Reincarnated as an Energy with a System

Chapter 2083: Tobin and Elena

Naysha was not the only one improving, either.

Across the whole batch, scores had been rising steadily. Not every cadet was improving as dramatically as Naysha, and many of them were still a long way from three hundred, but scores that had once settled around one hundred and eighty were now regularly reaching above two hundred, and several cadets who had struggled to break two hundred were now closing in on two hundred and fifty.

Lorna noticed.

At the end of the session, as the cadets were preparing to leave, she stood in front of the observation display and looked over the session’s results with an expression of open interest.

“I’ve been reviewing the scores from this batch,” she said, loudly enough for the room to hear. “The average has risen by a considerable margin over the last several weeks. More than I would normally expect over a single term, and more than any other batch I’ve taught in some time.” She looked up from the display. “Whatever you’re all doing, keep doing it.”

Several cadets exchanged glances, and one of the boys near the front spoke up.

“It’s Ning’s advice, Instructor. He explained how to plan the routes ahead of time instead of reacting to everything.”

“He showed us how to save fuel by not fighting our own momentum,” another added.

“And he told us to stop shooting until we were sure we could hit something,” someone else said, which drew a few laughs from around the room.

Lorna listened to them without interrupting.

Then, when the cadets had finished, she turned her head and looked across the room toward Ning.

She did not say anything. She simply looked at him for a long moment, with a thoughtful expression that Ning could not quite read, as though she were adding something new to whatever she already thought she knew about him.

Then she dismissed the class and turned back to her display.

A few days later, at the end of their morning lessons, Lorna stopped Ning and Naysha once again before they could leave for their meal.

“Come with me,” she said. “Both of you.”

Neither of them needed to ask where they were going. They had both been counting the days since their last visit to the administrative building, and Ning had noticed that morning that the date on his helmet matched the one Lorna had sent them nearly two months earlier.

The True Simulation had arrived.

They followed Lorna across the academy grounds and up the familiar stairs to Sergeant General Greeves’s office, where the two guards outside let them through without delay.

This time, the office was not empty except for Greeves.

Two other cadets were already standing in front of his desk, and they turned as the door opened.

They were older than Ning and Naysha, though not by a great deal, and their uniforms carried the small markings of a senior batch that Ning had seen on the upperclassmen around the academy. One was a tall, broad-shouldered boy with close-cropped dark hair and a serious, square-jawed face, and the other was a slim girl with sharp gray eyes and her pale hair pulled back tightly behind her head.

Lorna introduced them briefly. The boy’s name was Tobin Rask and the girl’s was Elena Sorvik, and both had passed their own Rank 1 thresholds a while ago and been allowed occasional visits to the True Simulation ever since.

They greeted Ning and Naysha politely enough. Tobin gave a short nod, and Elena offered a small, courteous smile.

But Ning could see the skepticism in both of them almost immediately. It was in the way Tobin’s eyes moved from Ning to Naysha and lingered on the markings of their batch, and in the slight, almost imperceptible pause before Elena’s smile, as though she had needed a moment to decide how to react.

Ning suspected that neither of them had expected to be sharing this opportunity with two cadets from Batch 122.

Greeves looked up from his desk and waited until all four were standing in a row in front of him.

“You know why you’re here,” he said. “The True Simulation session the academy has been waiting for is today. The four of you will be traveling to the facility this afternoon, and you will be representing this academy there.”

He folded his hands on the desk.

“You won’t be the only ones. Cadets from the other two military academies in this city will be taking their sessions alongside you. Every result you produce today will be compared directly with theirs, and every instructor in all three academies will see the numbers. I trust I don’t need to explain what that means.”

“No, sir,” Tobin said.

Greeves looked at him, then at Elena, and then his gaze shifted to Ning and Naysha.

“You two, in particular.”

They straightened.

“I told you the last time you were in this office that if either of you failed badly in the True Simulation, I would be the one explaining to the other academies why I placed our cadets ahead of theirs.” Greeves’s expression did not change. “That hasn’t changed. Do not fail badly.”

“Yes, sir,” Ning and Naysha said together.

Greeves held their gaze a moment longer, then nodded and dismissed them.

The four cadets left Greeves’s office together, and a few hours later, after a hurried meal and a brief stop at their dormitories to collect their equipment, they were traveling across the city toward the True Simulation facility.

A military transport carried them through the streets, past the commercial districts and the crowded residential towers, and eventually into a more heavily guarded part of the city where civilian traffic thinned out and military checkpoints became more frequent.

The facility stood at the end of a wide, empty road lined with security barriers.

It was a massive building, far larger than anything at their academy, with high reinforced walls and few windows. Armed guards stood at every entrance, and several layers of security scanned the four cadets and their equipment before they were allowed inside.

Even then, they were escorted through the corridors by a pair of soldiers who never left their side.