something like that, it never quite sounds like handing over a student council. It sounds more like transferring an invisible supply line, some shadow authority pressing down over the school from above — or maybe just a slice of governance that was never meant to be written into the student handbook. The scene looked moving. It genuinely did.

Freeze-frame it, throw on a soft filter and a caption like the torch passes on, and the school paper could run it as a feature spread. The problem was, I had no confidence at all that cracking it open would reveal anything but a transaction underneath. Some things that look like succession are, underneath, all trade. Some things that look like responsibility are just power changing hands, wrapped in compromise.

If I've learned one thing by now, it's this: Whenever an institutional scene looks too clean from the outside, you don't put your hand in. Then there was the third thing. The most lethal, most Federation, most nauseating — and, in an entirely predictable way, the most of-course-it-was-always-going-to-be-this — thing of all. The final decision on what to do with us. Mass expulsion — Obviously not. Who'd sign off on that. Not the military. Not the Academy, certainly.

And absolutely not the politicians — the ones who treat the nation's future and their own vote counts as the same short-term investment product. Not unless they wanted to face two things at once: One, an angry public. Two, the anger of the chairman of Kushima Heavy Industries. The first kind usually takes to the streets. The second kind usually doesn't. Honestly, I find the second kind far more terrifying. So the final conclusion was: basically, everyone was fine.

Not just fine — the government took the whole thing and repackaged it, beautifully, slapping on a label that could only have come out of a bureaucratic communications department: National Heroes. The first time I saw that phrase, I nearly threw my terminal across the room. Heroes. These days, apparently, anything qualifies.

Survive something dramatic enough, come back theatrically enough, and happen to be shaped right for plugging a hole somebody else was supposed to be accountable for, and the Federation will very thoughtfully issue you a brand-new identity. Pain is private. Packaging is public. Trauma is self-service. Reputation is state-managed. Truly excellent customer service.

For the rest of that week, one of the sights I saw most often was Maki — student representative, in uniform — appearing at exactly the kind of venues that give me acid reflux on sight. Shaking hands with important people. Photographs. Standing on stages. Public appearances. Lending her face to war bonds dressed up in the language of righteous duty that, stripped down, just meant: please keep funding this war on installment. Every time I saw it, the same familiar nausea came back. Not directed at Maki. The opposite.

I knew exactly how little choice she had in any of it. And it was precisely because I knew Maki wasn't the type who enjoys the spotlight that it made me sicker, not less. Some people are built for the front of a stage. Maki isn't. She's just steady enough, durable enough, unlikely enough to say the wrong thing on camera, so the Federation naturally shoved her up front to give this entire rotten production a presentable face. They really know how to pick people.

As for the so-called "rewards" — Honestly, to this day I'm not sure whether to call it a reward or a more sophisticated form of punishment. Back on the Yukikaze's bridge, Tobita had field-commissioned us as an emergency wartime measure. Under normal circumstances, once we were back inside Federal space, High Command should have reviewed the whole thing — knocked it down a grade, cut it in half, or buried it inside some vague paperwork stamped provisional under wartime special exemption. They didn't.

They just let it stand. Let it stand. The first time I held my new ID, I thought I was misreading it. The field was clean enough to be infuriating. It no longer said Student. It said, with total clarity: Lieutenant. I stared at that word for a long time. Lieutenant. Not a joke. Not a drill. Not something scribbled on a temporary bridge authorization board, waiting to be wiped clean the second we made port. It had been printed. Recognized.

Laminated inside an official document, turning into a reality that, no matter how long I looked at it, felt exactly like someone had slapped the wrong label onto my forehead.

"So—" D was frowning at his own ID, scratching his head, looking like a piece of heavy machinery that had just booted up and been fed far too much data at once.

"We're Lower House on paper, carrying Upper House ranks?"

"What else would it be?" Jess sat cross-legged on the arm of the sofa, delighted with the whole mess.

"Latest Federal education reform — issue officer commissions to secondary schoolers. Start 'em young."

"Highest you can get out of the Lower House is Sergeant Major, isn't it?" Roy turned his ID over, then back again, with a very healthy dose of skepticism. That's the best thing about Roy — even as the world tips toward the absurd, he still tries to hold the line with basic common sense first. It almost never works. He tries anyway.

"Isn't that a good thing?" Harvey looked up from the table, tone as flat as if he were discussing a time-saving equipment swap.

