A week before the league registration deadline, I stuffed all my savings—a pile of oil-stained, clinking Imperial coins—into my sturdiest pocket.
My goal was clear: the underground black market on Planet 7, "Forge Town."
I needed a heart—a powerful heart to power my pile of scrap for the "Royal Interstellar League."
Forge Town was always the same hellhole; the air was a thick cocktail of the screech of cutting metal, the acrid smoke of low-grade fuel, and the stench of sweat from countless scavengers and outlaws.
I ignored the punks whistling at me and dodged the vendors hawking suspicious tonics, heading straight for the shop at the very back with the sign "Greasy Fingers' Parts."
The owner, "Greasy Fingers," was a fat man whose hands were perpetually stained black, and a fawning, greedy smile was plastered on his face.
"Well, if it isn't our Little Wildcat," he said, his eyes lighting up the moment he saw me. "Looking for some treasures today? I just got a shipment of military-grade energy tubes. They'll definitely keep that little toy of yours going for..."
"I don't want energy tubes," I interrupted, my voice as cold as iron. "I want an engine."
Greasy Fingers blinked, then his grin widened. "An engine? Why didn't you say so! I've got just the thing for you—a real beauty!"
He led me to the back of the shop, where an engine sat looking impossibly pristine. Its silver-gray casing was polished to a mirror finish, still bearing the insignia of the Imperial Marines.
"What do you think?" Greasy Fingers patted the casing, which gave off a solid thud. "A 'Gale' Type III military engine! It might be a decommissioned model, but the output is pure muscle. It'll smoke those civilian-grade pieces of junk!"
I didn't say a word. I just stared at the engine.
Through my "Engineer's Eye," the internal structure of the Gale Type III was laid bare.
The exterior was indeed flawless, but deep within the energy conduction core, on a critical super-polymer transistor, there was a nearly invisible crack, finer than a human hair.
At low power, the crack wouldn't be an issue. But the moment the output crossed seventy percent, it would fail instantly, triggering a chain reaction that would turn the entire engine into a spectacular display of fireworks.
Looks good on the outside, rotten on the inside.
"This thing's too expensive," I said, shaking my head and pretending I couldn't afford it. "I need the cheap stuff."
"Now, don't be like that!" Greasy Fingers said, growing frantic. He thought I was just haggling. "We can talk about the price! This is mil-spec stuff. Once it's gone, it's gone!""I want that one." I pointed to a dust-covered, rusty behemoth sitting in the corner.
Oil-Finger followed my finger, looking like he'd just swallowed a fly.
"That? That... that's a scrapped agricultural tractor engine! Good god, Vex, have you lost your mind? That piece of junk can barely power a harvester, and you want to use it for the tournament?"
"I want it," I insisted.
In anyone else's eyes, this "Harvest-7" agricultural tractor engine was a clunky, outdated, and utterly worthless piece of scrap metal.
But to me, it was practically an uncarved masterpiece.
Its structure was simple and rugged, built with ridiculously solid materials. While its base power was low, its potential for modification was immense. Most importantly, its core control software utilized an ancient open-source architecture with virtually no encryption.
This meant I could easily bypass its power limiter.
"Are you sure?" Oil-Finger looked at me like I was a fool.
"I'm sure."
"Fine, fine," he spread his greasy hands with a "don't say I didn't warn you" look. "Since you're hell-bent on buying trash, I won't stop you. But I still suggest you take a look at this military engine. Its performance—"
"Enough." My voice was cold as iron.
My gaze shifted back to the polished, gleaming "Gale" Type III.
"Oil-Finger, who exactly are you trying to sell this pile of scrap to?"
Oil-Finger's smile froze. "Wh-what are you talking about? This is a military-grade treasure!"
"Treasure?" I scoffed. My voice wasn't loud, but it was enough to make the surrounding scavengers prick up their ears.
I extended a finger, pointing precisely to a spot on the engine's casing.
"The Gale Type III. To achieve instantaneous burst power, it uses high-brittleness T-7 models for its hyper-polymer transistors. These units have a three percent chance of internal microscopic cracks right out of the factory."
