[POV: Nardia]

  I was preparing with Genichiro for the next mission.

  Paperwork can steal your victory.

  A smiling corporate man can walk into your base, wave a clause amended “last week,” and carry away the thing you bled for.

  And apparently—if you want to fight that kind of enemy?

  You learn to swing paper back.

  That was the lesson I’d gotten hammered into me yesterday.

  So when I found myself on Shiratori’s maintenance deck again—tools clinking, lights humming, the ship’s white hull watching us like a silent witness—one question I’d been holding finally pushed its way out.

  “Hey,” I asked, trying to sound casual and failing, “Genichiro… how did you even meet Ahmad?”

  Genichiro’s wrench stopped mid-turn.

  He froze like I’d asked him to recite his childhood diary on open comms. Then he let out a deep, exhausted sigh that sounded like a whole universe of nope.

  “…You really want me to tell you? What a pain.”

  “Eh? If you don’t want to, it’s fine! Seriously, you don’t have to force yourself!”

  “It’s not that I don’t want to.” He scratched his cheek and looked away. “It’s just long. You good with ‘long’?”

  “I’m great with long!”

  He shot me an incredulous look, shoved a toolbox aside with his foot, and dropped onto a folding pipe chair with a heavy thunk.

  “…Alright,” he grumbled. “Then listen up. This is the story of how I met that bastard Ahmad.”

  (W-whoa… it’s starting! Like, actually starting!)

  “I’m from the Shiraishi house,” Genichiro said. “You’ve heard of it, right? Out on the frontier it’s… kinda famous.”

  “Yeah, a little,” I admitted. “My dad hired mercenaries once. Like… old-school warrior types?”

  “…Yeah. Pretty much.” Genichiro’s mouth twisted. “To be blunt, we’re an independent mercenary outfit. ‘Samurai of space.’ A bunch of idiots who worship stiff traditions and swing plasma katanas around whenever they don’t like something.”

  (That’s a brutal way to describe your own people!)

  “They wanted me to inherit that ‘traditional performing art,’ too,” he went on, voice rough with irritation. “‘Only ride the family ship.’ ‘Never let our tech outside.’ ‘Only touch machines with proper pedigree.’ They’d nag me every day.”

  He snorted.

  “And when they saw my new frame designs, it was always ‘too eccentric,’ or ‘doesn’t fit the house style.’”

  “Ugh…”

  “Right?” Genichiro’s eyes sharpened for the first time. “So one morning I just left. Walked out.”

  “…Just like that?”

  “I took one thing.” He leaned forward a fraction. “The design AI. That was mine.”

  “You… took it with you?”

  “It wasn’t ‘taking.’ It was mine to begin with!”

  The way he snapped it made my stomach flutter.

  (Okay, yeah. This was a real runaway.)

  “After that, I hit space and sold myself as an independent mech modeler,” Genichiro said. “I even went through GDC training. That was… well… trash.”

  “You said it out loud!”

  “The written exams were easy,” he grumbled. “But the practical training? All they ever said was ‘teamwork matters’ and ‘safety first’ and blah blah blah. Like—give me actual work first, then lecture me.”

  (…Yeah, that part is extremely Genichiro.)

  “Anyway,” he said, waving it off, “enough about me. The problem is him. Ahmad.”

  Genichiro’s gaze lifted a little, like he was staring past the hangar wall into somewhere far away.

  “From the beginning, Ahmad wasn’t normal. Supposedly he was at a ‘Resident’ research institute in Ruterdorf.”

  “Wait—he was a researcher?”

  “Yeah,” Genichiro said. “And from what I heard, the higher-ups were all smiles about his ‘bright future.’”

  (Then why is he out here being an adventurer…?!)

  “But research institutes only pamper the people who stay inside the lines,” Genichiro continued, flat. “Anyone who reaches for the unknown gets treated like a problem. And Ahmad… well. You know his personality. No way he’d obey.”

  “…I can kinda picture it.”

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  “Apparently a professor scolded him for ‘discussing outside the regulations,’ and he quit that same day.”

