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Watching Graves's car pull away from the house, Ethan couldn't bring himself to feel good about the deal.
Three sets of battle armor. Plus the corresponding miniature reactors for each.
He felt like slapping himself.
The theory was in his head. The knowledge was downloaded. But building the things consumed enormous amounts of time and material. Each suit was weeks of precision fabrication. Each reactor was a manufacturing process that couldn't be rushed without risking catastrophic failure.
But there was no other way. The Valorian government had backed him at every critical moment. The original research funding from Hargrove. The military support during the Aurelian operation. The Chancellor's personal intervention. The Bureau agents who'd put their lives on the line.
And the original set of armor — the Mark One — had been destroyed during Ethan's incursion into the Aurelian Republic.
That sat in his gut like a stone. The armor he'd built with his own hands, in Hargrove's lab, over three months of isolation and obsessive work. Gone.
Returning favor for favor was how Ethan operated. The people who'd been good to him got treated well. Three armor sets and reactors was the least he could do.
After Graves's visit, Frank finally stopped pushing the school enrollment issue. That alone was worth the price of admission. Given what Ethan's life looked like now, campus was about as practical as putting a fighter jet in a parking garage.
He packed his bags, set up the laboratory, and disappeared into a new round of research.
On the other side of the world, the Aurelian Republic was burning.
Not literally. But the political conflagration consuming the government was doing damage that fire couldn't match.
President Harrison Wolfe's administration had been fighting a losing battle to contain the fallout from the Ethan Mercer incident. The unauthorized military operation. The fighter jets shot down on live television. The Defense Secretary's public humiliation. The diplomatic catastrophe of launching an attack on Valorian airspace during a civilian broadcast.
There were too many eyewitnesses. Too much footage. Too many cameras that had captured the moment the Aurelian Republic's military might had been dismantled by a single teenager in a suit of armor.
Wolfe's political rivals smelled blood. Opposition media ran the footage on loop. Protest marches erupted in half a dozen states. The phrase "national humiliation" trended for three consecutive weeks.
Wolfe, sitting in the Presidential Office, stared at the mountain of documents on his desk and felt the walls closing in.
He'd already removed Andrew Callister from the Defense Secretary position for severe dereliction of duty and referred him to the judicial department. Callister, whose hand still bore the scar from Ethan Mercer's pen, had accepted his dismissal with the hollow eyes of a man who knew worse was coming.
But sacrificing one official wasn't enough. The failure was too catastrophic. Everyone could see that a golden opportunity for the Aurelian Republic to secure technological dominance had slipped through the fingers of incompetent leadership.
The phone on Wolfe's desk rang.
He looked at the caller ID, and his scalp went numb.
He took a breath. Answered.
"Mr. Vandermere. Good afternoon."
Silence.
"Mr. Vandermere, please allow me to explain. The responsibility for this situation lies entirely with Callister. His judgment—"
"Harrison."
The voice was quiet. Unhurried. The voice of a man who had never needed to raise it because people who heard it understood, on an instinctive level, what it meant.
The Vandermere family was the oldest political dynasty in the Aurelian Republic. Older than the republic itself, some said. They didn't hold office. They didn't run for anything. They didn't need to. For over a century, they had operated behind the curtain, funding campaigns, selecting candidates, and removing leaders who failed to perform.
Harrison Wolfe was the most powerful man in the Aurelian Republic.
The man on the phone was the most powerful man in the room where that title was decided.
"I suggest you hand over the presidency. Gracefully."
The words arrived without emotion. Without malice. Without room for negotiation.
Wolfe felt his spine dissolve. He sagged into his chair, the phone pressed against his ear, his mouth opening and closing without producing sound.
He knew the math. Public opinion didn't matter. Opposition pressure didn't matter. As long as the Vandermere family stood behind a president, everything could be managed. Scandals evaporated. Investigations stalled. Rivals found their funding suddenly dry.
But when the Vandermere family withdrew their support, presidents didn't survive. They didn't fight back. They didn't appeal to the public or rally their base. They resigned, because the alternative was being destroyed so thoroughly that their grandchildren would still be paying for it.
