Reincarnated as an Energy with a System

Chapter 2077: Quest Opportunity

They were given suits and led out across the landing pad to the old carrier, and then through the same airlock the boarding team had used the day before.

Inside, the ship was still dark and quiet, but the boarding teams had set up portable lights along the corridors, and the dust had been disturbed enough by their passage that it no longer hung so thickly in the air.

They were taken through several sections of the ship one after another. There were the empty crew quarters, the bunks now cleared of their remains, and the cramped galley with its outdated equipment.

They passed through the bridge, where Jason lingered over the old control panels with obvious fascination until Lorna gently moved him along, and through long cargo corridors lined with sealed containers that the boarding teams had not yet opened.

Eventually, they reached a set of large double doors near the rear of the ship.

The soldier leading them pushed them open, and the cadets stepped through into a vast hall that seemed to take up nearly the entire rear section of the vessel.

It was filled with Mechas.

There were several of them, standing upright in heavy maintenance cradles along both sides of the hall, their frames locked in place by thick mechanical clamps.

They were Rank 2 models, roughly twice the height of the Rank 1 machines the cadets trained with in the simulator, and every one of them was old.

Their armor was thicker and bulkier than any modern design, their joints were exposed in places where newer machines would have been sealed, and their proportions looked slightly awkward, as though they had been built before the military had fully worked out what a Mecha should be.

The cadets spread out across the hall, staring up at the machines in silence.

"They’re old," the soldier said, "and they’re inefficient compared to anything built today. They wouldn’t last a minute against modern Mekharan forces. But the frames are intact, and the materials are still good. They’ll most likely be recycled once they’ve been examined."

Most of the cadets nodded and continued staring, with a few murmuring among themselves about how strange the machines looked.

Naysha hardly cared about any of it.

She had walked straight to the nearest Mecha the moment she entered the hall and was standing at the foot of its maintenance cradle, staring up at its towering frame. Ning, standing a short distance behind her, saw the familiar faint distance come into her eyes.

Then, through his link with her System, he saw the message that she had been waiting weeks to see.

<Unregistered machinery detected.>

<Target is within permitted size limit.>

<Would you like to scan?>

Naysha had finally found something she could scan.

Naysha accepted the scan.

She had half expected the System to refuse her again at the last moment, the way it had refused every larger piece of wreckage on the battlefield the day before, and for a brief instant after she gave her answer, she held her breath and waited for the familiar message to appear.

It never came.

Instead, the System began to work, and a faint, layered outline spread outward across the towering frame of the Rank 2 Mecha in front of her, tracing its shape from the broad feet locked inside the maintenance cradle all the way up to the blunt, armored head several meters above her.

Then the schematic began to unfold.

It came layer by layer, far more slowly and in far greater detail than anything she had scanned before.

First the outer armor appeared, its thick, bulky plates rendered in translucent sections that she could see straight through.

Beneath them, the frame took shape, a heavy skeleton of reinforced alloy struts and supports that carried the machine’s enormous weight.

Then came the joints, one after another, each of them a dense cluster of actuators and bearings and hydraulic lines that the System mapped piece by piece. The cockpit followed, nestled deep within the chest, with its seat, its control interfaces, and the old connection port where a pilot’s helmet would once have linked to the machine.

After that came the power systems, a tangle of conduits and storage cells running through the torso and down into the legs, and finally the weapon mounts along the arms and shoulders, empty now, but still carrying the connectors and feed lines where weapons had once been attached.

It took far longer than any scan she had ever done.

The simulator pod had taken seconds. The charging stand had taken barely ten. This went on and on, the schematic growing more complex with every passing moment, until Naysha began to wonder whether the System would ever finish.

She did not move while it worked. She stood at the foot of the maintenance cradle with her head tilted back, staring up at the machine, and around her, the other cadets drifted slowly through the hall, looking at the other Mechas, talking quietly among themselves, and pointing out strange details in the old designs.

Nobody paid much attention to her at first.

Ning did.

He had noticed the moment the scan began, and he kept half an eye on her while appearing to wander through the hall like everyone else, pausing in front of another Mecha a short distance away as though he were interested in its outdated knee joints.

After a while, he noticed Lorna glance across the hall.

Her gaze moved from one cadet to the next in the idle way of an instructor making sure nobody had wandered off, and it was slowly working its way toward the far end of the hall, where Naysha stood without moving at the foot of the cradle, staring up at a single machine with the same unbroken focus she had held for several minutes.

Ning shifted his position casually, stepping a little to his left to examine the Mecha’s shoulder assembly from a better angle.

The movement placed him squarely between Lorna and Naysha, and when Lorna’s gaze reached that part of the hall, it found Ning instead, peering up at an old shoulder joint with apparent interest.

Lorna’s eyes moved on.