Don't Scratch the Car

"—Now, team One with Seven and team Twelve with Sixteen, organised in sparring pairs this time. Oh, and you'll be reporting to me afterwards, Gou-bo and Roku-bo."

 Sitting outside the President's office with Hirano pretending the gaijin staining the seat next to him didn't exist, Lachlan now knew how Ariake had felt. Arms folded, taking advantage of Hirano completely and utterly ignoring him to slouch comfortably with one foot crossed over the other, he could freely admit to himself that maybe that hadn't gone so well.

At least, he reflected, flexing his hands subtly, this way I might get the chance to ask some questions.

His left twinged, tingling in phantom pins and needles, still acting up after that beam and a few other hits along the way. At least it didn't feel like fire ants anymore. He'd give it a good massage to convince it to pipe down, but ignoring him or not, Hirano still had eyes.

The door finally popped open, Kyubi looking them over with sharp eyes. "Come on in, boys."

Ah yes, the trouble-making schoolboys coming in for a lecture and detention. He sighed, planting his hands on his knees and levering himself to his feet where Hirano rose smoothly and smartly to attention. Well, somebody had to play the delinquent to offset the perfect student, he thought as he settled his hands in his slightly-too-small uniform's pockets and trailed along. May as well be me.

"I'll make one thing clear. Competition is good—it keeps you sharp, and makes you strive to be the best. But animosity, I can't tolerate that." She turned, her fox ears and tails on full display again as she crossed her arms and leaned back against the unoccupied desk. "While your first responsibility is to your own team, you must be able to work with other Samurai as well, no matter what you think of them. Do I make myself clear?"

"Hai, Kyubi-sama."

"One day you'll have to coordinate with other teams. You'll have exercises here that require working with each other, too." Her tails flicked. "Sabotage each other on those exercises and all of you will lose, just as you did today."

She made a fair point. To be fair though, he hadn't wanted to take it that far. "Hai, Kyubi-sama."

"I'll trust you to do better next time. For now, you can enjoy your spots as equals at the bottom of the leaderboard and pick of the Edo Guardians' most miserable assignments. Dismissed."

So much for room to talk. Lachlan did a half-hearted impression of Hirano's crisp salute and left. He had a lot of questions he'd like to ask the people in charge around here, but it looked like they'd have to wait. For now.

Luckily for him, the rest of his team were already in the commons room, trading snark with one of the other teams in front of a chalkboard set up on one wall, away from the mess tables and the random ping-pong set-up.

"—was Hirano's fault for turning it into an elimination. That was clearly not what the exercise was meant to be."

"Oh sure, white-hair. It wasn't your fault when you nearly blew apart Raido-san's core."

"What about Umiko destroying mine?"

"You core was fine, she wouldn't have done anything—"

"Kore kore, what're you arguing about now?" Lachlan butted in with a yawn between Ariake and a girl, turning two sets of glares and the wary eyes of their resident female team in his direction.

"Perhaps if you hadn't been so busy with your feud, we would have actually stood a chance," Eden snapped at him. "Hirano was clearly coordinating his team, yet there we were, thrown to the winds."

He frowned at him. "Don't blame me when you spent half your time telling me how terribly I was doing."

"Umiko was about to run me through and you did nothing!" Ariake bristled practically in his face. "Kyubi-sama putting you in charge was a mistake. You have no idea how to lead—"

"Really?" Lachlan held his ground, narrowing his eyes. "I distinctly remember you telling me to shut up."

"Because you were filling the channel with stupid jokes—!"

"You wouldn't have listened to me even if I'd given you some perfect tactical plan," he cut him off. "How am I supposed to work with a team who won't work with me? This goes both ways, you know."

"If I recall correctly, you weren't trying to work with us."

Well, at least from the looks of it Eden and Ariake could work together. He blew the tension creeping into his muscles out with a breath. "Look, I know it could've been better. I didn't do a great job, I admit that—"

"This is interesting and everything, but we need to leave." The leader of Twelve—couldn't remember her name—looked pointedly at her watch and turned away with a practically-nonexistent bow, leading the other girls away. "If you guys don't want to be late, you might want to start moving, too. Bye."

He flatly watched them go for a moment, holding in a sigh. Either Hirano really was that popular around here, or gaijin were the scum of the earth. Either way, he couldn't win.

