Chapter 35: Fast Forward — 3
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Location: First-Year Naturals Private Training Ground.
Omni POV.
"It seems you're having fun."
The voice cut through their laughter cleanly, the way Rogers's voice always did — not loud, not sharp, just carrying the particular quality that made you hear it regardless of what else was happening.
All five heads turned at once.
Captain Rogers and Sergeant Major Barnes stood at the edge of the court, watching the team — who were, at present, lying flat on their backs in the sand, still breathing hard from whatever had happened moments before. The leather fragments scattered across the center of the court told most of the story. The expressions on their faces told the rest.
The teams transition from *lying down laughing* to *standing at attention* took approximately one second.
It was not a graceful second. Leon rolled sideways and came upright. Raymond grabbed his glasses from the sand before they got stepped on. Daniel was simply standing, the way large things became vertical quickly when they had to. Erica transitioned without visible effort, one state replacing the other with no perceptible middle. Martha stood up brushing sand from her uniform.
"Captain! Sergeant Major!"
They called it together — not quite synchronized, but close enough to suggest seven months of shared training had done something to them.
Leon stepped forward first, straightening his collar with the composed efficiency of someone who had absolutely not just been on the ground. "We didn't mean to make such a ruckus, sir. We were just having a bit of fun."
Barnes's eyebrow rose. His gaze moved across the court — the rope boundaries, the net, the fragments of what had recently been a volleyball scattered across the packed earth. Then it moved to the empty space beyond the treeline, where a collection of regular recruits had been standing approximately ninety seconds ago.
"We?" he said, his tone carrying the light, deliberate quality of someone who was enjoying themselves. "We, with who?"
The team looked around.
The training ground was empty. Their seniors (second and third years) who had drifted toward the sounds of the match over the past hour — the ones who'd been watching from the treeline, from the barracks windows, from the corner of the 1st year barracks ⁰— had vanished. Completely. With a thoroughness that suggested significant advance preparation.
Daniel scratched the back of his head, genuinely puzzled. "Where did everyone go? They were just here a minute ago."
"They ran the moment they saw us coming," Rogers said. The dry amusement in his voice was faint, but it was there. "It seems I'm considered something of a scary man among my own soldiers."
"Not at all, sir," Daniel said quickly. "You're a little intimidating, sure — but it's the Sergeant Major we're actually scared of."
The words left his mouth.
Daniel heard them enter the world.
He turned his head toward Barnes with the slow, careful movement of someone who has just realized they've said a thing and cannot unsay it, and needs to assess the damage before deciding on next steps.
Barnes was already looking at him. The expression on Barnes's face was the expression he wore at 0530 on mornings when he had decided that today was going to be educational. It was a very specific expression. Daniel had learned to recognize it over seven months in the way that people learned to recognize weather patterns — not because recognizing it helped, but because some part of the brain insisted on pattern-matching regardless.
Rogers laughed. It was brief — Rogers's laughs were always brief — but it was genuine. "Hear that, Buck? If you don't ease up, your going to need some serious work."
"That kid's biased," Barnes said. He jerked his chin toward Daniel without looking at him. "He's your apprentice. Of course he's going to side with you." He turned — deliberately, pointedly — to the remaining four members of the team, skipping over Daniel entirely, and folded his arms. "I'm not *that* bad, am I?"
Raymond found something very interesting in the middle distance.
Erica directed her attention to Barnes's left.
Martha became absorbed in reviewing her notebook, which she hadn't even opened.
Leon discovered an urgent need to examine the cedar trees along the perimeter, which had not changed since the last time he'd looked at them.
The silence stretched.
It said, with considerable eloquence, exactly what nobody was willing to say out loud: 'Yeah, you're not that bad. You're just the worst.'
Barnes stood in it.
"Right," he said, to no one in particular.
Rogers let the moment settle — he was good at that, knowing precisely how long to let something breathe — and then turned his attention to Leon.
"Setting aside Buck's predicament for now." A brief, measured pause. "Cadet Bartfort. How long until I have my order?" His gaze moved across the abandoned game, the net, the court marked out in rope. "Given how relaxed you all look, I assume it won't be long."
Leon snapped back into focus. "No, sir. All the prototypes are ready. We could run a demonstration today if needed."
