Jack Wilson's lab had become a graveyard of dead gods. Holographic schematics of the Titan and the Sentinel series, once the pinnacle of military engineering, now hung in the air like digital ghosts, overlaid with angry red lines of data that highlighted their every fatal flaw.
"Brute force is a dead end," Jack explained to his assembled R&D team, his voice a low, intense hum of caffeine-fueled inspiration. "Adler's fortress is designed to repel a Vulture assault. Its energy shields are tuned to dissipate the 'clean,' high-yield energy of a stellar nucleus power core. Sending a traditional mech against that wall would be like throwing a rock at a mountain."
He swiped his hand, and the old designs vanished, replaced by something new. Something sleek, organic, and utterly revolutionary. It was not a hulking giant of steel. It was a second skin.
"Adler's mistake, the one that Thorne copied, was treating the pilot as a component," Jack said, his eyes burning with a feverish intensity. "They built a cage for the human soul. We're going to build a cathedral."
He called it the "Coadjuvant-class Symbiotic Armor." It was not a vehicle one piloted; it was an extension of the user's own nervous system. It stood a mere five meters tall, a lithe, almost insectoid frame of dark, carbon-nanotube muscle fibers over a lightweight alloy skeleton. It had no bulky internal reactor. Its power source was the pilot themselves.
"The armor doesn't have its own core," Jack explained, pointing to a complex diagram of the neural interface. "It is a core. It draws power directly from the pilot's own bio-electric field, their Awakened energy, and amplifies it a thousandfold. The machine doesn't think. It feels. It anticipates. It moves with the speed of thought because, for all intents and purposes, it is a thought."
The concept was beautiful, elegant, and terrifyingly dangerous. To achieve that level of symbiosis, the pilot would have to synchronize their own neural patterns with the machine's bio-synthetic processor. A perfect sync would create a warrior of unmatched speed and agility. An imperfect sync... would result in catastrophic psychic feedback, leaving the pilot a drooling, brain-dead vegetable.
There was only one person with the raw processing power, the enhanced biology, and the sheer, arrogant self-belief to attempt the first sync.
Days later, Jack stood alone in the main testing hangar, the prototype Coadjuvant armor, codenamed "Zero," standing before him like a dark, silent promise.
"Beginning neural synchronization," the calm voice of his lab AI echoed in the hangar.
He closed his eyes. The neuro-link helmet descended, and the world of sight and sound vanished, replaced by a roaring, chaotic ocean of pure, unfiltered data. This was the machine's mind, a storm of binary code and electrical impulses. He did not fight it. He did not try to command it. He opened himself to it, letting his own consciousness, his own enhanced, lightning-fast thoughts, become a beacon in the storm.
For a terrifying moment, he felt his own identity begin to shred, to dissolve into the machine's logic. But then, he found the rhythm. The heartbeat in the hurricane. He synced his own bio-electric pulse to the machine's core frequency.
His eyes snapped open. He was not in the cockpit. He was the cockpit. He was five meters tall. He could feel the cold, smooth alloy of his own skin, the coiled potential in his carbon-fiber muscles. He flexed a hand, and the machine's hand, a delicate, lethal lacework of black metal, flexed in perfect, instantaneous unison.
It was not control. It was unity. He thought "run," and the world became a blur, the armor moving with a liquid grace that defied its own mechanical nature. He leaped, and for a moment, he flew.
He had done it. He had achieved a state of perfect, harmonious symbiosis. His power, his scientific mind, was no longer trapped in a shell of fragile flesh. It was now encased in a body of steel, a warrior born of the fusion of man and machine. He had not just built a better weapon. He had built a better self. He had reached his A-Class.