Chapter 19: The Grind

"Good work today Cadets, you're getting better at avoiding the landmines when you dodge. Since tomorrow is a break day I'll see you after lunch for your training. Dismissed." General Tennant informs them with a smile.

Both Max and Nico saw that one coming, for a man well into his senior years, the General is a workaholic at heart, there was no way that they were actually going an entire day without any form of training going on. At least not under his command.

General Tennant had a good reason for that though, a little bit of duty every day builds a habit of training. Once that habit is instilled into the Cadets so well that it becomes subconscious they will continue to do it well beyond basic training and instill it into the troops under their command as well. The fact that most commanders let their troops slack on long interplanetary missions is something that he considers one of the biggest killers of Soldiers in the Kepler Empire.

The first days of combat are when the battle is the most intense, targets are the most heavily defended and soldiers are the best equipped. If troops have been on transit for a month or more, barely training enough to keep up their skills, what do commanders expect will happen to them? Of course they're going to get slaughtered, you dropped them from the military version of a vacation directly into a hell full of anti mecha firepower and guided missiles.

Not just the Mecha Pilots either, the mechanics, the medics and the infantry as well. Everyone suffers from that same malaise after a long period of little training and no real work.

To some his method might be unorthodox, or considered a social experiment, but General Tennant has been successfully using it for decades now, and it's built him the reputation that he has as a brilliant strategist and peerless commander. With these two intended to be his successors, his work ethic is the most important thing he believes that he can impart to them before they graduate to actual combat.

Compared to his advanced piloting course, the observers noted that the other classes seemed to have it excessively easy. The intensity of his training simply put everything the government approved in their interplanetary education guides to shame.

The Cadets having the most fun were definitely the Mecha Ground Crew students. They learned radio etiquette, proper movement patterns and launch control. All in a virtual reality setting. To the students, it was like getting to handle real Mecha all day, even their book work was studied inside the virtual reality simulation for the most part.

The mechanics had it rough though. The very basics of their specialty were mecha repair theory and diagnosis. How did it break, why did it break, and what broke to cause this effect. They wouldn't get to the actual fixing until later their third year or maybe the fourth. Diagnosis and fine tuning of a Mecha system was life or death for pilots relying on top performance, no gaps in knowledge were allowed in the elite class.

Out of the three main courses theirs was the most knowledge intensive. Ground crew needed discipline. Pilots needed skill. But Mechanics needed insane amounts of knowledge. This caused their dropout rate from elite to regular courses to be the highest of the specialties. Higher even than the piloting course.

For their first half day, General Tennant had a special treat for his students. Targeting practice. Now, he wasn't so kind that he would let them do it in a simulated firing range with a stationary Mecha and stationary targets the way the other Cadets started. No, this was his advanced piloting course, not the sad joke that he viewed the regular elite piloting course as. He was going to introduce targets to hit into the existing avoidance scenario. Only five for today, and he'd see how the Cadets could do without getting shot to fragments or stepping on land mines.

The very first attempt went better than he had expected, with Cadet Max managing to hit three of the targets and complete the course without getting blown to pieces. There was something odd about Cadet Nico's targeting method though. General Tennant was watching, and she never pulled up her targeting array, only designated a firing point and shot on the move, hitting all five targets with ease. He'd never seen anything like it, so he investigated the data logs and found that the targeting array was indeed pulled up from the very start, but she only pulled the basic targeting crosshairs on to her Heads Up Display to process on her own instead of relying on the Mecha to determine appropriate leading distance.

"Cadet Nico, might I ask, how did you hit the targets without using the Mecha's targeting calculations?" He asked once he'd finished reviewing her run.

"I'm pretty good at guessing General, it's like an Innate Skill, but not officially." The petite Cadet responded with a smile.

"You should see her in action in the dorms, even if you dodge, she can still hit you with a paper ball." Max confirms, referring to the normal horseplay in the first year dorms and cafeteria.

"Impressive, but since it works at this level of difficulty I will let you continue. With any luck you may get a targeting related System Function unlocked when you hit a hundred total bonus points as your first additional function."

Max thinks about his own talents, what might the system unlock for him? He hopes it isn't some pointless buff to his already imbalanced Strength stat. The System is known to provide you with benefits to what you're skilled at, not what you're lacking in, so that is a distinct possibility that Max is trying to avoid happening to him. But he's not sure that he has another skill that's significant enough to get noticed and pull the Nanobots AI away from continually increasing his strength.

Without any frame of reference, isolated as he is with only Nico and General Tennant, Max really has no idea how far his piloting skills have progressed beyond the average, or how incredible the observers found it that he was able to nearly keep up with the dexterity and speed specialized Cadet Nico in the avoidance drills.

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