Holy crap, that's an update and a half. In my experience updates usually go ~2-3k words; 28k is like 10-15 updates all at once.
Second re-read, thoughts/typos as I go:
[X] Pancakes with maple syrup.
"Pancakes."
"Sorry, what's that?" asks Syifa.
...You know, I have completely forgotten what the pancakes vote was for.
Other sources have corroboratedcorraborated the story by revealing there existed doubts amongst the highest ranking officers of either Denver or Cincinnati Major Breaches reinforcing each other.
Typo.
If only it was so happily convenient.
-Comment by user "Zheng LingYu" (Verified WAN Account, United Nations Armed Forces, Air Force Air Commodore, Valkyrie Ace Rank 5) on news article "The foundations of the grand victory, the Alaskan Offensive" hosted on the Wider Area Network website 'TheFive.news'
wtfffffffffff why are you rank 5?how did you fall out of the trinity?!
-Comment by anonymous user, highest rated response to above comment
You know I have to wonder why attaching valk. ranks to comment sections sections for an article is even a thing ('top rated' ehy, is the internet entirely reddit now?)
Significant numbers of higher compatibility subjects appear to unconsciously lose patience when talking with unaugmented humans.
Should be 'subconsciously'. I know talking to people can be super awful but come on now.
Only in the higher ranking Aces, those within the top six hundred as ranked by combat ability score, do the issues become common and severe enough to manifest as Valkyrie Detachment Syndrome.
...Uh oh.
… Thus, in the stress of war, it is likely that many young, high ranking Aces analysed themselves in the face of death, devastation and deprivation of a like that humanity has not faced since Impact. They judge their own reactions, their gut feelings and passions, against the actions necessary for improvement, for success, for victory.
They have found themselves… wanting.
Valkyrie optimisation magic trick as applied to their own minds and feelings. Ouch. Makes sense but... yeah, ouch. One wonders if the Antagonists aren't the end result of this kind of process; so heavily optimised they turn outright robotic.
-"We are holding a snake to our chest to ward off a wolf."
- [Redacted]
Sounds like the non-Valk higher-ups are expecting...
difficulties post-war.
They might not even be wrong, given how far the gap between valk and non-valk is. In war, they're a vital military asset. In peace, they're pretty much an untouchably higher, post-human class of society.
You glance around in interest. Your group materialised on a platform formed from a single monolith of marble, rising a few meters from the surrounding flat plains of grassland.
Missed an 'a' there.
This… is like the very first simulator you participated in, except taken even further. Rather than the attacks of the fake Antagonists being simulated, your own attacks and even your propellant is being absorbed by the simulator and then simulated as soon as they leave your Impeller.
It took a moment to realise this meant the simulators treat Anna's exhaust fumes as a secondary weapon. Which is fair because I think we've seen her use it as such in previous updates. Though it would appear the sim is also doing it for all the other valk exhausts so it's probably nothing unique.
"Testing the simulator Anna? I imagine maximum safe setting must feel pretty strange to you," Syifa comms to you, having hovered to a stop, waiting for you.
You know, the way this is worded makes it pretty clear Syifa knows Anna hasn't been in sims much. Is this just Anna being obvious or is it typical of young Aces?
"Do… you like it this way?" you ask distractedly, concentrating mostly on referencing various recordings to gain a better understanding of how to commentate, or rather, cast, as it was apparently more commonly referred to in relation to sporting events.
In hindsight it's pretty obvious here that Anna's commentary is less Anna and more Anna running HowToSportsCommentate.exe that she's composed out of other sports commentators.
"No- yes- no," your mouth briefly seizes as you can't make up your mind, mental threads clashing against one another in disagreement. Again, a feeling of deep emptiness carves away at you for a moment.
Again with hindsight and the VDS thing; Anna's brain may be behaving like a multi-threading computer more literally than you'd think.
