With their new class schedule putting them in the advanced piloting course all day, it was determined by the academy that the two genius cadets would no longer be part of Year 1 Class 1, though for now they would remain in their old dorm room.

Officially they were part of the Advanced Education department now, which was usually reserved for Cadets in their final two years who showed enough promise to get recruited into the Special Forces training program. But lately, the quality of Kepler Terminus Cadets had been very good and their dorms were all full.

That proved to be a problem for the Academy, since the regular dorms of the First Years weren't all that secure, physically or digitally, and both Cadets were known to have skills in hacking. The General thought it was hilarious, but he was the only one on staff that did.

Everyone else was fully stressed about the fact that they might cheat their way through the exams, but General Tennant knew very well that his own personal examinations couldn't be cheated on, for he only tested true survival skills that were applicable to the battlefield.

That's why no other Instructor really understood his technique, they knew the book theory and the approved methods, but they were teachers through and through, most of them had never seen the battlefield.

The only one on the Class 1 team that had more than a single tour of combat duty was Sergeant Zamm. It was Zamm who alerted the General to the two promising Cadets here, and convinced him to come check them out.

Starting the third day, Max was starting to get used to the grueling schedule that General Tennant kept, but with years of Academy education left ahead of them, and a four year head start on the rest of the Special Forces trainees, he wasn't sure exactly what the Old General's rush was.

The other trainees had courses ten hours a day, plus physical fitness time, but General Tennant had Max and Nico in the simulators for 12 hours a day, in 6 hour stretches.

Max had already looked up the standard rotations, and they were three hours each, so he decided that might be why the General pushed for six hours at a time, to get them prepared for the times when they might need to pull a double duty shift in the case of an emergency, heavy losses or ongoing attack.

Understanding the logic was one thing, but convincing his body that it was actually capable of surviving it was entirely different. He woke up on time, made it through the training, ate and slept, that was it. Nico seemed to be adjusting better, so he searched her mind for answers this morning while he still had the energy.

To her it simply felt natural, the empire she served during her previous incarnation used performance enhancing drugs combined with genetic engineering to create super soldiers out of their limited human resources, so this body simply couldn't yet keep up with everything that was asked of her as a Mecha Pilot in the last life.

Max briefly considers that it might not be in the far past or the future, just an empire whose technology was heavily classified or far away from where they currently are, because the way she was trained before and the way General Tennant is training them now are entirely too close to be a mere coincidence.

Or maybe combat just has some sort of universally hellish quality to it, and it's the same no matter where you are?

"Since you're enjoying the drills so much, I have added a new realm of complexity to it starting this morning. Randomly placed land mines. Your sensors are fully capable of detecting them, just set them to the chemical detection setting and you're good as gold." The General informs them when they make it to class for their sixth day of training.

Tomorrow will mark their first full week of training, being their designated weekly day of relaxation, so they had hoped that today would be not too bad. After all, they'd gotten good at the previous obstacle courses that the General had been putting them through.

But it seemed that he simply couldn't wait until after the rest day for them to move on to a new difficulty level.

The landmines are indeed easy to detect with the sensors, the problem is that the sensor setting that finds them can't be active at the same time as the one that detects charged energy pulses that they use to predict incoming weapons fire. The Line Mecha's systems are simply not advanced enough for that level of multitasking.

Max has a decision to make, landmines or energy pulses? The anwer should be both, he just needs to determine how. For his first run, Max decides that the technique he will try is a quick scan for landmines every time he's about to move out of cover, then back to incoming weapons fire, and on to the next covered position, hoping that he didn't forget where the landmines were.

It is moderately effective, except that the quick scan doesn't always catch all the mines, and dodging the incoming shots requires moving off the planned path, which means recalculating his path through the buried obstacles.

He manages to blow himself up the first run, stepping on a mine to dodge an Ion Cannon blast, but the General doesn't criticize him, simply calls out his usual admonishment.

"You're dead Cadet. Go again."

General Tennant knows that this level of obstacle course is nearly impossible for a Cadet at this level, but the more times they face mortality, and the harder the training is to start, the better adjusted they will be to the battlefield conditions when the time comes to face real combat.

He wants these two to eventually take over his own Phalanx Class Mecha, but such an honor can only possibly go to heroes of the Empire or direct descendants of the current pilot, of which General Tennant has none that he finds to be suitable and worthy of the opportunity.