The front door creaked open.
"I'm home," Dexter called out, stepping into the house.
He slipped off his shoes and neatly placed them onto the shoe rack by the wall. The interior of the house looked exactly as he remembered it—from both this life and the last. Cozy, bright, and deceptively normal.
From the kitchen, his mother's voice echoed cheerfully.
"Is Dee Dee with you, Dexter?"
"She's with her friends, Mom," Dexter replied, already heading toward the stairs.
"I see. Well, if you're hungry, there are sandwiches in the fridge. Just go get one."
"Alright, Mom," he called back, already halfway up the steps.
He reached the second floor and turned into the room that, for the past day, had become his new sanctuary—his bedroom.
Once inside, he shut the door gently behind him, dropped his school bag onto the bed without a second glance, and turned his attention to the large, wall-length bookshelf. At a glance, it looked like any other shelf packed with thick, dusty volumes, science encyclopedias, physics tomes, and journals scribbled with unreadable notes.
He stepped toward it, reached for a specific book on the top right shelf, and pulled it forward.
Click.
A faint mechanical sound rumbled beneath the floorboards.
The entire shelf trembled, then began to slide open—gears whirring softly as it revealed a sleek, reinforced metal door with a faint blue glow pulsing at the edges.
Dexter stepped forward.
A panel slid open on the door, revealing a retinal scanner.
He leaned in.
BZZZZZ—SCANNING.
A beam of light passed over his eye.
"Identity confirmed," a calm robotic voice intoned. "Welcome back, Dexter."
With a gentle whoosh, the metal door split down the middle and slid into the walls.
Beyond it, dim lights flickered to life, casting an otherworldly blue hue across polished steel floors, robotic arms, massive servers, and an elevator that led deeper underground.
Dexter stepped inside.
The air felt cooler and sterile.
This… was the hidden heart of the house. His lab or rather—Dexter's lab.
Even with his own memories intact, the inherited knowledge from the real Dexter made this place feel like he'd lived here his entire life. Every console, every code, every invention tucked away in the corners—he knew them.
"Alright," he muttered, walking across the floor as lights lit up beneath his feet. "Let's get to work"
He walked in silence, hands in his pockets as his eyes scan the vast chamber. It was all too surreal, even now.
Despite this being his seventh day in this body, the memories felt too vivid to deny. They weren't just Dexter's knowledge—they were Dexter's life. His thoughts, his achievements, his failures. And right now, that included the story of how this entire underground empire came to be.
'Genius on a budget,' he thought amused.
It all started when Dexter was around seven. A scrawny, sharp-eyed kid with more ideas than cash. He couldn't buy parts, so he turned to where nobody cared about what got left behind—the WRB scrapyards.
The World Robot Boxing league was a massive global sport and after every match, broken-down combat bots, scorched components, and rejected prototypes were just dumped in designated salvage pits. What most saw as junk, Dexter saw as gold.
He started sneaking into those scrapyards after school armed with nothing but a wagon, a flashlight, and a backpack full of tools.
Servo engines, plasma capacitors, partial combat AIs with corrupted memory cores. He learned to fix them and use them.
It began with just a tool bench in the basement. A soldering kit, a broken wrist servo, and a dream.
But that bench became a tunnel.
And the tunnel became a lab.
With modified digging bots and salvaged excavation gear, Dexter dug deeper beneath his house reinforcing every wall and floor with salvaged WRB plating and alloy. What was once a child's workshop was now a subterranean fortress.
Even the entrance he came through now—a retinal scan behind a fake bookshelf was only one of several secret ways in. Trapdoors under the living room rug, elevator shafts hidden inside the laundry chute, a hidden ladder in the attic that dropped into the server core.
And all of it was funded through sheer ingenuity.
Now, in the present timeline, Dexter no longer just scavenged he sold quietly and anonymously.
To private collectors, neutral governments and even underground tech expos.
Security drones, clean-energy converters, tactical plasma turrets.
All developed and sold under the codename: RedSpark.
Some in hacker forums believed RedSpark was a rogue adult engineer, or even a defunct AI. Nobody would suspect a 14-year-old suburban kid with messy red hair and a sister who did cartwheels down the hallway.
He turned a corner, passing rows of storage pods and robotic arms mid-maintenance. Then he entered a secondary chamber—smaller than the main lab, but more personal.
And there it stood.
A towering robot with a sleek black and gold chassis, reinforced arms, and a partially open chest panel still connected to a calibration rig. Its fingers were articulated with elegant precision, and its core pulsed with faint light like a heartbeat waiting to begin.
Dexter stepped up onto the service platform, resting a hand against the polished metal surface.
"Looks like you're almost done, Midas."