June, 2509 AD – Garipan Military Academy

  Jack followed the old man to a freestanding circular building.

  The guards at the entrance checked both their biometrics, then stepped aside to let them pass.

  Inside, Jack saw that the circular structure covered nearly ten thousand square meters. The whole building was shaped like a serpent swallowing its own tail.

  They climbed a staircase. The old man stepped into a side room, then handed Jack a worker’s badge and a set of clothes.

  “Go clean yourself up. Then come back and see me.”

  Jack took the badge and headed toward the staff showers. Rounding a corner, he saw through an open lab door a woman with a waterfall of golden hair, full lips, sharp cheekbones—and a pair of icy blue eyes—shoving a fire extinguisher at a smoking fusion core while cursing under her breath in what sounded like advanced quantum physics.

  Jack stopped in his tracks.

  The look on her face was pure, focused concentration. It hit him somewhere deep—beauty and destruction existing in perfect balance.

  She yanked off her goggles. Those ice-blue eyes locked onto the 300-pound obstacle standing in the doorway.

  Torn, filthy uniform.

  And most importantly, the way this Fatty was staring at her.

  The blonde gave a short, sharp laugh.

  “What are you looking at? Never seen an experiment blow up before?”

  She snatched an energy pistol off the table, the motion so smooth it was like she was picking up a tube of lipstick.

  Jack saw the gun and every survival instinct his Martian genes had ever encoded lit up at once.

  “Shit.”

  The 300-pound man executed an impossible spin-and-sprint in under a second and shot down the hallway like a shell out of a cannon.

  That only made her more interested. A body like that shouldn’t be able to move like that.

  Nova stepped into the doorway and watched the direction he’d disappeared, a small smile tugging at her lips.

  “Interesting fatty,” she murmured. “That launch acceleration… the thrust-to-weight ratio is worth a second look.”

  Then she went to find her mentor and asked about him.

  When she heard the Fatty was a soldier and knew mech repair, her eyes lit up. Nova had an IQ north of 220 and could design cutting-edge mech systems, but her hands could never fully keep up with her brain. In that one respect, maybe God really did believe in balance.

  Hot water—real hot water—poured down from the shower head for the first time in months. Jack scrubbed at a body caked in grime and scars.

  The faint sting of open cuts reminded him he was still alive.

  Images flashed through his mind: shattered mechs, a young lifeless face, severed arms and legs.

  His knees started to shake again.

  Tears mixed with the hot water on his cheeks.

  It feels good to be alive, he thought.

  After he washed, he put on clean clothes, clipped on his badge, and went to find the old man.

  The old man led him into a lab packed with mechs.

  To Jack, it was like walking into a cathedral built out of machinery. Rows of half-dismantled mechs rose around him like towers. Impossible weapons lay everywhere, waiting to be resurrected. At the center of it all, the broken carcass of a “Beast-III” class mech lay on its side—a relic waiting to be reborn.

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  Thorne pointed at the mech graveyard.

  “Fix them,” he said simply, voice rough and low. “I assume you’d rather not go back to that hell you just crawled out of.”

  Then Thorne walked away.

  Jack’s survival instinct roared.

  For two days he became a storm of focused energy. He barely slept, fueled by protein slurry and pure terror. Somewhere between exhaustion and mania, he turned into something else—a ghost caught in the gears, a condemned soul refusing to die.

  People in the lab started whispering about him: the fat mechanic who never stopped working.

  His colonist genes burned fuel like a starship. Fat was for bad times, not for heroics.

  Thorne saw the spark.

  And then she came.

  Her voice rang out, bright and clear:

  “You. Fatty. With me. Now.”

  Jack froze and turned slowly.

  He already knew who she was from the gossip.

  Nova. Thorne’s prized protégé. Forged in the furnace of his obsession. A genius as arrogant and ruthless as her mentor. Twenty years old. More dangerous than the old man himself.

  Tall, straight-backed, golden hair tied up in a lazy sort of rebellion. Her features were so perfectly symmetrical she looked like a porcelain doll. The shapeless lab coat did nothing to hide the symmetry of strength and temptation beneath. Her eyes—sharp, electric blue, cold and fever-bright—locked onto him, and Jack suddenly felt like prey selected by a predator who just happened to also be a goddess.

  He stumbled along behind her, his mind a blur of fear and something hotter, harder to name.

