"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.
Every day the two Cadets returned to their First Year dorms, but every day they felt a little more out of place. They were still the only ones to have reached the fifty point mark two months after the Fall break when their training with General Tennant began, and they had physically matured well beyond the level of their supposed peers.
Not only that, but their speed, stamina and physical skills were well beyond almost anyone they met in the Dorms, even when they went to the main floor mess hall for dinner.
No longer did they feel threatened by the seniors, though they were still a little bigger than Cadet Max, the progression slowed down so much that very few would reach 150 bonus points before leaving the academy for the University.
Feeling that the difference was getting too small to be normal, Max decided to check his System bonuses for the first time in a while. It had been over two months since the thought even occurred to him after all, being so busy with General Tennant's training, and not expecting much.
The notifications still came in now and then, but always when he was at his busiest, so they were easily forgotten and rendered irrelevant compared to mastering the next technique that the General had set for them.
Shooting while on the move was now a standard part of their training, and the targets only got more and more tricky as the simulations went on. The combination of dodging incoming fire and ground obstacles while trying to hit those targets required every bit of mental fortitude he possessed.
Stuffing lunch into his mouth, Max opened the System interface to see how his stats had come along.
[Compatibility Determined] Rank A
[Primary Attribute] STR 2.5x modifier
[STR] 2+60%
[DEX] 2+16%
[SPD] 2+16%
[Innate Talent] Mind Reading
[Additional Functions Locked]
That partially explained the phenomenon to Max, his bonuses had put his strength over 3 points modified, well beyond what the Beta rank and lower senior students could boast of, starting with a base of only one point to modify.
Even if they too had Strength as their Primary Attribute, they couldn't compare to him physically. Max decided that must be what was causing his sense of disorientation around others, the System had pushed him too far from the human norm.
He briefly wondered if Nico felt the same way, or if her modifiers were too low to have caused that level of difference yet. She had just as much of a total modifier as he did, but it was split between Dexterity and Speed, giving her a good balance, but no truly outstanding stat.
The next break was coming up, which for every Academy Cadet meant crunch time, preparing for their end of Semester exams. General Tennant's class was no different, just smaller than usual.
He gave them a deadline of the next break to learn suitable aim for first years and integrate that knowledge with their handling skills. According to the General, the difficulty level that he had just increased was the bare minimum for Special Forces training standards, and if they couldn't keep up with that they'd be falling behind on their accelerated education schedule.
Making that standard was not going to be an easy task for any Cadet. What the Cadets Max and Nico didn't know was that piloting students in the other elite classes first worked on mastering the point firing technique. The method they were taught was to stop and brace their Mecha for accurate fire, then move on to the next target. The regular classes would start learning that in year 4 instead of 3.
Both Max and Nico had major advantages in this area though. Max had mentally scanned and memorized everything he could about shooting theory, targeting and firing on the move from every teacher he met, including the General. Nico, on the other hand, could use the Innate Talent from her System to directly interface with the targeting system and use it more like an extension of her own body.
General Tennant had been quietly astounded by the skill the students showed from the very first day, but locked away those thoughts using one of his system abilities while teaching so that the mind reading Cadet Max wouldn't pick up on it.
That was also why he kept them exclusively with him, one open minded teacher could give away the entire project and let them know just how unusually advanced they were.
Some civilian experience in simulators was nothing new for elite piloting course Cadets, but these two were not normal. They didn't have the mentality of the usual twelve year old Freshmen Cadets even before the System accelerated their maturation, but now they began their training runs showing matched emotionless faces suitable to seasoned combat veterans or hardcore VR gaming professionals.
Inside the simulation their shots are methodical, well planned, but lacking a bit of muscle memory and intuition only constant combat or physical practice could provide. Much better than any of the other Cadets could boast.
Within the week after he added shooting to their training, they had mastered point shooting to graduating Cadet standards and beyond, like they both had decades of experience and just needed to shake off the rust.
Their rapid progression somewhat reminded both the General and the observing instructors of wounded veterans returning to duty. Their actions gave off the impression that the Cadets knew the skills, they just needed to remind their bodies.
That left General Tennant an entire week to plan their final exams for the semester, and he had a particularly good one in mind. So far the Cadets had only shot at training targets, and faced the fire of mounted turrets. But for the exam, General Tennant intended to use a simulated battle with actual Line Mecha for them to fight.
Not only would it give him more insight into their skills, but also their teamwork and ability to function under pressure. In his mind, it was the perfect plan. To the other instructors who had to approve all final exams to prevent students from flunking out due to faulty examinations, it was a tragedy in the making.
How should they even score that? The Instructor who taught a student was not allowed to grade their final exams, to prevent bias from influencing the results, but the General's proposal was so outlandish they weren't even sure how they should grade his students.
These were students in their first year of Mecha Piloting training, but even if they treated them as Year Three students, who would be in their first year on the simulator this was too much. Should they grade it like an exit exam, where the senior students earned their qualifications on the Line Mecha in preparation to move on from the Academy? That's the difficulty level that the General had proposed.
Even worse, if they could pass that level of an exam, wouldn't it mean that the Academy had been too soft and using inefficient methods all this time, turning out Pilots who were far inferior to their true potential?