Chương 249: Chapter 248 - Silence

Two weeks later, Alexander sat in the leather chair with the OACS spread across the central workbench in pieces. Not broken pieces. Organized pieces. Every plate, every seal, every internal component laid out in the order it would go back together, cleaned, tested, and modified. He'd spent the first few days stripping it. The computational core came out first. A dense block of processing hardware nested behind the chest plate, hardwired into every system the suit possessed. The brain.

The thing that made decisions, managed power, monitored seals, targeted threats, and controlled thrusters. The thing that worshipped him. It sat on a shelf now, disconnected, inert. He'd considered destroying it, but the engineering was too good to waste. And the impulse was immature, even for him. Someday he might repurpose the processing architecture for something that didn't need to wrap itself around his body. The thrusters followed. Shoulder units, hip stabilizers, boot jets, the spinal array.

Dozens of micro-thrusters designed to orient the wearer in zero gravity and provide controlled atmospheric flight. All of them ripped out, mounting points sealed with filler plates. He didn't need them. Metallokinesis handled flight. The thrusters were dead weight and more systems reaching for him with that blind, eager obedience. The weapon integration ports went next. Shoulder hardpoints, forearm rails, the dorsal mount behind the neck. Stripped, sealed, smoothed over. He had his own weapons.

The suit didn't need to carry more, and he didn't have time to build compatible ones anyway. What remained was armor. Pure, functional, unintelligent armor. And that was where the real work began. The atmospheric systems stayed as hardware. O2 recycling, CO2 scrubbing, pressure regulation, temperature management. All essential for operating in hostile environments, though he wouldn't risk using it in space anymore. Without the brain, there would be nothing to manage the systems if he passed out.

The life-support loop would engage using preset thresholds if its hardwired sensors detected a drop in oxygen. It would also do it because he told it to. But he wouldn't trust his life to it. The suit now ran entirely on dumb automation logic and direct Technopathic input. Basic, reliable, and silent. Every computational reduction meant there was less to worship him. That was the goal. The servo actuators at every joint presented a different challenge.

They provided enhanced strength and reaction speed, amplifying the wearer's movements. Under the original AI, they predicted intent and pre-loaded the response. Without the AI, they did nothing until activated. Alexander had rebuilt the control interface from scratch. Each servo now responded to direct Technopathy input, his power replacing the predictive algorithms. It meant the suit would move exactly when and how he wanted, with no lag from prediction errors and no initiative of its own.

It also meant he'd need to dedicate an entire mental thread to managing the suit's systems while wearing it. Power distribution. Servo control. Atmospheric monitoring. Seal integrity. All the things the brain used to handle, now his responsibility. One thread for the suit. One thread for everything else. Combat, drones, tactics, survival. It would work. It had to. The arms had taken the most time. He'd rebuilt both forearms to match the gauntlet's specifications.

Supercapacitor banks lined the interior of each vambrace, capable of storing and discharging substantial current. Ionization pathway generators sat in the palms, the same system his gauntlet and cybernetic arm used to guide Electrokinesis into coherent lightning bolts. He hadn't been able to match the cybernetic arm's full integration. That arm was a masterwork of engineering, with the alien cube's nanite-enhanced materials bonded into its structure. The suit's arms were cruder.

Heavier capacitors, thicker conduits, less efficient energy transfer. But they'd throw lightning where he pointed, and that was enough. The suit's internal power source remained untouched. A compact fusion cell seated in the lower back, feeding every system through distribution conduits that ran like veins through the suit's frame. He'd reinforced the cell's shielding so his own Electrokinesis wouldn't bleed into it during heavy use.

The last thing he needed was his powers interfering, but managing it manually as he'd had to during the fight with Radiant was too demanding. Alexander picked up the chest plate and turned it over in his hands. The damage from Radiant's kick ran diagonally across the right side. A stress line visible to his eyes and screaming through Metallokinesis, the crystalline structure of the alloy disrupted along a path that followed the impact's force distribution. The plate hadn't broken. The alloy was too good for that.

But the internal structure had separated along grain boundaries, weakening the plate enough that another hit in the same spot would punch through. He could have fabricated a replacement. Would have been faster. But the rest of the plate was perfect, and replacing it meant recalibrating how it seated against its neighbors. Instead, he reached deeper with Metallokinesis than he normally would. Past the surface. Past the grain structure.

Down to where the metal existed as a lattice of atoms arranged in patterns his power understood instinctively. He found the fracture line. Felt the gap where the lattice had sheared apart. This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it. Then he did something that used to be useless. Alexander conjured metal. It wasn't much. A thread of nickel-cobalt alloy, manifesting in the space between the separated grain boundaries.

The energy cost hit immediately, a steady drain from his Core that was disproportionate to the tiny amount of material being created. He guided it along the fracture line, filling the gap atom by atom. The conjured material bonded with the existing lattice on both sides, bridging the separation. Slow work. Painstaking. Each millimeter required sustained focus and a constant feed of energy. Then came the part that mattered. He eased his power back slowly.

