Chapter 27: Test
The rain had stopped, leaving the air in the sector clean and cold, smelling of wet concrete and distant ozone. Ren pushed the manual wheelchair along the cracked access road, the squeak of one wheel keeping time with their progress. Kaito sat stiffly, a thick blanket over his legs despite the mild chill, his eyes scanning the monolithic training complex that rose before them like a tombstone.
“They repainted the struts,” Kaito muttered, more to himself than to Ren. “Used to be a rust-red. Now it’s this grey. Looks like wet ash. Cheaper, probably.”
“You miss it?” Ren asked, his voice quieter than he intended. The jacket felt heavier today.
“The paint? No.” Kaito chuckled dryly. “The feeling of walking up these steps under your own power. Yeah. Sometimes. But the mind plays tricks. It forgets the fear, the smell of burned wiring, the way your own sweat would freeze inside the suit at high altitude. It only remembers the… the freedom of the movement.” He glanced back at Ren. “Don’t romanticize it, kid. It’s a machine. A beautiful, terrible machine. You’re here to learn the terrible part so the beautiful doesn’t kill you.”
They reached the towering blast doors, dull and pockmarked from decades of particulate abrasion. A young attendant in a crisp grey uniform greeted them, his eyes widening almost imperceptibly as they flicked from Ren’s jacket to the man in the chair. “Commander Ikawi. Cadet. This way, please. Captain Yui is expecting you.”
The interior was a shock of sensory overload after the quiet damp of the morning. Harsh fluorescent light reflected off polished steel floors. The air hummed with a deep, sub-audible vibration—the power draw of countless systems. The smell was sterile, metallic, undercut with the sour tang of old sweat and hot electronics. They moved through a wide corridor lined with observation windows looking into gymnasiums where figures in fatigues moved with exhausting precision, and into hangars where the distant, still forms of exosuits stood on maintenance gantries like slumbering gods.
As they turned a corner into a transit hub, a group of four new pilots, their uniforms still stiff, were being led by a drill instructor. One of them, a young woman with her hair shorn close to the scalp, stopped dead. She elbowed the man next to her, her eyes locked on Kaito.
“Is that…?” she whispered, audibly.
The drill instructor sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Keep moving, cadets.”
But the woman broke ranks, stepping hesitantly forward. “Sir? Commander Ikawi? The Flying Star?”
Kaito’s expression softened into a weary, practiced kindness. “That was a long time ago, cadet.”
“My grandfather… he served under you at the Kobe Breach. He said you pulled his squad’s module clear of a collapse.” Her voice was fervent, almost reverent. “Could I… would you sign my tablet?”
She produced a standard-issue data slate. Kaito took it, a faint, sad smile on his scarred face. He scribbled something with a stylus. “Your grandfather was a brave man. He carried two wounded comrades three kilometers with a broken wrist. Tell him Kaito remembers.” He handed it back. The cadet clutched it to her chest, beaming, before being sharply recalled by her furious instructor.
As they moved on, Ren pushing the chair again, Kaito let out a long, slow breath. “Like being a ghost at your own funeral, sometimes,” he murmured. “The income helps, though. Autograph fee. Buys Aoi’s fancy synthetic eggs.”
Before Ren could reply, a new voice cut through the ambient noise, sharp and devoid of warmth.
“Still peddling that old heroism, Kaito? It’s bad for discipline.”
A tall woman stood before the entrance to a secured elevator bank, arms crossed over a pristine commander’s jacket. Her black hair was woven into severe, functional braids coiled at the back of her head. Her face was all sharp angles, and her eyes, the color of slag, assessed Ren with a single, sweeping glance that felt like a physical inventory. This was Captain Yui.
Beside her stood an older man. He was broad-shouldered, his silver hair cropped short against a scalp lined with old scars. His pilot’s fatigues were worn soft at the elbows and knees, but the medal ribbons on his chest were pristine. His face was a landscape of weary, deep-cut lines, and his eyes, a faded blue, held no welcome as they settled on Ren. This was Kenny.
“Yui,” Kaito said, his voice shifting into something more formal, yet tinged with familiar respect. “You’ve gotten taller.”
“And you’ve gotten shorter,” she replied, a flicker of something that wasn’t quite humor in her eyes. She nodded at Ren. “This is the cadet from the Sector Seven incident.”
“My nephew. Ren,” Kaito said, his tone leaving no room for debate on the matter.
Kenny’s jaw worked slightly. He didn’t offer a hand. “Kaito.” His voice was gravel wrapped in sandpaper. “Heard you were playing nursemaid. Didn’t believe it.”
