The Allbright System - A Sci-Fi Progression LitRPG Story

Interview led by Senior UHF Correspondent Sela Bourne.

Bourne: “How would you describe the Marine Corps to someone who's never encountered it up close?”

Tavath: “The short version? The sharpest instrument the UHF has ever built.

And the reason for that is Integration.

Every single Marine is Integrated. Every single one.

From the moment a Recruit steps onto a training ship, they have access to the Allbright System, Abilities, Attributes that grow with them, and a Deep Dive Simulation environment that gives them thousands of hours of effective combat experience before they ever touch a real Battlefield.

The other branches can't have that—there simply aren't enough Integrated individuals to fully staff a Navy fleet, an Armored Division, and a Marine Corps all at once.

So the other branches supplement with Unintegrated personnel, which they do very effectively, mind you.

But that means there's a ceiling on what those personnel can become.

The Marines don't have that ceiling.”

Bourne: “The training structure—could you walk us through how a Marine's first year actually looks, in terms of who's involved?”

Tavath: “It's a lot more collaborative than most people likely realize.

The common image is Marines training Marines—some grizzled veteran teaching Recruits how to shoot and move and survive.

And that's part of it, of course. But only part.

Liaisons from every branch come aboard the training ships directly.

The Navy covers Zero-G operations, boarding actions, ship-to-ship combat—the specific mechanics of fighting in an environment with no floor and no consistent orientation.

Things a ground-combat instructor simply cannot teach from theory alone.

The Armored Division sends their own people to cover working alongside heavy machinery in active engagements, identifying weak points in enemy vehicles, positioning infantry relative to armor so each covers what the other can't.

Get that wrong in the field and Marines become a liability to the very assets they're supposed to be protecting.

Even the Civilian Auxiliaries send instructors, which surprises people.

But a Marine on the ground needs to understand logistics networks, infrastructure, how to read a building compromised by bombardment before putting a squad inside it.

Not glamorous subjects—but they save lives with remarkable consistency.

Bourne: “What do the other branches get out of it?”

Tavath: “More than people would expect.

The Marines staff the ships they train on—and a Marine who understands shipboard operations is genuinely useful to the Navy, not just as a body filling a post. When the Navy runs a boarding action, the Marines are the ones going through the breach. When a ship hits a Void corridor and Daemons come through the break points, the Marines are the ones keeping the crew alive. Unintegrated personnel simply don't have the capability to contend with that.

The AD benefits equally. Heavy machinery is enormously powerful and deeply vulnerable to close-range infantry pressure. A Marine squad moving alongside an armored column and engaging enemy infantry is what allows those vehicles to operate at all in certain environments—urban fighting especially. In return, the AD provides the fire support and breaching capability that Marine infantry can't sustain indefinitely.

For the Civilian side, the Marines provide the most important thing of all: keeping the war away from the population. Without them, every city becomes a Battlefield within hours of an enemy landing.”

Bourne: “The slogan, "Always outmanned, never outmatched"—what does it mean to you?”

Tavath: “The UHF does not have enough Integrated personnel to match the Stellar Republic or the Celestial Dominion in raw numbers—not on the ground, not in space, not anywhere.

Their combined fighting forces, featuring both Integrated and Unintegrated soldiers en-masse, is simply not something that the UHF can match.

That is simply the reality of the war.

We are always going to be outnumbered in some context, on some front, in some engagement.

That's not a failure of logistics or planning, but the galactic scale of the conflict we're fighting.

What the Marine Corps represents is the UHF's answer to the problem of “How can we catch up to every other Faction in this conflict, when we’ve started centuries behind?”

You cannot win a numbers war with numbers you don't have.

So, you build something that doesn't need numerical parity to win.

You take every Integrated individual you can find, you put them through the most comprehensive training framework ever devised, you give them the combined expertise of every branch of your military and civilian apparatus that you have, and you build something that the other side simply cannot replicate at any volume.

Because that same advantage—numerical superiority—is what would break them, if they ever tried to emulate us. If they tried the same level of education and training for their vastly larger contingents of soldiers, their entire Faction would collapse under the weight of it all.

So… Outmanned, yes.

Consistently. Structurally. By the very design of the conflict we are fighting itself.

But never outmatched.

To illustrate the point a bit more: We consider a Marine to be at the bottom of the UHF-internal boards, when simulations show that they would be incapable of handling at least a five-to-one encounter with Unintegrated personnel.

That's the Marine Corps.

That's what it is and what it's always been.”

[Shortened Excerpt from "Always Outmanned. Never Outmatched." — The UHF Galactic Standard, Issue 1,204, PFC 931]