บท 14: Chapter 14 Puberty Sucks
When Max woke up in the morning nothing fit him. From clothes to shoes to even his bed, he had outgrown them all in the course of a single night. Forget the plan of going down to the commissary in his skivvies, he's definitely going to have to get someone to bring him a new uniform.
He looks over to Nico, who had also broken past the fifty percent margin yesterday, and presumably had the same issues that he did, only to find the small figure still sleeping comfortably in bed. She certainly wasn't as small as she was last night, but Max grew quite a bit in a single night.
Getting up, he found that he could now easily reach the data screen on the wall by the door, and began to scroll through for a way to get new clothes before realizing that he had no idea what his new size was. He didn't even know exactly how tall he was. Fortunately for him there is an easy way to find out your exact size here in the academy, in the form of a Virtual Reality headset.
They might have hacked the ones they were using to adjust their size to be compatible with the cockpit size of the Crusader Class Mecha in the simulators, but the unit could still scan your body and tell you everything from your height and weight to your body mass index and if you needed a haircut to stay within regulations.
So, Max put his set on and booted it up, asking it to run a user scan and report the data but not update any settings in the system at this time. He wasn't sure he'd be done growing at this point, and updating now might mess up their custom settings, making him a giant in the simulators.
According to the headset he had shot up to a whopping 170 cm tall, but still weighed only 39 kilos. He needed to eat to get enough calories into him for the nanobots to finish their work, but he couldn't very well do that naked. So, he went back to the data screen and paged Major Payne, who he knew would be up by this point anyhow.
"This had better be good, Cadet. I'm not your mother that you can just summon at will." She growled, coming into their dorm room with her morning coffee in hand.
"My apologies Major, but both of us went through the fifty percent activation last night, and now neither of us has anything to wear that even remotely fits. I wasn't sure what to do, but going naked to the commissary didn't seem like the greatest of plans." Max explains as the Instructor looks at him in shock.
Not only did both him and Cadet Nico get through the years goal for system gains in under two weeks, but the boy had also undergone one of the more dramatic puberty upgrades, likely due to his strength based Primary Stat. As you mature, the system helps shape your body to the bonuses that you've put into it, so a high strength male would naturally be a large and bulky person, where a dexterity specialized soldier like herself tended to be more on the lean side.
Major Payne produced a tape measure from her pocket and started measuring Cadet Max, getting his arm and leg lengths, as well as his height, chest and waist measurements. The process made Nico chuckle something about his three sizes, but Major Payne did the exact same to her, finding that she was still only 135 cm tall, shorter than average for the amount of maturing that her body had done overnight. The Major's estimation was that they would still need at least two or three days for the process to complete, so they were excused from classes, and an assortment of the regulation black uniform coveralls would be sent to their dorm in the meantime.
She would be checking up on them three times a day, as well as twice daily visits from the doctors to ensure that they weren't having any issues, but if they felt any sort of pain they were to report to the infimary immediately.
That suited them just fine, they could take their time and recover, with a LOT of food, and catch up on their simulator exercises that had been sacrificed these last few days in favor of extra time in the resistance trainer because they were trying for the last few gains to put them over the top.
In the observation room, the news from Instructor Payne had everyone buzzing in excitement. Not just one but two Cadets had come very close to, if not broken the Empire's growth rate records, and they were both at the same academy. That would be a great benefit for their careers, as the speed of a Cadet's progress reflected directly on the efficiency and skill of the Academy training them.
The news spread quickly and quietly to many other places as well, with more than one set of ears being interested in the fate of these Cadets. One in particular decided to use his sway and go see them for himself, volunteering as a course instructor for advanced Mecha Piloting at the Kepler Terminus Military Academy.
Max knew nothing of this though, all he knew was the coveralls arrived in only a few minutes and they could go fill up at the cafeteria. Not only the uniform rules had been suspended for them during this time, the portion size rules had too. During the transition, getting as much energy as possible was more important than maintaining a healthy body weight and blood sugar levels, which the standard diets were designed to do.
The only real problem was that growing hurt. A lot. Every second of breakfast was agony as his body adjusted, and he didn't think that Nico was in any better shape, despite remaining much shorter. The entire day progressed that way, just a steady stream of calories for his body to burn and intense pain that no available painkiller would even begin to nullify.
The doctors came by twice and confirmed that it was absolutely normal with a growth spurt as intense as his had been, but there wasn't much they could do about the pain without temporarily disabling the nanobots, which would cripple his advancement, and possibly his body as well.
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