“Someone has to keep the legends alive, Kenny. Since you’re so busy being bitter about new ones.” Kaito’s retort was swift, but it carried the weight of a thousand old arguments, not malice.
Kenny’s eyes finally left Ren to meet Kaito’s. A silent, complex communication passed between them. Kenny gave the slightest, almost imperceptible shrug. “The boy survived an uncontrolled bond with an Otowa-grade suit. That’s either monstrous luck or…”
“Or what?” Ren asked, the words out before he could stop them. He felt his cheeks heat under their combined stares.
Kenny looked back at him, his gaze like a pressure drill. “Or a problem waiting to happen. Prodigies break easy. And when they break, they take good people with them.” He said it plainly, a simple statement of fact.
“Enough,” Yui stated. Her word cut the tension cleanly. “This is not a reunion club. Ikawi, your clearance is reactivated for Training Bay Sigma only. Matthew, you are here as an observer. The cadet’s practical assessment begins now.” She turned on her heel and placed her palm on a scanner. The secure doors hissed open. “Follow.”
The bay beyond was cavernous, dwarfing the hangars they’d passed. In its center stood the simulator—not a simple cockpit mock-up, but a full-scale, functional exosuit frame, a Mark I trainer, caged in a gimbal system of hydraulic arms. It was scarred and dented, a teaching tool that had been used hard. Wires and fluid lines snaked from its open back panel into the ceiling.
“The Adam is a gentle partner compared to the beast you touched,” Yui said, leading them to a observation platform. “This is a Mark I ‘Grunt.’ Its neural interface is crude. Its feedback is blunt. It will hurt. Your objective is simple: achieve basic motility. Walk from one end of the virtual staging area to the other. A child’s task.” She turned to face Ren fully. “Your performance will determine if the incident was a fluke, or if you possess the latent stability to be worth the immense risk and resource expenditure of further training. Begin prepping.”
A technician approached with a neural cap and a skin-tight interface suit. Ren’s fingers felt clumsy as he stripped off his jacket, folding it carefully on a bench. The interface suit was cold, clinging to him like a second skin. He avoided looking at the watching adults.
Kaito wheeled himself to the edge of the observation glass. “Remember your posture,” he said, his voice carrying across the space. “The machine is an echo. You lead. It follows. Don’t fight the feedback, steer it.”
Kenny stood apart, his arms still crossed, a silent monument of skepticism.
Ren climbed the gantry, the metal cold under his bare feet. He lowered himself into the suit’s open pilot cavity. The interior was worn smooth by countless bodies, smelling of stale coolant and old fear. The technician pressed the neural cap onto his temples. It was cold, gel-like.
“Initiating low-level bond,” a disembodied voice intoned. “Synaptic handshake in progress.”
A static buzz filled Ren’s ears. Then, a low, resonant thrum started in his bones. It was the suit’s reactor, a distant heartbeat.
“Visual feed activating.”
The world outside vanished, replaced by a shimmering, monochrome grid—a virtual plane stretching to a horizon line. He was standing in the suit, but the sensation was wrong. He felt enormous, top-heavy.
“Begin primary mobility test.”
Ren tried to take a step. It was like wading through solid lead. The Grunt’s left leg lifted a few inches, then slammed down with a deafening crash that vibrated up his spine. His teeth rattled. A sharp, metallic pain flared in his lower back—the suit’s crude way of communicating stress on the joint.
From the observation deck, Yui watched, data streaming across a screen beside her. Kenny’s frown deepened.
Kaito’s voice came through a speaker, calm. “You’re leaning into the harness. You’re a passenger. You have to be the leg. Feel the actuator like it’s your own muscle. Now, again.”
Ren swallowed, his mouth dry. He closed his eyes inside the helmet, trying to ignore the pain, the overwhelming sense of scale. He remembered the panic in Sector Seven, the raw, screaming instinct. That was the stranger. This had to be him.
He shifted his weight, thinking not of moving a machine, but of walking. He focused on the simple, ancient rhythm.
The Grunt’s right leg lifted. It was smoother. It swung forward. The foot planted with a heavy, but controlled, thud.
He brought the left leg forward to meet it. Another thud.
One step. Then another.
The pain was still there, a constant ache, but it had a rhythm now. He was moving. The distant finish line glowed in the grid.
He didn’t see the look that passed between Kaito and Kenny—Kaito’s quiet nod, Kenny’s grudging, infinitesimal relaxation of his shoulders. He didn’t see Yui making a note on her data slate.
All he knew was the next step, and the next, the machine’s giant shadow moving across the virtual plain, each impact echoing through the cage of his bones, a slow, terrible, beautiful march into the unknown.