For advance chapters /patreon.com/HandsomeDuckGod
Outside the testing ground, Dominic Voss stood in a maintenance corridor with his phone pressed to his ear, his voice low and rapid.
His hands were shaking. Not from nerves. From the raw, physical thrill of realizing what he'd just witnessed.
"Adrian. Listen to me. I'm not exaggerating. I know what controllable fusion means, and I'm telling you — I just watched it happen."
On the other end of the line, silence.
"A palm-sized device. It powered five helicopter turboshafts, dozens of armored vehicle engines, and twenty military-grade strategic generators. Simultaneously. At full capacity. For hours. Hargrove himself confirmed it."
More silence. Then his brother's voice, careful and precise.
"Who owns the technology?"
"A seventeen-year-old kid. High school dropout. Orphan. No corporate backing, no institutional affiliation, no legal representation. His highest-ranking relative was a public school principal who just got fired."
The silence on the other end changed texture. It became the silence of a predator that had just spotted movement in the grass.
"I'm on my way."
The test ran through the entire morning.
For hours, dozens of engines and all twenty military generators operated at maximum rated capacity without interruption. The technicians monitoring the equipment had long since stopped being amazed and had moved into the territory of professional anxiety — several of them kept checking the thermal readings on the generators, convinced that something running this hard for this long was going to burn out.
But the machines held. And the reactor held longer.
Until, just past noon, the pale blue glow on the testing platform began to dim.
Not abruptly. Not catastrophically. It faded the way a sunset fades — gradually, gracefully, the light pulling inward as the last of its energy was drawn through the system. The generator displays began to descend. The engines wound down in sequence.
And then it was dark.
"Total energy output!" Hargrove's voice cut through the silence before the last generator had stopped spinning. He was leaning forward on his cane, eyes sharp, every trace of the frail old man gone. "I want the numbers compiled immediately."
The technicians scrambled. Instruments were checked, cross-referenced, rechecked. Data streams were compiled and calculated. It took several minutes.
"Approximately twenty million megajoules, Dr. Hargrove."
Ethan did the conversion in his head. Twenty million megajoules mapped almost exactly to the five hundred million kilowatt-hour estimate he'd given at the press conference. The reactor had delivered precisely what he'd predicted.
He allowed himself a small, private moment of satisfaction.
Then he opened the System interface.
[Prestige: 81,200]
Eighty-one thousand points. Up from roughly thirty thousand before the verification began.
The jump made sense. Prestige wasn't just about headcount. It scaled with the quality of the audience. Thirty students in a classroom had generated three hundred points. A thousand students at an assembly had generated over a thousand. But a room full of senior military officials, government researchers, and a living legend of Valorian physics? The emotional intensity per person was orders of magnitude higher.
Fear, awe, disbelief, excitement, patriotic pride — every officer and scientist in that testing ground had been cycling through extreme emotions for hours. And the System had been harvesting all of it.
Eighty-one thousand points. Enough to start seriously considering the higher-tier items in the Mall.
But before Ethan could savor the number, he noticed the silence.
Every person in the testing ground was staring at him.
Not with hostility. Not with suspicion. With the specific, paralyzed expression of people who had just watched the impossible happen and were still trying to rebuild their model of reality around it.
The silence stretched.
Ethan shifted his weight, suddenly uncomfortable. Crowds that wanted to tear him apart he could handle. Crowds that looked at him like he'd descended from orbit were harder to deal with.
Then General Hale started clapping.
One pair of hands, slow and deliberate. Then a second pair joined. Then a third. The applause built like a wave, rolling through the testing ground until every person in the facility was on their feet, and the sound bounced off the reinforced walls in a sustained, thundering ovation that drowned out everything else.
"Magnificent." A senior researcher, gray-haired and weathered, stepped forward with tears in his eyes. "Truly magnificent. I've spent forty years in applied physics, and I feel like I've been playing in a sandbox."
"This isn't just a breakthrough," another researcher added, shaking his head in disbelief. "This is a generational leap. The kind of thing they name eras after."
"The 'Rear Wave' has arrived." A military engineer, still holding a diagnostic tablet, managed a grin. "And we 'Front Waves' have no choice but to be impressed."
