“Sh-shall we start with an analysis of our opponents?”
“U-urgh.”
“The battlefield is different from the last squad match. This time, it’s a jungle. Come to think of it, Deep, your midterm exam was in a jungle, wasn’t it? How was it?”
“Uuugh.”
“The trees weren’t as d-d-dense as I thought. S-sorry. My pronunciation. Anyway, it was just about wide enough for a Titan to pass between the trees.”
“Grrk.”
“Ah, I watched that footage over and over, too! It’s practically a point of pride for non-noble pilots! In that video, you dodged and blocked every single one of your opponent’s attacks like it was the most natural thing in the world…”
Rob, who had been speaking, suddenly shut his mouth.
Joshua was glaring at Rob, clutching his stomach as he trembled.
Then Joshua turned his head and glared at me.
“You hit me, didn’t you. A lowborn, daring to…”
What was I supposed to say to that?
“Even my father never hit me!”
“I-I don’t have a father.”
“You never learned from your father, so of course you hit people!”
Wow.
I hadn’t expected him to pull the throttle all the way here.
No, now that I thought about it, Joshua was already in full troll mode with nothing left to lose.
It had been the same in Titan Core.
In a game ecosystem where all the users were veterans with nothing to lose anyway, trolls only got temporary suspensions no matter how much abuse they hurled, so they cursed without hesitation.
The problem was, this wasn’t a game, so I couldn’t ban Joshua Otto.
Of course, I couldn’t block him either.
Alang’s expression twisted slightly.
“Did you turn out like that because your father never hit you? Why, should I kick you this time?”
The moment his foot rose, Joshua flinched.
“You, you too…”
“Are you planning to ask a count if he has no father?”
“…Kuh, kill me!”
“Do you know I can take only the drones out of my Titan?”
I seriously wanted to kill him.
After hesitating for a moment, I pressed hard against my brow and grabbed Alang.
“L-let’s stop.”
“Tch. Fine.”
“Hah, you must be feeling great! If you treat a lowborn like an actual team leader and obediently do everything he says…”
“Let’s stop, Joshua Otto.”
Joshua flinched and looked at me.
“What?”
“This team battle is an annihilation match. It won’t end until either all of us are subdued, or all of our opponents are subdued. I know jungle warfare is your specialty, Joshua, but…”
Beep.
The hologram moved according to my gesture.
“Our opponents are strong, and we need to cooperate.”
Third place. Aaron Dyke.
And the two names that appeared beneath his were both skilled students ranked in the double digits.
“You have no intention of maintaining balance within the team, and you don’t want to listen to a lowborn or commoners. Then, as the team leader, I have no choice but to exclude you from the operation, Joshua.”
“How dare you act so insolently…”
“I said stop.”
When I frowned and raised my foot, Joshua visibly shrank back.
Even I could get angry.
I liked useless and unnecessary emotional exhaustion, but this was different.
Right now, we needed to learn as much as possible about our opponents, as quickly as possible, and formulate a plan or prepare countermeasures.
We didn’t exactly have the luxury of wasting time trying to soothe Joshua Otto’s feelings.
“The Keria family is a count’s house. Take on the role of protecting Alang so he doesn’t get taken down by the opposing team.”
Still, for me, hadn’t I handled the situation pretty well?
With this much, Joshua wouldn’t object too strongly, and Alang, who was cooperative with me, would accept it too.
Alang and Joshua looked at each other at the same time, then looked back at me.
“I hate this bastard, though?”
“I don’t want to do that.”
Agh.
***
“So?”
“S-so for today, I thought talking would be difficult, so we just called it off.”
To be more precise, I ran away.
And the place I ran to was, in the end, the Employees’ Club café again.
The sight of maids sweeping and mopping the floor around me, and butlers serving tables, no longer felt strange at all.
Was it really okay for a place like this to be the most calming place for me after the hangar and my dorm room?
Ran nodded.
Ian, who had been listening quietly, turned his head slightly, pulled a spanner from his waist, and handed it to me.
“Skull?”
“Do you think I’m you, Ian?”
“What’s that supposed to mean? Explain.”
I’d been hit by her with a spanner before, so what explanation did she need?
“A s-slip of the tongue.”
But Ian had a spanner in her hand.
If anyone asked me why I explained myself, I’d answer that someone threatened me with a spanner.
“A-anyway. How are things on the operator side?”
If I wanted to live, I had to change the subject.
Ran made a strange expression, then shook her head.
“It’s similar on our end.”
That strange expression wasn’t a very good one.
“The operators for Alang Keria and Rob respect me, but the operator on Joshua Otto’s side…”
“Did they c-curse at you or something?”
“No. They just didn’t say anything and kept looking at their smartwatch.”
They just kept looking at their smartwatch?
Was that even possible?
“An operator is s-slacking off?”
“Yes. They don’t even seem to show up to lectures much.”
That wouldn’t do.
A pilot could be like that. But an operator couldn’t.
No matter how important the pilot was within a team, if the rest of the members were absent, it was bound to collapse immediately.
Without an engineer, adjustments, customization, and most importantly repairs for the Titan would be paralyzed, and that would be the end.
And without an operator…
“That means there’s no one to gather and analyze information about the opponent.”
You get absolutely destroyed in the information war.
Only then did I realize it.
During the midterm exam, Joshua Otto had seemed unable to even imagine that Deep would employ various strategies.
