Standing at the foot of Bastion—the Defender-class mech—Neo felt its sheer scale pressing down on him. Up close, the machine seemed less like a tool and more like a cathedral of steel. The left leg had been stripped of armor plating, exposing a labyrinth of joints, gears, and pistons, all dark with grime and oil.
A cluster of Prism engineers circled it, frustration etched into their faces.
"The wear patterns make no sense—sensors read everything within tolerance, but the stress data is inconsistent!" muttered a young technician, scratching his head.
"We've already swapped lubricants three times, but the vibration persists," sighed a senior mechanic. "If this keeps up, we'll have to replace the entire drive assembly. And with the supply queue, that'll take three months at best."
Arms folded, Evelyn Kane stood silently to one side, her storm-gray eyes steady. When Neo entered, her gaze flicked to him with deliberate weight: your move.
Neo didn't rush for diagnostic terminals. Instead, he stepped closer, trailing his hand across the cold alloy of Bastion's leg like greeting an old comrade. Then he crouched, scanning every detail—bolt wear, subtle bends in hydraulic tubing, even the scatter of microscopic metal shavings clinging to the edges.
"Do you have a mechanical stethoscope? Long-rod type."
The engineers blinked at him. Such antiquated tools had been obsolete for generations. But after some searching, one was pulled from the depths of the workshop—dust-caked, almost forgotten.
Neo pressed the device against different points of the joint, ear tilted close. "Cycle the hydraulics. Slowly. Interval pulses—simulate walking stress."
The mech's hydraulics rumbled to life, deep and resonant. To the engineers, it was just noise. But to Neo, the vibrations were a layered symphony—frequencies and harmonics revealing secrets. He closed his eyes, listening to the machine's heartbeat.
Minutes later, he opened them and pointed to a nearly hidden cluster of gears, half-shrouded by larger assemblies.
"The issue isn't the main shaft. It isn't the bearings. It's here—the secondary linkage gears. Their phase is slightly out. That's what's causing harmonic wear."
"Phase offset? Harmonic wear?" The engineers exchanged baffled looks. The terms meant nothing to them.
Neo knew why. Such concepts belonged to Old World mech dynamics, long since lost.
He simplified. "Think of it like this—these gears, through either micro-flaws in manufacturing or distortion from years of stress, are falling slightly out of sync. Just fractions of a beat. At certain loads, that phase mismatch creates resonance. A fine, high-frequency vibration—like an invisible file—gnawing constantly at the system. Sensors can't catch it, but the damage accumulates."
He circled several gears with a grease pencil. "Your lubricant swaps probably worsened the resonance by changing damping properties."
Doubt lingered. But when they followed his instructions, probing the gears with scopes and micro-probes, they saw it: abnormal wear marks, fine and even, unlike the main shaft's patterns.
"It's true," the younger tech gasped. "It's really here!"
The problem exposed, the question remained: how to fix it without rare parts?
"You don't need replacements," Neo said quietly. "At this stage, we can counterbalance the resonance with dynamic weighting."
Shock rippled through the crew.
Neo called for the machining bay's most precise counterweights and fine-tune instruments. With nothing more than intuition, theory, and experience honed across lifetimes, he began his work.
Like a surgeon, he calculated placement by feel, guided by the language of steel and force. One by one, tiny tungsten weights—no larger than a fingernail—were anchored onto the non-contact faces of the gears. Each adjusted at exact angles, exact torque, using laser gauges and micro-wrenches.
Every move demanded perfection. A hair too much, a gram too light, and the cure would worsen the wound.
Three painstaking hours later, Neo straightened, sweat streaking his brow. "Run it."
Nervous hands powered the hydraulics. The Defender's leg cycled—step, step, step.
The shuddering, off-beat vibration… was gone.
The monitors showed harmony: power curves smooth, resonance damped, wear vectors aligned.
"It's… it's fixed." A veteran mechanic's voice cracked with awe. "By God—it's actually fixed."
"All that, with a handful of weights…" Another whispered.
Evelyn's face, normally carved from stone, softened. For the first time, a true smile flickered across her lips. She met Neo's eyes, and in hers burned respect—real, unguarded respect.
What Neo had done saved not just Bastion, but months of parts and resources. In Prism's world of scarcity, it was nothing less than a miracle.
Word spread through the hangar like wildfire. By the time Neo scrubbed oil from his hands, the eyes on him had changed. No longer suspicion. No longer doubt. Now there was admiration—astonishment. In the Wastes, knowledge was wealth. Neo had just proven he held a fortune.
But not all eyes were welcoming.
From the shadows at the hangar's edge, a man in industrial fatigues watched with cold calculation. One of Leighton's men. He turned and walked away briskly.
Neo had solved the problem. He had secured Evelyn's trust. He had claimed the engineers' reverence.
But he had also painted a glowing target on his back.