Ethan's ears went red. He wasn't built for this kind of attention. Give him a hostile teacher or a roomful of bullies and he could perform all day. Genuine, unguarded praise from people he respected? That hit different.
General Hale approached. The man's face was unreadable — the practiced mask of a career officer — but his eyes held a warmth that hadn't been there that morning.
He extended his hand.
Ethan shook it.
No words were exchanged. None were needed. The handshake said everything the general's pride wouldn't let him put into language: I was wrong about you. I apologize. And I am impressed.
Meanwhile, at the edge of the crowd, Hargrove watched the scene with a quiet, complicated expression. Pride. Relief. And underneath both, a fierce, protective instinct that he hadn't felt since his own students had been young and the world had been hungry for what they could build.
This boy is going to need protection, he thought. From the people who want to use him, and from the people who want to own him.
Outside the military compound, the reporters were still camped at the cordon.
Hours of waiting in the heat had thinned their patience but not their numbers. Every one of them understood the calculation: whether the reactor was real or fake, the aftermath would generate coverage. If real, it was the story of the century. If fake, the public humiliation of a viral fraud would drive clicks for weeks.
Either way, traffic. Either way, money.
What happened to the kid personally? Not their problem.
The journalists were passing around bottles of water and speculating about timelines when a low rumble drew their attention to the far end of the access road.
A black sedan. Not just any sedan. The kind of vehicle that cost more than most people's houses, with a grille that looked like it had been designed by someone who wanted the car to look angry. Tinted windows. Custom trim. And on the front bumper, a license plate that made several of the more experienced reporters go very quiet.
Military prefix. Capital registry. The kind of plate that belonged to someone who existed in the space between corporate power and government authority, where the lines blurred and the rules bent.
A few of the younger reporters murmured about who would bring a car like that to a restricted zone.
The senior journalists said nothing. They recognized the plate. Or more accurately, they recognized what the plate represented.
The sedan rolled to a stop at the compound gates. The rear door opened, and a man stepped out.
Adrian Voss was tall, lean, and immaculately dressed in the understated way that only very wealthy people could afford — clothes that looked simple and cost a fortune. Late forties, silver threading his temples, a face that had been handsome once and was now merely commanding. He straightened his cuffs, glanced at the reporters with the dismissive indifference of a man who'd stopped noticing the press years ago, and walked toward the gate.
The soldiers on duty recognized him instantly.
Adrian Voss ran Voss Industries, the largest private defense technology contractor in the province. Half the equipment these soldiers carried had Voss branding somewhere in the supply chain. Their commanding officers gave this man access. Their logistics officers processed his invoices. He was, in practical terms, a civilian who moved through military spaces the way most people moved through shopping malls.
The soldiers stepped aside. Adrian nodded once, the way a man nods at a doorman, and walked through.
Behind the cordon, the reporters watched with undisguised envy. Hours of waiting, credentials waved, and not a single one of them had gotten past the gate. This man had walked through on his face alone.
This was what power looked like. Not the kind that came with titles or uniforms. The kind that came with money, connections, and the specific brand of influence that made military checkpoints feel like turnstiles.
Inside the gate, Adrian Voss allowed himself a small, satisfied smile.
This was why he'd spent years building relationships, funding campaigns, and yes, doing things that wouldn't survive scrutiny if anyone ever looked too closely. Because power like this wasn't given. It was built. Brick by brick, favor by favor, until one day you could walk into a restricted military compound and the guards stepped aside without being told.
And now, beyond those gates, sitting in a testing facility surrounded by stunned soldiers and awestruck scientists, was a piece of technology that could make everything he'd built so far look like a lemonade stand.
Controllable nuclear fusion. In the hands of a teenager with no money, no connections, and no idea what was about to hit him.
Adrian Voss intended to fix the "no connections" part. Generously.
And just as his Italian leather shoes touched the pavement inside the compound—
The alarm went off.
A piercing, compound-wide wail that cut through the afternoon air like a knife. Soldiers who'd been standing at ease snapped to attention. Hands went to sidearms. Radio chatter exploded across every frequency.
Maximum security alert.
Adrian Voss stopped walking.
His smile disappeared.
PLz Throw Powerstones.