Location: OURO Laboratory

  Ever since Jack left, Nova would sometimes feel as if, in the cold laboratory lights and reflected glass, she could still catch a glimpse of that three-hundred-pound body passing by. It wasn’t a hallucination—more like a structural echo left behind in the environment. Specific memories, once activated, replay themselves again and again within a specific space. She realized that her proudly rational defensive system had already been infected by a logical virus planted by that Fatty—one she could no longer delete.

  Her father had called several times. Each time, she ended the call quickly, citing work.

  She had been born into a typical military family. Her father held a senior position in the armed forces and was largely absent throughout her childhood. That absence didn’t make her dependent; instead, it forced her to learn independence far earlier than most. Her mother, to whom she was extremely close, often had to play two roles at once.

  When she was still in school, there had been a stocky boy in her class who bullied her simply because she was a girl. One day, outside the school gates, he snatched the blue hat her mother had bought for her. She didn’t cry. She didn’t turn to find a teacher.

  Under the gaze of her classmates, she simply looked at him with her ice-blue eyes and said, slowly and clearly,

  “Give the hat back.”

  The boy made a face at her and put the hat on his own head.

  She stepped closer and repeated,

  “Give the hat back.”

  “Come take it if you—”

  He never finished the sentence. Her left hand locked precisely onto a point just above his left wrist. A brief nerve compression drained all strength from his arm. In the next instant, her elbow drove straight into the center of his chest, knocking the breath out of him. She bent forward, using leverage to lift his arm; the moment his balance broke, he hit the ground. The hat returned to her hand.

  From that day on, no one at school dared provoke her lightly.

  At eighteen, she changed her surname from her father’s to her mother’s—Carter—in memory of her mother, who had passed away more than a year earlier. From then on, contact with her father became rare.

  The first time she met Jack, she realized she didn’t dislike this slightly bloated-looking man.

  His fearfulness, caution, and terror of death weren’t cowardice—they came from a genuine reverence for life itself. He disliked wrapping lies in kindness and rarely discussed things in grand abstractions. He had a habit of breaking complex problems down into their smallest logical units.

  She had once asked him,

  “Jack, when others are willing to bleed and die for this country, you choose to step back. Don’t you love this country?”

  Jack looked at her the way one looks at someone who has misused a concept.

  “If there were only you and me left in this world,” he said, “and we loved each other, we’d be a single community. If we killed each other, we’d be two opposing ones. The nation doesn’t come first—relationships do. I love myself, and I love you. Am I wrong?”

  At the time, she’d wanted to refute his near-sophistry.

  But after calming down, she had to admit that he wasn’t denying the nation—he was reducing it back to its smallest structural unit: the community. A nation does not exist by default. It is built gradually by individuals through continuous cooperation, conflict, and compromise, until institutions, borders, and monopolies on violence emerge.

  When large numbers of individuals form stable consensus judgments about behavior, moral norms appear. When those norms are written into institutions by power-holding nodes and enforced with punishment mechanisms, they become law.

  As the number of individuals grows, the direct influence of any single member rapidly diminishes—not because individuals are unimportant, but because once a system enters path dependence and structural lock-in, marginal influence collapses unless one controls resources, coercive force, or narrative legitimacy.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  That was why breaking existing rules was never about slogans or moral superiority. You had to change the key nodes that stabilized the structure—those controlling resources, violence, or discourse.

  As Nova watched organizational authority maps scroll endlessly across the lab screens, she suddenly realized that the collapse of an old structure often wasn’t caused by external impact, but by internal nodes aging, dying, or being replaced.

  Once new nodes completed their reorganization, new consensus, new institutions, and new nations were born.

  “What is that Fatty doing now?” Nova murmured.

  ------

  After seven months of brutal training, endless drills, and constant small-scale clashes along the border, Jack Harlan’s body began to show the exhaustion and scars of a true soldier. Days blurred together—sweat, gunfire, and the roar of mechs weaving into one continuous noise—until one day, after an action in which he didn’t retreat and didn’t even have time to think, the man once labeled a coward suddenly realized he had fully merged into the camp’s cold, unforgiving rhythm of life.

