Reincarnated as an Energy with a System

Chapter 2069: Combat Classes

The fields shut down gradually once the game was over, lowering Ning toward the floor of the chamber with the same slow, gentle descent that every eliminated player had experienced before him.

By the time his feet touched the padding, half of the class had already gathered around him.

They clapped him on the shoulders and back, talking over one another about the rope, the run along the wall, and the moment Lorna had found herself tied up in the middle of the chamber, and for a few minutes, Ning could barely hear anything else.

Eventually, Lorna managed to restore enough order for the points to be tallied.

The game’s scoring had been tracked through their helmets the entire time, and once the results were finalized, the totals appeared on every display in the room.

The instructors had earned their points for every student they eliminated, while the students earned theirs for those who had survived the longest.

Ning’s total sat at the very top of the list.

80 Points.

Nobody else came close. Naysha placed second among the students with a respectable total from her long survival and the hits she had helped Ning land, while Liam’s single elimination and late exit put him comfortably in the middle.

Jason’s total was small, but he looked at it with a satisfied expression all the same, as though he had expected even less.

Across the class as a whole, the students had walked away with a significant lead over the instructors, which the cadets greeted with another round of cheering.

Several of the instructors took it with good humor, though one of them muttered something about never again letting a rope into the item container.

For the rest of the evening, the cadets treated Ning like a hero.

On the flight back to the station, they crowded around his seat to ask how he had come up with the idea of tying the balls to the rope, and whether he had planned the run along the wall from the beginning or simply improvised it.

At dinner, students he had never spoken to before came to the table to congratulate him. Even a few of the instructors nodded at him as they passed, Lorna among them, though she still wore the faint expression of someone who could not quite believe she had been caught.

Liam did not join any of it.

He stayed at the edge of the group throughout the flight, staring out of the viewing strip and saying very little even to his own friends, and when the cadets gathered for dinner, he ate quickly and left early, before most of them had even finished their meals.

Ning noticed, but he did not dwell on it.

After dinner, as the crowd around him finally began to thin, Naysha came over and sat down across from him.

"Where did you learn to use a rope like that?" she asked.

Ning shrugged. "I didn’t, really. It just seemed like the obvious thing to do with it."

Naysha gave him a long, unconvinced look. "Tying two balls to either end of it, running around the wall, and throwing it at an instructor while you were spinning in midair seemed like the obvious thing to do?"

"Once I thought of it, yes."

She clearly did not believe him, but she also seemed to recognize that she would not get a better answer by pushing, so she let it go.

"Fine," she said. "Then let’s talk about something else. I still owe you close combat lessons. I haven’t forgotten about our deal, and since we have nothing on the schedule tonight, I want to start now."

Ning raised an eyebrow. "Tonight? We’ve been flying and playing dodgeball all day."

"Which means you’re already warmed up," she said. "Unless you’re too tired."

Ning smiled slightly. "No, tonight works."

They found an empty corner of one of the station’s recreational rooms, a space with padded flooring that was clearly meant for exercise, and Naysha spent the next hour putting him through basic drills.

She started with footwork and stance, then moved on to simple strikes and blocks, correcting the position of his elbow here and the placement of his feet there with the brisk impatience of someone who expected her student to learn quickly.

Ning let her teach him exactly as though he needed it. He made the occasional mistake, corrected it once she pointed it out, and asked enough questions to keep her talking, and by the time they finished, Naysha looked considerably more satisfied than she had at the start.

"You learn fast," she said, wiping the sweat from her forehead.

"I have a good teacher."

She rolled her eyes, but Ning thought she looked slightly pleased all the same.

The next morning, the group boarded the transport craft once again for the second day of the agenda.

This time, they flew to the site of an abandoned colony, and the guide explained its history as the craft descended toward it.

It had been one of the very first human settlements in the system, established when Truimal’s people had first reached out beyond their own world, and for several generations, a few thousand people had lived and worked there, mining the minerals beneath Jalun’s surface.

Then the colony’s life support had begun to fail.

"It didn’t happen all at once," the guide said, as the craft came in to land beside the ruins. "The systems here were the best anyone could build at the time, but they were never designed to last as long as they were made to. Parts wore out faster than replacements could be shipped in, repairs grew more difficult each year, and eventually, it became clear that the colony could no longer keep its people alive."

She looked out at the buildings below.

"So they left. Every last one of them, over the course of a few months. And nobody has lived here since."

The colony looked exactly like a place that had been left behind. Its buildings were low and rounded, built to hold air inside them against the thin atmosphere outside, and most of them were now half buried in drifts of red dust that had blown across the plain for generations.