Chương 407: 187.Night Patrol

The moment the door closed behind us, whatever barely qualified as civilized warmth inside the duty room was cut off with it. School buildings at night have a very specific kind of quiet. Not a quiet where nothing exists. Everything was still there—it simply stopped serving anyone. The lights that handled illumination during the day had dropped to bare minimum; the corridors, walls, window frames, and bulletin boards all looked the same as ever, but they'd collectively lost the premise of "for student use."

The whole space felt unfamiliar because of it, as if the school had finally, at this hour, taken back the face it lends to human beings during the day, revealing the one underneath—a little hollow, a little cold, faintly impatient. Nikaido walked half a step ahead of me. Half a step, but she controlled that distance in a way that was genuinely annoying—not close enough to feel like she was looking out for me, not far enough to suggest we were operating independently.

Exactly the range that said: keep up, but stay out of my way. She held the flashlight in her right hand, beam pressed low, sweeping the floor first, then lifting to door handles and wall corners. Her movements were as crisp as standard procedure executed countless times before. I followed on her right, flashlight in hand, my mood split about evenly between this is such a pain and how has this woman survived this long without getting punched.

Snow-glow filtered in from outside, bleaching the stretch toward the east connecting corridor a flat, unpleasant white. Not a clean white. The kind you get when someone dumps cold water over a hallway and insincerely adds, don't worry, it's just a visual effect.

"Watch your step." Nikaido spoke suddenly. I glanced down and found a thin wet patch at the floor's edge—meltwater tracked in from outside.

"I saw it."

"You almost stepped in it.""'Almost' means I didn't."

"Night duty isn't scored on 'almost.'" I drew in a breath of cold air and decided to let it go. Working night shift with Nikaido, the real drain was never the workload. The workload was ordinary enough. What ground you down to sparks was her ability to make every reminder sound completely impersonal—aimed at the situation, never at you—while somehow every single one still landed square on your chest. We reached the east connecting corridor quickly.

It was one of my least favorite stretches in the whole main academic zone. Not because anything had ever actually happened there, but because it was too good at creating the impression that something might. Wide glass panels on both sides, one facing out, one facing in. At night, if the light angle went wrong, human shadows, snow-glow, indoor lighting, and glass reflections would layer over each other until they produced an entirely unnecessary plural. Nikaido stopped half a step before the entrance.

"As I said," she didn't turn around, keeping her voice flat, "don't shine it on the glass. Floor first, then handles and corners."

"Got it."

"Not 'got it,'" she said.

"Do it." I really wanted to ask if there had ever been a single day in this woman's life when she didn't talk to people like fresh recruits on their first morning of boot camp. I held it in. Not out of grace. Talking back now would look like losing. She went in first. Her beam stayed low and steady, gliding along the floor, occasionally lifting half an inch to catch window frames, door edges, and the shadows in corners. She wasn't fast, but every step landed exactly.

Her boots hit the floor clean and short, as if even her heels knew this wasn't the hour to drag. I watched from behind for a couple of seconds and thought: this woman doesn't patrol. She rehearses. Infuriating. And—annoyingly—kind of good to look at. The thought had barely finished forming before I clicked my tongue at myself. Some aesthetic instincts really do sabotage your character judgment. I dragged my attention down and swept my own beam over the right side—floor, then handles, as instructed.

The light traced the baseboard, the fire door, a metal knob, the exit sign, and one stretch of glass washed white by the snow outside. In that exact instant, my hand lifted maybe half an inch too high. Just half an inch. The beam grazed the window. The glass threw both our reflections back at once. Snow-glow, interior light, and the twin flashlight halos overlapped, and for one short, stupid second, the pane produced a third silhouette—upright, standing dead center between Nikaido and me, going nowhere.

