043. Academy (1)
043. Academy (1)
Two weeks had passed since Rinne was deployed on missions.
We started with non-combat missions and gradually increased the proportion of combat. From support missions to reconnaissance missions. From reconnaissance missions to engagement missions.
Then, when she successfully completed a mission to clear out a small hive, Rinne's skill level reached 5.
Before anyone knew it, Rinne had grown beyond being merely missed when absent to becoming a capable support operative—the kind whose absence would disrupt operations.
There had been no particular incidents up to that point.
Laika, an experienced instructor, actively covered for her, and even when an attack slipped through, Rinne could block it with the self-defense buff she'd developed.
On the day-to-day side of things, she had improved tremendously as well.
Among those, what I found particularly puzzling was Rinne's manner of speech.
"Oppa, what's the mission today?
"Anyway, whatever, do you have a moment before we head out on the mission?
"It's not like I'm looking for you because I want to spend time with you or anything, Oppa. There's just something I wanted to ask.
"More importantly, shouldn't you be grateful? Being able to spend time with a cute girl like me?
"......Why haven't you answered for a while now? Oppa?"
Having chattered on up to that point, Rinne waved her palm back and forth in front of my eyes.
As if checking whether I was conscious.
Of course, I was conscious.
I was only focusing on a part she didn't seem to care about at all.
That being.
"You, I mean."
"Huh?"
"Why do you keep calling me Oppa?"
"......Ha?"
Rinne's face flushed bright red.
Then she suddenly snapped at me.
"What are you saying at this point! You told me to call you Oppa!"
"No, that was when we were doing the role-play last time......."
There's no need to keep calling me Oppa now, is there?
When I questioned her, Rinne shot back.
"You never know. If I switch back to how I addressed you before, I might lose my immersion and become unable to use the family narrative again."
"I think that's not very convincing......."
I'd already grasped the entire structure of the spell formula that applied the buff; what did immersion have to do with it?
"Oh, whatever! Then you want me to call you 'you' like before? Call you? You want me to call you 'hey, you, buddy' or something?"
"No, I meant I'd like you to call me Commander while we're at it."
That was the formal title.
As I stated the obvious matter-of-factly, Rinne dug her heels in.
"No. Oppa or 'you.' Pick one or the other."
Rinne then added with a sneer.
"Or I could call you Worthless Commander. Pfft."
Why were only those sorts of forms of address unlocked? It was a mystery.
It was a mystery, but if I absolutely had to pick one among them regardless...... Oppa would probably be better. It was more polite than being called Worthless Commander or 'you.'
Above all, it felt a bit more familiar.
Familiarity was important. Setting aside the fact that greater familiarity led to better command compliance, it could also raise the Phase Resonance Rate.
Well, it had already risen quite a bit.
[Phase Resonance Rate with Commander: 37%]
When it was first measured, it was probably around 11 percent or so.
Reaching 37 percent in less than a month was truly dramatic progress.
The problem was that despite her favorability rising steadily, her attitude toward me hadn't softened in the slightest.
No, in some ways, she was actually being more prickly than before.
Just look at her now.
"Anyway, Oppa, stop just standing around like you've got nothing to do and come down to the basement. If you don't come down, execution."
"For what?"
"Just come down for a sec. No backtalk."
Hmm.
Could the precision analyzer be incorrectly measuring Rinne's non-military body and overestimating the phase resonance rate?
That didn't seem likely. For starters, when a stat's value can't be measured accurately, it doesn't display an arbitrary number; it replaces it with a question mark. The fact that 37% appeared meant that figure was actually confirmed.
In that case, there was really only one reason Rinne had started acting so strangely.
——Because she's embarrassed.
"......Oppa, you're thinking something weird right now, aren't you?"
"Not at all."
"No, you're definitely thinking something weird."
"I said I'm not."
"Then? What were you thinking?"
"About your novel."
It wasn't a lie.
After all, Rinne's novel Beyond the Cradle also featured a character who 'acts cheeky when embarrassed.'