In reality, Deep didn’t dislike using a variety of strategies, and had shown them reasonably well before.
From the very first fight against Kaiser, he had used a strategy of knocking the opponent down by exploiting the fact that the enemy machine was a heavy-armored Titan, heavy and sluggish.
When he trained jointly with Karina Luna, he had even operated a heavy-armored Titan himself.
Compared to that limited information, what had Joshua Otto’s moment-to-moment reactions been like?
They hadn’t been bad.
To be honest, it was impossible to call him first-rate, but I clearly remembered that he had desperately struggled to win somehow.
Considering that he had adopted side skirt missiles, which were difficult for an opponent to anticipate, he had a fair grasp of the effectiveness of surprise attacks and unexpected strikes.
I had thought Joshua Otto lost because he was arrogant and careless.
I had assumed that even though he had all the information on Deep in his hands, he lost simply because he hadn’t looked at it.
But there might be a slightly different reason.
“Deep is probably right.”
Ran nodded.
“It seems the operator over there is more of a problem than Joshua Otto.”
That only made my head hurt more.
“Who is that operator?”
“Ah, one moment.”
“Soraya Umbra.”
Before Ran could even look up the operator’s information, Ian answered first.
“She’s from the southern Baron Umbra family, and she’s an unusually severe social misfit.”
“How severe?”
“About as bad as you when I first met you.”
That comparison hit way too clearly.
“How do you know so well?”
“She’s famous in aristocratic circles. It’s easier to gossip about people who don’t attend banquets than people who do.”
So she knew for a reason far scarier than I expected.
“Th-then, Ian, did you go to banquets in the past?”
“Very occasionally. That’s not the important part.”
Ian raised the spanner again.
“Then that girl’s skull?”
Hmm. Should we crack it?
“N-no, we shouldn’t.”
For a second, it felt like Ian had gone inside my head and come back out.
In the first place, this wasn’t a problem that would end just by solving whatever issue that operator Soraya had.
It wasn’t only Operator Soraya who was uncooperative; Joshua was just as uncooperative.
On top of that, Joshua’s uncooperative attitude had clearly made Alang quite angry as well.
A sigh came out on its own.
In the end, what was needed to win wasn’t pride, but acknowledgment and acceptance.
You had to acknowledge your own problems first before you could move forward.
It was the same as how I had worked to improve my inadequate physical condition.
But what on earth was I supposed to do with someone who was inherently uncooperative and had been raised under aristocratic principles?
I was just about to rest my chin on my hand and think for a moment.
“Soraya Umbra!”
Someone shouted loudly outside.
Soraya Umbra.
At the unmistakable name, Ran and I looked at each other at the same time and rushed outside.
The moment she saw the person who had shouted, Ran looked flustered.
“That’s Professor Alfred Doran, isn’t it?”
“I know Professor Alfred D-Doran.”
I knew who he was.
He was a professor with an excellent reputation on the academy community boards.
A meritocrat who treated everyone fairly, regardless of whether they were nobles, commoners, or lowborn.
At the same time, he was considered one of the chairman’s reasonably trusted close aides.
“He isn’t the sort of person to shout, though?”
I certainly knew that too.
When I tilted my head slightly, I finally saw the woman standing in front of Professor Alfred.
She was hunched over with her shoulders drawn in tight, and just from looking at her, she seemed like she wouldn’t be easy to deal with.
This was the first time I’d seen a noble with hair that long and unkempt.
The way she anxiously looked around while clutching tightly at her sleeves somehow gave me a sense of kinship.
“Soraya Umbra. I thought you weren’t attending lectures again today, and as expected, you were outside?!”
“N-no, no. I-I was just, um, the s-snacks in my dorm ran out, so for a moment…”
She stuttered too.
I felt an even stronger sense of kinship.
“I know you dislike attending lectures, Cadet Soraya! But do you not understand that if you fail to maintain more than the required attendance, you may have to repeat the year, and in severe cases, even be expelled!”
“Um, P-Professor, your v-voice, it’s loud.”
People’s gazes were gradually beginning to gather around them.
“And didn’t I tell you to attend club activities consistently as well? It doesn’t necessarily have to be an operator-related club, so you must at least continue going to the club you currently belong to!”
“P-Professor.”
“I’m worried because I feel the scope of your relationships with other cadets is far too narrow!”
He really was a good professor, but…
Soraya flinched every time she felt someone’s gaze, then suddenly turned her eyes toward us.
“I-I actually!”
Soraya hurriedly clamped a hand over Professor Alfred’s mouth.
“I-I-I-I was l-looking into the Employees’ Club!”
Huh?
Soraya began running urgently toward us.
Professor Alfred looked slightly bewildered, but he didn’t bother following her.
No, in the first place, Soraya wasn’t running fast enough that anyone would need to chase after her.
If anything, she was absurdly slow.
Soraya rushed into the café, panting for breath, then looked ahead and froze with a flinch.
“Somehow, the conversation reached all the way here.”
There was no way Senior Ayla would miss something like this.
After thinking for a moment, I closed the door behind her with a click.
“U-um, I, um…”
“Please speak.”
“I-I’ll just leave now.”
“You came in of your own accord, but leaving might be a little difficult.”
Those were the eyes of a predator watching its prey.
“First, shall we try on a maid uniform?”
“I’msorryI’msorryI’msorrypleaseletmeleave.”
Good.
For now, the target had been secured.