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Ethan looked at Adrian Voss through the faceplate and felt nothing but pity.
"You're a pitiful man, Voss."
His voice came through the external speakers, amplified and slightly flattened by the helmet's audio system. Every word carried across the testing ground.
"You spent your whole career taking things that belonged to other people. Patents. Companies. Reputations. You convinced yourself that this was strength. That money and connections made you untouchable."
"But in the end, you built nothing. You created nothing. Everything you have was stolen from someone who actually did the work."
"Watch closely. Because today, I'm going to show you what real work looks like."
The three mechanical arms delivered the new reactor into the armor's chestplate.
The moment the final component locked into place, the Mark One erupted with light.
The moment the final component locked into place, the reactor in the chestplate ignited.
A steady, intense pale blue light bloomed from the center of the armor's chest, throwing hard shadows across the testing ground floor. The repulsor ports in both palms flickered to life with a low hum. And behind the faceplate, two narrow eye slits lit up white-hot, giving the helmet the sudden, unsettling appearance of something that was looking back.
The rest of the armor was metal. Just metal. Red and gold alloy, catching the overhead lights, gleaming with the dull sheen of precision engineering. No magic. No fantasy. Just a machine that had been dead thirty seconds ago and was now, unmistakably, awake.
Ethan looked toward the crowd.
"Don't blink. Because every second from here on will be recorded in history."
The faceplate dropped.
The last sliver of the boy's face disappeared behind alloy and engineering. The armor sealed itself around him with a pressurized hiss, and the figure standing in the center of the testing ground was no longer Ethan Mercer.
It was something new.
Then, under the gaze of every person in the room, four jets of thrust erupted from the armor's palms and boot soles.
White-hot. Controlled. Perfectly balanced.
The figure lifted off the ground.
Not violently. Not with the lurching, unstable wobble of experimental flight systems. The armor rose smoothly, steadily, as if gravity had simply agreed to stop applying.
Three feet. Six feet. Ten feet. Hovering.
The testing ground went silent in a way that had nothing to do with respect or anticipation. It was the silence of several hundred people whose understanding of reality had just been shattered like a pane of glass.
"That's impossible."
The voice came from somewhere in the press section, small and bewildered.
"There is no technology on this planet that allows powered flight in a human-scale frame with that kind of stability."
"The stabilization alone — the gyroscopic calculations, the thrust vectoring, the real-time balance corrections — that's a problem the entire aerospace industry hasn't solved."
"Forget the aerospace industry. The robotics industry hasn't solved basic bipedal balance. And this thing is flying."
Ethan's voice came through the speakers again, calm and faintly amused.
"Relax. Hovering is the most basic thing Mark One can do."
"What comes next is why I needed the fighter jet."
Before a single person could process that sentence, the thrust from the armor's repulsors tripled.
The four jets of flame that had been holding Ethan at a gentle hover suddenly erupted with a force that turned the air beneath him into a visible shockwave. The reporters in the front rows threw their hands up against the blast of wind and heat.
Mark One launched.
The acceleration was so sudden, so violent, so far beyond anything the crowd had been prepared for, that the armored figure seemed to simply vanish. One frame it was hovering at ten feet. The next frame it was a red and gold streak climbing into the October sky like a missile with a pilot.
The sound hit a second later. A thunderclap of displaced air that rattled the testing ground's reinforced walls and made several reporters duck instinctively.
Then silence. The figure was gone. A contrail hung in the air where it had been, dissipating slowly in the wind.
Every head in the testing ground tilted upward.
"THE SCREEN! LOOK AT THE SCREEN!"
On the main display, Ryan Calloway's camera feed showed the view from the fighter jet's cockpit. Blue sky. Scattered clouds. The jet cruising at several thousand meters.
And there, floating beside the cockpit canopy as casually as a man leaning against a wall, was the Mark One armor.
Red and gold. Hovering at fighter-jet altitude. Matching the aircraft's speed without visible effort.
Through the cockpit glass, Ryan's camera caught the armor in perfect focus. The chestplate glowing. The faceplate angled toward the jet. The entire figure hanging in the sky as if it belonged there.
"So THAT'S why they needed a fighter jet!"
"It's keeping pace with the jet! At this altitude! A SUIT OF ARMOR is flying alongside a FIGHTER JET!"
"This can't — I don't — what am I looking at right now?"
"This is a battle armor! An actual, functional, flying BATTLE ARMOR!"
"Mark One alone is enough to push the entire field of military technology forward by a CENTURY!"
The doubts were gone. All of them. Every snide comment about robots and LED panels and stage shows and car batteries. Obliterated in the three seconds it took for a red and gold figure to launch from a testing ground floor and appear beside a fighter jet at cruising altitude.
Because nobody in this room, no matter how skeptical, no matter how hostile, no matter how deeply invested in Adrian Voss's narrative, could look at a man flying under his own power at several thousand meters and call it a special effect.
