Chương 401: 183.Day One 2

On December twenty-fifth, at around 0640, standing at the main gate, I experienced for the first time how Christmas could be just another labor format. The snow had stopped for a while overnight, but a half-dead layer remained on the ground, crunching underfoot like someone quietly mocking you. The security office light was still on. Fog ringed the glass.

Inside, the heater looked like a separate civilization; I was outside, holding the logbook, a keyring, and a cup of hot coffee Maki had forced on me, very aware I belonged to the cheaper world.

"You look like you're about to appear before a judge," Maki observed at my side. She was bundled more than usual too—a dark coat over her uniform, scarf perfectly tied like in some regulation diagram. It was ridiculous. We were all being dragged in as sacrifices, and she still managed to dress like the system itself. I wrapped my hands around the cup and answered honestly.

"Because it's basically the same," I said.

"Except court doesn't schedule sentencing from 0700 at the gate."

"Complaining means you're alive."

"President, you realize your idea of comfort is two sharp taps on the chest to see if the patient is still breathing." She didn't answer. Just made a small noise and took the logbook from me, comparing the list of those staying over the break against the entry permits. She worked fast—so fast it made me suspect she had some kind of separate, military-grade mental filing system just for dealing with every headache this world produced.

I had thought, naively, that a school on the first morning of break would at least look a little empty. Maybe even dignified. By 0700, I knew I'd overestimated civilization again. The first wave through the gate was parents. Not one or two. A flock. One second the road outside was a few headlights gliding past; the next it had become where is Dorm 3A and can we go in to help our child pack and where do we get temporary parking permits and my kid lost their student ID, can I still take them out all at once.

Every single parent had that pre-holiday, justified urgency, as if a five-minute delay here would delay the family dinner until next year. I stood just inside the gate, and for the first time in my life realized that excuse me in rapid-fire mode did actual physical damage.

"Vice President, parking passes."

"On it."

"Vice President, dorm access list."

"Hold on."

"Vice President, this parent says she's been waiting twenty minutes."

"And I'm supposed to award her a medal for patience?" The mother in question flinched. Maki closed the folder and stepped in before things went nuclear.

"Apologies. She's been here since 0640. Her tone's a little frostbitten," Maki said.

"If you give me your child's name and dorm, I'll confirm."

"Tone's a little frostbitten" sounded polite. It translated, roughly, to the Vice President is nearly frozen into feral mode; please bear with us. Coming from Maki, it actually worked. The woman swallowed whatever she'd been about to say and listed names. I flipped through the list and muttered, low:"Translated into human speech, that was 'she's about to break,' right?"

"Roughly," Maki said, not looking up.

"But festive season calls for softer phrasing."

"So Christmas courtesy is just wrapping my damage in nicer words."

"You're finally starting to understand administrative aesthetics."... Thanks. I'd rather not. The parent wave ebbed. Next came the ones here "on business."

"On business" sounds, on paper, like something with a logic, an appointment, a clear purpose. In reality, it's more like a random event in bureaucratic drag. Some were here to sign forms. Some represented external units dropping off post-holiday materials. Some were just showing up on Christmas morning to see if some teacher "happened to be around," like this was a corner shop, not a military academy. My job was to keep them at the appropriate boundaries and funnel the right questions to the right places.

It wasn't hard, exactly. But it wasn't easy either. The key was never looking idle. If you looked like you had bandwidth, the universe immediately supplied more work. By around 0830, even the contractors had started coming in. First was equipment maintenance, their truck barely parked before a second small transport rolled in behind them.

The driver jumped down rubbing his hands, thrusting a manifest at me while asking about buildings and commenting that it'd be easier to move post-New Year equipment now before the snow got bad. Two more followed—one delivering consumables and cleaning supplies, one for end-of-year checks on major facilities. In theory, it was a break. In practice, the campus was already wearing its worksite face—everyone "preparing for a more troublesome beginning."

Checking manifests at the gate, I had the stray thought: The reason the world can pretend it's fresh at New Year is not because it resets. It's because some unlucky people are always in the back, hauling the old dust, old gear, old processes, and old mess out of sight. Today, I was one of the unlucky ones.

"Vice President, signature here." Maki passed me a pen. I blinked and scribbled, then handed the clipboard back.

"You spaced out," she said.

"No," I said.

"I was engaged in holiday-specific institutional observation."

"Conclusion?"

"The world's festive mood is probably built out of frontline resentment." Maki nodded.

"Accurate," she said. I squinted at her.

"You being this agreeable is making me nervous."

"The facts are obvious today," she said.

