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The Bureau guards on the deck exchanged uneasy glances.
They'd been briefed on the original armor program. All three sets delivered to the Republic's defense forces came with a prominent, underlined warning in the operational documentation: unsuitable for underwater deployment. The central reactor's structural integrity couldn't guarantee water-tightness under deep-sea pressure. One leak, one crack in a seal, one failure of a pressure gasket, and the pilot would be dead before the armor had time to shut down.
If Ethan had wanted to dive two thousand meters in any armor they knew about, he'd be committing suicide.
But he'd also said he was going. And nobody on this boat had the authority, the standing, or frankly the courage to tell Professor Mercer he couldn't do something.
Ethan, oblivious to the hand-wringing, walked back into the cabin.
A few minutes later, he came out carrying a briefcase.
Zachary Calder watched the teenager approach with an expression that had shifted from irritation to something closer to anticipation. Not hopeful anticipation. The kind you feel when you're watching a stranger walk toward a cliff and wondering how loud the sound will be.
"That it? Your diving gear?" Calder's voice was flat. "Let's see it. Put it on. Show us how a human being dives two thousand meters into the deep sea."
Ethan ignored him.
He set the briefcase upright on the deck, took a breath, and pressed his thumb to the handle.
A thin strip of red light swept across his thumbprint. An instant later, a calm, synthetic voice with the clipped cadence of a very proper butler emanated from the case.
"Welcome, sir. Mark Five is on standby."
Calder was thrown for half a second. Then he barked a short laugh that carried zero humor.
"Nice touch. Voice activation. Really selling the bit. You'd do great in movies."
Ethan didn't respond. He lifted the briefcase to his chest with both hands.
The case activated.
The top panel split open along seams that hadn't existed a moment earlier. Components unfolded outward, telescoped, and locked onto his chest in overlapping plates that interlocked with the precision of a mechanical lockbox. The section of armor covering his torso spread upward, sealing around his shoulders, then his neck, then his skull. Within six seconds, a full helmet had deployed over his head with a soft mechanical hiss.
The lower half of the case did the same in parallel, disassembling into plates that wrapped around his abdomen, thighs, shins, and feet.
Ten seconds. Start to finish.
When the final plate locked into place, the reactor at the center of the chestplate ignited.
Not the pale blue glow of the Mark One-Three series. This one was deeper. Darker. A rich, saturated blue with hints of something almost violet at the edges, the color of deep water holding light.
Calder went completely still.
His mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
He'd been in his lab for over half a year. He'd assumed the world had moved on at roughly the pace the world always moved on, which was to say, not very fast. Scientific advances came gradually. Engineering progress was incremental. The fundamental rules of what was possible didn't shift in a single six-month window.
And yet, standing on this deck, a teenager had just deployed a full suit of powered armor out of a briefcase in under ten seconds.
His opinion of Ethan Mercer was being revised in real time, and the revision was not flattering to his previous assessment.
The Bureau guards were equally shaken, though for different reasons.
The armor delivered to the Republic's military — three suits, the pride of the defense establishment, the most advanced personal weapons platform in the country's history — took approximately five minutes to deploy. That was with two trained technicians assisting the pilot, robotic arms at a designated staging area, and a checklist protocol that couldn't be rushed.
Five minutes. In modern warfare, five minutes was an eternity. Enough time for a missile to cross a province. Enough time for an assault team to breach a compound. Enough time for the difference between victory and defeat.
What Ethan had just done made those five minutes look like a joke.
You could walk into a coffee shop, set the briefcase on a table, and within ten seconds be standing in full combat armor. You could deploy it on a subway platform. In an elevator. In bed. The tactical implications weren't incremental — they were category-breaking.
Commander Hayes finally recovered enough to speak, glancing at the reactor's new, darker glow.
"Professor Mercer. Sir. Is this… what's the designation?"
"Mark Five."
"Upgrade to the Mark One through Three?"
"A different branch, actually." Ethan's voice came through the helmet's external speakers, clear and slightly filtered. "The military suits are combat-focused. This one prioritizes portability. Weaker weapon loadout, but you can carry it anywhere."
He tapped the reactor at the center of his chest with one gauntleted finger.
"And the reactor's different."
Hayes frowned. "How different?"
"New element."
Calder, who had been recovering from his previous shock, lurched forward again.
"A new — what does that mean, a new element?"
"It means the reactor can function underwater."
"No it can't."
Calder's voice cracked. He was staring at the reactor in Ethan's chest with the specific, wild-eyed focus of a man watching a law of physics being broken in front of him.
"Professor Mercer — you cannot — no element — not a single element on the periodic table can sustain a nuclear reaction in a deep-sea environment. That's not a question of engineering. That's not a question of miniaturization or containment. That's a question of how matter fundamentally behaves under those conditions!"
"I know."
"You KNOW?"
"That's why I didn't use an element from the periodic table."
Calder's eyes bulged like a man being slowly strangled by his own worldview. The Bureau guards, who had watched this exact breakdown happen to multiple researchers over the past year, exchanged subtle, sympathetic looks.
Ethan pretended not to notice the researcher's incipient stroke.
"Dr. Calder. I'm going down to survey the seabed topography. The Mark Five will broadcast live video feed to a monitor on board. You're the expert on seafloor conditions. Please evaluate whether this site is suitable for reactor construction."
A small object buzzed out from behind the armor's shoulder plate and hovered at chest height. Bright yellow. Roughly the size of a golf ball. Optical sensors tracking Calder.
