Don't Look at Me, I'm Forging - The A1 Blueprint
A soft, electronic hum vibrated through t2 The
A1 Blueprint
A soft, electronic hum vibrated through the floorboards of
Chamber 09, vibrating right up through the soles of
Kae’s scuffed boots.She stared at the wall-mounted interface.MODULE 1:
THEORETICAL METALLURGY & PSIONIC RESONANCE THEORY — COMPLETED.
SCORE: 100 / 100.Kae pulled at her collar, her fingers snagging on a loose thread of her faded smock.
She’d tried to miss at least two questions on the secondary heat-dispersion algorithms just to blend into the class average, but the system had flagged her alternative calculations as “non-standard optimal.””Great,” she muttered under her breath, shoving her oversized glasses back up her nose. “Just fantastic.”Before she could dwell on her lack of tactical failure, the chamber’s blue ambient lights dimmed to an industrial amber.
The central hydraulic platform groaned as a heavy, unpainted chassis rose from the sub-floor bay.It was an
Frame.A real, military-standard infantry chassis.
Not the hollowed-out training rigs sold on the civilian salvage markets, but the actual heavy titanium-alloy base frame used by
Vanguard units in the
Its lines were boxy, brutal, and completely unrefined—a blank slate waiting for an engineer’s psionic signature.Kae’s breath caught in her throat.
She stepped closer, her anxiety temporarily replaced by the sharp, electric itch that always hit her when she saw raw metal.
She reached out, her fingertips brushing the unpolished shoulder plating.
Dense.A synthesized voice chimed from the overhead speakers.Candidate 613-1031.
Modification.
You have three hours to utilize the provided raw materials to alter, refine, or enhance the baseline
Evaluation will be conducted based on structural integrity, psionic bandwidth efficiency, and field utility.Up on the observation balcony overlooking
Chambers 07 through 12, three senior evaluators stood around a bank of glowing telemetry monitors.Garret, a tall instructor with the refined posture of an
Inner-Rim noble house, flicked through candidate profiles on his tablet. “Another batch of mid-tier applicants.
Half of them will try to dismantle the main psionic conduit housing within the first twenty minutes just to prove they know how a core matrix works.””And ninety percent of those half will fry the circuit links and end up with a fifty-percent power drop,” Selene, a sharp-eyed senior researcher from the
Wing, replied without looking up from her screen. “They see an
A1 frame and lose their heads.
They think ‘modification’ means turning a battle-proven frame into a flashy prototype.” “What about
Dubois’ dark horse?” Marcus
Kincaid asked.The scar-faced veteran instructor gestured toward
Monitor 09 with a half-empty mug of bitter black coffee.
On the screen, a small girl in an oversized olive smock was hovering near the
A1 chassis, her hands hovering inches off the metal like she was trying to read its temperature.Garret snorted. “The
SSS potential, sure, but raw potential doesn’t mean a damn thing if you don’t have the discipline to etch a clean catalyst path.
Look at her—she’s just staring at it.
She hasn’t even picked up a pneumatic wrench.” “She’s feeling the grain,” Marcus said softly, taking a slow sip of his coffee. “Watch her hands.” Down in
Kae was having a very quiet, very intense argument with herself.I could dismantle the chest plate, she thought, tracing the seam where the primary core sat wrapped in insulated copper wire.
I rerouted the secondary power lines around the spine,
I could cut the frame’s weight by twelve percent…She stopped herself, her hand freezing over the tool rack.No.
That was a trap.She knew how these academy tests worked.
The simulation rig provided standard workbench tools, but without a high-grade psionic furnace, trying to manually re-etch an internal core circuit on an assembled
A1 chassis was suicide for the frame’s structural stability.
One microscopic slip in the psionic ink alignment, and the whole power loop would short out during stress testing.Besides, the core wasn’t the
A1’s real problem.
