Black Armor Project

February 5, C.E. 71.

The plaque for the 811 Special Tactical Research Institute had yet to be mounted on the wall, but Xu Yanqiu had already spent a full forty-eight hours on the second underground floor of the materials laboratory building.

He had not slept since the day the Spark Data arrived.

Disassembly reports covered three tables. He had circled seventeen sections of the G Weapons' Phase-Shift Armor parameters in red ink, each accompanied by a scribbled note.

When Lin Yuan pushed open the laboratory door, Xu Yanqiu was hunched before a whiteboard, already on his third marker color.

"Professor Xu."

"Stand right there." Xu Yanqiu did not even turn around. "I'm calculating the matching range for the thermal expansion coefficient of your Ceramic Steel. Don't interrupt me."

Lin Yuan leaned against the doorframe, his fingers interlaced before him, and did not urge him on.

Thirty seconds later, Xu Yanqiu redrew a circle on the whiteboard and turned around.

His eyes were bloodshot, and his lab coat bore coffee stains from who knew when, but his gaze seemed charged with electricity.

"This thing of yours follows an entirely different path from existing MS technology."

"I know."

"No, you don't." Xu Yanqiu tossed the marker onto the table and walked up to Lin Yuan, jabbing a finger through the air. "What is the armor logic for MSs throughout the entire C.E. world? Lightweight, high mobility, Phase-Shift. The thinner the armor, the better. The more precise the energy supply, the better. Pilots survive on reaction speed and control skills."

"And then?"

"And then you tell me you want to slap a material three times heavier than current armor onto an MS." Xu Yanqiu's voice rose half an octave. "Do you know what three times heavier means? The thrust-to-weight ratio gets cut in half, mobility plummets, energy consumption doubles, and every joint actuator has to be redesigned."

Lin Yuan did not argue.

He walked to the whiteboard, picked up another marker, and wrote a line beside the circle Xu Yanqiu had drawn.

East Asia had no ace pilots.

Xu Yanqiu stared at that line. His mouth opened, then closed again.

"PLANT has Coordinators." Lin Yuan set down the marker and faced him. "Their reaction speeds are three to five times those of Naturals, and their spatial awareness is on another level. The Atlantic Federation has enhanced humans, pushing the human body to its limits through drugs and neural modifications."

"What does East Asia have?"

Xu Yanqiu said nothing.

"East Asia has four billion Naturals, the world's greatest heavy industrial capacity, and the ability to smelt thirty million tons of steel and two million tons of rare earths every year."

Lin Yuan tapped the whiteboard with his finger.

"I don't need some sprite that can dance through the sky. I need an ordinary soldier to climb inside, take three beam rifle shots and still remain standing, then shove a cannon barrel into the enemy machine's face before it can react."

The laboratory fell silent for several seconds.

Xu Yanqiu rubbed his chin, his gaze dropping to the thermal expansion coefficient range on the whiteboard.

"You're going for volume."

"That's right."

"Not building one superhero, but building a hundred iron coffins to drown the enemy."

"Iron coffins isn't exactly a lucky description." The corner of Lin Yuan's mouth twitched. "But the meaning is right."

Xu Yanqiu turned and walked to another table, opening a G Weapons armor disassembly report.

"I've already seen the core weakness of Phase-Shift Armor. Its defense against kinetic weapons depends on its energy supply. Once the charge runs dry, it's just an ordinary alloy shell. Your Ceramic Steel doesn't work that way, does it?"

"Ceramic Steel is passive defense. It requires no energy to maintain; the material's physical structure itself can withstand high temperatures and kinetic impacts. The cost is weight."

"How much weight?"

"For the same protected area, roughly 2.7 times the weight of Phase-Shift Armor."

Xu Yanqiu's brow furrowed as his fingers tapped the edge of the report.

"What about mass-production feasibility? Industrial smelting processes, nano-ceramic composite techniques, crystallization temperature control—I've reviewed the basic plan you gave me, but do you understand the distance between a laboratory and a production line?"

"That's your job."

Xu Yanqiu raised his head and stared at Lin Yuan.

"I'll give you the direction and principles." Lin Yuan's pace did not change. "You turn it into an industrial product East Asia can produce steadily every month. Whatever equipment, personnel, and budget you need, make a list. I'll sign it."

Xu Yanqiu closed the report, pressing a palm against its cover.

