The first class of the day took Derek to an entirely new part of the academy. Not that he’d explored it that much, not beyond a general having found each of his previous classrooms, which had been pretty much all over, but somehow this latest one was in an entirely new place, through a nondescript door he’d walked past a good half-dozen times before finally realizing it was actually where he had to go, finding an entirely separate staircase, which led underground rather than into one of the higher floors.

  And from there, he headed down, down, and down further.

  … there was an elevator, wasn’t there? An elevator he’d missed?

  Derek sighed. Hopefully.

  But it was too late to head back up and go searching for it now, so continued on, reading the various signs on the walls.

  Apparently, this place was where all the labs had been tucked away.

  As he searched for the specific one he was supposed to be in five minutes from now, Derek also found himself walking past an elevator door. At least he’d know where the entrance up top was once he took it to get back … but at the same time, there’d clearly been an elevator to miss.

  But eventually, he found what he was looking for, though, and entered the small-ish classroom, already filled, with only a single empty chair left.

  And the teacher was already looking at him expectantly.

  Ah, hell …

  Derek hurried to sit down, only then taking the time to actually look at the teacher.

  He was a tall man, with a broad back and a wide grin plastered across his face more suited to a barkeper at the local pub greeting a regular than a teacher, the dissonance further exaggerated by the fact that he was wearing a naval uniform, the regular duty version, with his rank insignia making him a captain … unless Derek was wrong about that, which was a definite possibility.

  “Good afternoon class. I’m Captain Maximillian Amos of the United Earth Navy, and for my many sins, I have been selected to teach you brats about the way things work up there.”

  So Derek had been right, then.

  He suppressed a grin that might be taken the wrong way. The class on space combat seemed like it would be pretty good. And even if it turned out to be bad, it should be entertaining.

  “Uh, captain, by ‘sins’ you mean …” someone with more curiosity than sense began to ask before cutting themselves off.

  But Amos shrugged.

  “The Warspite was built specifically to match my personal [Skill]set, and since she got torn up fighting a [Raid Boss], the pencil pushers decided I was ‘available’ while she’s being fixed up.”

  So not just a naval officer, but an experienced naval officer. Even better.

  “Does that mean you’re a high-Level officer, then?” Derek asked. “[System]-wise, I mean?”

  After all, people only got specialized ships once they had powerful [Skills] worthy of having a vessel designed around them.

  Amos shrugged. “You could say that.”

  Then, he grabbed a marker and started drawing on the whiteboard with it, sketching a rough image of a couple of guns, a wall of something, and some various, er, things attached to the wall.

  It took him about a minute. For the first half, they were all watching him, but pretty quickly, the muttering started, only to cut off in an instant when he turned back to face the room, grin somehow even wider.

  “Today, we’re going to be trying a bit of a practical exercise: I have some gear off Warspite that’s too heavily damaged to be fixed but still has one last gasp in it, a couple of point defense guns and a set of armor and defenses, and once we’re down there, you’ll have until the end of the lesson to put something together that can block the guns.”

  On one hand, that sounded awesome. On the other hand, unless the others were literal geniuses who’d grown up with a wrench in hand, how the hell were they supposed to use wrecked gear at all?

  Ergo …

  “Do we get any help with the electrical stuff?” Derek asked.

  Amos shook his head. “You won’t need it, I’ve got a [Skill] to make it work. The only thing you’ll have to do is arrange the available equipment properly. Now, follow me, everyone!”

  He was already halfway out of the door before he motioned for them to move for the first time, prompting them all to practically jump to their feet.

  Derek snorted inwardly. If it weren’t for the fact that Seoul Academy was careful in who it let teach its classes, he’d have had a hard time believing this was an actual military officer, at least not one who was technically “on duty,” which the current situation should count as.

