Serika did not panic.
That was the first thing Kazuto noted about her when the crystal started glowing in his hand and the expression on his face shifted into something she clearly could not read or categorize. A lesser officer would have reached for a weapon, or called for backup, or done something loud and reactive that would have changed the shape of the next hour in ways that would have been difficult to recover from.
Serika did none of those things.
She sat back in her chair, laced her fingers together on the table, and waited.
That told him something important about who she was.
He spent thirty seconds fully reading the interface before he said anything — running his eyes across the panels that only he could see, building a basic understanding of what he was working with before trying to explain it to someone else. The system was organized with the logical clarity of something designed for rapid comprehension under pressure. No unnecessary complexity. No decorative elements. Pure function.
The main panel was divided into four sections.
BLUEPRINT DATABASE — currently showing one unlocked entry, greyed-out silhouettes filling the rest of the visible space, each one a weapon or piece of equipment waiting to be accessed. The unlocked entry was labeled: SIDEARM TYPE-1 — STANDARD CONFIGURATION. Below it, a material requirement list that he scanned quickly. Standard electronic components. Wire. A power cell of any common type. Metal for the housing. Nothing exotic. Nothing that would require special access to obtain.
RESOURCE POINTS — showing a current balance of 340 points with a small upward arrow indicating recent accumulation. A note below the number read: Points accumulated from confirmed neutralization events using system-derived methods. The wire trap he had built in the street had earned him 340 points from the single disabled Beta. He filed that away.
CRAFTING INTERFACE — the production panel, currently showing the sidearm blueprint in detail when he focused on it. A three-dimensional schematic rotated slowly in the panel's center, with component callouts and assembly sequence numbered in order. The estimated production time for a first-time build was listed as twelve minutes. Subsequent builds of the same design would decrease to approximately four.
SYSTEM LOG — a running record of activations, observations, and notifications. The most recent entry read: Field improvisation event recorded. Non-blueprint construction detected. Efficiency rating: adequate. Recommendation: blueprint utilization will yield significantly superior results.
He almost smiled at adequate.
"Ryuu," Serika said. Not impatiently. Just anchoring the conversation.
He lowered his eyes from the interface and looked at her.
"The crystal activated something," he said. "A system. It's — " He paused, choosing words that would be accurate without requiring him to establish credibility he hadn't yet earned. "It's a technology interface. Blueprint-based. It gives me access to weapon designs and a production framework. I can build things with it that I couldn't build without it."
Serika's expression did not change. "Weapon designs."
"Starting with a sidearm. There are more locked behind it — I can see the silhouettes but not the details yet."
"How do you unlock them?"
"I don't know yet. Resource accumulation, probably. The system tracks effective use."
She was quiet for a moment. He could see her processing — not doubting, exactly, but building a model, the way a competent analyst built a model from incomplete information. Finding the load-bearing assumptions and testing them before committing.
"The wire trap you built in the street," she said. "That was before the system activated?"
"Yes."
"Using maintenance knowledge."
"And some applied logic."
"And it worked." She unfolded her hands and placed them flat on the table. "Which means the system didn't give you the ability to build effective things. You already had that. The system gives you something else."
He looked at her.
"You're faster than I expected," he said.
"I've been doing this job for eleven years," she said. "What does the system give you that you didn't already have?"
Kazuto thought about it for a moment — genuinely, not performatively. It was a good question and it deserved a real answer.
"Precision," he said finally. "What I built in the street worked but it was rough. Improvised. The system's blueprints are optimized — they take the same materials and produce something that performs at a level I couldn't reach by guessing." He focused briefly on the sidearm schematic rotating in the panel. "The gun I can build right now, with common components, would outperform standard GDA sidearm issue by a significant margin. Same caliber class, different internal configuration."
Serika looked at the containment case and the glowing crystal inside it for a long moment.
Then she stood up. "Stay here."
She left.
He waited. The interface stayed open in his field of vision, patient and unhurried, the sidearm schematic rotating its slow rotation. He spent the time reading the material requirements again more carefully, cross-referencing against what he knew was available in a standard maintenance bay.
Everything on the list was accessible. Nothing required GDA restricted supply channels. That was either by design — the system calibrated to what its user could realistically obtain — or a feature of the entry-level blueprint specifically. He suspected both.
Serika came back eleven minutes later carrying a flat equipment case. She set it on the table and opened it.
Inside, arranged in foam cutouts, was a collection of components that Kazuto recognized immediately — drone repair parts, a standard civilian power cell, wire coils, a small metal housing blank from a maintenance supply kit. Nothing that would flag on any supply audit. Nothing that required authorization.
She had pulled it from a maintenance supply cache somewhere in the facility. Quickly, without raising questions about why a GDA intelligence colonel needed drone repair components at nine PM.
She sat down and gestured at the case. "Show me."
Kazuto worked with the interface open alongside his physical hands — the schematic in his left visual field, the actual components on the table in front of him. The system's assembly sequence was numbered and precise, each step illustrated with a rotating detail view that showed exactly how components related to each other in three dimensions.
He had always been good with his hands. The body he was in was good with its hands. The combination, guided by a blueprint that had been optimized by whatever intelligence had designed the system, produced something that felt less like construction and more like following a very clear recipe.
The work was quiet. Serika watched without speaking. He appreciated that.
