Chapter 41: Chapter 39: A Battle of Fingers!

Ceres stood in shock, while Gwen too was equally stunned. She too was an avid player of Glucose Rush. It was a popular easy training game for exosuit repairers to test their hand-eye coordination and precision, as well as speed!

Almost everyone who wanted to train their hands or test their skills would have played it at least once. Having seen Leonard’s test result, both of them was a hundred percent sure that he was rank number one!

The two trainees left behind in the room looked at each other, seemingly both knowing what the other was thinking.

They immediately rushed off to their personal rooms to grab their multis, and went to the medbay, waiting outside the door for their god to reawaken. Today was the day they could finally measure themselves against the top player in person!

After an hour, Senia walked out of the room, confused as to why the two trainees were looking beyond her into the door like rabid fans of a famous celebrity. Noticing their multis with the Glucose Rush game loaded up, a smile grew on Senia’s face.

“Now you guys finally understand, but this isn’t the time to train or play yet. You can do it on your own free time, but right now we have to do a bit more testing. Consider the next few tests as the true gauge of whether you will do well for the competition!”

The two excited faces calmed down, but their hearts were still simmering with a burning sense of competition!

Back at the training room, Leonard finally walked in, striding with his usual gait as though he hadn’t been ridiculously knocked out previously. Ceres and Gwen stood at attention and bowed as he walked past them to his training chamber.

“Welcome back, Elder” Ceres said as he maintained his bow, making Senia smile slightly while Leonard was absolutely confused. When was he this revered? Even Gwen was bowing to him!

“Was I knocked out for a year and am somehow promoted? What happened to you guys?” Leonard asked.

“We welcome your return, SpaceSwordImpulseTorpedo888” Gwen said as she too kept her bow, while Leonard’s face started to grow red from the mention of that username from when he was thirteen, slightly embarrassed.

“I don’t know how you guys found out, but I asked the game master to change it multiple times, it doesn’t represent who I am now!” Storming off, Leonard refused to talk to them while Gwen giggled, knowing that they caught him!

Ceres was surprised Gwen had essentially done a 180 degree turn in terms of attitude towards Leonard after she saw Leonard’s test result. Strength really was the main currency here!

The three training chambers opened, prompting the trainees to stop their little act and enter. The training chamber had three boxes of dismantled jumbled up exosuit parts, with no organization done whatsoever.

A workbench was materialized using the hardlight projection, along with basic tools. Despite Ceres having spent an hour in the chamber with physical testing bordering on lethal ranges, he was still amazed when he saw it and took a moment to appreciate it.

 A robotic voice sounded from the intercom again as before. “Assembly test begin, assemble the exosuit design as fast as possible within twelve hours. Upon completion, you may exit the training chamber. Start on timer.”

Ceres cracked his hands and flexed his fingers as a large timer on the wall of the training chamber appeared, counting down ten seconds. He used the extra time to eyeball everything he saw on the top layer of parts, while estimating what type of suit it was.

However, he couldn’t figure out what was the weight category even! He wasn’t allowed to touch the box in those ten seconds too, making it hard for him to even guess the material just based on shape and colour alone!

Realizing that Leonard was probably doing the same test, Ceres felt a tension like never before, not even when he was fighting Chad in the VR qualifiers. He was challenging the rank one Glucose Rush player on Athen!

Ceres wasn’t one to give up easily but as soon as the timer hit zero and the exosuit design schematics opened up in front of him in a holo-image, his jaw dropped. It was a heavy knight exosuit!

He was only experienced in repairing light to middle exosuits for riot groups and for his own practice at the Gladius, and assembling a light exosuit from scratch was pushing his limits already.

A heavy knight exosuit assembled from jumbled parts was impossible to complete in twelve hours!  

Nonetheless, he remembered the purpose of the training camp and boosted his determination, not surrendering to despair and frustration as he looked over the design of the exosuit in multiple holographic windows all around him.

The name of the heavy knight exosuit was the Barelia Defender, a popular flagship exosuit model from another star system’s exosuit company - Barelia Designs, unsurprisingly.

It came with an assembly manual too, but for an assembly to be completed in less than 12 hours, you didn’t need full functionality but to get it into working order.

Hence, reading both the manual and the designs were necessary to strip unnecessary steps as much as possible! If Ceres could get the exosuit to operate under normal conditions, it was already considered a success!

