Jonathan felt steadier on his feet as he navigated the mech through the test for the second time. He managed to walk through the hangar and out the door without a visible stumble. His score went up a bit, reaching eighty-two percent. Again, Jonathan was presented with the option to advance to the next test. Again, he hesitated.

Part of him wanted to speed through and see what else he could do besides just walking in a straight line. After all, the appeal of piloting a mech was in the destruction it could unleash and the danger it could plow through. He didn't need to go to all the trouble of loading up a simulated world if he wanted to practice walking back and forth.

On the other hand, he wasn't doing this for fun. He was using a virtual interface to pilot a warrior mech, but it wasn't a game. This was training, a chance to practice in virtual reality for life and death situations that Jonathan would be facing sooner or later.

Hopefully later.

He could hardly expect to succeed in serious combat if he was only eighty-four percent capable of walking across level ground. Charging forward before he'd mastered the basics had been a good way to lose a few lives when he'd been playing video games. Now that he only had the one life, it behooved him to be a little more sensible.

Newly resolute, Jonathan refused the offer to proceed to the next task and went back to the beginning. With the improvement he'd shown between his first and second try, he figured he could rack up a perfect score after five or six more attempts.

His estimate was pretty close to the mark... if he counted his attempts by the dozen. After the first few tries, improvements came at an agonizing crawl. Grinding out the last few percentage points was especially frustrating, as the system didn't actually provide him with an example of a perfect pass that he could use as a model.

He ended up using a few deliberate failures to practice more extreme movements. It took a few tries, but Jonathan was pretty proud of himself the first time he pulled off a cartwheel. It sounded like he was in the middle of a ten car pileup as the mech's feet crashed into the ground, but he still puffed out his chest as his momentum carried him into a balanced, upright position. The system was equally unimpressed by his amateur gymnastics and his attempt to moonwalk through the test, failing both attempts.

The experience with trickier maneuvers, though, added the last missing jot of confidence to his efforts to walk normally. Finally, after passing through the same hangar more than seventy times, Jonathan was presented with a reward screen reporting a one hundred percent completion rate. There was no reward for full completion, but Jonathan didn't mind. After so many repetitions, the chance to take another test was a reward in itself.

With a grin, he hit the button to advance. There was a brief flicker in his vision, then Jonathan found himself waking up in his training pod. A blinking message overhead informed him that he had reached the four hour limit for training, causing his session to end automatically.

He stared at the message for a moment, then sighed. He wanted to argue, but he knew there was no wiggle room in that particular regulation. It had been put in place for his own good, as hooking your mind up to a virtual trainer for too long had all kinds of nasty side effects. It was just hard to keep that in mind when he'd been cut off right when he was finally about to move on to new content.

He dragged himself out of the pod. After four hours of piloting a virtual mech, it felt strange to be moving his own body by itself. The aches and pains that he'd been expecting after lying motionless for so long never materialized. While the mildly superhuman strength and reflexes he'd gained from cultivation were nice, it was the little everyday conveniences that made the whole effort so worth it.

Jonathan went ahead and did a few stretches in a sort of moving meditation. Cultivation was a matter of accumulating the result of many small efforts over time. It was amazing how much easier it was to stick to an exercise regime when there were actual superpowers to be gained.

Admittedly, staying motivated had been difficult when he'd hit his bottleneck. His experience at the assessment had offered a tantalizing peek at the world beyond his block. Unfortunately, his cultivation efforts immediately following the test had proven just as fruitless as everything he had tried before.

Jonathan was eager to get into a real mech again and see if that was the key to getting past his problem. Until then, he tried to maintain a diligent practice schedule so that he laid a solid foundation for that future day when the wall in front of him finally came tumbling down.

He got through a few repetitions of the simple practice forms before Philip's pod hissed open. He made a mental note to finish up the exercises later that night. Right now, he wanted to hear about Philip's experiences in the virtual trainer.

It looked like Philip was thinking along the same lines, judging by the way he came bounding out of his pod as soon as the lid was up. He had a triumphant look on his face. Jonathan wondered if it had something to do with the extra few minutes he'd spent in the pod after their training time had been exhausted.

"I'm number one in the leaderboard," Philip said, "the closest to gaining access to the full virtual world."

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

"There's a leaderboard?" Jonathan asked. He'd called up the virtual world's menu only the one time, and once he'd realized it wasn't his Divine Piloting System he hadn't been interested in exploring the options.

Philip grinned. "There's a leaderboard for everything here. You need to work harder if you want to keep your top spot. I didn't even see you in the top ten."

His look at Jonathan was filled with challenge and just a bit of disappointment. Jonathan shook his head. He wasn't going to stoop to gaming the system in order to keep the top ranking if he couldn't hold it with his own strength. After all, the most important thing was to come out of the academy with a solid foundation so that he could survive his stint in the military.

