Chapter 674: I Have Somewhere to Be (2)

The Established Class test began quickly.

The first phase threw materials at Grey that required more than memorizing whether something conducted energy or held a load well, forcing him to account for interactions between materials, processing methods and situations where one property became a weakness instead.

Grey swept through them almost as quickly anyway, his hands moving across the holograms in continuous motions while answers locked into place faster than Hollen could finish checking the previous one.

The blueprint phase finally pushed the Face count into the thousands, but that barely registered after the things Grey had been building recently. He rotated the mech once, stripped away three unnecessary layers with a gesture, then identified its primary function, the secondary systems feeding it and the type of Spirit that would make the entire thing work without wasting half its design.

The flaw phase lasted less than a minute.

—

[ESTABLISHED CLASS MECH TECH CERTIFICATION PASSED]

—

The two Vanguard candidates had stopped looking annoyed.

By the time Vector began, neither of them was even sitting anymore, and Hollen had moved closer to the edge of the testing platform with his mechanical lenses fully spread across one side of his face.

The blueprints were finally reaching the scale Grey remembered from his own early work, ten thousand Faces and more appearing in layers rather than one simple structure, but that only meant he needed a few more gestures to peel them apart.

Raw materials disappeared one after another.

Blueprints rotated, separated and reconstructed.

Mistakes that were supposed to hide inside thousands of Faces lit up almost immediately once Grey understood what the machine was trying to accomplish, and several times he found secondary weaknesses the test hadn’t asked him to identify at all.

—

[VECTOR CLASS MECH TECH CERTIFICATION PASSED]

—

Hollen looked at the completion time, then looked back at Grey.

"You may begin the Vanguard examination whenever you’re ready."

"I’ve been ready."

The Vanguard test changed the scale more noticeably, blueprints expanding until tens of thousands of Faces surrounded Grey in layered holographic structures. The first one reminded him vaguely of the Able Eye blueprint he’d once struggled to document, which was almost funny now that his Cyber Space could hold information orders of magnitude more complicated without making his skull feel like it was splitting open.

The materials were more specialized as well, many of them combinations rather than simple alloys, meshes or Nullites. Grey still tore through the first phase, and by the time the blueprint analysis began, the two actual Vanguard candidates were staring at him with expressions that had gone well beyond irritation.

The woman finally whispered to her companion.

"How long did our preliminaries take?"

"Three days."

Grey heard them.

His lip twitched.

’And these fuckers were complaining about waiting an hour.’

He didn’t bother turning around, focusing on the Vanguard blueprint as it unfolded into almost twenty-five thousand Faces. There were enough interacting systems now that an ordinary Mech Tech had to understand the mech as a whole rather than reading one circuit at a time, but Grey had been forced past that kind of thinking a long time ago.

He identified the function, rejected two Spirits that would technically work but produce terrible Sync Rates, then selected a third whose function aligned with both the mech’s primary system and the way its secondary circuits redistributed output.

The flaw test followed immediately afterward, hiding three interacting errors rather than one, and Grey corrected all three before the examination could finish highlighting the section he had touched.

—

[VANGUARD CLASS MECH TECH CERTIFICATION PASSED]

—

Silence settled over the room.

Grey rolled his shoulders.

"Command."

Hollen didn’t move.

Grey waited for several seconds before looking over.

"Hello?"

Hollen blinked. "You intend to continue?"

Grey frowned. "I told you that when I came in."

"You said all the way."

"Yeah."

Hollen stared at him.

"All the way to what?"

"Dominus."

The color left the man’s face.

Behind him, the two Vanguard candidates seemed to freeze at exactly the same time, and Grey started wondering whether everybody here had somehow assumed he wanted a cute little Vanguard badge before going home.

Hollen cleared his throat.

"I can only personally certify through Command Class."

Grey’s expression flattened. "Of course."

"My own certification is Command Class, so anything beyond that requires review from the Board."