"They have a point. You can save your empty apologies for later, gaijin." Ariake turned to Drake, who'd spent the entire time looking at the chalkboard. "Hey, other gaijin. We need to go."

"Why do I even bother," Lachlan muttered to himself, regarding the core of the world somewhere beyond the ceiling, as if it'd reach down and answer him. "Where is this place, anyway?"

"In the heart of Edo city, a few kilometres away," Ariake said, already stalking off.

A few kilometres away? "How're we planning to get there—by school-bus?"

"Don't be ridiculous," Eden sniffed.

"They don't give us transport?" Drake asked.

"We're Samurai-master cadets, not high schoolers. We use our own."

"My car's in the student garage," Ariake said without turning around. "It can fit all of us."

Lachlan cocked an eyebrow. "Awfully generous of you."

That earned him a glare. "If you get one speck of dirt on my seats, I'll pluck out your eyes."

"Point taken."

With only minor threats and grumbling, they drove through a city he idly watched pass by through Ariake's fancy sedan windows on a highway that seemed to curve through the air on pillars more than it touched the ground, winding between tall stacks of traditional-style architecture. There were static billboards, advertising signs, and flags just about everywhere he looked as they left the highway, rolling to a stop in front of a building resembling the bastard child of a dojo and a skyscraper.

"You drive like an old man," he commented as he shut the shiny beige door and peered up at the monstrosity, the kanji for "Edo" and "Guardians" proudly displayed over the symbol of a circle surrounded by three shooting lines. The same one mirrored on their uniform patches.

"Slam my door again and I'll make an old man out of you," Ariake snapped, fussing over it before locking up and setting the alarm, the car letting out a surprisingly chicken-like noise.

He really hadn't closed it that hard. His fellow cadet still stormed across the pavement like Lachlan had insulted his family honour, leading them all through the revolving door into a lobby that smelled faintly of incense, cigarette smoke, and a lot like leather, all calm brown tones and warm lighting starting to edge into dingy where the sunlight didn't touch. Plush carpet, too.

Reminded him of something, though he couldn't place it until the receptionist waved them around the corner, through an open paper folding door into a room that stank of smoke and housing only two of the other teams, both of them already looking like they were about to leave. A fan spun lazily in the ceiling despite the AC vents, a board pinned to one wall, a table off to the side, and a potted bamboo in the corner. It's like a detective agency from a noir.

"You really couldn't have driven any faster?" Eden remarked from behind him.

"I drove here at the speed limit—!"

"Team Sixteen?" The guy with the other teams turned, a cigarette in his mouth giving away the source of the smell, and eyed them with a bored air. "You're late. Get over here, I need to give you the tenth run-down of the day."

Eden gave a quiet "hm" as they all obediently filed into place. Lachlan side-eyed him, but his gaze was running over the board, choosing to keep his comments to himself for once.

"Alright, here're your comms." The EG guy turned back, handing out mostly-featureless blocks that looked like about nothing.

Lachlan squinted at his, popping it open along a seam to reveal a little screen and a... keyboard? "Is this a pager?" It didn't look a lick like any pager he knew, but what else could it be?

"Nope. And yes. Runs on the same service, but it's two-way." The other tapped at a speaker grill on the back. "Also can be used as the world's worst ham radio."

All of that crammed into this bulky hand-sized piece of plastic? And two-way? The time on the little screen blinked a minute as he eyed it. "Is this another military trade secret?"

"It's not out for public use, if that's what you mean. You can poke at it later." He turned to the board, tapping at what looked like printed files pinned up there. "This here is the assignments board. While you sonny boys get to play around with your Core-En constructs and spend most of your days waiting around for an oni to show up, we handle incidents involving magic. These little jobs are part of that."

"Like police work?" Drake asked.

"Close enough. Once you've graduated and are bored out of your skulls waiting for something to happen—if you're lucky enough to stay in Nihon—you'll spend more time helping out your local Guardian division than fighting sea monsters." He plucked a file off its pin. "All of these give you extra credit. How much depends on the difficulty of the job, how well you did, etc. For you, the boss called me up and told me to hand you and team One the nastiest on the list. This is yours. Enjoy."

The nastiest, eh? Lachlan took it like the snake on a stick it was, eyeing a sketchy drawing of ghostly lanterns as the man shooed them off, Ariake and Eden scowling hard enough to father a yokai.

And thus began a week of hell.