Reincarnated as an Energy with a System

Chapter 2045: Recommendation

When the counter finally reached zero, her fuel gauge was hovering only a short distance above empty itself, and there was no piece of debris close enough to snatch up and swing the way Ning had done during his own run.

She did the only thing left to her and tried to keep moving, threading between a pair of asteroids while three Mekharans closed in from behind.

One shot clipped her Mecha’s leg, and another struck the shoulder.

When her fuel ran dry a few seconds later, the machine simply drifted along its last trajectory while the enemies finished it off.

The cockpit display filled with damage warnings before it went dark entirely.

For a moment, the room outside the pod remained silent as the observation screen shifted to the results.

<325 Points>

The silence broke all at once as several students began speaking over one another.

Three hundred and twenty-five was not the absurd number Ning had produced two days earlier, and nobody in the room confused the two, but it was well past the threshold that most of them had been chasing for months without ever touching.

More importantly, it was Naysha’s highest score by a margin of more than thirty points.

That was the sort of jump cadets usually managed only after many months of training, not over the course of a few evenings.

When the pod opened and Naysha climbed out, she looked almost dazed. Her short red hair was pressed flat against her forehead with sweat, and she glanced at the score display as though checking that it had not changed while she was getting out.

Several of the students closest to her stepped forward to congratulate her before she could say anything, a few of them clapping her on the shoulder. One of the girls who had scored under two hundred earlier asked how she had managed to save so much fuel through the middle of the course.

Naysha answered a few of the questions without much detail, mostly because her mind still seemed to be partly inside the simulation.

It was only after the crowd around her had thinned a little that her eyes found Ning standing near the back of the room.

Ning walked over with his hands in his pockets and a faint smile on his face.

"Congratulations," he said. "You did better than I expected you to."

"Why does that sound more like a backhanded compliment?"

Despite the words, there was very little irritation in her voice. She looked back toward the score with an expression that suggested she was still trying to convince herself that the number belonged to her.

"I still wasted fuel in the later sections, though," she said. "There were at least three places where I knew I was making the wrong choice and made it anyway because I couldn’t see anything better."

"There probably wasn’t anything better at the level you’re flying at right now," Ning said. "You’ll find those routes once you’ve spent more time in the simulator. What matters today is that you stopped losing points to the things you already knew how to fix."

Naysha nodded slowly.

Ning noticed that her right hand was flexing at her side, as if her fingers had cramped from holding something small in place for a very long time, but he said nothing about it.

Lorna went through the last two students’ attempts with the same detailed commentary she had given everyone else, though neither of them came close to the excitement Naysha’s run had caused.

When the session finally ended, she dismissed the class with a reminder about their next lesson.

The students filed out of the simulation room in small groups, many of them still talking about the score.

Ning had nearly reached the doorway when Lorna’s voice stopped him.

"Ning, come with me."

He turned back toward her.

Lorna had already started toward the far exit of the room when she paused and looked across at the girl who had been about to leave with the others.

"Naysha," she added, as if it had only just occurred to her. "You as well."

Naysha glanced at Ning with a questioning look, but he could only shrug, and the two of them followed the instructor out of the simulation building and across the academy grounds toward the administrative center.

Lorna said very little along the way, walking with the brisk, purposeful stride of someone who had already decided exactly what she was going to say once she arrived.

Ning recognized the route only once they were climbing the same stairs he had taken on his first day.

The two guards outside Sergeant General Greeves’s office confirmed Lorna’s identity and let them through without any delay, which suggested to Ning that she had sent word ahead.

Greeves was seated behind his desk exactly as Ning remembered him, wearing the same decorated uniform and the same expression of a man who had heard far too many promises from cadets to be impressed by any of them in advance.

He looked up from his display as the three of them entered.

His gaze lingered on Ning for a moment longer than it did on the others before he turned toward Lorna.

"Instructor Stellis. I assume this is the matter you mentioned."

"It is, sir."

Lorna stood straight with her hands clasped behind her back, while Ning and Naysha stopped a step behind her.

"These are two cadets from Batch 122 who completed the Rank 1 assessment this week. Ning, the transfer, scored four hundred and sixty-nine on his first attempt two days ago. Naysha Flores scored three hundred and twenty-five today, which is her personal best by a significant margin."

Greeves’s eyebrows rose very slightly at the first number, which was more of a reaction than Ning had expected from him.

"Four hundred and sixty-nine," he repeated. "Is that above the academy record?"

"By forty-one points, sir. In my assessment, the simulator also underrepresented his performance because it denied him the use of a captured enemy weapon that a real Mecha would most likely have been able to operate."