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 was

which aspects of the Rhino had

settled on several major upgrades. They were not what he had expected to pick before consulting with the pair of tech specialists. Instead of adding more armor to the Rhino's hull or incorporating a

alternative, which in turn demanded the whole energy transmission system to be torn out and replaced with a

this upgrade vastly improved the logistics of the cohort, since the new spelltech reactor did not

be useful for something, after

the vehicle. Sunny had not paid it much attention before, but after receiving input from Kim, he understood how important it was

Army was going to quickly turn into hell. Being able to maintain a stable connection was even more important for the Irregulars, since the cohorts were meant to act semi-independently while being coordinated by Master Jet

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 be retracted and hidden beneath the armor

third upgrade was the most esoteric and abstruse. It involved extremely advanced spelltech applications which Sunny did not really understand, so he simply told Samara to choose the best

the Nightmare Gates produced. Everyone knew that Gates messed with technology and electronics in weird ways, but very few people understood

and die in the middle of nowhere for no apparent reason. So, even though it cost

tear only because

the specialists go, he made another

decided to enhance her combat performance by getting his hand on the most powerful mundane weapon available

receive an incredibly powerful — by the standards of mundane soldiers, of course