"At least we skip the reserve NCO and reserve officer exams entirely."... That one actually landed. I went quiet for two seconds and realized I didn't have a counterargument. This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. He wasn't wrong. The Federation's testing system is basically an administrative maze purpose-built for suffering. Parachuting straight past it, from a purely practical standpoint, wasn't entirely bad news.

"Wait — doesn't that mean—" Jess's eyes went wide.

"We still have to go back and sit through class, but our IDs already say officer?"

"Yes." Akari, by the window, supplied the conclusion, perfectly calm.

"The system considers us both students and not simply students — inside the school, and already pulled into the military apparatus outside it. Taxonomically, it's disgusting. But very Federation."

"Taxonomically, that sentence itself is disgusting," I said. Akari nodded.

"Thank you." That was not a compliment. Lan stood a little apart, looking at her own ID, brow creased faintly. She wasn't like Jess, who broadcasts every reaction live, and she wasn't like D, who wears his confusion on his face. Lan takes information in first, runs the risk calculation privately, and only then decides whether it's worth speaking.

"Bringing this rank back into the school," she said slowly, "there's no version of that where it goes smoothly."

"Of course it won't." I leaned back, staring at the word on my own card until it looked less like a rank and more like a curse mark stamped on my forehead.

"If the Federation had the nerve to issue these, someone's already lined up to watch the show. Or to use it."

"Both," Maki said, sliding her ID into an inner pocket, her tone unreasonably level.

"And probably more than one group of each." That's the thing I hate most about Maki Kushima. She's always right. And it's precisely because she's right that it's so irritating to hear. I looked at her. Her expression hadn't shifted — like the handshakes, the photos, the bonds, the endorsements, the handover, the paperwork, and now this card were all things she'd already seen coming and simply had to catch. The nausea came back. Not at Maki. At the whole structure. The Federation really is something.

Wrap us up as National Heroes while shoving us back into school. Hand us officer ranks while still calling us students. Perform generosity while quietly finishing the paperwork on our new place in the chain of command. Only an institution can pull that off and make it look like a favor. Much obliged.

"So," Jess concluded, cheerfully, "when second term starts, our little Lower House cohort walks back onto campus with officer IDs. Sounds like the perfect setup for a disaster."

"Could you, just once, not be that accurate?" I asked.

"No." She grinned, thoroughly punchable.

"It's a gift." I looked around the living room and felt something strange settle over me. Winter break really was almost over. Aida had moved out. Aki had put the armband in Maki's hands. The government had finished the packaging. The military had finished looking the other way. The Academy had finished its silence. And we were going back to No. 22, back to being Lower House students, carrying IDs stamped Lieutenant, still pretending our lives could be summed up in four words: normal return to school.

I ran my thumb along the edge of the laminate. Optimistic as hell. The night before term started, No. 22 Platinum Bridge Street had two visitors. No. More precisely — one visitor, and one long-standing background fixture who'd finally been promoted to a speaking role. Hedwig at our door was something I'd nearly gotten used to.

Not that I'd taken it gracefully — just that after ferrying the Empire's Third Princess from the back door of Joint Operations Command to Platinum Bridge Street, discovering she lives directly across the street, and surviving a No. 22 debrief that was too short to be a deathbed meeting and too long not to count as psychological contamination, your tolerance for scenes with no business making sense goes up as a matter of self-defense. The woman standing beside her tonight was different.

I'd always known Hedwig had someone with her. Not the oh, there's a person nearby kind of knowing. The kind where every time you saw Hedwig, there was another figure at the edge of your vision — quieter, straighter, radiating the specific weight of a very expensive hazardous object. Silent as decor, heavier in presence than most people who make noise. Tonight, the decor spoke.

"Good evening, everyone." Not loud. Very polite. Entirely flat — the flatness of someone who has executed the exact required quota of courtesy and has no intention of offering the world a single gram more.

"I am Hilde, Chief Bodyguard in service to Her Highness Hedwig. There is a matter I'd like to ask your assistance with." Something went cold at the base of my skull. A request? When someone like that says there's a matter I'd like your help with, in that tone, it lands about the same as: would you mind keeping an eye on this grenade, the pin's already out. Honestly, my first thought was: is she here to leave the princess with us permanently? Not overthinking it.

People like her don't volunteer to speak unless what's on the table is too big to ignore. Jess had already pulled the door wider, wearing a smile shameless enough to belong in a gossip almanac.

