Chapter 2088: Whiteout

The observation gallery was quiet for a moment.

Then Instructor Varga’s voice carried across the room.

"One hundred and eighty-five. That’s a respectable result for a first attempt, particularly on a desert map. Most cadets who draw the desert on their first run don’t survive the landing." She glanced down at the pod as its hatch opened. "That’s not bad at all."

The cadets from the other two academies did not seem to agree.

"A hundred and eighty-five," one of Hale’s classmates said, loudly enough for everyone to hear. "That’s the lowest score of the day."

"I told you," another said. "A first-year like that should have stayed home. It’s embarrassing for her academy, honestly."

"At least now we know why they keep sending upperclassmen who score two hundred," someone else added. "Compared to that, two hundred looks good."

Laughter rippled through the gallery.

Naysha climbed out of the pod and walked back up the stairs toward the observation gallery. Her face was flushed and damp with sweat, and she moved a little stiffly, as though her body still remembered every impact it had taken.

She did not say a word to any of them. She simply walked past the laughing cadets and took her place beside Ning, her face calm and expressionless.

Ning watched her and could tell that none of their words had reached her at all.

He knew why.

She had not been fully immersed in the simulation. From the very first moments of her run, while she was still falling toward the desert and fighting to orient herself, half her vision had been covered with text from the System.

A message had appeared almost as soon as the pod had sealed, and it had remained there throughout the opening minutes of the battle, partially blocking her view of the sky and the dunes and the weapon fire rising toward her.

<Unregistered machinery detected.>

<Target is within permitted size limit.>

<Would you like to scan?>

She had accepted it at once, even as she was falling, and the scan had run alongside her battle for most of its opening stretch, its schematic slowly unfolding across part of her vision while she fought with what was left. That was part of why her early struggles had been so severe.

But by the time the simulation ended, the scan had completed.

The True Simulation pod was now recorded in its entirety among her schematics, every system, every motion control, and every piece of the simulation software that ran it.

She could load it into her Emulator whenever she wanted.

She did not need to worry about whether she would ever be given another chance at the True Simulation, or how long she might have to wait for her next turn, or whether the instructors would consider her worth recommending after a score of one hundred and eighty-five. She could practice it every single day, an hour at a time, for as long as it took.

The cadets laughing at her had no idea, and Naysha had no intention of telling them.

Instructor Varga called the last name.

"Ning."

Ning rose from his place in the gallery and walked toward the stairs. The path took him directly past Hale, who was leaning casually against the gallery railing with his arms folded and the same pleasant smile on his face.

As Ning passed, Hale spoke without bothering to lower his voice.

"Try to do better than your friend," he said. "Though honestly, I’m not sure the bar could be any lower."

Several of the cadets around him laughed.

Ning simply smiled at him and kept walking.

He descended the stairs, crossed the floor of the chamber, and climbed the short steps to the entrance of the pod.

The hatch was open, the dark interior waiting for him. He stepped inside, and the hatch sealed shut behind him.

The darkness inside the pod lasted only a moment.

The seat rose to meet Ning, the restraints closed across his chest and shoulders, and the connection port slid into place behind his head with a soft click.

Then the cockpit formed around him, larger and more detailed than anything in the academy’s simulator, every control solid beneath his hands and every display glowing with sharp, clean light.

Ning had a moment to admire it before the world outside the cockpit appeared.

It was white.

There was no sky, no horizon, and no ground that he could clearly make out. There was only a churning, howling wall of white pressing against the Mecha from every direction, snow driven sideways by a wind so fierce that it seemed to roar through the very walls of the pod.

Somewhere beyond it, faint and distorted, Ning could hear the deep thud of distant explosions and the high whine of weapon fire.

The True Simulation had dropped him into a blizzard.

He was standing on solid ground this time rather than falling, though only barely. The moment the simulation began, the wind slammed against the Mecha’s side, and the motion systems around the pod responded instantly, tilting and shaking it so violently that Ning felt the restraints dig into his shoulders.

The Mecha’s feet slid on what he guessed was ice beneath the snow, and he had to adjust its stance before it toppled over.

The shaking did not stop. It continued without pause, the wind battering the Mecha in irregular gusts that rocked the pod from side to side, never letting it settle for more than a second at a time.

Ning glanced at his sensors.

They were barely functioning. The storm was interfering with nearly every system he had, filling his displays with flickering static and phantom readings that appeared and vanished almost at once.

His targeting system could not lock onto anything further than a few dozen meters away, and even within that range, the readings were unreliable.

Then his allied channel crackled to life, and it was not much better.

"—holding position at—" A burst of static swallowed the rest. "—need support on the eastern—" More static. "—contacts moving toward—"