Chương 327: 139.Got You!! 2

The next second, the whole world yanked backward, hard. Not flying out. Being fired out. The shock pad behind me seemed to grow a fist in an instant, driving my whole body — breath, stomach, and whatever dignity I'd managed to hold onto — deep into the seat. The edges of my vision blacked out immediately, while the guide line ahead blazed like someone had taken a red-hot needle and stitched it straight through my eyes. I tried to inhale; the harness caught my chest first.

I tried to speak; my jaw clenched shut from the jolt before I could. Simulators are liars, every one of them. No — more precisely, simulators politely edit reality down into a version a teenager can survive without professional supervision. Real launch isn't "g-force." Isn't "high-G maneuvering." Isn't any of those textbook terms that sound serious on paper and completely fail to mention that your body swears first.

Real launch is closer to: Someone grabbing your soul, without so much as a warning, and yanking it half an inch out of your body.

"Attitude lock released. Type-0 Unit One — she's yours now." Roy's voice came through the comm, steady enough that it sounded less like he'd just fired me into deep space and more like he'd simply pushed open a classroom door for me. … Having a navigator this calm, this close to cold-blooded, matters enormously at a moment like this. Because if even he had panicked, I would absolutely have treated the entire cockpit to a live demonstration of teenage screaming.

I gritted my teeth and pressed my right hand steady onto the control stick. The moment the Type-0 cleared the launch rail, the whole frame seemed to lose its definition of "forward." No wind. No ground. Nothing for the human inner ear to hold onto. Just the attitude data jumping across the instruments, and the deep space outside the canopy — black enough to swallow your sense of direction along with everything else. I knew what I was supposed to do first. Confirm attitude. Bring the nose level.

Slide out along the outer line. Don't rush, don't fight, let the frame settle into its velocity. I knew all of it. The problem was that knowing doesn't mean the body follows. My left hand had barely pushed the throttle up half a notch when my right hand overcorrected on instinct. The Type-0's nose tilted slightly, the attitude ring flashed yellow in the lower-right corner of my HUD, and my heart nearly jumped straight out of my throat.

"Don't fight the frame," Roy said immediately.

"Your correction's too large. This isn't a sim evaluation. Nobody's giving you extra points for looking good."

"…I know!" I knew, I really knew! But my body clearly didn't. A body that's been thrown into vacuum alone for the first time has its own opinions about "calm operation." Its current position was probably: survive first, sort the rest out later. I forced that rising breath back down and slowly pulled the nose level by the instruments. The Type-0 — not a bad-tempered horse, but absolutely not the kind that would accommodate a rookie — settled reluctantly back to the designated attitude under my hands.

"Better. That one sounded like a human," Jess said over the tactical line.

"Thank you for the encouragement at this particular moment."

"Don't mention it. I figured if you were too tense, making you want to kill me first would help with the nausea."

"So in your assessment, I'm the type who maintains equilibrium through hatred?"

"Current results look promising." … Damn it. That actually worked a little. At least that small mistake had shocked me awake. Not the hot-blooded I've found my spirit kind of awake — the physical move wrong again and you actually die kind. Very realistic. Very useful. Humans don't grow up through courage — they grow up through almost getting themselves killed and deciding not to be that stupid again. I finally had enough margin to look up at the view outside. My stomach dropped again. The Yukikaze was behind me.

Not far. But farther than I'd imagined. Looking out from inside the ship, the bridge, the hangar, the corridors, the mess — all of that was inside. Structure that wrapped around you. But the moment you left and looked back, all those bulkheads and decks that you'd spent so much time finding too long, too cold, too hard — they suddenly became something that almost deserved to be called gentle.

The Yukikaze wasn't large, at least not compared to the massive capital ships in the textbooks that got drawn to look like moving mountain ranges. But right now, suspended behind me, running lights showing through the deep dark, she still looked like a stubborn fragment of civilization refusing to go out. Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings. And between me and that fragment: one thin canopy and a life-support system.

That recognition came too fast, and too honestly. When the canopy sealed, I thought I'd already accepted being alone. I hadn't. The real alone was the moment the Yukikaze first fell back beyond the reach of my hand, and the whole universe went quiet in the way things go quiet when they're waiting for you to make a mistake. … Right. Fine. Great. If I'd ever done anything wrong in a past life, the universe had apparently been saving it all up for today.

"Type-0 Unit One, relative course nominal," Roy continued, his tone unreasonably steady.

"Half a degree left. Not more. Yes. Exactly that. Hold."

"Holding." My voice was tight, but not shaking. At least the public execution could be delayed a few more minutes.

"Seawolf cross-section appearing again!" Akari's volume jumped.

"Second layer of the gravity-dust net is showing an impression — no, not an impression, a section has been borrowed."

"Human speech," Jess said, on it immediately.

"Part of it isn't pointing in our direction!"

"… That sentence is technically useless, but I understood it." So did I. Unfortunately, I understood it too fast. What had been a faintly distorted patch of deep space ahead suddenly seemed to be pressed from the other side by an invisible finger. First, the star-points shifted. Not flickering, not disappearing — a very slight, very brief displacement. Like someone lifting the sheet of night sky and giving it a wrinkle from behind. Then an edge appeared in the dark. Not light. Not even a shadow, exactly.

More like the trace left behind when something that was never supposed to be visible got accidentally scraped against our three-dimensional world, and left a mark of its impatience. Thin, flat, angled — the geometry was nothing human engineering would ever allow to exist. It looked like metal, but without the thickness or reflectivity metal should have. It looked like a blade, but folded into another direction the next instant, like a piece of paper being forced into a geometry problem that refused to cooperate.

