The first shipment arrived just after dawn.
Derek was already awake—had been, technically, for several hours—standing barefoot on the polished concrete floor of the lower-level workspace he'd had quietly retrofitted beneath the Bel Air house. From the outside, the property looked like any other discreetly extravagant hillside residence: glass, stone, carefully cultivated privacy. Beneath it, however, was something else entirely. Not a lab, not yet. Not officially. Just a reinforced, climate-controlled space with industrial power routing, vibration isolation, and the kind of anonymity money could still buy if applied carefully.
The freight elevator hummed softly as the pallets descended.
Carbon composites. Ceramic strike plates. Rolls of experimental fiber weave sealed in matte-black polymer sleeves. A small crate containing multilayer graphene sheets, each separated by vacuum film and packed with a level of care usually reserved for organ transplants. None of it labeled in any way that would raise eyebrows. All of it expensive enough to make accountants nervous.
Not all the materials had arrived. Some were still delayed—custom orders caught in regulatory purgatory, others moving slowly through shell companies and intermediaries designed to keep any single supplier from seeing the full picture. But it was enough. Enough to begin.
Derek exhaled slowly, more out of habit than relief.
He didn't smile.
The routine didn't change.
That surprised him, at first.
He still woke early—earlier now, given how little he slept. He still trained every morning, pushing his body through punishing, methodical workouts that bordered on obsessive. Strength, endurance, flexibility. If the Wraith was ever going to work as intended, the human inside it couldn't be an afterthought.
After training came reports.
North Compton's redevelopment continued its steady, grinding transformation—permits cleared, foundations poured, community boards placated with just enough transparency to avoid friction. Reality Quest crossed another engagement milestone, the internal analytics showing something deeper than raw downloads now: cultural entrenchment. The steam engine blueprints had begun to ripple through the game's ecosystem, guilds scrambling to control what was suddenly the most disruptive technology in a digital twelfth century.
Derek read it all, signed off where necessary, delegated where it made sense.
Then he went downstairs.
That was the difference.
The Wraith waited on paper.
Schematics covered the central worktable, weighted at the corners with tools rather than paperweights. Handwritten annotations crowded the margins—calculations, stress tolerances, notes pulled from memory rather than reference material. This wasn't R&D in the traditional sense. There were no brainstorming sessions, no trial-and-error loops designed to "see what worked."
He already knew what worked.
Or at least, he knew what should.
The frustration came from translating certainty into reality.
The armor layers were the first problem.
On paper, multilayer graphene paired with a shear-thickening, diamond-like non-Newtonian composite was elegant. Under low stress, flexible. Under sudden impact, rigid enough to disperse force across a broader surface area. In theory, it could shrug off small arms fire, blunt trauma, blades—maybe even a .50 BMG if the strike spacing conditions were right.
In practice?
Bonding the layers without introducing microfractures was a nightmare.
Derek stood over a test panel clamped into a rig, eyes narrowed as the hydraulic press applied incremental force. Sensors fed data to a tablet in his hand—pressure distribution, flex response, internal stress spikes.
Too stiff.
He adjusted the bonding ratio, recalibrated the press, ran it again.
This time, the panel flexed beautifully… right up until it delaminated at the edge, a whisper-soft failure that nonetheless rendered it useless.
He closed his eyes for a moment.
In his previous life, this stage had taken years. Years of funding pitches, prototype failures, committees arguing over feasibility. He remembered the dismissive smiles, the way people nodded politely while already deciding the idea was impractical, too expensive, too ambitious.
Now, the resources were there.
The clock was the enemy instead.
Sleep deprivation gnawed at the edges of his focus. Three hours a night, sometimes less. He could feel it—not as exhaustion, but as a faint, constant pressure behind the eyes. The kind that made mistakes more likely, patience thinner.
He compensated with discipline.
Every step documented. Every failure logged. No shortcuts.
The helmet was worse.
