Lin Youfu’s eyes went wide, his entire body leaning forward in his seat as if he’d just witnessed something utterly unbelievable.
Beside him, Gaskell kept typing replies into his optical brain communicator, muttering in a low voice,
“When did Pingzhao ever learn to do something like this? Did you know about it?”
Lin Youfu lowered his voice just as much.
“…I had no idea.”
Materializing a psychic barrier? Next thing you know, it’ll be materializing psychic attacks, won’t it?
That kid Pingzhao—how could he keep something this big from him!?!
The livestream camera captured the two instructors’ reactions in full, and the host smiled as she spoke,
“It seems Valcour’s students all love to keep their secrets~ In this final round, all three military academies just keep surprising us! What developments will the next seven days bring? I can’t wait to find out!”
None of the five faculty advisors present dared to say a word. Polite smiles plastered on their faces, their gazes met briefly across the room and then darted away—each of them looking thoroughly guilty…
At the start, keeping things under wraps had been deliberate. But now, what their students were getting up to was genuinely news to them!
Most attention was focused on Qilin Academy and Valcour, so Selena wisely kept her mouth shut.
Ever since returning from the Eshuinox Star, the students would say things like “Those Qilin folks are so sneaky!”—yet during the ten-day break in between, they’d barely spent a single moment apart from each other!
Every day they ate together, trained together, and almost slept in the same room.
So if the other two military academies were anything like that, it would be hard to guarantee her side remained unaffected…
And as it turned out, her concerns had merit. Before long, on First Military Academy’s side, Leola stood up holding a few hand-sketched blueprints.
“Captain, I need your help… If we build this through-view radar, we can keep moving.”
“Through-view radar!?”
Wu Pingzhuo immediately slapped both hands over his upper and lower body’s key areas.
“W-Wait, that’s… not appropriate?”
Leola said flatly,
“…Dream on.”
Fu Xingyuan looked at his teammate with a complicated expression.
“Wu Pingzhuo, you used to be a perfectly serious guy. What happened to you…”
“Cough, cough—hey, I’m just trying to lighten the mood, don’t get the wrong idea!”
Wu Pingzhuo’s face reddened. He had no idea why, but ever since meeting the four of them from Qilin, his brain occasionally would just short-circuit.
Sometimes it was like he’d been possessed by Wang Tianwei or Jian Jingyu—an unstoppable urge to be funny at the worst possible moments!
“How long has this condition been going on?”
“Brother, let me explain…”
Leola stopped paying attention to the two foot soldiers and turned to He Siyu with her sketch, explaining,
“The through-view radar uses a special frequency of sound waves to pierce through snowstorms and ice layers. I’ve expanded its scan range, which makes it safer for us.
But the parts are extremely delicate—one tiny mistake and it’s ruined. It requires extremely high psychic precision.
Doing it alone would take too long, Captain…”
“No problem, I’ll assist you.”
He Siyu didn’t hesitate.
“Just teach me what to do.”
Fu Xingyuan chimed in.
“We canhelp too?”
“Yeah, I’m in!”
Leola gave the two of them a disdainful look.
“Forget it. Last time, you mismanaged two out of ten wires. We have limited materials here, and I really don’t have the time to let you practice. Just keep watch—expand your psychic barriers and don’t let a single danger slip by.”
“…Fine.”
Wu Pingzhuo answered glumly, then cast a sulky glance at Fu Xingyuan.
Leola was clearly getting more sharp-tongued by the day too. If everyone was turning “Qilin-style,” why was he the only one getting called out?
In the camp’s livestream studio, several mech engineers raised their eyebrows high.
“Leola used hand-drawn sketches to design a compact mech-mountable through-view radar? She must have memorized the scale and all the key specs?”
“Indeed, very impressive! There probably aren’t more than a few people in the entire Mech Engineering Institute who could pull that off.”
“She really lives up to First Military Academy’s reputation.”
“Everybody’s still holding back trump cards.”
Compared to Qilin’s combination infrared-and-ultrasonic detector, the through-view radar boasted higher accuracy and a smaller form factor, making it ideal for exactly this kind of weather.
But as military mech engineers, they also knew full well that the cost of a through-view radar would be higher than both of those devices combined—both in terms of raw materials and because it demanded far greater psychic capability and technical expertise from the person building it.
Currently, the Federation’s through-view radars were mostly large or medium-scale, commonly installed on planetary exploration and resource extraction machinery, used for dealing with harsh environments like Blizzar.
The fact that Leola could design a small-scale through-view radar in such a short time meant she had serious personal interest in this field. Another extremely promising talent!
As for which was better? You could call it neck and neck—Qilin’s solution was definitely sufficient for the job, while First Military Academy’s was a straight-up endgame play.
Selena slowly let out a breath. Good thing she hadn’t said anything just now.
Back at the military headquarters watching the livestream, Meng Chongyun took in every performance from all three academies, and even his expression brightened somewhat.
The enemies were tough, not to be underestimated, but weren’t the Federation’s rising stars slowly emerging and letting their radiance show?
To protect these young shoots, the military would stop at nothing.
“Knock, knock, knock.”
Deputy Chief of Staff Guo Hongfan only entered after receiving permission, placing on the desk the summary report of wormhole activity from all ten Federation military districts that he had finished reviewing.
“Everything you asked for is here. I checked it through thoroughly—nothing overlooked. The ones that erupted this month are all marked in red…”
Then, seeing Meng Chongyun’s expression, he sighed inwardly.
“Chief, maybe you ought to make a visit to the Academy of Sciences.”
Meng Chongyun pulled the pile of documents toward him and opened a 3D interface on his desk for comparison.
“Mm. If I have time.”
It was a dismissive tone.
Guo Hongfan knew immediately that the chief wasn’t going to take his advice to heart.
Then again, he could understand—he had only just received an injection the other day, so showing up again now would just earn him a laser-eyed glare from Director Xue.
“…Alright, Chief, one more thing.
The First Military District soldiers who came back from Nova have been in quarantine for fourteen days now. All examination reports show normal—no parasitic infection, and their mental states are well.
In five days, we have the projected M5 black hole starbeast outbreak. Do you think it’s possible to lift their quarantine and put them into combat?”
Meng Chongyun frowned as he considered for a moment.
“Extend observation by another three days. If there’s still no sign of anything abnormal, then release them—but they must go through a full scan and disinfection first…” “Understood.”
“And how goes the situation at the quarantine management center?”
“Wen Nanfeng, Xue Jie, and Chi Yongxin from the medical school are working hard on methods to drive out the Alpha Glodcrown parasitic infectants…”
