The rest of the simulation was surprisingly uneventful. The moment we placed the cargo at the drop off point at the relay station, my field of view went black and a mission report appeared in front of me in glowing letters. After skimming over the data, I pulled the goggles from my head and found myself back in the classroom, hanging in the harness of my sim rig opposite to Ray, who gave me wide smile and two thumbs up. I smiled back and turned to the other side to find the other members of our team climbing out of their harnesses already. I was about to address them when behind me, someone began to clap.

It was Lieutenant Steel, and on his face I could see the very familiar conflict of emotions that appeared there whenever we beat one of his new missions. On one hand, he was proud of us for performing well. But on the other, he was disappointed that his creations had been bested.

After his own graduation, Steel had at first quickly ascended the ranks of the Keres force and soon become a member of the academy faculty - due not only to his excellence in simulations, but also his knowledge of programming them. He was the major programmer for all the training software for the Keres, but also the Talos Defense Force. He also worked on the development of new sim tech and had even been involved in the Agalma Project that had led to the creation of the Daidala prototype.

And despite this impressive list of achievements throughout his career, he was still much younger than all our other instructors – his flashy looks only added to that impression. These days he dyed his hair platinum blonde and wore it in a tousled side cut with weekly varying geometrical patterns shaved onto the side of his head. On top of his head rested a pair of interface goggles. Faint, black lines that ran in complicated patterns across the backs of his hands and along his arms. They looked like tattoos on first glance, but currently they seemed to pulsate with a soft white glow, indicating that his cybernetic interface implants were active. It indicated to me that he had apparently been meddling with the sim while we had been in it.

Around him, I saw the other students grouped in their teams. It seemed like they had been watching our performance on the big screen in front of the class room, and now they were staring at us in wide-eyed silence. The fact that we had taken much longer than all the others made me realize that we must have been the only ones to see the mission through to the end. I didn't like being stared at like that, so I resorted to cleaning up the tangled cables of my rig extra diligently, to avoid having to look at them.

Lieutenant Steel stepped up next to me and cleared his throat.

"Well done, all of you. Extra points to the whole team for your excellent performance under pressure, and to your commander for improvisation," he lauded us.

He was typing something on a tablet, then looked up at me for a moment, and then down at the tablet again.

"So. Cadet Sky. It seems like you just broke all known records of consecutive missions with 100% unit retrieval. Despite my... efforts."

He met my gaze with a deadpan expression on his face, but I saw a spark of excitement in his eyes. Maybe it was just his age, which was closer to us cadets than most other instructors, but sometimes he seemed more like a rival than a superior, and he had made it his personal mission to get me to sacrifice a unit and forgo my self-imposed fifth lesson. That little game between us had been going on for years now, and so far, I had always won. But he was never sore about it for long.

And so, even if he didn't say it, I knew that he was proud of my achievement. Probably even more so than myself, because the curse of perfectionism usually did not allow me to revel in my victories very long before I had set my mind on the next task.

"Thank you, sir," I replied quietly, "You didn't make it easy this time."

"You're a tough nut to crack. But I will get you... eventually" he smirked, and I found myself smiling back at him.

He clapped his hands together again to get everyone's attention.

"Thank you everyone, good job – that means all of you. Remember, you are here to learn, and if you didn't make it to the end this time, use what you saw here today to perform better next time. And practice, people, practice! I hope I don't need to remind you of your upcoming finals. Class dismissed."

That little game we played through his sims was only one reason why he was my favorite teacher. The second one was the fact that Lieutenant Steel never shot me down when I had a question. So while the other students began to make their way out, I addressed him again.

"About those worms, Sir. Are they your creations? Or are they..."

"Real?" he finished my sentence. "Well, in these simulations, technically everything is my creation. But in this particular case, well, I will let you guess."

He crossed his arms and looked at me expectantly. This was another part of the game – the one in which I tried to figure out if what we had seen in his sims had been a reflection of actual places or creatures, or had just been born from his imagination.

"Well, what do you think?"

"Their size was quite impressive for a kind of... nematode, I suppose?" I pondered for a moment. "Sensing electromagnetic waves is definitely something that we've seen in other animals. Now, spitting corrosive saliva? A stretch, but okay. But-"

"But?" he gave me curious look.

"The teeth."

"The teeth?"

"Creatures with unreasonable amounts of teeth, okay, I can believe that, in principle. But that rotating kind of movement that they did..." I gestured with my hands and shook my head. There was no way for me to imagine how what I had seen was physiologically possible.

"Aww, damn. Was it too much?"

"Yeah. But very convincing for a few seconds when I stared down that maw."

"Well, better luck to me next time," he shrugged with an exaggerated sigh.

"Of course." I turned to leave with a smile on my lips, but then I remembered something else.

"Oh, and one more question, sir. There was something else. Like..." I searched for words to describe what had happened, unsure if I had perhaps just imagined it. But now I had already started, so I decided to finish my sentence nonetheless. "There was this split second of a delay before the pulse from the ADM hit the worms. Almost as if the simulation didn't know... what to do in that case. It felt like... lag."

It had been a weird feeling, and it had lasted probably less than half a second, but it had seemed as if time had stood still. It was something I had never experienced in a simulation before. This training was, after all, supposed to prepare us for the real world, which we would get to roam eventually – albeit only indirectly, through remote-piloted suits. Still, the terminals running these training simulations were among the fastest in the city, and usually able to emulate the most complex scenarios effortlessly.

"Huh, really," he feigned ignorance, but I knew him well enough to be able to tell.

"Honestly, Sir," I narrowed my eyes at him, as it occurred to me what he insinuated, "How did you expect us to take these things down after they ambushed us?"

He shrugged, then grinned mischievously.

