Chapter 58: Chapter 55: The Madness of X

“60% functionality, primary system active.” The robotic voice beeped for yet the fifteenth time in the training chamber. Ceres was panting, his wrist and elbow hurting from the rapid movements.

It’s only been three months into the training camp.

He had been repairing the same exosuit non-stop for the whole day, not being able to get the repair done below one hour.

The door to the training chamber opened, while a grizzly man that was only to be referred to as X walked in with haste. “Do you remember what I said at the start? If you force me to physically come here…”

Instructor X glared at him while Ceres shivered instinctively. Ceres considered him to be fairly fearless, but over the past three months of training with the instructor, the harrowing punishments taught his body differently.

“I’m only going to say this once more for the umpteenth time. Make me say it again and you can forget about the rest of the training.” Instructor X grabbed Ceres and forced him to sit down, placing an intense force on his shoulder making Ceres feel like he was shouldering an entire mechsuit!

A holo-monitor popped up, laying out an overall 2D drawing of the exosuit with labels. “Remember, your speciality is extremely rapid repair, the trick is to catch people off-guard with how fast you can repair! Your trait is not to be as perfect as Gwen, or memorize as much as Leonard. So now tell me, how can you win over them?” Instructor X stood near the monitor and stared at Ceres.

Ceres groaned as he massaged his sore arms. “Isn’t it to train harder in my hand and eye speed? The faster my hands move the better I can repair!” Before Ceres could react, his cheek was slapped two times on the right, knocking him over.

To Ceres’ eyes, the instructor hardly moved at all, still standing there in position!

“Do you want to obtain this speed? You won’t get it in just six months, and certainly with not this little training facility and the obvious lack of genetic enhancers. It’s barely enough to train even a proper soldier! I’ve already said this before, if you want to repair faster, don’t make yourself faster, make the repair easier!” Instructor X scolded Ceres before pointing again at the holo-monitor.

“Again, every exosuit design must have a powerpack, an exoskeleton frame, motors at every human joint, a processor and a nerval jack. That’s the basics of an exosuit. Now each of these components must have a factor of safety inside it. Take for example the nerval jack. The symbol rate of the data transmission from the pilot to the suit can only be so high, any higher would potentially cause damage and fatigue to the pilot.”

“Another example would be the arms! The motors at the joints of the frame also have hard mechanical limitations such as stoppers or just sheer inability to bend past a certain angle, but sometimes they will use limit switches or software signals to indicate they have reached the maximum operating envelope.”

“Lastly, both the processor and powerpack also have certain safety thresholds that limit the data rate, the power output and cycle and vibrational resistance!”

“But with a strong body and high NEIR level like yours despite being an exosuit repairer, why bound yourself to such mundane limitations? The safety limiters for each of these components are there for other dumbasses who don’t know the difference between a tap and a punch and can’t control their nerval instructions!”

Ceres was still massaging his arms as realization dawned on him, his face slowly changing into an extremely shocked face. “Hold on, you’re asking me to remove all the safety limiters on the exosuit to make myself into a walking bomb?? I thought you were joking all this time!”

Was the instructor mad? Doing such a thing goes against everything he had learnt during riot repairs. Sure, he always skimped a bit on the functionality percentage, but he never went below 60% ever.

Anything below was dangerous territory in his eyes. Even Uncle Dawn would not have approved of it.

In an instant the instructor dashed towards him, stopping only an millimeter away from Ceres’ face, their eyeballs almost touching. “Ex-act-ly, now if you don’t want to blow yourself up you better try your absolute hardest, shouldn’t you? And if you make me come down here again in person, I will blow you up myself. That includes the scenario where you already blew yourself up.”

Ceres swallowed instinctively. Instructor X was absolutely mad! How could someone just decide to turn off all the safety limiters? What if you dislocated your arm because the frame dragged you too far?

What if a simple turn of the head caused your neck to snap? What if the power pack overheated and burned the skin off your back? There were good reasons why these safety limitations were there in the first place!

But as he pondered more on it as the training chamber automatically replaced the previous repaired exosuit with a damaged one, he was starting to come around to the idea. He had previously been doing the repairs for others rather than himself, but if he knew his body and skill level the best, couldn’t he tailor the threshold of the functionality?

“I know the maximum and minimum hard limits, so there’s no need for me to apply a factor of safety to any of these! I could run the exosuit at its highest peak performance or achieve minimal functionality much faster if I ignored actually achieving the safety requirements!”

Some sort of epiphany about exosuit repairing occurred within his mind, changing his perspective drastically!

Previously, he considered himself a fast repairer as he always aimed for minimum safe functionality while clearing the system test, but he never thought of changing the system test itself.

His view on how to perform an exosuit repair unlocked into a new horizon, and Ceres could only slightly hope that it wasn’t a suicidal one.

“Don’t worry about blowing yourself up, as long as the damage isn’t bad enough, our medbays can handle it. You’ve already seen in action once. The only thing you need to worry about is if you hurt yourself so much that I have to come back down here in person.”

Ceres nodded, getting up on one leg, ready to put his new perspective and ideas into practice. But before Instructor X could leave, Ceres had a serious question that had been bugging him the entire training camp.

“Where are all these damaged exosuits coming from? Is there some sort of machine that applies random damage?” Ceres asked.

“Kid, you’re such an idiot I can’t even believe you don’t know this. The damages on those suits are real, why the fuck would I even waste time to make a machine that damages perfectly functioning exosuits? That’s like using money to lose more money.”

“But where are you getting them from?”

“From my stock, of course. I’m selling them off after you repaired them. Good work so far by the way. And no, you’re not getting a raise. I got to feed my cats.”

“....”