  For a second, Nya and Meadow flashed through his thoughts—they were beautiful.

  But this… this was a supernova burning through every flaw he’d ever tried to hide.

  Her lab was a holy contradiction.

  At the far end stood a mech Jack had never seen before: tall, radiant, its alloy plating glowing faintly with inner blue light.

  “It’s a morph-frame,” Nova said, catching his stare.

  “Transforming mech?” Jack snorted before his brain could stop his mouth. “That’s a showpiece for senators. In a real mud pit, one grain of sand and that sort of hydraulic nonsense locks up and dies.”

  The room temperature dropped ten degrees.

  A blur of motion—she crossed the space in a heartbeat and seized his arm, twisting hard. Her body pressed up against his: heat, curves, the faint smell of ozone and coffee wrapping around him.

  Her voice in his ear was velvet-wrapped poison.

  “You dare mock me, Fatty?”

  “Ow—ow! Easy! Easy!” Jack groaned, half from pain, half from sheer disbelief that he was still alive enough to feel pain.

  Color flushed across Nova’s cheeks—rage, excitement, or both. She shoved him toward the mech.

  At her command, the machine began to move.

  Armor plates peeled away like molten sand. The frame folded and slid with the grace of living muscle. The angelic figure collapsed inward into a dark sphere, then unfolded again as a sleek fighter, then morphed once more into a war-beast built for slaughter.

  Liquid metal. Living alloy. A god-killer disguised as engineering.

  Watching the mech change shape under the flow of that liquid metal, Jack felt his expression shift from disdain to unease. His hand stopped midway through a gesture, fingers stiff in the air. His mouth hung open.

  Then his face settled into something else entirely—pure engineering awe.

  He staggered to a nearby console and, with shaking hands, launched a diagnostic. The incoming data mocked common sense. Harder than any known structural material. Lighter than air had any right to tolerate.

  A substance that could kill gods, or forge them.

  Each transformation cycle required a sixty-second cooldown. A full minute of vulnerability—a window when this godlike weapon would be a sitting target.

  Thorne’s masterpiece had a hairline crack.

  And Jack had seen it.

  He looked up at Nova. She stood with arms folded, lips curved in a sculpted cold smile. Her entire presence radiated genius and merciless certainty.

  A dry, unsteady laugh slipped out of Jack’s throat.

  “This is a… paradigm-breaking design,” he managed. Reverence, fear, and something broken all tangled in his voice.

  He met her gaze.

  “So tell me… did God plant a seed in your brain to let you design something like this?”

  The defects in this gene-mutant body of mine last longer than any perfect machine. Thorne saw that in me, he thought silently.

  That night, lying alone on his bunk, the data from earlier still burned behind Jack’s eyes.

  He thought of Nova’s gaze.

  Thorne’s orders.

  The machine that moved like flesh and blood.

  Nya’s scars.

  Meadow’s fragility.

  They were like him—full of cracks and flaws—and that was exactly what made them human, made them last longer than the gods they were building.

  Humanity worshiped gods because gods broke the laws of nature.

  But here, underground, wrapped in twisted metal and the arrogance of brilliance, Jack understood a darker truth:

  When machines broke those laws, they stopped being machines.

  They became gods.

  And if gods could be built, then humans—fat men, cowards—lost the right to mock, to hide, to beg. They became clay, waiting to be reshaped or discarded.

  Flaws like his—obesity, fear, screwed-up genes—were humanity’s last crooked joke thrown at the gods of their own making.

  Jack rolled onto his side, skin damp with cold sweat, and whispered into the dark:

  “Maybe the moment we decided to build gods with our own hands… we stopped being afraid of them.”

  The lab lights dimmed. Jack blinked. For a moment, the harsh white glare softened into a faint blue, like water running over glass. His vision blurred, then snapped back into focus.

  A line of text flickered at the edge of his sight, so faint he almost thought he was imagining it:

  [System calibration complete: retinal overlay activated]

  He rubbed his eyes. Nothing. Just the same blinding lab lights.

  Nova didn’t look up from her console.

  “Don’t fight it,” she said offhandedly, as if commenting on the weather. “It’s just an overlay. You’ll barely notice it’s there.”

  Jack muttered something under his breath, but her words kept echoing in his ears.

  He couldn’t remember that exact moment clearly afterward—only that from then on, sometimes, when the pressure closed in, a strange glint would flicker through his eyes.

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