Don’t Look at Me, I’m Forging

The copper taste at the back of Cerys Lind’s tongue is the universal signature of a cooling coil that blew its seal around 03:00. She lifts her head off the workbench with an alarming pop in her neck, peels a synth-foil wrapper off her cheek, and gets back to work. Scraps of brass, a busted actuator, three burnt micro-fuses and too little sleep: the usual. Then the calibration runs, and the machine does something it was never designed to do.

Don’t Look at Me, I’m Forging is a sci-fi mecha progression fantasy about an engineer who keeps accidentally inventing things that change the balance of power — and who keeps trying, with increasing futility, to go back to a quiet life in the shop.

What follows is a rise she never asked for. A shuttle to Aegis. A dormitory in Block 6. Dining hall politics, a muster at Training Field B, and an assignment to Squad 7, which is where the war stops being theoretical. A touchdown in Sector 7 that goes badly. A cleaver that should not be able to do what it does. Midnight metallurgy in a bay she is technically not cleared to use. And then the broadcasters start running her name in a top ten, which is the single worst thing that could happen to someone whose entire plan was to be left alone.

The mechs get bigger. The attention gets worse. Cerys keeps solving the problem in front of her because that is what she does, and every solution makes her harder to ignore — by the people who want her building for them, and by the ones who would rather she stopped breathing.

This is competence-driven progression with technical detail that actually holds up: a protagonist who earns every edge through craft, and who would trade all of it for a working coil and a quiet afternoon.

For readers who like mecha sci-fi, forge and engineering progression, military academy settings, and protagonists who are genuinely annoyed by their own success.