Reincarnated as an Energy with a System

Chapter 2057: Trip Agenda

Ning and Jason reported the four cadets that same evening.

They went directly to the staff room after returning to the academy, where the soldier who had shown Ning to his room on his first day happened to be on duty, and Ning handed over the recording from his helmet without much explanation beyond a brief account of where it had been taken and why.

The soldier watched it twice, the second time with a considerably harder expression than the first, and then sent the two of them back to their dormitory with instructions to say nothing about it to anyone until the administration had looked into the matter.

By the following morning, the four cadets had been suspended.

The full announcement came later that day, passed quietly through the academy the way most news did, from one table in the cafeteria to the next. The suspension would last for two weeks, during which the four would be confined to their quarters outside of supervised duties and barred from all training and simulation sessions.

It was less than Ning had expected.

According to what the staff told him afterward, the problem was the very thing that had made the recording possible in the first place. The four cadets had confessed, clearly and on record, to breaking his helmet, but the helmet that had recorded that confession was obviously working. When the administration examined both his and Jason’s helmets, they found them fully functional, with nothing to show that either had ever been damaged at all.

A confession to an act that had apparently left no trace was still a serious offense, but without evidence that the sabotage had actually succeeded, the academy treated it as an attempt rather than a completed crime, and the punishment was reduced accordingly.

Ning did not particularly mind. Two weeks of confinement was enough to make the four of them think twice before trying anything similar, and more importantly, it had cost Ning and Jason nothing at all.

Liam was never mentioned in the investigation.

Nothing on the recording had tied him directly to the act, and if the four cadets had named him during their questioning, nothing came of it. Even so, Ning noticed that Liam stopped coming around after that. He no longer lingered near their table in the cafeteria, no longer passed close to Ning in the hallways, and no longer stood nearby during combat training making remarks meant to be overheard.

Whether it was because he was being more careful now that four of his friends had been caught, or because he had simply decided Ning was more trouble than he was worth, Ning could not say, and he did not care enough to find out.

Time passed.

The simulation sessions continued as the month went on, and Ning watched with mild interest as several of the cadets returned for their second or third attempts. Some of them had clearly taken his advice to heart and practiced what they could with the recordings available to them, and a few of their scores rose by ten or fifteen points as a result.

But most of them were still so far from the threshold that Ning doubted they would ever reach it. A cadet who improved from one hundred and seventy to one hundred and eighty-five had done well by their own standards, but the distance between that and three hundred was not something that could be closed with advice alone, and without far more time in the simulator than the academy allowed, Ning suspected most of them would remain where they were for a long while.

He had settled into the academy quite nicely by then.

His days had found a comfortable routine of lessons, training, Daywatch shifts, and meals at the table that the rest of the cafeteria still called the losers’ table, though fewer people seemed to say it out loud these days.

Jason talked more in their room in the evenings, usually about whatever old machine he was taking apart, and Naysha had begun joining them for dinner every few days, sometimes to discuss piloting and sometimes simply because she preferred the quiet of their table to the noise of everywhere else.

More time passed, and the day of the field trip to Jalun drew steadily closer.

To Ning’s surprise, the mood around the academy began to change as it approached. The same cadets who had shrugged at the mention of the trip a month earlier were now talking about it with noticeable enthusiasm, though it did not take Ning long to realize that the excitement had very little to do with Jalun itself.

The trip would last a full week, and for most of the cadets, that week would be the closest thing to a break they had been given in a long time. There would be no early morning drills, no running laps around the training track, and no instructors watching every movement they made in the combat yard.

Even if the planet at the end of the journey turned out to be as dull as everyone said, a week away from the academy’s routine was apparently reason enough to be glad.

A few days before departure, Lorna gathered the class at the end of their morning lessons and sent the trip’s agenda to every helmet in the room.

"This is the schedule for the full seven days," she said. "Read through it carefully. If any of you has a legitimate reason to sit out any part of it, medical or otherwise, let me know ahead of time. I will not be making arrangements on the morning of."

Ning opened the agenda and looked it over.

The first and last days were set aside entirely for travel, one to reach Jalun from Truimal and the other to return. The five days in between were what the trip was actually for.

Most of those five days were spent visiting sites of historical importance scattered across the planet’s surface. There were old research stations from the earliest days of Truimal’s expansion into its own solar system, the remains of a colony that had been abandoned long before any of them were born, and the location of a battle fought during the first Mekharan incursion into this part of the galaxy, which the agenda described as a memorial site.

A decent portion of the schedule, however, was made up of tests.

They would be taken through the cadets’ helmets at different points throughout the five days, covering navigation, environmental analysis, survival procedures, and a handful of other practical subjects tied to the locations they would be visiting.

Points would be awarded for each test, and whoever had accumulated the most by the end of the trip would receive military credit toward their record.

Ning read through the full list once more before closing it.

He could understand now why people had not been especially excited about the trip when he first asked. Five days of looking at old buildings and abandoned outposts on a frozen world, broken up by tests that would follow them wherever they went, did not sound much like a holiday, no matter how much time it kept them away from the training yard.

Still, he found himself mildly curious. He had visited a great many planets, but very few of them had come with an itinerary.

Then, in the last days before departure, a rumor began to spread through the academy.