Chapter 347: I Entered the Wrong Kind of Wet Competition

Lyra’s next date involved an eighty-ton excavation machine, because apparently I could turn even quality time into something that required a damage deposit.

I hadn’t accepted Hansen’s race entry. I called the organizer, canceled the arrangement made without my permission, and asked which idiot had offered money for delivering me alive.

The answer was a recovery contractor claiming an interest in the leased equipment. The organizer called the passenger wording promotional exaggeration, which immediately made me want to meet him in a room with fewer exits.

Then he mentioned the ten-thousand-credit qualifier prize and the freight yard beside the course, and I developed a much worse idea than simply refusing.

"I wanted to enter myself," I told Lyra. "I could reach the people altering our deliveries, embarrass Hansen, and potentially make somebody pay for the afternoon."

"I knew you were interested when you stopped pretending the entry fee offended you," she said. "If I’m coming, you tell me when the plan changes."

I agreed before she could add a condition about sensible behavior. That would have been unfair to both of us.

Bridget helped check the route, then stayed at the club with Cherry while Lyra and I took the ordinary service boat to the quarry. Nobody needed a rescue crew following our date, especially before we had properly earned one.

The working site sat outside the residential bubble at a serviced coastal depth. Dry control cabins looked down on underwater industrial tracks, and great powered machines waited in rows beneath the viewing tunnel.

My lease cost thirty-two hundred for practice and the short event period. Entry added twenty-five hundred, which made Old Mate ask whether robbery had become too affordable for me to appreciate.

The trainer looked at my body, then at the controls, and finally asked how flexible I was.

Lyra answered before I could. "More than his judgment, unfortunately."

[System: Tell the bloke you’ve operated a casino and survived three girlfriends choosing curtains, mate. A few levers should be within your emotional range.]

None of that counted as learning how to stop eighty tons of metal.

[System: Then start with the brake, you glossy bloody pool toy, because confidence doesn’t reverse through a wall.]

We spent the first session learning ordinary controls. Galaxy Brain helped me remember the instructions and compare the machine’s response, but it didn’t replace practice or cancel the weight dragging behind each turn.

Lyra learned the service controls beside me. When I missed a turn, she explained what I had done without sounding like a medic explaining why my existence remained expensive.

I liked having her there. I liked it even more when she tried the practice course and immediately clipped a soft marker after teasing me about mine.

"I felt the instructor should know that marker had clearly attacked you, sweetheart."

"It knew I was getting confident," she said. "Your bad habits are apparently contagious."

The trainer made us demonstrate the emergency stop separately before allowing another lap. Lyra got it right first, then refused my suggestion that she should receive an honorary racing title. She wanted lunch and a photograph of my face when the cabin alarm startled me, proving that love could survive while remaining deeply interested in blackmail. I offered dessert in exchange for keeping the image away from my uncles.

During the break, we ate on the dry platform overlooking the machines. Her hair caught against my fin when she leaned close, and she let me carefully free it instead of pulling away in a hurry.

I told her I had missed doing things badly with her.

"You usually save the mistakes for strangers and tell us the impressive version afterward," she said. "This one was much better."

The instructor returned with the advertising wrap included in our sponsor package. It was bright pink, carried the milk counter’s logo, and made the excavation machine look like a private purchase somebody hoped would arrive in plain packaging.

I named it Moist Tax Deduction before anyone could stop me.

Lyra laughed hard enough to lose the first argument about changing it, then helped apply the name where the event camera would see. The commentator tested his microphone, read it aloud, and sounded personally betrayed.

[System: You’ve painted a mining rig like a marital aid, mate. Somewhere a bloke’s wife just asked why his browser history needs an industrial license.]

The advertising worked, because he had said our name twice while trying to complain about it.

Old Mate offered Beat the Portable Toilet, six thousand EXP and thirty IP for finishing ahead of the truck-sized sanitation rig without stealing another competitor’s machine. The condition seemed unnecessarily suspicious until I noticed how much I liked the sanitation rig’s seating.

Mine Now couldn’t carry a whole excavator anyway. It still required one separable visible object within three meters, room beside my body, and tolerance for the actual weight and momentum.

I accepted, then sent Bridget our position and the qualifier time. Cherry replied with a photograph of Lukas asleep beneath a blanket while the head dancer kept his phone out of reach.

His concussion meant missing the fun for now. I refused to pretend that wanting him beside me changed the injury.

Horass answered the photograph I had sent him of the course. From his clinic bed, he identified a blind turn and compared it to a battle I strongly suspected he had invented while waiting for lunch.

His practical warning was useful enough that I thanked him before hanging up on the third sentence about historical infantry hats.

Before leaving the practice bay, Lyra asked for the promised photograph beside our terrible pink machine. I kept the embarrassing name in the frame because I wanted to remember that we had chosen the joke together.

Lyra and I walked the assigned approach with the trainer. I stayed near her rather than vanishing into every interesting opening, which made it easier to notice when she stopped beside the lane marker.

A crushed recovery cage hung from the crane above our turning point. Its dimensions matched the pink machine almost perfectly, and the fresh collection tag beneath it carried my full name instead of the equipment number.