[TAS] Volume 2 - Chapter 109 - Learning (Patreon)

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Hello everyone, LunaWolve here!

RR has received Intermission 106.4 - Subterfuge today with no major changes.

For the Wolf Lords, this chapter has seen no major changes.

And also: Please do not read the chapters here on Patreon, but go for the googledoc, .pdf or .epub instead. Patreon butchers all forms of formatting and you're missing out on easier and more enjoyable reading experiences.

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We're SO back, y'alls.

Racing straight towards the Challenges now to finish up Vol 2, Book 2~!

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I'm looking forward to hearing your first impressions and opinions on this chapter. \o/

I hope you will enjoy it!

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Volume 2 - Chapter 109 - Learning

Where the Offensive Heavy exists to be seen—to draw the enemy’s attention and fire towards them—the Defensive Heavy exists so the squad does not get killed in the process.

The Defensive Heavy, however, is not a “tank,” as the more classic gaming-terminology and archetype would have it—no single Marine can easily fill that particular role. 

The classical tank generally is, in UHF doctrine, a two-Marine construct: The aggro-drawing Offensive Heavy and the unkillable Defensive Heavy, operating as a bonded pair. 

The first drawing fire, the latter making sure the squad survives the following onslaught.

As such, the mandatory sub-roles for a Defensive Heavy reflect this division of labor:

• Damage Interdiction: The capacity to place themselves—via equipment, body, or Ability—between tremendous incoming harm and the squadmates it was intended for, and to do so repeatedly.

• Protective Positioning: The ability to read firing lanes, angles of approach, and squad movement, as well as the capacity to change their own positioning via Damage Interdiction to maintain cover geometry for multiple squadmates at once.

• Mobile Anchor: The skill to advance, withdraw, and manoeuvre while defending the squad.

• Sustained Durability: The personal resilience—through equipment, Attributes, and Ability investment—to survive the portion of the enemy’s attention that cannot be redirected, absorbed, or avoided.

A challenger must convincingly demonstrate all four in controlled simulations, squad evaluations, and assessment scenarios.

The optional sub-roles, meanwhile, are factored in as point bonuses during evaluation:

• Threat Projection: The capacity to be a credible offensive danger in their own right such that an enemy cannot simply work around the Defensive Heavy as a static obstacle, but must actively account for them.

• Choke-Point Control: Specialized proficiency in holding narrow terrain, where a single heavily armoured Marine can deny an entire push.

• Mobile Cover Provision: Mastery of full-cover shield systems and grav-lock deployments, providing firing positions and safety for squadmates mid-advance.

• Guardian Response: Reflex-interception of threats to specific high-value squadmates, including blast redirection and shrapnel management.

• Counter-Collapse: The ability to blunt, stall, or reverse a committed enemy push after the line has already been compromised.

• Self-Recovery: On-the-fly healing, equipment repair or massive damage mitigation without Squad Medic support.

• Area Denial: Equipment or tactics that make the chosen ground of the Defensive Heavy actively hostile to occupy.

• Last-Stand Doctrine: The psychological capacity to continue performing the Role at full effectiveness while isolated, surrounded, or beyond reasonable expectation of survival.

It should be noted that evaluation weighting for this Role is unusually skewed toward the mandatory sub-roles. 

An impressive offensive repertoire can never compensate for a dropped full-cover shield. 

The UHF has a great number of Marines who can kill the enemy, yet it has never once had enough who can keep the enemy from killing them.

[Excerpt from “Excellence Through Design: The Philosophy of the Challenge System, The Defensive Heavy”, UHF Recruit Training Codex, PFC 724]

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“—which brings me to the part that’s always a bit awkward to say out loud” Evelyne said, tapping the final column of her comparison matrix, the booth’s display bathing her pale face in a soft blue hue. 

