Chương 56: 24.Electronic Warfare Course 24-3

The instructor walked over and stopped beside my station.

"Reason." Here we go again. How many people today were going to ask me to summarize my life choices in one word. I pulled up the blocked node.

"It was too clean," I said.

"At this interference level, a real friendly pulse wouldn't be this regular, and the heat signature wouldn't be this smooth. This one looks like someone pasted the textbook answer on their face and expected you to be moved by it." The instructor said nothing. But Evelyn spoke.

"Your read was right. You cut too fast." Her voice wasn't loud, but it was clear. That coldness wasn't bad temper—her brain simply ran at a lower temperature by default. I turned to look at her.

"You saw it too."

"Yes."

"Then why didn't you cut it?" Evelyn looked at me the way you'd look at someone using a knife as a spoon.

"Because cutting friendly access without secondary verification puts personal intuition ahead of the main process," she said.

"If you're right, it's called experience. If you're wrong, it's called an incident." I laughed slightly.

"So what's your plan—file a request form first?" Jess drew a very quiet breath behind me. Good. That line successfully split the air in the room. Evelyn didn't get angry. Which was the annoying part. She wasn't the kind of person you could easily provoke. The truly difficult ones are exactly this type: you stab them, and they first assess the wound depth before deciding whether it's worth responding. She reached out and tapped her own interface, projecting it to the main display.

"My method was to cross-reference the rhythm tail differential first," she said.

"Even the cleanest overwrite signal leaves extremely fine delay variance at the point of synchronization. If you cut directly, you break apart the camouflage structure behind it—which means you lose one chance to trace back to the source." Oh. I stared at her display. She was right. Behind the main map she'd opened a small window that almost nobody would notice, capturing rhythm tail differentials.

That blue marker's synchronization was so clean it was nearly suspicious—and she'd been using exactly that to slowly push it toward the false friendly column. Good. This person didn't just see it—she had a cleaner blade for it too. The instructor stood between us, looked at both displays for a few seconds, then tapped the main control station. The blue marker in corridor seven immediately exploded into red. Enemy overwrite node: confirmed. A low stir moved through the classroom.

Someone on the white-uniform side frowned. Someone on the gray-uniform side swore internally. And on my operator station, the unauthorized-interruption warning was still glowing enthusiastically. The instructor finally spoke.

"Hoshino Shimo: correct result, incorrect procedure. Evelyn Sado: correct procedure, slightly slow on efficiency." He paused and looked at both of us.

"Neither is perfect." Funny. That's exactly how I'd describe her too. He switched the main display back to the primary interface, his tone as calm as someone announcing a deeply impersonal arrangement.

"For the third exercise, you two are working together." … Wonderful. The Federation really does love binding problematic things together and expecting them to produce educational value. Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author. Evelyn didn't object. Neither did I. Because objecting wouldn't help, and I'd suddenly become curious: if you put someone like this next to me, which breaks first—the system or me. The third exercise launched.

Upgraded conditions: enemy and friendly signals overlapping, false nodes inserted into the internal network, partial optical feed delayed, communications showing three-stage repetition. In plain terms: the entire battlefield had been turned into a pot of data congee, and you were expected to fish out which grain of rice was poisoned. Evelyn and I shared a dual operator station. The way she sat down was clean too—like she didn't want the chair to get ideas about its own importance.

"I'll handle rhythm and nodes," she said, without looking at me.

"You watch movement vectors and anomalous behavior." Oh. Even her division of labor felt like a surgical briefing. I took the other side.

"You always work with people like this?"

"Most people aren't worth the time it takes to explain." I tilted my head at her.

"And me?" She finally glanced sideways.

"You cut stupidly just now," she said.

"But it wasn't random." …Quite the way with words. I laughed once.

"Thank you. Your compliments are as warm as a pathology report." Once the simulation started, we didn't talk much. Evelyn's hands were fast—fast in a quiet way. She moved through the noise like someone stripping wire, each layer cut clean: peel away the outer heat-signature false readings first, then lock onto groups with anomalous communication delays. I kept my eyes on the overall movement picture, watching for whichever node looked too human or not human enough. Ten minutes in, I spoke first.

"Node eleven." Evelyn didn't look up.

"Reason."

"It's waiting to be noticed," I said. Her fingers stopped for a fraction of a second. She pulled up node eleven immediately. It was a friendly marker tucked beside a supply bay—low heat signature, minimal movement, looking like a wounded unit waiting for extraction. Very plausible. Plausible enough to make you sigh. Evelyn looked at it for two seconds.