This wasn't a robot. This wasn't a powered exoskeleton. This wasn't anything that existed in any laboratory, any military program, any research institution on the planet.
This was something from the future. Built by a seventeen-year-old. In a borrowed laboratory. In three months.
And the man who'd accused this kid of plagiarism was sitting on a stool in the front row with the color draining from his face.
Adrian Voss didn't fall off his stool. That would have required muscles capable of movement, and his body had temporarily stopped responding to commands.
He sat perfectly still, staring at the main screen, and watched the architecture of his life collapse.
The plagiarism claim was dead. Not wounded. Not weakened. Dead. Buried under the weight of a second invention so far beyond anything Voss Industries could have conceived, let alone secretly developed, that the suggestion was laughable.
He'd told a room full of cameras that ALL of Voss Industries' resources had gone to fusion. And now a kid was flying beside a fighter jet in a suit of armor that made his company's entire technology portfolio look like a child's toy set.
The logical trap had sprung. And Adrian was inside it.
In front of his television, Dr. Edmund Hargrove's hands trembled on his cane.
Not from frailty. From the specific, overwhelming emotion of a man who had spent seventy years pushing the boundaries of human knowledge and was now watching someone leap past those boundaries like they were chalk lines on a sidewalk.
Battle armor. Powered flight. A human being hovering beside a military aircraft wearing a suit that a teenager had built in his laboratory.
The implications cascaded through Hargrove's mind at a speed that belied his age. Military applications. Civilian applications. Search and rescue. Disaster response. Space exploration. The armor wasn't just a weapon. It was a platform. A new category of technology that opened doors the world hadn't even known existed.
And this was just the beginning. The boy was seventeen. What would he build at twenty? At thirty? At fifty?
What kind of wheel have I set the Hargrove name upon?
Not a wheel. A rocket.
Beside him, Marcus Hargrove sat in silence. His mouth, which had been delivering verdicts and calculations and skeptical assessments for three months, was closed.
The levitation alone had been enough to demolish his argument about accumulated research. The human body dynamics required for stable powered flight at that scale were a problem that international experts had been working on for decades without solution. And this kid had solved it. In three months. As a side project while building the suit itself.
When Ethan launched toward the fighter jet and the contrail hung in the air like a signature, Marcus felt the last wall of his skepticism come down.
He wouldn't admit it out loud. Not yet. But his father's sideways glance told him the old man already knew.
"Don't say it," Marcus muttered.
Hargrove said nothing. He didn't need to. The smile on his face said everything.
At the Bureau of Internal Affairs, Director Nathan Graves was already on the phone.
"Listen carefully. Adrian Voss. I want him under immediate surveillance. He does not leave that testing ground."
"Second: all identified foreign operatives in the venue are to be tracked the moment the armor lands. I want to know who they contact and what they transmit."
"Third: the moment Mercer touches down, I want a security detail on him. Visible. Armed. Nobody gets within fifty feet without clearance."
The operative on the other end acknowledged each order with military precision.
Graves hung up and leaned back in his chair. The armor changed everything. With this demonstration broadcast live to the entire Republic, the Voss Industries plagiarism claim wasn't just discredited. It was humiliated. And humiliated people made mistakes.
Adrian Voss was about to make the biggest mistake of his career, because desperate men always did. And when he did, Graves would be ready.
Inside the testing ground, the reporters had shifted from shock to frenzied excitement.
"Tell me — if it's just a flight test, why use a fighter jet? A helicopter would've been enough!"
"Because a helicopter can't keep up, you idiot! Did you SEE the acceleration? That thing went from hover to fighter-jet altitude in three seconds!"
"Calloway is the luckiest journalist alive. First the reactor press conference, now THIS. From the cockpit of a fighter jet."
"Forget lucky. The guy bet his entire career on Mercer twice and won both times. That's not luck. That's judgment."
General Hale stood at the edge of the testing ground with his arms crossed and an expression that was doing extraordinary work to remain neutral.
He'd scoffed at the idea of military battle armor. Movie nonsense. Science fiction. And now a suit of powered armor was floating beside one of his fighter jets at combat altitude, and the kid inside it had warned him not to "pester me for one of these suits."
The general was already mentally composing his procurement request.
Through the armor's internal communication system, Ethan could hear every voice in the testing ground. The shock. The wonder. The reporters tripping over themselves to describe what they were seeing.
He hadn't planned to say anything yet. The demonstration would speak for itself. But the months of being called a fraud, a thief, a plagiarist, a disgrace, had left their mark. Not as wounds. As fuel.
He connected his mic.
"I know everyone is curious about why this test required a fighter jet."
His voice came through the testing ground's speakers and simultaneously through every television broadcasting the live feed.
"It's because in the next phase of the demonstration, even a fighter jet might not be able to keep up."
A beat.
"Ladies and gentlemen, please hold your breath."
"The debut of Mark One is just getting started."