Second Genesis

The angel lady had watched Grey craft before, technically speaking, but this was the first time she had ever been able to watch him properly from beginning to end. The closest thing had been the Infernal Temper Band, yet the halo surrounding Melix at the time forced her to keep herself hidden while Grey worked with Veyrath, which meant she had only caught fragments of the process through their connection.

This time there was nothing forcing her away, and after watching Grey prepare for less than fifteen minutes, she was already questioning nearly everything she thought she knew about mech technicians.

Grey's workspace looked terrible. Materials were scattered across three different tables in an arrangement only he seemed capable of understanding, several tools were sitting close enough to the edges that a careless elbow could send them crashing to the floor, and his Cyber Mat was slightly crooked beneath his hands.

That last part irritated her far more than it reasonably should have, especially when Grey just started working on it without noticing the misalignment at all and immediately began organizing the first layers of the Silver Maw Recursion Frame.

He hadn't properly prepared his mind either, which was something even mediocre technicians knew better than to ignore before attempting a mech several Classes above themselves.

There had been no extended meditation, no ritualized review of every construction stage, and no meticulous arrangement of materials based on when they would enter the build.

Grey had looked over the blueprint once, checked the raw materials, muttered something about how much all of this shit cost, and then started working.

The annoying part was that none of it seemed to matter.

Grey's hands moved with an intuition that bordered on offensive, reaching for tools and materials before the need for them became obvious while thousands of Curved Faces steadily took shape beneath his fingers.

He wasn't rushing, nor was he carefully testing every movement before committing to it, and the entire process instead carried the casual confidence of someone repeating something he had already done countless times. Yet, the angel lady knew for a fact that this was his first attempt at constructing this mech.

It wasn't lost on her that Grey was only Vector Class where the Mechanical Jaw Spirit was concerned. Technically, even describing him through individual Classes was somewhat misleading, since all of those advancements remained strangely hollow while Prometheus itself possessed no true Class at all.

As long as the root of Grey's power remained unranked, he hadn't even begun to tap into what his actual path was capable of becoming.

For the purposes of this craft, though, Vector Class was close enough. The Mechanical Jaw Spirit was a Recursive Frame that still operated within principles she understood, its lineage had been developed through ordinary progression, and the Silver Maw itself was the result of generations of technicians improving upon a coherent foundation.

There was no ancient God breaking every rule in sight here, which meant Grey should have been judged by the same standards as any other technician. And by those standards, what she was watching was absurd.

Drawing a blueprint to a high SA-Index before construction was hardly some secret revelation, and technicians had understood for ages that theoretical repetition improved their chances when they finally worked with real materials.

That advantage had limits, though, since even a perfect blueprint was only a theoretical environment where every Face behaved exactly as expected and every material followed its documented properties. The real world didn't have the decency to cooperate so cleanly.

Two pieces of the same alloy could carry slight differences in purity, Loopglass could respond differently depending on how tension spread through the surrounding Faces, and Dominion Quicksilver was notorious for developing tiny irregularities once enough separate sections began communicating.

Those deviations were why a technician could understand a blueprint perfectly and still lack the experience necessary to construct it at the same level as its creator. There were even famous technicians who had designed 100% SA-Index blueprints years before their hands became skilled enough to build the finished mech properly.

Grey seemed completely disconnected from that limitation.

The angel lady watched a Loopglass Filament develop a minute tension problem and prepared herself for Grey to notice it several seconds later, only for his hand to shift before the distortion fully formed.

He altered the adjoining Faces without pausing, relieved the pressure, and continued the build as though the material had behaved exactly as expected.

The same thing happened when a section of Dominion Quicksilver expanded slightly more than the theoretical blueprint predicted, with Grey adapting the surrounding structure almost before there was anything visible to adapt to.

It slowly occurred to her that Grey didn't seem to distinguish between drawing the mech and building it.

His six blueprint attempts had apparently settled into his mind like six physical constructions, each failure teaching him something he now treated as real experience rather than abstract information.

When reality deviated from the theoretical model, his comprehension bridged the difference so quickly that even she struggled to pinpoint when he had noticed the problem. By the time Grey reached the later stages, she had completely forgotten about the crooked Cyber Mat that had been driving her insane.

The Silver Maw slowly came together beneath his hands, over a million Curved Faces compressing into a design that looked almost ridiculously simple compared to the complexity hidden inside it.

What remained on the worktable was a sleek piece of silver metal shaped to follow the lower half of Grey's face, narrow enough that most people might have mistaken it for decorative armor if they couldn't sense the enormous Recursive structure folded through its interior.

Grey ran one thumb across the finished surface, checked the final response from the Cyber Cores, then gave a satisfied nod.

He hadn't even needed to summon the Mechanical Jaw Spirit during construction.

That part interested the angel lady almost as much as his crafting did, since Grey had quietly modified the Loading stage while assembling the mech and rewritten several sections of its internal software around the fact that the intended Spirit already lived inside his body.

Instead of treating fusion as the moment an external Spirit entered the Vessel, Grey had designed the Silver Maw to recognize the Mechanical Jaw Spirit the instant physical integration with his body was complete.

It was another alteration that should have required repeated testing, yet Grey had inserted it into a Dominus Class blueprint on his first physical attempt like he was changing a setting in a menu.

"Alright," Grey muttered as he reached toward his face. "Let's see if you're as pretty on me as you are on the table."

He gritted his teeth and summoned the damaged Helm Frame first, peeling the cracked mech away from his face with a faint metallic hiss of pain before setting it aside. Then he lifted the Silver Maw and pressed the curved metal against his jaw, where dozens of microscopic pins immediately extended from the inner surface and pierced directly through the flesh until they touched the bone beneath.

Grey's body jerked hard enough that the table rattled.

Liquid Dominion Quicksilver poured from the Silver Maw and moved through his mouth in thin streams, wrapping around the roots of his teeth before climbing upward to form delicate silver borders around the enamel. The sensation was strange enough that Grey's hands clenched against the edge of the table, yet he forced himself to remain still while the mech continued integrating itself into his jaw and establishing thousands upon thousands of tiny pathways toward his Neural Frame.

Then the Mechanical Jaw Spirit reacted.

It had been quiet inside Grey for so long that the movement almost surprised him, but once the Silver Maw finished establishing the first complete Recursive pathway, the Spirit surged toward it without hesitation.

It pooled through Grey's internal Frame and rushed into the waiting Vessel like a fish finally dropped back into water, spreading throughout the million-plus Faces until the silver structure suddenly pulsed with life.

The angel lady's eyes widened as the fusion completed.

Grey remained still for several seconds while information poured across his vision, then the pain around his jaw faded and his lips slowly curled upward. He opened the resulting status screen, glanced first at the Sync Rate, then at the Energy Reserve beneath it, and his grin became much wider.

"Good thing I've got the wealth of several Empires behind me now," Grey said, staring at the numbers. "Otherwise, I'd be fucking cooked."