The Bureau guards recognized it immediately. The Signal Bee. A relay drone Ethan had been using for various operations over the past few months. Durable, mobile, capable of transmitting live feed across significant distances.
Calder looked at the tiny hovering drone. Looked at the armored teenager. Looked back at the drone. Slowly raised one hand, pointed at the Signal Bee, opened his mouth, closed it, and gave up entirely.
Ethan clapped him on the shoulder — gently, because Mark Five gauntlets could probably fracture a collarbone if you weren't careful — and walked to the railing.
"Be back in a bit."
The reactor in his chest pulsed. Boot thrusters engaged with a low, resonant hum. Ethan rose from the deck, hovered for half a second, then angled forward and shot out over the water in a smooth, controlled arc.
At the peak of the arc, he cut power and let gravity take over. The armor hit the surface and plunged through, leaving a small, contained splash that vanished within seconds.
And then he was gone.
The Signal Bee, buzzing in a slow orbit around Calder's head, transmitted the live feed to the tablet in Hayes's hands.
-----
Two thousand meters down, the world was black.
Ethan's helmet HUD adjusted to the darkness, painting the seabed in false-color imaging that made it look like something between a lunar surface and a poorly lit cave. The reactor's dark blue glow was the only organic light source for kilometers in any direction.
He spent the first minute doing a slow survey of the area.
Calder's intel had been accurate. The seabed here was relatively flat — not perfect, but workable. A few scattered rock formations broke up the terrain. The occasional outcropping of sediment. Some debris from ancient geological activity. But no significant depressions, no combustible deposits, no tectonic instability.
To build a proper foundation for the reactor facility, he'd need to clear a roughly football-field-sized area. Not as quick as he'd have liked, but manageable.
He got to work.
The Mark Five had traded combat capability for portability. That trade-off was exactly what he needed on the deck, but down here it was costing him time. The Mark Three could have disintegrated these boulders with a few missiles. The Mark Five had only the palm-mounted pulse cannons — effective, but lower yield. He'd have to grind through the work one rock at a time.
He raised his right gauntlet. A condensed bolt of pale blue energy erupted from the palm-mounted emitter and struck the nearest boulder — a formation about the size of a small car. The rock shattered, fragments tumbling slowly through the water column in the characteristic silent-underwater way that made the whole scene feel like a dream.
Second boulder. Third. Fourth. He was settling into a rhythm, a kind of deep-sea manual labor that combined the precision of surgical demolition with the tedium of construction work.
That was when the creatures showed up.
The first one he noticed was a mass of motion at the edge of his HUD's visual range. Large, fast, and closing on him in a way that suggested it had already decided what to do with him.
He swiveled his helmet and got a look at it.
It was… honestly, he didn't know what it was. His biology knowledge covered the species from Earth-Prime. This world had its own marine biology, most of which he hadn't bothered to study. The thing closing on him was roughly the size of a small truck, bioluminescent, with features that suggested it belonged to a deep-sea predator lineage that had evolved without any interaction with armored human intruders.
It came at him fast.
He fired the pulse cannon.
The energy bolt passed wide — intentionally — and detonated against the seabed beside the creature. The shockwave and brilliant flash sent the beast into immediate retreat, bioluminescent panels flaring as it fled back into the deeper darkness.
Ethan turned back to his work.
Then he noticed the water around him was getting… brighter.
Not much. Not dramatically. But a faint, steady glow had begun to accumulate at the edges of his vision. Small points of light, multiplying. Dozens. Then hundreds. Then a slow, ominous crowd of bioluminescence closing in from every direction.
Calder's voice crackled through the helmet comm.
"The brightness of your weapon fire — it's too high. The marine life at this depth has extremely strong phototaxis. They're attracted to light sources. Every time you discharge that cannon, you're essentially ringing the dinner bell."
Ethan looked around. The situation had shifted from "scattered creatures" to "actively organizing swarm" in the span of two minutes. He could see now that the original creature he'd scared off hadn't fled away — it had fled into a larger group. And that larger group was now interested in him.
He sighed. Pulse cannons against a few curious animals were one thing. Pulse cannons against a swarm attracted by the pulse cannons themselves were a recursive problem with no clean solution.
So that's why the Stark Element team designed it this way. Stealth first. Underwater operations require a different approach.
He engaged the boot thrusters and began his ascent. The swarm followed for a few hundred meters, then fell away as the armor climbed beyond their comfortable depth range. By the time Ethan broke the surface, the dark water below him had gone still again.
He rose up into the sunlight, water streaming off the Mark Five's armored plates, and hovered beside the research vessel.
Calder was at the railing with the tablet in his hands, staring up at Ethan with an expression that combined academic fascination, professional humiliation, and the quiet recognition of a man who realized his entire field of study had just been redefined by a teenager in a briefcase.
"So." Ethan's voice came through the external speakers, casual and slightly amused. "New problem. Pulse cannons are too bright. We'll need a different approach for clearing the site."
Calder swallowed. Looked down at the tablet, which was still displaying the last few seconds of the swarm encounter. Looked back up at the armored figure hovering over the water.
"Professor Mercer."
"Yeah?"
"I think… I think I owe you an apology."
Ethan smiled inside the helmet. The HUD couldn't transmit it through the opaque faceplate, but his voice carried warmth through the speakers.
"Dr. Calder. Welcome to the project."