Kai's personal workshop was a cramped, repurposed storage locker in the basement of his residential block—a space he'd "acquired" through a complex series of energy-grid favors and structural adjustments. It was his sanctuary, a place where the strict, discriminatory laws of the Arbitral Council held no sway, and where only the laws of physics and his own genius mattered.
The workshop was a controlled chaos. Half-finished Cultech prototypes hung from the ceiling on salvaged magnetic lifts. Workbenches, built from stacked engine blocks, were covered in schematics—some printed, some sketched onto scrap paper—and tools Kai had painstakingly modified from cheap components.
His current project was a massive undertaking: retrofitting an obsolete, heavy-duty industrial fabricator. The machine was designed for simple plating, but Kai was trying to force it to weave Adaptive Kinetic Weave—a complex material requiring micro-vibration frequency control that was supposedly only achievable by billion-credit factory equipment.
Standard operating procedure demands a frequency stabilizer, Kai muttered to himself, his voice raspy from disuse. He was running a simulation on a battered portable comm. I have a salvaged capacitor array and a modified internal governor.
He was working on the issue that later Oliver Thompson would solve with materials science: how to get a low-grade machine to do a high-grade job.
He paused, running his callused hands over a polished segment of salvaged titanium alloy. He felt a moment of deep, appreciative calm—the one emotion he consistently found in his work. He was completely in his element, the analytical mind divorced from the social conflict.
He pulled out the only pristine component in the shop: the early, raw blueprints for the Apex Suit. They were holographic projections stored in a secured crystalline chip. When activated, they flashed to life: a skeletal, hyper-efficient combat suit, its core design emphasizing speed and asymmetric power delivery—a reflection of his Divergent Flow philosophy.
The design was intricate, mixing old-world martial arts joint flexibility with cutting-edge Cultech energy pathways. He had notes scrawled in the margins detailing the theoretical integration of Inner Force and Outer Force—a synergy that established academies claimed was impossible to achieve cleanly in a mech suit.
"If I use the hyper-flexible joint system, the tensile strength required for high-G maneuvering increases by 400%," he muttered, running a simulation. "Need a better alloy, or... a Bio Energy dampening field that compresses the atmosphere around the joint."
He shook his head, momentarily frustrated by the resource limitation. His genius was always ahead of his budget.
Suddenly, a loud, metallic CLANG echoed from the ventilation shaft above.
Kai froze. His hand instantly went to a modified energy wrench—a tool that could deliver a non-lethal, high-voltage shock. Intruders in the low-born districts rarely brought good news. It could be another enforcement shakedown, or worse, a rival trying to steal his tech secrets.
He moved silently, his training from the dilapidated dojo kicking in—low center of gravity, controlled breathing, scanning the shadows automatically for exits and advantages.
He found the source: a tiny, repurposed security drone, no bigger than his thumb, had tumbled down the ventilation shaft. It was clearly observing him, its single lens blinking rhythmically.
This wasn't Grix or a local thug. This was sophisticated. The drone was using a stealth alloy that would make it almost invisible to standard radar—high-grade tech.
Kai's initial suspicion hardened into cold focus. Was it one of the Top 5 academies, continuing their surveillance? Or had his energy fluctuation from Chapter 7 been noticed?
He didn't activate the wrench. He didn't want to destroy the drone; he wanted to capture it.
He sat back down at his bench, pretending to return to work, but his mind was racing, calculating the drone's likely sensor array and reaction time. He slowly, deliberately, began running a diagnostic on his fabricator—a machine that had a powerful magnetic field when operational.
He timed it perfectly. As the drone adjusted its angle for a better view of his blueprint crystal, Kai hit the power rune on the fabricator.
The resulting magnetic pulse was brief but devastatingly precise. The drone sputtered, fell out of the air, and hit the ground, its advanced sensors blinking out.
Kai snatched it up. It was beautiful, high-quality gear. He quickly neutralized its internal tracking beacon and began a deep-level analysis of its data logs. The discovery filled him with a professional excitement that overcame his residual paranoia. This wasn't local tech.
He found the signature: an unusual encryption method tied to an internal planetary routing cluster—a cluster that didn't belong to the Top 5. It was a lower-level, non-standard connection, almost an experimental network.
Kai's analytical mind flagged it instantly. The tech was elite, but the network was unconventional. He stored the drone, a phantom witness, knowing he had to find the source. His unconventionality had just attracted something equally unconventional.