None other than Roxy, the heroine of Beyond the Cradle volume 1, who could be called the main love interest.
Roxy liked the protagonist Min-hyuk but didn't know how to express it properly.
The more her favorability rose, the more brazenly she acted—snapping at him for no reason, pulling pointless risqué pranks...... That was part of her charm.
It was no exaggeration to say that Rinne was now copying Roxy's behavior almost exactly.
No, to put it more precisely——
'Was Roxy modeled on Rinne herself?'
That was my conviction, at least.
Right from Roxy's profile, she was an artist biodroid with absolutely no talent for combat.
Her manufacturer, body type, and manner of speech were all identical.
Except for swapping a writer for a painter, she was a carbon copy of Rinne.
Therefore, I wasn't particularly worried about this cheeky attitude of Rinne's.
If Rinne thought the same way Roxy did in the novel, then that prickliness meant she was that interested in me.
On top of that, the cheeky attitude was also evidence of the self-esteem that had risen now that she could carry out missions.
Rinne was merely expressing that interest and confidence in a wrong-headed way due to a lack of social skills.
And if she ever crossed the line, I could just teach her a proper lesson like in the novel.
"Well, whatever. Think all the weird thoughts you want, Oppa's too weak to even touch a single hair on me anyway. Heuheung—"
......Just you wait. I would make sure to teach her one. A proper lesson.
Vowing that inwardly, I obliged Rinne's request and headed to her basement.
As soon as I went down to the basement, Rinne held something out to show me.
Manuscript pages filled with writing.
"This is......."
"A new narrative I'm drafting."
"What are you planning to make?"
"Area-of-effect."
Area-of-effect?
"Remember the other day, when we were clearing out the hive and ran into four or five enemy Legions at once?"
"Right."
I remembered Rinne having a pretty hard time of it then.
Individually, they weren't particularly strong, but the sheer number itself was threatening.
More than that, she must have been flustered. Because up to that point, Rinne had never faced that many enemies at once.
Still, I'd judged she would be fine once she adapted and hadn't bothered devising any special countermeasures——
But it seemed the person in question felt a need for them.
"After that incident, I got the idea: 'What if I apply a narrative to numerous enemies all at once?'"
"So that's why you were searching for a narrative that could make the area-of-effect version work?"
Rinne nodded.
"I actually already found it."
"You found it?"
"Yeah. So......."
Originally, Rinne couldn't apply 'Weakness Discovery,' which weakened enemies, to multiple foes at once.
That was because she had to draft a separate narrative establishing a weakness for each individual enemy unit.
Rinne mulled over how to solve that problem and eventually arrived at this idea.
—What if she granted numerous enemies the attribute of belonging to a 'specific group' and wrote a narrative structure that made them subject to the same 'rules'?
"......Even with you explaining it like that, it's hard to understand."
"Well, Oppa's a layman. Still, you'll get it if you read it directly."
I did so.
It didn't take very long. Works created for Narrative Granting were drafted more like 'plots' or 'synopses' than the main text of a novel, so they could be written on the spot and modified to suit the enemy.
Because of that, the length was roughly 2,000 characters.
As Rinne explained, it worked by binding the enemies into a single group and subjecting them all to the same rules.
To be more specific——
"Granting the enemy Legions the setting of being Academy cadets, then applying a debuff in one go in the form of school rules?"
"Yeah."
"Will something like this actually work?"
"It did work, though?"
Rinne said.
She said she'd tested it alone in the simulator, and it had generally worked.
"Then that's good. What's the problem?"
"The efficiency is too low."
"The efficiency?"
"Yeah. I should say the effect is less than one-tenth compared to when applying it on individual units."
That was indeed a problem.
As I nodded in agreement, Rinne grumbled at me.
"For some reason, it seems the narrative I wrote is being judged as low-quality. I tried changing the details here and there, but there hasn't been much progress."
"Then showing this to me is......."