A cheap illusion. An effective one anyway. Nikaido's reaction beat the illusion to the punch. She was already pressing my wrist down with the back of her hand, almost in the same instant that shadow finished forming. Not hard. Precise. Too precise to read as I noticed something wrong so I stopped it. It read more like her body had already decided it didn't want that shape in her field of view, and moved before the reasoning caught up. My beam dropped back to the floor, sliding off the glass.

The third silhouette dissolved instantly—just the two of us again, outlines back where they belonged. The corridor turned back into a corridor. Cold, long, annoying, and grounded in reality. Only then did Nikaido speak.

"I said, don't hit the glass." Flat. Flat enough to suggest nothing had happened at all—just a routine correction to an unprofessional little slip. I glanced down at my wrist. She'd already let go. The speed of it hadn't.

"Your reaction time's a bit fast," I said.

"Because there's no reason to make that mistake twice."

"My hand just slipped."

"Night vision fills in wrong outlines on its own." Nikaido tilted her head slightly, the tips of her ice blue hair catching the cold light like a coat of frost.

"Unnecessary visual interference just wastes confirmation time." Perfectly reasonable. Too reasonable. Reasonable in the way of someone who'd had the explanation sitting in her pocket the whole time, ready to pull out and seal any instinct back inside procedure the second it surfaced. I didn't answer right away, just watched her profile.

She'd already turned back, her beam resuming that maddening, precise arc—down, corners, edges, forward—as if pressing my wrist had been routine maintenance, not worth a second thought. Her shoulders were level, her pace steady. On the surface, she was still exactly the Nikaido who had discipline welded into her bones. But something still felt off. Not because she'd corrected me. You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story. Because she'd been too fast.

Not annoyed you're causing extra work fast. More like she genuinely didn't want to look at that glass for one more second.

"Vice President." I snapped back.

"Right side done?"

"... Done."

"Then keep up."

"I am."

"You stopped." I nearly laughed. Right. It wasn't only me watching her. She'd been watching me too. We just weren't looking at the same thing. I closed the gap back to half a step. Outside, the snow kept falling, fine white light bleeding through the glass, occasionally dragging our shadows down to our feet, stretching them, then chopping them apart. Every time Nikaido passed a window, she deliberately kept her beam low, refusing to let it touch the glass by even a hair.

She did it so naturally it looked like habit—which, precisely because it looked like habit, made it suspicious. I watched twice without making it obvious, and a thought slowly settled.... Was I reading too much into it? If this were only about avoiding glare misjudgment, she wouldn't need to be that fast. If it were only about keeping my technique clean, she wouldn't need to reach over and physically stop me. That motion hadn't read like correction. It had read like an intercept.

Intercepting me—or intercepting herself. I narrowed my eyes but didn't ask. With someone like Nikaido, the more directly you ask, the faster she'll repackage the answer into official language and hand it back sealed. If you want to find where she cracks, you have to watch. Not ask. And right now, I'd probably just found the first one. Very thin. Thin like ice that hasn't split yet, just gone quietly white along one line underneath.

I pressed my beam back down and said nothing, following her through the rest of that glass-heavy, shadow-heavy corridor. But that second stayed in my head. Very quiet. Very inconvenient. Nikaido might not just be a stickler. By the time we stepped out of the east corridor, that thin white line was still there. Not a conclusion. Not yet. At most, the rough draft of a hunch—like penciling an answer in the corner of an exam page, too faint to circle, but you already know you're probably right.

Ahead was the second-floor empty classroom zone. Unlike the glass-heavy corridor, this area's unpleasantness was more old-fashioned. Long hallway, a row of classrooms, each door fitted with a narrow window strip. By day, convenient for a teacher doing rounds. At night, a row of very polite eyes—no mouths, no blinking, just quietly clipping a piece of your shadow off as you passed. The hallway lights weren't all on. Every other one, cold white, stripped of warmth.

Walls and door frames sliced into alternating bands of bright and dark; even the light strips on the floor looked measured with a ruler, then deliberately left gapped. If the person beside me hadn't had discipline welded straight into her skeleton, this place would already be perfect breeding ground for bad ideas.