  “Same day?!”

  “Same day.” Genichiro’s lip twitched, almost amused. “By the next day he’d erased his researcher registration, and the week after that—”

  He let out a short laugh.

  “He bought a yard here on Rankis. With his inheritance.”

  “Bought… a yard?!”

  “Told you.” Genichiro shook his head, equal parts annoyed and impressed. “He’s not normal. Not with money, not with momentum.”

  I stared at Shiratori’s hull behind him.

  (So Ahmad didn’t become an adventurer because he ‘changed.’ He became one because he refused to stay inside a box.)

  That explained a lot. In a way that was… unfairly convincing.

  Genichiro snorted, nostalgia slipping into his voice.

  “And the first ship Ahmad was flying back then—an old rental called the Anderson. A wreck. Total junk.”

  “That bad…?”

  “The outer coating was peeled off everywhere. The thrusters would reverse on their own. The cooling system screamed nonstop.” He made a circle with his hand, like he was framing a picture.

  “The first time I saw it? Sparks were literally flying next to the pilot seat.”

  “Eeeeh?!”

  “And Ahmad goes, ‘It has character.’”

  “His values are broken!”

  “Don’t ask me,” Genichiro said. “He said the more something’s broken, the more attached he gets.”

  He shifted his legs on the folding chair.

  “Anyway, the Anderson got blown apart in combat. Somehow he got picked up by a beacon and lived. In this huge universe, that’s basically a miracle.”

  My throat tightened.

  A beacon. A rescue ping. A ship drifting in darkness.

  I couldn’t help thinking about the “false positive” note in the new mission packet.

  In the frontier, even help could be bait.

  “But,” Genichiro continued, “because the Anderson died, Ahmad had to get a new ship. That’s when he got his hands on Al?Safar—literal scrap.”

  “Scrap?!”

  “He demanded a replacement from the Earth Human Federation military,” Genichiro said, deadpan. “Beat them with paperwork. They made a special exception and handed over the wreck of a torpedo tender that had been requisitioned and then crippled.”

  “Wait.” My brain caught. “He beat the military… with paperwork?”

  “Yep.”

  “That’s… actually kind of terrifying.”

  “That’s Ahmad,” Genichiro said, as if he’d just named a natural disaster.

  “So Al?Safar was originally a warship?”

  “Yeah.” Genichiro’s tone sharpened. “Originally it was a luxury ship built by some bankrupt rich guy, but frontier laws requisitioned it for a border conflict with aliens—Ghrabur, back then. Ahmad fought there as a hired mercenary to earn his frontier security license. Needed real combat experience.”

  So that was where the unshakable nerve came from.

  Not talent. Not destiny.

  Just… the kind of experience you can’t fake.

  But then Genichiro’s expression darkened.

  “Al?Safar was… hell,” he said. “Not normal scrap. It was the remains of a monster—Ancients tech mixed in all over the place. Ahmad tried to rebuild it by mixing it with other Ancients junk he’d found. And he failed. Repeatedly.”

  “A monster…?”

  “The self?repair metal would go berserk. Structural material would bounce. And inside the hull, the space was twisted enough you could get lost like a labyrinth.”

  He folded his arms, giving me a wry, bitter smile like he could still smell the chaos.

  “And Ahmad? He loved it.”

  “…Loved it?”

  “Yeah.” Genichiro’s voice turned flat with disbelief. “‘It’s unknown!’ he said, all excited. While I was yelling ‘what a pain,’ he was happily taking notes.”

  (So Ahmad really is a researcher at his core…!)

  “But,” Genichiro added, and his tone changed—quieter, steadier—“the picture he had in his head… wasn’t wrong.”

  “…It wasn’t?”

  “Al?Safar moved.” He looked down, as if seeing the old hull beneath his boots. “After work straight out of hell, that scrap turned back into a ship.”

  His eyes narrowed, remembering.

  “…That part was kind of moving.”

  (‘Kind of’?! Be more impressed!)

  But I didn’t tease him this time.

  Because I could hear it—just under the complaint—something like respect.

