Shadow Slave

While the intense and arduous training slowly taught the members of the cohort how to fight together, Sunny had several other time-sensitive tasks to complete. Keeping up with all these concurrent responsibilities really tested his mental capacity, but there was no other choice than to simply grit his teeth and do it.

Probably the most important of the tasks facing him was to allocate his contribution points and acquire various assets to strengthen the cohort. However, that was not a straightforward issue. After several days of studying how his subordinates fought and getting acquainted with their Memory arsenals, he was finally ready to make some decisions.

To do so, he chose a moment when the three members of the melee vanguard — Belle, Dorn, and Quentin — were busy in the Dreamscape pods, and called his other three subordinates over.

After all, all three of them were specialists in various support fields that had to do with the cohort's equipment. Kim was a technician, Samara was a capable spelltech engineer, while Luster…

Well, Luster was supposed to be an ace pilot. That wasn't really useful in this situation, but what was Sunny supposed to do, leave the poor guy to sulk all alone in a corner?

After consulting with Kim and Samara, he gained a lot of insight into what would be the best way to spend the contribution points.

The Rhino might have seemed like a simple transport vehicle, but it was really so much more. Sunny did not know a lot about war and strategy, but he knew that mobility was one of the most important factors when determining the impact a combat unit could make.

That was especially so for the cohorts of the First Irregular Company, which were supposed to be elite rapid-response units that had to constantly travel between various flashpoints to provide support to the ground troops.

upgrading their APC

of the Rhino

specialists. Instead of adding more armor to the Rhino's hull or incorporating a powerful cannon to its forward

power reactor with a much more potent alternative, which in turn demanded the whole energy transmission system

things, this upgrade vastly improved the logistics of the cohort, since the new spelltech reactor

guy turned out to be

the command and communication suite situated in the rear of the vehicle. Sunny had not paid

to maintain a stable connection was even more important for the Irregulars, since

lot of juice to the communication suite, so Sunny could easily replace it with a much more advanced and powerful system that, hopefully, would have no problem punching through the mass of interference. The added external antennas, both the comically tall telescopic one and the more modest parabolic one, could

upgrade was the most esoteric and abstruse. It involved extremely advanced spelltech applications which Sunny did not

the detrimental effects that the Nightmare Gates produced. Everyone knew that Gates messed with technology and electronics

to make sure that the Rhino would not simply stall and die in the middle of nowhere for no apparent reason. So, even though it cost him a

did not shed a tear only

the specialists go,

by getting his hand on

the result, the cohort became entitled to receive an incredibly powerful — by the standards of mundane soldiers, of