Rogers nodded, something thoughtful moving across his face. "Then you won't object if I tell you a few high-ranking guests will be in attendance."
It was framed as a question. It was not a question.
"None at all, sir."
"Good." A faint smile — the small, settled kind. "I'll send word ahead. Weather and fate permitting, they should arrive within the week. Make sure everything's ready well before then."
"Sir, yes sir."
Rogers turned to go, Barnes falling into step at his side with the easy synchronization of two people who had been walking in the same direction for a very long time. They'd covered perhaps four paces when Rogers glanced back over his shoulder.
"That game you were playing," he said. "What was it called?"
'This is it.'
The thought arrived in Leon's mind with the sharp, clear quality of genuine opportunity. He could see the path forward: say the name, the right name, the name he'd intended to use before the original catastrophic introduction, the name that would course-correct everything and set the record straight and—
"Haikyuu!"
Daniel's voice rang across the training ground at approximately the volume of a formation announcement.
"It's called Haikyuu!"
Leon turned toward Daniel with the slow, deliberate motion of a man who is revising his entire understanding of the word 'Timing.'
'You couldn't help yourself, could you?'
'No, Leon. Stop. This is your fault to begin with.'
'You named it Haikyuu the first time. You did that. This is yours.'
'You can't kill him. You can't kill him. You can't kill him.' He repeated it until it settled.
"It really is," Daniel continued, entirely too pleased with the contribution he'd just made to human knowledge. "Leon and Luxion invented it."
Rogers turned. His eyebrows rose slightly. "Is that true, Cadet Bartfort?"
Leon held the look.
The hole was too deep. He could see the walls from where he was standing, and there was no climbing out of this one with his dignity intact. The name existed. It had always existed. It was going to keep existing regardless of what he said in the next three seconds.
"...Yes, sir," he said. The words came out slightly strangled, as though they'd had to fight their way through something. "It's true."
Rogers's smile settled into something satisfied. He looked at the court one more time — the rope, the net, the empty space where the ball had been — and nodded, more to himself than anyone present.
"Good," he said. "The gods know this island needs more to do that isn't drinking. The Gods know we've already got more than enough of that."
He walked away.
Leon stared at the middle distance for a moment.
Then he picked up a fragment of leather from the ground, turned it over in his hand, and went to fabricate a replacement ball.
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Location: Lehigh Island Harbour.
Omni POV.
One week later. Early morning.
"Why am I here?" Raymond asked.
The harbour was quiet at this hour — the kind of quiet that existed before the base fully woke up, when the only sounds were the water against the pier and the distant rhythm of the early watch. The morning light came off the channel in long, low angles, and the air carried the particular coldness of an island before the sun had committed to the day.
He and Leon stood near the edge of the dock, waiting. Beside them, arranged with the careful deliberateness of a formation trying to look natural, was the reception party Rogers had assembled: the Chief Engineer of the Howling Commandos — a broad, weathered man who had the permanent expression of someone who had spent three decades building things out of whatever was available — present to translate, as best he could, whatever technical demonstration Leon was about to deliver. Captain Rogers himself, standing at the center of the formation with his hands loosely at his sides, the way he always stood when he was waiting. And ten soldiers behind them whose primary qualification for their present position appeared to be looking appropriately formidable.
"I needed someone to help with the presentation," Leon said. His eyes were on the water. They weren't quite meeting Raymond's.
Raymond looked at him. Seven months of living alongside Leon had given him a fairly accurate read of the gap between what Leon said and what Leon meant — it was a skill that had developed the same way his range estimation had, through repetition and pattern recognition and the occasional embarrassing miss.
"I call lies," he said, and adjusted his glasses.
Leon's expression did something small and complicated.
"You just didn't want to be standing here alone," Raymond continued, not unkindly. "And I was the only one dumb enough to say yes."
"Is that a *crime*?" Leon turned toward him, clasping his hands together with the expression of a person who has decided that transparent sincerity is the only remaining strategy. "Raymond. Buddy. Friend. You wouldn't leave me alone in a room full of bigshots, would you?"
Raymond looked at him for a moment.
The honest answer was that he understood exactly what Leon was doing and why, and that Leon knowing he understood wasn't going to stop either of them from ending up exactly here anyway. The presentation mattered. What happened in the next few hours mattered. And Leon — who could redesign a weapons system from first principles in an afternoon and had apparently memorized the trajectory physics of a volleyball court inside a week — did not, in Raymond's observation, particularly enjoy being the only person in a room who knew what was happening.
