The lecture hall of Class 4 was not filled with holographic charts today.
Instead, the lights were dimmed, and Professor Vane, a Level 300+ Weave Phase veteran, stood before them with a haunting look in his eyes.
He wasn't teaching from a textbook; he was opening a wound.
"History isn't just dates, students," Vane said softly. "It is the weight of lives spent to buy the peace you enjoy."
"Today, we look at the Luyten-99 Skirmish. I was the commander. It was supposed to be an easy patrol."
The Calm Before the Void
The projection ignited, pulling the students into the memory.
The scene began in the bustling Hangar Bay of the UCC-7, a Federation Mothership.
The air was filled with the hiss of pneumatic lifts and the smell of ionized fuel.
Kaelen saw a younger Vane, his face less scarred, laughing with a group of pilots as they boarded a small Patrol Class-V ship.
"Check those thrusters, Jared!" a young pilot shouted, slapping the side of a 15-foot Scout Mecha.
"Don't worry about me, Ama," Jared replied, his face bright with a casual, cocky grin. "I've got enough fuel to run circles around any pirate trash we find."
They were happy. They were joking about the dinner they'd have when they returned.
They looked like the older brothers and sisters of the students in the room.
"We took off," Vane narrated, his voice echoing in the silent classroom. "Target: A small pirate freighter suspected of smuggling raw ores. A 'Level 1' threat. Or so the math told us."
The Trap Springs
The patrol ship exited warp near a cluster of asteroids. The pirate ship sat there, looking like a rusted heap.
Vane ordered the mecha squads to deploy for a standard boarding procedure. "Mecha Squads 1 through 4, move out."
The hangar doors of the patrol ship hissed open, and the armored warriors launched into the vacuum.
Their Living Armors shimmered, beautiful and powerful. But as they closed the distance, the 'freighter' didn't run. It unfolded.
"The math shifted," Vane whispered. "The freighter was a shell. Inside was a Pirate Dreadnought—The Obsidian Fang."
The Dreadnought didn't just fire; it unleashed a Gravitational Anchor.
The patrol ship was caught like a fly in a web. The unexpected energy surge fried the sensors of the lead mecha pilots.
The Mathematics of Death
The battle turned gruesome in seconds. The Dreadnought's main cannons opened up—not with lasers, but with Matter-Disruption Slugs.
Kaelen watched, his heart hammering, as Jared's mecha—the boy who had been joking just minutes ago—was clipped by a glancing shot.
The armor didn't just break; it shattered, the vacuum of space sucking the pilot out through a hole the size of a fist.
"Captain! We can't break the anchor!" Ama's voice screamed over the comms. Her mecha was hovering near the Dreadnought's engine core.
"The mothership is too far! We have to blow the anchor from the inside!"
Professor Vane stopped the projection on a frame of the tactical map. "Look at the board, class. Use your Game Theory."
"At this moment, I had two choices: Option A, order the remaining mechas to retreat—98% probability of ship destruction."
"Option B, order Squad 3 to perform a suicide burn into the docking bay—75% probability of ship survival. 0% probability of Squad 3 survival."
The students sat in horrified silence. This was the "High-Dimensional Math" Marcus had talked about. It wasn't about numbers; it was about souls.
The Final Charge
"I chose Option B," Vane said, his voice trembling.
The projection resumed. Ama and three other pilots didn't hesitate. They knew the math.
They ignited their boosters, their Ribbons flared to maximum output—the Loop Phase glow blindingly bright.
"To the Federation!" Ama's voice crackled once, then turned to static as she dived into the teeth of the Dreadnought's point-defense cannons.
The screen erupted in a series of brutal, silent explosions. Armor plating was torn away like paper.
One mecha was bisected by a beam of light, the pilot's body-half drifting away in a spray of frozen blood. But Ama made it.
She slammed her mecha into the anchor's core and detonated her own Ribbon reactor.
The shockwave broke the anchor. The patrol ship jerked free.
The Aftermath
The scene ended with the younger Vane standing at the observation window, watching the debris of his friends' mecha drift into the dark.
There was no victory music. The lights in the classroom came back on.
"They died so I could stand here today and teach you," Vane said, his eyes locking onto the students.
"The pirates didn't win because our information was wrong. They won because they were willing to be more cruel than we were prepared for."
"As you prepare for the Strand Phase, remember: Every level you gain makes your life more valuable, but it also makes the cost of your sacrifice higher."
Kaelen felt a chill that the Type-4 serum couldn't warm. He looked at Mina, whose eyes were wet with tears.
The lesson was clear. The universe didn't care about their "happy faces." It only cared about the geometry of the fight.
And sometimes, the only way to solve the equation was to subtract yourself.