Aurora Over a Dead World

Chapter 21: Suspicions

"Wow... this is terrible! You shouldn’t be doing that to your students, right?" Delilah says, shoving her phone practically against my face and showing me a recording of my students’ fight.

"How did you get that? I thought the simulator data was restricted," I ask this woman with disgust. It’s been two days since we went into the simulation. I gave the students three days of "vacation" to have time to process the experience.

I spent those two days studying everything I could from the recordings at my house, but today I decided to come to the academy to grab some other, less relevant data from the machine, only to find Delilah, who’s talking my ear off.

"Well, I have access to the simulator’s private data. After all, I’m the one taking care of it and I help adjust it for the classes that use it," she says, explaining how she got access to the fight data.

"Haa... look, I didn’t give you permission to see that," I say sharply. This damn teacher got access to something I didn’t want others to see. I know these professors at this academy, the ones who’ve never really fought for real, wouldn’t accept my teaching methods, which are somewhat cruel.

"I was just checking if the simulator had some kind of failure during your session, since I didn’t know if you’d be able to use the machine! But you put your students in there to die!!!"

"Yeah, yeah, right, they died. I died too, you know? It’s not a real death. Besides, on a battlefield, being close to death is common." I’m nowhere near being among the strongest in the world.

I’m definitely strong, but there are many stronger than me among the Kairas. Astrid is a good example. She was the top 1 of her generation and has a power that’s really strong and hard to deal with, and she’d beat me in combat. The Chaos and Harmony power is truly terrifying.

Chaos and Harmony [Allows the User to completely affect the order of everything that exists within their line of sight, at the cost of an extreme overload on the user’s vision, affecting any vector that can be seen and calculated, applying another extremely heavy load on the brain when performing complex calculations. However, once the effect is realized, it is capable of generating Chaos or Harmony in any existing vector recognized by the user.]

’That makes me think, it’s crazy that Astrid revealed her power.’ Most Kairas hide what their power is when that power allows them to do many things. Thanks to knowing Astrid’s power, we also know its weakness.

Chaos and Harmony depend entirely on Astrid knowing the vectors she will try to affect and seeing them, and she needs to calculate everything at the same instant of use. That means if a vector changes even a tiny bit by a millisecond, her power simply fails.

And because of that, it’s almost impossible for her to manipulate vectors that have already been manipulated, like mine when I drag the sky, for example, since she doesn’t know how the altered vector works.

"That doesn’t matter!!! The simulator wasn’t made for you to go dying inside it! It’s still a physical experience that’s integrated into your brain!! And the brain doesn’t handle death well!!" she criticizes in a worried tone, but something in her concern sounds fake.

"Why does someone dying inside the simulation bother you so much? The simulator itself shuts down if the damage is considered dangerous for the brain."

"...W-Well, it would be horrible for those poor students to feel what it’s like to die! You were so cruel to them and—"

"Stay out of my business," I interrupt her, grabbing her phone. I mess with the settings, erasing everything and resetting the phone, then I crush it just to guarantee the chip inside it didn’t retain any saved data.

"I’m a teacher who will give classes the way I want, and I have Astrid’s permission for that. It won’t be you or anyone else who decides how I teach my students."

"Don’t go poking around in what I do in that simulator again. I might have to make it so you’re no longer a teacher here."

"..."

"Hahaha, of course, of course... I’m sorry, I went way too far," she backs down, but in a very strange way, because she keeps her friendly tone even with this obvious threat and situation.

"I’m truly sorry! You’re absolutely right, they’re your students! I’m just a teacher without much relevance, so I don’t want to lose this job. I won’t talk about this anymore, but I ask you to avoid overloading the simulator. It has limited memory for processing vectors it’s never seen before."

"The machine needs to compute and calculate 10 to the 64th power to realistically realize the effect of your vectors. So another confrontation as extreme as the one you did could make the machine error out," she starts to leave with this warning.

"...I’ll keep that in mind..." I say to her as she leaves the room carrying the remains of her broken phone. I grab my own phone, the one I recently bought, to ask Nexus a question.

"Nexus, why does a mere teacher have access to the private data of the academy’s simulator? And this is a question with Commander Nadir’s authority, rather than a question with my flimsy authority as a teacher." It’s so nice to be able to use Nadir’s authority because we are a duo in the system.

"[Delilah is the teacher who helped finish all the adjustments that made the simulator work. As such, she was put in charge of the simulator’s care and support.]"

"I see, so she’s the technician who maintains the machine." It makes sense. It’s like hiring someone to fix a computer; naturally, they’ll have quite a lot of access to your machine depending on what they’re going to do to it.

"But can she really just take private data and transfer it to her phone like that?"

"[Currently analyzing all academy rules, there is none that limits the scope of Delilah’s actions with the simulator. After all, she naturally needs the data to improve and readjust the simulator for the most realistic experience possible.]"

"Is there any way I can privatize data from the simulator? I don’t want to have to use that thing knowing she’ll always see what I do." I had a lot of plans for using the simulator, and I was willing to accept that Astrid would see it, but a random teacher?

A teacher who could be kidnapped, extorted, or even betray the academy and sell information, possessing data on me and the monsters I’ve seen? I don’t want to run that absurd logistical risk.

"[I’m not certain. The simulator is something new, a lot of data is missing. It’s necessary to speak with Delilah herself about it, or with Director Astrid.]"

"You can be really useless sometimes, you know that? But thanks for what you reported... I want a complete file on this Delilah. Something about her sounds... off to me." Maybe it’s because I’m paranoid and I detest optimistic people.

But doesn’t Delilah seem a bit strange? Normally, people take my threats more seriously, even if I’m not trying to impose my authority, or even if the person doesn’t know who I am.

"[I will gather all her data and put together a proper file on her... do you need anything else?]"

"...Not for now. I have to go over what I’m going to teach my students, so I’ll be busy." I have a lot to teach them now that I’ve already shown them the basics: how easy it is to die and how frightening a real battle is.