"Fine," Raymond said. "I'll stay."
Leon's shoulders dropped slightly in relief. If you weren't looking for it, you'd miss it entirely.
"But you owe me one," Raymond added.
"Done," Leon said immediately, and turned back to the sky.
Raymond folded his arms and looked out at the channel.
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"Ship spotted!"
The call came sharp from the signal tower by the edge of the floating island, carrying across the dock and sky.
"They're here." Rogers's voice, calm and carrying. "Men, attention."
The formation snapped into order. Chins level. Shoulders square. Eyes on the channel.
Leon and Raymond followed, a half-step behind, falling into the posture that seven months of Barnes had made automatic.
The ship appeared on the horizon first as a dark mass, then resolved into lines and scale as it came up the channel. Eight hundred and fifty meters — Leon's eye made the measurement automatically, the habit of constant calculation inserting itself without being asked. The hull caught the morning light and threw it back in a way that suggested the materials weren't anything produced in local shipyards. The craftsmanship at the bow. The configuration of the deck. The trimwork that emerged more clearly as the ship eased toward the harbour entrance.
And the seal. Mounted at the bow, gilded and unmistakable even from the pier.
The royal seal of the Kingdom of Holfort.
Behind the flagship, roughly twenty escort ships held their positions past the harbour mouth — close enough to respond, far enough to leave the approach uncluttered. Disciplined. Patient. The kind of positioning that didn't happen without a crew that knew its job completely.
The main vessel came to anchor without drama. The anchor chains ran out. The ship settled. A gangway was lowered from the upper deck with the quiet efficiency of a crew that had done this before.
The formation held.
Two royal guards descended first. Then a line of attendants. Then three court officials in formal dress, moving in careful single file.
Then her.
Queen Mylene descended the gangway with the bearing of someone who had spent her adult life moving through spaces designed to impress her and had long since made her peace with them. She was composed in the complete way — not the performed composure of someone managing an emotion, but the settled composure of someone whose role had become second nature. She looked like the most important person present without appearing to try, which was, Leon suspected, the hardest thing to learn and the thing you stopped noticing once it was learned.
A ripple moved through the assembled soldiers. Not movement — just the small, collective shift of people recalibrating who they were standing in front of.
Rogers stepped forward to greet her. The exchange between them was brief and formal and carried in its brevity the ease of two people who had dealt with each other long enough that the ceremony was a courtesy rather than a necessity.
Two people in the formation were not surprised to see the Queen there, Rogers and Leon.
Rogers wasn't surprised because he was the one who'd sent for her.
While Leon wasn't exactly surprised by *her* but by someone else, two someone else's.
What stopped the breath in his throat — quietly, completely, in a way that he was fairly certain did not show on his face because he was working very hard to ensure it did not show on his face — was who came down the gangway behind the Queen's immediate retinue.
Among the court attendants and military adjutants and additional guards, two faces quickly registered in his mind, on this dock, on this island, behind the Queen of Holfort's flagship, while Leon was standing in a first-year cadet's uniform having aged about 8 months since they'd last seen each other face to face.
'Nicks. Jenna. What in all seven blazing hells are you two doing here?!'
The thought tore through his mind at a volume that, for one very specific and genuinely alarming moment, he was not entirely certain had stayed internal.
His face did not change. His posture did not shift. His eyes remained forward, fixed on the correct point in the middle distance, and the expression they were attached to remained exactly where it was — neutral, composed, the correct expression for a cadet at attention during an official arrival ceremony.
Inside his head, it sounded considerably different.
'Nicks descended the gangway with a soldier's bearing — wearing the same armour as the other Royal Knights. He was taller. Leon noted this with the involuntary irritation of a younger sibling.
Jenna descended beside him with the bearing of someone who had been recruited for something she had decided to treat as an opportunity from the moment the offer was made. Her eyes were already moving across the formation with the quick, assessing quality they always had when she entered a room she hadn't been in before.
They hadn't spotted him yet.
Leon was on the right flank. The formation was orderly. He was a cadet among cadets, and there was no reason for their eyes to land on him specifically before the we
lcome exchange was complete.
He looked straight ahead.
And he waited.
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