Chapter 2090 Commander-like

It had responded to his command slightly before the message should have reached it, which meant it was not receiving his messages through the allied channel at all. It was receiving them some other way, faster than a real allied unit ever could.

That was a timing error a real allied unit could not have made.

Ning turned his Mecha, raised its weapon arm, and fired point-blank into the new unit’s chest.

The disguised Mekharan had been raising its own weapon toward the back of Ning’s Mecha at that very moment. It never finished the motion. It staggered backward as the bolt tore through its chest, its corrupted allied signal cutting off abruptly, and collapsed into the snow.

In the observation gallery, someone let out a sharp breath.

"How did he know?" one of the cadets from the second academy asked, loudly enough for the entire gallery to hear. "That was an allied signal. It had an allied signal. How did he know?"

Nobody had an answer.

Ning reached the eastern line a short while later and found it close to breaking. Three allied units were holding a narrow gap between two outcroppings of ice against a much larger group of Mekharans pressing in from the north and east, and their positions were growing more desperate by the second.

Ning did not simply join them. He began giving orders.

He sent commands through the allied channel, timing each one carefully to account for the delay, so that each order arrived at exactly the moment it was needed rather than a few seconds too late.

He directed one allied unit to fall back slightly, drawing a group of Mekharans forward into the gap after it like bait. He sent another to hold its position and fire steadily from behind the outcropping, keeping the enemy’s attention fixed on the gap.

And while the Mekharans pressed forward, focused entirely on the units in front of them, Ning took his own Mecha and the last allied unit wide around the eastern outcropping, moving through the storm where the enemy could not see them.

They came out of the white on the enemy’s flank.

The Mekharans never saw them coming. Ning’s Mecha and the allied unit opened fire into the side of the enemy group, and caught between the fire from the flank and the steady fire from the gap, the Mekharans broke apart. Within seconds, the entire group had been destroyed, their bodies scattered across the snow.

The eastern line held.

The observation gallery had gone completely silent again.

"He’s commanding them," Elena whispered. "He’s using the allied units like a commander would. Like he’s done it a hundred times."

Instructor Varga had moved to stand at the front of the gallery, her arms folded and her eyes fixed on the display. She had not spoken since the disguised Mekharan fell.

The battle continued, and the enemy began to adapt.

The Mekharans stopped advancing in large groups that Ning could flank and began moving in small, scattered units, approaching from several directions at once through the thickest parts of the storm.

They stopped standing still long enough for the snow to pile against them, and they began timing their fire to coincide with the loudest gusts of wind, so that the sound of their weapons was swallowed before it reached him.

So Ning adapted as well.

He kept his allied units moving, never letting them settle into a position long enough for the enemy to surround them. He began listening for the gaps in the wind rather than the sounds within it, using the brief moments of quiet between gusts to place the enemies around him.

When the Mekharans began approaching in small groups, he split his allies into small groups as well, using them to cover one another while he moved between them, striking wherever the enemy was thinnest.

For a long time, it held.

But the simulation was relentless, and it did not stop sending enemies. His ammunition began to run low, his Mecha took hits that he could not avoid, and one by one, the allied units around him fell to the endless pressure of the storm. Damage warnings spread across his cockpit, and the pod jolted violently with every impact.

Ning kept fighting.

When his ammunition ran out, he took the weapon from a fallen allied unit and kept firing. When his Mecha lost an arm to a heavy blast, the motion systems jerked his body sideways so hard that a real pilot might have cried out, and Ning simply adjusted his balance and kept moving.

When the last of his allies fell, he fought on alone, deep in the heart of the battle, surrounded by enemies in the endless white.

He went down still fighting, his Mecha finally collapsing beneath a coordinated assault from four directions at once.

The simulation ended.

The display went dark for a moment. Then the score appeared.

<396 Points>

Nobody in the observation gallery said a word.

It was more than a hundred points higher than anyone else had managed that day. It was nearly a hundred and twenty points higher than Hale’s score, which only an hour earlier had been greeted as the triumph of the session.

Hale stood at the railing, staring at the number on the display. His smile was gone, and in its place was a blank, stunned expression that made him look considerably younger than he had all afternoon.

Tobin and Elena stared at the score as though they could not quite believe what they were seeing. Elena’s hand had come up to cover her mouth, and Tobin was slowly shaking his head.

Naysha stood beside them with her arms folded, and she was smiling slightly. She did not look surprised at all. She had expected it from the moment Ning had walked past Hale on his way to the pod.

Below the gallery, the pod’s hatch hissed open, and Ning climbed out.

He descended the steps without any sign of the stiffness or exhaustion that every other cadet had shown after their runs. He looked as though he had just come back from a short walk.