Derek did not rush decisions anymore. That phase of his life—where speed substituted for certainty—was long past. When he finally allowed himself to think about Wraith again, it wasn't with excitement so much as calm inevitability.
He already knew it would work.
That was the unsettling part.
Most innovators lived in the long, grinding purgatory between idea and proof. Derek didn't. The design had already survived that crucible once—in another life, another world, under different constraints. The failures, the dead ends, the materials that cracked under stress or degraded under heat, the circuitry that introduced latency where latency meant death—those ghosts had already been buried.
What remained was not research.
It was execution.
And execution, unlike discovery, was something money, patience, and silence could solve.
He sat alone in the Bel Air house's study, the late afternoon light slanting across a table already cluttered with notebooks. No screens. No assistants. Just paper filled with precise handwriting and schematic sketches that looked more like architectural plans than weapon designs.
Wraith was never meant to be bulky. That mistake had killed most armor programs before they left the drawing board. Weight bred fatigue. Fatigue bred mistakes. And mistakes, in environments that required armor, were terminal.
The suit's strength came from layering—not thickness. Multilayer graphene sheets interwoven with a non-Newtonian diamond-like compound, engineered to remain flexible under normal motion but instantly harden under high-velocity impact. Not magic. Physics. Stress-response materials tuned to specific energy thresholds.
Small arms would flatten.
Armor-piercing rounds would disperse.
Even .50 BMG rounds could be survived—once, maybe twice—if they didn't strike the same location repeatedly. Wraith wasn't invincibility. It was survivability with margins.
The helmet was its own universe. Ballistic glass laminated with transparent graphene, layered sensors feeding into a visual processing suite that could shift seamlessly between night vision, thermal imaging, range-finding overlays, and passive magnification. No flashy HUD nonsense. Clean, modular data. Information when needed, silence when not.
There were two versions planned. The unpowered variant relied on the suit's materials alone, with only the helmet requiring energy. The powered version—far more dangerous in the wrong hands—used a compact exoskeletal framework embedded beneath the armor layers, multiplying the wearer's strength fivefold without compromising mobility.
And there lay the bottleneck.
Power.
Every advanced armor project failed there. Batteries were heavy. Short-lived. Unreliable. Or worse—volatile.
Derek had spent weeks reviewing emerging energy storage technologies, not from defense contractors or flashy startups, but from obscure journals and shelved patents. He wasn't looking for hype. He was looking for something everyone else had dismissed.
That was how he found Beowulf Tech Services.
The company barely existed in public consciousness. No flashy branding. No consumer products. Just a string of filings, a handful of academic citations, and a single, devastating innovation: a nickel-diamond battery with a projected lifespan of fifty years.
Not fifty charge cycles.
Fifty years.
The technology was elegant in its simplicity. A betavoltaic design refined beyond its predecessors, using diamond-encased nickel-63 isotopes to generate steady, low-output energy over decades. Not explosive. Not fast-charging. But stable. Predictable. Maintenance-free.
Perfect for systems that could not afford failure.
And commercially suicidal.
Battery companies thrived on degradation. Planned obsolescence wasn't a conspiracy—it was economics. Investors had fled Beowulf the moment it became clear that their product didn't need replacing. Why sell one battery when you could sell ten over the same period?
The company was private. Quiet. And hemorrhaging money.
Derek smiled faintly as he closed the last document.
He didn't need a battery company that sold volume.
He needed one that solved permanence.
He picked up his phone and called Alan Payne.
"I need a meeting," Derek said when Alan answered. "Confidential. As soon as possible."
"With who?"
"Beowulf Tech Services. Their CEO."
There was a pause on the other end, the faint sound of keys clicking as Alan pulled up information. "They're… small. And not doing well."
"Good," Derek replied. "That means they'll listen."
He ended the call before Alan could ask follow-up questions.
That night, Derek compiled a second list. Not people. Materials.
Graphene sheets manufactured to tolerances far tighter than consumer electronics required. Specialized ceramics. Rare bonding agents. Micro-actuators normally reserved for aerospace applications. Nothing illegal. Nothing overtly military.
Individually, the orders were meaningless.
Together, they would have raised eyebrows.
So Derek made sure they never appeared together.
Assumed names. Layered shell companies. Addresses that routed deliveries through intermediaries who never saw the full picture. Payments made instantly, without negotiation, without questions.
Silence bought cooperation.
By the time the last order was confirmed, Wraith was no longer an idea.
It was a countdown.
While Derek was laying foundations in the physical world, something unexpected was unfolding in Reality Quest.
The game had matured faster than even Blackfire's most optimistic projections. Players had stopped treating it like a product and started treating it like a place. Economies stabilized. Political factions emerged. Oral histories formed—stories passed between players about events that had occurred months earlier in-game but felt ancient.
Then someone found an Easter egg.
It wasn't obvious. It wasn't glowing or announced. A single player exploring a forgotten ruin at the edge of a minor European kingdom triggered a sequence no one had documented before. A sealed chamber. A coded mechanism. And inside—a set of blueprints.
Not magical artifacts.
Blueprints.
Detailed schematics describing a steam engine.
In a world locked at a 12th-century technological ceiling, it was heresy.
At first, players assumed it was flavor lore. Then someone built it.
The engine worked.
Word spread like wildfire through guild channels and private forums. Speculation exploded. Was it a one-off? A developer test? A hint of future updates?
Blackfire said nothing.
Derek watched the data streams quietly from his home office, expression unreadable. He had authorized the Easter eggs months ago—not as shortcuts, but as catalysts. Civilization didn't advance linearly. It leapt when the right knowledge landed in the right hands.
Reality Quest wasn't about escapism.
It was about emergence.
In Bel Air, none of that mattered.
What mattered was that a new house had come alive.
The neighborhood noticed immediately. They always did.
A $5 million ranch-style property didn't sit quietly, even when its owner wanted it to. Cars had arrived. Furniture deliveries. Contractors performing discreet upgrades. Security installations that were subtle but unmistakably expensive.
The speculation began before Derek even spent his first full night there.
At garden gates and kitchen islands, the theories multiplied.
"He's foreign," one woman insisted over brunch, lowering her voice. "You can tell by the security posture."
"No," her husband countered. "Tech money. Has to be. No kids, no visible family, but constant logistics. That screams Silicon Valley."
At a country club dinner, someone claimed the house belonged to an investment fund. Another swore it was a hedge fund manager avoiding Malibu exposure. A third suggested entertainment—producers liked privacy.
No one guessed correctly.
And that was the point.
Derek moved through the house like someone testing a space rather than occupying it. He hadn't decorated much. Clean lines. Functional rooms. The study mattered. The rest was infrastructure.
From the outside, he was an absence filled with rumor.
From the inside, he was assembling the next phase of his life with methodical calm.
The world believed it was watching him now.
It had no idea how much had already begun.