  Genichiro didn’t admire people easily.

  Which meant Ahmad had earned it the hard way.

  “And once Al?Safar was finally running,” Genichiro said, “Ahmad started raking in money from adventuring. And then one day he says it.”

  Genichiro puffed his chest and did the world’s least dramatic Ahmad impression.

  “‘Genichiro. I want a newly built ship.’”

  “Y?yes…!” I blurted automatically, caught up in it.

  Genichiro shot me a look. “Don’t answer me like you’re in a play.”

  “Sorry!”

  “I refused at first,” he continued. “‘Do you even have the money?’ ‘Do you have enough materials for a shipyard?’”

  “And he didn’t?”

  “He had everything.”

  “He had everything?!”

  “For real.” Genichiro clicked his tongue. “Sometimes his speed is just… unreasonable.”

  He reached into his toolbox and pulled out a design pad. After a few taps, a crude early model appeared: a sleek, white hull—barebones geometry, no paint wear, no scars.

  He tilted it toward me.

  “He showed me this and said, ‘This is the ship I’m commissioning.’”

  “Wah… it’s white…!”

  “White is for my surname,” Genichiro said. “Shiraishi. That color. The ‘bird’ part? He slapped that on himself.”

  “…Why a bird?”

  Genichiro muttered, and his ears went just a little pink.

  “He said that ‘with this, you’ll be able to spread your wings as a modeler.’”

  My chest did something stupid.

  “Uwaaa— that’s so Ahmad.”

  “…Is it?”

  “Yes! It’s extremely him!”

  “…Hmph.”

  Genichiro snorted like he was hiding embarrassment behind force.

  “So the name became Shiratori,” he finished. “‘Shiraishi’s bird.’ It was his way of… well. Encouragement.”

  I looked up at the real ship—at the clean white hull that now carried Ancients scraps in triple isolation and kept getting dragged into the ugliest parts of the frontier.

  Encouragement.

  A name meant to help Genichiro “spread his wings.”

  And now that name was on a ship that people wanted to steal, control, and weaponize with clauses and escorts.

  (…So this ‘white ship’ has always been about more than aesthetics.)

  The deck lights flickered softly. Somewhere down the hangar, I heard Thomas laughing.

  And for a moment, both of us just faced forward—toward the white ship.

  The present snapped back in with a soft chime from the base intercom.

  “Dock activity update: Gandhara Heavy Industries vessel requesting departure clearance.”

  Right.

  The “collection ship.”

  The thieves-with-receipts were leaving… and we were being ordered to escort them.

  Genichiro’s chair creaked as he stood. The nostalgia vanished behind the same tired, sharp practicality he wore like armor.

  “Alright,” he muttered. “Story time’s over. Work.”

  I swallowed and nodded, then glanced once more at Shiratori’s hull.

  A name made as encouragement.

  A ship built from stubbornness.

  A captain who quit research the same day he got scolded.

  A mechanic who ran away with his own design AI.

  And now a living?maybe Ancients fragment “learning” inside a sealed box, and corporate escorts waiting at our dock like hungry dogs.

  (So yeah.)

  (This is the ugly side of adventuring.)

  But if Ahmad could beat the military with paperwork…

  If Genichiro could rebuild a monster?scrap into a ship…

  Then maybe—just maybe—this white ship could keep flying without letting someone else decide its destiny.

  I tightened my gloves.

  “Genichiro,” I said, voice small but steady, “thanks. For telling me.”

  He grunted. “Don’t mention it.”

  Then he glanced at me—just once.

  “And don’t let Romonori’s smile get in your head,” he added. “We’ll deal with it.”

  “How?” I asked.

  Genichiro’s mouth twisted into something almost like a grin.

  “The same way Ahmad always does,” he said. “We learn. We prepare. Then we hit back where it hurts.”

  “…With paperwork?”

  “With whatever works,” Genichiro replied.

  The comm deck lights stayed calm.

  The ship stayed white.

  And outside, the dock clamps started to disengage.

  The internship marched on.

  (End of Vol. III)