Reincarnated as an Energy with a System

Chapter 2053: Repair Plans

Naysha had barely been in the room for a minute before she picked up both helmets and turned them over in her hands, one after the other, holding each of them at different angles beneath the light while Ning and Jason watched in silence.

She did not open either of them. She simply looked, and to anyone who did not know better, it would have seemed as though she was examining the outer shells for scratches or cracks.

Ning knew better. Through his link with the Upgrade System, he could see the schematics unfolding across her vision as the helmet scanned both pieces of equipment layer by layer, mapping every board, sensor, and connector inside them and highlighting the places where something had gone wrong.

It took only a short while before she set them both down on Ning’s bed.

Jason, who had been sitting stiffly on the edge of his own bed the entire time, leaned forward. "Well? What did you find out? Is there anything you can do?"

Naysha turned toward him.

"The problems are simple," she said. "Ning’s helmet has had the camera and the microphone tampered with. Whoever did it didn’t break anything else, just those two parts, which is why the rest of the helmet still works and only the inputs are missing."

She pointed toward Jason’s helmet.

"Yours is worse. A key component on the main circuit board has been destroyed, a small transistor that regulates power to the display. Without it, the screen never receives enough current to turn on, which is why it looks completely dead even though most of the helmet is fine. It needs to be replaced."

Jason stared at her. "You can tell all of that just by looking at them?"

"More or less."

"How?" Jason’s eyes went from her to the helmets and back again. "And even if you’re right, how are we supposed to fix them? We can’t exactly walk into supply and ask for replacement parts without explaining why we need them."

Naysha did not answer the first question, and Ning noticed that she did not seem to think it needed answering.

"That’s the real problem," she said. "I can do the repair, but I need parts that will fit. Do either of you know where we could find broken helmets? Old ones, damaged ones, anything we could take components from?"

Ning shook his head, and Jason did the same after a moment’s thought.

"The military keeps all of that under lock," Jason said. "Damaged helmets get collected and logged, and then they’re either refurbished or destroyed. Nobody just leaves them lying around, especially not here."

Naysha had expected as much, judging by her expression. She glanced around the room as though hoping something useful might present itself, and her gaze eventually settled on the desk beside Jason’s bed, where the stack of old tablets sat in a neat row alongside the small devices he spent so much of his time working on.

She looked at them for a long moment.

"Are those yours?"

Jason followed her gaze. "Yes."

"Could I use them? Some of the parts, I mean."

Jason hesitated, clearly torn between his attachment to the machines and his desperation over the helmet. "Would they even work? Those tablets are old. Some of them are much older than anything the academy uses."

"I don’t know yet," Naysha admitted. "I’d have to look at them first. Older doesn’t necessarily mean incompatible, but I can’t promise anything until I’ve seen what’s inside."

Jason was quiet for a moment, and then he stood and reached toward the far end of the desk, where one of the tablets sat slightly apart from the others.

Its casing was scratched along one corner, and a thin crack ran across the lower part of the screen.

"This one’s already broken," he said, holding it out to her. "I was keeping it around to study the internals. If you need to take something from one of them, take it from this."

Naysha accepted the tablet and turned it over in her hands. The scan began almost immediately, and Ning watched the familiar schematic spread across her vision as the helmet mapped the tablet’s internals in a matter of seconds, marking several components in a different color from the rest.

"This might work," she said. "I’ll need tools, though."

"I have tools." Jason was already pulling a small case out from beneath his bed, and when he opened it, Ning saw a neatly organized set of precision drivers, pry tools, tweezers, and a compact soldering pen, each one slotted carefully into its own place. "Will these do?"

Naysha looked inside and raised her eyebrows slightly, apparently more impressed than she had expected to be. "They’ll do very well."

She cleared a space on the floor between the two beds, sat down cross-legged with the tablet in front of her and the tool case open at her side, and got to work immediately.

Jason sat down on the floor nearby to watch, and within a minute, his expression had changed from anxious to openly astonished.

Naysha opened the tablet as though she had done it a hundred times before. She found the hidden clips along the edge of the casing without searching for them, slid a pry tool into exactly the right place to release each one in turn, and lifted the back panel away in a single clean motion that left nothing bent or scratched.

From there, she moved even faster. Screws came out in a precise order, ribbon cables were disconnected without being tugged, and the internal frame came apart in layers until the entire tablet lay spread across the floor in carefully arranged pieces.

The whole process took her less than two minutes.

"How are you doing that so quickly?" Jason asked quietly. "I’ve had that tablet for a year, and it took me most of an evening to work out how to open it without breaking anything."

Naysha did not look up. "I’m good with machines."