A1 was built like a brick—reliable, but notoriously susceptible to kinetic shock waves that bled right through the primary armor plates, bruising the pilot’s internal organs even when the metal held.Kae turned around and walked over to the material supply rack.It was stocked with standard academy inventory: bars of refined iron, raw copper ingots, small chunks of low-grade fluorspar, and heavy slabs of dense obsidian-slate—a heavy, brittle mineral mostly used for cheap ballast.Kae picked up a chunk of obsidian-slate.
It was dark, rough, and weighed a ton.
Most engineers ignored it because it cracked easily under direct heat.Brittle if you smelt it with standard fire,
Kae thought, her mind clicking into gear.
But if you use a liquid-phase psionic bleed… if you strip the silica out first and bind the remaining iron-heavy residue with fluorspar…Her chest tightened with excitement.
It was a recipe she’d messed around with in her dad’s garage three years ago when she ran out of money for proper armor plating.
It was messy.
It was unconventional.
And it made a liquid compound that dried into an impact-absorbing outer shell.She dumped an armful of obsidian-slate and three bars of fluorspar onto the workbench.Kae closed her eyes and took a steady breath.
The noise of the terminal, the ticking clock, the unseen eyes of the evaluators—all of it faded into a dull, background hum.She pressed her palms against the raw pile of minerals on the table.Her psionic energy didn’t burst outward like the dramatic flare most cadets cultivated.
It leaked out quietly, like oil spreading across still water.
A deep, shimmering violet aura clung to her fingers as she pressed her mind into the microscopic gaps between the mineral grains.In her mind’s eye, the stone wasn’t a solid block.
It was a chaotic web of impurities, trapped air pockets, and unstable crystal bonds.
She didn’t use heat to melt it; she used her psionic frequency to vibrate the quartz veins until they crumbled into fine white dust, leaving behind only the ultra-dense iron-rich sludge.Then, she channeled the fluorspar into the mix.On the workbench, the pile of dark stone didn’t melt—it liquefied into a thick, shimmering metallic paste that ebbed and flowed like mercury.Up on the observation deck,
Garret’s coffee mug stopped halfway to his mouth.”What the hell is she doing?” he muttered, leaning over the console. “Is she… is she cold-refining obsidian-slate?
Without a furnace?”Selene shoved her glasses up her nose, her fingers flying across her keyboard to bring up
Chamber 09’s real-time psionic density readouts. “Her resonance precision is sitting at ninety-four percent.
No—ninety-six.
She’s stripping the silica at a molecular level using pure physical vibration.
That’s… that’s senior-level mineral extraction technique.”Marcus didn’t say anything.
He just stared at the monitor, a faint grin tugging at the corner of his scarred mouth.Down in the bay, the small girl in the baggy smock wasn’t touching any heavy machinery.
She was simply walking around the
A1 Frame, brushing her hands along its chest and shoulder plates, leaving behind a smooth, dark green-black coating that adhered instantly to the titanium alloy like a second skin.”She’s not touching the core circuit at all,” Selene murmured, her eyes wide as she read the live simulation data. “She’s creating an organic kinetic-damping layer on the exterior.
Look at the structural stress numbers…” The monitor flashed green.A1 FRAME – MODIFICATION COMPLETE.
EXTERNAL ARMOR INTEGRITY: +52% MASS INCREASE: +3.1% CORE CONDUIT EFFICIENCY:
UNCHANGED (100%)Garret stared at the numbers in disbelief. “A fifty-two percent jump in armor density?
With three percent added weight?
Using slate?””She bypassed the core trap entirely,” Marcus chuckled, taking a long gulp of his coffee. “Every noble kid in
Chamber 01 through 08 is currently sweating through their crisp tunics trying to re-wire an engine they barely understand.
And this one just built a tank out of cheap gravel.”Marcus reached over and tapped the console, saving the diagnostic log to his private folder.”Garret,” Marcus said quietly. “Keep an eye on
Chamber 09 when she starts the weapon module.
I want to see what she does when you give her a laser edge and a tub of blood-mineral ore.”