Integrating night vision, thermal imaging, rangefinding, low-light enhancement, and limited X-ray approximation into a single, full-face ballistic shell without turning it into a brick was an exercise in compromise. Power draw alone was a balancing act. The non-powered version had to function with minimal energy consumption, relying on passive systems wherever possible. The powered version… that was another matter entirely.
That problem circled back, inevitably, to the battery.
Derek leaned against the worktable, tablet resting beside him as he stared at the Beowulf battery specs for the hundredth time that day. Nickel-diamond architecture. Fifty-year theoretical lifespan. Energy density that bordered on absurd.
Twice the size of a smartphone.
Perfect for the prototype.
Not perfect for refinement.
He'd already called Peter Bishop.
The conversation replayed in his mind, irritation resurfacing despite the rational outcome.
"Smaller?" Peter had said, frowning. "Yes. But only prototypes. Lab-scale. Unstable."
"Define unstable."
A pause. "Define 'acceptable risk.'"
That had been enough.
Derek had shut it down immediately. Volatile power sources inside a suit designed to take high-velocity impacts were a nonstarter. The irony wasn't lost on him: armor capable of stopping a bullet meant nothing if the power core turned the wearer into shrapnel.
Still, the limitation chafed.
He scribbled notes anyway. Alternative architectures. Redundancy concepts. Energy buffering. Ideas for later.
Always later.
Days blurred.
The materials continued to arrive in staggered shipments. Each delivery nudged the project forward while introducing new friction points. Tolerances that worked in isolation behaved differently when integrated. Weight distribution became a constant adversary—every added gram multiplied across movement, fatigue, heat retention.
Heat.
That was another problem.
Ballistic resistance generated heat under sustained impact. Electronics generated heat under continuous use. A sealed suit trapped it all. Derek sketched cooling channels, passive heat sinks, phase-change materials layered beneath armor plates.
Each solution introduced new complications.
Each complication demanded another hour.
Or three.
Sleep became optional in theory and dangerous in practice.
By the fifth night of consecutive three-hour rest cycles, he caught himself staring at a schematic without reading it. The lines swam slightly, refusing to resolve into meaning.
He set the pen down deliberately.
Stood.
Walked upstairs.
Cold water on his face. Measured breathing. Ten minutes of stillness, the kind he'd learned long ago when burnout threatened clarity. He didn't allow himself coffee. Didn't allow chemical crutches beyond what was strictly necessary.
When he went back down, the fog had receded—enough.
Despite everything, progress accumulated.
A forearm section prototype sat mounted on a test stand, sleek and unassuming. Derek fired into it remotely—controlled conditions, calibrated distances. The first rounds flattened and dispersed exactly as intended. The third round struck too close to the second, and the panel failed, but not catastrophically.
He nodded once.
Acceptable.
Not final. But promising.
The helmet's sensor suite powered on for the first time two days later. The feed layered cleanly—thermal over low-light, distance markers resolving without jitter. He rotated the helmet slowly, watching latency values stay within tolerable margins.
For the first time in days, he allowed himself something close to satisfaction.
Outside, life went on.
Alan sent updates. Lawyers flagged nothing urgent. Neighbors waved when they saw him in the driveway, their curiosity tempered now by familiarity. To them, Derek Morgan was still the polite young homeowner, the startup founder who kept odd hours and minded his business.
They didn't see the armor.
Didn't see the equations.
Didn't see the cost being paid in hours of sleep and invisible pressure.
Derek preferred it that way.
He stood alone in the workspace, lights dimmed, the partial Wraith components laid out before him like pieces of a future that hadn't decided what it wanted to be yet.
There were still missing materials.
Still unanswered problems.
Still no engineers, no manufacturing lines, no paper trail that connected this project to anything official.
Just an idea on paper.
And a man stubborn enough to drag it into existence.
He checked the time.
Two hours until morning.
He picked up the pen again.