“Currently, Callahan is behind Rachel in almost every single category the proctors look for during a Challenge. There are only three areas where he will likely hold an advantage over her, as far as I have been able to discern; feel free to correct me if you feel I am overlooking anything: The mandatory sub-role of ‘Sustained Durability’—courtesy of his armour’s heavier cut and the larger shield he runs, both of which outweigh hers by a meaningful margin and likewise provide more personal protection than Rachel has access to—and the optional sub-roles of ‘Area Denial’ and ‘Last-Stand Doctrine.’ Practically everything else…” 

She paused, and something genuinely pained-looking crossed her features. “He is either marginally behind her, or—and I’m sorry to have to say this as krass as this—in a completely different star sector entirely.”

‘Huh… Either that’s actually the truth, or she’s a really good actress,’ Thea noted, watching the visible reluctance on the other girl’s face before the words came out. ‘Probably the latter, knowing what I know now… Fantastic.’

“So if Alpha Squad truly intends to retain Callahan as your Defensive Heavy,” Evelyne concluded, “your main focus needs to be the mandatory sub-roles. All four of them. You will not have the time to meaningfully build up any of the optional sub-roles beyond maybe one—two at the absolute most—no matter how much of a head start Thea’s read on Masters’ exact Build gives your preparations and training. The remaining two weeks until the Challenge simply don’t allow for more than that—and even that much is a stretch, in my honest opinion.”

A sober silence settled over the table at those words.

They were seated around a table of one of the Sovereign arcade’s private booths once more—it was, as always courtesy of Thea, completely covered in an assortment of snack bowls and drink pouches from the arcade’s own kitchen and bar, which Desmond was currently taking full, shameless advantage of, reaching across the table to drag an entire bowl of fried-something toward himself during the intervening silence.

It was the day after the Psychic 101 lectures—and after Corvus’ rather dramatic proclamation about Thea’s role in dealing with the Sen Heiress—they had collectively decided to immediately set up another training session with Evelyne and Lucas for the following day. 

There was no real point wasting days they didn’t have.

Desmond had, somewhat surprisingly, decided to also join in once more, having apparently learned quite a bit from the previous session he’d been part of. Thea hadn’t really had a reason to deny the request at the time, so the four of them were now seated around the table.

She did, however, have the slowly emerging feeling that a good part of his motivation might have been that he was still vying for Evelyne’s attention—despite Corvus’ very distinct warnings to keep away from her. 

‘Somehow, I get the feeling that the warning had the exact opposite effect on him…’ she couldn’t help but note, as she caught him ogling Evelyne’s figure for what must have been the thirtieth time in the past two hours. 

He was trying to be sneaky about it—quick glances disguised as simply reaching and looking for certain snacks in Eve’s direction, as checking the display between them—staring through its transparency at the other girl, as stretching at times, even—but with a Perception as high as Thea’s, it was practically impossible not to catch him each and every time. 

Especially because his heart rate flickered marginally upward every single time he did so, like a quiet alarm-drum that went off in Thea’s head whenever Desmond decided to make a dumb decision once again.

Which was apparently quite often.

Regardless of that strange social tidbit—which Thea didn’t particularly care for, if she was being entirely honest with herself—having Evelyne on board for another training session was, as Alpha Squad had collectively agreed yesterday, Karania included, a non-negotiable part of the “Keep Lucas in Alpha Squad” plan.

They’d chewed through many, many alternatives over several hours, especially during the dead downtime where the Sovereign had sat outside the Void for Captain Cross’ announced lane change—which had meant Kara’s and Ela’s plans for Skill Trainings were on hold anyway—and had come up with exactly zero better options than paying Evelyne’s asking price and subsequently accepting the increased exposure of Alpha Squad to the Sen Legacy that came bundled with it.

Corvus hadn’t been particularly happy with it, but he also had begrudgingly admitted that it was, ultimately, their best shot at trying to keep Lucas—he was under no illusion that Rachel would somehow simply bomb the Challenge without them doing anything.

Thea and Lucas had tried their best to make one thing crystal-clear in that discussion: They would never ask anyone to join who didn’t volunteer freely, to try and minimize the Sen exposure as much as possible. 

