Building Zoids in a World of Titans

The workshop compartment smelled of solvent and ozone. Alex sat hunched over the portable bench, the Liger Zero's electron fang clamped in the magnetic vise. Carbon scoring marred the golden-yellow alloy where it had pierced the Mire-Devourer's hide. He worked the micro-abrasive pad in slow circles, each pass revealing cleaner metal beneath.

Seventy-three percent efficiency. Left foreleg actuator still running hot. Mane Blast capacitors need rebalancing after three discharges in twenty-four hours.

The numbers cycled behind his eyes, familiar and controllable. Unlike the conversation outside. Unlike Rhian's face when the canopy sealed.

The hatch slid open. He didn't look up.

"Alex."

Ziya's boots were quiet on the grating. She stopped at the bench's edge, datapad dark in her hand. Her gaze tracked the fang, the pad, the tension riding his shoulders like a second frame.

"You okay?"

His hand didn't stop. The abrasive whispered against alloy.

"Fine."

She exhaled, measured. "Millcross is a hard call. No good options. You know that."

The circle completed. He flipped the fang, clamped the other side.

"Doesn't change the math."

"No." She folded her arms, leaning against the bulkhead. "But it changes the weight. You're carrying it like it's yours alone."

The next circle started. His thumb found the blue pendant beneath his coat, pressed once, released.

"Someone has to."

The abrasive pad stalled. He set the fang down, still not facing her.

"Heroes get people killed. She sees the version of me that walked out of the Liger fight, not the one who froze when the Stormclaw charged Rhian. Not the one who almost didn't make the shot."

Ziya didn't move. "She sees the one who came back."

"Because I had to."

"Did you?" Her head tilted, the shopkeeper's assessment stripped down to something rawer. "Or because you couldn't live with the alternative?"

The question hung in the recycled air. Alex's fingers found the pendant again, the blue stone warm against his palm.

"Rhian thinks I'm something I'm not. That's not admiration. That's a blind spot." He turned finally, meeting her gaze. "Blind spots get exploited. By Titans. By nations. By anyone who decides the boy who builds monsters is worth more than the monsters themselves."

"And if she's right?"

The silence stretched. Somewhere in the Mule's belly, the Arosaurer's core pulsed its steady emerald rhythm.

"Then she's the only one who is." He returned to the fang, the abrasive whispering against gold. "Doesn't change what we do next."

The abrasive pad stilled against gold alloy. Alex's fingers curled around the vise handle, knuckles blanching.

"You remember the shelter alarms?" Ziya asked. Her hair had fallen loose from its tie, dark strands brushing the curve of her jaw. "The day the Stormclaw hit Veridia. You were in the Arosaurer. I was on the eastern wall with Rhian."

Alex's throat tightened. "She was at the river. She told me."

"She was beside me." Ziya stepped closer, boots silent on the grating. "We didn't run for the bunkers. She grabbed my arm — nearly broke my wrist — and made me watch. Said she needed to see you come back."

The workshop walls seemed to contract. The Arosaurer's core pulse throbmed in the floor plates.

"She was cheering." Ziya's voice softened, stripping away the shopkeeper's precision. "Every time you landed a hit. Every time the Liger staggered. She was screaming your name into wind that would've drowned a Titan's roar."

Alex released the vise. The fang clattered against the bench, forgotten. He turned.

"I didn't know."

"Of course you didn't. You were busy not dying." Her hazel eyes held his, unguarded in a way the ledger never allowed. "She wasn't watching a pilot. She was watching you. The boy who gave her berries. The one who answered her stupid questions."

His back hit the bulkhead. The words came unspooled, raw and uncalibrated.

"I think about that day. The way the Liger's claws sparked off my shoulder plating. How close it came to the cockpit." His voice cracked. "If I'd hesitated. If the shot had drifted. She'd have watched me come apart."

Ziya didn't look away.

"She's ten. She believes the world bends around the people who refuse to break." His hands found the pendant beneath his coat, gripping the blue stone until its edges bit his palm. "I can't be that person. Not every time. And if she ever realizes I'm just... someone who gets lucky..."

He stopped. The admission hung between them, heavier than any component he'd ever lifted.

Ziya didn't flinch. Didn't reach for a ledger or a ledger's logic. She stepped into his space, close enough that the scent of machine oil and something warmer — jasmine, maybe, or the soap she used when she let her hair down — crowded out the workshop's solvent sting.

"She doesn't think you're a machine, Alex. She thinks you're stubborn." A ghost of a smile touched her mouth, softening the sharp planes of her face. "She thinks you're the kind of idiot who walks into a Stormclaw's jaws because a kid screamed into a comm. And she's right. That's not luck. That's you."

He wanted to argue. The words stacked up behind his teeth — probability matrices, structural failure rates, the thousand ways the next fight could end in fire.

She cut them off with a fingertip to his chest, right over the pendant.

"Rhian's not waiting for you to be perfect. She's waiting for you to show up. Same as me."

The air left his lungs in a long, ragged rush. His shoulders dropped, the tension bleeding out of them like pressure from a cracked line.

"When did you get so smart?"

"Five years of watching you overthink everything." Her thumb brushed the pendant's edge through his coat. "You build Zoids that move at three hundred kilometers an hour. Try moving at the speed of now for once."

A laugh escaped him, rough and surprised. "That's terrible advice. I'd crash into a canyon wall."

"Then I'll be the one pulling you out of the wreckage. Again."

He leaned down, the workshop ceiling pressing close, and pressed his mouth to her cheek. Warm skin. The faintest catch of her breath.

"Thanks, Ziya. For... seeing it."

Her eyes held his, dark and steady in the amber light. "Anytime. Now go talk to the kid before she decides to pilot the Lanstag into the Stonefangs."

He pulled back, the ghost of a smile still clinging to his mouth. "Right. Then we figure out what comes next."

"Together?"

He touched the pendant one last time. "Together."

Advance chapters on my p@tR$0n/Najicablitz.

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