Chapter 673: I Have Somewhere to Be (1)

The certification hall was smaller than Grey expected, tucked into the second floor of a Mech Tech guild building whose first floor had been stripped so thoroughly that several display cases were sitting empty.

Even the walls looked unfinished in places, old mounting brackets still hanging where equipment had clearly been removed recently, and Grey had barely stepped through the door before he heard someone complaining about exactly why.

"This is ridiculous. They used to be able to run three examinations at once."

The speaker was a broad-shouldered man with dark green hair tied behind his neck, sitting beside a woman whose metallic grey eyes hadn’t left the testing chamber since Grey arrived.

Both had Vanguard Class certification requests hovering above the bands on their wrists, which made the irritated look they gave Grey considerably easier to understand when the attendant directed him toward the only active examination platform.

The woman crossed her arms.

"Now we have to wait through Proving, Established and Vector before they can even prepare ours."

"Take it up with Sir Temolt," the man said. "Apparently he stripped half the cities under Melix clean for some private project."

Grey’s steps slowed.

The examiner waiting beside the platform was an older Mech Tech named Hollen, a narrow man with a shaved head and several thin mechanical lenses folded against one temple. He looked tired more than anything else, though Grey noticed the man’s lips tighten at the mention of his missing equipment.

"Not half," Hollen said. "Closer to everything worth using above Vector Class."

The green-haired man scoffed.

"And is he even a Mech Tech?"

Grey turned his head slightly.

"I’ve heard nobody can find a certification under his name," the woman added. "Who knows how much material he’s wasting."

Grey stared at both of them for several seconds before continuing toward the platform.

’These motherfuckers.’

They were sitting comfortably in one of Elowen’s cities, taking certification tests while an army marched toward Melix and Grey had less than three days to figure out how to keep Earth from being carved apart by hundreds of foreign powers. Somehow, the only part that reached them was that Sir Temolt had taken their nice testing toys.

He almost introduced himself just to watch their faces change, but Hollen gestured toward the platform before Grey decided whether it was worth wasting the time.

"Hand."

Grey pressed his palm against a floating pane, and the examination system rippled once before assigning him a simple candidate number. Hollen glanced over the information, apparently seeing nothing that interested him, then stepped back while translucent walls rose around Grey.

"You are attempting sequential certification?"

"All the way up."

Hollen looked at him again, while both Vanguard candidates stopped whispering behind the barrier.

"You understand that failure at any Class ends the examination?"

"Sure."

"And that every Class contains three phases?"

Grey nodded, wanting to hurry past this already.

Hollen folded his arms. "Then we’ll begin with Proving."

The room disappeared.

Grey found himself standing in an empty holographic space while a chunk of dull golden metal rotated in front of him, every ridge and impurity recreated closely enough that he could have mistaken it for something pulled straight from storage.

A web of choices unfolded around it, ranging from structural behavior and conductivity to processing temperature, compatible material families and common failure conditions.

"Phase One tests material knowledge," Hollen’s voice echoed into the chamber. "Identify the material and record all relevant properties presented by the system."

Grey recognized Tempered Brass Steel before Hollen finished speaking.

His hand swept once through the air, selecting the material family, then shifted twice more as entire groups of properties collapsed into place. Grey tagged its structural uses, relative ease of processing and the conditions that made its lattice useful for simple Proving Class construction before flicking the answer away.

The next material appeared almost immediately.

Flexweave Mesh.

Then Aurum Nullite.

Then a resin Grey had used enough times that he answered half the fields before the hologram had finished expanding.

Outside the chamber, Hollen’s lenses unfolded over his eyes and the two Vanguard candidates stopped talking.

Grey barely noticed.

Materials came one after another, but after everything he’d downloaded into Cyber Space while building his understanding toward Dominus Class, Proving Class knowledge wasn’t even close to a challenge. He could have guessed the answers without ever having seen the materials before just by their chemical structures alone.

His hands moved continuously, a swipe identifying one material, a twist separating valid traits from false ones, then another gesture sending the completed answer away before the system could fully settle.

