Reincarnated as an Energy with a System

Chapter 2087: Desert Map

Bright streaks of weapon fire rose toward her from the ground, and before she could even begin to orient herself, something struck her Mecha’s shoulder.

The impact slammed through the pod.

Naysha’s whole body jerked violently to one side, her head snapping against the padded seat behind her, and for a moment, the shock of it drove every thought out of her mind. It felt real. It felt as though she had been struck by something enormous, the force of it rattling through her bones, and her hands tightened instinctively on the controls as she fought to stay upright.

In the observation gallery, Tobin let out a low whistle.

"Desert," he muttered, mostly to himself. "That’s a bad draw."

Ning glanced at him. "Why?"

"Because of the sand," Tobin said, without taking his eyes off the display. "Mekharans can bury themselves in it. They dig in and wait, completely hidden, and then burst out when you’re right on top of them. Most pilots hate desert maps. You never know where the next one is coming from."

Inside the pod, Naysha was still falling.

She forced herself to focus, gritting her teeth against the shaking of the pod, and fired her Mecha’s thrusters to slow her descent. The motion systems shoved her upward against the restraints as her Mecha braked hard, and the ground, which had been rushing toward her a moment earlier, began to approach more slowly.

The weapon fire from below continued.

Naysha twisted her Mecha in the air, dodging a second shot, then a third, and as the ground came closer, she finally caught sight of her attackers. Three Mekharans stood on the crest of a dune a short distance away, their weapons raised toward her.

She raised her Mecha’s weapon arm and fired.

Her shooting had always been her strength, and even in the chaos of the fall, with the pod shaking around her and her body still reeling from the first impact, it did not abandon her.

Her first shot struck the nearest Mekharan squarely in the chest, and it collapsed backward down the dune. Her second caught another in the shoulder, spinning it around, and her third finished it before it could recover.

Then her Mecha hit the ground.

The landing was brutal. The pod jolted so hard that her teeth clacked together, and for a moment, her vision blurred. When it cleared, she realized she had landed awkwardly on the slope of a dune, her Mecha’s feet sinking deep into the shifting sand, and the third Mekharan was already turning its weapon toward her.

She fired again and brought it down.

For a moment, the immediate area around her was clear, and Naysha drew a long, shaky breath.

The True Simulation was nothing like the asteroid field.

Everything she had practiced at the academy, every route she had planned and every correction she had learned to make early, had been built around a predictable environment with clear objectives and a straight path forward.

Here, there was no path.

There was only sand in every direction, smoke and fire and wreckage, and the overlapping voices of allied units crackling through her communication channel, calling out positions she did not recognize and objectives she did not understand.

And the physical feedback was worse than anything she had imagined. Every step her Mecha took through the sand made the pod sway and lurch beneath her. Every impact, every near miss, and every sudden movement threw her body around inside the restraints.

It threw her off completely.

For the first several minutes, she struggled. She moved too slowly through the dunes, unsure of where she was supposed to go, and when an allied unit called for support from somewhere to the east, the message arrived through her channel several seconds late, after the allied unit had already been destroyed.

She overcorrected her movements in the soft sand, wasting fuel as her Mecha slid and stumbled down the slopes, and twice she nearly fell entirely.

Then the sand exploded beneath her.

A Mekharan burst upward from the dune directly in front of her, sand pouring off its body in great cascades, and it slammed into her Mecha before she could react. The impact threw her backward, and inside the pod, Naysha was hurled against her restraints so hard that the breath was driven from her lungs.

She fired blindly and missed. The Mekharan struck again, and her Mecha staggered.

She fired again, and this time, the shot connected. The Mekharan fell back into the sand.

Naysha sat there for a moment, gasping, her hands trembling on the controls.

Tobin had been right. They could come from anywhere.

But slowly, as the battle continued, she began to adapt.

She learned to watch the sand. She noticed that the dunes shifted very slightly before a Mekharan burst from beneath them, a faint rippling of the surface that was almost impossible to see unless she was looking for it.

She began to keep her Mecha moving rather than standing still, never staying in one place long enough for a buried enemy to reach her.

She learned to stay on the harder ground where she could, along the edges of the half-buried ruins, where the Mekharans had nowhere to hide.

The next time the sand rippled in front of her, she was already firing before the Mekharan had fully emerged.

From the observation gallery, Ning watched her settle into the fight. Her movements grew smoother, her decisions faster, and the panic that had marked her first few minutes gradually gave way to something closer to the calm focus she showed in the academy’s simulator.

She linked up with a small group of allied Mechas holding a position among the ruins and helped them repel a sustained assault, destroying several enemies in the process.

She lasted a fair while.

But she had lost too much time in those first few minutes, and too much of her fuel and armor to the struggles of her landing and her clumsy early movements.

When the enemy finally adapted to her tactics and began bursting from the sand in groups rather than one at a time, she did not have enough left to hold them off.

Her Mecha went down beneath three Mekharans at once, and the simulation ended.

<185 Points>