Halloway’s Investigation
The air in Maintenance Bay 4 was thick with the scent of ozone and scorched hydraulic fluid. Kaelen stood at attention, his boots slick with the coolant runoff from the 9-7C’s mangled chassis. The mech loomed behind him, a dying titan held together by scavenged actuators and sheer, desperate engineering. Its structural integrity monitor blinked a rhythmic, crimson 12 percent—a countdown to total mechanical failure.
Instructor Halloway didn't look at the machine. He stared at a floating holoscreen, his fingers dancing through the raw diagnostic logs of Kaelen’s recent arena duel. The silence was clinical, heavy with the weight of the Academy’s automated judgment.
“Class-A Threat,” Halloway murmured, his voice devoid of inflection. He swiped a finger, expanding a graph that showed an impossible spike in output during the final seconds of the fight. “The system flagged this as a hardware malfunction, Vane. But I’ve reviewed the logs. This isn’t a malfunction. It’s an unauthorized optimization of the core logic. Where did you get the kernel?”
Kaelen kept his expression neutral, though his pulse hammered against his ribs. “I pushed the salvage unit beyond its factory settings, Instructor. I needed to pass the trial.”
“Don’t insult me with survival excuses,” Halloway stepped closer, his shadow engulfing Kaelen. “You didn’t just push it. You rewrote combat subroutines in real-time. That level of data throughput is impossible for a student-grade interface. If I report this, the Academy security detail will strip that frame to the chassis and ship you to the labor camps before the sun sets.”
Back in the isolation of his quarters, the air felt thin, recycled, and suffocating. Kaelen’s neural interface flickered, a jagged line of red code spilling across his vision like a digital hemorrhage. He had 46 hours until the qualification trial. The 9-7C was a carcass, and the Academy’s AI—a cold, omnipresent god of logic—was still hunting for the source of his anomaly.
He dragged the second Blackline data packet into the frame’s primary logic stream. It was a volatile, high-density shard of forbidden architecture, but it was the only thing capable of masking the signature of the core he had already integrated. He began weaving a complex layer of obfuscation—a digital shell game designed to make the AI believe his performance spikes were merely the result of a malfunctioning, over-taxed actuator system. He poured his focus into the interface, rewriting the signal headers. Integration complete. The 'Class-A Threat' flag on the public leaderboard flickered, stalled, and finally settled into a 'High-Variance' warning. It was a reprieve, not a cure.
Two hours later, Halloway summoned him to the administrative wing. The office smelled of sterile metal and power-draw heat. Halloway sat behind a desk displaying the jagged, rhythmic pulse of various student mechs. He didn't look up from his tablet.
“The 9-7C is a relic, Vane,” Halloway said, his voice a flat, clinical drone. “It shouldn't be capable of sustained high-G maneuvers, let alone dismantling a Tier-2 frame. You’re running a ghost-code. I know it’s a Blackline kernel.”
Kaelen felt the room tilt. “Why haven't you reported it, then?”
Halloway finally looked up, his eyes cold and devoid of sympathy. He tapped a key, and a wireframe of the 9-7C appeared in the air between them, glowing in angry red. “Because the Academy is stagnant, and your ‘malfunction’ is the most efficient combat data I’ve seen in a decade. I’m giving you a binary choice, Vane. You surrender the core for my research, and you’re expelled with a clean record. Or, you keep it and face the upcoming group training exercise.”
“The training exercise is a standard drill,” Kaelen countered, his voice steady despite the dread pooling in his stomach.
Halloway smiled, a thin, humorless line. “The exercise has been reclassified. It’s a live-fire ambush, Kaelen. If your frame holds, you prove your worth. If it shatters, you die in the wreckage. Keep the core, and you keep the risk. Choose.”