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With an easy backflip, Ethan brought the Mark VII down onto the rooftop of the headquarters tower, landing light and steady.
The moment he stepped out of the armor, the rooftop erupted in applause.
The praise came with it, unrestrained.
"Chairman. Outstanding."
"You pulled it back from the very edge."
"Our livelihoods are safe."
"Ten minutes. In ten minutes the Chairman did more for this country than most people manage in a lifetime."
Ethan took in the crowd and bowed.
"Thank you, all of you. You worked hard tonight. Everyone except the night shift, go home and rest. You've earned it."
No one moved. They stayed where they were, cheering.
Ethan, with no other lever available, fell back on his authority.
"Not listening to your boss anymore?" He raised his voice with mock severity. "I'm starting to think none of you want your jobs. Anyone still standing on this rooftop in three minutes can go home and pack a box while they're at it."
Seeing the Chairman apparently working himself up, the crowd laughed, quieted, and began to filter off the rooftop, heading down to gather their things and go home.
Before long, the crowded rooftop had emptied, leaving only Ethan and Yvette.
It was early spring. The daytime had been mild, but the night still carried a real chill off the coast.
Ethan noticed Yvette instinctively rubbing her shoulders against the cold. He crossed to her and draped his jacket over her shoulders without a word.
"Don't."
Yvette, still in the grip of whatever mood had taken her, did not accept the gesture gracefully.
"I'm still standing on the rooftop. Fire me, if you have the nerve."
Ethan was caught slightly off guard by the resentful note in her voice.
In his experience, apart from the occasional softer, girlish hobby she allowed herself in private, Yvette Caldwell was a career woman through and through. Cool, controlled, precise. Tonight, for some reason, she was neither.
Perhaps sensing that her own tone had wandered somewhere it did not usually go, a flash of something close to panic crossed her eyes. She caught herself, and folded the feeling back down.
"Remember this, Junior Brother." Her voice came back level. "As long as the hills remain, you never need to fear running out of firewood. In the future, unless there is genuinely no other option, do not put yourself in danger like that. Ever."
Watching her retreat back into her composed self, Ethan felt an odd flicker of regret.
Given the choice, he had preferred the unguarded concern of a moment ago.
"All right. I understand, Senior Sister." He kept his tone light. "And don't worry. I'm extremely attached to staying alive. If I hadn't been certain I'd walk out of there, I would never have walked in. I don't gamble with my own life. I only ever bet on sure things."
Seeing the playful manner return, the residual fear in Yvette's chest eased considerably.
The two of them returned to the command room, confirmed that the new transmission lines were holding without issue, and then Ethan took his leave. He still had a great deal of work waiting on the Transformer builds and the Vibranium integration.
As Yvette watched him lift off the rooftop and streak away into the dark in the Mark VII, a strange, unfamiliar feeling stirred in her chest for the first time, and she did not, standing there in his jacket, entirely know what to do with it.
---
Ethan reached the underground laboratory. Before he could even strip out of the suit, his phone rang.
He glanced at it. It was the Director who happened to share his old habit of calling at inconvenient hours.
"Good evening, Director Holt. It's late. What can I do for you."
Hearing Ethan's voice, alive and unbothered, Xavier Holt finally let himself relax on the other end of the line. And then, having confirmed the boy was fine, he started in.
"You reckless brat. Who authorized you to take a risk like that on your own initiative? Even if you won't think about yourself, think about everyone else. Do you have the faintest idea what it would have meant if something had happened to you in there? It would have been a catastrophic loss for New Future, and for the entire Republic."
Ethan held the phone slightly away from his ear and picked at it, waiting the lecture out.
Once Holt had run down a little, Ethan spoke up, chuckling.
"Anger's bad for the blood pressure, Director. You know what kind of person I am. If I hadn't been confident I'd come out the other side, I wouldn't joke around with my own life."
Once Holt's temper had cooled, Ethan moved to the actual subject.
"While I have you. What's the story with that circuit breaker? How does a component that critical fail without anyone catching it?"
In truth, Ethan already had a firm suspicion about who had tampered with the breaker, so the question was not an interrogation, and it was not about assigning blame. The real purpose was angling toward something else entirely.
He had, after all, put in the work and risked the armor to save the program tonight. Surely that warranted a little appreciation. And he was still short a great many materials for his eventual Optimus Prime build.
But the upright, literal-minded Holt did not catch the angle at all. He answered with genuine contrition.
"The equipment and components for the entire program total tens of thousands of tons. There are only so many qualified inspectors. An oversight on a single component, while unacceptable, is not incomprehensible given the volume. But you needn't worry. I will absolutely not let the personnel responsible for inspecting that component walk away clean. And once this is resolved, I intend to submit a request for disciplinary action against myself to my superiors as well."
Listening to this earnest, self-flagellating speech, Ethan felt a wave of helplessness.
Why was the man so dense?
He cleared his throat.
"Director. That isn't what I meant. Listen. These contingencies were within New Future's response planning from the start. Do you genuinely think it was a lucky coincidence that a suit of armor capable of surviving ultra-high-voltage discharge happened to exist exactly when one was needed? So this whole thing, from our side, is not actually a crisis. It's a handled situation."
Holt was, for a moment, stunned into silence.
It was true. If Ethan had not anticipated some version of this kind of accident, how would a suit specifically capable of withstanding that voltage have come to exist in the first place?
"Then what," Holt said slowly, "exactly do you mean."
Ethan perked up immediately.
"My meaning is very simple. Look at it this way. I put in the labor, and I put my armor through real wear and tear, all on account of this incident. Don't you think some sort of compensation would be appropriate? A labor fee, let's call it."
Sitting in his office, Holt was speechless.
If the boy wanted benefits, he could simply have asked for benefits. Was the entire scenic detour necessary?
"The government just transferred twenty billion marks to you. On top of the rare-earth materials from before. What else could you possibly need, you grasping little."
Ethan immediately adopted a wounded tone and began pouring out his sorrows to the Director.
"Director, you have no idea how much capital the energy industry burns through. That batch of materials you sent solved an immediate problem, yes. But to call it sufficient would be a fantasy. And more to the point, to prevent another incident like tonight, the other cities in the rollout are all going to need to be fitted with the new transmission lines I developed, which means more materials, more fabrication, more of everything."
Seeing Ethan winding up to complain further, Holt felt his head begin to throb.
"Enough. Stop reciting your sutras. Just tell me how much you want."
Hearing the surrender, Ethan did not hesitate. He immediately began listing off the materials for his Optimus Prime build like a man reading a restaurant menu.
He did not yet have the exact specification for the Autobot leader in his head, since he had not purchased it. But based on his existing knowledge of Transformer construction and the Megatron manufacturing process he had just internalized, he could deduce a great deal of what the build would require, and he extrapolated the rest.
It took two or three minutes to recite the full list.
Without waiting for any reaction from the other end, he dropped a cheerful "Thanks for your hard work, Director, love you, kiss kiss," and hung up.
Meanwhile, in the capital, the veins on Xavier Holt's forehead were standing out visibly. If the brat had not been several hundred kilometers away at that exact moment, the Director would genuinely have considered driving over to deliver a beating in person.