"No need to argue." Right. When even the President was admitting the system had a tilt, I felt slightly less like I was just being dramatic. By 1000, the gate was in full warzone mode. Parents picking up residents. Students dragging suitcases out. Contractors hauling boxes and crates in. Visitors flipping IDs at the threshold. Two staffers from god-knew-which office were literally using the area map at the side to discuss schedules for the first week back. Every person had a reason. Every reason sounded urgent.

Maki and I stood in the middle like two breakwaters, keeping the first wave of chaos from breaking through. And I had to admit—Maki was useful. Not just useful. Very. Some people, just by being there, drop the local noise floor by two notches. She didn't raise her voice or pull out special expressions. She just lined up names, times, permissions, and process, and most people remembered they weren't here to start a riot. I filled in the other role.

Put simply: when she used rules to straighten the world, I used less elegant means to shove anyone trying to slide between them back into place. Around eleven, for instance, we had a father try to drive straight to the dorm side gate without registering, on the grounds that it was "just two boxes, we won't be long." I watched his "is it that hard to be flexible" face and thought, this is how every traffic problem in the Federation starts.

"No," I said.

"It'll only be a minute."

"So do most accidents." He choked. Maki stepped in smoothly.

"If there's a lot to carry, we can log it and arrange a cart," she said.

"But we can't let vehicles in." He looked between her and me—did some very quick risk analysis—and surrendered to the more human one.

"... Fine. Sorry to trouble you." Once he left, I muttered:"Notice how everyone prefers surrendering to you." You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

"Because I'm polite," she said.

"And me?"

"You're threatening."

"That doesn't sound like praise."

"I didn't say it was."... Fair. After noon, things did ease, but not enough to call it quiet. More like moving from "holding your breath while drinking" to "able to stand and sip water." We took turns slipping into the security office to thaw our hands, fix the logs, and plug the gaps from the morning. The middle-aged guard nodded at me with something almost like respect.

"Not bad, Vice President," he said.

"Thanks," I said flatly.

"My dream has already downgraded from 'survive New Year' to 'survive 1400.'" Maki sat nearby sorting forms. At that, she slid a warmed can of coffee over without comment.

"Drink." I took it. The metal was still hot. I paused.

"President, if you keep handing people hot drinks when they're about to die, it's going to give people the wrong idea."

"What idea?"

"That you have a conscience." She finally looked up.

"Shimo."

"Yeah."

"Drink your coffee." Fine. I popped the tab. Dignity is hard to maintain against caffeine and central heating after twelve hours on your feet. That's not weakness. It's physiology. The afternoon was better than the morning, but not calm. The contractors finished deploying their gear, ladders and trolleys and coffin-sized equipment cases trundling into the main building. Two partner orgs arrived to sign off and confirm their post-holiday entry procedures.

The gate area stayed in that permanent simmer—never boiling over, never still. By 1600 my legs felt like someone else's. Maki still looked stable. Stable enough to be annoying.

"Aren't you tired?" I asked.

"I am," she said.

"Then why do you look like you can take three more meetings and two budget hearings?"

"Because I'm not wearing my fatigue on my face."

"Is that a President-exclusive skill?"

"No." She clipped the last visitor log back onto the board.

"It's basic discipline." I was quiet.

"I suddenly understand why you're President and I'm the one who'll end up in the school history archives as 'repeated verbal offender, solid work performance.'""You're finally self-aware."

"Are you actually in a good mood today?"

"No."

"Then why are you still roasting me?"

"Because you're useful." That somehow felt more like a Maki-kind of compliment than an outright compliment. Cold. Functional. No decoration. And yet, coming from her, it landed heavier than pretty words. I looked away, pretending to study the sky. The snow clouds were dropping again. The light slid from grey-white into a deeper blue. Around 1700, most of the pick-up parents had gone. The visitors were gone. The contractors finished and checked out. Only a few lingered, moving the last pieces.

The gate, hammered all day, finally had room to breathe. Which just made the fatigue louder. While you're busy, anger and adrenaline hold you together. The second the noise drops, your body takes the mic.

"I've finally figured something out," I said, bracing a hand on the table.

"What?" Maki asked.

"For some people, Christmas means bells, lights, cake, and family," I said, looking at the emptying gate.

"For us, it means making sure everyone else gets their bells, lights, cake, and family across the threshold." She glanced at me.

"That was unexpectedly human," she said.

"President, you're incredibly rude."