  And then they found themselves in a massive underground chamber that all but screamed “airplane hangar,” albeit one that looked like a “crash investigation” scene straight from an old police show, with scorched, ripped, and torn chunks of metal scattered all over the floor, a pair of car-sized contraptions that were likely the aforementioned point defense weapons sitting on one end, while a sheet of metal covered almost the entirety of the opposite wall, massive, paralell, gouges that were almost certainly clawmarks running down one side.

  “Holy …” Derek muttered, freezing in place as he took it all in.

  “If you think that’s bad, you should see the other guy,” Amos laughed. “We’d have gotten away without a single casualty too, but a dumbass sailor just had to drop a crate on his foot in the middle of the fight.”

  It sounded like empty bravado, or perhaps a pointless boast, considering the state the ship had clearly wound up in, but the more Derek thought about it, the more impressive it was.

  Something had eviscerated the ship, and the only injury had been an accident entirely disconnected from the actual fight? Either Amos was one of the best captains in the fleet, or the absolute luckiest, bar none.

  “So, here’s how this is going to work,” Amos announced. “You have until ten minutes prior to end of class to take any of the gear available in this room, do whatever you want with it, as long as it keeps the guns from going through the armor.

  “We’ve got two guns here, one particle beam, one laser, I’ll be firing them both until they break for good or a full minute has passed, whichever’s shorter.

  “If you need to move something that’s too heavy for you, ask me, don’t try to lift something crazy and end up hurt out of pride.

  “And, reminder, nothing needs to be hooked up; I can power everything for the duration of this exercise.

  “But once again, this isn’t about rebuilding the hull the way it was; it’s about rebuilding it in a way that will let the armor keep out the laser and particle beam.”

  “Anything?” Derek asked.

  Amos nodded.

  “Fine, I’ll stuff the barrels of the guns with scrap metal.”

  He could have just done that, but that’d have ruined the point of the exercise, so he figured he’d talk about it, earn himself whatever class credit the captain was awarding for solutions, and then let the whole affair proceed as originally planned.

  Amos burst out laughing. “Are you sure you’re not a member of the E-4 mafia who decided to spend his leave screwing with me?”

  “Uh, who?”

  “The non-commissioned officers who are experts in getting shit done, and creatively interpreting orders,” Amos explained. “So, anyway, you solved it. But we’re going to go through with the exercise anyway.”

  Derek turned to head after the others, but then, he realized something.

  “Uh, Captain?” he asked.

  “Shoot,” Amos replied.

  “Aren’t we way too close for this to be a proper test?” Derek asked. “These guns are meant to be used across hundreds or even thousands of kilometers of distance, and we’re …” he glanced back at the guns, “… like maybe two hundred meters away? Or does the atmosphere blunt them that badly?”

  “Actually, this place can be depressurized for tests like that, and I’ll be using the feature,” Amos said, gesturing at the guns. “Thing is, those are point defense weapons, they’re basically peashooters, and what you’re working with is battleship hull armor. Yeah, you’re way closer than you’d ever be in an actual fight, but you’re basically throwing the weakest guns in the navy against the toughest armor. The only reason it’s even a contest is the distance.”

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  Derek nodded and finally joined the other students, who were already arguing.

  “I say we just stick everything to the plate,” one student offered.

  “If that were enough, it wouldn’t be a challenge,” another interjected. “And if we stick too much crap to the outside, the laser’s going to throw it all against the armor as plasma and ruin the mirror.”

  “Do the cooling runes still work?”

  And so on.

  All very basic, despite how technical everything was.

  The navy used three kinds of weapons: railguns and missiles, which weren’t in play here, especially since the best counter to them was just dodging, which wouldn’t work here, and energy weapons.

  Lasers were, well, coherent light that rapidly superheated what they hit until it flashed into plasma and erupted, and they were the reason why navy ships often looked like sparkly Twilight vampires when struck by light.

  Simple mirrors as armor wouldn’t have worked alone; they weren’t perfect and would absorb some of the energy from the impact, quickly starting to melt and losing their reflective properties.

