Chapter 352: 352 | Not My Problem
The east field at seven in the morning looked like a divorce proceeding where both parties had brought weapons.
Misato had divided the space into two halves with training cones, her squad on the left and Blair’s on the right, running through basic formation drills that should have been simple enough for literal children to understand. Move together. Stop together. Don’t leave gaps in the perimeter. Kindergarten stuff repackaged in tactical terminology.
Blair’s team treated the exercise like a personal insult.
"Formation Two requires the left flank to advance with the center." Misato’s voice carried across the field with the patience of a woman who had already accepted she would strangle someone before noon. "Charles, that means you move when Naomi moves. Not after. Not before. With."
Charles Leone adjusted his collar with two fingers and did not move. The blonde hair, the expensive product, the posture of someone who’d been told since birth that the world existed to accommodate his schedule. Charles looked at Misato the way you might look at a parking meter that had the audacity to demand payment.
"I don’t follow lottery kid formations," Charles said. "My ability requires independent positioning to maximize—"
"Your ability requires you to be alive, which requires you to be where I tell you to be when I tell you to be there." Misato’s lime green ponytail snapped as she turned. "Formation Two. Again."
Blair stood twenty meters away with her arms crossed, watching the disaster unfold with the expression of someone who’d bought tickets to a show and discovered the theater was on fire. Her red hair caught the morning sun. The tactical suit fit her the way tactical suits were apparently designed to fit heiresses from billion-dollar families, which is to say it clung to every curve like it owed her money. The 39F situation strained the composite fabric in ways that would have violated multiple engineering specifications.
I forced my eyes to the training cones instead. Priorities.
"Run it again," Misato ordered.
We ran it again. Naomi advanced with her staff channeling blue-white energy, and Belle called positions from her detection range, and Jordan’s shadows spread across the grass in dark patterns that mapped the space around us. My squad moved like water around rocks because we’d spent three weeks building this, rep by rep, drill by drill, under Misato’s psychotic training regimen until our bodies understood each other better than our brains did.
Charles moved three seconds late.
Dante flinched left when he should have held center.
Javier tried to compensate for both of them and ended up in no-man’s-land between two positions, too far from either to be useful.
Blair did not move at all. She stood exactly where she’d been standing, watching her own squad collapse around her like she existed in a separate timeline where coordination was someone else’s problem.
"Stop." Misato pressed her fingers against her temple. "Stop. Everyone stop."
The field went quiet except for the ocean wind and Jordan’s shadow tendrils retracting into the grass with a sound like silk on concrete.
"We’ve run Formation Two nine times." Misato spoke to the sky. "Nine. The average coordination score for nine attempts is thirty-seven percent, which is lower than your average for Formation One, which we ran fourteen times before that and achieved forty-one percent. You are getting worse with practice. I did not know that was physically possible."
"Maybe the formations are the problem," Charles offered.
"The formations are not the problem. The formations are academy-standard two-squad integration protocols designed by people who have forgotten more about gate operations than you have learned in your entire pampered life." Misato’s voice stayed level but her left eye twitched. That twitch was a warning sign that the people closest to her had learned to respect. "The problem is that half of you refuse to move as a unit because you’ve spent your entire academy career relying on individual power to compensate for the fact that you don’t trust anyone enough to watch your back."
Blair’s chin lifted. A millimeter. Maybe two. Enough to notice.
"And the other half," Misato continued, turning to my squad, "is coordinating beautifully within your own formation while treating the other five people on this field as obstacles to navigate around rather than allies to integrate with."
That one landed. I felt it, and so did Belle, whose amber-brown eyes shifted from their permanent state of calculating assessment to something closer to recognition. We had been doing that. Running our patterns clean while pretending Blair’s people were geography rather than partners.
"Fifteen-minute break," Misato said. "Hydrate. Eat something. Come back ready to actually try, or don’t come back at all."
The two groups separated immediately, because of course they did. Oil and water. Cats and dogs. Whatever metaphor described two populations that would rather eat broken glass than share a water bottle.
I dropped onto the grass next to Jordan and gulped from a bottle that Naomi had filled from the cooler before practice. She sat cross-legged beside me, her binder open to a page of formation notes that she’d already updated with red ink indicating where things went wrong. Naomi’s dedication to documentation bordered on clinical obsession, but the woman produced results that were impossible to argue with.
"Charles is going to get someone killed," Belle said from my other side, ripping open a protein bar with her teeth.
"Charles is going to get himself killed." Jordan lay flat on the grass with one arm over his eyes. "There’s a meaningful difference."
"Not when we’re standing next to him in a gate."
I watched Blair’s group across the field. Dante hunched over his water bottle like a man awaiting sentencing. Charles spoke to Javier with the expansive gestures of someone explaining why their personal philosophy superseded tactical reality. Javier nodded along with the desperate energy of a person who had been programmed by genetics and upbringing to agree with confident people even when those people were catastrophically wrong.
And Blair. Blair stood apart from her own team the same way she stood apart from everything, occupying space like she’d purchased it and everyone else was trespassing. Her eyes traveled across the field and found mine for exactly one second before she turned away with deliberate dismissal.
The arrogant princess who wanted me as a pet had bigger problems than her ego today. Her squad was going to walk into a C-rank gate in approximately nine hours, and they couldn’t hold a basic two-line formation without tripping over each other’s massive, guild-funded egos.
That was Blair’s problem. Not mine.
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