The whispers about Ryosuke's "conceptual deletion" of the resonator sphere had barely died down when a new kind of murmur began: the approach of the Cross-Training Delegation.
The United Federation's great strength—and its constant headache—was its staggering diversity. To build a cohesive military from Jedi, Space Marines, and ninjas required brutal, practical exercises in interoperability. Every quarter, a contingent from one branch would be embedded within another for "shared doctrine immersion."
This cycle, it was the Star Fleet's 5th Tactical Squadron—a group of elite officers and pilots from the Star Wars continuum—who would be joining the Jaeger Academy's advanced cadets for joint simulations.
Sergeant Kova addressed the assembled top-tier recruits in a briefing amphitheater. A hologram of a Star Destroyer hung in the air.
"Don't be impressed by their fancy ships or their mystical 'Force'," she growled. "In a straight-up brawl between a Venator-class and a Mark-XV Jaeger in atmosphere, I'd bet on the Jaeger. But they have things we lack: strategic mobility, fleet-scale coordination, and specialized force projection. You will learn from them. They will learn the meaning of grounded, close-quarters combat from you. Most importantly," her cybernetic eye whirred, focusing on each of them, "you will not embarrass the Corps. Is that clear?"
"YES, SERGEANT!"
The delegation arrived at noon. They marched into the main concourse in crisp, grey and black uniforms, their bearing rigid. At their head was a woman with copper hair tied in a severe bun and eyes the color of flint: Commander Liana Rae. She moved with an economy of motion that spoke of a lightsaber duelist's grace.
Beside her was a man who drew every eye. Tall, with the bronzed skin and sharp features of a Core World aristocrat, his posture was one of casual, innate superiority. His name, whispered by awestruck cadets with even basic galactic history, was Kaelen Thorne. A Jedi Knight—or as close to one as the post-Shift, pragmatically reformed Jedi Order produced—and an ace TIE Defender pilot. He was handsome, charismatic, and his presence in the Force was a calm, blazing sun that Ryosuke's Six Eyes perceived as a vortex of luminous energy.
Kaelen's gaze swept over the assembled cadets, lingering for a moment on Ryosuke. A faint, curious frown touched his lips, as if he'd tasted something unfamiliar on the wind.
The joint training began with a simple mixer in the simulation dome. Cadets and Star Fleet officers were paired for basic Jaeger familiarization. Ryosuke found himself assigned to none other than Kaelen Thorne.
"Recruit Tanaka," Kaelen said, his voice smooth, carrying the faint, cultured accent of Coruscant's upper tiers. "I've heard the rumors. The man who breaks scanners and erases matter. A pleasure."
"Lieutenant Thorne," Ryosuke replied, matching the neutral tone. "I've heard of Jedi. I'm curious to see how the Force interfaces with machinery."
"A question I have for you as well," Kaelen said with a small, challenging smile.
They climbed into a dual-control trainer rig, a modified TS-9 configured for instructional use. The cockpit was cramped with two.
"Neural handshake initiating in three, two, one…"
The connection flooded them. Ryosuke felt the familiar weight of the machine. And he felt something else—a bright, flowing current of foreign energy intertwining with his own consciousness. The Force. It was disciplined, focused, but it had a will, a sentient curiosity that brushed against the cold, infinite expanse of his Cursed Energy.
[Foreign energy matrix detected: The Force (Light-Side aligned).]
[Passive interaction: Neutral. No compatibility detected. No conflict.]
Kaelen, in the co-pilot's seat, stiffened. His eyes flew open. "Your presence… it's a void. A negation. The Force flows around you but cannot touch you. What are you?"
"Focused," Ryosuke said simply, taking primary control. The rig stood with its usual seamless grace. His sync meter read 52%. "Your turn. Navigate us to marker Beta."
Kaelen, still visibly unsettled, reached out with the Force. He didn't just move the controls; he persuaded the machine. The rig's movements became subtly more fluid, its balance preternaturally perfect. It was a different kind of sync—not a merger, but a benevolent possession.
[Observation: Force-user employing telekinetic and predictive enhancement on machine functions. Efficiency gain: approximately 15%. Synergy, not true synchronization.]
