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Ryan Calloway did not disappoint.
Within a week, Ethan's declaration video had swept across the Republic like a brushfire. Every platform, every comment section, every news cycle. Four million views became forty million, and the number kept climbing.
The reaction was split, as expected. Half the public saw the video as the desperate bluff of a plagiarist buying time. The other half saw a kid who was either delusional or holding the biggest trump card anyone had ever seen.
Ethan didn't care about the split. He cared about the clock. Three months. Ticking.
In the executive suite at the top of the Voss Industries tower, Adrian Voss watched the video for the seventh time and couldn't shake the feeling that something was wrong.
The kid should have been angry. Panicked. Ranting about injustice, threatening lawsuits, making emotional appeals to a public that had already turned on him. That was how innocent people behaved when they were falsely accused. They fell apart. They got loud. They gave Adrian's PR team ammunition to use against them.
Instead, Ethan Mercer had looked directly into a camera and spoken with the calm, measured certainty of a man who already knew how the story ended.
No anger. No defensiveness. Just a three-month deadline and a logical trap so clean that Adrian's entire legal team had gone quiet when they heard it.
If he produces a second invention, our plagiarism claim is dead.
Adrian could feel the unease settling into his bones. But refusing the verification meeting was impossible. If Voss Industries declined, the public would read it as fear. Competitors who'd been circling for years would smell blood. And the fragile fiction that Voss Industries had "invented" fusion technology would begin to crack.
More importantly, Adrian needed Ethan Mercer alive and functional.
It had been a month since the reactor remnants had been transferred to Voss Industries' research division. Dozens of top researchers. Unlimited budget. Round-the-clock shifts.
The result: nothing.
Not a single inch of progress. The underlying science operated on principles that Valoria's physics couldn't even properly frame, let alone decode. It was like trying to read a book in a language that hadn't been invented yet.
Adrian had suspected this might happen. He hadn't suspected it would be this absolute. The researchers weren't struggling. They were stuck. Completely, hopelessly, fundamentally stuck.
Which meant the only person on the planet who could replicate this technology was the same seventeen-year-old Adrian had tried to buy for seven million marks and then publicly accused of theft.
Ethan Mercer couldn't be destroyed. Not yet. He needed to be brought to heel first. Broken just enough to be useful.
The three-month deadline bothered Adrian deeply. But for now, all he could do was prepare.
He convened the PR department and began planning for the verification meeting.
Standing at the floor-to-ceiling windows of his office afterward, watching the traffic far below, Adrian's reflection stared back at him with cold eyes.
Mercer, I hope you've learned something from the last few weeks. Don't pull anything clever at this meeting.
Because if you do, the consequences won't be limited to your reputation.
Two weeks into the laboratory work, a disruption arrived.
The guard on duty at the facility's main gate called Ethan's workstation phone with the particular tone of voice that soldiers use when they've encountered a problem they're not authorized to solve.
"Sir, there's a middle-aged man at the entrance claiming to be Dr. Hargrove's son. He's insisting on entry."
Under normal circumstances, anyone trying to force their way into a classified research facility would receive a very direct lesson in why that was a bad idea. But Dr. Hargrove's son occupied a specific category: not authorized, but not someone you could put face-down on the pavement without consequences.
"I'll come down. Give me five minutes."
Ethan set down the micro-fabrication tool he'd been using, pulled off his work gloves, and headed for the ground floor.
He found the visitor in the main hall, standing with his back to the entrance, studying a black-and-white photograph mounted on the far wall.
The man was in his fifties. Square-jawed. Military posture despite the civilian clothes. The resemblance to Dr. Hargrove was immediate and obvious. Same jawline. Same sharp eyes. Same bearing that suggested a person accustomed to being taken seriously.
"'The universe does not yield its secrets to the impatient,'" the man read aloud from the brass plaque beneath the photograph. He didn't turn around. "Do you know who said that?"
Ethan looked at the photograph. A young man in his thirties, lean and intense, standing in what appeared to be a makeshift laboratory. The equipment behind him was primitive by modern standards. The man's sleeves were rolled up, his hands were stained with ink, and his expression carried the fierce concentration of someone who was going to solve the problem in front of him or die at the desk trying.
"That's Dr. Hargrove. Thirty, maybe thirty-five years old. Early days of the nuclear program, judging by the equipment." He paused. "The quote sounds like something he'd say."
"Correct."
The man turned around. His eyes were sharp. Assessing. The gaze of someone who'd already made up his mind and was waiting for confirmation.