"Second-floor empty classroom zone," Nikaido said, her voice unusually clear in a hallway like this.

"Exterior door locks first, then window latches. Don't shine inward first." I raised a brow.

"I'm starting to suspect you've numbered every single door in this school."

"Some sections, yes." I turned to look at her.

"... That was sarcasm."

"I know." She kept walking, expression unchanged.

"Facts don't stop being facts because of tone." Extremely Nikaido. Thoroughly annoying. And, damn it, kind of cool. I mentally bolded the note she talks like a bulletin board that grew a mouth and matched her pace, turning to check the row of doors on my right. The metal handles were freezing. Winter school buildings are like that—even objects can't be bothered to pretend hospitality.

The cold shot straight into my knuckles, reminding me it was the middle of the night, no one was here, and even the most ordinary things go slightly wrong at the wrong hour. Click. Very soft. My hand kept moving, but my eyes had already cut sideways. Not my side. Ahead and slightly left of Nikaido, near the third empty classroom. Tiny sound. Small enough to vanish in daylight noise. Probably a window frame, a latch, a heating pipe, some plastic fixture asserting its existence after shrinking in the cold.

In other words: completely explicable. But Nikaido stopped. Half a beat. Literally half a beat. If I hadn't already caught this once in the glass corridor, I might have missed it entirely. She didn't freeze. Didn't spin dramatically. The step she'd been about to plant simply pulled back into her body for a fraction of a second first, as if an invisible thread had been tied to her ankle and someone had given it the lightest possible tug. Then she raised her flashlight.

The beam sliced through the pale corridor air, swept the classroom door, the narrow window, the handle, the frame, and finally settled squarely on the spot the sound had come from.

"Interior materials contracting in the cold," she said. Too fast. Not her movement—her explanation. Fast enough that the click had barely finished before she already had the answer loaded, eager to fire it out. Not to convince me. Not entirely to complete the record either. More like she couldn't tolerate that one second of blankness, so she slapped a reasonable answer over it immediately, crushing anything that shouldn't be allowed to grow.

I finished checking my own door at a deliberate pace and didn't respond right away. Her beam stayed fixed there, as if waiting for the sound to file a written statement justifying its own existence. Her shoulders were still level, her posture unbroken—but I saw it. The grip at the web of her right hand, around the flashlight, was tighter than before. Very slight. Not quite a flaw. More like an unnatural stress line appearing on a metal surface a moment before it actually cracks.

"Normal?" I finally asked. She didn't look back.

"Normal."

"That 'normal' sounded more like an order than an observation." She was quiet for a second before bringing the beam back down.

"Most anomalous sounds in a school building at night trace back to temperature difference, material contraction, and airflow."

"Most," I repeated.

"Yes."

"And the minority?" This time she turned to face me. Light skimmed the side of her face, sharpening her jawline. Her expression was as cold as before—maybe colder—but I couldn't tell if it was imagination, or whether the shadow under her lashes had actually deepened, like someone had just tapped, very lightly, on the inside of a mask that was as beautiful as it was infuriating.

"The minority are simply not yet confirmed," Nikaido said. I almost laughed. So very her. Unwilling even to say "I don't know" as "I don't know." She had to wrap it in disciplinary phrasing first, as if calm enough wording meant the unknown didn't count as unknown. I tucked the clipboard under my arm and drifted up beside her, following where her beam had swept. Empty classroom. Locked. The narrow window inside was uniformly dark.

Nameplate, notice, class schedule, all sitting quietly in place, as if the students who'd napped and copied notes and whispered inside during the day had never existed at all. Click. Again. Lighter this time. Like something inside had shifted with great restraint. Before I could react, she'd already stepped forward, beam snapping up again. Still steady. Still precise. But the way that step launched was too clean to be patrol-clean. It was guard-clean.

