novelraw Chapter 44
Chapter 44
Chapter 44
“Squad 2, move up.”
At Jin Crow’s gaze, the cadets of Squad 2 looked at one another once each, then opened their mouths.
“Hoo, what can we do. If they tell us to do it, we have to.”
“Why the sigh? It sounds like it’ll be fun.”
The banter-like exchange between Famille and Dokgo Ran brushed past his ears.
“At the end of the day, it’s just a beast, isn’t it?”
“……It doesn’t seem like an opponent we can take lightly.”
Following that, as if they had already exchanged words beforehand, Hino Kanae and Beatus each took out their special-issue weapons, a katana and a handgun.
As could be felt, there wasn’t a single cadet who sensed any strangeness in this situation.
Making a training dummy out of a Creature was, in itself, a deranged idea, but if it could be realized, everyone acknowledged that there was no better teaching aid than this.
“…….”
However, at the very least, Baek Hwi-young could not accept it so easily.
That was only natural.
His gaze, without any need for further thought, was fixed on Jin Crow, the one who had created this situation.
But even that did not last long.
“What are you doing, Baek Hwi-an!”
“I told you, it’s Baek Hwi-young.”
At Dokgo Ran’s words, as always, Famille looked at her with exasperated eyes.
Even so, perhaps she felt the same inside, as she asked back toward Baek Hwi-young, who was standing outside the sparring arena.
“Aren’t you coming too? What are you doing?”
“……Just thinking for a moment.”
Only then did he blink his vacant eyes, and forcibly moving his stiffened body, he stepped into the sparring arena.
He withdrew the gaze that had been about to head toward Jin Crow.
Instead, he stared at the Creature that had been reshaped once more into a training dummy.
-Kraaaaaaah!
The roar it let out was exceedingly realistic.
The glare of purple and red mingled together flashed as if it intended to kill every living human on the spot, and though the inside had been reassembled through various forms of bioengineering, the exposed flesh on the outside was endlessly threatening.
At least in the eyes of the other cadets, the Creature before them was a monster reproduced to near perfection.
However, it looked different to Baek Hwi-young.
Standing in the sparring arena behind his teammates, he silently gazed at the Creature before him, then soon thought,
‘……It’s far cruder than the one in my memories. Is that only natural.’
Across the lives he had repeated thus far, he could not even begin to estimate how many thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of millions of those monsters he had killed.
Because of that, he knew.
No matter how well it was imitated on the surface, it was nothing more than a low-grade product that barely reached the level of a prototype.
Of course, that was something that applied only to Baek Hwi-young.
“Definitely, standing in front of it feels different from the simulation.”
“That’s true.”
At Dokgo Ran’s words, spoken with a fair bit of confidence as she stepped into the sparring arena, Hino Kanae nodded.
And it wasn’t much different for Famille, who was silently watching while clenching and unclenching her fists, or for Beatus, who was gripping the handguns in both hands tightly.
A massive body close to three meters tall.
Eyes brimming with killing intent, clearly set on tearing you in half at any moment.
It was closer to a monster than something you could even call a beast.
Perhaps because of that.
Standing in the sparring arena, they began rapidly discussing strategy while gripping their weapons tightly, without anyone needing to prompt it.
“First, let’s dodge.”
“If we rush in, we’ll get hit instead. First, create distance and figure out its attacks, then…….”
“We need to respond as defensively as possible.”
“For now, maybe try severing the joints…….”
However, their words failed to reach one another and instead became tangled together in midair.
In a way, that might have been only natural.
Generals who would later each earn their own epithets.
Put another way, it meant that within Squad 2 alone, a total of five leaderships were gathered together.
“I don’t know!”
The one who ended the argument first was none other than Dokgo Ran.
Before the other cadets could even finish preparing, she kicked off the ground of the sparring arena and leapt upward, and at the same time, the Pawn—its artificial muscles writhing as if it would tear the enemy apart at any moment—burst its glare and slammed its fist straight into the ground.
Kwaaaaaang!
A thick cloud of dust billowed up.
