The room was a stark, white cube, the air humming with the low thrum of the Shanghai base's power core. It was a place built for sterile, uncomfortable truths. At its center, a single steel table separated two men who were, by every definition, enemies.
Lin Feng stood with his arms crossed, his face an impassive mask. He looked at the American scientist, the man who had designed the monster he'd nearly died fighting. He saw the bruises, the exhaustion, but he also saw a fierce, unyielding intelligence in Jack Wilson's eyes. He saw a man who had burned his own world down for a principle.
Jack, for his part, saw the legend. The warrior who could command lightning. But he looked past the power and saw the man. He saw the cold, weary stillness of a soldier who had seen too much, trusted too little. This was not a man who would be swayed by sentiment. Only by data.
"Let's get one thing straight," Jack began, his voice a dry rasp. "I'm not here to apologize. The Titan was a perversion of my work. A crime. And I am going to destroy it, and every machine like it. To do that, I need you."
He slid a small, hardened data drive across the table. Mei-Ling, standing in the corner, moved to intercept it, but Lin Feng held up a hand, stopping her.
"Let him talk," Lin Feng said, his voice a low rumble.
Jack tapped the drive. A holographic projection bloomed above the table, displaying the 3D wireframe of the Titan, lines of complex code and biometric data scrolling beside it.
"This is not just a machine," Jack explained, his voice gaining a cold, scientific passion. "It's a cage. Thorne's design doesn't use the pilot's brain for control; it uses it as a component. It hijacks the pilot's combat instincts, their raw survival drive, and uses it to run the mech's combat AI. The pilot is a passenger, trapped in a nightmare, his consciousness suppressed while his body is used as a biological processor."
Lin Feng stared at the chaotic, screaming spikes of the pilot's neural feedback on the display. He remembered the Titan's movements—its inhuman speed, its perfect, mathematical brutality. It hadn't been a man fighting him. It had been a ghost.
"The fatal flaw," Jack continued, zooming in on the power core's energy matrix, "is the symbiosis itself. To achieve that level of neural integration, Thorne had to strip away all the system's autonomic governors. The machine can't regulate itself. It relies on the pilot's hijacked biology to prevent a core overload. It's a design built on a knife's edge between peak performance and catastrophic self-destruction."
He looked Lin Feng directly in the eye, the scientist and the soldier connecting in a shared, terrible understanding. "You pushed the pilot past his biological limits. That's why the core went critical. It wasn't just your lightning. It was his own screaming mind that blew that machine apart."
Jack's expression hardened. "The Alliance will have a fleet of these new 'Sentinels' at Tokyo. They'll be under Thorne's direct command, supposedly to 'help.' But they all have the same flaw. The same vulnerability."
He swiped the display, showing a new file: a complex, elegant string of viral code.
"This is a logic bomb," Jack said. "A digital ghost. It's designed to mimic a standard tactical software update from Alliance command. Once it's in their system, it will lie dormant. But when I activate it, it won't attack the machine. It will attack the link. It will sever the connection between the pilot's hijacked instincts and the machine's core regulation. It will force the Sentinel to try and regulate its own power. A function it is incapable of performing."
He leaned forward, his voice a low, intense whisper. "The Sentinels will tear themselves apart from the inside out. But my virus is theoretical. It's based on the Titan's data. To perfect it, to make it work on the new models, I need a real-world combat model. I need to know how you fight. I need your energy readings, your reaction times, your combat patterns. I need your battle data to weaponize this code."
A heavy silence filled the room. Mei-Ling stared at Jack, her expression a mixture of horrified disbelief and dawning comprehension. She looked at Lin Feng, then at Director Chen, who had been watching from the observation window, his face a grim, unreadable mask.
The proposal was insane. To trust their most valuable asset, their greatest warrior, to a traitor from their sworn enemy. To give this American the keys to their kingdom, based on a ghost story and a string of code.
Lin Feng did not look at Chen. He did not look at Mei-Ling. He looked at the cold, brutal logic on the screen. He saw a path, a narrow, dangerous, and utterly insane path to victory.
"Get him a lab," Lin Feng said, his voice flat and final. "He can have whatever he needs."