Her shoulders had gone thin—almost invisibly so—but it made the sense of I am actually bracing against something suddenly much sharper.

"Window latch," she said. I blinked.

"What?"

"This classroom's latch runs loose." Her cadence ticked up, barely, but I caught it.

"The cold makes the frame vibrate."

"You know this specific classroom's latch is loose?"

"Day-shift log, last week." Right. Exactly Nikaido. A Disciplinary Chair who could probably recite which window in the building is most likely to rattle. Drop that character into a different story and the author would hand her some grand title—Silver Gatekeeper of Academy Order, something like that. Standing in front of me, it only produced one very practical thought. This woman's life must be exhausting. Not the "busy" kind of exhausting.

The kind where she probably doesn't feel it herself, but everyone watching from the sidelines runs out of breath on her behalf. I didn't press further, just glanced sideways at her. She'd already reset—beam back on the floor, shoulders back to their habitual line. She even jotted a note on her clipboard, handwriting steady, as if those two little sounds weren't worth a second thought. I no longer believed in "not worth a second thought." Not because I thought something was actually there.

Because I was starting to see that her reaction to sounds like that—unexplained, unannounced, arriving out of nowhere—was too fast to pass as neutral. She wasn't just confirming. She was racing. Racing to name it before that sense of the unknown could take shape. Racing to file it before it could stay unfiled. Racing to shove it back into the "explainable" drawer before it had the chance to become something else.

I suddenly thought back to every one of her earlier, infuriating requirements— Don't shine it on the glass. Don't assume it's just the wind. Two-person confirmation. Log it on the spot; don't reconstruct it later. Not just fussiness. She genuinely needed everything to have a name, a cause, a procedure—so she could put herself back in a position that felt safe. I looked away from her profile, lowered my head, and made a show of writing on my own board. Didn't write a single word.

Because my head was louder than the corridor right now.... Interesting. No—wrong word. More like— I see. What Nikaido was afraid of probably wasn't the dark. It probably wasn't the building itself, either. She was afraid of the things inside the dark that hadn't been named yet. Which was why she fought so hard to turn every step into regulation, every sentence into definition, every faint sound back into something rational before it had time to be anything else.

"Vice President." Her voice dropped half a degree colder.

"How much longer are you planning to stand there?" I blinked, realizing I'd probably been staring a bit too obviously. So I cooperatively looked away, shining my beam at the equipment room's door placard instead, doing a passable impression of someone earnestly confirming the state of some spare mops.

"Just checking," I said, "whether this counts as one of your 'high-misjudgment zones' from the manual."

"It does," she said instantly.

"You really did write that down."

"Because it was necessary."

"Your life really is exhausting." Nikaido's brow twitched, very faintly—so faint it looked like even she wasn't sure whether the comment fell into her requires response category. In the end, she just pushed her beam forward again, tone snapping back to that teeth-grinding evenness.

"Less talking. Keep moving."

"Yes, Chair." I followed, but my mood had shifted completely from a few minutes ago. Before, I'd just been annoyed. Now I knew something. I knew that her standing guard all evening, that suffocatingly detailed manual, the duty logic that wouldn't even let a person drink tea in peace—none of it was purely a flamboyant personality flaw on parade. Some of it was genuine armor. I see. So this living rulebook wasn't seamless after all. Not without a shell. Not born this rigid, either.

She'd just built the shell so completely, so thoroughly, that even she had nearly convinced herself it was her original shape. And I— Probably from this exact moment, I had very unfortunately developed an interest in that shell itself. Not a noble interest. More the very-Hoshino-Shimo kind of quiet curiosity that shows up right before someone does something they shouldn't. If I tapped it, lightly, what would happen? The thought had barely finished forming before I caught myself with an internal oh, come on.

Bad sign. Looked like the one who genuinely needed the Disciplinary Committee's attention tonight, start to finish, might have been me all along.