Cadets graduating from the academy on Matoug were almost always assigned to simple garrison duty in the area. They might have to fight off the occasional infestation of void beasts, but any serious combat would be left to more highly rated forces. More highly rated forces like all the units filled with graduates of the Royal Academy. Even with the Divine Piloting System helping him out, Jonathan wouldn't be guaranteed to survive if he didn't get as much as he could out of the academy's training.

It would be short sighted to throw himself into competing in every leaderboard the Royal Academy kept track of.

"I just finished the first test," Jonathan admitted. There was no point in lying, not when there were publicly available leaderboards. Besides, it was better to let endure Philip's disappointment now instead of letting him build up major pie in the sky expectations before everything came crashing down.

Philip raised an eyebrow at Jonathan's admission, though he still tried to put a good face on things. He clapped Jonathan on the shoulder. "If you stick at it, you'll catch up. An eighty-one percent sync rate is no fluke."

Jonathan wondered about that. The Royal Academy put a lot of stock in that initial testing number, but he suspected they would have been less impressed if they knew he had received an artificial boost. If his sync rate was supposed to reflect some innate talent, he certainly hadn't felt anything remarkable in the virtual training arena. Perhaps there was some advantage that wouldn't show itself until the next time he piloted a mech in the real world, but in that case Jonathan's lead in merit points would be long gone by the time it kicked in.

Either way, Jonathan intended to work hard and accumulate progress in a slow and steady fashion. He'd build up a solid foundation through the virtual trainer, pay careful attention to what the teachers of the Royal Academy had to say, and not waste any time trying to game the leaderboard. He'd be sad to see the gold on his uniform taken away, but he wouldn't mind having the target shifted off of his back.

Also, no matter where he ranked on the leaderboard, he'd be attending the same classes and doing the same virtual training. The cultivation resources the school provided wouldn't be as generous if he fell to the middle of the pack, but Jonathan had been stuck at a bottleneck in his cultivation for years. The kind of exotic good needed to help him break through wouldn't be part of a monthly stipend. He'd have to find some way to buy it on his own no matter what his class rank. All in all, there wasn't much need to keep his place atop the incoming class other than personal pride.

Jonathan had his pride. He liked showing off as much as the next guy. Compared to that, though, he liked being alive even more. If the ticket to a long and peaceful life was to keep a low profile, he didn't mind keeping his head down.

Rather than press the matter, Philip led the way to the cafeteria. Lying down in the virtual trainer didn't demand a lot of physical exertion, but the device was more than just a computer. It connected with the user's mind and spirit, which meant that running the thing taxed their bodies and burned plenty of calories. Jonathan certainly felt his stomach telling him that he needed to refuel.

As they walked, Philip regaled Jonathan with tales of his own virtual prowess. Jonathan listened attentively, both out of simple courtesy and because he wanted to know what sort of tests were waiting for him in the future. From the sound of things, he could expect to see another five rounds of movement tests, followed by five combat tests. The tests culminated with a set of tests combining both movement and combat, although Philip had been in the middle of his first run through the first such test when their training time had ended.

Philip wasn't shy about sharing his test scores, which revealed an interesting trend. His initial result on the first movement test had been even worse than Jonathan's, as he'd had to actually catch himself with his mech's hands to keep from falling completely prone. As Philip had worked through the movement tests his scores had improved due to his increased familiarity with the mech, then started to drop as the tests grew more difficult. The last test had seen him take multiple retries before he passed. A similar pattern had held true for the combat tests.

Maybe Jonathan hadn't cost himself too much time after all. If the time he spent polishing off his movement skills on the first test saved him time on the later tests, he might even claim a spot on the leaderboard in a few days. Jonathan kept that notion to himself, not wanting to make any promises that he wasn't sure he'd be able to keep.

Philip didn't prod Jonathan for the details of his own experience. Naturally, nothing about the first test would be of interest to somebody who was working his way through the eleventh. Besides that, while Philip was a single-minded training maniac, he did possess at least a little bit of tact. He wasn't going to force Jonathan to recount the details of four hours of failure.

The meal provided at the cafeteria was, as always, reasonably tasty and high in calories.

Philip was uncharacteristically quiet as they ate. Jonathan didn't pay him much mind. The virtual training environment was intense. Even now, Jonathan still felt a little awkward not to be walking around in a two story war machine.

He was also starving. He hadn't been moving around much while he was in the virtual training pod, but his brain had been put through the wringer. An experience like that burned almost as many calories as a more traditional workout. As such, Jonathan didn't have much on his mind besides getting food from the tray to his stomach as efficiently as possible.

Their companionable silence was broken by the rattle of a lunch tray landing on the table. Jonathan looked up to find that they had an uninvited visitor. A fellow student stood in front of him, glaring straight at him with a challenge in his eyes. Jonathan set down his fork and raised an eyebrow.