Chapter 2092 End of Year Exam

Naysha had switched from the academy’s Rank 1 simulator to the True Simulation pod almost as soon as they returned, and she practiced it with a single-minded determination that Ning found quietly impressive.

Night after night, she loaded the pod into her helmet and ran the True Simulation until her hour was up, drawing desert maps and orbital stations and frozen planets, failing and starting again, over and over.

She never spoke about it, but Ning noticed the change in her all the same.

She was getting sharper. In the Rank 1 simulator at the academy, her scores continued to climb, and she moved through the asteroid field with an ease that made even the instructors watch her more closely.

In combat training, her reactions had grown faster, and her decisions came more quickly.

During their evening lessons, she began correcting Ning’s stance with the absent confidence of someone whose mind was somewhere else entirely, as though she were already thinking through her next run in the True Simulation while she talked.

It was a quiet change, the kind most people would not have noticed. But Ning noticed.

Jason continued to come slowly out of his shell.

The two cadets who had started sitting at their table after the trip to Jalun had become regular companions, and over the following months, a third and then a fourth joined them, drawn by Jason’s growing reputation as the cadet who knew more about technology than anyone in the academy.

Jason still stammered when he was nervous and still fell silent when a conversation moved away from machines, but he talked far more than he once had, and Ning often came back to their room in the evenings to find him deep in a discussion with one of his new friends about some ancient device or forgotten protocol.

He laughed more, too. Ning had not heard him laugh at all during the first month they had known each other. Now, he heard it almost every day.

Liam’s group stayed away.

After the trip to Jalun, and especially after the True Simulation, they seemed to have decided that Ning, Naysha, and Jason were no longer worth their attention.

Liam rarely looked toward their table anymore, and when the two of them passed in the hallways, Liam simply kept walking. Ning could not tell whether it was because Liam had given up, or because he was waiting for something, but either way, he left them alone.

Beyond the academy walls, the war news remained quiet.

But it was a tense kind of quiet. The rumor of a captured Federation planet, which had spread through the academy before the trip to Jalun, had never been confirmed.

But it had never been denied, either. The official news broadcasts said nothing about it at all, and the instructors refused to discuss it whenever a cadet asked. That silence seemed to say more than any official statement could have.

Military transports moved through the city more often than they once had. The soldiers on Daywatch routes seemed more alert, and the checkpoints between districts grew stricter.

Once or twice, Ning saw Lorna and the other instructors speaking quietly together in a corner of the training yard, their expressions grim, and falling silent when a cadet came near.

Nobody knew anything for certain.

But everyone could feel that something was coming.

The end-of-year exam arrived on a cold, gray morning, as the last weeks of the academy year drew to a close.

The cadets of Batch 122 had been preparing for it for months. In the final weeks before it began, the mood around the academy changed noticeably.

Conversations in the cafeteria turned to study schedules and practice tests, the training yards stayed crowded long into the evenings, and the simulation room was booked solid by cadets desperate for one last attempt before their scores counted for anything.

Jason spent several nights in a row bent over his tablets, going through engineering diagrams until the early hours of the morning.

Naysha ran the Emulator every night as usual and spent her free afternoons in the training yard. Even Liam, who had always carried himself as though he had nothing to prove, could be seen studying quietly in the corners of the library.

Ning did very little to prepare. He did not need to.

The exam itself was spread across four days and covered every part of what the cadets had learned over the course of the year.

The first day was given over entirely to written tests.

The cadets sat in long rows in one of the academy’s largest lecture halls, answering questions on tactics and military history, engineering fundamentals, Mecha theory, communications, and the dozens of smaller subjects that had filled their lessons.

The tests were long and demanding, and by the end of the day, many of the cadets walked out of the hall looking exhausted.

The second day was the combat evaluation. Each cadet was paired against a series of opponents in the training yard, some of them fellow students and others instructors.

They were assessed not only on whether they won or lost, but on their technique, their control, and their judgment. Ning made sure to lose a few of his matches, though only narrowly and in ways that made sense, while Naysha won almost every match she fought.

The third day was the simulation assessment.

Each cadet made a single attempt at the Rank 1 simulator under formal conditions, with their score counting directly toward their final result. Ning had wondered for a moment if he should try and go for the perfect 500, but upon thinking about it, he decided not to do so.

There was no need to show off, and it would just be demotivating for the students that came after him. So, he simply got a score in the 460s.

Naysha’s score was one of the highest of the day, above 400, and close to what Ning had received.

Jason, who had been dreading this part of the exam more than any other, managed a result that was low but not disastrously so.