Chương 314: 133.Furious Planet 1

All-Terrain Vehicle One hit that glowing, blue-white lunatic of a planet like a metal tooth the Yukikaze had just spat out — biting straight in. For the first second, the main display nearly convinced me the camera had failed. It wasn't shaking. The whole world was tilted. The sky in the feed didn't look like a sky at all. It looked like a sheet of glass being wrung out, over and over, by some invisible hand. Blue-white gravity-shear bands cut across the upper atmosphere in bands.

The horizon in the distance wasn't an arc — it was something that breathed, rising and falling like the planet's own skeleton was rolling over underneath.

"Entering atmosphere." D's voice came through the main channel, short as ever — so short it sounded like every extra word would have cost him money. The next second, the forward view lurched hard downward. Not a fall. Gravity had simply spiked. The numbers in front of me flipped like someone had kicked the table over — 0. 8, 2. 1, 3. 8, then straight back down to 0. 4, jumping around like Harvey after three shots of espresso, sitting down at a piano.

"Gravity turbulence entering first layer!" Akari's voice tightened.

"Hoshino, right-side fissure band is bleeding over — original trajectory needs correction!"

"I see it!" I nearly shouted it back, fingers flying to layer two models on top of each other. This planet was genuinely deranged. Not the kind of deranged that poisons you. Not the kind that burns you to slurry. The kind that would make a physics teacher hand in their resignation on the spot. The gravity streamlines in the upper right of the display started warping. What had looked like a river now looked like a ball of blue yarn some kid had gotten into with both hands.

I zoomed in on one fissure current that had suddenly flared bright, and my stomach dropped.

"First wave, five degrees right! Not three — five! Now!" D didn't waste a syllable. The vehicle's camera cut sideways instantly. The whole main display lurched with it. I nearly threw myself, chair and all, into the auxiliary console. Beside me, Jess reached over without ceremony and pinned my cup down — and, incidentally, my data slate, which had nearly gone airborne.

"Thanks."

"Don't mention it. If the acting captain breaks her neck on the bridge before we even hit ground, I'd have a hard time explaining that to anyone."

"How do you always manage to land exactly between punchable and useful?"

"Talent." She said it without a shred of shame, hands never stopping, layering comm delay and gravity-particulate interference into my main window at speed. She was unsettlingly quiet today — even her sharp mouth had been trimmed down into something purely functional. I wasn't sure what to do with that. The instant the vehicle corrected back to level, Maki's voice cut in.

"Floating rock mass, forward right." Her tone was steady. Steady the way someone reads off a breakfast menu. And the second I heard it, my brain still — with zero dignity — lost half a beat. …Pathetic, Lieutenant Hoshino. Hours have passed since last night, and you're still glitching like a system somebody keeps secretly hitting reset on.

"I see it." I hauled my focus back to the feed.

"D, don't cut under it — hug its left side. Three seconds, and that thing drops."

"Copy." Almost the same instant he answered, the massive rock hanging ahead of the vehicle lit up entirely. Not reflected light. Generating its own. Blue-white light bled through the seams in the stone, like a small sun had woken up inside. A heartbeat later, the whole mass seemed to be seized by an invisible fist and crushed on the spot — detonating mid-air into a storm of glowing crystalline shards, swept sideways along the storm current.

If D had been half a second slower, I'd be up here trying to work out a dignified way to sort the first wave's ashes. I drew a breath, my back already slick with cold sweat. We'd only just entered the atmosphere. This planet hadn't even started its real performance yet.

"Altitude fourteen hundred, hull stress rising!" Akari rattled off the numbers fast.

"Low-G window's holding, but the main fissure band is drifting south ahead of schedule!"

"Shimo." Ash's voice cut in.

"Give us a new entry point." Wait — I froze half a beat before realizing he'd said it out of pure habitual efficiency, nothing more, and forced my eyes back to the display, barely daring to blink. If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. The active-indium geyser field lay dead ahead.

Several enormous blue light columns punched straight up from the surface, bright enough that they didn't look like ore deposits — they looked like glowing nerves someone had drawn out of the ground with a giant syringe. The mining zone around them was littered with half-floating debris, twisted metallic-blue striations, and patches that looked like ground — though by now I no longer trusted anything on this planet that merely looked like ground. A gravity curve on the right began to lift. Not rising. Turning over.

Peeling upward like a tsunami folding a whole sheet of water at once.

"Switch to B-2!" I called it immediately.

"Don't enter the main Zone-A geysers. Secondary vein under the right ridge — bright enough, surface more stable. Take the active indium first. Storm crystal waits for the second storm peak!"

"Copy," Ash said. That, right there, was exactly why I was sitting on the bridge and not down there with my head in my hands, fighting gravity myself. Annoying. But true. As much as it grated, Aida hadn't pinned me up here for nothing. If the field commander and the bridge analyst both got knocked flat by the same planet at once, the Yukikaze's next chapter could just be retitled All Hands Drifting Peacefully Through Space. The vehicle punched through a blinding curtain of gravity dust.

The feed dissolved into static, the whole screen flooding with blue-white noise, like someone had dumped a bucket of glowing sand straight onto the lens. Jess slammed interference suppression to maximum, her voice dropping a notch.

"Particulate spike. Feed's going to cut in and out. Hoshino, don't watch the main camera — watch the undercarriage telemetry."

"I know."

"That was a reminder. Not a dig."

"…You're being very un-Jess today."