"Come in, come in — No. 22's broke, but not so broke we can't host a princess and a..." She looked Hilde over.

"... Chief Bodyguard."

"Thank you," Hilde said. That was it. No sorry to intrude so late. No apologies for the short notice. Nothing that might suggest this particular Chief Bodyguard had ever been issued a human temperature setting. I was starting to understand. Given someone like this standing permanently at her shoulder, it made complete sense that Hedwig had turned out the way she did. Maki brought them in, ran the usual routine — seats, hot drinks, stabilize the room. The sequence had gotten so smooth by now that No.

22 could probably start billing for small-scale diplomatic receptions. Once seated, Hilde stated her business directly.

"The Academy does not permit armed personnel of my classification onto campus grounds. Nor are we permitted to drive Her Highness into the residential sector." Her manner of speaking was distinctive — not cold, not hard. More like a blade honed so clean it made no extra sound while it cut.

"Therefore, tomorrow, at the start of term, if anyone here owns a personal vehicle, I would ask your assistance transporting Her Highness." The room went quiet for about half a second. Then every set of eyes turned to me. Oh, for fuck's sake. Did you all coordinate this in advance. I sat on the edge of the sofa, cup still in hand, and felt less like a housemate and more like a rigged lottery result nobody had told me about yet. Jess didn't even bother hiding it. Her whole face read: see?

Fate wants you driving the princess again. I'd barely opened my mouth—"... I can help." The voice came from the farthest corner. Everyone turned at once. D sat there, a little hunched, a little slow as always, but unusually serious when he spoke. Dwight "D" Barkley almost never volunteers, let alone for something that sounds this troublesome the moment you hear it — so when he spoke first, even I went still.

"Not just Her Highness," D said, scratching his head like he was running a seating chart.

"Harvey, Lan, Roy, Akari, Jess — I can take all of them." The living room went quiet for two seconds. Then Jess detonated.

"D—!! Did you win the lottery or something?!" Excellent question. It was exactly what I was thinking. A man who runs his entire life on a hardline economy of fuel, parts, and load suddenly saying I can take everyone hits about as hard as Harvey announcing a dorm mixer — not impossible, but you check the sky for cracks first. Maki looked at him.

"What's going on?" D apparently decided language was too inefficient for the situation. He stood, said "come see," and headed for the back door. The rest of us followed. The backyard at night was cold. My motorcycle sat in its usual spot — clean, ordinary, low-profile, like a civilized person making a sincere effort at dignity. The problem was parked beside it. The two previously empty spaces were now entirely occupied by an enormous, garishly painted, heavily modified bus. Not an ordinary bus.

The kind of thing that, just sitting in a residential backyard, looked like someone had melted an entire wrong aesthetic, an excess of subwoofer culture, and some luxury relic smuggled out of a parallel nightlife universe, and poured it straight over a chassis. Everyone: "..." I looked at it for two seconds and gave the only honest verdict available.

"This thing looks like a cyberpunk hearse." Jess burst out laughing.

"Holy shit, that's exactly it." It was. Hearse from the outside. Mobile fortress by the footprint. A nightclub sign, a black-market mod catalogue, and a street-tour poster all boiled down and poured over the paint job. I genuinely suspected that if it sat here overnight, the neighbors would wake up wondering whether a very stylish gang patriarch had quietly passed away on our street. Maki went straight to the practical angle.

"D, this can't go in the student lot." She circled it once, tone level, content unforgiving.

"Once term starts, park it behind the classroom block. Fewer complaints back there." D nodded.

"Okay." Hilde's concern ran differently.

"When Her Highness is aboard — can the sound system stay off?" That line was so precise I nearly choked. Not because it was funny. Because it was too accurate — accurate enough that I could tell she'd run three assessments the instant she laid eyes on this thing: one, it can technically carry people; two, it's a hazard; three, the real hazard almost certainly isn't the vehicle's mass, it's the possibility of a bass drop capable of physically dislodging a princess's soul. D blinked, then answered honestly.

"Yeah."

"Good." Hilde nodded. The exchange had the precise rhythm of a tiny military inspection — the only difference being that the item under review wasn't a weapon system, it was a bus that looked ready to switch into neon mode at the school gates without warning.

