Chapter 138: Students’ Status
"You... seem really irritated. Did something happen, Tanya?" Eirwen asks Tanya, who is crushing a piece of paper in her hands, one disciplinary action added to five others she has accumulated in a single month, earning her several minor punishments that keep piling up.
"It’s these fucking idiots who gave me another pointless punishment!!! They don’t understand anything, absolutely nothing!!! Look at this, Eirwen!! I got a disciplinary action just for firing a single heat beam and eliminating the monster!! Why should I have to wait for my team to get into position to fight when I can kill the monster with a single concentrated heat shot!!?" She speaks as if what happened to her is completely incomprehensible.
"I have power!! Why should I have to limit myself just because I don’t have a higher position!!? None of this makes any sense! I saved us time and kept my team from having to take unnecessary risks!!! While everyone was getting into position, I took down the monster easily!!" Tanya says, repeatedly stomping her foot against the floor, expressing her dissatisfaction.
She doesn’t understand the problem, even though there is actually a logical reason for it, since if the monster were too strong or could reflect attacks, it would be a problem for everyone if she attacked while her teammates were still preparing. The formation was meant to ensure everyone’s safety, not to determine whether she could easily kill monsters or not.
Her poorly thought-out action really did save time and prevent injuries, but she did it in a situation that could have gone completely wrong, injuring more people than if she had done everything properly.
Eirwen is in the same area as Tanya, but they are not on the same teams, so Eirwen doesn’t really know what Tanya has been doing or why she has been receiving so many disciplinary actions.
However, Eirwen isn’t in the best situation either, for reasons similar to Tanya’s, even though Eirwen is more obedient.
"...I...think you shouldn’t complain so loudly. You could get another reprimand if a superior passes by and hears you criticizing everything..." Eirwen says in a completely unenthusiastic tone, because she also received two reprimands, one for throwing an ice grenade at a monster when she wasn’t supposed to, and another for making the environment too cold and damaging military equipment.
Eirwen completely forgot that it isn’t enough to simply protect her allies; she also can’t destroy the supplies they are transporting or the equipment being used for communication.
Because of the ice, the batteries they were carrying became useless, and now they can only be melted down to salvage a small portion of the materials.
"Things aren’t easy at all! Honestly, Professor Zenith never said anything about this!!" Tanya complains as if Zenith were largely to blame, even though compared to them, Zenith could barely use her powers freely and, for the most part, had to work as part of a team.
"Honestly, these idiots don’t know anything!! They’re doing everything wrong. Punishing me like this makes absolutely no sense." Tanya doesn’t stop complaining to Eirwen, who simply listens in silence.
"If I can’t kill monsters instantly, then why am I on the team that has to kill monsters while other teams transport things?! Honestly, it makes so, so, so little sense to me!!" Tanya seems to be complaining in circles without actually trying to understand where she went wrong, which begins to irritate Eirwen a little as she thinks about the mistakes she herself has made.
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"Good job, Ashlyn. That wasn’t bad at all. Your help is more efficient than I expected." Rouge praises Ashlyn. Rouge is outside the ruins with the monster extermination team, while Ashlyn was sent along as support.
Both of them are doing well at their jobs. Ashlyn’s power is extremely useful, and strategically, her abilities have improved the team tremendously, making her quite a valuable asset.
Meanwhile, Rouge has a very efficient power for both support and attack, allowing her to help her team effectively. And because she is stricter about rules and things like that, she follows orders as they are given instead of trying to find loopholes like Tanya, which has earned her praise.
Since her synergy with the team is good, after all, she doesn’t really need to know how to work as a team. The person leading them gives orders based on position, individual power, the monster, and the situation.
They control the battlefield through commands that keep the allies from getting in each other’s way, greatly reducing the need for the team to know each other or understand how to fight as a team.
"O-Oh, thank you...this was so difficult... Honestly, the commander we have is absurdly efficient! He gives so many orders in such a short amount of time and manages to control everything!!" At the commander’s request, whom she obeys, Ashlyn created more than 1,000 shadows to attack the nearby monsters. With that, data was collected using drones, and then the team, with Rouge included, was sent in to exterminate the monsters.
Thanks to Ashlyn’s shadows, the soldiers were able to collect data beforehand before fighting, which meant there wasn’t a single injury. That is why Ashlyn is important: her power allows them to conduct preliminary assessments, since her shadows are expendable assets, which cannot be said for soldiers who shouldn’t be sacrificed just to test the monsters.
Normally, the soldiers would have to fight the monsters and only discover what they could do in the middle of the fight, but because the monsters have to fight Ashlyn’s shadows, they end up revealing their powers, meaning the soldiers don’t have to hold back at all.
"Do you think we’ll have more work today?" Rouge asks as she sits down in the chair and drinks from a bottle of water, her wolf tail wagging as she wipes the sweat from her forehead with a handkerchief and enjoys her break.
"I-I don’t know. I-I don’t think so. I wasn’t called in, so I-I think we’re going to take a break for today, since the overwhelming majority of the monsters nearby have been eliminated and prevented from e-entering the ruins."
"Besides, at the request of our superiors, I-I’m keeping the shadows patrolling within a 100-meter radius around the area o-outside the ruins, so I’ll notice if a lot of monsters show up." Ashlyn explains what she thinks, though she isn’t certain.
"I hope we don’t have any more work today. I’ve got a headache. I’ve never had to use my powers this much in such a short period of time. I never imagined the team in charge of extermination had to work this hard." Rouge complains about the work to Ashlyn, who generally doesn’t have to do as much as the others since her power does almost everything on its own.
"By the way, how the hell did Professor Zenith, who could barely use her powers freely, do this monster extermination work?" Rouge asks Ashlyn, who has had more contact with the technical side of the job.
"Ah! I-I asked, and the commander we’re obeying said that Zenith generally used weapons, her fists, and her tail, and killed monsters with her hands, so she barely used her powers unless necessary."
"And when necessary, she preferred to use electricity or magnetism to fire metal objects at high speed!" Ashlyn tells Rouge with a confident smile at what she discovered.
"...Cool. It must have been pretty tiring for her to have to fight monsters using her body and weapons. Honestly, the monsters aren’t that strong, but there are so many of them that they end up being drawn in from outside the ruins by the concentration of people."
"By the way, Ashlyn, I heard that the number of people in the ruins is limited to 500 to 1,000 people at most precisely to reduce the number of monsters attracted to us, so honestly, your help here is immensely important!"
"I was told that without you, the patrol and extermination would take eight hours just to collect information, and the monster extermination mission would take three days! And that was cut down to five hours!" Rouge is genuinely impressed.
She had always thought Ashlyn was the weakest and, because of her withdrawn personality, would be one of the ones who helped the least, but her power helps far more than she would if she were a powerful combatant.
"H-Hahaha..." Ashlyn lets out a shy, embarrassed laugh at the praise as she sits down in a chair.
’Thank goodness my powers got stronger... haaa... if I were any weaker, doing all of this would be so difficult...’ Ashlyn thinks about her powers. Mycena gave her undeniable help in becoming stronger, which gave her greater practical control over her powers.
"Do you think the o-others are doing okay?" Ashlyn asks Rouge, who shrugs at her.
"I have no idea. They should be fine. Tanya and Eirwen are in a safer area than we are, Charlotte is helping a Vice Commander, and Edith is with the medical team. It shouldn’t be as difficult as what we’re doing right now." Rouge speaks to Ashlyn with a disinterested tone, while Ashlyn grows thoughtful about whether the others are doing okay.