Chapter 676: Final Accuracy

The Command Class result appeared while Grey was still turning over everything he’d learned from the examination, and the moment the passing notice came through, Hollen moved to prepare the final test. Grey barely noticed him, his attention caught instead on the memory of those altered raw materials and the strange feeling he’d gotten whenever he reached past their physical properties toward the Command buried inside.

—

[COMMAND CLASS MECH TECH CERTIFICATION PASSED]

[Accuracy: 93.9%]

—

’That’s familiar.’

Grey hadn’t recognized it during the first phase, not properly, but now that he knew what he was looking for, the similarity was obvious. The part of his Neural Frame he’d started thinking of as its "emotional" side after his fight with Kronos wasn’t simply better at sensing souls, it seemed unusually sensitive to anything carrying the imprint of will.

Commands were exactly that.

Grey let Soul Link spread inward as the final examination formed around him, and almost immediately, the world looked different.

The first raw material hadn’t even fully rendered before Grey felt what was wrong with the way he’d been looking at things.

At Command Class, he’d studied the material first and then tried to identify what some living being had imposed upon it afterward. Through Soul Link, that distinction almost disappeared, the physical substance and the will altering it appearing as two pieces of the same thing.

The Dominion Class took that idea considerably further.

A dark violet alloy rotated in front of Grey, carrying three overlapping influences that would have taken him several minutes to separate during the previous test. One pushed the metal toward rigidity under pressure, another forced energy traveling through it to spread evenly across every available Face, while a third weakened the first two whenever the temperature passed a certain threshold.

Grey’s eyes brightened.

’Oh.’

A Command changed something, but a Dominion layered several of those changes together until the material wasn’t merely obeying an instruction anymore, it was operating beneath a set of interacting rules.

Grey swiped his hand through the hologram.

Three property windows opened at once, then collapsed as he identified the base material, separated the layered influences and recorded how each one changed the others. The entire question disappeared within seconds.

Hollen stiffened outside the testing chamber.

The next material came almost immediately, then another, and Grey only got faster as he stopped trying to consciously translate everything into the material knowledge he’d memorized. Soul Link sank through the outer properties instead, tracing the pieces of will embedded inside until the logic holding them together became obvious.

His hands moved in broad, smooth motions.

A mineral designed to disperse heat had been Dominioned to retain heat until an external threshold was reached, then release it all at once. A flexible mesh contained one influence forcing it to recover its original shape and another allowing deformation only along chosen Faces, the two interacting until something naturally pliable behaved more like programmable muscle.

Grey cleared both without hesitation.

The two Vanguard candidates had long since stopped pretending they understood what they were watching.

"He’s faster," the woman whispered.

Her companion didn’t answer.

Grey was.

The jump from Command to Dominion should have made the test dramatically harder, and objectively it had, but it was testing exactly the thing Grey had accidentally become much better at perceiving. His memorized knowledge gave him the physical foundation, while Soul Link stripped away the part that had blindsided him before.

The first phase ended.

—

[PHASE ONE COMPLETE]

—

Hollen’s mechanical lenses shifted twice as though he didn’t trust what they were showing him.

The second phase appeared before he could say anything.

This blueprint was enormous even compared to the Command Class examples, layers of Faces unfolding until Grey could no longer see the opposite side without mentally separating the structure. Three distinct Spirit seats sat inside it rather than one, but the truly difficult part wasn’t that it could support three Spirits.

It was that none of them had one fixed role.

Grey expanded the first Spirit seat.

A defensive beast Spirit placed there would pull one set of Dominions to the surface, causing the mech’s outer structure to prioritize reinforcement and impact distribution. A spatial Spirit in the exact same position would activate an entirely different relationship between those same materials, turning sections that had been armor into anchoring points for movement.

The second and third Spirits complicated that further.

Their Commands didn’t simply add together, they altered which layers of the mech’s existing Dominion became dominant. Changing a single Spirit could shift the purpose of thousands of Faces without physically moving any of them.

Grey stared for less than five seconds, then his fingers started moving.

He rejected the obvious three-Spirit combination first, replaced one with a Resonant Spirit whose influence could bridge the other two, then demonstrated three viable configurations from the same blueprint. One produced a defensive platform, another became a high-mobility assault frame, and the last sacrificed both extremes for stability between them.

The blueprint flashed green.

Grey was already moving on.

By the time Phase Two ended, Hollen had stopped checking individual answers and was simply watching Grey’s hands.

—

[PHASE TWO COMPLETE]

—

The flaw-finding phase was worse.

Not every flaw existed in the blueprint itself, and not every incorrect Dominion needed to be removed. Some were layered so closely that changing one Command buried inside a material shifted the entire relationship between three separate systems.

The hardest question presented Grey with a torso assembly whose energy network failed whenever output crossed seventy-eight percent.

At first glance, the obvious solution was to widen the main distribution channels, but doing that created instability in the Spirit seats. Replacing the material solved the instability while destroying the Dominion linking the three internal systems, which meant the blueprint had been built around something that appeared fundamentally incompatible with itself.

Grey’s eyes glazed slightly and Soul Link sank inward.

He stopped looking at the blueprint as machinery and followed the intent instead, tracing each Command until he found one that didn’t belong where it seemed to belong. A reinforcement Dominion attached to one alloy wasn’t meant to strengthen the material constantly, it was supposed to strengthen only after detecting instability elsewhere.

The trigger had been defined incorrectly.

Grey reached out and changed a single condition within the Command.

The entire blueprint settled and calmed.

A problem spread across hundreds of thousands of Faces disappeared with one adjustment to the intent governing them.

Grey grinned.

The remaining questions vanished one after another, and by the time the chamber began dimming, Grey felt less like he’d completed a test than finally found the instruction manual for half the things he’d been brute forcing his way through for months.

Then the result appeared.

—

[DOMINION CLASS EXAMINATION COMPLETE]

—

Nobody spoke.

Hollen stared at the score, while the two Vanguard candidates stood beside him with the same frozen expressions they’d worn ever since learning Grey’s identity.

**

Far away, Axion-9 received another notification.

He opened it almost lazily, already expecting to see that Grey Temolt had failed the examination shortly after beginning it. That made sense, 93.9% accuracy at Command wasn’t remotely good enough for the standard Axion-9 had set, and anyone who struggled there had no business pretending they belonged at the next level.

Then his mechanical eyes constricted.

—

[Candidate: Grey Temolt]

[Final Accuracy: 100%]

—