"Oh she's working on something in one of the smaller simulators. Told me off when I tried asking what she was up to," Koujirou snorted with a roll of his eyes, "She'll probably show up just in time for her matches."
Couple this with Setsuna's comments on Koujirou
also practising in secret and this gets kind of hilarious with how in synch they are. Setsuna practically out-siblings his own sibling.
(granted this is in part because Yukari acts more like the pair's mum, but still)
The terrain for each round will be in the following order," the Instructor continued as all of a sudden, the surrounding space flares and scenery appeared.
Inconsistent tense.
Wind and snowflakes whipped sharply at the cadets in the seats and a brief curtain of gold obscured the view for members of Flight One, before Sandra used her Impeller to bring her hair under control.
Ahaha, the long-haired life. I can commiserate.
On the other end of the scale, the oceans surrounding the islands present no cover or concealment, bar one.
(Unless the 'one' is the mountain? The sentence doesn't feel set up to be a play on words though)
With that warning, the scene changed again, all the water around the cadets evaporateding without a trace.
Might be a nitpick, but inner grammar gut says this should be an '-ing' verb since its happening
with the scene change rather than after it.
The environment for the next round was completely different. Concrete and steel reached upwards. Grass drew green lines in black cracked pavement. Rows upon rows of apartment buildings stretched away from the skyscrapers in the city center, empty window sockets staring outwards. Skeletons of rusted steel lined the roads, shadowed by trees and shrubs. The sun sat low in the sky, burning a tired, rusty red. On the western horizon, an enormous wall of dull orange and sullen brown loomed, advancing over the dried shells of ships marooned on the dry lake the city bordered.
I realise this probably isn't sandstormed!Dubai but I'm still picturing it as sandstormed!Dubai. #doyoufeellikeaheroyet
New towers and buildings arose from the surroundings, concrete, glass and steel.
If the previous wasn't nitpicky this definitely is, but this is one of those cases where you should really be using a semi-colon. There's been a few others, but this is the one where it's easiest and clearest to explain; it's a sentence in two parts, the 'new towers and buildings' rising, and then a list of adjectives describing said towers tied on to the end of the sentence. It reads better as:
"New towers and buildings arose from the surroundings; concrete, glass and steel."
Here the 'concrete, glass and steel' is essentially a list of stuff describing the rising towers, but if you have "-the surroundings, concrete, glass and steel" you have the comma being used to separate the sentence, then being used to delineate items in the list, creating an ambiguity the semi-colon can fix. (I don't actually know any of the proper linguistic grammar terms for this, I'm sorry)
Since commas can be used to both separate elements of a list
and to split clauses within a sentence, it can get ambiguous at times if they wind up doing both right next to each other within a single sentence, forcing you to re-read to understand what it's saying. Semi-colons are - to my knowledge - only ever used to separate clauses, so they can be useful to clear these things up.
"She's throwing them right into the deep end," chuckled Shuri with a hint of disbelief. She paused for a tic and glanced at the rest of the flight, then continuing without any contrition in her voice, "Oh sorry, I mean, you're all being thrown into the deep end. You're probably going to eat penalties for damage to the residential tower, especially habitats. Try to avoid dumb fire."
"She's asking for first years cadets to not miss each other in high impact combat?" Yukari looked at the commentator's box uncertainly.
"It appears so. It will be good practice in fire control... and weapon efficiency," Sandra said hesitantly.
I actually got confused for a moment and thought Anna and Meyer been responsible for the arena design, but on second read they aren't? Or at least, Anna isn't. Shuri speaking like this was Anna's choice to fling them into an Arco and a hive as the final rounds is a little amusing in retrospect.
I mean, I don't think I remiss in thinking the 'she' is Anna? If Shuri was talking about the judges, it would be 'they'.
High level Antagonists were built differently from their mundane cousins, space twisted and materials simply rose from the floor, moulded by esoteric forces to spontaneously form a titanic Antagonist Scarab, assault platform that thundered off seconds after, seemingly fully operational
"I doubt you need the hint, but stay silent and let the… environment take care of your opponent if it comes down to the fifth round," Shuri said.