When my eyes tracked it, a chill ran up the back of my neck. The feeling was nauseating. Not awe. Not shock. Just pure, visceral nausea — the kind where your organs refuse to accept it before your brain does. Because that wasn't a ship. At least, not anything we could comfortably call a ship. Textbook vessels had bows, hulls, armor, propulsion vectors.

What was in front of me looked like a higher-dimensional predator that had happened to jam a small piece of its skeleton through into the world we could see, and was using the posture to tell us: the spatial sense you rely on means nothing from where I'm standing.

"…I see it," I heard myself say. My throat was dry as sandpaper.

"Shimo, don't stare." Maki cut into my private line immediately.

"Watch the instruments. Use the data to hold the feeling down." I yanked my gaze back to the HUD. Right. Can't stare. Look at something like that too long, and the brain starts trying to complete it using the most familiar logic it has — and then you discover it can't be completed. Part of how humans manage to stay sane is that the world usually agrees to follow its own rules. The moment something's edges are in violation, one extra look is enough to remind you exactly how cheap your common sense is.

"Type-0 Unit One, maintain relative distance," Roy said.

"Don't let the visuals take you. Follow the course line."

"Copy."

"Good. You're still responding, which means your soul hasn't actually left."

"…Roy, your version of reassurance is starting to sound like Maki's."

"I'm not reassuring you."

"Then you're both a match made in cruelty." The open channel went quiet for half a beat. Then Jess burst out laughing. Akari made a sound like she'd inhaled wrong. Lan, with great propriety, said nothing — but precisely because it was so proper, the silence read like I'm currently unable to laugh, please disregard my face. Even Aida, after a brief pause, added coolly:"Hoshino, congratulations on finding time to matchmake crewmates during active combat. Mental status: excellent."

"I take it back. I would rather have blacked out from the launch." Maki didn't laugh, didn't argue, just said, very flat:"Focus." … Right. That was the worst part. The less she engaged, the more my own smart remark felt like I'd thrown a flashbang into the universe and blinded myself with it. I bit down on my back teeth and dragged my attention back to the target. Ahead, the Seawolf's cross-section deformed again. This time I didn't try to look directly.

I fixed my eyes on the outline being back-calculated from the gravity-dust net on the HUD. Much better — data at least didn't deliberately grow itself into something designed to destroy a three-dimensional brain's reward circuitry. Even so, the outline was uncomfortable to read. It didn't look like it was moving. It looked like it was changing modes of existence.

Like a wolf hiding beneath a four-dimensional surface, occasionally extending an ear, a tooth, or something that had no business being called an ear or a tooth, just to confirm whether we were still stupid enough, scared enough, worth one more bite.

"It's trying to retract deeper," Akari said.

"But the gravity signature is still caught. Window's still open — just getting narrower!" Jess took the rhythm, clean as if she'd been born for the tactical station.

"Shimo, don't chase its shadow. Go for where it's going to expose itself next."

"How am I supposed to know where it's going to bite from next?"

"Because your brain costs more than mine," Jess said, then dropped her voice.

"And right now, you're the only one at that angle." I drew a breath. Right. Fine. Being trusted at a moment like this was genuinely one of the most annoying and effective things anyone could do. I watched the gravity signature pulsing in front of me, overlaying the star-point displacement from when that black slice had appeared, the dust-net deformation, and the outer line Roy had given me. The tactical picture that had been getting scrambled by wrongness finally, reluctantly, reassembled into something usable.

It wasn't retreating. It wasn't fleeing. It was retracting its claws. And that motion — retracting claws — would, for one instant, expose the most vulnerable joint.

"…I have it," I said quietly.

"Repeat," Ash said immediately. I stared at the flickering, wound-like distortion ahead and made my voice sound as little as possible like a fourteen-year-old who had almost had her soul shaken loose by her first live launch.

"The Seawolf isn't contracting to a single point. It's folding its faces inward, which means the thinnest part of the cross-section isn't on the dark edge we're looking at right now." I dragged the reticle down and left.

"It's here. In two seconds, it's going to flip out a narrower angle. That's where the phase-oscillation warhead goes." A short silence on the channel. Then Aida:"…Consistent." Jess followed: "Told you her brain cost more than mine." Roy added, calm: "Assuming her hands don't outrun her brain again at the last second."

"You really do hold grudges."

"I'm protecting a ship asset."

"So now I've been classified as a fixed asset." Maki said, mildly: "Not a fixed asset. A high-risk, high-attrition, currently irreplaceable consumable unit." I was quiet for half a beat.

"…Maki, that's factually accurate and also deeply hurtful."

"You still have the energy to protest. Status stable." She paused, then added the part that actually mattered.

"Hoshino. Hold your current calm. Don't rush to prove anything. Just force it to expose itself. That's all." That sentence landed like a hand pressing down on the nerve that had been about to lunge forward the moment I found the window. Right. Not proving myself. Not a clean hit. Not pulling off something extraordinary on the first live sortie. What I needed to do right now was small. Small enough to be one motion. Small enough to be one round, one angle, one window shorter than a breath.

And precisely because it was small, I couldn't miss it. I pressed the Type-0's nose down another half-degree and slid along the outer line toward the twisting dark ahead. The Yukikaze behind me. The bridge in my ear. The Seawolf ahead, retreating into the dimensional seam like something's malice pulling back into the wall. And me, caught in the middle — not brave, not composed, honestly kind of a mess. But at least, right now, I finally didn't feel like something that had been thrown out here.

More like — I'd actually entered this fight. And in that instant, the darkness ahead turned over again. Thinner than a blade, colder than a shadow — the cross-section stabbed out from the tightest intersection of the gravity signature, exactly where I'd predicted. My pupils contracted. The reticle locked on.

"I can see its bones—!"