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The next morning, Ethan ate breakfast with Frank and Linda, shouldered a duffel bag that contained everything he'd need for three months of isolation, and headed for the train station.
The capital was a long way from Ashford City. Even on the high-speed rail, the journey ate the entire morning. Ethan spent it with his eyes closed and his mind open, running the Mark III's assembly sequence for the hundredth time, testing each step against the knowledge the System had downloaded, looking for weaknesses he might have missed.
He didn't find any. But that didn't mean they weren't there.
By the time he stepped off the train, it was early afternoon. He grabbed a bowl of noodles from a street stall near the station, flagged down a taxi, and gave the driver an address that made the man raise his eyebrows.
"That's way out past the edge of the city. You sure?"
"I'm sure."
The drive took over an hour. The city thinned, then disappeared. Commercial districts gave way to residential neighborhoods, which gave way to industrial zones, which gave way to farmland, which gave way to nothing. By the time the taxi turned down a narrow access road flanked by chain-link fencing and surveillance cameras, the nearest building of any kind was a kilometer behind them.
Hargrove had chosen the location for two reasons: confidentiality and safety. The experiments conducted in a human kinetics laboratory involved forces, pressures, and energy outputs that could be genuinely dangerous if something went wrong. Putting the facility in the middle of a valley, far from anything a malfunction could damage, was common sense.
It also meant the taxi fare was going to be astronomical.
When the meter clicked over to a number that made Ethan wince, he paid without argument. If there'd been a bus route to this valley, he'd have taken it. There wasn't. He made a mental note to budget for transportation when he sent Hargrove the expense reports.
The facility was larger than he'd expected. A complex of buildings arranged in a rough campus layout, anchored by a central structure that looked like a small sports stadium. Research wings branched off to either side. A warehouse sat behind the main building, and military-grade security fencing enclosed the entire perimeter.
The scale of the place said everything about how much the Republic valued Edmund Hargrove. This wasn't a university lab or a corporate facility. This was a personal research institute, funded and maintained by the government, for the exclusive use of a man they considered a national treasure.
And now, for three months, it belonged to Ethan.
He showed his credentials and Hargrove's authorization letter to the soldiers at the gate. They checked the documents, made a phone call, and escorted him inside.
He could hear the argument before he reached the laboratory door.
"This is absolutely unacceptable!"
"We're being evicted from our own lab for some teenager?"
"I don't care what kind of circus this Mercer kid is running outside. This laboratory is for serious research. Handing it to a child is like giving a concert piano to a toddler."
"Hargrove has lost his mind. That's the only explanation."
The researchers inside were not taking the transition well. There were about a dozen of them, men and women ranging from their thirties to their sixties, each one a specialist in some branch of human kinetics, biomechanics, or materials science. They'd worked in this facility for years. Some of them had built their careers within these walls.
And they'd just been told to pack up and leave because a seventeen-year-old with a controversial reputation needed the space.
Ethan stood outside the door and listened for a moment. He understood their frustration. These were serious scientists being displaced from serious work by someone who, as far as they knew, was either a plagiarist or a publicity stunt. The Voss Industries press conference had done its damage here, too.
But understanding their frustration didn't change the timeline. The Voss brothers were building their case. The Whitfield family was maneuvering in the capital. The Aurelian Republic had intelligence assets tracking his movements. Every day he spent negotiating with irritated researchers was a day he wasn't building the armor.
He pushed open the door and walked in.
Every head turned.
"So this is the famous Ethan Mercer." A gray-haired woman in her fifties crossed her arms. "Don't think for a second that you're pushing us out of this lab."
"I've been working in human kinetics for twenty-three years," a younger man added, pointing at the equipment around them. "Half these instruments were calibrated by my hands. And you're going to waltz in here and take over?"
"Hmph. I don't know what tricks you used to convince Dr. Hargrove, but don't think you can fool the rest of us."
Ethan didn't raise his voice. Didn't argue. Didn't defend himself. He let them finish, then spoke.
"I hear you. And I understand that this is disruptive. You've been doing important work here, and I'm interrupting it. That's a fact, and I won't pretend otherwise."
He looked at each of them in turn.
"But here's what I can tell you: in three months, this laboratory is going to become the most famous research facility in the world. And it's going to happen because of what gets built inside these walls."
"When that day comes, you'll know whether Dr. Hargrove's judgment was wrong. You'll know whether this lab was wasted on me."
He held up the authorization letter. Hargrove's signature was bold enough to read from across the room.
