Reincarnated as an Energy with a System

Chapter 2078: System Function: Emulator

Ning smiled faintly to himself and stayed where he was.

Behind him, the scan finally completed.

The schematic settled into place across Naysha’s vision, every layer of the Rank 2 Mecha recorded and stored, and a series of messages appeared one after another beside it.

<Scan complete.>

<Quest Complete: First Complete Scan of a Mecha>

<Reward: New System function unlocked>

Naysha’s breath caught. A moment later, another message followed.

<Emulator: Any technology previously scanned may be emulated through the System Helmet.>

<Current limit: 1 hour of emulation per day.>

She did not understand it at first.

She read the description once, then again, and then a third time more slowly, turning each word over in her mind as though it might mean something different if she looked at it long enough.

Any technology previously scanned may be emulated through the System Helmet.

Emulated.

Slowly, the meaning settled over her. Anything she had scanned, the System had recorded completely, down to the last wire and the last bolt. If the System could reproduce that recording inside her helmet, then she could run any of those things as though they were real, seeing what they would show her and controlling them as she would control the real thing, without ever needing to touch the original again.

Naysha opened her list of recorded schematics.

There were not many of them yet. The charging stand was there, along with the copied data from her old helmet and the small fragment of outdated armor plating from the battlefield. Now the Rank 2 Mecha sat at the bottom of the list, its entry still marked as new.

And among them, recorded during her 325-point run, was the simulator pod.

Naysha stared at that entry for a long moment.

The simulator pod at the academy, the one that every cadet was allowed to use only once a month unless an instructor granted them an extra session. The one she had spent months waiting for, counting down the days between attempts, studying recordings in between because there had been no other way to practice.

If she could emulate it, then she could run the Rank 1 simulation every single day, an hour at a time, without waiting for anyone’s permission. She could practice the routes Ning had shown her until they became instinct, and fail as many times as she needed to without it ever being recorded against her.

And beyond that, she had the Rank 2 Mecha, a real machine, twice the size of anything she had ever been allowed to sit in, recorded completely, every system and every control.

Naysha turned around.

Ning had stepped back from the shoulder joint he had been pretending to study, and when she turned toward him, he saw her face clearly for the first time since the scan began.

For the first time since he had known her, Naysha looked openly excited.

Her eyes were bright, her cheeks were faintly flushed, and the guarded, serious expression she wore almost everywhere had disappeared entirely, replaced by something that looked very much like the expression of a child who had just been handed a gift she had stopped hoping for.

Ning raised an eyebrow.

"What’s gotten into you?"

Naysha opened her mouth, then closed it again.

"Nothing," she said.

But she could not stop smiling. She tried to look serious, pressing her lips together and turning away toward another Mecha, but the smile kept returning every few seconds, tugging at the corners of her mouth no matter how hard she tried to hide it.

When her roommate came over a moment later to ask what she was looking at, Naysha answered with a cheerfulness so unusual that the girl gave her a puzzled look and wandered away again.

Ning watched her and said nothing more. He already knew exactly what had happened, and he was perfectly content to let her keep her secret.

A short while later, the soldier leading them announced that it was time to leave, and the cadets made their way back through the ship’s dim corridors toward the airlock.

Several of them lingered in the hall a little longer than necessary, taking one last look at the old machines before they were recycled.

As they walked back across the landing pad toward the outpost, one of the officers who had accompanied the boarding teams fell into step beside Lorna and the other instructors at the front of the group.

"There’s something else you might want to pass along to your cadets," the officer said. "The boarding team recovered part of the ship’s archives overnight. Most of it was badly degraded after so long, but a few sections were still intact. We’re still working through what’s left."

Lorna glanced at him. "Do you know what happened to the crew yet?"

"Not yet," the officer said. "But we expect to know more soon."

Behind them, Naysha walked with her eyes fixed on the ground ahead and her hands clasped behind her back, still trying and failing to stop smiling.

The cadets returned to the station late that afternoon, and for a few hours, they were left to themselves.

Most of them spent that time in the communal area or the cafeteria, still talking about the old carrier and the hall full of Mechas, and about Jason, who had been dragged into so many conversations since the previous day that he had begun to look faintly exhausted by his own popularity.

Shortly before dinner, Lorna sent a message to every cadet’s helmet asking them to gather in the communal area.

They assembled quickly. Something in the tone of the message suggested it was not about the next day’s schedule, and when Lorna arrived, the room fell quiet without her needing to ask.

She stood in front of the large display at the end of the room and waited until every cadet had found a seat or a place to stand.

"The defense outpost contacted us this afternoon," she said. "They’ve finished working through the archives recovered from the ship, or at least the parts of them that survived. Since you were all present when the ship came in, and since one of you is the reason it came in safely at all, the commander asked that I pass along what they found."