Which hadn’t exactly led to putting Corvus at ease, as they’d hoped, as he had simply pointed out that this was exactly the issue when dealing with the Sen.

“The Sen never make you do anything you don’t want to,” he’d said. “They entice you with the things they already know you will want. That’s what makes them so damn dangerous in the first place. You never feel like you’re truly giving anything up when interacting with them, until one day you realize you’ve racked up a massive amount of debt—socially or otherwise.”

Those sentences had been swirling around Thea’s mind more or less constantly ever since, and were swirling again now, as she listened to Evelyne’s continued explanations and thoughts on how to proceed.

“As for the actual how of getting Callahan to where he needs to be,” Evelyne said, spreading her hands slightly in defeat as she wound down, “I’ll be honest—I’m not exactly sure. Training methodology isn’t my area at all. But that’s not really my job here anyway... I’m just here to provide the data and intel.”

“Alright.” Thea said, and took control of the conversation without missing a beat.

Training was her domain, after all.

“So there’s a specific kind of drill I used to run, back during Wildmaws’ Season of Attrition—it was a stretch of balance patches where tanky builds were extremely strong in the meta, so absolutely everyone was learning vanguard builds and styles,” she began, already pulling up the arcade’s Wildmaws custom-scenario editor on her datapad. 

“The setup’s simple, really: You get designated several ‘must protect’ targets, and the scenario spawns enemy groups that try to kill them despite your best efforts. The trick is that the conditions continue to evolve, however—the scenario reads what you’re doing and adjusts dynamically. For example, you overcommit to one flank? The next wave punishes exactly that. You turtle too hard? It starts spawning flankers. You can’t win the scenario. Like, at all—believe me on this, please, I’ve tried more times than I can even really count... It’s not built to be won. It’s sole purpose is to teach you basically everything Evelyne just listed as mandatory sub—”

Mid-sentence, her brain finally caught up with the manners she remembered she was supposed to observe around other people that weren’t her squad.

‘Oh! Right.’

She turned toward Eve mid-flow, giving her a small nod. “Thanks for the rundown, Evelyne, by the way. We really appreciate your assistance on this.”

The other girl seemed to simply freeze entirely at that.

‘Damn… I missed the right timing for that again, didn’t I…? Thank them first, then start talking, Thea. Come on, we’ve been over this…’ she quietly reprimanded herself, trying—once more—to burn the correct ordering into her mind. 

It was tough, though, when there was information to get out that was plainly more important than simple social niceties that the Sovereign’s cached GalNet had mentioned as important building blocks for conversation. 

Evelyne would have survived without a thank-you for a few minutes, she was fairly certain. 

But if Thea had forgotten what she’d wanted to say about the drill—

“That sounds… pretty great? Honestly,” Lucas interrupted her train of thought with an interested nod, leaning forward. “Which of the sub-roles does it cover, then?”

Thea thought for a moment, going through her memories of the many, many, many scenario runs she’d had done and running it against the sub-roles Eve had listed for them earlier.

“All of them. All four of the mandatory sub-roles are covered by it—though the ‘Mobile Anchor’ is not particularly prevalent, to be honest. Most of the time, the protection targets are kinda stationary, or just move very little. We’ll go for a different drill on that one, I think.”

She turned to Desmond, “I’ll slot you in as an enemy for Lucas to worry about, Desmond. Drone Operators are one of the most problematic enemies a vangua—ehhh Defensive Heavy can possibly encounter, so that’ll really amp up the difficulty for him.”

“I—I’m not sure we need more difficulty?” Lucas offered. “Shouldn’t we… I don’t know, try it out first? See how I do? I mean, before we add difficulty on top?

Thea looked at him with a single raised eyebrow, waving him off. “Higher difficulty means faster learning, Lucas. Why do you think I always used to run with handicaps in non-important tournament play? Why would you purposefully want slower learning, if we only have two weeks left?”

