The New Recruit

Various other tasks were performed, each one taking about an hour to fully demonstrate. Each test was about a minute long, and with almost fifty teams, it was a long and tedious day, There was a half hour lunch break, where almost everypony complained about their backs, having been standing all day, but Ace and Peregrine had good reason not to complain; they were joined by Spitfire and Fleetfoot.

"You're lookin' a little thore, there, Athe," noted Fleetfoot. "Whath the matter?"

"He's being accused of cheating by the other students under their breath," answered Spitfire. "None of them has the guts to come out and say it to me, probably because they think I'm in on it. That, or they know what they're saying is wrong, so they won't come out and say it any more than they would announce that the sky is green with purple polka-dots. Sound about right?"

Ace nodded.

"You can speak up, kid. This isn't a formal injunction. This is lunch. Take a moment to rest."

He swallowed his food. "A lot of it stems from the fact that we didn't train yesterday. We took massages, and you were there when we took a moment in the hot tub. There's a lot of that rumour going around, too."

"You that in the tub with him?" chuckled Fleetfoot. "How dare you both take advantage of thomething that everypony ith allowed to uthe? It'th not like you were alone in there, right?"

There was a pause, eventually broken by Ace. "Well..."

"Nothing happened," answered Spitfire. "It was literally just a soak in a hot tub."

Ace nodded in agreement. That's really all it was. Sure, they were alone in the hot tub at the same time, smiling and chatting, and Spitfire even laughed at one point, but they weren't an item.

After lunch, everypony's performance took a small dip. They were all sluggish from being so stuffed, and sore from standing for so long, then sitting, then being made to stand again. Even Ace and Peregrine suffered from this. There was precedent that the students needed to be fed to have the energy to keep going, but without the extra time to let their food digest, their bodies were diverting energy away from their muscles to focus on their digestion.

Luckily, it was something that was easy enough to work with and not excessively dangerous. Going on the dizzitron immediately after lunch was a bad idea, but cloudbusting was easy enough. Ace and Perry scored a little bit better than they had the first time, but there were still rumours going around.

When it was time for the dizzitron, Peregrine very loudly and clearly asked for the machine to be set to maximum, and Spitfire approved. She knew his plan, Soarin knew his plan, and even some of the students knew what he was doing. No matter, though.

The group dizzitron was different from the solo version. Rather than releasing both participants at once, it would release the lead pony first, and then the wing pony would follow after. The lead pony was supposed to help his or her wing pony recover and land.

Except, that wasn't what happened, here. Peregrine was still not very good at recovering, and as Ace was released, he had to delay his gathering of a cloud to reshape into a glider for a few seconds. To everyone's shock and amazement, save for those few that had seen them practising, Ace rescued Peregrine from his spinout and brought them both back to the ground.

"That's not what I commanded you to do," was Spitfire's response. "Your lead pony was supposed to catch your wing pony." She paused, locking eyes with Ace, who had to keep from smiling. "However, I will also recognise that no pony is an island. When you're flying with a group, and one of you is spinning out, it's neither the lead pony, the wing pony, nor anypony in the formation's job to perform a rescue. You don't sit and wait for somepony else to help them recover. You help them recover. It doesn't matter whose job it is; you fly as a team, and you support one another. While you did not follow the instructions to the letter, you did maintain the spirit and purpose of the exercise. Even so, there's no penalty in the rulebook for the wingpony catching their lead pony. Your time is fifteen point seven seconds."

Ace once again had to listen to other ponies sneering at him for receiving preferential treatment. While Spitfire had not given most of them speeches, she was still making notes of the stand-outs. There was the cloudbusting team that had knocked one of the standby rescue teams off of their perch, there was the team that had kept colliding with each other on the obstacle course, and there was the team that had scored the academy record for cloud construction. There wasn't a lot of positive speech going around, and they'd prompted it twice. There was bound to be jealousy.

But they weren't done yet. The penultimate event of the day, just as it was starting to turn dark, was the lightning storm test. Ace and Peregrine were no longer worried, as they'd practiced all of the moves for this, and had found the method that would set them ahead of everypony else. It was the same as what Thunderstruck had done, with one exception. He had been working alone. They would be working together.

Ace dove off of the cloud headfirst on Spitfire's whistle, and Peregrine caught him by the knees. Thunderstruck had used his back legs to gather the clouds, but Ace could do it with his front hooves much easier.

Peregrine wasn't paying any attention to what Ace was doing. His attention was on where to fly next, and Ace would handle the rest. All he had to do was make sure he kept a tight grip on that earth pony.

Once the clouds were gathered, Ace let out a whistle, and Peregrine looped around in a circle, dropping Ace through a hole on the clouds that they'd bashed through at the beginning. He let Ace go right before passing, and Ace used the impact force of the clouds to compress them all together. Thunderstruck had needed to move in front of the cloud collision to force it to compact.

There was a brief moment of recovery as Ace rolled to the top of the cloud and started charging. Thunderstruck had to do this before starting the wind, but if Ace charged and Peregrine started the wind, they could do both at once. And as soon as the cloud was charged...

*BOOM!!*

Four bolts of lightning shot out of the bottom of the cloud in such rapid succession that they may as well have been simultaneous. And Ace was standing there on top, uninjured.