Chapter 2111: Guerilla Fighter

This time the Records had evaluated the life the System had built for him. The two years at the academy, the scores in the simulators, the time spent flying alongside active pilots on the hub, and the long hours in Battlefield Tactics were all there in his records, and the Records had looked at all of it and drawn its conclusions.

Vanguard Pilot was the obvious one. It would make him better in the cockpit, sharpening the skills he already had and pushing him further along the path he was already walking.

Field Tactician was a natural fit for his work in Battlefield Tactics, a Calling built for commanding squads and reading battlefields.

Guerrilla Fighter was the one that caught his attention.

He did not know exactly what the Records had seen in his life that had led to it.

Perhaps it was the way he had flown in the blizzard, building a picture of the battlefield from scattered clues and striking at enemies who could not see him.

Perhaps it was the way he had used his allies as bait at the eastern line, or the way he had drawn the enemy into a trap during his tactics exam. Or perhaps it was something deeper that the Records had found in him, something he did not quite recognize himself.

Either way, it was the most interesting of the three.

And in a war built on disguise and infiltration, where any machine could be the enemy and any ship could be something other than it appeared, a Calling built around irregular warfare seemed like it might be the most useful one as well.

Ning reached out and pressed Guerrilla Fighter.

<Calling selected: Guerrilla Fighter.>

<Relevant knowledge and skills will now be granted.>

The knowledge came at once.

It did not come gently, the way the knowledge of winemaking had settled into his mind on the mountain all those years ago. It came in a flood, a sudden rush of information pouring into him from the Records, far more than he had expected.

Irregular warfare came first. He learned how small forces could fight much larger ones, how to strike where the enemy was weak and withdraw before it could respond, and how to turn an army’s own size and strength against it.

Ambushes came next, along with the principles behind them. He learned where to place them, when to spring them, how to choose terrain that would hide a force until the last moment, and how to read the signs that an enemy was walking into one.

Fighting outnumbered followed. He learned how to survive when surrounded, how to break through encirclements, how to use concentrated force against a dispersed enemy, and when to fight and when to flee.

Then came terrain. He learned how to use mountains, forests, ruins, and asteroid fields, how cover and concealment worked in every kind of environment, and how to move through ground the enemy did not know.

Supply denial came after that. He learned how to cut an enemy off from its resources, its reinforcements, and its communications, and how to starve an army without ever meeting it in open battle.

Hit-and-run tactics followed, with their methods of striking quickly and vanishing, of harassing an enemy until it exhausted itself trying to catch something that was never there.

And beneath all of it came combat in general. There were principles of movement and timing and judgment, lessons that applied to every kind of fight, from a single soldier in a back alley to a squadron of Mechas in the depths of space.

The knowledge kept coming for longer than Ning would have thought possible, until finally, after what felt like several minutes, it slowed and stopped.

Ning stood very still in the circle of light and examined what he had received.

He was mildly impressed.

He had expected the Calling to be useful, but he had not expected it to be so thorough.

Crownus had built the Heavenly Records more than a hundred and thirty thousand years ago as an experiment, a test of how a System might interact with people. He had told Ning that himself. He had called it barely more than an interface.

And yet the knowledge contained in this single Calling was genuinely practical.

It was the kind of understanding that a soldier might spend a lifetime learning through experience, gathered together and handed over in a single moment.

Much of it, Ning could tell, had not come from Crownus himself at all. It had been added over time, gathered from the lives and experiences of every person who had held this Calling before him, and refined over thousands of years of war.

Crownus’s simple experiment had grown into something far more than he had intended.

Ning could not help but smile slightly.

The words faded from the air in front of him, and the presence of the Heavenly Records withdrew from the edge of his awareness, leaving him alone in the circle of golden sunlight.

The priests who had been standing at the edges of the chamber raised their heads.

One of them, the older of the two, stepped forward and looked at a small tablet in his hands. It was connected to the temple’s records, Ning realized, and would have recorded the Calling the moment it was granted.

The priest’s eyes widened.

He looked up at Ning, then back down at the tablet, then up at Ning again. He turned and murmured something to the other priest, who hurried across the chamber to look at the tablet herself. Her expression changed in exactly the same way.

"Guerrilla Fighter," the older priest said slowly. "You received Guerrilla Fighter."

"Is that unusual?" Ning asked, though he could already tell from their faces that it was.

"It is rare," the priest said. "Very rare. In the last century, fewer than a dozen people across the entire Federation have received it. And it is highly valued, especially now."

He lowered the tablet.

"In a war like ours, where the enemy hides among our own ships and machines, and nothing can be trusted to be what it appears, a soldier who understands irregular warfare is worth more than a hundred who do not."