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The detected temperature kept climbing, and everyone in the command tent felt like ants on a heated pan.
Even knowing it was certain death, soldiers stepped forward to volunteer.
"Colonel. Let me go. Maybe I make it."
"Colonel, I've had thick skin since I was a boy. Let me try."
"I give my word, sir, the moment it looks wrong, I pull back."
Colonel Tolliver looked at the men volunteering to walk into a death they all understood, and felt a wave of helplessness layered over genuine pride.
Ultra-high voltage left no room for luck. If there had been even a one-in-ten-thousand chance, Tolliver would have led the attempt himself, without hesitation, life or no life. Given what the Hidden Dragon program meant for the Republic, there was nothing Tolliver would personally have refused to sacrifice.
But the reality was unforgiving. Voltage at the levels now present at the breaker assembly would punch through not just human flesh but through the armor of a main battle tank. There was no act of courage that survived contact with that much energy. Courage was not the missing ingredient. Physics was.
Second by second, the team could only watch the circuit temperature crawl toward its limit.
Off to the side, Tolliver picked up an insulating suit and began, grimly, to put it on. If it came to the final moment, he would make the attempt himself. Success or failure did not matter. He would, at least, have lived up to what the Republic had made of him.
Just as a heavy despair settled over the tent, the perimeter security officer's voice came over the communicator.
"Colonel. Radar has an unidentified flying object inbound. Speed in excess of Mach five. Estimated arrival, thirty seconds. Do we engage with anti-air missiles?"
Tolliver's head felt as though it had doubled in size.
Of all the luck. The situation inside the facility was already a catastrophe, and now there was an unidentified high-speed contact inbound from outside. He thought of the firm standing orders regarding the security of the conversion hub, and he was, for a moment, fully prepared to give the order to shoot the contact down.
He had begun to open his mouth when the communicator hissed with static.
Another voice cut into the military channel.
"Good evening, Colonel Tolliver. This is Ethan Mercer, Chairman of New Future Technology Energy."
Tolliver froze. Then his face broke into something close to wild joy.
If there was a single person in the entire Republic with a chance of resolving the deadlock, it was the inventor of the Hidden Dragon program himself.
"Mr. Mercer. Is that genuinely you."
"It's me, Colonel. I'll be on site in under thirty seconds. Time is short, so I'll be direct. When I arrive, pull back your anti-air weapons and your armed personnel from around the conversion hub. Don't waste a second of the time we have."
Tolliver felt as though a load-bearing pillar had appeared beneath a collapsing structure.
"Understood. No problem. You come straight in. You will not face a single shot or a single obstruction. I'll see to it personally."
Ethan acknowledged this, and had J.A.R.V.I.S. withdraw from the military channel.
As the channel cleared, Tolliver turned to the communicator and gave the order.
"All perimeter units. Cease all offensive posture. Confirm weapons safe. The inbound contact is friendly. Ensure it reaches the conversion hub without obstruction. Move."
The order propagated. The soldiers on the outer line stood down.
→ Half a minute later, a red-and-gold suit of powered armor appeared on the horizon.
Confirming a clear approach, Ethan did not slow. The Mark VII ran at full speed, and the brilliant figure crossed the darkened coastline and tore straight through the outer defensive line in an instant.
He arrived inside the conversion hub and went directly to the control room.
There, a brand-new high-voltage circuit breaker, roughly half the height of a person, had already been staged and prepared for installation. It was the replacement unit that the rushed deployment had failed to install in time.
Ethan did not stop to greet anyone. He shouldered the breaker unit and flew straight back out toward the converter assembly.
From the moment he entered the control room to the moment he left it, perhaps ten seconds had elapsed.
The personnel in the control room, Colonel Tolliver included, were left stunned.
He hadn't paused to discuss a plan. He hadn't conferred with the technical team. He had grabbed the breaker and gone straight for the forbidden zone. How was this different from delivering himself to the slaughter? Did he imagine this was like the press conference, where his armor had shrugged off a pair of lightweight missiles? Millions of volts, with the current to match, was not something a suit of armor could survive, no matter how advanced.
"There. Mercer's entered the arc zone."
Under everyone's strained attention, the Mark VII flew into the zone of overflowing electrical discharge.
Crack.
Arcs of current as thick as a thumb lashed against the surface of the armor. On the video monitors, the watching personnel felt their hearts seize.
But inside the armor, Ethan was entirely calm.
The arcs looked terrifying, but the appearance overstated the reality. The actual potential of the discharge reaching the armor's surface was, at most, around a hundred thousand volts, which did not come close to the defensive ceiling of the Mark VII. As the countless arcs slid across the plating, J.A.R.V.I.S. reported only minor surface wear. Nothing structural. Nothing that threatened the suit or its occupant.
Seeing Ethan moving through the arc zone without the slightest difficulty, the control room was stunned, and then, slowly, relieved.
But in Colonel Tolliver's eyes, the relief was undercut by a growing shock.
As a frontline combat officer, Tolliver had seen this class of armor before. Ethan had previously built three suits for the Valorian military, and Tolliver had been present for the training and performance evaluation of one of them. He knew, from direct observation, exactly what those suits could and could not do.
And it was precisely because he knew that he was alarmed.
The military suits performed superbly against conventional kinetic and explosive threats. But against certain specialized attack vectors, electromagnetic pulse, ultrasonic weapons, and high-voltage electrical discharge, their performance had been considerably less impressive, not dramatically better than a conventional armored vehicle. Under ordinary conditions, the armor Ethan had built for the military could survive electrical currents at tens of thousands of volts, perhaps up to a hundred thousand, but it would not have done so with the effortless ease the Mark VII was now displaying. The military suits would have been straining. The Mark VII was barely registering the load.
This meant one of two things.
The first possibility was that when Ethan built the suits for the military, he had deliberately held back the full extent of his defensive engineering, delivering capable but not maximal armor.
That possibility was, in itself, unremarkable. Inventors retained their best work. It was expected.
The second possibility was more disturbing. It was that the young man in the footage had, in the few short months since delivering the military suits, achieved another generational breakthrough, and pushed the armor's defensive performance to an entirely new tier.
But was that even possible.
Electrical-discharge-resistant armor materials at this level were a problem that experts across the Republic, and across the world, had not solved. The materials science required to make a suit shrug off a hundred thousand volts as casually as the Mark VII was doing did not, by Tolliver's understanding, currently exist in any laboratory on the planet.
How could one young man have overcome it in a matter of months?
Did he treat fundamental materials breakthroughs as casually as eating dinner?
And yet, thinking of the freak of nature the footage represented, even the battle-hardened colonel found that he could not rule it out. This was the man who had synthesized a new element. The man who had built sentient machines. The man whose seabed reactors were, at this very moment, feeding an entire city from the floor of the ocean. If anyone alive could casually solve an impossible materials problem in a few months, it was him.
While Tolliver's mind churned through the implications, the exclamations of the control room staff pulled him back.
On the monitors, Ethan, in the new armor, had crossed the outer arc zone and was striding, without hesitation, directly into the heart of the million-volt forbidden region.