  Also, seeing as mirrors were a foundational part of laser construction and therefore, any improvement to the armor would be accompanied by a comparable improvement to the weapons they were meant to defend against … but that was where magic came in and gave the laws of physics a wedgie.

  It was simple, really. Cooling runes would rapidly disperse any heat the armor wound up absorbing, massively and unnaturally extending the longevity of the armor.

  As for particle beams, they were also quite simple, beams of charged particles accelerated by magnetic fields and hurled against the side of enemy vessels, passing that same energy into the armor and, hopefully, cracking it open.

  They outright ignored the mirrored armor, and should theoretically have been able to tear it apart with ease, opening the way for lasers, but they were also highly vulnerable to the same kinds of magnetic fields that created them, which was why navy ships used electromagnetic field generators to disperse incoming beams … at least until something fried them.

  Derek wasn’t too sure how things actually worked out in actuality, but based on the research he’d done in the past (far too much of which had been watching various tv shows), energy weapon duels tended to start out with neither side truly able to hurt the other, until the defenses started getting worn down, from where things rapidly went down hill until the damaged vessel was in pieces.

  Honestly, part of him feared one of the big requirements for passing this test as intended was everyone else knowing more than he did.

  They were certainly arguing like they knew what they were talking about.

  “Fixing the runes should be easy, right? Just get a picture off the internet and draw them.”

  “And you honestly think they’re going to put complete schematics for military runes online?”

  “Maybe the old ones …”

  “We can’t fucking use the old ones to fix the modern ones, we’d be lucky if they only stop working!”

  That particular argument carried on like that for a while. Derek wasn’t sure for how long, as he tuned it out after about thirty seconds of listening to it, about twenty-nine seconds too long, in hindsight …

  Though the others seemed to have some better ideas.

  “Do we actually need to put the generators under the armor? We know where the guns are aiming because we can see it, we just need to put them somewhere else, that way, the armor’s not in the way and interfering.”

  That was a great idea, but …

  “What if we didn’t attach them to the armor at all?” Derek offered. “If we put them halfway between the armor and the guns, they’d affect the particle beams a lot longer.”

  “We’d still have to deal with the power supp- … actually, no, we don’t, do we? Captain Amos is going to take care of that …”

  ***

  All told, the kids were … well, they were kids. Any actual crew running around the way they were would likely have gotten dishonorably discharged for sheer incompetence after not even a single day, but … once again, these were kids, a bunch of fifteen to eighteen-year-olds going purely off self-study done on their own time and impulse, and for that, that was damn impressive.

  Even if that Thoma kid might need a lesson or two in learning stuff properly, rather than learning for the test.

  Creativity and looking for “alternate win conditions” were important skill for anyone to have, especially for the sort of person who wanted to head out into space … but learning the basics helped in all situations.

  Then again, perhaps he shouldn’t judge it from that perspective either, after all, while he was trying to judge attitudes and general tendencies here, perhaps those might change with more knowledge to go on.

  Either way, it was interesting to see the various approaches. Some were trying to rebuild the original setup, a technically correct answer that would work in most situations but probably not not work at this range, which was less than the width of a battleship, a range at which the defenses had been never meant to be used as the only times two ships would be that close was if they were in adjacent slips in the dock for repairs … or one was about to ram the other.

  Now, that wasn’t to say that putting the defenses back together without access to blueprints or a formal education on the topic wasn’t impressive, but it certainly wasn’t something that would actually solve the issue he’d confronted them with.

  Then there were the meta-gamers who saw the problem, and decided to look at all the potential solutions that would not be usable under normal circumstances before anything else.

  And then you had the people who looked at the solution from an entirely separate point of view, practically banishing “the standard” from their minds before trying to decide on their approach, coming up with some truly wild stuff.

  But either way …

  “Alright, time’s up, everyone out,” Amos announced, clapping his hands; the sudden noise actually startling several students.

  “Just one more se- …”

  “The time is up,” Amos repeated. “Hard deadlines are a part of things like this.”