Ceres eyes flickered as he rapidly read the manual and referenced the design at the same time, laying out in his mind his own instruction manual that was a modified version of the provided assembly manual.

He sat on the floor for a good two hours just reading and continuously absorbing as much of the design to memory as possible.

As he finalized his own personal instruction manual, he got up and stretched his limbs, making sure they were warmed up for the upcoming hours of nonstop assembling!

As an exosuit weight category got larger, their parts generally also became more numerous and heavier. Ceres had to dump the three boxes of exosuit parts onto the floor in order to better identify them.

Once he had mentally labelled each of the parts on the floor, he brought the first two hundred components to the table, and started laying out the parts in sequence of the steps in order, with the first section being the closest to the table and the last the furthest.

This took him another one hour as the parts numbered close to two hundred thousand!

Breathing in deep, Ceres focused his brain, trying to recall the peak NEIR level of 1.8 that he experienced in the VR world. While his brain could achieve it, his body as of right now couldn’t respond fast enough, remaining in the low level of 0.85 that he had before his nerval jack installation.

Ceres still tried to push his limits, moving his hands as fast as he can, assembling the parts with haste. Tools and drill bits were used rapidly, while the workbench started to become a mess of tools. He couldn’t afford to spend time organizing the tools, simply keeping an approximate mental note of where the tool was after he used it.

Sweat rolled down his face as his arms were strained due to the constant high exertion. Ceres had to take a short break every five minutes, but the fatigue was slowly building up in his muscles, making the breaks longer and longer! He needed more stamina!

As the hours passed, the exosuit slowly started to take form, with the inner frame being completed. Ceres now had to exert strength to gather all the heavy components together, such as jet thrusters, the power pack, deployable barriers and individual motors for each of the joints.

The heavy exosuit was turning out to be much larger than Ceres, seemingly intended for an adult of 1.9 meters height. With Ceres being relative short at 1.7 meters, he inwardly made the personal choice to stick to lighter weight exosuits no matter how amazing or dominating the heavy knight exosuit was turning out in front of his eyes.

Ceres had a hard time understanding the manual, as some of the modifications that he was making apparently were discouraged against despite the suit being able to function properly.

He didn’t have good in-depth knowledge of how a heavy exosuit user works, only being able to understand things in terms of his own body and preferences.

The best exosuit design, in his opinion, was purely customized to one person! While he had made some repairs for mining suits that fell within this category for the riots, he had hardly done an full assembly like this!

This led to a lot of delays where Ceres self-doubted his shortcut modifications that were meant to save time, as he still didn’t really know what constitute as ‘assembled’. To him, as long as you could throw a punch and run with it, it was good enough!

 He still decided to go through with it, as he believed that it was the only way to potentially beat SpaceSwordImpulseTorpedo888, aka Leonard Athen, the ranked one player! He was sure that the other two participants, even Gwen would be doing the exact same thing as him.

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At the 11^th hour, Ceres finally relaxed as his simplified version of the exosuit was completed! He just now needed to run the processor’s functional test to double check everything.

He was fairly proud of himself having assembled the exosuit in quite a short time frame, considering that he didn’t need to print or manufacture any components together.

It was like ordering modular furniture, the assembly wouldn’t be much longer than the actual manufacturing!

“Running diagnostics, 60% functionality restored. All critical systems functional!” Ceres cheered as the training chamber simultaneously opened its door, allowing Ceres to leave.

Most commercial exosuit designs in the Empire was designed to be rugged, only requiring a basic of 30% functionality to execute basic movement procedures.

A 100% means all redundant and additional systems were available, but 60% was more than enough to work in most situation!

 As he left the training chamber, he saw Leonard sitting quietly watching the replay of Ceres’ assembly on one monitor with the other monitor being Gwen’s current assembly.

Ceres felt a bit depressed at losing to Leonard, as he saw on the large monitor that Leonard only took eight hours to complete it!

Leonard noticed Ceres expression, smiling gently. “Don’t be too discouraged Ceres, your trait of aiming for minimal functionality that barely clears the threshold actually has broaden my horizions! I never actually considered that one way to reduce the time taken would to be to compromise that much functionality! It would be very critical on the battlefield!”

“What do you mean? Didn’t you also do the same?” Ceres was even more horrified now, running to a nearby monitor to read the detailed results of Leonard’s test. 95% functionality!