"There's a dance floor in here?!" Jess had already climbed inside without anyone noticing, her voice exploding back out through the door with the thrill of a new-world discovery.

"D, did you fit an entire club in this thing?!"

"Wasn't my mod." D looked almost innocent.

"My cousin gave it to me." Oh. That crew. The image surfaced immediately — the ones dressed like whole city blocks should part for them, carrying enough presence to shut down a street for a party on their own. A few of them standing next to this bus wouldn't look out of place at all. It would just look like it had always belonged to their world. No wonder. No wonder this thing didn't read like a vehicle. It read like a value system on wheels.

Harvey walked up, knocked on the shell, checked the interior, and delivered a very Harvey verdict.

"Carries people. Carries trouble."

"Isn't that the ideal transport for this household?" Roy added from behind him. Lan gave a small hum, like the conclusion was beyond dispute. I stood there — watching the bus, watching Jess refuse to come out, watching Hilde run her noise-risk assessment, watching Hedwig simply observe without a trace of what strange commoner spectacle is this on her face — and felt my expectations for tomorrow drop another level.

I'd thought the worst possible opening for second term would be us walking through the gates with Second Lieutenant, Lieutenant, and Captain printed on our IDs, getting stared at like a new species by the entire school. I'd been too optimistic. The real worst opening was almost certainly going to be: A pack of cadets rolling onto campus inside a cyberpunk hearse with a built-in dance floor, under a pre-negotiated agreement to keep the subwoofers off.... Fuck.

If the Federation doesn't eventually collapse, there is no justice in this universe. Morning of the first day of second term. The backyard at No. 22 already looked nothing like anything that belonged in a normal residential district. More precisely — from the moment D's bus arrived, this place had parted ways with the word normal for good. The sky wasn't fully bright. The backyard air sat cold and damp, a thin skin of dew on the ground.

My motorcycle sat in its usual spot, clean, ordinary, unassuming, like someone working hard to maintain their dignity. Next to it — Something else. Something that looked like a nightclub, a hearse, an underground mod scene, and a specific breed of youth restlessness that refuses to face reality had all been welded onto the same frame, then fitted with wheels as an afterthought. Maki Kushima stood in front of it now, arms full of something. The next second she swung it up and threw the whole bundle onto the roof.

Whump. It unfurled, draping over half the vehicle — a skin of rough netting, like a metal animal being forced into tree bark. D stood beside it, frowning up.

"What's that." Maki didn't spare him a glance.

"Camouflage netting."

"I know that." He pushed back, unusually fast for him.

"I'm asking why." She finally turned, her expression as calm as someone correcting a basic fact of life.

"Because you're going to class," she said.

"Not opening a mobile nightclub for a dawn block party." Jess, crouched by the door inspecting the dance floor she'd found the night before, nearly fell in laughing.

"Mobile nightclub, ha—""This is not a nightclub." D kept his heavy face dead serious, mounting a final defense of his vehicle's honor.

"This is a bus." I stood off to the side, helmet under my arm, looking at the thing now half-swallowed by netting — which somehow made it look even more like a piece of large-scale contraband — and couldn't resist adding:"Now it looks like a cyberpunk hearse that just escaped from the woods." D was quiet for two seconds.

"... Still a bus."

"Fine," Maki said, wrapping it up.

"Bus, hearse, or a mass social-death device with a dance floor built in — whatever it is, if it's going onto campus today, it needs to be hidden before most of the faculty arrive."

"Hidden?" Jess poked her head out.

"So we're not going to school today, we're running an infiltration op?"

"Close enough," Harvey supplied from the back, calm as ever.

"Except the enemy is the Disciplinary Committee and the entire faculty's sense of taste." Too accurate to argue with. Maki kept issuing orders while she pulled the net taut.

"D — again. Not the student lot."

"Then where."

"Behind the classroom block," she said.

"More blind spots. Teachers won't bother walking that far, admin won't patrol it specially." Jess raised her hand.

"Question."

"You'd better not have one."

"What if we get caught?" Maki secured the last corner and looked up.

"Then it's the school's newly piloted mobile disaster-evacuation vehicle."

"That excuse is terrible."

"The Federation survives administrative review on terrible excuses constantly. Haven't you adjusted to that by now?" Fair, actually. Mornings at No. 22 really do feel like a field command post sometimes. Not because we're professionals — just because with enough people, enough overlapping trouble, and not enough budget, everything naturally develops a survive today, figure out the rest later energy. While Maki and D finished with the net, the door across the street opened. Hedwig stepped out, Hilde behind her.

