Episode-814
Chapter : 1627
Mina stepped closer, her boots clicking softly on the concrete floor. Lloyd didn't react. He didn't even blink. He just stared at that one square inch of black metal, his eyes wide and bloodshot, vibrating with a terrifying, manic intensity.
"There is a flaw," Lloyd muttered to the empty air. His voice was a dry, cracked whisper, like dead leaves skittering on pavement. "The crystalline matrix... it's uneven. 0.003 percent variance in the alloy density. If a kinetic strike hits here... if the angle is right... it could propagate. It could shatter."
He rubbed harder. Scrub. Scrub. Scrub.
"I need to strip it," he mumbled. "I need to melt it down. Re-forge the shin guard. No, re-forge the whole leg. The thermal stress might have compromised the knee joint too. Start over. Start over."
Mina moved into his line of sight. She was standing five feet away from him.
"Lloyd," she said. Her voice trembled slightly, but she forced it to be steady.
He didn't look up. He didn't seem to hear her. He was trapped in a loop, a mental prison where the only thing that mattered was the imaginary imperfection on the metal.
"The Lodestone," Lloyd whispered, his voice rising in pitch. "Lucifer used the Lodestone. It inverted the magnetic polarity. This alloy is inert... it should be inert... but what if he has something else? What if he has a gravity well? What if he has a time dilation field? I haven't tested for time dilation. I need to build a temporal simulation chamber. I need more time."
He dropped the cloth, picked up a caliper, measured the metal, frowned, and picked up the cloth again.
Rub. Rub. Rub.
It was the behavior of a man who was trying to scrub a stain off his soul by polishing a piece of armor.
Mina placed her books on a nearby workbench. The heavy thud echoed in the silent lab.
Lloyd flinched. His head snapped up.
For a terrifying second, there was no recognition in his eyes. He looked at her with the cold, dead assessment of a automated turret acquiring a target. He scanned her face, her hands, her posture. He didn't see Mina; he saw biological mass. He saw a variable entering his controlled environment.
His hand twitched toward the wrench on the table, a defensive reflex that broke Mina’s heart.
Then, slowly, the gears in his mind seemed to grind and catch. The blankness in his eyes receded, replaced by a confused, painful squint. He blinked, once, twice, as if trying to clear a film from his vision.
"Mina?" he croaked.
"Hello, Lloyd," she said softly.
He stared at her, his chest heaving as if he had just run a marathon. He looked down at the cloth in his hand, then back at her, then up at the towering Aegis suit. He looked lost.
"You... you can't be here," Lloyd stammered. He stood up, but his legs were weak, and he had to grab the Aegis’s leg for support. "It's not... the containment field isn't calibrated. The Golem Heart emits low-level psychic radiation. It could affect you. It could make you sick. You have to leave. Protocol... safety protocol..."
He was babbling, trying to push her away with logic because he didn't know how to handle her presence emotionally. He turned back to the shin guard, his hand raising the cloth again.
"I just need to fix this," he said, his voice pleading. "Just this one spot. Then it will be safe. Then I can rest."
Mina didn't leave. She walked forward. She stepped into the shadow of the machine, invading the personal space he had guarded so viciously against everyone else. She stopped right in front of him.
She reached out and placed her hand over his. His hand was freezing cold, trembling with a fine, constant vibration.
"Lloyd," she said. "Look at me."
He tried to look around her, tried to look back at the metal. "The scratch... I can see it... it's right there..."
"There is no scratch," Mina said firmly. She used her other hand to gently turn his face toward her. She forced him to meet her gaze. "There is no scratch. The metal is perfect. The suit is finished."
Lloyd’s eyes darted frantically, searching her face for the lie. "It's never finished. If it's finished, then... then the war starts. If it's finished, I have to use it. And if I use it and it fails..."
His voice cracked.
Chapter : 1628
"It won't fail," Mina said. "You built it. You are the greatest engineer this world has ever seen. It won't fail."
She gently pried his fingers open. The polishing cloth fell from his hand and fluttered to the concrete floor.
"It is ready, Lloyd," she whispered. "You can stop."
________________________________________
The cloth hit the floor with a soft whisper, but to Lloyd, it sounded like a hammer dropping. The physical connection to his work was severed. Without the cloth, without the repetitive motion, he had nothing to distract him. The silence of the room rushed in to fill the void, and with the silence came the thoughts he had been holding back for weeks.
He stood there, swaying slightly, his hand still suspended in the air where Mina had released it. He looked at his empty palm. It was stained with grease and micro-filings of metal.
"Stop?" Lloyd repeated the word as if it were a foreign language. "I can't stop. You don't understand."
He took a step back, putting distance between himself and Mina's comforting warmth. He retreated until his back hit the cold metal of the Aegis suit's leg.
"If I stop," Lloyd said, his voice gaining a frantic edge, "the noise comes back. Do you hear it? The silence is too loud. It screams."
He grabbed his own hair, pulling at the roots.
"I need to work. I need to calculate the mana efficiency of the vibro-blades. I need to run the simulations again. There's a 0.004% chance of failure in the knee actuators. That's too high! That's death!"
Mina watched him unravel. She didn't move to comfort him yet. She stood her ground, a calm anchor in his storm.
"Lloyd," she said, her voice cutting through his panic. "The suit is just metal. It doesn't care if you polish it. It doesn't care if you bleed on it. You are using it to hide."
"I am not hiding!" Lloyd shouted. The sudden volume made the glassware on the tables rattle. "I am preparing! I am strategizing! I am the only one who sees what's coming!"
He gestured wildly at the ceiling, at the world above.
"Lucifer isn't gone! He's just waiting! He broke my father. He broke the strongest man I know like a twig. And you think I can stop? You think I can rest?"
He paced back and forth in front of the suit, his movements jerky and uncoordinated.
"I have to be better. I have to be stronger. I have to be a machine. Machines don't miss. Machines don't hesitate. Machines don't... machines don't watch their friends die."
His voice broke on the last word. He stopped pacing. He leaned heavily on a workbench, his knuckles white as he gripped the edge.
"I see it every time I close my eyes," he whispered. "The spear. The black spear. It wasn't fast. It wasn't invisible. I saw it coming. I had... I had time. In my head, I had time. But my body wouldn't move fast enough. I was too slow. I am always too slow."
He looked up at Mina, and the agony in his eyes was raw and terrifying.
"I built this," he pointed at the Aegis, "so I never have to be slow again. I built this so I never have to feel flesh tearing under my hands again. Inside that suit, I'm safe. Inside that suit, I'm not Lloyd Ferrum. I'm a weapon. And weapons don't grieve."
Mina took a slow breath. She understood now. This wasn't just about protection. This was about identity. He wanted to erase himself. He wanted to delete the human part of him that was hurting and replace it with steel circuits and Lilith Stones.
"You think the suit will save you," Mina said.
"It will save you," Lloyd corrected her instantly. "It will save the estate. It will save the kingdom. My survival is... secondary. My survival is a statistical probability I am trying to maximize, but acceptable losses are... acceptable."
"You are not an acceptable loss," Mina said fiercely.
"I am!" Lloyd yelled. He slammed his fist onto the workbench. "I am the only acceptable loss! Because everyone else... everyone else is innocent! Jasmin was innocent! She held a tray, not a sword! She shouldn't have been there! I put her there!"
He was hyperventilating now. The panic attack was peaking. He slid down the front of the workbench until he was sitting on the floor, his head between his knees, gasping for air.