They completed the course flawlessly, a strange, silent contest of philosophies playing out in hydraulics and neural impulses. When they disengaged, Kaelen was sweating slightly, a look of intense contemplation on his face.
"You don't just pilot," he said. "You become it. There's no separation. It's… unnerving."
"You don't pilot," Ryosuke countered. "You command it. You ask, and it obeys. It's… diplomatic."
A grudging respect passed between them.
---
The real test came two days later: Operation: Shattered Sky. A large-scale, multi-domain simulation. The scenario: a Federation research outpost on a moon was under attack by a hybrid threat—ground-based Kaiju-spawn burrowing from below, and piratical starships (simulated by drone craft) strafing from orbit.
The cadets and Star Fleet officers were mixed into combined arms teams. Ryosuke was placed in Team Obsidian, with Kaelen (in a command/gunnery role), Sera, and a sharp-eyed Star Fleet tactical officer named Jax who specialized in electronic warfare.
Their assignment: defend the outpost's primary power regulator from three waves of assault, using a combination of a stationary, twin-linked heavy laser cannon (manned by Kaelen and Jax) and ground troops (Ryosuke and Sera).
The simulation began with a quake as burrowers erupted from the synthetic rock. Sera laid down fields of fire, her control much improved, creating flaming barriers. Ryosuke moved between the threats, his Infinity barrier deflecting chitinous claws and acid spits, his precise applications of Blue pulling monsters off-balance into Sera's flames or crushing their sensory organs with pinpoint spatial compressions.
Above, the shriek of mock engines filled the dome as drone-simulated Z-95 Headhunters streaked in for a bombing run.
"Air threat! Bearing zero-nine-zero!" Jax called out.
Kaelen closed his eyes at the laser cannon's targeting array. He didn't just aim. He reached out with the Force, feeling the vectors, the pilot's intentions a second before they acted. He fired. Twin bolts of crimson energy lanced out, not at where the lead ship was, but where it would be. It vanished in a pixelated fireball.
"One down," Kaelen said, his voice calm.
But there were too many. A second wave of burrowers emerged behind their position, heading straight for the regulator. Sera was out of position. Jax was focused on jamming the ships' sensors.
Ryosuke was twenty meters away, surrounded.
He didn't run. He looked at the charging spawn, then at the heavy laser cannon. An idea, insane and brilliant, crystallized in his mind, shaped by his otherworldly comprehension.
"Kaelen! The cannon! Can you fire a sustained burst on my mark? Full power, zero elevation, horizontal sweep!"
"Are you insane? You're in the line of fire!" Kaelen shot back.
"Trust me!" Ryosuke's voice was a blade of absolute certainty.
For a heartbeat, there was silence on the comms. Then Kaelen's voice, tight with decision. "On your mark."
The spawn were ten meters away. Ryosuke planted his feet. He raised both hands, not towards the monsters, but towards the path between the cannon and himself. He didn't summon a barrier. He prepared to shape a tunnel. A conduit of warped space.
"MARK!"
Kaelen fired. A continuous, searing beam of plasma roared from the cannon, straight at Ryosuke's back.
Ryosuke's Six Eyes saw the energy's wavelength, its propagation. His hands moved, sculpting the air. The beam hit his localized Infinity field and did not stop. Instead, the distorted space bent it, like light through a fiber-optic cable. The deadly energy flowed around him in a shimmering cocoon of distorted light, then fanned out from his outstretched hands in a wide, scything arc of annihilation.
The horizontal laser sweep he'd requested, delivered through him.
The charging spawn met the beam and ceased to exist. The ground behind them was scorched black in a perfect, ninety-degree arc.
The beam cut off. The dome was silent except for the hum of machinery. Ryosuke lowered his hands, smoke curling from his sleeves where the ambient heat had scorched the fabric. He was unharmed.
On the command balcony, Sergeant Kova, Commander Rae, and Commandant Idris watched, frozen.
"Telemetry confirms it," a stunned technician whispered. "He shaped a sustained heavy laser blast with a spatial field. Redirected it without attenuation. That's… that's not physics. That's metaphysics."