  He jerked his thumb over his shoulder, towards the door. “Go!”

  They hurried out at that, allowing him the chance to look over what they’d created.

  For the most part, it was all about placing all the electromagnetic field generators along the walls, which would royally screw with the particle beam and practically take it out of contention.

  But the laser would be an issue. Granted, with only the laser hitting the armor, without the charged particle beam chewing up the mirror layer, that slab of hull would immediately gain a great deal of survivability, but would that really be enough?

  Probably not, not at that kind of range. The inverse square law was a bitch like that. Energy weapons were subject to exponential decay, rapidly losing intensity with distance, though at “normal” engagement ranges, they tended to be diffuse to the point where a few hundred kilometers more or less didn’t make much of a difference.

  But that cut both ways; if you got way too close, even the least of shipboard weapons hit like a solar flare, and if this weren’t the most heavily reinforced chamber in the city, rated for WMD testing for when the dean was feeling experimental, he’d never have dared try this.

  It was fun, though, wasn’t it?

  Anyway, the students had basically just created a trash mountain out of the leftovers, piled up in front of the armor slab, to absorb at least the first few lasers. Probably the best way to use that part of the supplies, in all honesty. Sorting trash from treasure — another important skill out there in the black.

  Now that everyone was out, he followed, then used [Temporary Window] to make the wall transparent, used his phone to activate the room’s air pumps to turn it into a vacuum, and finally triggered [Last Hurrah], turning the pile of trash in there into something functional. Somewhat functional.

  To his eyes, lance of energy after lance of energy flashed out, the rapidly cycling point-defense weapons hurling their deadly payload at the target, the particle beam coming apart before it had gone even halfway across the room, the walls, floor, and ceiling sparkling as errant particles were sent careening every which way, one sparking and shutting down as it ate more hits than the rest, bad luck taking its toll.

  The first burst of light lit up the scrap metal shield, the second turned the first layer into a liquid that flowed down into the pile, the third vaporized a large chunk of the top, destroying the “shield” but creating a cloud of gasseous metal that nevertheless managed to absorb some of the energy of the following shots, all of which hammered into the hull plate the kids had meant to protect.

  To the students … all they really saw was a flash of light as the pile of scrap erupted into a flood of glowing metal so hot it flowed like water, followed by the armor set up against the far wall glowing white hot, parts of it having flashed into plasma and sprayed across the room … but there was at least a small layer of metal left between the guns and the wall.

  “You did all right,” he finally decided. “Not perfect, but alright. Now, off you go, I’m sure you have places to be.”

  Amos looked after the students as they headed off to their next class, chatting happily, while he headed into the room with his storage ring to pack up the mess. He’d throw it into the foundry later, when he was back at the naval base.

  ***

  Well, that was spectacular. But what really put a smile on Derek’s face was the [System] window that had popped up when all was said and done.

  He wasn’t going to take either of those [Classes] under almost any conceivable circumstances. But it was still tangible proof of the fact that he was moving in the right direction.

  Basically, it was a meta-[Class], lacking powers of its own but capable of enhancing those of his others. To a degree.

  Furthermore, the whole “making flavor text real” was one of the big, defining features of legendary [Classes], which was what he was hoping to get eventually. Well, they made their own flavor text real, depending on how many of the six he’d eventually get wound up legendary, [Novice Rules Lawyer] might actually be entirely useless.

  But it was still something nice to think about.

  Oh, and taking that as his first [Class] would be epically stupid in general, as he wouldn’t have any [Skills] to boost, outside of his Bloodline.

  Also nice. But it was an engineering [Class]. Granted, he’d need knowledge in that department, but not to the point of grabbing an entire [Class] based around it, never mind his starter one.

  Perhaps he’d get some cool combination of options if he kept at it, or something better that covered all his bases, but ultimately, the only thing to do was to keep working and see what the [System] offered.

  Oh, and he’d finally figured out where the entrance to the elevator was on the surface. That was great too.