“I don’t think that’s true for… most people, actually,” Desmond interjected from Thea’s side, around a mouthful of fried-something. “Difficulty is a double-edged sword, in my experience. I say we try it out on a bit of an easier setting first, too.”

A frown settled on Thea’s face.

‘What? Why wouldn’t that be the case for everyone…?’ 

If something was too difficult for you, you simply had to try harder and think better, no? What else would a higher difficulty even do, other than make you learn faster?

That’s just how it worked. That’s how it had always worked. 

‘Double-edged sword…? In what galaxy…?’

Her eyes flicked to Evelyne, searching for an ally in the argument—

—and the other girl simply froze up again the moment their eyes met, going rigid as a statue like Thea had accidentally called on the forbidden Name once again.

Thea immediately dropped her gaze to the snacks on the table.

‘Fuck! Right… Forgot about the Cyan thing for a second there. Damnit!’

She let out a heavy sigh and threw both hands up in surrender. “Fiiiine. We’ll start with fewer enemy combatants, then. But Desmond’s gotta be a part of it—he needs more training on his drones anyway, so we can do a two-for-one here.”

Lucas and Desmond high-fived each other, for whatever reason Thea had not a single inclination of—

—and then stopped mid-motion, as she added rather forcibly: “I’ll add enemies as I deem necessary! And I won’t be hearing any complaints! Plan ‘Keep Lucas in Alpha Squad’ is under my direct authority by order of Corvus, so you will accept whatever I put in front of you!”

All three of them stared at her now.

Thea managed to hold out against their combined gazes—defiant face on full blast—for approximately three seconds, before she felt the heat creep up her neck and into the tip of her ears.

“A—Anyway, let’s get into the damn game already…”

—

“Aaaand he’s dead,” Thea muttered underneath her breath, chin in both hands. “Again.”

On the massive central-arena display in front of them, Lucas’ first-person feed dissolved into the scenario’s failure-grey as a trio of drones—Desmond’s drones—finished dismantling the last of the three protection targets behind him. Two charges had been lost to Stalkers in the opening breach, the third had just been mopped up by drone fire exactly eleven seconds later while Lucas was still trying to find the last Stalker-on-the-loose.

Final run time: Two minutes, forty-one seconds.

Their best of the day. 

Which was precisely the issue Thea was chewing on.

Her and Evelyne sat side by side on the large viewing stands at the side of the arena, watching Lucas go through the scenario for the fifty-seventh time—and also watching Desmond be an absolute menace with his drones, continuously finding new and, as Thea had to quietly admit, very creative ways to end Lucas’ runs in under two or three minutes at best. 

Not a single attempt had broken the all-important three-minute mark yet—at which the scenario actually really began, in Thea’s opinion—despite the comparatively low difficulty settings she had grudgingly agreed to start them on.

The current, easy configuration had Lucas protecting a group of three targets—squad size minus two, not including himself—and he kept slamming into practically the exact same wall, over and over and over again.

Around one minute and twenty-three seconds into the scenario—Thea had timed it subconsciously across several runs by now, her old instincts of trying to beat the damned thing resurging in full force just from watching it play out in front of her—the scenario spawned a group of enemies called the Stalkers.

It was not a particularly ingenious naming convention on Terra’s part, admittedly. 

But then, rarely did anything ever truly benefit from having some kind of unique, fancy name, Thea had come to realize over the many years of dealing with all sorts of games at the Golden Age Arcade. 

The best naming convention was, frankly, the one where you could immediately ascribe accurate or semi-accurate attributes to whatever it was that the name was meant to describe.

And Stalkers, much as the name implied, were the scenario’s stealth pressure: High-level adaptive camo that bordered on practical invisibility and a nasty habit of ignoring the Defensive Heavy entirely to go straight for his charges. 

It had taken Lucas half a dozen attempts to realize they even existed—his first several defeats had likely seemed, from his perspective, as if his protection targets had simply fallen over out of nowhere—before he’d finally realized they were around and slowly started assembling a gameplan against them.