  September 15, 2510.

  Local afternoon, Prime World Epsilon.

  Less than ten hours remained before the operation, later known as the Cadian Meat Grinder, would begin.

  In those ten hours, Jack understood for the first time, viscerally, that a nation’s mobilization capacity wasn’t a slogan—it was a powerful, tightly woven, almost irresistible web.

  Every person was a node in that web. When orders were issued and the web fully deployed, those nodes were forced—through discipline, institutions, and punishment—to adjust their frequencies until they resonated with the web’s overall direction.

  The thought of simply treating the 66th Armored Recon Company to a steak dinner quickly became insignificant. From intelligence agencies to the president, down through the military chain to this very place, a top-down amplification rippled outward, driving every node into motion almost simultaneously.

  News arrived: someone was suspected of leaking military intelligence and had been arrested for interrogation. The scope of involvement was expanding rapidly.

  Jack finally understood that in such a system, when a node showed risk, the simplest, fastest, and cheapest solution was never to determine who was “truly guilty,” but to replace the entire segment of the structure.

  Even if some nodes were still stable, once adjacent nodes were deemed unstable, they had to be replaced as well. The system never pursued fairness—only the rapid minimization of risk.

  Kincaid returned with the latest update.

  “Supreme Command has moved up the Thunder Operation timetable,” he said. “The offensive to break the western encirclement of Cadian City begins tonight. We move first. Our job is to identify and mark targets for the air force—the entire damn network. We’re the spearhead.”

  Jack Harlan guided Thor, the century-old war machine, up the ramp of a medium assault transport. The heavy doors slammed shut. Before darkness swallowed him, the interior lights flickered. First Company of the 66th Special Recon Battalion would be the deepest-penetration unit. Their aerial insertion would drop them behind enemy lines. They would be the first to launch.

  They reached the designated drop zone. Enemy anti-air fire erupted. The transport shuddered as flak tore through the airframe.

  Kincaid’s voice crackled over the channel again:

  “All units, be advised. The enemy anti-air network covers airspace above 1,000 meters. We do not have air superiority. Transport will execute Gravestone-class low-altitude insertion. Drop altitude: 500 meters.”

  Silence filled the channel.

  Five hundred meters.

  For mechs weighing tens of tons, this wasn’t an insertion—it was a fall. From exit to impact, less than seven seconds. Engines had to reverse at 120% output the instant they cleared the bay. A delay of even 0.1 seconds would turn the pilot into pulp inside a can.

  It was suicide.

  But the system didn’t care. In the tactical simulations of the Janus Quantum-Entangled Mainframe, this was the only way to get the spearhead through. How many nodes snapped on landing was just another number in the casualty report.

  The transport bay doors hissed open. Wind howled. Below wasn’t cloud—it was burning treetops and erupting firelight. That wasn’t the sky. That was hell, right there.

  “First Company—jump! Jump! Jump!” Rashid roared, voice full of brute force, like he was kicking them out himself.

  Jack stared at the burning canopy below.

  Seven seconds.

  Seven seconds from exit to impact.

  A 0.1-second delay and he’d be meat.

  He remembered Nova’s words:

  “Nodes can be replaced.”

  Then let them replace me.

  At least for these seven seconds, he was still himself.

  “God,” Jack whispered, “how would you choose my fate?”

  Jack drove Thor out of the bay first.

  Weightlessness lasted only an instant. Then the ground rushed up to meet him.

  Inside the cockpit, the air screamed as Imperial shells tore past, ripping sound itself apart.

  Jack’s body shook in the seat.

  STARK-2: “Fatty, are you afraid?”

  Jack: “I’m not afraid.”

  STARK-2: “But my monitoring shows your physiological indicators are rapidly rising. Especially your heart rate.”

  Jack: “STARK-2… you didn’t use to talk like this. When did you get so human?”

  STARK-2: “Nova was concerned you might feel lonely and isolated. She installed an emotional system so I could accompany you more effectively.”

  “God…”

  ------

  Clang… clang… clang… screeeech—

  STARK-2: “Fatty, hold it—don’t vomit—whatever you do, don’t vomit—I’m right in front of you, please—hold on—”

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