"Four vacuum hot-press furnaces, at minimum. Borrowing one set of nanoscale powder production equipment from Germany won't be enough; we need two. The rare-earth alloy screening requires upgraded spectral analyzers. The current precision is off by an entire order of magnitude."

"What else?"

"People. I need six PhDs in metallurgy, not the kind who only write papers, but people with over ten years of hands-on industrial line experience. And structural mechanics specialists. The brittle fracture patterns of Ceramic Steel are completely different from metal substrates, so we need to build new failure models from scratch."

"Give me the list today."

Xu Yanqiu stared at him for three seconds.

"Lin Yuan, where exactly did you get this set of things?"

"Not important."

"Not important?" Xu Yanqiu's voice turned sharp. "You hand me a formula that violates thirty years of my materials science experience, tell me it works, and then say its source isn't important?"

"Professor Xu." Lin Yuan stepped before him, lowering his voice slightly. "You've run the preliminary verification data, and you can judge the feasibility yourself. Whether it's real or not, you know better than I do."

Xu Yanqiu's fingers loosened from the report cover.

He turned toward the small test furnace in the corner. It still held residual heat from the validation run two days earlier, and a dark gray film had solidified along the walls of the alloy crucible.

"The verification data did pass." He admitted it. "But that was a small sample under laboratory conditions. Industrial mass production is another matter entirely."

"That's why I brought you over from the Materials Bureau."

The door opened, and Sheng Lan entered with a signed memorandum in hand.

"Director, the first batch of equipment transfer applications has been submitted, but the Power Institute has held up approval for two vacuum hot-press furnaces. The signatory is Director Wei from the Power Institute's Equipment Division. Also, the Electronics Research Institute refused to release anyone, citing Zhou Boyuan's ongoing United Army communications system upgrade project and saying he cannot be transferred midway through it."

Lin Yuan took the memorandum and glanced through it.

"What is Director Wei's relationship with Luo Qiming?"

"They attended military academy in the same class and worked together for three years."

"Write that down."

Sheng Lan made a mark in her notebook.

"I'll handle Zhou Boyuan myself. Use what equipment we have for now. Professor Xu, can your small furnace produce the first batch of prototypes first?"

Xu Yanqiu had already returned to the whiteboard, another marker in hand.

"Give me seventy-two hours."

"Too long."

"Are you teaching me how to run experiments?" Xu Yanqiu did not turn back, but irritation colored his voice.

"Forty-eight hours."

"Get out. You're disrupting my train of thought."

Lin Yuan turned toward the door. As he passed Sheng Lan, he gave her a quiet instruction.

"Put Director Wei's obstruction of the approval process on the list. Once Luo Qiming's relationship map is complete, deal with them together."

"Understood."

The two left the laboratory building. The fluorescent lights in the corridor buzzed overhead.

Sheng Lan opened her notebook and looked at what she had just written.

"Director, you've seen Professor Xu Yanqiu's temperament for yourself."

"As long as he produces results, I don't care about his temper."

"What if he really produces a prototype in forty-eight hours?"

Lin Yuan walked ahead without slowing.

"If he produces one, then let every military force in East Asia know that from this day forward, their soldiers no longer have to go to war in armor made of paper."

Sheng Lan closed her notebook and quickened her pace to follow him.

Forty-six hours later.

On the second underground floor of the 811 Institute's materials laboratory building, Xu Yanqiu removed a palm-sized dark gray metal plate from the furnace chamber.

Its surface was rough, its edges showed obvious stress fractures, and its crystalline structure was uneven.

But the hardness tester's reading jumped three times before settling on a figure that left Xu Yanqiu silent for an entire minute.

He picked up the phone.

"Lin Yuan, get your ass over here."

"It worked?"

"It produced a half-finished product. The crystallization is unstable, and mass production is still a hundred thousand miles away. But the hardness rating is forty-seven percent higher than the base material of Phase-Shift Armor."

The other end of the line was silent for two seconds.

"Professor Xu, do you believe it now?"

Xu Yanqiu looked at the ugly metal plate in his hand, his voice hoarse.

"Believe what? Believe that a twenty-four-year-old brat like you is holding something that can rewrite the rules of war?"

He held the metal plate up beneath the light, and its dark gray surface reflected a fine, dense sheen.

"I believe it. But you have to give me time to turn this piece of junk into something fit for the battlefield."