"I want to ask your opinion, Oppa. Since you're an Academy graduate, for starters."
Aha. So that was it.
As I nodded in understanding, Rinne added with a smirk.
"Well, not that there could possibly be anything wrong with my writing."
It seemed she had no intention of receiving criticism regarding her writing.
She simply wanted me, as an Academy graduate, to confirm that her draft itself was sound, then advise her on the skill operation she believed was the actual cause of the problem.
Unfortunately for her, my answer was 'negative.'
"It's wrong, though?"
"......Ha?"
Rinne shot back as if wondering what nonsense I was spouting.
But that was what I wanted to say.
Because the content of this story was far, far too different from the actual Academy.
There were errors obvious at a glance.
"There's a part where the partner biodroid and Commander are assigned to the same room. That's wrong. The dormitories are separate to begin with, and they can't even move between them. Normally, they only gather for classes. Did you actually research this properly?"
"I did it properly."
"What did you reference?"
Rinne answered a moment later.
"Light novels."
"What?"
"I said I used Academy-genre light novels as reference material."
Oh, for crying out loud.
"How can you use that kind of thing as a reference?"
"Ha? 'That kind of thing.' It's the 'War Hero Re-Enrolls in the Academy' series, a superhuman on a white horse who'll lead the light novel renaissance, you know? Can you not badmouth it carelessly?"
"Let's see. How much of a masterpiece it is."
I looked up the novel in question on the wiki.
The results were predictably the worst.
Starting with the inaccuracies Rinne had unquestioningly accepted a moment ago, it was full of ridiculous settings and unrealistic developments.
For example, the relationship between the faculty and the cadets.
In the novel, it was depicted as if the cadets were in an adversarial relationship with the professors, but the professors were retired folks living leisurely lives, so they weren't that combative. The instructors were the annoying ones.
On top of that, the disciplinary committee wasn't the impactful presence it was made out to be in the novel, either.
Beyond that, students dueling each other and a heroine who cross-dressed to live in the male dormitory were both nonsense.......
"And another thing that's nonsense is——"
"Ah, shut up!"
Rinne started whining.
"Everything you just said, Oppa, is an established part of the Academy genre, you know? It's like a heartwarming promise among otaku, something everyone knows and tacitly agrees on!"
Well. I wouldn't know about that.
"Anyway, it's not factual."
So the realism was far too low.
"Why is realism even necessary in the first place? There are so many fun novels about things that could never happen in reality!"
"I agree with that, but your skill fundamentally operates by overlaying the developments you wrote onto reality."
In other words, if it diverges too much from reality, the efficiency inevitably drops.
In that sense, the narrative Rinne drafted differed too much in its details from the real Academy. Its setting was based on the fantasy genre otaku had created—the so-called 'academy story.'
The problem of the area-of-effect buff's minimal effectiveness was surely also due to this preposterously low realism.
Of course, that wasn't the only problem.
"......The plot itself isn't particularly compelling either, is it?"
"Don't be a hater."
"No, really."
How should I put it.
"It reads like an academy story written by someone who's never actually been to school."
At those words, Rinne's face went bright red.
Then she burst out shouting.
"Fine! I never went to school!"
Oh, dear.
"No, really?"
Usually, specialist-type biodroids spent about one to three years in vocational school before being sent into the field.
"I was sold for military use, remember."
"Ah."
So it was a case of being specially recruited, so to speak.
If that was the case, it wasn't strange at all for her to have been deployed straight to the field without preparatory education.
"Then what do we do?"
"Who knows."
If the only problem was the realism of the setting, it would have been enough for me, an Academy graduate, to simply correct the historical accuracy errors.
But Rinne's current narrative was lacking in aspects other than realism...... namely, the unique 'sensibility' of the Academy genre.
The cause of that insufficiency appeared, as expected, to lie in the author's lack of experience.
If so, the recommended solution was the same as last time: give her more firsthand input.
"Alright. Let's go right now."
"Go? Where?"
Where else?
"The Academy."