"The Board?"

Hollen nodded, still looking somewhat shell-shocked. "Certified Mech Tech guilds across the Genesis World operate through an alliance network. Standards, examinations and certifications are shared between branches so that a rank earned in one Territory is recognized in another."

Grey glanced around at the mostly stripped testing hall.

"This is part of an interworld alliance?"

"Yes."

"Looks rich."

Hollen wisely ignored that.

"We don’t currently have a Dominus Class Mech Tech available locally, but the Board can authorize remote certification. You can complete the examination here, then someone with the proper titles will review the record and issue the certification if you pass."

"How long?"

"Usually less than a day."

Grey frowned. He didn’t like that at all.

An automatic examination was one thing, but handing his results to some random asshole he’d never met and hoping they didn’t decide to make his life difficult sounded like a terrible system. Grey had enough enemies scattered through Genesis that letting an unknown person decide whether he passed anything was practically begging someone to fuck with him.

Ji had said registration closed tomorrow, though.

Grey didn’t have another option.

"Fine. Give me the tests, but send the request now."

Hollen looked troubled rather than relieved.

"Sir, if I submit a Dominus review request and the candidate fails before reaching the proper examination, the branch can face expulsion from the alliance network. This is meant to prevent frivolous requests, so I really must ask that you—"

Grey’s patience finally disappeared. "I’m Sir Temolt."

Nobody moved.

The green-haired Vanguard candidate’s face went blank first, while the woman beside him slowly turned her head toward Grey as though she had misheard something. Then both of them seemed to replay the conversation from earlier at once, remembering every complaint about Sir Temolt stealing their equipment and wasting resources despite apparently not even being a real Mech Tech.

The man fainted.

His knees buckled and he dropped sideways into one of the chairs, while the woman caught the edge of the table with one hand and went so pale that Grey briefly wondered whether she was going to join him.

Hollen somehow looked worse.

He hadn’t insulted Grey directly, but silence had done plenty of talking earlier, and now he clearly understood exactly whose had taken the resources that had been stripped out of this hall.

The stranger he had quietly agreed wasn’t a real Mech Tech had apparently walked in immediately afterward and cleared four certifications in less time than some candidates needed to finish one phase.

Grey raised an eyebrow. "My request?"

Hollen nodded stiffly. "Immediately, Sir Temolt."

"Good."

The Command Class chamber began rebuilding itself around Grey while Hollen hurried toward the guild console, and this time the blueprint assembling overhead crossed into six figures of Faces. Grey’s smile finally returned as circuitry spread around him in layers dense enough that an ordinary person probably wouldn’t have known where to begin.

**

Far beyond Melix, Hollen’s request entered the Board network.

The difference between a minor branch system and the Board’s central registry was enormous. Whereas back in the branch all they had seen was a candidate number, here Grey’s candidate number disappeared almost immediately as deeper records synchronized around it.

A name replaced it.

[Grey Temolt]

The mechanical being watching the request went still.

It possessed nothing that could reasonably be mistaken for a human face, its body formed around a dark metallic core suspended inside three rotating rings while six articulated limbs unfolded independently around it. Hundreds of smaller components drifted nearby without physical connection, rearranging themselves whenever its attention shifted from one display to another.

A Para Bot. One of the Race that believed machinery belonged to them.

The same broadcast that had caused Great Udon to wonder aloud whether Grey Temolt was the greatest Mech Tech of his generation had spread far beyond Earth, and few had taken the insult more personally than the Para Bot now staring at Grey’s name.

A narrow line of blue light passed across its central core. Then the Dominus examination parameters opened.

The Para Bot adjusted one value.

[Required Accuracy: 99.99%]

That was the highest the system allowed.

"If you really are supposed to be a rival to I, Axion-9, you’ll be able to do it, Grey Temolt." Its rings began turning again. "Don’t consider this me blocking you, consider it me giving you a bar to leap over."