"I didn't. It's not my job to come up with the solution. It's my job to find new problems for you to solve. The program was supposed to figure out on its own what would work and what wouldn't, based on the parameters I created for the creatures. It may have reacted a bit sluggishly because I had not anticipated such a... creative approach."

"But then –"

"The other teams didn't even have any ideas when they were attacked and realized a frontal assault with their weapons was not working out too well. Sky, this mission was intended to be failed - by all of you."

Baffled, I raised my eyebrows. The extent of my confusion must have shown on my face quite obviously because he smirked at me.

"It was quite interesting to see that even when you are set up to fail, you succeed," he went on, giving me that curious look again. "'Failure is not an option' for you indeed. You are an interesting cadet, Sky. And now you should hurry, or you'll be late for your next class. Carpe Diem."

"Carpe Diem," I whispered back, deep in thought about his words even as I walked out of the classroom.

I had expected that I had just overlooked something. An obvious solution, another, less obscure weakness to the creatures that I had overlooked. I had never dreamed that I would have to almost break a simulation in order to finish a mission.

"Hey."

A voice called out to me, sharp and unpleasant. When I raised my head, I spotted Lily lurking in the hallway. As she met my gaze, her facial expression went from tense to sour.

Lily was a very beautiful girl, with long, brown hair and big doe eyes, and her looks fooled many people into thinking she was innocent and sweet. She used that fact to hide her true, self-absorbed, backstabbing, coldhearted nature pretty well. But I had come to see her true face during our early days at the academy, when this girl and some of her friends had for some reason decided that it would be a hilarious pastime to make my life as hard and unpleasant as potentially possible.

Years had passed since then, and the vicious pranks they played on me and nasty rumors they spread about me had ebbed over time. I was never one for holding grudges, so for the most part I was perfectly happy to go about my life completely ignoring her existence, but whenever we had to interact, I realized that she was still a tremendously obnoxious person to talk to.

"Well if it isn't little miss perfect," she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm, as she stepped out and blocked my way.

"You humiliated me back there," she growled, "And I don't like being humiliated."

I heaved a deep sigh.

"Lily, in case you didn't notice, our team was actually the only one to finish. We did a good job. Why can't you just be happy about that? Besides, I don't recall doing anything to humiliate you."

"You had Flash shoot at me!"

"Out of necessity! I clearly explained my plan to all of you. Do you want me to tell to you again how an EMP works? I thought you passed Electrical Engineering and Unit Maintenance with 100/100 like me, but maybe you need a refresher?"

That comment hit home, and she grit her teeth in anger. While it had taken me years to learn how to stand up to her abuse – bruising her ego a little bit like that usually did the trick - my heart rate still tended to climb to uncomfortable heights whenever we argued like that. Fortunately, that didn't happen too often any more these days.

"You didn't know it would work!"

"That's... true, but it was as good a plan as any, don't you think?" I said and shrugged. "Or did you actually have something better in mind?"

She bit her lip in frustration and said nothing. The way she averted her gaze and heaved a sigh was a strange sight – this was different from our usual occasional arguments.

"But it's still your fault!" she said without looking at me, sounding like a sullen child.

I had a feeling that we were not just discussing the mission here, she just took it as an excuse to vent her frustrations, whatever they were about. She was one of the pretty people, and if TV advertisements were to be believed, they didn't have a problem in the world that couldn't be solved with money.

"What exactly is my fault?" I asked in annoyance, "I didn't program the sim, and I didn't put you on my team. Heck, neither of us wanted that. So would you kindly leave me alone-"

I stepped to the side, but she blocked me again. I met her sullen expression with an annoyed glare. I knew that if I had to, I could probably overpower her, especially after my recent training with the Enforcer cadets. For a split second I actually seriously considered getting into a brawl with her right there and then, despite the trouble it would get me into.

She leaned in and narrowed her eyes at me, bringing her face so close to mine that I could smell that she had been chewing strawberry-mint gum not too long ago.

"You seem awfully close with Steel. How come?" she asked.

Her voice was so full of scorn that I involuntarily shrunk away from her a bit.

"Just because I ask Lieutenant Steel questions about his programs doesn't mean I... it doesn't mean anything," I replied quietly.

There was more offense and fluster in my voice than I had hoped. I knew what she was insinuating, and it was ridiculous. Nonetheless, my cheeks began to burn.

"Yeah, I can hardly believe it either that anybody would go for someone like you - but why else would they pick you for the Agalma Project?" She stared me down through narrowed eyes, arms crossed, and suddenly seemed much taller than me.

And just like that, she was able to make me feel insecure and powerless again. With nothing but a few words. After all these years. All that feeling of triumph and success from just minutes before, when we had beaten the mission, had completely vanished, and I felt small and empty. It seemed like some things never changed, after all.

"You know that's bullshit. I got selected because-" I bit my tongue.

I couldn't tell her the true reason why I, specifically, had been chosen. Even I was not supposed to know about the interface issues. I had tried to reassure myself time and again that they wouldn't have asked me if they hadn't thought I could really pull it off, so my skills must have played some role, at least. I was on top of my class, after all. Steel had nothing to do with it, I knew that, she was just lashing out blindly at this point - but her stupid comment still affected me.

Perhaps the interface really just didn't leave them any other choice... I thought, as my gaze dropped to the floor before my feet.

"It's because of my grades," I mumbled, despite better knowledge.

"Because of your grades. Sure." she repeated mockingly, her words laced with disdain. "Listen up now, next time we're on a mission together you better-"

Footsteps were approaching, and she must have heard it to because she fell quiet and turned to look along the corridor. I raised my head and spotted Blaze casually strolling towards us.

____
A.N.
I guess that's the first part I had to split kinda awkwardly, to avoid posting a huge 5k chunk :D But I think it is better this way - I hope it makes it easier to read!