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The pilot's voice came through the communicator, and it was shaking.
"Reporting, General. The fighter jet has reached maximum speed."
On the testing ground screen, the telemetry confirmed it. Mach 3. The absolute ceiling of the most advanced interceptor in the Valorian military. The airframe was at its structural limit, engines maxed, every system redlined.
And the red and gold armor was still on the wing.
Not struggling. Not straining. Floating beside the jet with the relaxed posture of a man on a morning walk who happened to be moving at three times the speed of sound.
The testing ground erupted.
"It MATCHED Mach 3!"
"Matched? Look at the armor. It hasn't even broken a sweat. That thing clearly has room to spare!"
"The most advanced fighter jet in the Republic just hit its ceiling, and the armor is treating it like a warm-up!"
The excitement was building toward delirium when Ethan's voice cut through the speakers.
"I'm afraid I have some bad news."
The crowd went quiet.
"Since the fighter jet has reached its speed limit, Ryan's camera can no longer keep up with what comes next."
Disappointment crashed through the room. After everything they'd seen, the idea that the demonstration would end because the camera platform couldn't go fast enough felt like the cruelest possible anticlimax.
Then Ethan continued.
"So I've prepared a backup."
Above the testing ground, a small device rose into the air. It was roughly the size of a baseball, smooth and featureless except for a single lens on its front face and a pale blue glow at its base.
"I call it the Signal Bee. Its core is powered by a miniature reactor, and by sacrificing all other capabilities in favor of pure speed, it can reach a maximum velocity of over Mach 10."
"It's also equipped with autonomous evasion and stabilization programming, which means it can film at extreme speeds without losing clarity or getting destroyed."
"It'll handle the camera work from here."
The Signal Bee shot upward and vanished.
The distance that had taken the fighter jet and Mark One nearly ten minutes to cover, the Signal Bee closed in under a minute. The testing ground screen flickered, and the feed switched from Ryan's cockpit camera to the drone's lens.
The image was crystal clear. The armor, hanging in the sky, waiting.
The crowd cheered. The demonstration wasn't over. It was about to get serious.
Under General Hale's order, the fighter jet banked and returned to base. In the realm of speed, the most advanced interceptor in the Valorian military had been reduced to a support vehicle. Its job was done.
Ethan was alone in the sky now. Just him, the armor, and a baseball-sized drone that could film at ten times the speed of sound.
He felt the anticipation building in his chest. Not nerves. Hunger. He'd never pushed Mark One to its true limit. The lab had been too small, the airspace too restricted, the testing conditions too constrained. Everything up to this point had been operating within margins he'd imposed on himself.
No more margins.
He opened the throttle.
The acceleration was so violent that the Signal Bee's stabilization systems had to fire corrective bursts to keep the armor in frame. A massive explosion cloud formed behind Mark One as the air itself protested the speed, and the red and gold figure punched through Mach 3 like it was a curtain.
Mach 4.
Mach 4.3.
Mach 4.5.
Mach 4.8.
Mach 5.
The testing ground fell silent.
Not the excited silence of people processing a surprise. The absolute, hollow silence of people who had run out of categories for what they were seeing.
Mach 5. Five times the speed of sound. Faster than any manned aircraft in operational service anywhere on the planet. Faster than most missiles. A speed that existed, until this moment, only in classified research programs and theoretical papers.
And the armor didn't look like it was slowing down.
Ethan was about to push harder when General Hale's voice crackled through the communication system, urgent and sharp.
"Mercer! Pull back!"
"The restricted airspace I cleared for this test only extends about a thousand kilometers. At your current speed, you'll overshoot the boundary in minutes and enter civilian flight corridors."
"If you cause an incident, neither of us will recover from it!"
Across the live broadcast, viewers groaned. The most extraordinary demonstration in technological history was being cut short by a paperwork problem. Insufficient airspace clearance. The mundane bureaucracy of restricted zones colliding with the extraordinary reality of what was happening in the sky.
Hale looked genuinely pained. He hadn't expected this. Nobody had expected a "simple verification meeting" to produce something that could outrun the fastest jets in the military.
But Ethan didn't turn back.
"General Hale, quick question. What's the current world altitude record for a manned aircraft?"
Hale blinked at the non sequitur.
"Twenty-five thousand meters. Set by a Northern Sovereignty interceptor. Why?"
"Do you know the true purpose of a record, General?"
A beat.
"Records are meant to be broken."
On the screen, Mark One banked hard, angled its repulsors downward, and shot straight up.
Not gradually. Not in a climbing arc. Straight up, like a bullet fired at the stars.
The telemetry display on the testing ground switched from speed to altitude. The numbers climbed with sickening speed.
Ten thousand meters.