He tried to speak. To plead. To offer something.
Nothing came out.
Because he knew that any plea would be useless.
After the call ended, Harrison Wolfe sat in the Presidential Office of the most powerful nation on earth and stared at nothing. He understood what came next. And the light in his eyes went out.
Two months after Ethan entered the laboratory, the news detonated.
AURELIAN REPUBLIC PRESIDENT WOLFE FAILS TO SECURE RE-ELECTION.
In the entire history of the Aurelian Republic, only a handful of sitting presidents had failed to win a second term. Under normal circumstances, incumbency was an almost insurmountable advantage. A sitting president who wanted re-election got re-election.
Wolfe hadn't just lost. He'd been removed.
And when the leaders of every nation on the planet learned who had replaced him, the reaction was universal: alarm.
President Elias Kane.
The name alone sent foreign ministries into emergency sessions.
Kane was the most prominent hawk in the Aurelian Republic's political establishment. His public image had been forged in a conflict in the Eastern Sovereignty theater, where he'd held the rank of Major General. Against explicit orders from his superiors, he'd launched an unauthorized offensive that had resulted in devastating civilian casualties.
When the military tribunal convened, Kane had shown no remorse. He'd stood at the podium, looked the judges in the eye, and declared that everything he'd done was in the service of the Aurelian Republic.
The tribunal had ended his military career. The Vandermere family had given him a new one.
With a once-in-a-generation genius emerging in Valoria, the question on every analyst's mind was immediate and obvious: why would the Aurelian Republic elect a warmonger as president? What was their intention?
Kane's inaugural address answered the question with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
The speech was short. Aggressive. Built on a single thesis: the people and actions that had brought shame to the Aurelian Republic would pay a terrible price.
He didn't name Ethan Mercer. He didn't need to. Everyone on the planet knew exactly who he was talking about.
This wasn't a dog whistle. It was a bullhorn.
In the laboratory, Ethan watched the inauguration footage on his phone during a break between fabrication cycles.
Pay a terrible price.
He snorted.
He hadn't even settled his own accounts with the Aurelian Republic yet, and they were already threatening him. The fighter jets that attacked him during the verification meeting. The operation that kidnapped Frank. The Defense Secretary who'd held his uncle hostage.
Ethan wasn't a generous person on his best days. And this was not his best day.
He opened his social media account. His personal page, which had become one of the most-followed accounts in the Republic, was a scene of near-total harmony. After the Aurelian operation and the super soldier serum, his critics had been completely silenced. His fan base was rabid, loyal, and absolutely merciless toward anyone who said a word against him.
The comment section was a no-man's-land for detractors. One negative word, and the response was swift, overwhelming, and brutal.
Ethan typed a post.
"To celebrate the glorious retirement of Aurelian Republic President Harrison Wolfe, I've decided to hold a press conference in the middle of next month."
"A sneak peek: this time, the product is related to intelligent robotics."
"Details to follow."
He hit publish and went back to work.
The post detonated across the global internet in minutes.
The reaction was instantaneous and volcanic.
He's celebrating Wolfe's removal? That's a direct slap in Kane's face.
This kid just publicly provoked the president of the most powerful nation on earth.
A TEENAGER is picking a fight with a WARMONGER HEAD OF STATE.
...Has he lost his mind?
But the people who'd watched Ethan Mercer fight his way out of the Aurelian Republic's military encirclement on live television felt differently.
This is the same guy who took down forty fighter jets with a palm laser.
The same guy who flew into enemy territory alone to rescue his uncle.
Compared to that, poking a president on social media is child's play.
Meanwhile, in the Presidential Office of the Aurelian Republic, Elias Kane read the post on his screen and allowed himself a cold, thin smile.
The provocation was juvenile. Transparent. The kind of thing a teenager did because he hadn't yet learned that the world punished bravado.
Kane had reached the presidency by understanding one thing better than anyone else in the political establishment: when your opponent made an emotional decision, you made a strategic one.
He stood. Walked to the window. Looked east, toward the direction of Valoria.
"A press conference."
A beat.
"Perhaps that's an ." I