Hedwig was in full formal Academy dress today — dark standing collar, shoulder lines pressed razor-straight, waist tailored within an inch of its life, that coldly well-bred face on top of it all. She didn't look like she was heading to class. She looked like she was arriving to take command of some unlucky unit. Hilde was still Hilde. Quiet. Straight. No wasted words. Like a standard-issue firearm fitted into a human shape. When she saw the bus, her footsteps paused. Half a second. That was enough.

It meant even the Chief Bodyguard recognized this thing sat outside the range of common sense.

"This is today's transport?" she asked. D nodded.

"Yeah." Hilde looked up at the netting, then at the paint flashing beneath it, like she was calculating whether this diplomatic incident could still be salvaged. In the end, she settled for one practical line.

"Remember. No sound system while Her Highness is aboard." I nearly bit through my cheek. D, honest as always: "Got it."

"Good." The way Hilde nodded made the whole exchange feel less like a school send-off and more like an equipment sign-off. Hedwig let her gaze rest on the bus and the netting for a moment. Her expression barely moved. That was the terrifying part. Anyone else would've shown at least a flicker of this is what I'm riding in? Not Hedwig.

She simply accepted it, calm as anything — as if the Galactic Empire's Third Princess boarding a camouflage-netted, dance-floor-equipped, possibly subwoofer-armed monster bus to attend a Federal military academy was simply the natural endpoint of civilized development. This woman really was formidable. Formidable enough that I couldn't decide whether to admire her or fear her. Roy stood by the bus, hands in his pockets, delivering his assessment with complete sincerity.

"Drive this onto campus and it reads like a crime manifesto."

"No," Lan corrected, calm, beside him.

"It reads as a promotional truck first. Crime manifesto second." Those two had a rhythm together that was too easy, too natural. I pulled my eyes off Roy and Lan and gave my handlebars my full, deliberate attention. Living is like that sometimes. You don't have to solve every problem. You just have to learn not to process too many secrets in the same morning. Maki finished the concealment work and scanned the group.

"That's it. D takes everyone in first, original route."

"Got it." D nodded.

"Hide the bus once you're inside, then get out in batches. Don't all pour out at once — it looks like a circus."

"That's an insult to circuses," Jess said.

"I'm protecting the circus's reputation," Maki replied. I laughed. Once. Short. But I laughed. The whole thing was too absurd not to. Absurd enough to take the edge off the pre-term nerves by at least half a layer. D started sorting seats. Harvey, Lan, Roy, Akari, Jess, plus Hedwig — the giant monster had room to spare. Hilde stood aside, watching Hedwig board with the expression of someone signing off on an armed and sensitive shipment. Before boarding, Hedwig glanced back at me.

"Lieutenant Hoshino isn't coming with us?" I hadn't answered when Maki appeared at my side. I'd been about to snap my helmet down. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her standing by my bike, completely still. I paused.

"You're not getting on?" Maki let out a small breath — short, controlled, but loaded with content. Roughly translated: did you forget there's someone out there whose entire job is finding reasons to come after us.

"Someone has to deal with Freya Nikaido," Maki said. My hand stilled on the strap. Right. I'd almost managed to forget the Chair of the Disciplinary Committee still existed. Not just existed — thriving, almost certainly. Thriving enough to be standing at the gate on day one, like a low-pressure system wearing the student handbook for skin, ready to log every offending detail one by one. Like the netting. Like the mobile nightclub. Like us. I looked at Maki.

She was dressed with unusual precision today — collar, shoulder line, cuffs, the new weight of the Student Council armband, all pulled tight and clean. That wasn't an outfit. That was armor. D's bus was responsible for smuggling everyone else in. I was responsible for getting myself in alive. And Maki was heading to the gate first, to stand in front of whatever was waiting there with teeth.... Fuck. Second term hadn't even started, and our division of labor already sounded like a behind-the-lines briefing.

I pressed my helmet down and started the engine. The bus's running lights flickered on almost at the same moment — a giant creature finally deciding to get up and go terrorize a few faculty members. Morning air, still cold. Sky just shifting from gray to pale light. Looking at Maki standing beside my bike, I understood, with complete clarity, that not one part of today intended to behave itself. The bus pulled out first. Maki and I stayed behind.