"If you like it, I'll go back to normal once everyone's home alive." Light. Almost a joke. I still froze for a second, for no reason I could account for. Before I could answer, the main display cleared. And then I saw the ground. No — I saw this planet's version of "ground." The entire mining zone looked like a blue ruin some god had smashed apart and glued back together blind. Massive pure-ferrite columns jutted out of the earth at crooked angles, some only half-anchored while the rest drifted slowly skyward.

Blinding blue light seeped from cracks in the surface; active-indium veins pulsed through the rock like blood vessels, each throb lifting the surrounding rubble and dropping it again. Then I saw the Living Stain. It clung to the edges of several glowing rock faces — a dark blue-black film, too thick, too dense, like something flattened against the ground. The surface moved. Not wind. It contracted and expanded on its own, slow and deliberate, as if using the planet's gravity to breathe. My stomach turned.

"…I am formally announcing that I despise floors that look like they might still be alive."

"Logged," Roy said, dead straight, from the near-orbital channel.

"Adding to Lieutenant Hoshino's prohibited-terrain list, post-mission."

"Please add 'mountains that fly' while you're at it."

"That one's probably going to take two full pages." The vehicle began to slow. D kept it low, the chassis nearly scraping down the flank of a half-floating ferrite slope. The metal undercarriage shrieked against loose rock; the external view jolted like the whole rig could get slapped into the sky at any second.

"Landing countdown," Ash said.

"Hold." I was watching the gravity sequence.

"Don't push straight down — surface values are spiking. Touch it now and you'll—" The number flipped, hard.

"—buckle." D pulled the vehicle up a fraction at almost the exact same moment I spoke. The next instant, the patch of ground they'd been about to land on sank half a level, then got hammered flat by a 4. 1G spike, rubble blasting outward in a radial crater — like someone had dropped a building on it from orbit. Cold ran straight down my spine.

"…Thank every god there is," I muttered.

"Don't thank anyone yet," D said.

"We haven't touched dirt." This man, when he doesn't comfort you, that's one thing. But when he actually tries — he just slides a knife straight between your ribs. Akari's voice spiked.

"Now! Low-G pocket forming!" I nearly slapped the console shouting it.

"That's it! Sixty meters, forward left, shadow of the ferrite column! D — down!" The vehicle dropped. The feed lurched violently. Half the bridge held its breath at once. I stared at the screen, braced for the next frame to show not a landing but a very expensive all-terrain vehicle pressed flat into the ore field. It didn't come. After two brutal jolts, the picture steadied.

Through dust, blue light, rubble, and drifting gravity particulate, the vehicle had planted itself on that brief, grudging patch of safe ground.

"Touchdown," D said. The bridge went quiet for a moment. Not because no one was relieved. Because everyone here understood: on this planet, landing didn't mean safety. At best, it meant you'd earned the right to start the next round of being humiliated by physics.

"First wave, disembark," Ash said. The external camera switched to outside the hull. The instant the hatch opened, the storm poured in. Not wind. More like the entire world dragging a massive sheet of metal back and forth — a high, low-frequency drone that ground straight into the skull. Gravel, blue dust, and glowing gravity particles spun erratically along the warped air outside the door.

In the distance, an entire half-floating ridge was slowly lifting toward the sky, its edges constantly shedding into bright, glittering debris. Then Maki stepped out. Her footing on the surface of this glowing lunatic planet was steadier than I'd expected. Not because the environment had gotten kinder. Because that was simply who she was.

The moment her boots actually hit a combat zone, every part of that cold system she usually used to torment everyone around her booted up in full — precise as a blade sharpened one time too many. Her powered armor flared faintly. Gravity anchors drove into the ground on their own, keeping the first reverse pull from sweeping her away. I watched her brace against the vehicle's flank and sweep her eyes over the ore ahead, and felt something tighten in my throat that had no business being there.

She'd reduced me to a wreck last night. Today I was on the bridge, worrying about whether a mountain was going to fall on her. Was there a more unreasonable division of labor anywhere in the known universe? I genuinely doubted it.

"Secondary vein confirmed, thirty meters ahead," Maki said.

"Copy," I answered. Only after the word left my mouth did I notice I'd replied to her faster than usual. …Not the time to audit my own emotional management. Moving on. D already had the multi-function extraction arm up, cutting into the outer crust over the active indium. The first cutting beam struck the vein's edge and the whole field flared from within, like a nerve being scraped raw. A low, muffled resonance rolled up from underground. Like the planet was offended. Like it was preparing to wake up properly.

"Extraction begins," Ash said.

"All hands, first-cycle active-indium recovery is live." And at that exact moment, Akari sucked in a breath.

"Wait—" She yanked a second monitoring feed wide open. On the western edge of the field, a new gravity-fissure band was forming. Not slowly brightening. Like a blade drawn straight out of the sky — the whole blue-white fracture tore open the upper atmosphere in an instant and drove down at an angle, straight toward the first wave's position. My chest dropped. My hand hit the comm key before my brain caught up.

"First wave! New western fissure forming, storm's coming in early—" My voice caught. Because under that fissure band, a wide stretch of ground had started to glow. Not the steady energy-glow of an active-indium vein. Something wilder. Rawer. Blindingly bright. Cracks split open one after another, like the earth itself was opening its eyes.

The next second, dozens of massive blue crystal columns tore straight up out of the rock, racing along the runaway gravity current, growing as they climbed — bright enough that the whole mining zone looked like it had been set on fire. Storm crystal. And on a scale that was frankly obscene. Jess let out a low whistle beside me.

"Wow," she said.

"This planet really does want to settle every account at once."