Before, conjured metal had always dissipated the moment he stopped sustaining it. This time, he held the shape in his Will and refused to let the world correct itself. Reality fought back, but he ignored it. In this space, in this moment, the Machine God decided. Not physics. Not common sense. Alexander Rooke and his Ambition. A moment passed. The metal remained. A miracle, technically. Also slightly deflating, given it had taken twenty minutes to repair a fracture line the length of his index finger.

Still, he almost felt like an actual god. A tiny, little god watching over a sliver of metal. He sat back and checked the result with Metallokinesis. The repair was seamless. The crystalline structure ran continuously through the weld, with no boundary between original and conjured material. Stronger than the surrounding plate, if anything, because the conjured alloy had formed without the manufacturing stresses present in the rest of the piece. Alexander turned the plate over and started on the next fracture line.

There were four more. While his hands worked and one mental thread held the conjured metal in place, the other drifted across the workshop. Past Talia's hoverbike leaning against the wall near the door, its external panels replaced with a heat-resistant alloy that gleamed under the workshop lights. The internals were heat-shielded and insulated, every vulnerable system wrapped in ceramic barriers. Done. Ready for Flashpoint. Talia herself was back on Astra Omnia, getting Alice settled with the other rescued kids.

Alexander had managed to dodge that responsibility, citing too many things to do and oh so little time to get them done. By his count, they were going to need a daycare soon. That was someone else's problem though. His awareness spread further. Through the workshop walls, across the underground level, up through the house, and out across the island. Augustus was on the eastern cliffs. Alexander could feel the old man's signature pulsing in a steady rhythm. Flight practice.

The pattern had changed over the past weeks, growing more stable. Less strained. A week ago, Augustus had demonstrated for Alexander in the courtyard. Steady hovering, controlled lateral and vertical movements. It was neither fast nor agile, but the magic was reliable, and he had the Endurance to maintain it for extended periods. Between that and his portals, Alexander agreed it was good enough. Augustus had given him a look that suggested 'good enough' wasn't in his vocabulary, but he'd accepted the assessment.

He was still out there pushing. That was Augustus. Another signature flared on the western shore. Annie's MetaMetal blazed across his Metallokinesis like a beacon, bright and unmistakable as she launched off the cliffs. He tracked her trajectory through the air. It had taken a lot of practice, but she was now able to combine partial saurian transformation, generating dense reptilian muscles in her legs for the jump, while Density Flux Control shed most of her weight at the moment of launch. She was flying.

Wings beating in steady strokes that generated real lift, though her directional control was still rough. Her turns were wide and her corrections came in jerky adjustments rather than smooth banks, but she was airborne under her own power, staying up as long as she wanted, and improving every day. The thought of him facing Flashpoint alone had driven her hard enough that he'd wondered if she didn't have a little ambition of her own mixed in with her Heart aspect. He'd even offered to launch her at Flashpoint.

She'd grinned and asked if she could do a flip on the way to punch out his remaining eye. Felix and Gilly were absent from his senses entirely. They were on the other side of the Beastworld gateway, along with most of the crew. Hunting. Felix was not going to be ready in time for the fight, despite considerable effort. The decision had been difficult, but they couldn't afford any mistakes.

Thanks to the ongoing dissolution of AEGIS, with some of its infrastructure and staff being generously donated to the Compact under Maximilian's direction, Flashpoint's tour had been cut short. But they knew exactly where he was and for how long. And the window of opportunity was closing. Droney hovered near the far end of the workbench, watching him work. The drone's new armor caught the light as it rotated slowly, maintaining its usual patrol of the workshop.

The helmet was Alexander's favorite piece of recent fabrication. Round, hinged along a single joint that allowed it to fold open for maintenance access, with a narrow visor slit across the front. It looked like a medieval knight's helmet scaled to fit a drone the size of a basketball. Droney had examined its reflection in a polished plate for a few minutes after Alexander fitted it. Then it had beeped once, a wave of approval washing across the bond, and returned to its patrol. The third fracture line sealed.

Two remaining. A thought surfaced as he worked. The nanites in his body were made of an advanced alloy he'd studied extensively through Metallokinesis. He knew its structure. Knew its composition at the atomic level, even if he didn't know what the metal actually was. If he could conjure that specific alloy and provide it to the nanites as raw feedstock, he might convince them to replicate. Right now they were a finite resource.

They'd healed his nose and ribs, bonding with bone and cartilage where necessary, but their numbers only decreased over time as individual units failed or were consumed by the repairs. Giving them the ability to reproduce would change everything about his long-term durability. Assuming the function existed in their limited instruction set. Something to test. Later. When he had reserves to spare and time to monitor the results. The fourth fracture sealed. One left.

Alexander leaned forward, poured energy into the final line, and let his mind settle into the rhythm of creation. Metal from nothing. Structure from will. The gap closing atom by atom beneath his focus. When he finished, he held the chest plate up and examined it. Five fracture lines, all repaired. The plate was whole. Stronger than it had been when the military handed it to him. He set it down and looked at the suit laid out across the workbench. Every piece modified, tested, and ready for final reassembly.

Tonight he'd put it back together. Tomorrow he'd put it on for the first time since the changes. See what silence felt like. Then they'd go kill a flaming asshole. Before he could become a god. Divinity needed to remain an exclusive club. Awesome people only.