The Warrior Mechanic

Upon searching through this area, he could see how filthy the place looked overall. The hidden areas of the city really didn’t get much attention from the urban maintenance bots, that were built to maximise efficiency.

He always detested the government that seemed to do the bare minimum in territories that didn’t generate a lot of revenue for the empire.

This made him wonder just how impoverished the colonies of the empires were.

Cael gave the entire alleyway a focused look, with his hands on his waist. He was getting quite tired of constantly looking in the same place and decided that he’d probably call it a day there. He had no other leads on where these lost files could be and so, this sent him straight back to square one for this quest.

As he prepared to leave, though, he noticed an odd glow in the corner of his eye. Turning, he could see that a hologram was being projected behind one of the bins.

Rushing over to the scene in a flash, he just gave a look back behind him to see the tens of metres that he had crossed in only about 2 seconds.

“Woah.” He thought to himself, looking down to his own body with incredulousness.

Getting his mind back to the topic at hand, he crouched down to pick up the fragment that almost perfectly camouflaged into the darker ground below.

There was a hologram being projected from this object, which showcased a spinning image that he deduced was the image of a certain file.

Pocketing the device, he headed back home as quickly as he could to try and discern the meaning behind this projection.

Placing it on the table in his bedroom, he jolted back upon seeing his projector spontaneously awake. It turned out its activation wasn’t as spontaneous as he presumed, and he could see a file had been transferred over to his device.

Checking for the source of the file, it simply said ‘Unknown’. This had to be from that little fragment now resting on his table.

This surprised him, since any file transfer from an unknown source would prompt the user to agree to the download. However, in this case, he was given no such option. This scientist who’d managed to create his system only surprised him more and more as time went on.

[File: 92166d3c.wcm]

Cael was spooked by this odd file name and type. It looked like complete gibberish, and the file type was also unsupported by his own projector.

Were these the lost files that his system was talking about? He assumed that they weren’t so, since he wasn’t given any sort of reward for finding this fragment. Seconds later, the fragment’s projection faded and just resembled and broken piece of metal.

No matter what he did, he just couldn’t get the projection to activate again.

Cael didn’t see the need to delve deep into this matter right now, and just left the situation to rest for now.

Now, he had to focus on receiving sufficient gears in the vault so that he could go on to upgrade his skills and stats.

After a few sessions in the vault, he’d received a total of 462 gears in his matches. Now, he was receiving much less gears for his performances - due to his better exosuit and the greater difficulty of opponents that he faced.

[User: Cael Breckenridge]

[Titles: Novice Merchant, Vault Novice]

[Strength: 6]

[Speed: 6]

[Durability: 6]

[Intelligence: 21]

[Dexterity: 6]

[Creativity: 12]

[Focus: 15]

[MP: 10/10]

[Skills]

[Stat Upgraded!]

[+1 Strength]

[Stat Upgraded!]

[+1 Speed]

[Stat Upgraded!]

[+1 Durability]

[Stat Upgraded!]

[+1 MP]

With this sudden improvement, he noticed an immediate bettering of performance in the vault. He was winning more fights, but he did reach a limit where the opponents he faced were around his level.

Whenever he climbed too high in the rankings, he’d be sent down by stronger opponents and then sent back up when fighting those below his level. It was great to specifically know how he fared against other exosuit warriors.

Through playing several games, it allowed him to get even more gears, and improve his stats further. The much lower number of wins meant that he couldn’t gain gears anywhere near as fast but he wasn’t bothered.

Along with this, Cael employed the use of his Quick-Build to release his swarm drones and occasionally his Vulture XR-1 Titan.

Here, he was seeing steady profits, which also allowed him to receive gears from that. He made sure to make his swarms as small as possible, since it could allow them to sell faster.

Less people would be willing to spend such a hefty amount on drones, so he wanted to decrease the cost to make his product affordable to more customers.

Even though his items were more like bundles, his system altered the algorithm so that his items would appear near the top of people’s searches. He could see that was having a clear effect on his number of sales.

During this time, he also received infrequent followers and ratings, where the overall ratings of his price, innovation and quality remained relatively stagnant.

[User: Cael Breckenridge]

[Titles: Novice Merchant, Vault Novice]

[Strength: 9]

[Speed: 8]

[Durability: 8]

[Intelligence: 21]

[Dexterity: 6]

[Creativity: 12]

[Focus: 15]

[MP: 13/13]

[Skills]

Before the event began, he wanted to make sure that his MP would be at around 15, so that he could use his exosuit as well as possible. Instead of creating a whole new exosuit to handle his larger mana stores, he just wanted to perform slight augmentations to the design.

This could make it last longer, while he could use the weapons like the powered gauntlets and extreme-heated blade more frequently.

Cael put several hours into the vault to acquire as many gears as he could, but this was pretty much as fast as he could.

Slightly under 3 weeks remained until the event, and he decided to begin working on his physical exosuit at this time. Looking over his design, he made some minor readjustments that managed to improve the power efficiency and speed slightly. Its overall rating remained the same, and the changes certainly weren’t significant.

Cael used his profits and total revenue to start purchasing the items that he needed to begin the assembly of this suit. They came flooding in through his teleporter, and he started laying out the items across the several desks laid out in the makeshift workshop.

Since he bought the items from various sellers, the weight of the suit was split and allowed the resources to come through his teleporter instead of through interstellar delivery.

Several ingots of Husnium, Dresium and other metals came pouring in, and the components like the energy rifles and mana cores also arrived.

For exosuits, these mana cores were flat and shaped like flat steel canteens to make sure they could be laid over the skin.

He felt slightly rusty -it had been a while since he was in this place- but he soon entered his flow.

It was just another day in the office for Cael. Of course, the physical assembly was more of an alien experience that he felt his body was lacking behind his mind in.

There was a disconnect between the two, but it didn’t take long before he felt greater synchronisation between his ideas and their actual implementation.

Days went on, as Cael relentlessly worked on his creation. He handled it as meticulously as possible, determined to form the highest quality exosuit possible for him.

Along with that, he continued his intense training and felt more motivated than ever to continue. There was no time for breaks now – this was his crunch time.

With less than 2 weeks left, he continued working and working the absolute hardest he could. During this time, he was even sent an email from his uncle detailing the specifics of the event.

This was something he was looking forward to knowing, as it could let him better prepare when the day came. Firstly, the email detailed where the event would take place.

As he expected, the arena hosting the event was in Oseron, on The Capital Planet. Along with that, it would consist of an individual event where the Breckenridge fighters would face each other in 1v1 matches.

Finally, the young talents would band together to try and fight a slightly older, more experienced Breckenridge. Cael kissed his teeth in annoyance after reading that he’d have to try and work with these talents.

He’d been working for these past 2 and a half months to defeat them, not to fight alongside them.

Cael, after taking a shower, looked at the very muscular physique that he now attained. With every slight movement, he could see his vascular muscles contracting and relaxing. It was quite a surreal, to see such an impressive build on his own body.

He always assumed that this sort of physique would be for others and never for himself.