The Allbright System - A Sci-Fi Progression LitRPG Story

It is instead often experienced as a loss, on a psychological level.

Three months of silence is not trivial to the average human mind.

You leave conversations unfinished, routines unbroken, relationships placed on pause—only to return and find that, for everyone else, the pause never even existed.

Your friends and colleagues speak as if you had merely been gone for lunch. Your squadmates pick up conversations from “just yesterday” as if the same amount of time had passed for you.

The world has not moved, but you have aged inside it.

This mismatch is the core fracture point.

Humans are inherently built to measure relationships in shared time.

When that shared time desynchronizes, the mind searches for decay that isn’t there—and often invents it to protect its habits and routines. Marines frequently report feelings of isolation, displacement, and unreality after exiting a Skill Training, despite objective evidence that nothing in their relationship with their squadmates or friends has actually changed.

Interestingly however, a not insignificant number of individuals show almost an opposite reaction.

These Marines—often considered socially awkward by their peers or straight up flagged with attention deficit disorders by the psychological evaluations—operate on a different baseline assumption naturally:

Relationships do not change unless acted upon.

Time passing alone does not register as a similar loss nor an impetus for change.

For them, six months without contact feels no different than an hour. When they return, the world behaving ‘normally’ is not jarring but expected, for they have not been a part of said world, so no change could be enacted upon their relationships.

In civilian life, this trait is usually seen as a liability or a downside.

In a time-dilated military environment however, it becomes an unexpectedly big advantage.

As a result, while most Marines struggle to sustain more than three or four Skill Trainings per year without severe psychological strain, this subset can endure as many as they can afford—even back-to-back if time and credits permit—without any measurable degradation.

This phenomenon has been observed in every Drive and is closely monitored by Ship AIs and Officers alike.

Psychological support is available to all Marines—built directly into the cost of Skill Trainings themselves—ensuring there are always enough specialists on hand for those struggling with dissociation or reintegration.

Some, however, never feel the need nor are deemed as required to take that offer.”

[Excerpt from “The Quiet Gap,” a UHF internal psychology brief on the effects of time dilated Skill Trainings on Marines, PFC847]