I paused, watching the sweat begin to bead on Oil-Finger's forehead, and continued.
"This engine's production batch is A-177; the defect rate for that batch was exceptionally high. The crack is right where I'm pointing, 3.7 centimeters inside. Once the engine exceeds seventy percent power for more than fifteen seconds, it will overheat, and then... *boom*!"
I made the gesture of an explosion.
"You aren't selling an engine. You're selling a mobile bomb."
The area went silent instantly. Every eye was fixed on Oil-Finger's deathly pale face.
His mouth worked, but he couldn't manage a single word.
Got him.
I watched him calmly, like he was a piece of meat on the butcher's block."Now, let's talk about the price of this tractor engine." I tapped the Harvest-7. "I think it should be free. Call it compensation for the emotional damage of you trying to sell me a bomb."
Oil Fingers' face went from ghostly white to a nasty shade of purple. He knew that if word of this got out, his days of doing business in Forge Town were over.
"And," I added, "to help me forget this ever happened, those scrapped armor plates, burnt-out servo motors, and broken mechanical arms in your warehouse... every part you were planning to sell as scrap metal belongs to me now. Call it hush money."
Oil Fingers swayed, as if his spine had been ripped out.
He gritted his teeth, forcing the words out. "...Fine. It's... it's all yours."
Half an hour later, I drove out of Forge Town in a rented hover-truck, fully loaded with my "spoils." In the back, the massive Harvest-7 engine sat like a slumbering beast of steel.
A smirk spread across my face.
Calm? Contempt? Control?
No. What I felt now was a near-manic urge to create!
Back at my container workshop, I slammed the door shut, sealing out the noise of the world. This was my kingdom.
I hoisted the tractor engine into the center of the workshop and pulled my massive industrial wrench from the tool wall. Strangely, when I tried to loosen an ancient bolt on the engine casing, several high-strength alloy wrenches I used simply slipped.
Finally, on a hunch, I picked up my old wrench—the one engraved with the letter "G."
*Click.*
The bolt gave way.
I froze for a second, staring at the wrench in my hand. Its material... seemed far harder than I had imagined.
`[Plot Flag YF001: Triggered]`
No time to overthink it. I dove straight into the frantic work of modification.
Step one: crack the power limiter!
I plugged a data cable into the engine's ancient control port, my fingers flying across the virtual keyboard in a blur. Countless lines of code flowed past my eyes like a rushing river of data. I quickly located the power-limiting module locked by the manufacturer.
Delete! Bypass! Rewrite!
Just as I was about to finalize the last step, my "Engineer's Eye" caught an extremely abnormal data stream within the software's low-level code. It was buried deep, like a phantom lurking in the abyss. All the code had been commented out, leaving only a single tag: "Ghost Echo."
Ghost Echo?
`[Hidden Thread AF001: Embedded]`
I tried to delete it, but the system returned an "insufficient permissions" error.
Strange.I frowned. No time to dig into this now, so I just flagged it.
Software done. Next up: hardware!
I sliced open the engine's thick casing with a cutting torch and began welding on the various scrap parts I'd "extorted" from Oil Fingers in the crudest, most direct way possible.
A snapped crane boom became the mecha's spine.
Two scrapped hydraulic legs from a mining bot became its legs.
I even took my biggest prize—a ridiculously thick lead-core shielding plate salvaged from a decommissioned nuclear reactor—and welded it directly onto the mecha's left arm.
That would be my shield.
There were no elegant lines or flashy paint jobs—only brutal weld seams and a grotesque silhouette cobbled together from mismatched metals.
It looked like a steel monstrosity crawling out of a scrap metal graveyard.
But to me, it was like watching a god being born.
Info on my opponents in the qualifiers... I need to know what kind of scrap heaps they're running.
I pulled the metal card I'd taken from that Iron Rat gang member out of my pocket.
[Side Plot Foreshadowing SF001 Triggered]
I activated it.
An encrypted communication request was sent out silently.
A dialog box popped up on the screen:
"Jinx is online. Deal? Or chat?"
I typed out a line:
"I want the loadouts for every opponent on day one of the Royal Interstellar League qualifiers. Name your price."