Twelve minutes and forty seconds from the first component pick-up, he set the completed weapon on the table between them.
It did not look like much. The housing was the metal blank, modified and shaped. The barrel was a repurposed drone motor shaft, machined to spec using the multi-tool's smallest bit. The trigger mechanism was wire-formed from the coil stock. The power cell sat in a recessed grip chamber.
It looked like something a competent technician had built from spare parts.
Serika picked it up with two fingers, examined it, checked the chamber, verified the safety.
"Test?" she said.
"It'll fire," Kazuto said. "The power cell drives a magnetic acceleration system — same principle as a railgun but miniaturized and calibrated for a projectile the size of a standard round. No chemical propellant. Quiet. The barrel's lined to reduce heat signature." He paused. "The rated penetration at ten meters is approximately three times standard GDA sidearm output."
Serika set it down. Looked at him.
"You built that in twelve minutes from drone parts."
"Thirteen, roughly."
"And the system has more of these."
"Many more. Heavier weapons. Vehicle systems. I can see the outlines — the further I go, the more complex and capable the designs get." He looked at the locked silhouettes in the database panel. "What I can access now is the beginning."
She was quiet for a full minute. Not uncomfortable silence — thinking silence. He waited it out.
"Who else knows about this?" she said finally.
"No one. You're the first person I've told."
"Why tell me at all? You could have kept it hidden."
He considered the question honestly. "Because keeping it hidden while the city takes Gamma Wave incursions and the power grid gets systematically mapped is a waste of something that could matter. And because—" He stopped.
"Because?" she prompted.
"Because I've been in this world for less than two days and I've already seen enough to know that the gap between what GDA's official position is and what's actually happening is significant and growing." He met her eyes. "I'd rather work with someone who notices that gap than pretend it isn't there."
Something shifted in Serika's expression — not much, but enough. The same micro-adjustment he had noticed in the corridor earlier. The recalibration of an assessment.
"You're twenty-four on paper," she said. "Fourteen months in Zone B maintenance. No military background. No advanced education flagged in your file." A pause. "You don't talk like any of those things."
"People contain surprises," Kazuto said.
She almost smiled again. Still very small.
She picked up the weapon he had built, turned it once in her hands, and placed it back in the equipment case.
"I'm going to ask you to do something," she said. "And I'm going to be direct about what it is and what it means, because I think directness is more useful with you than the alternative."
He nodded.
"I want you to build another one. Tonight. Using only what I can source from non-flagged supply channels. I want to test it properly — ballistics, heat signature, operational duration." She paused. "If it performs the way this one suggests it will, I'm going to take what I have to Zone Command and recommend the formation of a special unit with you attached as primary technical resource."
"And if Zone Command says no?"
"Then I'll figure out something else." She said it flatly, with the confidence of someone who had a long history of figuring out something else when the official channel closed. "But they won't say no. Not with what I'll be showing them."
Kazuto looked at the equipment case. Looked at the crystal, still faintly glowing in the containment foam beside it.
He thought about the locked silhouettes in the database panel — the rows of outlines waiting behind the single unlocked entry. Heavier. More capable. Further along a development curve that he could only partially see from where he was standing now.
He thought about the power grid being methodically stripped apart, one relay at a time, by something that was executing a plan.
He thought about a cafeteria full of people who had normalized slow defeat.
"Alright," he said. "What can you source tonight?"
Serika was already pulling out her communication device.
"More than you'd think," she said.
They worked until two in the morning.
By the time they finished, there were three weapons on the table — two sidearms and a compact submachine configuration that the system had unlocked midway through the session when his Resource Point balance crossed a threshold he hadn't been tracking consciously. The submachine gun's blueprint was more complex, the assembly sequence longer, but the principle was the same: optimized design applied to accessible materials, producing output that dramatically exceeded what the inputs should have been capable of.
Serika tested each one against a ballistic panel she had brought from the facility's range. The results were consistent. Clean grouping. Penetration as rated. Heat signature below standard issue.
She photographed everything. Documented the material inputs. Wrote her assessment notes in a careful, factual hand that suggested she was already thinking about how to present this to people who would be skeptical.
At two-fifteen, she capped her stylus and looked across the table at him.
"Get some sleep," she said. "I'll contact you tomorrow."
Kazuto stood, rolled his shoulders, and looked at the three weapons on the table.
"The system's going to keep developing," he said. "What's accessible now is a fraction of what it can reach. Heavier weapons. Vehicle systems. Things that could change the shape of what's possible in the field significantly."
"I know," Serika said.
"The people who find out about it are going to want to control it."
"I know that too." She met his eyes steadily. "That's why the first person I told was me."
He picked up the crystal from the containment case. It had cooled to barely perceptible warmth. He closed his fingers around it.
"Goodnight, Colonel," he said.
He walked out into the corridor, past the checkpoints, and into the night air of New Konoha.
Overhead, the sky was dark and clear for once — no red on the horizon, no distant fires. Just stars, visible between the cloud breaks, indifferent and ancient.
He walked back to Block 7 with his hands in his pockets and the system interface running quietly in the corner of his vision, the database panel showing its locked silhouettes in patient rows, waiting.
He was starting to understand the shape of what was coming.
He was not afraid of it.
He was, for the first time since opening his eyes in this borrowed body in this broken world, something close to ready.
End of Chapter 5