"For now, this isn't a negotiation. It's an order from Dr. Hargrove. I've given you time to wrap up your current work before vacating. That courtesy was my idea, not his. Don't make me regret extending it."
Behind him, the soldiers who'd escorted him in took a step forward. Not aggressively. Just enough to remind everyone in the room that, within the walls of this facility, Dr. Hargrove's word was law.
The researchers looked at the letter. Looked at the soldiers. Looked at each other.
"Fine." The gray-haired woman uncrossed her arms. Her voice was cold but professional. "We'll clear out. But I want you to know, Mercer, that I'll be watching. In three months, if this lab hasn't produced something extraordinary, I will personally tell Dr. Hargrove that he made the worst decision of his career."
"That's fair," Ethan said. "I wouldn't expect anything less."
One by one, they gathered their notes, their personal equipment, their coffee mugs. The exodus took about an hour. Nobody spoke to Ethan on the way out. A few shot him looks that ranged from skeptical to openly hostile.
Then the last door closed, and Ethan was alone.
The laboratory was enormous.
Without the researchers occupying it, the space felt even larger. Banks of instruments lined the walls. Testing rigs, force-measurement platforms, motion-capture arrays, pressure chambers, vibration tables. Equipment that most universities in the Republic couldn't afford, available in quantities that would make a corporate R&D department weep.
And in the warehouse behind the main building, Hargrove's people had already delivered the materials. Ethan checked the inventory against his list. Titanium-gold alloys. Palladium micro-lattice components. Ceramic-polymer composites. Neodymium magnets. Fiber-optic sensor arrays. Neural interface substrates.
Everything was here. Every item on the list, plus twenty percent overage because Hargrove had added a margin for experimental failure.
Fifty million marks worth of trust, Ethan thought. Don't waste it.
But before he sealed himself inside this building and disappeared into the work, there was one more thing to do.
He set his phone on a workbench, propped it against a tool rack, and hit record.
"My name is Ethan Mercer."
He looked directly into the camera. No script. No prepared remarks. Just a kid in a laboratory, talking.
"A week ago, Voss Industries held a press conference and accused me of stealing their work. They presented evidence that my technology was developed by their research team over the past decade."
"I'm not going to stand here and argue about documents. I'm not going to hire lawyers or hold my own press conference or produce counter-evidence. That's their game, and I'm not interested in playing it."
"Instead, I'm going to do something simpler."
"In three months, I will emerge from this laboratory with a new invention. Something that will make the fusion reactor look like a warm-up exercise."
"When that happens, the world will have two choices: believe that I, a seventeen-year-old with no corporate backing and no research team, independently developed two revolutionary technologies in the space of a few months, or believe that Voss Industries, the same company that accused me of theft, somehow also developed this second technology in secret and I stole that one too."
He paused. Let the logic settle.
"I'll leave the math to you."
"See you in three months."
He stopped recording. The video was about three minutes long. He'd wanted it shorter, but he'd spent fifteen minutes trying to find a filter function on his ancient phone before accepting that his face was going to look exactly the way it looked.
He sent the video to Ryan Calloway with a message: Same as last time. Get it everywhere.
Ryan's response came in twelve seconds: On it. Don't even think about giving this to anyone else.
Ryan's situation had followed the same roller coaster as Ethan's reputation. After the military verification, his exclusive footage had made him the most sought-after journalist in the Republic. Major outlets offered him positions. The station that had fired him came crawling back. He'd been riding higher than he'd ever imagined.
Then the Voss Industries press conference had knocked him right back down. The same outlets that had been courting him suddenly stopped returning calls. The narrative had flipped, and a journalist whose career was built on Ethan Mercer's credibility was only as valuable as Ethan Mercer's reputation.
Ryan understood, with the clarity of a man who'd been through this cycle twice now, that his fate and Ethan's were braided together. If Ethan fell, Ryan fell with him. If Ethan rose, Ryan rose alongside.
So when the kid sent him a three-minute video declaring war on one of the largest defense contractors in the Republic, Ryan didn't hesitate. He uploaded it, boosted it, called every contact, and burned every remaining favor he had.
By midnight, the video had four million views and climbing.
Back in the laboratory, Ethan didn't watch the numbers.
He was standing in the center of the facility, surrounded by fifty million marks worth of equipment and materials, with the complete engineering blueprints of the Mark III Iron Man armor fully rendered in his mind.
The power source was solved. The knowledge was downloaded. The materials were here. The facility was his.
All that remained was the building.
He picked up the first titanium-gold alloy plate, carried it to the primary fabrication station, and began.
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