The last hologram vanished.

—

[PHASE ONE COMPLETE]

[Accuracy: 100%]

—

Grey looked toward Hollen.

"Next."

Hollen took a second before responding.

"Phase Two."

The material chamber dissolved and a blueprint expanded around Grey, hundreds of polygonal Faces locking into position until a small mechanical forearm assembly hovered in front of him. The final count settled at 846 Faces, complicated enough to force an actual Proving Class Mech Tech to understand more than where pieces physically fit, but nowhere near the Curved Face monstrosities Grey had dealt with when he was still learning.

"Identify the mech’s primary function, secondary function, and the ideal Spirit classification for integration."

Grey rotated it once.

The answer was obvious from the load distribution. The outer brace wasn’t designed to generate strength on its own, it was meant to redirect impact away from the wrist and elbow while reinforcing the user’s grip during sudden bursts of force.

A smaller set of channels along the underside could return a portion of that stored force through the palm, which made the secondary function an assisted strike rather than simple protection.

Grey swiped his hand.

"Primary function, impact stabilization and joint reinforcement. Secondary, kinetic return through the palm."

Several Spirit options appeared.

Grey dismissed most of them without reading past the first line.

"Best match is a defensive beast Spirit with a secondary charging or impact trait, Proving Class or weak Established at most. Anything focused purely on speed wastes half the architecture, and an elemental Spirit without a physical reinforcement tendency would need the mech redesigned around it."

Silence followed.

Then the blueprint vanished.

—

[PHASE TWO COMPLETE]

[Accuracy: 100%]

—

The green-haired Vanguard candidate leaned forward.

"How the hell did he—"

"Quiet," Hollen said.

The problem wasn’t that Grey knew the answers, it was the Accuracy Percentage and the speed. He was barely looking at them, and even for a Vector Class mech tech, getting 80% accuracy was already more than good enough. To pass the test, you only needed 55% accuracy.

The third phase began with another blueprint, this one considerably denser than the first and built from just over a thousand Faces. Grey recognized the intent almost immediately, a compact chest-mounted energy regulator meant to take unstable output from a Spirit and smooth it before feeding that power into a larger mech.

Hollen’s voice returned.

"One error has been intentionally introduced. Identify the flaw and explain its consequence."

Grey stared at the blueprint.

Then he frowned. Not at the difficulty, but at how easy it was.

His eyes followed the primary energy path from the Spirit seat into the regulating channels, through a layer of polarized Nullite and back toward the distribution junction.

Whoever had altered the blueprint had reversed the orientation of one tiny section near the return path, which meant the regulator would function normally under low output before beginning to trap excess energy inside the circuit every time the Spirit surged.

Grey pinched two fingers together and pulled the offending Face out of the hologram.

"This."

Hollen’s eyes widened.

"The Nullite polarity is reversed. Low output won’t show anything wrong, but once the Spirit pushes past the regulator’s normal load, energy starts cycling backward into the containment route instead of bleeding toward distribution."

Grey rotated the Face and dropped it back into place.

"Best case, the mech overheats. Worst case, the user straps a bomb to their chest and wonders why their last thought smells like burnt hair."

The system flashed.

—

[PHASE THREE COMPLETE]

[Accuracy: 100%]

—

[PROVING CLASS MECH TECH CERTIFICATION PASSED]

—

Nobody outside the chamber spoke.

Grey stretched his shoulders while Hollen stared at the completion time, then looked toward the two Vanguard candidates as though checking whether they’d seen the same thing he had.

The woman with metallic eyes had uncrossed her arms sometime during the test, while her companion was now leaning so far forward that his elbows rested on his knees.

Grey waved toward Hollen.

"Established."

Hollen blinked. "You don’t want a break?"

Grey looked at him. "I have somewhere to be tomorrow."

That seemed to snap the examiner back into motion, and with a few quick gestures the Proving Class environment collapsed around Grey. The empty space darkened, then thousands of new Faces began appearing at once as the first Established Class test assembled itself around him.