Fifteen thousand.
Twenty thousand.
The breathing in the testing ground quickened. Every person in the room knew what the number 25,000 meant. It was the line. The highest any human being had ever flown in a powered aircraft. The record that had stood for decades, set by a military superpower with unlimited resources and the best aerospace engineers on the planet.
Twenty-two thousand.
Twenty-three thousand.
Twenty-four thousand.
Twenty-five thousand.
The armor crossed the line without slowing.
"HE BROKE IT! THE ALTITUDE RECORD!"
"That's impossible! At twenty-five thousand meters, the temperature drops to nearly minus sixty Celsius! Machines fail at those temperatures!"
"And the oxygen! There's virtually no breathable air at that altitude! How is the suit's life support handling this?"
"If a weapon were deployed at this altitude during wartime, there would be no defense against it. Nothing currently in service can operate this high."
Twenty-eight thousand meters.
Thirty thousand.
Mark One hung in the sky at thirty thousand meters, five thousand meters above the previous world record, in an atmosphere so thin and cold that no manned aircraft had ever operated there.
The Signal Bee hovered nearby, its stabilized camera capturing an image that would be reproduced on the front page of every newspaper in the world by morning: a red and gold figure, arms at its sides, suspended against a sky so dark it was nearly black, with the curve of the planet visible at the edges of the frame.
In front of his television, Dr. Edmund Hargrove couldn't breathe.
His face had gone red. His chest was tight. The air seemed to have gotten stuck somewhere between his lungs and his throat.
Marcus was at his side in an instant, one hand on his father's back, patting firmly, all traces of their earlier argument forgotten.
"Dad, breathe. Slowly. In through the nose."
The old man gasped, coughed, and finally exhaled with a sound that was half relief and half something else entirely.
Then he stood up.
His ninety-one-year-old legs held. His voice, when it came, carried the force of a man who had spent his life building the foundation that this boy was now launching from.
"A heaven-sent genius."
His eyes were bright and wet.
"I have spent seventy years in physics. I thought I understood the boundaries of what one person could achieve. I thought I knew where the ceiling was."
"I was wrong."
He looked at the screen, at the red and gold figure hanging thirty thousand meters above the earth, and for the first time in decades, Edmund Hargrove felt what he could only describe as awe.
"With these two technologies alone, the Republic of Valoria can stand toe to toe with any power on the planet. Including the Aurelian Republic."
Marcus said nothing. For once, he had no counterargument. No mathematical objection. No appeal to accumulated research or the impossibility of youthful breakthroughs.
He'd been wrong. Completely, spectacularly, humblingly wrong. And the proof was floating thirty thousand meters overhead, caught on camera by a drone the kid had also built, powered by a reactor the kid had also built, wearing armor the kid had also built.
Three inventions. Three months. One seventeen-year-old.
Marcus looked at his father's face and saw the tears the old man was trying not to shed.
"Don't say it," Marcus muttered.
Hargrove smiled through the wetness.
"I told you so."
Thirty thousand meters up, Ethan Mercer looked down at the world.
The curve of the planet stretched beneath him. Clouds far below, thin and white against the dark blue of the lower atmosphere. The land was a patchwork of browns and greens, too distant to make out details. The sky above was nearly black, and the first stars were visible even though it was afternoon.
A few months ago, he'd been sitting in a classroom at Ashford Prep, getting his homework stolen and his shoes slashed, enduring two years of silence because he had no power, no money, and no one who cared.
Now he was standing at the edge of space, wearing technology from another universe, with the entire Republic watching.
It felt like a dream.
But it wasn't. The cold was real (the suit's thermal regulation held it at a comfortable seventy degrees inside). The altitude was real (the HUD displayed 30,247 meters). The view was real.
And so was the voice crackling through the communication link from far below.
"Mercer!" General Hale's tone was somewhere between exasperation and awe. "At thirty thousand meters, there's nothing up there but vacuum and starlight. Satisfied?"
Ethan grinned inside the helmet.
"No accidents up here, General. Not even a stray bird."
"Very funny. Are you coming down, or do I need to file flight clearance with the space program?"
"One more thing first."
He angled the armor downward, pointed his body at the earth like an arrow aimed at the ground, and opened the repulsors to full.
The Signal Bee's camera caught the moment Mark One went from hover to terminal velocity. The sonic boom at thirty thousand meters was silent on the ground, but the shockwave was visible on the drone's feed as a rippling distortion in the thin atmosphere.
No holding back this time.
Mark One dove toward the earth, accelerating through the upper atmosphere with nothing in front of it but sky and nothing behind it but a contrail that stretched from the edge of space to the clouds below.
The debut of Mark One was entering its final act.
Plz Throw Powerstones.