Chapter 2044: Naysha’s Test

Naysha’s preparation timer ran down while she was still testing how the controls responded beneath her one free hand.

When the cockpit display finally flashed the beginning of the assessment, she pushed the Rank 1 Mecha forward into the asteroid field without the hurried burst of acceleration that had marked nearly every one of her previous attempts.

Outside the pod, the class watched her machine leave the starting point at a pace that seemed almost cautious compared to what they had seen from her before.

A few of the students who knew her scores glanced at one another, as though wondering whether she had lost her nerve.

Ning knew better.

He could see the way her Mecha angled itself slightly upward long before the first drifting wreckage had come anywhere near her route, and he understood that she was already looking several obstacles ahead rather than waiting for the debris in front of her to force her hand.

Inside the cockpit, Naysha was doing exactly what Ning had spent the previous two nights drilling into her.

The asteroid field no longer looked to her like a series of walls appearing one after another in front of her machine.

It looked like a moving map, where every piece of rock and metal was already traveling toward the place it would occupy several seconds from now, and her task was simply to arrive somewhere none of them would be.

She traced the route in her mind well before she needed it, adjusting a few degrees here and adding a short pulse of thrust there. Each time a piece of debris passed through the space she had once intended to use, she was already somewhere else, without having to fight her own momentum to get there.

It wasn’t as easy as she had thought it was going to be.

She couldn’t see as much of the world around her as she could from the simulation recording viewed from outside. Her vision was much more confined here, making it harder to judge things as well as she knew she should.

Still, she did the best she could.

Her right hand stayed pressed awkwardly against the side of the control housing, two fingers still holding the loosened wire in place. It made every movement of her right hand matter more than it normally would have, but the controls answered her with a crispness she had never felt in this simulator before.

She was beginning to suspect that part of the trouble she had blamed on herself for months had been sitting inside the handle the whole time.

The first Mekharan emerged from behind a broken engine casing roughly a minute into the run.

Naysha’s helmet received the radio signature and confirmed it as hostile. She raised the Mecha’s weapon arm in one smooth motion and fired a single shot that struck the machine squarely through the chest before it had even finished turning toward her.

Shooting had never been her weakness.

The clean hit drew a murmur of approval from several students outside who had seen her do the same thing in previous attempts, though they had rarely seen her arrive at that first enemy with so much of her fuel still untouched.

Ning watched the resource counters on the observation display more closely than he watched the combat itself.

The difference was not dramatic enough that most of the cadets would notice it immediately, but to him, it was obvious within the first few minutes.

She was still making mistakes.

Now and then, she would hesitate a fraction too long before committing to a correction or take a slightly wider route around a cluster of wreckage than she needed to.

But they were smaller mistakes than before, and they cost her less.

She was no longer stacking one wasteful correction on top of another the way she had in the recording she had shown him.

Lorna seemed to notice the same thing, because she unfolded her arms and leaned a little closer to the main display as Naysha passed the point where her previous attempts had usually begun to unravel.

The middle section of the simulation grew denser, with heavier debris crossing at awkward angles and Mekharans appearing from behind cover more frequently.

Naysha moved through it with a steadiness that made several of the watching students go quiet.

She waited for every identification signal before firing, as she always had.

When a human Mecha drifted out from behind a shattered hull plate, she lowered her weapon and let it pass without the slightest twitch toward the trigger.

When two hostile units appeared on opposite sides of her route, she took the nearer one with a single shot and used a large tumbling asteroid to break the other’s line of fire before dealing with it a few seconds later.

Not every problem could be solved cleanly, however.

Deeper into the field, the debris began arriving in tight, overlapping patterns that left her with only two real choices: spend fuel to force a quicker path through or slow down and lose distance while she waited for an opening that might never come.

Naysha chose to spend the fuel more than once.

Each time, Ning saw her counter drop by an amount that would have made her wince if she had been the type to show it.

On another occasion, she misjudged how quickly a spinning chunk of machinery would cross her route and had to brake hard to avoid it, canceling a good deal of the momentum she had worked so carefully to preserve.

She recovered from it well enough, though it was clear she could not completely avoid paying for the mistake.

Even so, she kept going, and each new section of the field took her farther than any of the cadets who had gone before her that day had managed to reach.

Her ammunition ran low first.

She had been disciplined with it throughout the run, rarely firing a second shot unless the first had genuinely failed, but the later sections of the simulation simply produced more enemies than any reasonable supply could deal with.