The staging area for the Second Practical Fitness Test is nothing like what the recruitment pamphlets showed.

The photographs had clean white corridors and soldiers standing in neat, symmetrical lines. What User is actually standing in is a massive outdoor processing yard — concrete barriers stacked at irregular intervals, equipment crates rising three meters high along the eastern wall, and the constant low hum of Defense Force scanning equipment sweeping across every applicant in the holding zone like a mechanical tide. There are hundreds of them. The air smells like synthetic polymer from the test suits still in their crates, industrial cleaning agent, and underneath both of those things, something faintly biological that no one talks about but everyone notices.

Kaiju country. Even the air here carries the reminder.

User is reading the crowd — other applicants, most of them young, most of them moving through fear in the particular way people move through it when they have wanted something for a very long time and are suddenly standing very close to it — when someone steps into their peripheral vision.

He is not young. He is not moving through fear. He is moving through something closer to overwhelming gratitude at the concept of existing in this exact moment, which is somehow more unsettling.

The man — visibly in his thirties, which stands out immediately in a holding area dominated by eighteen-year-olds — is staring at the registration terminal with the expression of someone who has been waiting for this specific terminal for a decade. He has a clipboard. He has a pen tucked behind his ear. He is vibrating.

Then he notices User noticing him.

"Oh."

He straightens immediately. He extends a hand with the automatic confidence of someone who has practiced this introduction many times and is still somehow getting it slightly wrong. His handshake is extremely firm.

"Kafka Hibino. Thirty-two. I know — I know, that's a lot. I've taken this exam before. Several times. This is going to be the time, though. I can feel it. I can genuinely, literally feel it in my chest right now."

He pauses.

He is still shaking User's hand.

"Sorry. I do that. You looked like someone who could use someone to talk to, or maybe I'm the one who needed that. I genuinely can't tell yet."

Before User can respond, the processing yard changes.

The sound happens first — a collective, involuntary silence falling over several hundred people simultaneously, as though the air pressure shifted. Then the reason becomes visible.

A girl has walked into the staging area. She is not physically imposing in the conventional sense. But she moves through the crowd the way weather moves through open space — everything parts before she reaches it. Her expression is composed to the point of being architectural: built, reinforced, displaying nothing. The test suit she is already wearing fits with a precision that makes everyone else's look borrowed. The ID badge clipped to her lapel catches the morning light.

Kikoru Shinomiya.

The name lands in the staging area like a stone dropped into still water. The ripple is visible.

Kafka — still standing beside User, still technically holding their hand — makes a sound somewhere between impressed and intimidated. A strangled exhale.

"That's," he says, his voice dropping to something quiet and slightly awed, "that's the Director's daughter."

Across the yard, above the crowd, the speaker system crackles to life with the flat authority of something that has been delivering this announcement for years.

"All Second Practical Exam applicants, please report to your designated assessment quadrants. The evaluation window opens in four minutes. This is not a simulation."

Four minutes.

Kafka releases User's hand. He exhales slowly, rolling his shoulders once, and something settles over his face — not quite fear, not quite peace, but the specific expression of a man who has been waiting ten years and is now standing four minutes from the beginning of the answer.

The crowd around them begins to move. Equipment checks. Hushed conversations. One applicant near the east barrier is visibly shaking. Another has gone completely, unnervingly still.

What does User do with the four minutes they have left?