Chapter 523 | Timestamped

Chapter 523: 523 | Timestamped

I ate. All of it. Eggs, sausage, the surviving bacon, three pieces of toast, a banana, and two of the protein shakes that tasted like chalk and regret. C-rank metabolism, now with a fresh B-rank Endurance layer, demanded fuel the way a furnace demanded coal. I’d learned to stop being polite about it around the same time I’d stopped being invisible.

Belle spun her laptop to face the table. "Monterey. Final logistics." The map glowed, the coastline she and Blair had spent an hour dissecting, the shelf, the kelp line, the deep water where the readings went dark. "We deploy Friday, fourteen hundred. Eight of us. Tier Two aquatic-adjacent, entity count sixty to seventy-five." She tapped a highlighted zone. "The shelf holds above the waterline at low tide. Ninety minutes of stable ground before it floods. Javier ran the numbers."

"Ninety-two minutes," Javier corrected. "If we deploy exactly at fourteen hundred. High tide hits at fifteen forty. After that the shelf’s underwater and we’re fighting amphibious hostiles in their own biome, which is a losing proposition for everyone who isn’t Naomi."

Naomi perked up. "Wave Motion’s more efficient underwater. Less stamina cost, longer range." She caught herself half a second before she said something confident and softened it into a shrug. "I could hold the line if it came to that."

"It won’t come to that," Blair said. "Because we clear in eighty minutes and leave before the tide turns your shelf into a swimming pool." She leaned over the map, and for a moment the sharpness dropped, replaced by the thing I’d seen in a collapsing cave when she’d read the geology like a book she’d memorized. "The kelp forest is the problem. Sixty-plus hostiles moving through cover we can’t see into. Belle’s detection maxes at whatever her range is with the buff, but visibility on the surface is nothing. They come up from below and we don’t get warning."

"Fifty meters with the Silver buff," Belle said. "Through solid barriers. But water disrupts the signal. I’ll get maybe thirty in the kelp. Less if it’s thick."

Jordan groaned into the table. "So we’re fighting things we can’t see, in water we can’t fight in, on a shelf that’s going to flood, and if we’re a minute late we all drown. Cool. Great. Love this for us."

"Firepower solves most of it," Blair said. "Naomi holds high ground and rains hell. Jordan controls the waterline. I flank." Her jaw tightened on the word. She still hated the support role, hated it in the specific way of someone who’d been the strongest person in every room since she was eleven. But she’d taken it. That was new. "The alpha’s the wildcard. It’ll be in deep water beyond Belle’s range until it decides to surface. When it comes up, it comes up fast."

Everyone looked at me.

I’d learned to expect that. Belle handled numbers. Blair handled tactics. Naomi held the center. Javier fed data. Jordan turned complaints into contingencies. Hikaru watched. And when it all came down to it, they looked at me for the one sentence that ended the argument.

"When it surfaces," I said, "it targets the weakest position first. That’s how these things work. So we don’t give it a weakest position. Everyone stays tight, everyone covers a lane, and when it comes up, it comes up into all eight of us at once." I tapped the deep water on the map. "It thinks it’s an ambush predator. We make it a target."

Silence for a beat. Then Belle nodded and started typing. Blair studied the map, and something crossed her face that wasn’t quite agreement and wasn’t quite anything else.

"That works," she said, quiet. Like admitting it cost her.

"See," I told her, "you can say nice things. It didn’t even hurt."

"I take it back."

"Too late. Belle wrote it down."

"I did," Belle confirmed without looking up. "Timestamped."

Blair’s ears went crimson. She drank her water. The cap hissed.

Misato appeared at the head of the table then, tablet in hand, ponytail pulled tight, captain’s mask locked down over whatever had been in her eyes yesterday in the tree line. She looked at the map, at the formation Belle and Blair had built, and gave a single nod. "FGRA confirmed the bid. Eight-person clearance, full combat authorization, Monterey, Friday fourteen hundred." Her gaze swept the table and landed on me for exactly a half second longer than it needed to. "Simulator debrief at oh-six-hundred tomorrow. We run the aquatic scenario until it stops going wrong."

"It goes wrong every time," Jordan said.

"Then we’ll be there a while." She turned to leave, then stopped, and spoke low enough that only I caught it as she passed behind my chair. "You burned six cups this morning."

"Vale’s methodology."

"I know Vale’s methodology." Her hand brushed my shoulder, brief, the touch of someone checking that a thing was real. "Refill the vault before Friday. I don’t want you walking into Monterey with an empty tank because a man who can’t be hit decided to teach you humility." She kept walking. "And eat more. You look like a ghost."

She was gone before I could answer, off toward the FGRA liaison and whatever paperwork kept an eight-person strike element legal.

Naomi watched her go, then looked at me. She didn’t say anything. She’d already run the math on Misato yesterday, the way she ran the math on everything, quietly, and come out the other side deciding she was keeping me anyway. Her thumb traced a slow line on my thigh.

"Sunday," she said. "Auntie’s. You promised."

"I did."

"Boba. No thinking about gates. No death timer. Just you being annoying and me pretending I don’t like it."

"I can do annoying."

"I know. It’s your best skill." She smiled, and there it was again, the warm and stupid thing in my chest.

Blair stood, collected her water, and left without a word, which I’d learned was as close to friendly as she got. Her jacket with the fraying skull patch caught on the chair and she yanked it free with more force than the moment required. The scorch mark she left on the table edge was small enough that maybe nobody would bill her for it.

Jordan finally sat up, his face marked with the pattern of the table, hair a disaster. "So we’re really doing this. Monterey. Sixty monsters. A flooding shelf. A giant fish thing in deep water." He rubbed his eyes. "And you’re going to hold it all together with one sentence and a milk-based recovery system."

"That’s the plan."

"That’s not a plan. That’s a personality disorder."

"Can be both." I stood and stretched, and my whole body reminded me that Vale had spent the morning dismantling it piece by piece. "Six AM simulator. Don’t be late or Misato adds laps."

"I’m going to be so late."

"She’ll blame me for it."

"She blames you for everything. It’s the funniest part of my day."