You don't want to kill anyone else.
The Academy has a total of forty four Instructors rostered, a pair of Instructors for every first year squadron, a single Instructor for every second year squadron, an Instructor for every two third year squadrons, and two in reserve. You eye those last two with no small amount of surprise. What possible situation in an Academy entailed two Ace rank Valkyries to standby on reserve, especially when there's already another forty already present?
*snort*
This time, the Instructor does give you a sideways glance, before quietly muttering under her breath as she digs deeper into the jar, "No cookies then, maybe just some wafer crackers... "
Uh- you- that was- You're not fat, you're just tall... and dense.
Lol.
You can't let someone into your Impeller. Or even enter another Impeller while leaving it intact. While your Impeller is intact. It's too dangerous. You must not, you must never. Never again.
More therapy indicated.
An explosion of grumbled swearing over open comms from Instructor Mulyani rocks you back on your heels, making you forget your worry for a moment.Who said that only pride would be hurt here? Your poor ears.
Lol.
"Valkyrie Sanchez, I am here on behalf of the crafty- uh, crafting class to deliver an invitation," the president of the Crafting elective class intones, her solemn atmosphere damaged by the slight slip.
Freudian slip, eh?
Record of generator activity, publicly available requisition requests for resupply of armaments for the Santiago police department and missing inventory reports from the UN Air Force suggest differently.
Okay, someone attempted to blow up the facility there.
Possibly using appropriated UN armaments.
You were so tired, that by the end, when the other focus of the class, the cryptology group, asked you for any experience for Antagonists communication, you dumped them your records of the few interceptions you managed inside the Saskatoon breach and fled while the class descended into pandemonium.
New cult get.
Her cover is going to be growing pretty thin by now.
-You don't listen, so this… this is a message for you to see!-
I'm guessing this was one of the dissidents back in her old village, killing people under her protection.
Your presence speeds up the startup sequence substantially, firstly as your triad of modified generators at their emergency maximum output allowed you to push nearly twenty terawatts of power by yourself, more than two hundred times the specified power of the standard fusion generator included in most Valkyrie frames.
Jesus fucking wut.
Secondly, your Impeller is powerful enough that you can simply stand inside the fusion chamber and adjust the plasma disk directly with your Impeller and Heavy Particle Projectors.
Christ Jesus fucking
wut.
"It worked," you practically gush, waving your arms about as you try to find words, "I…"
That was fun.
🤗
You're holding one end of a massive support strut in place, the other end being manipulated by a flight of Valkyries, as the alert comes in.
Continuing to hold the thousands of tons of metal in place, you fly closer to Sandra and watch the updates.
Casual fucking bullshit of this sort is so commonplace, you dont realize it's there until you reread the scene and do a doubletake.
Ana is holding up one end of several thousand tons, something that requires a flight of Valkyries to handle the other end.
And she multitasks by snooping over Sandra's shoulder.
I wonder how much of her base ability is improved by this.
Thirty seconds. You're going to hold the all of Sydney in your Impeller soon.
That's Valk arcology range.
Anna is fucking terrifying.
An hour later, and despite practically combing through the structure, but find neither a culprit, nor evidence leading to one.
Yeah, this is unlikely to be a Type.
Human sabotage.
Weee!
A massive delta wing painted in UN blue with eight engines, Sandra's jet is even larger than strategic bombers, and far larger than the slim and sleek courier jets or angular military transport jets. The only larger purely mechanical flying vehicles you know of are the UN Air Carriers.
Probably a holdover from the days of plenty.
Her limp is getting more pronounced. You're sure that some of those around her have now begun to notice the slight hitch in her movements and subtly uneven pitch in her steps now, the Instructors at least, if no one else. You analyse and confirm your suspicion. Shuri appears to have good and bad days, and today is a particularly bad day, but her physical capability is dropping.
Oh dear.
The Instructors have seen it. Dunno if Sandra has noticed, but we probably should have Ana ask.
Several cadets chat with her as they fly back from their lessons, most enthusiastically the cadet Ace O'Connor that you met on the first day here, gesticulating wildly with her arms and Impeller as she talks about the practical lesson
You notice a few of the cadets around O'Connor pat her and shake their heads.
Man, Yukari is getting hit on and not even noticing it.
After a moment of thinking about it, you decide that this class seems rather sensible. If they're discouraging taking excessive risk, this is probably a staid and collected class.
Surely.
Hahahaha.
Ana, you innocent soul.
Ah, so that's probably Anna's very brief stint in Taylor Hebert school of community management that was mentioned all the way back at page 10. Well, either that or maybe a consequence of that.
Probably a consequence thereof.
Anomalous activity at Sydney. How much do we want to bet this is Antagonist-reconstructed Caitlin? The anomaly was apparently creating and manipulating biological materials.
Unlikely.
I thought so at first, but they should have had no way of predicting the UN's industrial schedule, and no real reason to be subtle.
Instead of the micromachine grown monster, they could have hacked the entire arcology network, or seeded proper grey goo, or actual high yield warheads (>50 MT equivalents) as traps. Killed a couple Valks, wrecked the project further.
If this is Caitlin, she's working for the local version of SEELE.
Not the Antagonists.
The sabotage could also just be generic anti-UN sabotage. After all the UN is up to its eyebrows in shady stuff that might foster some anger.
Nope.
The skill required to pull this off under the nose of Valkyrie surveillance says not. And the timing suggests that the perp had access to high-level internal UN plans, since the plan to fix Sydney was actually brought forward at short notice, which means the sabotage was too.
We're either dealing with a very subtle and well-informed Antagonist infiltrator, or human sabotage.