Commandant Idris's bionic eye whirred. "He used a weapon designed to kill capital ships as a precision infantry tool. He turned himself into a living artillery piece."
Down in the sim, Kaelen climbed shakily out of the gunner's seat. He walked up to Ryosuke, his earlier arrogance utterly gone, replaced by raw astonishment. "You… you bent light. You bent coherent plasma. The Force can deflect blaster bolts, but that… that was a river of fire. And you channeled it."
"It was efficient," Ryosuke said, his breathing only slightly elevated. The strain had been mental, not physical—calculating the spatial curvature in real-time under fire. "You provided the river. I just dug a new bed for it."
Jax stared at him like he was a new type of hyperdrive. Sera just shook her head, a laugh of pure disbelief bubbling out of her.
The simulation ended with Team Obsidian achieving a 98% defense rating, the highest in the exercise.
---
That evening, a formal dinner was held in the officers' mess to "foster inter-branch camaraderie." Ryosuke, as one of the standout performers, was required to attend. He wore a freshly pressed cadet uniform, his white hair a stark banner in the room of blues and greys.
He felt out of place among the polished banter and political sotto voce conversations. He navigated the crowd with a detached air, his Six Eyes passively tracking the complex web of social alliances and tensions—the subtle rivalry between Star Fleet line officers and Jedi, the wary respect the Federation officers held for the "primitive" but brutally effective Jaeger pilots.
He found himself on a balcony overlooking the academy's landing lights, seeking quiet.
"You have a talent for finding the edges of rooms."
He turned. Commander Liana Rae stood there, holding two glasses of a faintly glowing, blue liquid. She offered him one.
"Commander."
"Call me Liana. Tonight, at least." She leaned on the railing, looking out. "Your performance today was… instructive. Kaelen is one of the most gifted Force-sensitives of his generation. Arrogant, but with reason. You unsettled him. That's not easy."
"He's skilled," Ryosuke said, taking a sip. The drink was sweet, effervescent, with an alcoholic kick that felt alien in his system. "His connection to his weapon is profound. Just different."
"Different," she echoed. "That's the word, isn't it? The Federation is a patchwork of 'different.' We paper over it with uniforms and chain of command, but the fissures are there. Some in Star Fleet Command still view your Jaegers as walking coffins. Some in your Corps see us as flyboys afraid to get our boots dirty." She looked at him directly. "But you… you're a different kind of different. You don't fit anyone's box. Idris is protecting you, you know. Silas and his IRD shadows want you in a lab. There are senators on the Federation Council who see a man with your potential not as a soldier, but as a strategic asset to be controlled."
Ryosuke said nothing, letting her talk. This was more than casual conversation.
"The Interschool Competition," she continued. "It's a showcase. The winners get paraded before the brass. For someone like you, it could be a springboard to the Academy of Realms on Omnius Prime. Or it could be a gilded cage." She finished her drink. "Kaelen requested you be assigned to his squadron for the upcoming deep-space tactical exercise next week. I approved. Consider it an opportunity. And a test. Not from me. From the universe. To see what happens when a void meets a star."
She left him on the balcony.
[Social/Political Landscape Analysis Updated.]
[Commander Liana Rae: Ally (Provisional). Motives: Strategic curiosity, potential recruitment for Star Fleet interests.]
[Lieutenant Kaelen Thorne: Rivalry/Emerging Respect. High-value social connection for cross-branch influence.]
[Warning: Visibility is increasing. The 'showcase' presents both opportunity and high risk.]
The System was right. He was being moved from piece to piece on a board he only half-understood. The academy was no longer just a training ground; it was an antechamber to a much larger, more dangerous world.
As he re-entered the bustling mess, he saw Kaelen, surrounded by a group of Star Fleet officers and a few bold cadets, holding court. Their eyes met across the room. Kaelen raised his glass in a silent, acknowledging toast. The challenge was clear.
Ryosuke gave a slow, slight nod in return. The ghost in the machine had stepped into the light, and now the architects of the future were taking notice. The climb was accelerating, and the winds at this altitude were fierce.