Moving to the next class.
The next class of the day was Hazard Navigation Basics.
The room was shaped like a dome with no visible corners. Projected terrain flickered around them — scorched deserts, fungal ruins, frozen cities. Simulated but real enough to smell like mildew and ozone.
The instructor — a reconstructed neural echo named Instructor Levi — stood at the center, arms clasped behind his back. His voice was dry but deliberate.
"Some of you may be wondering," he began, "why we bother with classrooms at all."
"Why not download everything directly into your neural scaffold and be done with it?"
Someone in the back made a snorting sound. Lyra didn't look, but she agreed with the sentiment. They could do that. The System had done that for countless minor protocols — sanitation, ration sequencing, emergency translations.
"The answer is simple. Downloaded data is stored. Learned data is reflexed."
He paced, slowly rotating the terrain hologram around them with a flick of his fingers. The landscape shifted from a dead forest to a crumbling city block with red plant growth curling through windows.
"On Earth, you will not have the luxury of consulting archives mid-combat. Your body — your shell — will not ask for permission before bleeding."
"If a Blightvine bursts from the soil, you will not have time to buffer, decrypt, and recall. You will have time to react. Or die."
The projection changed again. A Swarmsmith drone cluster emerged from a collapsed vehicle. A simulation of a student — clearly out of sync — paused to query a system suggestion.
The drone impaled them in under 1.2 seconds.
Silence.
"Learning is latency reduction," Instructor Varl said, matter-of-factly.
"Training builds pathways your neural interface can call instantly — without consulting an archive. The System values reaction time. Even in the digitized world, milliseconds are life."
He let that sit for a moment. Then he waved his hand again. The classroom reset — desks, neutral lighting, and the faint hum of cooling code.
"And there's another reason," he said. "A less obvious one."
"Rehabilitation is not a solo operation."
His eyes — sharper than they should've been for an instructor sim — met Lyra's for a fraction too long.
"You'll be deployed with other people. People who don't think like you. Who didn't rank like you. Who may die like you."
"Understanding others — trust, communication, coordination — that's not something the System can code into you. That's something you build."
"And in case no one's told you yet: the Earth doesn't care if you were introverted."
Lyra looked down at her desk.
It seemed like Instructor Levi's approach was a complete 180 from Instructor Vell's.
Instructor Levi flicked his wrist, and the terrain stabilized into a canyon system — dry, brittle, narrow. Sharp ridgelines stretched overhead, and faint bioluminescent flora pulsed beneath the rock's shade like veins under bruised skin.
"This is Zone C-Ravine," he said. "One of the earliest sites tagged for reclamation mapping. Looks manageable, doesn't it?"
A flick of two fingers. The simulation zoomed in.
A faint shiver rippled through the dirt. The ridge above gave way in sudden silence. A landslide of dust and fragmented stone buried the canyon path in seconds. When it cleared, the landscape was rearranged — like Earth had blinked and changed its mind.
"After the flare," Levi continued, "magnetic faultlines destabilized large segments of the crust. Microgravity fluctuations. Geoshift zones. Earth no longer remembers what stable terrain is supposed to look like."
A faint metallic tang drifted in the air — the sim's way of suggesting dust and ozone.
Another tap. The canyon reset. This time, a lone figure entered the scene. Fully suited in early-generation reclamation gear — bulkier than current models, slower.
They moved with textbook caution. Careful. Controlled. But as they crossed between two fractured arches, a red alert blinked faintly on their HUD.
They paused.
Too late.
A vine — slick and red like a wet cable — snapped down from above. It didn't strike hard. Just surgically.
The figure jolted.
And then began to melt.
Not from heat — from corrosion.
Their arm liquefied inside the suit. The projection zoomed in: microscopic blooms of blistering fungus devouring the synthetic mesh.
"Blightvines," Levi said flatly. "Not technically alive. These are chemical-parasitic offshoots. Rooted in bio-engineered waste dumped during the Collapse era. They activate when they detect heat and carbon pressure. Standard suits back then had no reactive insulation."
The figure dropped to their knees, then fell entirely. The suit crumpled around them. Onscreen: SHELL INTEGRITY FAILURE.
The class was quiet. The projection hovered mid-air like a paused crime scene.
Levi stepped forward.
"Now," he said. "Given what you've just seen… what could that reclamation scout have done differently? Anyone?"
Silence stretched.
A few students glanced at each other. A boy near the front raised his hand tentatively.
"Thermal masking?" he offered. "Maybe a buffer to diffuse heat signatures?"
Levi gave a sharp nod.
"Correct in principle. But the tech wasn't available at the time. Good instinct."
Another hand — the same girl who had sat beside Lyra earlier.
"Route analysis," she said. "If they had overhead mapping, they could've identified the Blightvine's shade cluster pattern. Avoided it entirely."
"Very good," Levi said. "Pattern recognition saves limbs."
He paused, then turned to face the rest of the room.
"This is what Hazard Navigation means. You cannot memorize every threat. But you can learn how threats behave. What they signal. What they want. You read the terrain the way medics read vitals."
He paced once more.
"Over the next twelve weeks, you'll train in dynamic sims like this. You'll analyze, anticipate, adapt. Or fail. Some of you will freeze. Some of you will break."
"The System will be watching."
A beat.
"And so will I."
Lyra didn't speak. But she watched the projection — the Blightvine's recoil, the moment of hesitation, the time lost.It wasn't the suit that killed them, she thought. It was the pause.