Ceres’s jaw dropped, not understanding how could someone his age have assembled it even faster than he did! And without skipping a good amount of the redundant systems!

Leonard laughed “I already knew the design by heart, in fact I probably know most of the commercial exosuit designs available in the Empire. I never bothered modifying their instruction manual myself, I just followed it word by word!”

This meant Leonard literally shaved three hours of reading and understanding that Ceres had to spend in order to fully understand the design. The was the sheer advantage Leonard had over him – pure memorization and prior understanding!

But even if Ceres did the same, he wouldn’t be so sure that he could get it up to even 80%! Leonard had him beat in both hand speed and memory.

Gwen finally exited the training chamber after three and a half hours, failing the test by more than two hours and a half.

However, she had achieved 100% functionality! She was distraught at the fact that even Ceres had her beat, because while she was extremely meticulous and achieved full functionality, she didn’t clear the base requirements of assembling it within 12 hours!

The three trainees look at each other, knowing that this training camp was already bound to be extremely rewarding!

They each had their own perspective on how to repair an exosuit, and while none of them would ever submit themselves to each other, they would blatantly steal the best habits of others – molding it into their own!

At this point it was way past their dinner time, and their dinner was literally a lump of gooey brown nutri-paste on a platter, except the nutri-paste was exceptionally bland and specifically modified to maximize nutritional intake.

The trainees gobbled as much as they could, too tired to even speak to each other or even complain about the lack of taste. Senia had disappeared since the start of the test, so they were guided by automated instructions and lights along the hallway to their personal rooms.

In a sense, the three trainees were pretty much the only humans in the entire facility for the most part, supported by a fleet of automatous drones.

Ceres followed the lights, when the thought of having an entire room to himself finally hit his head!

He had hardly slept alone since he joined the orphanage, being stuck literally in a military boot camp with sixty other humans in the same large room of bunk beds. Looking at the pristine prepared bed in his small personal room that feature its own desk and computer,

Ceres finally had a taste of the upper-class, though he soon collapsed onto the bed, completely tired from the extremely eventful day.

Learning about the Athen Family, meeting the rank one player in person and then challenging him for half a day straight, he was starting to like this training camp a lot more! He pulled out his multi and pulled out the video replay of Leonard’s and Gwen’s assembly.

 The three of them were vastly different in terms of their habits when repairing or assembling an exosuit. Gwen was a perfectionist and would willing trade additional time that could be saved for even a 1% increase in functionality.

Her entire life’s viewpoint is to be meticulous and prepared for anything, making her strive for the best results possible which may make her lose focus on other equally important aspects.

She had yet to master proper resource management and trade-offs, never having worked in a real-life scenario where time and materials were scarce, but she was the repairer to go to if you wanted a complete renewal.

Leonard was a down-to-basics repairer, his sole attribute being the enormous memory capacity he had, a walking dictionary on most of the popular exosuit designs in the Loeric Empire.

He had a major flaw of not being able to design an exosuit from complete scratch on his own, always relying on pre-existing designs to get him started.

Modification was almost a no-go for him too, he trusted the original designer's viewpoint, and would only install modifications to a design if it was popular or approved officially by the company! What a rigid mindset!

Ceres was a rugged focus, aiming at achieving the fastest assembly speed with minimal functionality.

In his life experience, things didn’t need to work at full functionality, especially in the thick of the fight! His ‘part-time job’ as a riot exosuit repairman showed that to him very clearly. He was confident in his perspective, and he only wanted to learn the best habits from Leonard and Gwen, not adopt their viewpoint whole-heartedly.

On his inbuilt room terminal, a holographic monitor appeared next to the two videos that he was watching, showing the final test results that compared him to the entire database of the Loeric Empire!

He could finally figure out where he stood in the Loeric Empire! As the rank seven player on Glucose Rush currently and with his well-trained body thanks to Braton’s help, Ceres expected to be near at least maybe the top 30% of participants in the Loeric Empire!

He even had the mysterious ‘power of friendship’!

The screen loaded the data, the loading screen causing Ceres to become anxious. Before he could utter a word of complaint, the terminal suddenly showed the details of his test, along with narration!

“The test result of Ceres, planet Athen, star system Strathon empire-wide, compared against other 20 year olds. You are currently sitting at the top 68% ! Congratulations in beating the lower 31.99999% of the 20 year old population bracket!”

“….”

 

 

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