"Wait, we just let Antagonists shoot them down?" asked Koujirou, snapping out of his stupor with a frown directed at Shuri, "That's not right."
"They're not dying," Shuri responded dryly, her brief burst of humour evaporating, "They're just uh, losing the match."
Who wants to bet the first time a matchup reaches the fifth round, we get a 'who can kill the most Antagonists before getting shot out the air' competition instead. I can completely see Koji and Setsuna doing this
if when they get there.
"Use voice to text Koujirou," advised Sandra with a wince as Koujirou fumbles over his holographic keyboard, then spoke audibly to her datapad, "Input option; voice. Restriction to eighty percent similarity."
Sandra's neat paragraph was spotted through with the word 'shoe', apparently her own data pad picking up Koujirou voice as she tried to subvocally dictate.
"Unparsable command. Unexpected occurrence of exclamation; shoo," Sandra's datapad chirped back at her.
"Sorry Sandra."
Whilst Setsu/Koji's combined inability to swear is amusing, the real comedic takeaway is that Koji's (Japanese male) and Sandra's (British female) voices are
over 80% alike.
While firing a weapon or missile inside a simulator using maximum safety settings did not actually destroy it, as the simulator would simply absorb the actual physical object and only maintain its simulacrum, the fact remained that the expended rounds were removed from the storage of the Valkyrie and have to be replenished.
This combined with the bit about XHEAP being so expensive and short-lived we get later actually raises a few odd questions. Do they actually fire the incredibly-expensive-and-short-lived-outside-of-valk-storage missiles, causing them to start degrading? This... seems incredibly wasteful; xheap launches should be
completely simulated, surely?
"Good luck," Millia said with a tentative smile.
"Same to you," Emily replied, her face still a mask of determination.
The two disappeared and the battle started.
Gotta admit, if you're worried about the war between update lengths and update delays, the Millia vs Emily scenes are the ones I would cut. Covering over them quickly either from commentator or stands perspective (like what happens with Setsuna's curbstomp rounds) would have kept them in the update, but a full play-by-play for all four rounds? If this were an anime, that would be the filler episode. Even if its intended as a character intro for them it could still be cut way down.
The tactics they use are interesting don't get me wrong; they're well-written fight scenes. But they have no weight, because we have no idea who these characters are. A more compressed coverage would put them more along the lines of Syifa, where we have just enough to go 'hey, they sound interesting' without suddenly bumping them into centre-stage for a good chunk of the update.
"Why do you two always do this?" complained Yukari.
"Cause then even if one of us is wrong, we'd still be right," the two chorused in unison, then grinned at each other and high fived.
...Though I do love this bit.
They are the best dorks.
"Both are heading in a beeline towards the summit of mountain ranges, trying to get ranging on each other. Now we know that Millia and Emily are practically completely mirrored in their frames and capabilities. Along with their weapon parity, their acceleration and sensor capabilities are very similar."
"They are both also aware of this, this match will be a technical one relying on tactics more than component power."
As an aside, kinda wish you specified which commentator was speaking in the italicised segments. I
think it's Meyer-then-Anna, but it could do with clarifying; you only have to do it in the first instance and then the reader can infer the pattern. You don't even need 'Anna said' / 'Meyer said' if you want to keep to the 'background italics' style, just have one reference the other by name as you do in one of the later segments.
"It will help you both develop multitasking and parallel thinking abilities," Sandra continued, still completely serious.
Sensible, but also shows the breeding grounds for VDC to develop; after a certain point focusing all your attention on, say, a single conversation is more like putting all your multiple 'threads' on a single task. No wonder the Aces get bored with it.
...Guh, I was going to do a full commentary pass on this but it's catching up on midnight here so I'm gonna have to cut it. I'll comment on the second half tomorrow. In the mean time:
Woohoo, it lives!
