Reincarnated as an Energy with a System

Chapter 2081: Return to Truimal

Naysha placed third.

She looked at the result with a small, satisfied nod. Her strong performance in the navigation test at the battlefield had carried her most of the way, along with her long survival in the dodgeball game and a steady string of good results everywhere else.

But the name that drew the most attention was Jason’s.

He had placed far higher than anyone had expected, ahead of Ning and well into the upper part of the list.

His strong result at the abandoned colony had helped, but the largest part of his total had come from a single entry added on the fourth day, recorded on Commander Ostrava’s personal recommendation, crediting him for his actions in the command center.

Several cadets congratulated him, and Jason looked at the result with an expression of complete disbelief, as though he expected it to change if he looked at it too long.

The next day, they left Jalun.

The shuttle that carried them home was the same model that had brought them, and once again, they shared it with a group of tourists returning to Truimal. The departure was as slow and gradual as the arrival had been, the shuttle easing upward out of the station’s hangar and into space a little at a time.

This time, nobody complained about it.

More than a few cadets glanced at one another as the gentle acceleration pressed them back into their seats, and Ning suspected that after what Lorna had told them about the old carrier, every one of them was grateful for every slow second of it.

Once they were in open space and the shuttle had settled into its long cruise, the cadets began to talk.

And they did not stop.

The same cadets who had shrugged at the mention of the trip a month and a half earlier, who had complained that Jalun was nothing but a dead planet and that there would be nothing worth seeing, now could not stop talking about it.

They talked about the dodgeball game, about the rope and the run along the wall and Lorna tied up in the middle of the chamber. They talked about the old carrier, the hall full of ancient Mechas, and the crew who had chosen to die rather than be caught. They talked about the sunrise from the top of the mountain.

And again and again, they talked about Jason standing at the edge of the tier in the command center and shouting across the room at the commander herself.

Jason, sitting beside Ning, spent most of the flight trying to sink lower into his seat every time his name came up.

Naysha sat across the aisle from them this time, and somewhere in the middle of the flight, she leaned over toward Ning.

"I’ll admit it," she said quietly. "That was a lot better than I expected."

Ning smiled. "You said it would just be a lifeless planet."

"It was a lifeless planet," Naysha said. "It just turned out the planet wasn’t the point."

Jason, who had overheard them, looked up from his seat.

"I want to come back," he said. "Next year. If they let us."

Naysha raised an eyebrow at him, and Ning laughed.

Several hours later, the shuttle reached the space hub near Jalun, the same smaller hub where they had emerged from the teleportation matrix on the way in. It angled itself toward one of the glowing frameworks and passed straight through without slowing.

The view outside flickered for an instant, and then they were back near Truimal’s local space, with the larger hub hanging ahead of them and the bright gray-orange sphere of home growing slowly larger beyond it.

Not long afterward, they passed close to the moon again.

Its pale surface slid past the windows, scattered with the same tiny clusters of settlements and research stations they had seen on the way out, glinting faintly in the sunlight.

Ning glanced across the aisle at Naysha.

She was looking out of her window at the moon, exactly as she had on the outward journey. But this time, her expression was different.

The tension that had held her so still a week ago was gone, and she watched the stations drift past with a calm, quiet look on her face, as though something that had once weighed heavily on her had grown just a little lighter.

When the moon finally fell behind them, she turned away from the window without any trouble at all and leaned back in her seat to rest for the remainder of the journey.

The academy returned to its routine as though the trip had never happened.

The cadets came back to the same early mornings, the same lessons in tactics and engineering and Mecha theory, the same laps around the training track and the same bruising hours in the combat yard.

Daywatch shifts resumed, sending small groups of students out into the city to push stalled vehicles and give directions to lost travelers, and the simulation schedule picked up exactly where it had left off before they departed for Jalun.

Within a day or two, most of the cadets had settled back into their old habits, and the week on Jalun had already begun to feel like something that had happened a long time ago.

Some things, however, had changed.

Jason’s life was different now, though only a little, and in ways that someone who did not know him might never have noticed. People nodded at him in the hallways when they passed, a small, ordinary gesture that nobody had made toward him in all the time Ning had known him.

A few cadets who had been on the trip greeted him by name in the training yard, and once, during an engineering lesson, the instructor asked him a question directly and listened to his entire answer without interrupting.

At meals, the table that the rest of the cafeteria had once called the losers’ table was no longer quite so empty.

A couple of cadets began sitting there without being asked. Jason did not seem to know what to make of any of it. He answered their questions politely, stammered through the conversations, and spent the rest of each meal glancing between his new tablemates as though half expecting them to leave at any moment.

They did not leave.