For three years Karl lived inside a factory of his own making.
The place wasn't a workshop so much as a cathedral to violence: a hulking, climate-controlled hangar built on private land outside the city, welded into the earth with money and secrecy. It smelled like machine oil, hot metal, and something older — ambition. Blueprints, schematics, and annotated photographs covered wall-sized panels. Motion rigs hung from rails. Cryochambers blinked their sterile lights. In the center of it all lay the skeleton of the thing Karl had decided would answer his grief: a nanite-driven mech, more engine than suit, meant to fly like a bullet and land like a falling god.
He had lifted the idea from the stuff of childhood miracles: the Kamen Riders he'd watched in the safe, muted hospital evenings. He remembered the way those heroes would transform — a ritual of straps, helmets, and mechanical humming — their bikes roaring like thunder. The Rider was always alone in the tunnel of noise before they became something else. Karl kept that memory: the thrill of a single person changing shape and purpose, of technology turned into armor and identity. He wanted that theatre and that efficiency. He wanted to be the man inside the thunder.
The mech's core was cunning in its brutality. Millions of programmed nanites nested inside modular plates — microscopic machines that could reconfigure the frame in flight, change surface textures, and repair damage on the fly. Its propulsion system didn't rely on fuel tanks so much as an engine that harvested energy from the air itself: vortices and shockwave compression fed turbines, plasma spools, and the nanite swarms that converted kinetic input into thrust. It could bite through the sky and twist through storms. It could also, if ordered, disassemble a city's defenses in little more than a heartbeat.
Karl supervised every stage. He designed fail-modes and redundancy; he wrote code stacks that read like prayer. Engineers, some of them want ads or black-marketers with names too pretty or too dirty to share aloud, came and went under NDAs and blank checks. For months his team tested frames, fired microjets in wind tunnels, taught swarms of nanites to behave as one living muscle. The suit learned to breathe, to bleed, to mend.
Investors smelled it fast. The moment the hangar's thermal signatures showed on satellite sweeps and whispered corners of venture boards, offers flowed in like floodwater.
"Sell us the platform," a defense conglomerate suggested through a pitch that tasted like varnish. "We'll manufacture for global peace."
A private military firm offered a price that made the accountants in Karl's head tilt their heads with longing. Another consortium — shadowed by shell companies and sovereign accounts — put trillions on the table, citing "stability operations" and "deterrence packages." Billionaires with polite smiles and palms like velvet threatened corporate takeovers and litigation storms. They sent diplomats, retired generals, and men who wore their cruelty like tailored suits.
Karl heard every word and smiled each time, because the thing none of them understood was that this device was not an asset to trade. It was a scalpel for a single wound. The mech's existence had one purpose: to be the hand that reached into the world and turned the screw on the men who had forced his parents into the desert. He watched the offers as a man watches an enemy show his hand; each offer made the blade sharper but the choice cleaner.
"Wouldn't it be better to sell and fund better?" Reginald asked one night, when the thing's shell had been polished to a gunmetal sheen and technicians were calibrating nano-swarms against simulated biofabrics. Reginald's face still carried the small, exhausted humanity of a man who had tried to protect a child and failed to protect a world.
Karl's reply was as quiet as the hangar: "Then their children live. Their sons go to school. They keep their pets. That is the currency they used to buy humiliation. I will not accept their ledger."
So he didn't sell. He fooled the world into thinking the project was a high-risk research grant; he bought front companies that laundered parts and shell teams. He hired couriers who lived in shadows. He paid for black-ops logistics with money routed through charities and patent trusts. He cut the lines the investors wanted tied up, wrapped the design in legal thickets and non-disclosure veneers, and kept the keys to the hangar's engines in a drawer beside Reginald's left hand.
While Karl refined the suit, Reginald ran another war of his own.
The butler became a lone archivist and a silent inquisitor. He pulled feeds, subpoenaed shipping manifests, and bribed small bureaucrats who thought their moral compromises were simple taxes. He traced every thin string of connection from the rebels' cameras back through VPNs and burner phones, following names to addresses, addresses to gardens, gardens to birthdays. Reginald annotated the list in the same neat hand he had used for the house ledgers: names, dates, relations, likely whereabouts, pets, medicines, habits. For each name he found a photograph, a social media smear, a ledger of debts, something that let him see the human network behind a rebel's face.
Three years turned into a ledger of grudges.
In the last days before deployment, Karl sat in the control ring beneath the framed dome of the mech. It was a cockpit that looked like a chapel — curved, ergonomic, the foam seat molded around his frail body so that when he reclined it felt like being held. The VR helm was the crown: a composite of lenses, haptics, and neural dampeners that latched to the skull with a soft hiss, sealing heat and the throb of blood into the suit's interface. By design, the rig let him become the machine: not simply remote-control, but mind-merge, a tethering of intent and code.
He waited one evening for the hangar's calibrations to quiet, and Reginald brought in the last packet: a leather folio filled with everything the archivist had gathered — addresses, houses, people, pets, birthdays, and a map with pins. He had sorted the names with the same clinical tenderness he'd used to fold bandages. Reginald's hands were steady. "They're there, sir," he said. "Every one."
Karl's breath went shallow. He looked at the names — neat blocks of paper — and then at the helm. He could have retired the list to a safe and sold the suit by morning. He could have converted the hangar into a philanthropy and retired to the pale comfort of a different life.
Instead, he kissed the edge of the folio. "Start the engines," he said.
They strapped him in. The VR crown settled. The world narrowed to a tunnel of code and readouts, a high-fidelity simulation that licked his senses with the promise of speed. The mech's vocal processors hummed low — a ready growl beneath his ribs — and the hangar lights dimmed as the outer plates sealed.
Reginald cleared his throat, then said only, "Remember who you promised."
Karl fit his hands on the controls, every fiber of his body humming with focused intent. He thought of his mother's last smile, of his father's voice, of the crater that had swallowed their sand and names. He thought about the offers, the polished suits, the men who would have bought his silence. He thought about the ledger Reginald had made.
Then he launched.
The mech screamed into the night like an animal freed. It folded into a spear of muscle and metal, air ripping into the turbines as it shot skyward. The cockpit became a tunnel of data: live feeds from the mech, street maps rendered in skeletal lines, the small red dots that marked the coordinates Reginald had pried from the world.
Karl's mouth quirked, a private, terrible smile. The first pin pulsed ahead on the HUD. He tasted dust and thunder. Outside, the world's small lights burned like fragile promises.
He whispered to the empty seat, to Reginald, to the names on the folio: "One by one."
Then the city fell away behind him, and the first jump took him toward the first of the rebel families.