Reincarnated as an Energy with a System

Chapter 2100: Naysha Rising

The arguments went back and forth across the hall, theories rising and falling as pilots tried to make sense of what they had just been told. Some insisted it was simply a massive military buildup, Mekharans preparing for a larger offensive than any the Federation had faced in centuries.

Others suggested ships, a vast fleet built in secret. A few pilots near the front proposed stranger ideas, structures or weapons that nobody in the Federation had ever imagined.

Nobody could agree on what it meant.

But everyone agreed on one thing.

"Whatever it is," Dorn said finally, his voice cutting through the noise of the hall, "they’re clearly up to something. And when they’re done building it, we’re the ones they’re going to point it at."

The hall fell silent again.

Ning sat back in his seat and looked at the image of the scarred planets on the display.

He was curious.

He could have found out what the Mekharans were doing in an instant. All he needed to do was ask the System, and it would tell him exactly what was happening on Corvessa and every one of those other planets: what the metal was being used for, where it was being taken, and what the Mekharans were planning.

Or he could ask Crownus, who knew everything that happened in this galaxy and could tell him the answer without even needing to look.

He chose not to.

It would have ruined the surprise. He had made the decision long ago, when he first began traveling the universe, that he would not use his abilities to see the future or to learn every secret before it was revealed.

Life was more interesting when he did not know everything in advance, and this was the kind of mystery he enjoyed most. Whatever the Mekharans were doing, he wanted to find out the same way everyone else would, as the pieces came to light one by one.

But he did tell himself that he would keep an eye on it.

He looked more closely at the image of Corvessa on the display.

As he studied it, he found himself idly estimating the scale of the mining. He looked at the size of the pits and trenches, the depth of the hollowed mountains, and the vast areas of stripped plains, and he calculated roughly how much metal must have been extracted from a single planet.

Then he multiplied it across the dozens of other planets shown on the display, over the years and decades the intelligence officer had described.

He paused.

The number he arrived at was enormous.

It was far larger than anything the pilots around him seemed to have considered. It was not enough metal to build a few more bodies, or an army, or even a vast fleet of ships.

It was enough to build something truly colossal, something on a scale Ning had not expected from a civilization that had spent four thousand years fighting a war at roughly the same level as its enemy.

And he could think of very few things that would require quite so much metal.

For a brief moment, something cold settled in the back of Ning’s mind. It was not fear, exactly. Ning had very little left in this universe that could frighten him.

It was something closer to unease, the faint, uncomfortable sense that he was looking at the first visible piece of something much larger than anyone in this hall had realized.

Then the feeling passed.

Ning leaned back in his seat as the briefing broke up around him and the pilots began filing out of the hall, still arguing among themselves.

He would keep an eye on it.

* * * * * *

Life on the hub settled into a steady routine after Ning was accepted into the training program.

The days were long and demanding, filled with formation drills, live-fire exercises, and mock engagements against pilots who no longer held back against him the way they had during his first weeks.

Dorn remained as gruff as ever, but his criticism had changed. It was sharper and more specific now, aimed at the kind of small refinements he would have bothered to point out only to a pilot he considered worth the effort.

In the quiet hours between training sessions, and in the long nights when the station’s lights dimmed and most of the pilots retired to their quarters, Ning often found his attention drifting back down to the planet below.

To Naysha.

He had kept his link with the Upgrade System from the very beginning, and the distance between the hub and the academy made no difference to it at all. Whenever he wished, he could see what Naysha’s System showed her: her schematics, her quests, her progress, and the counters and messages that appeared across her vision as she went about her days.

He did not watch her constantly, since that would have felt too much like spying, but he checked in often enough to know how she was doing.

She was doing incredibly well.

Her True Simulation scores had been climbing steadily throughout the year.

She had been sent to the facility twice since Ning had left for the hub, and through his link, he had watched both sessions from orbit.

In the first, she had been dropped into a battle among the ruins of a burning city and fought her way through it with a calm, focused precision that would have been unrecognizable to the cadets who had mocked her during her first attempt.

<312 Points>

In the second, she had drawn a desert map again. Ning had watched with particular interest as she landed, adjusted to the shifting sand within seconds, and began reading the faint ripples on the dunes before the first buried Mekharan had even begun to emerge.

<334 Points>

Instructor Varga had written her name down after that one. Ning had seen it through Naysha’s helmet camera, the instructor’s stylus moving across her tablet as Naysha climbed out of the pod.