Reincarnated as an Energy with a System

Chapter 2071: Fear Reinvigorated

"The battle that followed lasted almost three days," the guide continued. "The garrison here was small, and help had to come all the way from Truimal. In the end, the Mekharans were driven off, but it cost the lives of nearly everyone stationed on this planet at the time."

She looked out across the plain.

"Everything you’ve learned at the academy about identification signals, about not trusting what your eyes tell you, about verifying every ship and machine before you let it near you, began here, on this plain, because of what happened on this day."

Nobody said anything for a while after that.

Naysha had gone very quiet.

Ning noticed it as they continued along the path. She walked slightly apart from the others, her gaze moving slowly from one piece of wreckage to the next, and she did not speak to anyone, not even to her roommate when the girl tried to ask her something.

After a while, she stopped beside a fallen human Mecha.

It was a large machine, much larger than the Rank 1 models they trained with in the simulator, lying on its side with one arm torn away and its chest cavity blown open.

Naysha looked at it for a long moment, and Ning saw the familiar faint distance come into her eyes as the System began its scan.

<Scan unavailable.>

<Target exceeds current size restriction.>

She moved on to another piece of wreckage, a separated leg from a different machine, and tried again with the same result. Then she tried a torso section, and then a broken shoulder assembly, and each time the System refused her.

Eventually, she found a small fragment of armor plating lying in the dust a short distance from the path, no larger than a person’s arm, with part of an internal mechanism still attached to its underside.

This time, the scan worked.

The schematic spread across her vision, mapping out the plating and the mechanism attached to it, and a moment later, a note appeared beside it.

<Schematic recorded.>

<Design classification: Outdated. Component of obsolete Mecha model.>

<Quest progress unchanged: First Complete Scan of a Mecha. A fragment does not qualify.>

Naysha looked at the message for a long moment before closing it and rejoining the group without a word. Ning saw the disappointment on her face, though he suspected that the quest was not the only reason she looked the way she did.

A little later, the guide stopped the group near the center of the battlefield.

"Your test today is a navigation exercise," she said. "Each of you will receive a series of waypoints across the site. You’ll need to reach each one in order, using your helmet’s navigation tools and your own judgment, and return here as quickly as possible.

"Your score will depend on your time, your accuracy, and whether you stay within the marked safe zones. Some of the wreckage out there is still unstable, so watch where you step."

The waypoints appeared on everyone’s helmets, and the cadets set off across the plain.

The course was well designed. The waypoints were scattered among the wreckage in a way that made the most direct route between them impossible, forcing everyone to choose paths around fallen machines and through narrow gaps, while the safe zones were marked carefully enough that cutting corners would cost points.

Ning could have finished it faster than anyone else in the class. He could see the optimal route between every waypoint the moment they appeared, and with his speed, he could have returned to the center long before the others had reached their second marker even without going beyond the ability of a regular cadet here.

He chose not to.

He had already drawn more attention than he needed since arriving at the academy, between the simulation score, the incident with the four cadets, and the dodgeball game, and he saw no reason to add another record to the list.

So he took a slightly longer route than necessary, paused at a few waypoints as though checking his bearings, and returned to the center at a pace that placed him comfortably among the better students without putting him at the top.

When the results were posted, Ning’s name sat several places down the list.

Naysha was near the top. She had moved through the course with the same sharp focus she brought to everything, choosing her routes quickly and wasting very little time, and she had finished only a short distance behind the cadet who placed first.

Jason placed in the middle of the class.

For most cadets, it would have been an unremarkable result. For Jason, it was something close to a triumph, and Ning saw him looking at his score for a long while with a small, quiet smile.

The group flew back to the station late that afternoon, and the mood remained subdued throughout the flight.

That night, after Jason had gone to sleep and the station’s corridors had grown quiet, Ning returned to the long corridor with the observation windows and sat down in front of the glass.

Outside, the long night of Jalun had fully settled over the landscape. The pink sky was gone, replaced by a deep black scattered with stars, and the ridges beyond the station were nothing more than faint shapes against the darkness.

Ning sat there for a long while and thought about the battlefield.

He thought about the cargo ship split open on the plain, and about the guide’s words, and about how much of what he had seen since arriving in this system traced back to that single fear. Every human Mecha broadcast an encrypted signal to prove what it was.

Every cadet was taught from their first day never to trust what they saw. Humans built machines to look like Mekharans so they could walk among them unseen, and Mekharans reshaped themselves into human ships and vehicles so they could do the same.

Two civilizations had spent four thousand years teaching themselves that anything could be the enemy.

And Ning could not help thinking that a war built on that kind of fear would be very difficult to end.