For advance chapters /patreon.com/HandsomeDuckGod
While the technicians gaped and General Hale white-knuckled the railing, Dr. Edmund Hargrove was watching something none of them had the expertise to see.
The engines were impressive. Five helicopter turboshafts and dozens of armored vehicle power plants running simultaneously off a palm-sized device was, by any standard, miraculous. The military men and engineers around him were reacting to the spectacle of it — the sheer improbability of the output.
But Hargrove was watching the control.
This was the distinction that separated parlor tricks from civilization-altering technology. Humanity had known how to release nuclear energy for the better part of a century. The bomb proved that. The challenge had never been about producing energy. It had always been about managing it.
Controllable versus uncontrollable. That was the mountain. Nuclear bombs existed before most people alive today were born, but decades later, with all the advances in technology and computation and materials science, nuclear energy was still a nightmare to integrate into daily life. Because an uncontrolled release of nuclear energy was a weapon. A controlled one was a power source. And the gap between those two things had buried careers, consumed budgets, and frustrated generations of physicists.
The device on that testing platform wasn't just producing energy. It was distributing it. Cleanly. Precisely. Matching the load demand of each connected system in real time, allocating output across dozens of simultaneous draws without fluctuation, without waste, without a single spike or dip in performance.
That alone was enough to prove that the boy possessed a level of talent in applied physics that Hargrove had never encountered in anyone else, living or dead.
But Hargrove hadn't traveled eight hundred miles for applied physics.
He'd come for fusion.
And the engines and generators he'd seen so far, while extraordinary, could theoretically be powered by an exceptionally efficient fission system. Unlikely, borderline impossible at this scale, but not definitively ruled out.
What came next would settle the question.
The military generators.
These weren't the commercial units from the factory press conference, and they weren't the vehicle engines currently spinning on the testing floor. Military-grade strategic generators were built for one purpose: keeping an entire military district operational during wartime. Communications. Radar. Electronic warfare systems. Command infrastructure. The kind of equipment that, if it went dark, turned a fighting force into a collection of blind, deaf soldiers stumbling in the dark.
The energy requirements were staggering. The civilian generators Ethan had used in his factory demonstration wouldn't reach one percent of military specifications. The helicopter engines and armored vehicle power plants currently running on the testing floor were, in terms of raw energy consumption, not even in the same category.
If the reactor could drive the military generators to full capacity while simultaneously powering everything else on the floor, then the energy contained in that device was beyond anything nuclear fission could produce at this scale.
Which meant it was fusion. And not just fusion — controllable fusion. The kind the entire world had been chasing for decades without success.
Hargrove caught the eye of the soldier at the final control panel and nodded.
The soldier pulled the switch.
The first military generator shuddered.
It was a subtle thing. A vibration that ran through the housing, a twitch of the diagnostic needle. Half the people in the room thought they'd imagined it.
Then the turbine began to turn.
"Was that — did it just—"
"The generator moved. I saw it move."
"That's not possible. There's no way—"
"Look at the output display. It's climbing."
The numbers on the generator's central display ticked upward. Slowly at first, then faster. Forty percent capacity. The turbine's hum deepened, filling the testing ground with a low, resonant vibration that layered on top of the helicopter engines and the armored vehicle power plants, creating a wall of sound that pressed against the chest.
Sixty percent.
The technicians had stopped talking. Every eye in the facility was locked on that display.
Eighty percent.
Someone whispered something that might have been a prayer.
One hundred percent.
The first military-grade strategic generator was running at full rated capacity, drawing power from a device smaller than a human hand, while five helicopter engines and dozens of armored vehicle power plants drew from the same source simultaneously.
The second generator started. Then the third. The fourth. The fifth.
One by one, all twenty military generators spun up to full operational capacity.
The testing ground was now producing enough power to sustain an entire military district during wartime. Communications, radar, electronic warfare, command systems — all of it, running off a glowing blue disc that a teenager had built in a rented factory for five million marks.
And the reactor's light held steady. Constant. Undiminished.
Dr. Edmund Hargrove's hand trembled on his cane.
Not from weakness. Not from age. From the sheer, overwhelming weight of what he was witnessing.
He had spent seventy years in physics. He had watched the republic grow from a sanctioned, isolated nation into a global power, and he had been part of the engine that drove that transformation. He had seen breakthroughs that changed the world.
But he had never — not once, not in seven decades of work — seen anything like this.
