Reincarnated as an Energy with a System

Chapter 2101: Integration

Ning had no doubt about where those improvements had come from. Every night, without fail, Naysha loaded the True Simulation into her Emulator and practiced it for a full hour, drawing every kind of map and every kind of battle the simulation could produce.

Over the course of a year, those hours had added up to more practice in the True Simulation than any cadet in the history of the academy had ever received.

And nobody knew but her, and Ning.

Her Research classes were paying off as well. Just as Ning had expected, the Research wing had given her legitimate access to machines that ordinary cadets would never be allowed near: experimental equipment, prototype components, and damaged machinery brought back from the front lines for study and analysis. Naysha had scanned all of it, one piece at a time, and her list of recorded schematics had grown longer than Ning could easily keep track of.

Her quest progress was moving steadily.

Ning watched one evening as she finished repairing a damaged sensor array in the Research wing’s workshop, a piece of equipment that her instructors had expected to take a full team of technicians several days to fix. She had finished it in under an hour.

As she set down her tools, a message appeared across her vision.

<Quest Complete: Repair 20 broken machines, each in under an hour>

<Reward: Repair per Week increased by 2>

Naysha had looked at the message for a long moment, then smiled faintly and gone back to work.

A few weeks later, another quest completed, and with it came a new message that made her stop entirely in the middle of the Research wing’s corridor.

<Quest Complete: Upgrade 3 recorded machines>

<Reward: New System function unlocked>

<Integration: Two or more recorded schematics may be combined into a single new design, provided their components are compatible.>

<Functions left to Unlock: 3>

Ning had watched her read that message three times, standing frozen in the middle of the corridor while other cadets stepped around her, and then he watched her walk very quickly back to her room, where she spent the rest of the evening staring at her list of schematics with an expression of intense concentration.

He could only imagine what she was planning.

But what interested him most was something he noticed near the end of the year.

Naysha’s name had begun appearing in the communications passing between the academy and the hub. Lorna had sent a recommendation, followed by another from Greeves, and then a third from Instructor Varga. They were the same recommendations that had preceded Ning’s own orders months earlier.

Naysha was close to being sent up to the hub to train as a pilot as well.

Ning was pleased when he learned that. And, though he would never have said so out loud, he was a little proud of her.

A year ago, she had been an orphan with a broken helmet, standing in a street arguing with four soldiers who had sabotaged her, about to be shut out of everything she had worked for.

Now she was one of the best cadets in her academy, with scores in the True Simulation that some active pilots never reached, and her name was being passed up the same chain that had brought Ning to the hub.

He had given her the helmet. Everything she had done with it had been her own.

At the end of the year, Ning’s rotation at the hub came to an end.

Dorn saw him off at the shuttle bay, standing at the edge of the docking platform with his arms folded and his scarred face as unreadable as ever.

"You’ll be back," Dorn said. It was not a question.

"I hope so," Ning said.

Dorn grunted. Then, after a moment, he held out his hand.

Ning shook it.

"Don’t let them make you soft down there," Dorn said gruffly, and turned and walked back into the hub without another word.

The shuttle descended slowly toward Truimal.

Ning watched through the window as the planet grew larger beneath him, the gray-orange sphere filling more and more of his view until it stretched from one edge of the window to the other.

The shuttle eased into the upper atmosphere a little at a time, the gentle descent pressing him lightly back into his seat, and he found himself remembering the journey to Jalun more than a year ago, the slow climb out of the atmosphere and the long drift past the moon, with Jason gripping his armrests in the seat beside him and Naysha staring out at the research stations.

It felt like a very long time ago.

The sky outside the window turned from black to deep blue, then to the familiar gray-orange of Truimal’s atmosphere, and the city spread out below him, its towers and transport rails and crowded streets exactly as he remembered them.

A short while later, the shuttle landed at the port on the edge of the city, and a military transport carried him back to the academy.

Things had changed while he was gone.

He noticed it as soon as he passed through the academy’s gates. The cadets moving between the buildings seemed older, more confident, and more certain of where they were going. The new first-years were easy to spot by the uncertain way they looked around them, and Ning realized with mild amusement that he must have looked the same way on his first day.

He found Jason in their room.

Jason was sitting at his desk, bent over a device Ning did not recognize, and when the door opened, he looked up and broke into a wide, delighted grin.

"Ning!"

He stood so quickly that he nearly knocked the device off the desk, and he crossed the room and pulled Ning into an awkward but enthusiastic embrace.

Ning noticed the change in him at once. Jason stood straighter than he once had, and he looked Ning in the eye when he spoke, without the hesitation that had once marked every conversation.

He talked quickly and easily about everything that had happened in the Technology wing while Ning had been away: the projects he had worked on, the friends he had made, and an old communication protocol he had helped the military recover from a damaged archive, which had apparently earned him a commendation.

He was more confident than Ning had ever seen him.