Reincarnated as an Energy with a System

Chapter 2082: Improvements

Liam’s group was still around, but they kept their distance. Liam himself rarely looked toward Ning’s table anymore, and his friends, who had once made a habit of passing by it with loud remarks, now walked past it without saying a word.

Whether it was the suspension, the dodgeball game, or the simple fact that Jason now had people sitting beside him, Ning could not say, but the change was obvious all the same.

A few days passed in this manner.

Every night, without fail, Naysha used the Emulator.

She never mentioned it to anyone, not even to her friend, but he could see the effects of it in her.

She came to their evening combat lessons looking slightly more tired than usual, with faint shadows beneath her eyes, and on more than one occasion, Ning caught her moving her fingers absently during lessons in the same small, precise patterns he had seen her use during her simulation runs.

Through his link with her System, he could see the emulation timer reset each morning and run down to zero each night.

He said nothing about it. She clearly wanted to keep it to herself, and he was more than happy to let her.

Then Ning’s turn in the Rank 1 simulation came around again.

The room was crowded when he arrived, and Ning noticed that more cadets than usual had found reasons to stay and watch. Several of them were whispering among themselves as he walked toward the pod, and when Lorna called his name, the whispering stopped entirely.

Ning settled into the pod, connected his helmet to the port behind the seat, and waited for the familiar cockpit to form around him.

He had already decided how he would approach this run.

His first attempt had drawn more attention than he needed, and he had no desire to repeat the spectacle of tearing a weapon from a dead Mekharan or bludgeoning his way through the final stretch of the course with a length of debris.

This time, he would play it conservatively. He would fly efficiently, shoot carefully, and do nothing that would make the room hold its breath.

But he did not intend to lose to his own record, either.

When the simulation began, Ning moved through the asteroid field with the same quiet efficiency as before, making his small corrections long before any obstacle forced them and letting his momentum carry him through openings that the other cadets would have had to fight their way past.

He engaged every hostile with a single shot whenever he could, ignored those that were not worth the ammunition, and passed the friendly Mechas without ever raising his weapon.

When he reached the notorious section where the human and Mekharan machines rotated around one another, he dealt with it exactly as he had the first time, matching their rotation until the signals separated and then firing once. But he did it slightly more slowly than before, as though he had needed a moment to think it through.

He ran out of ammunition at almost the same point as on his first attempt.

This time, he did not reach for a piece of debris. He simply flew on, dodging and weaving through the increasingly dense field and avoiding every enemy he could no longer fight, until the hostiles finally closed in around him and the simulation ended.

The score appeared on the observation display.

Three points higher than last time.

The reaction from the room was very different from the stunned silence that had greeted his first run. There was no shock this time, no disbelieving stares, and no students checking the academy record to make sure they had remembered it correctly.

They had all seen what Ning could do, and they had expected him to do it again.

But there was a quieter kind of reaction instead. Several of the cadets nodded at one another, and a few of them clapped.

When Ning climbed out of the pod, a couple of students who had been watching the run with particular attention stopped him to ask about the way he had passed through one of the denser sections of the field.

They were not shocked anymore. They were impressed.

Naysha’s name was called later in the same session.

She walked to the pod with the same calm, focused expression she always wore before a run, and if anyone in the room noticed anything different about her, it was only that she seemed slightly less tense than usual.

The moment the simulation began, it became obvious that something had changed.

Naysha flew through the asteroid field with a confidence that none of the cadets had ever seen from her.

Her movements were smooth and unhurried, her corrections came early and small, and she slipped through the debris with an ease that made several of the watching students glance at one another in surprise.

She looked far more comfortable in the cockpit than she had ever looked before, as though she had spent the last week flying this exact course every single day.

Which, of course, she had.

Her shooting had always been her strength, and it remained so.

But now it was paired with movement that no longer wasted her fuel, and the combination carried her deep into the later sections of the simulation, far beyond the point where her previous runs had ended.

When the dense crossfire of the final stretch finally overwhelmed her, her fuel and ammunition counters were both still showing reserves that would have seemed impossible for her only a month earlier.

The score appeared.

The room erupted.

It was forty points higher than her previous best, which had already been the highest score she had ever managed. Even several of the cadets who usually paid little attention to anyone’s runs but their own were staring at the display in disbelief.

When Naysha climbed out of the pod, she looked at the score for a long moment, then glanced across the room toward Ning.

Ning gave her a small nod, and she gave him a faint smile in return before she was swallowed by a crowd of cadets asking her how she had done it.