Chapter 2104: Last Spar

Naysha had come back down from the hub a few days earlier.

Her orders had sent her up to the orbital hub as Ning’s had, but rather than being sent out to the frontier, she had been assigned to the defensive patrols that guarded Truimal itself, flying in rotating shifts around the planet and its moon. It was real combat duty.

The patrols had engaged Mekharan scouts twice in the past month alone. But it kept her close to home, and between her rotations, she was given short stretches of leave on the planet below.

She had arranged one of those stretches to fall on the last few days before Ning left. Ning had not asked her to, and she had not mentioned that she had done it on purpose, but he knew all the same.

On his last evening at the academy, she found him in the dormitory and told him to come to the training yard.

They had not sparred together since before he had gone up to the hub.

The training yard was nearly empty at that hour, with only a handful of first-years running late drills at the far end, and the two of them took the same corner they had used during their first year, beneath the same flickering light that nobody had ever bothered to fix.

Naysha squared up across from him and raised her hands.

"Let’s see if you’ve forgotten everything I taught you," she said.

They fought.

It was different from the sessions they had shared in their first year. Naysha was faster now, and sharper, her movements carrying the quiet confidence of someone who had been in real fights and come out of them alive. She pressed him hard from the very first exchange, testing his guard and probing for openings, and Ning found himself enjoying it more than he had expected.

He let her win.

He made it close, as he always did, giving her enough openings that she had to work for every one of them and taking a few rounds himself so that it never looked like he was handing her the victory.

But in the end, she caught him with a sweep he could easily have avoided and put him on his back on the training mat.

She stood over him, breathing hard, and for a moment, she did not offer her hand.

"You let me win," she said.

Ning looked up at her innocently. "Did I?"

Naysha stared at him for a long moment. Then she shook her head, let out a short breath that was almost a laugh, and pulled him back to his feet.

They sat together on the edge of the training mat afterward, watching the first-years at the far end of the yard stumble through their drills, and for a while, neither of them said anything.

"I’ll catch up to you," Naysha said eventually. "Very soon. Wherever they send you, I’ll be there before you know it."

Ning looked at her. Her expression was calm and steady, and there was no doubt in it at all.

He believed her.

Through his link with the Upgrade System, he could see what she had been working on during her rotations at the hub.

Late at night, when her patrol shifts ended and the other pilots had gone to sleep, she had been sitting in her quarters with her helmet on, building schematics with the Integration function she had unlocked months earlier. She was combining recorded designs into new ones, piece by piece, testing compatibility and discarding what did not work and refining what did.

Ning had glanced at a few of them. Some were small improvements to existing equipment, but others were far more ambitious. One of them, still incomplete, appeared to be built around the frame of the Rank 2 Mecha she had scanned on Jalun, combined with components from at least a dozen other machines she had recorded since.

If she finished it, she would not need anyone’s permission to catch up to him.

"I believe you," Ning said.

Naysha glanced at him, as though checking whether he was humoring her. Whatever she saw in his face seemed to satisfy her, because she nodded once and looked back out across the training yard.

"Good," she said.

The next morning, Ning gathered his few belongings and prepared to leave.

Jason was still sitting at his desk when Ning woke, his eyes red and shadowed from a sleepless night, his tools scattered across the surface in front of him. When Ning stood and began packing, Jason turned around in his chair and held something out toward him.

It was a small communication device, no larger than the palm of Ning’s hand, its casing old and slightly scratched but polished until it gleamed. Ning recognized the model at once. It was one of the old tablets Jason had kept on his desk during their first year, taken apart and rebuilt into something entirely new.

"It’s an old model," Jason said, his voice slightly hoarse. "But I rebuilt most of it. Upgraded the transmitter, rewrote the protocols, and linked it into the academy’s network through a relay that the Technology wing uses. It should reach the network from almost anywhere in the Federation. Even out on the frontier, if the relays hold."

He held it out a little further.

"So you don’t disappear," he said quietly.

Ning took the device and turned it over in his hands.

He could have built a far better communication device himself, without effort, in less time than it would have taken Jason to pick up his first tool. He could have spoken to anyone in the galaxy from anywhere in it without any device at all.

But that was not the point.

Jason had spent his last night awake, working on this with his own hands, using the old technology he loved, because he did not want to lose his friend to the war. Ning found that he was genuinely touched, more than he had expected to be.

"Thank you, Jason," he said. "I’ll use it."

Jason nodded quickly and looked away, rubbing at his eyes with the back of his hand.

"You’d better."