Reincarnated as an Energy with a System

Chapter 2050: Simulation Date Set

In the days that followed, Jason gradually became a different person around Ning, though the change happened slowly enough that anyone who had not been paying close attention might have missed it entirely.

He no longer gathered his tray and left the cafeteria the moment Ning sat down across from him, and when Ning asked him something, he answered with full sentences rather than the single, clipped words he had relied on during their first week, occasionally even adding a remark of his own before falling quiet again.

He was friendly now, in his own way. Yet Ning could tell that the young man simply was not used to talking very much, and their conversations tended to drift into long pauses that had nothing to do with Jason trying to avoid him.

It was more that Jason seemed genuinely unsure of what was supposed to come next, as if he had spent so long keeping to himself that he had forgotten the natural rhythm of an ordinary conversation and was now trying to relearn it one exchange at a time.

Whenever those pauses grew too long, Jason returned to his machines.

He owned a surprising number of them for a cadet who had arrived with only a single piece of luggage and a storage case. Several data tablets of different sizes and ages now lived on his desk, along with a small collection of devices whose purposes Ning could not immediately identify, and Jason would spend hours bent over one or another of them with an expression of complete absorption that Ning had never once seen on his face during class.

Some of the tablets were so old that their casings had yellowed at the edges, and one of them took several seconds to wake whenever Jason touched its screen, humming quietly to itself as though it resented being disturbed.

One morning, as Ning was getting ready for class and Jason was sitting on the edge of his bed with that very tablet resting in his lap, Ning finally asked about them.

"What’s with all the tablets?" he said, nodding toward the desk. "Some of those look like they’re older than both of us put together."

Jason glanced up, and for a moment, he seemed to weigh whether the question was the setup for some kind of joke at his expense. When he found nothing of the sort in Ning’s expression, he looked back down at the screen in his lap.

"They probably are," he said. "I like older technology. I find it fascinating, you know, the way things used to be built before everything was standardized. All the different ways people solved the same problems before everyone decided upon a correct way to do it. I like learning everything I can about them. It’s like I’m learning history itself."

There was a small spark of enthusiasm in his voice as he said it, the first Ning had heard from him since they had met, and Ning decided not to press any further in case questioning him too closely made it disappear.

"Fair enough," Ning said, reaching for his helmet. "We should get going, or we’ll be late."

Jason set the tablet down on his desk with obvious reluctance, sliding it carefully into its place among the others, and the two of them left the dormitory for class together.

The morning passed without anything particularly unusual.

The first period was engineering fundamentals, which covered load distribution across mechanical frames and the basic principles behind the power systems used in most military equipment, and Ning noticed that Jason paid far closer attention to it than he did to most lessons, taking notes on his tablet.

The second period was an introductory session on Mecha theory, in which the instructor walked them through the general history of how human Mechas had developed from crude imitations of captured Mekharan bodies into the machines the military relied upon today.

Ning found the lesson more interesting than he had expected, particularly the parts that touched on how much of the early human designs had been copied directly from the enemy, which matched what Lorna had told him after his first simulation.

When the second period ended and the students began gathering their things for the morning meal, Lorna raised her voice over the noise of the room.

"Ning, Naysha. Stay behind for a moment."

The rest of the class filed out of the room, several of them throwing curious looks over their shoulders, and Jason gave Ning a brief nod before leaving with the others.

Naysha made her way down from her seat and came to stand beside Ning in front of the instructor’s desk.

"I received word from Sergeant General Greeves this morning," Lorna said. "The date for your True Simulation session has been confirmed."

She sent the details to both of their helmets, and Ning checked the information as it appeared across his display.

The date was almost two months away.

He looked at it for a moment longer than necessary, just to make sure he had read it correctly, before glancing back up at her.

"That’s quite far off."

"It is," Lorna agreed, without sounding particularly sympathetic about it. "The slot was originally set somewhat earlier, but it conflicted with the trip to Jalun, so it had to be pushed back. The pod is booked solid for weeks on either side of the trip, and this was the earliest opening that didn’t interfere with anything else."

Ning nodded as though that explained everything, even though he had no idea what she was talking about.

"Use the time well," Lorna continued, looking between the two of them. "The True Simulation is considerably more demanding than anything you have attempted so far. I would rather neither of you walk into it believing that your scores this month mean you can afford to relax. That’s all. Go and eat."

They saluted, and Lorna gathered her materials and left the room ahead of them.

Ning waited until her footsteps had faded down the hallway before turning to Naysha.

"What’s Jalun?"