Like I explained before, when it came to military hardware, the army didn’t want highly specialized machinery that only particularly gifted pilots could use, but versatility. A mech that even the average soldier could operate.
Of course, just being able to use a mech—meaning being compatible with the magicite core—was already a big hurdle, so it wasn’t like natural aptitude didn’t come into it at all. That was closer to a minimum requirement, though. The most important point was that there was more than one person in the world who could use it.
Long story short, the hybrid unit I had been using, after going through extraordinary changes from a single battle, had been deemed unfit for mass production.
If that growth had happened gradually over several battles, the engineers probably could have studied the process and adapted it—but that wasn’t what had happened. It had gone through a huge growth spurt all at once. Some even called it evolution.
So yeah, it was hard to argue with the assessment that it didn’t make a good model for mass production.
Still, even if they couldn’t mass-produce it, the fact remained that this one mech, which had taken down a swarm of monsters including four large-class monsters, had now powered up even more. Of course they would want to put its current performance to the test.
Which was why, under normal circumstances, I would have been shipped right back onto the front lines. This time, however, Mogami had stepped in and put a stop to it.
Well, I had lost my temper pretty badly last time, and even Mogami didn’t want to send an untested mech into battle before the maintenance crew knew how to keep it running. On top of that, it wasn’t even clear if the unit had finished growing.
When Mogami, who was both the developer and sponsor, said, “Let’s wait and watch it a little longer,” it wasn’t like the military could push back.
Instead, Mogami’s team gave them a simulator program modeled after my hybrid unit. It had all the pregrowth data intact, and it even included simulated versions of the attacks from the large and mid-sized monsters I’d seen up close.
That last part was especially popular among the other students. Apparently, even the ones using standard or beast-type units were begging to have the new data added to their simulators.
I completely understood. If you were heading to the battlefield next year, of course you would be desperate to get the latest combat data.
I left all that up to Mogami, so I don’t know the details. But from what I heard, there was even a waitlist for more copies of it.
I’d already given the data to Isotani, by the way.
She had paid me half a million yen, so it was hard to say no.
It was an interesting contrast watching Isotani grinning from ear to ear about having gotten the newest data first while Rank Nine positively fumed because he couldn’t get his hands on it.
Because of all this, I finally had a chance to attend school like a normal student, checking in on the steadily updating data for my unit and casually hunting down monsters in the simulator.
Training, classes, breaks. Training, classes, breaks. The same routine, over and over.
Sure, they stuck diving weights on me during training, and once the simulator sessions were over, I was crushed under the physical strain of storing the unit. But unlike real combat, nothing here was actually dangerous.
Yeah. This is the school life I wanted.
However, I was apparently the only one enjoying that peaceful routine enough to hope that it lasted…