When he'd traveled to the Meridian Commonwealth three years ago to observe their experimental fusion reaction, the result had been a brief, violent, uncontrolled burst of energy in a stadium-sized facility. Proof of concept. Nothing more. The scientists there had celebrated like they'd landed on the moon, and they'd been right to — because even achieving uncontrolled fusion for a few seconds was a feat that most of the world hadn't managed.
The device on the testing platform in front of him was producing sustained, controlled fusion output from a reactor the size of a phone. It was powering military-grade equipment that would strain a conventional nuclear plant. And it showed no signs of approaching its limits.
The leap from the Meridian Commonwealth's experiment to this was not incremental. It was not a step forward. It was a leap of decades. Maybe longer. Like comparing the Wright Brothers' twelve-second flight to a commercial airliner crossing the Atlantic.
"I never expected," Hargrove said, and his voice was so quiet that only the Ministry official standing beside him could hear, "that I would live to see the advent of controllable nuclear fusion."
He was silent for a moment. His eyes were bright.
"To learn the truth in the morning and die content in the evening. That is enough."
The Ministry official looked at the old man's face and felt his own throat tighten.
Across the testing ground, a man in a technician's jacket watched the proceedings with an expression that had nothing to do with scientific wonder.
Dominic Voss was not a military man. He was not a scientist, not in any meaningful sense, though the degree from Hartwell University hanging on his office wall said otherwise. What Dominic Voss was, first and foremost, was an opportunist.
Voss Industries — co-founded by Dominic and his older brother Adrian — was one of the fastest-growing technology firms in the Republic of Valoria. The brothers had built it from the ground up, leveraging their elite educations and a ruthlessness that made competitors nervous and regulators uncomfortable. Within a decade, they'd muscled their way from commercial tech into defense contracting, helped along by connections to a powerful political family in the capital whose patronage opened doors that should have remained closed.
Technically, defense technology firms were subject to strict government oversight. National security demanded it. But with the right connections, "strict oversight" became "periodic paperwork," and the Voss brothers had the right connections in abundance.
Dominic had been embedded at the Northvale Provincial Military District for the past eight months, officially serving a three-year stint as an outsourced Chief Technical Engineer. The title was cover. The real purpose was to build relationships with the military brass, secure procurement contracts for Voss Industries, and position the company as the primary defense technology partner for the entire province.
It was tedious work. Military life didn't suit a man accustomed to penthouse offices and restaurant dinners. The food was bad, the accommodations were spartan, and the conversations were aggressively boring.
Until today.
Dominic stared at the glowing reactor on the testing platform, and behind his carefully neutral expression, his mind was running calculations at a speed that had nothing to do with physics and everything to do with money.
Fusion technology. Miniaturized. Functional. Built by a seventeen-year-old orphan with no corporate backing, no institutional support, no legal representation, and — most importantly — no patent protection.
This wasn't a scientific breakthrough. This was a business opportunity. The kind that came along once in a generation, if it came along at all.
He needed to talk to Adrian.
Quietly, without drawing attention, Dominic peeled away from the observation group and slipped toward the facility exit. He needed privacy and a phone signal.
His brother would want to hear about this immediately.
Back on the testing floor, General Hale was moving fast.
Whatever contempt he'd felt for Ethan Mercer that morning had been incinerated by the reality playing out in front of him. He didn't need to understand fusion to understand what he was seeing: a device that could make every energy-dependent piece of military hardware in his district independent of fuel supply lines.
That wasn't just impressive. That was a strategic asset of the highest order. And strategic assets attracted attention — from allies and enemies alike.
He turned to his adjutant.
"Effective immediately: Ashford City Military Compound enters maximum security alert. All off-duty personnel are to report for active duty. I want every access point secured and every perimeter patrol doubled."
The adjutant snapped to attention.
"Until this testing is complete," Hale continued, his voice carrying the flat, absolute authority of a man who was done asking and had started ordering, "I don't want to see a single unauthorized person within five hundred meters of this facility. Not a reporter. Not a civilian. Not a stray cat."
He turned back to the testing floor, where the reactor continued to glow and the engines continued to roar and a seventeen-year-old kid stood with his hands in his pockets, watching it all with the quiet satisfaction of someone who'd known exactly what was going to happen.
The general's jaw tightened.
He owed that boy an apology. And he was man enough to give it.
But that could wait. Right now, the priority was making sure that whatever was sitting on that testing platform didn't fall into the wrong hands.
PLz Throw Powerstones.