A gameplan that Thea could not help but feel was extremely naive, for a lack of more polite words.

His solution has simply been to saturate the likely approach lanes with the Havoc’s area fire and hoping the splash clipped whatever was creeping in. And it had worked, admittedly… For exactly two scenarios—but from the third onward, as the scenario evolved around whatever the player did, the Stalkers had simply adjusted to that bombardment. 

They’d simply started hugging the walls of the scenario’s buildings, slipping along cover that his barrages couldn’t efficiently saturate or worse—in two separate instances, his bombardment had actually blown open the very structures that had been funneling the enemy’s approach, carving brand-new avenues and sightlines straight to his charges.

Those rounds had ended very, very quickly after.

That had been around a dozen runs ago. 

Yet, even now, he was still struggling with every single Stalker spawn.

Thea was, much to her own dismay, getting frustrated with the situation.

‘This is why I never did drills with other people around… Fuck!’ she thought, fingers digging painfully into her cheeks. ‘Just switch your fucking weapons and aim for the footprints, Lucas! They displace the sandy floor and all dust swirling in the arena with every damn step! It’s not that hard! Damnit!’

She wanted to yell it at him so badly—had wanted to for the past ten attempts, honestly. The answer was sitting right there, practically waving at her from the central display every single round. 

But she knew better. 

Yelling the solution across the arena would defeat the entire purpose of the scenario. 

The drill existed to teach problem-solving and adaptability under pressure—the exact mandatory sub-role skills the proctors would be grading during the Challenge and the very ones that Rachel was handily beating him in, according to Evelyne. 

Handing him the answer on a platter wouldn’t build anything except dependence on her voice in his ear, which was the exact opposite of what he needed.

Still, if he was already stumped by mere Stalkers—practically a tutorial-scenario enemy, tier-one pressure, if even that—then it was not looking good for the two-week deadline they had… Not even remotely.

“You seem… distraught,” Evelyne offered from Thea’s right on the stand, her voice soft and carefully aimed. Thea breathed out a heavy sigh, nodding despite herself. 

She knew better than to let a Sen get a clean look into her psyche. She knew that. 

Corvus’ many, very wordy warnings were practically pinned to the inside of her skull after yesterday’s exceedingly long squad meeting… But this was too damn frustrating to stay quiet over.

“I don’t understand why he struggles so much with the Stalkers,” she said, waving a helpless hand at the display, where Lucas was currently resetting for the next run. “They’re practically a tutorial-scenario enemy. We only have two weeks, and he can’t even last three minutes after—what, two hours?! We’ve been in the arcade for over four hours now—counting your rundown—drilling for half of that practically non-stop, and we’re still basically at step one…” 

She turned towards the other girl, and the question came out more pleading than she intended. “What am I doing wrong here…?”

That was the real wound underneath it, she knew—as much as she didn’t want to admit it out loud to anyone, but still had. 

The “Keep Lucas in Alpha Squad” plan was her responsibility—Corvus had said as much in front of everyone—and here she was, failing catastrophically in the very first hours of implementing a plan that had seemed completely foolproof in her head.

‘Get to the arcade. Drill a lot. Learn a lot. Win the Challenge.’

It sounded naive and simple, sure… but that was literally how it had always worked. 

For her entire life. 

Every wall she’d ever hit had ultimately crumbled under exactly that formula. 

Grind the scenario. Suffer the pain, the humiliation, the resets. Extract the lesson. Improve. Break through. 

So why was it not working right now? 

Why was Lucas making practically no visible progress whatsoever?

Evelyne was quiet for a moment, her eyes on the display rather than on Thea—watching Lucas shoulder his shield and roll his neck for the next attempt—and when she finally spoke, her voice was noticeably measured, like she was being deliberately gentle.

Like someone handling something valuable they considered fragile.

