Jonathan spent the rest of the day gradually pulling closer and closer to his coveted one-hundred percent pass.

He actually lost a couple of points on his first retry. Jonathan was focused too much on trying to make every shot perfect and ended up flat out missing the fox a few times. The next retry was even worse, and his third attempt to improve on that ninety-two percent score ended when he tripped and fell, leaving him a sitting duck for the murderous spirit beast.

The experience of a furious animal tearing through his mech from the back was, if anything, even less pleasant than having it dig through his mech's chest armor.

He didn't restart right away after that debacle. Instead, Jonathan sat for a moment in the grayed out world and thought about what he'd been doing. Maybe his first pass had been a fluke, but he didn't think so. Jonathan was pretty sure that he'd been performing well below his true abilities on the successive retries. He needed to get his head on straight before he took another stab at it.

He took a deep breath, held it for a moment, then let out a long, slow exhale. He'd gotten too eager. When he'd been taking the movement tests, getting across ninety percent had been a sign that he was almost done. Having his first successful attempt at this test crack that threshold had made him think that he was on the cusp of a perfect score.

He'd forgotten his mantra: slow and steady progress. Jonathan wasn't going to get anywhere by lunging forward and hoping for a lucky run. He needed to build up his skills through careful repetition. Once the foundation was in place, the test scores would improve as a matter of course.

The bottom line was that while scoring a lucky one-hundred would meet his self-appointed task of acing every test, it wouldn't have nearly the same meaning as a perfect score that reflected his true abilities. What he really needed was to be able to reproduce a perfect performance whenever he needed it.

Once Jonathan let go of his eagerness for quick improvement, he saw immediate gains. There was probably some kind of philosophical point to be made there, but Jonathan didn't dwell on it. Instead he focused on the feel of the plasma rifle in his mech's hands.

Even with his high sync rate, there was a slight disconnect between himself and the mech. Jonathan knew he had an advantage, feeling the world through a pair of batting gloves rather than the winter mittens his classmates had to fight through, but even a minor obstacle was still an obstacle. It took careful focus to feel the cool surface of the grip in his metallic hands.

Paying close attention to the rifle helped Jonathan make the minute adjustments necessary to aim his fire at the beast's most vulnerable points. It wasn't without cost—his focus on the rifle led him to slack off just a bit on his dodging. The fox got close enough that his mech flashed temperature warnings in his vision even as he snatched his arm out of the way at the last second.

The near miss gave Jonathan his best chance for a targeted shot, as the fox's line of travel was almost directly away from him. The next time it passed by, he deliberately let the fox pass close by, hoping to replicate the initial success. It worked, letting him score another bullseye. Those two shots alone had done as much damage as he usually saw after five or six hits. Unfortunately, the fox wasn't nearly as tired out as it usually was after charging at him five or six times. It also seemed, unfazed by the damage, rocketing towards him as recklessly as ever.

He tried again to dodge it with as little movement as possible, but fighting a spiritual beast wasn't that simple. At the last second the fox jinked just a little bit to the side, ripping the arm of his mech clean off.

Jonathan tried to switch to his beam saber and fight one-handed, but it was hopeless. He hadn't been any match for the fox in close combat with a mech that was fully operational. With one arm gone he barely managed to put up any resistance before the fox dug its way into his piloting compartment and the world went grey.

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Jonathan let out a frustrated breath. He was sure he was on the right track, but he had a feeling that it would be a difficult path to walk in order to get his 100% passing score. In a way, it was a valuable lesson. Real enemies fighting with their own lives on the line would naturally exert any effort to survive. The virtual world's ability to replicate that sort of desperate fight was what made it such a useful training aid.

Before he could start the test again, a warning beep from the system let him know that he was almost out of training time. Jonathan decided to pack it in for the day. As he walked back to his dorm room, he tried to fix in his mind the feeling of dodging with the minimum possible motion.

He'd been using every available minute of training time since Philip had introduced him to the virtual training pods. That would be changing soon.

Not because the training had gotten any less valuable or less important. No, the problem Jonathan was facing was that school would be starting. As a scholarship student from a third-rate planet, Jonathan would have his hands full just keeping up with everybody else, academically. He'd still invest all the time he could in training, of course, but it couldn't be his only focus.

He'd reaped valuable gains from the intense training he'd done so far. In terms of concrete system results, he was almost halfway through the testing suite. That was, he had completed almost half of the tests perfectly, as far as the system judged things. It was a little unfortunate that such an achievement didn't receive any sort of direct reward, but Jonathan took pride in the achievement nonetheless.

More importantly, the effort that he'd spent grinding his scores up to the 100% threshold had greatly increased his comfort and proficiency in operating a mech. Perhaps a real prodigy who had naturally achieved an 81% sync rate would have done better, but Jonathan knew that his own hard work had resulted in a dramatic improvement in his own abilities. Where before he had been tentative and needed conscious thought just to walk across the room, he had now reached the state where operating the mech was almost the same as moving his own body.

Not just that, but he had gotten familiar with the superhuman aspect of mech operation. It wasn't enough to move the mech like he moved his own body when he needed to jump across a gap measured in multiple body lengths or climb up a skyscraper in moments. The mech was much stronger for its weight than any human being, after all. Also, even the basic mech was equipped with a simple flight module. It had taken a lot of hard work and a few embarrassing failures, but he'd reached the point where he didn't hesitate before tackling any challenge his mech could handle.

He'd also grown reasonably proficient with the standard mech weapons loadout. Jonathan wasn't sure how he would stack up in a real fight, but at least against the training opponents he felt like he was basically using the beam saber and plasma rifle without any major issue.

Considering that each weapon was the size of a human being, he thought he'd done well to become reasonably handy with them in such a short time.

He still had two more weeks before his skill would be measured against his fellow students. In two weeks he'd be required to be part of the virtual world. Even if he ducked out of any duels, other people would still be able to follow him around and judge his abilities for themselves.

Two weeks after that, the challenge system would open up. Jonathan had no doubt that he'd receive a flood of challenges as soon as that happened. First because his fellow students were the sort of high flyers who wouldn't hesitate to challenge an unknown name on top of the standings, and second because Chad hadn't been shy about spreading the rumor that Jonathan was struggling to even qualify to enter the virtual world.

The one bit of good news was that the challenge system was set up with fairness in mind. On the one hand, it meant that Jonathan couldn't skip out on challenges. On the other hand, it meant that he wouldn't have to spend all of his training time every day defending his merit points. As long as he didn't go around accepting challenges from outside of the system, he'd only have to deal with one fight every other day. And, of course, he'd see fewer challenges if he went on a winning streak.

Jonathan was ready to compromise on his goal of perfect completion of every test if he really found himself up against the deadline. After all, it would be hugely embarrassing if he couldn't access the shared virtual world by the time teachers were holding classes in the system. Not to mention the merit points he'd be docked every day for failing to meet the deadline.

He hoped it wouldn't come to that. He had some reason for the hope, too. As each test built on the last, the skills that he had honed to a fine point would carry over from test to test, increasing his score the whole way. It was hard to say for certain, but he thought he had a good chance to finish all of the tests on time.

He just hoped that the students who got into the virtual world ahead of him wouldn't accumulate an untouchable level of experience while he was still working on the entry tests. Unfortunately, he wouldn't really know how he matched up against everybody else until it was time to fight with something on the line.