"You're incredibly loud." I was about to snap back when two figures came up through the thin snow outside. Not a dramatic difference in height, but their cadence matched. The one in front had something in his hand, shoulders hunched like the wind and life had been lecturing him all day. The one beside him walked steady, also carrying a bag, face calm, like she wasn't here to take over a shift so much as take over a household ledger she'd known would be messy. I squinted, then almost laughed.

Roy and Lan had arrived. Roy wrinkled his brow the second he saw us.

"You two look like you've just rotated off the front," he said.

"Accurate," I said.

"Except today's enemy was parents, visitors, and vendors." Lan took in the gate, then us, and went straight to the essentials.

"Where do we start the handover?" she asked. Seeing them there gave me a weird little shot of relief. Not because the suffering was over. That was too much to ask. But because at least we'd made it to the point where someone else could take the baton. — Walking Roy around the back of the security office, I realized how completely the sky had dropped. The gate that had been trampled all day by parents, vendors, and people convinced their errands were urgent, finally looked like itself again.

The snow hadn't come back in force, but a thin layer covered the ground, glowing under the lamps like someone had sprinkled expired sugar over the academy's realism. Roy had the file under his arm. He didn't look terrible, but the I was supposed to be in the normal world tonight fatigue was written all over him. I knocked the keyring lightly against the old iron bar by the back door and jerked my chin toward it.

"It's not bad, actually," I said, half-laughing.

"Look. There's even a shower. And a bathroom." He stopped and looked at me. His brow tightened.

"Shimo."

"What."

"Don't smile at me like that. It's gross." I elbowed him.

"Cut the act," I said.

"You think you and Lan are as subtle as you two seem to think? Please." He actually stepped aside to avoid my elbow, looking like a wounded spreadsheet being dragged in for an audit.

"Don't say that here," he hissed.

"We're at the gate."

"Oh, so you can think about appearances," I drawled.

"Funny. Because when you saw your name next to hers on the night shift, your face screamed, 'calculating the systemic costs of spending Christmas with Lan.'""That was duty cost," he snapped.

"Not whatever garbage is in your head."

"So you admit there's something in your head."

"I admitted nothing."

"That brand of denial is about eighty percent admission." He glared. It was funny—not furious enough to commit, just the look of someone whose least defensible secret had been poked. So he piled all his annoyance into his brows. As the Council's finance officer, he was sharp and composed when it came to numbers, gear, reconciliations, and reports.

But the second Lan entered the equation, his responses developed a weird lag—like a machine that usually ran perfectly, now spinning awkwardly on a bolt that had started running hot. It was entertaining. But my mood was decent, so I let him off. I opened the side door at the back of the office and stepped aside, gesturing in.

"This is the forward post." The little front space wasn't big—one desk, two chairs, a chest-high metal cabinet, and an old building monitor board on the wall. Not advanced. Not exactly primitive either. It had that stubborn I'm old, but I still work feel. I hooked a thumb toward the inner door.

"Back here's the rest room," I said.

"About two tatami if you're generous. Barely enough for two people to take turns collapsing like borderline citizens of a civilized nation. There's also a full-3D TV with terrible reception. In theory that counts as entertainment. In practice it's mostly there to remind you that the world's entertainment quality and the duty system both depend on luck." Roy poked his head in.

"... Small," he said.

"Did you think unpaid labor gets premium facilities?" I said.

"The fact it's not literally an icebox is already institutional mercy." He eyed the projector in the corner, a relic that had clearly tried to keep up with the times and failed.

"Does that thing actually work?"

"It does," I said.

"As long as you accept that sometimes the visuals look haunted and the audio sounds like someone is broadcasting underwater next door." He paused.

"... You're making me want not to use it."

"Congratulations. You're entering the correct duty mindset." He grunted, refusing to give me the satisfaction of a proper reaction. He tapped the file folder instead, slipping back into work mode.

"What about the handover items?" he asked. I looked him dead in the eye. Then said, honestly:"Ask Maki. She does it better." He narrowed his eyes.

"You didn't memorize it?"

"It's not that I didn't want to," I said.

"It's that my brain is cooked. Giving you the grand tour without faceplanting is the last of my professional dignity." That wasn't exaggeration. From 0700 through to now, the fact that I'd stopped short of becoming a sentient bollard was already a solid contribution to student self-governance. Asking me to recite teacher exit flows, night patrol routes, door-key mapping, and emergency overrides on top—that would be an abuse of the nervous system.

Roy studied what I was sure looked like a salvage-title face, and—for once—didn't push. He just clicked his tongue.

"How the hell did you get through this?" he asked.

"Spite, coffee, and the last scraps of my sense of civic duty," I said.