"Its heartbeat simulation is too even." I turned to look at her. Her eyes were still fixed on the display. She said it the way someone reads off a time—not showing off, just reporting. The corner of my mouth moved.

"You saw it too."

"Yes."

"This time—you cut or me?" Evelyn finally looked at me. Those ice-gray-blue eyes were very clear, very thin in the cold light.

"Trace the source first," she said.

"Cutting is wasteful." Good. I liked that line. We worked backwards together and pulled out an entire chain of false nodes—like extracting the enemy's whole intestinal tract from inside the system. The score on the main display kept climbing, fast enough to be annoying. That kind of score usually means someone is going to use it to demand you be more like a machine. When the final round ended, our pair was at the top of the class. Dual-operator priority identification: First.

Two seconds of silence in the classroom. Gray-uniform students glanced over at me. The white-uniform side went quiet in that high-end way—the we won't lose our composure, but we will be very displeased kind of quiet. The instructor looked at the rankings, then looked at us.

"Good result," he said.

"But I'll say it once: what the battlefield relies on is replicable process, not two people who happen to be irritatingly perceptive." I nodded.

"Understood." Evelyn said: "Understood." When she said it, it sounded more genuinely understood than when Akari said it. Which was more annoying. After class, people filtered out. Jess mouthed at me on her way past: you're done—you're binding white-uniform geniuses to yourself now. I gave her a very well-mannered eye-roll in return. I was about to close my station when Evelyn spoke.

"You don't distrust the system." I stopped and looked at her. Most people had cleared out. The ventilation was still running, and the whole observation classroom had settled into a low mechanical hum—like a very disciplined metal creature grinding its teeth before sleep.

"Oh?" I said.

"Then what am I?" Evelyn unplugged the data cable from the interface port, movements still precise.

"You distrust systems that haven't been tested by a real battlefield," she said.

"That's a significant difference." I looked at her. That line wasn't heavy. But it cut accurately. I laughed slightly.

"You don't simply trust the system either." She looked up.

"Then what am I?" I looked at her operator station—too clean. Her uniform—too clean. Those eyes that seemed to disassemble people into functions before deciding whether to dislike them.

"You trust that only what can be organized into the system deserves to survive a little longer." Evelyn was quiet for two seconds. Not the discomfort of being seen through. More like she was assessing whether the line was worth remembering. In the end she only said:"Most of the time, that's accurate." …Right. Principled in her coldness, this one. I picked up my identification ring from the station surface and headed out. As I passed her, she added one more line.

"Next time you want to cut a node, you can tell me first." I stopped and looked back.

"Why?"

"Because you cut too fast," she said.

"But your direction is usually right." That didn't sound like an overture. It sounded more like one blade saying to another: your angle is too wild, but the material isn't bad. I nodded.

"Next time you want to trace a source, you can tell me first too." Evelyn looked at me.

"Why?"

"Because you trace cleanly," she said.

"But sometimes the battlefield doesn't have time to wait for elegant." She didn't smile. But I was fairly certain something very faint moved in the depths of her eyes. Not pleasure—more like someone in a cold storage room putting their hand on a tool that happened to fit. When I left the observation classroom, the corridor's cold light lay across the floor like a row of unsigned verdicts.

Today's ledger: One: completed systems class, confirmed that the essence of electronic warfare isn't pressing keys—it's who believes the wrong thing first. Two: formally met Evelyn Sado—a white-uniform talent who keeps her interface cleaner than her interpersonal relationships. Three: completed a fourth collision in systems class, including: unauthorized interruption of a high-confidence friendly channel, publicly trading critiques with an Upper House surgical instrument, and accidentally taking first place.

Four: Evelyn isn't on the side of the rules. She's on the side of correctable precision. That's harder to deal with than someone who simply follows regulations. Five: I think I understand now—if I ever end up leading a unit, this kind of person would be very useful. As long as she doesn't start treating the whole team as interchangeable components first. The evening wind came through the central corridor, carrying the cold smell from the white towers above. Jess was the seam. Harvey was the patch.

Akari was the crosshair. Aida was the doctrine. And Evelyn— Evelyn was the kind of person who, in the middle of a battlefield with data falling apart on every screen, would look at it calmly and tell you: Don't panic. There's still a portion that can be calculated. That kind of person is dangerous. Not because she's here to reassure you. But because she's here to make sure that even as the world starts to distort, at least someone is still framing the distortion one grid at a time.

And the Federation loves that kind of person. The Federation loves blades. Especially the kind that know exactly how sharp they are, and are still willing to be put back in the box.