Perhaps it was a blessing in disguise.
Even though they had not prepared in time, its attack was blunt and heavy enough that it could be narrowly avoided.
“W-What the hell……!”
Even so, from the perspective of those who had been attacked in the middle of speaking, it was impossible not to feel irritated.
“Kiyaa-hahat!”
Dokgo Ran’s scatterbrained shriek rang out, and Hino Kanae and Beatus quickly dispersed at the same time, their expressions a mix of awkwardness and bewilderment.
“Hoo.”
Famille, however, as if she had already anticipated Dokgo Ran’s outburst, let out a deep sigh and quietly slipped on her special-issue weapon, shaped like open-finger gloves.
Of course, it wasn’t as though she intended to recklessly charge at the Creature like Dokgo Ran did.
Who would do something that insane?
Famille took a short, deep breath, then murmured to the AI support device mounted in the black gloves shaped like open-finger gloves.
“Activate.”
Wwoong-.
In that moment, a series of blue lights flashed from her equipment, which at a glance had looked like ordinary gloves, and soon her psionic energy flickered at her fingertips.
“Hoo.”
They weren’t the premium equipment from Mer Corporation that she normally used, but mass-produced items she had received upon enrolling at the Central Special Service Academy; aside from being a bit slower in response speed, their reliability was actually better than what she had used before.
“Oh!”
Right after activation, she cast a quick glance at Dokgo Ran, who couldn’t endure even that brief moment and was already rolling around with the Creature.
‘Since she’s buying time, should I consider that a blessing?’
It wasn’t just her.
Beatus, also from the martial line, was disrupting its movements with successive shots, while Hino Kanae struggled on, slicing through the Creature’s hide with her swinging blade.
Still, there was something oddly off.
How should she put it.
It was as if their attacks, which didn’t blend together, were chaotically tangled and instead ended up interfering with one another.
Just as Famille was about to feel a strange sense of dissonance at their 모습.
Swick-.
Baek Hwi-young, who had been silently standing one step behind them, blinked his ash-gray eyes flashing beneath his ash-gray hair, as if to say he had never been standing there blankly.
Then, drawing the spear he had slung over his back, he stepped one pace forward.
“……Ten minutes.”
“Huh?”
At that muttering, so faint it was barely audible, Famille asked back, but Baek Hwi-young had already stepped forward to the front.
Watching his back, Famille couldn’t help but tilt her head.
‘What is it?’
It sounded like something spoken absentmindedly, and it had been so quiet she hadn’t heard it clearly, yet a strange sense of incongruity crept over her.
“Kiyaaah!”
“Damn it! Stop thrashing around so much!”
However, her thoughts were soon cut off by Beatus shouting at Dokgo Ran in an exasperated voice.
“……Sigh.”
In the end, all that came out was a sigh.
Kwaaaang!
With a thunderous boom, the Creature’s thick fist slammed down toward the ground, warping the sparring arena floor as a thin cloud of dust rose.
“…….”
Unlike Squad 1, which had gone down quickly, Squad 2 was holding out quite well.
Perhaps because of that.
Ideale, while unable to dispel the anxious look in her eyes, watched the battle between Squad 2 and the training dummy clad in a Creature’s hide with a gaze filled with considerable interest.
Kwaaaang!
Each time the Creature’s fist buried itself into the ground, the earth shook.
‘Squad 1 lasted three minutes. Squad 2 has just passed three minutes now…….’
At a glance, one might think it disappointing.
In fact, the records in the simulation room for Squad 1’s cadets hadn’t been that bad either.
But precisely because of that, Ideale quickly grasped why Jin Crow had chosen this method, regardless of its brutality or radical nature.
‘Because practice and theory are different.’
No matter how they were evaluated as superhumans capable of deciding the outcome of a battlefield alone, or even cadets classified as elites, raw gems were still just raw gems.
Until a raw gem is polished, it is rough and of limited use.
The scene before her was proof of that.
The cadets discovered as raw gems were floundering, unable to control their own talents.