***

Max’s face was warped with fury as he heard the painful screams of his fellow group members over the multi-terminal as Ceres either flung them off the building, dealt multiple concussions or maimed multiple people.

Of course, nobody actually died or was in danger of dying due to the hidden safety features attached to every participant like a personal shield that had a 92% success rate.

But suffering severe injuries was still an entire traumatic stress-inducing group package, delivered and verified by Ceres.

The other group members on the ground paled as their specially crafted plan broke apart in an instant.

With the lack of a strategy, many of them started to have their own special thoughts.

Immediately sensing the potential fallout of the tenuous alliance, Max started belting out instructions, showing a facade of having everything under control, while still formulating a backup plan since he was fairly certain that nothing would work against Ceres anymore!

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This was the moment to act on his own, but he didn’t know where the crown was yet.

At this point, everyone’s multi started to light up with the transmitted location of the crown, which was near the corner of the boundaries.

“Our only hope now is to get the crown before Ceres does, and keep it away from him as long as possible! I don’t care who gets it, don’t let Ceres advance to the next stage!” Max bellowed to the other group members, who hastily nodded and followed him.

Of course, Max cared very much that he should be the one to hold the crown the whole way!

He wasn’t alone in thinking this, because as his group started to make their way over to the crown, a few desertions happened among the 20 outers who followed Max, reducing their size to barely eleven participants.

Surprisingly, the ‘fucker’ who lost his multi to Ceres was still with them as they ran through the streets on the ground level towards the location of the crown, which was still stationary.

The wildlife of Zone 31 came out in full force as they navigated deserted buildings, partially collasped tunnels and dilipadiated alleys. Max didn’t know the names of any of the multi-limb monkeys nor the swarm of mutated rodents, but his team sacrificed member after member.

After a harrowing good fifteen minutes of continuous desertions, fights and close calls with the wildlife, Max’s group finally made it to the crown, which has been in the same location ever since.

“Good, no one touched it at all!” Max smirked as his now much smaller group of six members walked into a subway station, where the location of the crown was shown underground on the passenger platform, on top of a vending machine.

Max knew that he had to grab the crown and hold out as long as possible before the inners came with their repaired exosuits!

Back when Ceres had already landed on the rooftop, the alliance leaders of the inners decided to back out of their plan earlier and started repairing their exosuits, knowing that they will never beat Ceres in a head-on fight without it.

Max believed in rushing to the crown and having a head start in holding the crown, where he can easily throw the crown away when he was being chased and repair his exosuit then!

The crown wasn’t particularly nice, and no sensible king would wear it as a form of prestige. It was literally just a metal headband that you could either hold in your hand as a large ring or wear it on your forehead.

It laid on top of the vending machine, as though it was some forgotten thing left by a passerby. However, to the six of them who wanted to advance to the next stage, it might as well currently be their life’s treasure!

The group of six under Max raced towards the crown, each one of them trying to beat each other to the crown.

But just before they reached within one meter while kicking and shouting at each other, an uncanny thought hit Max’s brain and caused him to shout: “WAIT! Everybody STOP!”

The loyal five members who followed him all this way stopped, knowing that Max had the best computational ability amongst all of them, and if he said something was wrong, something most definitely was wrong!

“Ceres is known as the bomber, and he previously did the same thing with the control flags in the qualifiers!” Max gritted his teeth as he remembered being forced off the flags due to the sheer amount of explosives lying around the flag.

He had only moved on to the main competition due to having survived till the end of Ceres’ and Chad’s rampage through the map. The thought of being blown up when he was so close to the prize triggered a form of fear within him.

“He must have either laid a proximity bomb or some sort of trigger when someone snatches the crown!” Max explained to the other group members, who nodded vigorously.

They too felt that it was very possible for Ceres to plant such insidious traps into the area, the vending machine or even the crown itself.

Ceres already had an exosuit worn, though Max still didn’t know how he did it. It was very possible that with the speed and agility boost provided by the exosuit, Ceres could already be here, watching them.

Max quickly calculated how much time Ceres would take to get here after he had knocked out the participants on the rooftop, and found that it would be five minutes earlier.

That was more than enough time to design a simple bomb and blow their group up.

“I got an idea, stand back and let me throw this pebble!” A group member said as all six of them took a step back. He swung the pebble in a baseball throwing pitch, nailing the crown directly head on. The crown was knocked off the vending machine, but there was hardly any explosion.

No smoke nor flames erupted anywhere, leading to an awkward silence between the group.

“It might be a proximity mine on the area around!” Undeterred, the group started finding any rocks and rolling them on the ground or pelting the area around the vending machine.

After a good three minutes of continuous throwing, they were starting to have severe doubts about whether there were any explosives around the area.

They looked towards Max, who kept thinking about the defeat of Gwen Derfas in the qualifiers, where her team was ambushed right after the explosion.

“I don’t think there is any bombs around from Ceres, just grab the crown and let's go! We’ve wasted too much time!” A group member strode forward with about 80% confidence that he was right, before Max could stop him.

The member took timid steps towards the bomb, holding his breath in as though breathing too hard would trigger a bomb.

“Yea, I didn’t have any time to put any bombs. I just got here.”

The group member heaved a sigh of relief upon hearing that: “Oh, that’s great... wait what?”

Max spun around towards the voice, only to see a metallic fist coming straight at him, crushing his face in with his nose and sending him sprawling on the ground next to his vaunted ring.

How could Max withstand a blow from an exosuit unprotected? He whimpered on the ground, while the rest of the group tried to fight back, despite being unarmed.

In less than 30 seconds, the fight was already over, since the group didn’t have an exosuit at all.

Ceres made quick work of them, punching each of them a second time to make sure they were considered knocked out despite them already being unconscious on the floor.

“Why were these idiots just standing around waiting?”

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