"My father had that photograph taken the week he cracked his first major theoretical problem. He hung it here when the laboratory was built, and he put that quote beneath it as a reminder. He told me once that doing real science is like that photograph: it looks simple, but behind every result are years of work that nobody sees."
He stepped closer.
"The era where an apple falling from a tree could lead to the discovery of universal gravitation is long gone. Without years of research, inference, data, and the foundation of accumulated knowledge, nobody makes breakthroughs in science. Nobody."
The words were aimed like bullets.
Ethan met them without flinching. He had a System in his head and the complete engineering knowledge of the Marvel Universe loaded into his neurons. He could afford to be calm.
"Just because others can't doesn't mean I can't. You're underestimating what's possible."
The man's frown deepened. He was winding up for a rebuttal when his phone rang.
He pulled it from his pocket, glanced at the screen, and his expression shifted from hawk-like intensity to something closer to a teenager caught sneaking back in through a window.
He answered.
"MARCUS!"
Dr. Edmund Hargrove's voice came through the speaker with enough volume to echo off the hall's marble walls. Ethan, standing six feet away, heard every word.
"WHERE ARE YOU RIGHT NOW?"
Marcus Hargrove, son of the most revered physicist in the Republic of Valoria, researcher at the Northern Sovereignty Institute of Advanced Studies, a man who had published more papers than most departments, winced and held the phone an inch from his ear.
"Dad, I'm conducting research in the Northern Sovereignty. I just stopped by to—"
"DON'T LIE TO ME! The security office has called the house FOUR TIMES! I know exactly where you are!"
Marcus's jaw tightened.
"I don't care what you want to accomplish there, but you are NOT to disturb Ethan's work! Get out of that facility and come home immediately!"
Ethan watched this exchange with genuine fascination. The Dr. Hargrove he knew was measured, precise, and spoke with the quiet authority of a man who'd never needed to raise his voice.
This version of Hargrove sounded exactly like Frank Holloway on a bad day. Apparently, even living legends became regular parents when their children were involved.
Marcus managed a few placating words before ending the call with the specific exhaustion of a man who'd been getting yelled at by the same person for fifty years.
He turned back to Ethan. The hawk's gaze was still there, but something else had crept in behind it. Not warmth. More like reluctant honesty.
"I still don't believe that a high school student can produce anything that will shock the world."
He held Ethan's eyes.
"But I want you to understand something. My father has been upright his entire life. In ninety-one years, he has never asked anyone for a favor. Not once. Not for himself, not for his career, not for his family."
Marcus's voice quieted.
"But to put together the funding for your project, he called in every relationship he had. People he hadn't spoken to in decades. Former students. Old colleagues. Government contacts. He practically begged."
Ethan's chest tightened.
"The money can be earned back. That's not what concerns me. What concerns me is his reputation. My father spent seventy years building a name that means something. If you fail, if this project produces nothing, it won't just be your credibility that suffers. It will be his."
"The man who validated a plagiarist. The man who gave fifty million marks and his personal laboratory to a teenager who couldn't deliver. That's what the headlines will say. And at ninety-one years old, he won't get a chance to recover from that."
"Do you understand what I'm telling you?"
The question wasn't hostile. It was a son protecting his father.
Ethan nodded. Slowly. Solemnly.
"I understand. And I will not fail."
"I hear that from researchers all the time. It means nothing."
"Then let me say it differently." Ethan's voice dropped. Steady. Absolute. "This was your father's choice. He looked me in the eye, evaluated my work, and decided to back me. That wasn't charity. That was the judgment of a man who's been evaluating science longer than I've been alive."
He met Marcus's gaze.
"There are less than three months left. I'd ask you to stay in the Republic. Don't go back to the Northern Sovereignty. Not yet."
"Why?"
"Because on the day of the verification meeting, I'm going to show the world something that will make you understand exactly what kind of wheel your father has set the Hargrove name upon."
Marcus studied him. The skepticism was still there. But underneath it, for the first time, was the faintest crack of uncertainty.
What if this kid actually delivers?
He didn't say it out loud. Instead, he turned, walked to the door, and paused with one hand on the frame.
"I'll be watching, Mercer. Don't make my father regret this."
The door closed behind him.
Ethan stood in the empty hall for a moment, looking at the photograph on the wall. A young Hargrove, sleeves rolled up, staring down a problem he refused to lose to.
The universe does not yield its secrets to the impatient.
Then he went back upstairs and resumed work on the Mark III's shock absorption system.
Plz Throw Powerstones.