Of course, she must not be disappointed.
As an educator and a senior who had walked the path ahead, one should not be disappointed upon seeing rough raw gems, but rather confirm how they should be cut and polished.
Turning that mindset over in her thoughts, Ideale closely scanned the cadets of Squad 2 with her distinctive white eyes.
‘Each of them has a strong individuality. That’s why they end up interfering with one another.’
Objectively speaking, every cadet in Squad 2 was operating psionic energy at a level beyond that of an ordinary first-year cadet.
Among them were cadets whose names were familiar, but there were also some unexpected ones.
‘Beatus. And Baek Hwi-young…….’
In particular, those two caught her eye the most.
In Dokgo Ran’s case, compared to when she had picked a fight with Jin Crow earlier by demanding a spar, her riot-like nature seemed somewhat toned down, but she was still rampaging about.
Famille Demezear, at a glance, appeared rational, yet she displayed a coldness where, even knowing that a fellow cadet might fail to respond properly or get hurt if they made a mistake, she would attack without hesitation if it was an effective strike against the Creature.
And Hino Kanae was…… how should she put it.
Compared to the other two, she didn’t make any particularly flashy moves, but she seemed to have a tendency to hesitate excessively while only waiting for opportunities.
‘But Beatus and Baek Hwi-young are different.’
Beatus covered blind spots with calm gunfire and martial arts, while Baek Hwi-young, to the point that it was strange he hadn’t stood out until now, was exceptionally good at choosing the moment to strike and withdraw, targeting the Creature’s openings.
Though it was a half-forced sidelined post, watching the talents of cadets she would one day call juniors was quite an enjoyable thing.
‘That aside…….’
At first, Ideale’s eyes had been busy assessing each cadet’s level, but before long, her gaze shifted not to the cadets, but to the training dummy opposing them.
-Krrrrrrrr!
True to Professor Lillian’s words about attaching a voice full of realism, the resounding sound echoed powerfully.
……She still questioned whether it had really been necessary, though.
Even so, as a training dummy made in merely three weeks, its movements and such could not be called outstanding in many respects, but beyond that, she could see a kind of possibility.
‘What if that could be modified for deployment on the battlefield?’
At a glance, it seemed possible.
There was precedent.
In fact, during the Third Galactic War, armored equipment that had once been produced as training dummies had proven quite helpful against the Empire’s tactical golems.
How many soldiers of the Human Composite State had been saved by that.
‘Of course, using it as-is would be a burden because of the outer hide…… No, rather, it might be fine to use it for deception operations or to lower morale.’
An Empire that was a thoroughly pyramid-structured caste society.
Leaving aside the nobles who commanded knights, it would deliver no small shock to ordinary soldiers made up of commoners.
Of course, that was under the assumption that ‘the Empire side is also being plagued by Creatures.’
“……If possible.”
It was just as Ideale muttered that absentmindedly.
“Um, Headmistress?”
Lillian, who had been reclining on what looked like a common mass-produced chair, had somehow approached behind her along with the chair, and spoke while letting out a long yawn mixed with the hazy smoke of an electronic cigarette.
“Hwaaam, that won’t do.”
“Huh?”
It was a calm and confident voice, as if she had read Ideale’s thoughts.
“Mass-producing those to make tactical weapons or the like is unrealistic. Haam.”
“Why is that?”
In terms of organizational structure, Ideale was a superior to Professor Lillian, but it was a relationship that required mutual respect.
Because of that, she asked back politely.
In truth, the biggest question was how Lillian could speak with such certainty.
“It’s harder to procure materials compared to ordinary training dummies. And…….”
However, the one who answered her question was not Lillian, but Jin Crow, who approached while calmly keeping his eyes on Squad 2’s cadets.
“I’ve heard that it costs about five times the budget compared to making existing training dummies.”
“……Then?”
“Please don’t worry. We’ve reduced the number of training dummies used in lectures for our faction and the opposing faction by exactly half. About twenty-five units should be sufficient even with the old models, don’t you think?”
It was a truly astounding answer.