"I buy the last two. First one seems to be the primary fuel."

"Thanks for the compliment."

"Not a compliment."

"I know. I'm out of bandwidth to distinguish malice from concern." By the time we went back around to the front desk, Maki had everything arranged. She stood at the desk with the log and the keys. Lan stood beside her, reading over the night checklist. One talking, one noting. Efficient enough to be a training video. The second Roy stepped in, Maki went straight into it. No wasted words, no repeats. She was so precise it wasn't hard to imagine she had already sorted doors by difficulty of locking.

I lasted about two lines of that before making the correct choice: step away. Once Maki hit that speed, the best thing anyone else could do was not interrupt. Especially someone like me, with a half-cooked brain and dead legs. Step in and I'd just become noise. So I slipped back. Then another step. Then leaned against the wall and slid into a mode best described as physically present, spiritually clocked out. Lan noticed.

"Are you alright?" she asked.

"If you're asking about my body, I'm technically alive," I said.

"If you're asking about my mental state, I reserve the right to wait for counsel." She looked like she wanted to laugh, but only pressed her lips together. Roy flipped through the pages, still making time to stab at me.

"I think your greatest contribution today was proving that overwork can be weaponized," he said.

"This isn't weaponization," I said.

"This is trauma, visualized." Maki didn't look up, but added, calm:"Then you've done very well."

"President, have you merged 'encourage subordinates' and 'stab them on your way past' into one skill tree now?"

"It's efficient." High-efficiency. Logical. No encumbrance from conscience. It was after full dark by the time we'd transferred everything. It wasn't technically late. But if you've been standing since 0700, your sense of time corrodes. Noon and dusk blur. The world divides into only two states: still working, can leave. For me and Maki, at least, we were finally edging into the second. When I wheeled the bike out, the cold actually helped.

Not by restoring energy—more like slicing my fatigue into identifiable pieces, so I could tell which bits had broken first. Maki pulled her gloves on with the usual precision. She'd been out there just as long as I had and should have been just as wrecked. But she was the type who stored her exhaustion in her bones. From the outside, she still looked steady. How it held together inside was her problem. I was about to hand her helmet over when I caught something at the edge of my vision.

Some things, once seen, never go away. Especially when you live with Jess. The next week's peace outlook was not great. Maki swung onto the back of the bike like nothing had happened.

"Food?" she asked.

"Before we go back." I steadied the handlebars and looked back.

"This time of night it's just chains," I said.

"What do you want?" She barely paused.

"Sushi." I blinked.

"Sushi?" In its own way, the answer was very her. Most people, after a day like this, think ramen, fried food, hot pots—anything greasy enough to glue their soul back together. Maki could end a sixteen-hour shift and say "sushi" in the same tone she used to approve forms. I pulled my terminal up.

"Computer. Nearest sushi place still open." It blinked and spat out a list in three seconds. Mostly familiar chains, each with names that sounded like focus-grouped slogans. At the bottom, one listing made my eyebrow twitch.

"Got it." I angled the screen toward her.

"How about this one—Sushi Naniwamaru." Maki skimmed it, then read the tagline out loud."'Dunan's No. 1 Aquaculture Supplier, Perfectly Recreating Earth-Era Fish…'" She trailed off, as if genuinely weighing whether "perfectly recreating Earth-era fish" was a selling point or a confession. Finally, she nodded.

"Fine." I grinned and set the navigation.

"Just now you were trying to decide whether that slogan was a triumph of biotech or a sign marketing had a collective episode, weren't you?"

"They're not mutually exclusive," she said.

"... Too true. I have no counter." I glanced back at the security office once more before we left. Roy and Lan had already gone inside with the file. I couldn't see their faces from here, but just knowing that box of "ultra-thin" would be sharing oxygen tonight with duty logs, instant drinks, and a haunted TV made me think that, in some corners of the world, the programming really was well arranged. Not my problem tonight. I pulled my gloves back on. Behind me, Maki's voice came light and flat through the helmet.

"Let's go, Shimo."

"Yeah." As the headlight cut on, I had the oddest feeling. Like this whole mess that had started at dawn finally had a seam. On one side: parents, visitors, vendors, handovers, systems, unpaid labor, and the frontline of Christmas logistics. On the other: night road, cold air, a blinking waypoint for a cheap sushi joint, and the person behind me who, after an entire day like this, could say "sushi" and pull the world back into something chewable. Framed like that, even farmed fish at a chain didn't sound so tragic.

At least tonight, we weren't on nights. That counted as a kind of holiday grace.