“I don’t think you’re doing anything wrong, exactly,” she began. “The drill is phenomenal. Honestly, it’s probably the best-constructed training scenario I’ve seen anybody put together on the quick like this, even with a preset to work off of” 

She paused briefly, taking a shallow breath. “But… not everyone learns the exact same way, Thea. And… I think you might be assuming that the best way he learns is the way you would.”

Thea blinked at her, not following what the other girl was saying.

“Think about what this drill actually is, fundamentally,” Evelyne continued, still careful in her tone and wordchoice. “An unwinnable scenario that punishes you harder the longer you survive, with hidden information you have to infer mid-run. For someone like you, that’s—” 

She moved her hand absent-mindedly, searching for the right word. “—fuel, I’d imagine? The wall exists, so you throw yourself at it until you find the weak spot, and every death until then is just additional data to include in every subsequent run. You mentioned it earlier, yourself… You run handicaps for fun. Pressure sharpens you. But… For a lot of people, pressure doesn’t sharpen anything. It just… stresses them; makes them prone to mistakes. Which is something that needs addressing, no doubt. But trying to do too much at once, is just as detrimental, if not more so, than not addressing it at all. Every failed run makes people like that try their existing plan harder instead of looking for a new one—which is exactly what he’s doing with the bombardments, no? He’s not exactly… refusing to adapt. He’s just simply drowning too fast to.”

She tilted her head slightly, eyes still on the display, like she was too focused on her train of thought to do anything else but stare at it.

“Some people learn best under pressure, like you. Some learn through pure repetition—same scenario, same spawns, a hundred-hundred times, until the pattern lives in their very bones and instincts… And other people again learn best by watching—seeing someone else solve the problem first, and then reverse-engineering the solution backward to understand how they arrived at it. I’d say that none of these are inherently better than other types, personally... Especially the third one is actually most common for how a majority of squad-level tactics actually propagate in the field.” 

She took a deep breath, then looked at Thea for the first time in this conversation—not meeting her eyes directly, “Maybe the parameters need to change in a way that sparks his imagination, rather than yours. Or maybe this particular scenario simply isn’t conducive for him at all right now. Maybe it’s too hard—and it might become useful again later, once he has more tools and experience to apply inside it.”

Thea stared at her, mouth half-open.

She hadn’t expected that level of in-depth breakdown from her short outburst… But she couldn’t deny that what Evelyne was saying sounded logical, when laid out like that, as much as she still struggled to imagine other people not enjoying pressure for learning purposes.

Slowly, she turned back toward the display—where Lucas was, at this very moment, opening into run fifty-eight’s Stalker spawns with the exact same Havoc barrage pattern as the previous six times—and felt several things rearrange themselves in her head at once, with an almost audible click.

‘He picked up Rachel’s moves—or rather, my emulated moves from Rachel—extremely quickly after seeing me use them against him… And against Ela,’ she remembered, then. ‘He’s always asking others for advice and specifically for demonstrations… Even that naked woman yesterday mentioned that he’d asked her for advice in that regard...’

Desmond’s drones came in from yet another angle that Lucas had not been anticipating, taking out two of the targets in quick succession, before the Defensive Heavy could reposition his Stalwart in time. 

‘He’s one of those copy-cat learners that Evelyne mentioned, isn’t he…?’

Two minutes and thirteen seconds into the round, a Stalker managed to take out the third and final charge, once again blanketing the arena in the scenario-failure’s gray hue. 

It was exactly that moment that Thea came to a decision, abruptly jumping off the stands in one fluid motion and into the arena five meters below—opening her saved profiles in the Wildmaws interface mid-fall and selecting the faux-Rachel one she’d created for their first training session—before landing in full Defensive Heavy gear, a loud metallic thud and a huge cloud of dust erupting from her position.

“Lucas, tap out for now. Get some rest—and pay close attention,” she ordered, stepping with large strides toward the start spot at the scenario’s center. “Oh—and leave your equipment. I’ll need to wear it, or this won’t really work…”

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