At the Molten Knight research academy, most of the children were over twelve. You were regarded as the foundation for the next generation of upgraded Molten Knight iterations.
Here, you discovered that the academy's researchers could even directly interact with the Molten Knight pilots—the genetically modified children. This undoubtedly strengthened your resolve to continue down this path.
At eleven, you won a full scholarship among the newest batch of enrolled students and became a gifted student the academy focused on cultivating. You no longer had to live in the crowded communal dormitory at the Orphanage, nor did you have to soak broken black bread in hot water every day and force it down with bitter coffee.
Your mentor arranged a bright bedroom for you within the academy. Sleeping in a large, snow-white goose-down bed, you no longer had to worry about falling off when you turned over, or about bumping your head against the cold wooden boards above whenever you hunched over.
Yet your classmates and mentor noticed that, compared with more nutritious food, you preferred to hold an oak roll cake in your mouth while hurrying to classrooms and laboratories. In their eyes, perhaps you were reminding yourself of hardship while cherishing the sweetness of the present.
At twelve, this was your third year in the academy. The curriculum added Locust dissection experiments, even live-subject experiments. For most students, these posed tremendous psychological pressure, and injuries during experiments were far from uncommon.
But for some reason, those locusts bore you no hostility, and you had never feared them.
As a result, your experiments went exceptionally smoothly. Before long, you had completely mastered the bodily structures of every kind of Locust.
You had heard that the creation of Molten Knights was closely tied to the "breeding" of locusts, so you