Axton ran Sally through the basics of how to make a custom War Suit. It was a rather interesting thing for the Player to watch the preconceived notions of another person crumble away under the realization of how simple making a custom mech really was in this world.

“I can’t believe I had never even tried doing that…” Sally muttered to herself.

Axton put a hand on the NPC’s shoulder and gave a rather sympathetic yet condescending pat.

“Don’t be so upset. Most people are simply too afraid of doing things themselves when they easily could. It isn’t actually that hard, now, is it? The difficult part is making everything fit together; that is the part that actually requires some know-how. It is a bit like building a PC; you just need a bit of help here and there, but most people can actually do fairly well on their own if they know a bit about this and that.”

Sally nodded and then gestured over to a few parts nearby her workspace.

“Yeah, but I can’t believe I didn’t realize how… well… how modular all these parts are.”

She picked up a component from a Myrmidon Light War Suit in one hand and another part from a Prole Light War Suit in another. The two parts came from completely separate nations, each with differing concepts for how War Suits should be built, equipped, and used. And yet, despite both being made by nations that quite literally wanted the other to die in a nation-spanning mass-extinction event…

“Yeah…” Axton said dejectedly as he pulled a wire from one and slotted the square-shaped red bit into the red, square-shaped indent. The connecter and port locked together with a semi-audible click and both Player and NPC alike sighed in disappointment. “You’d think that they would all somehow come up with a better and more proprietary system for national Suit design than ‘X Connector goes in X Plug’.”

“Yeah, but at least that makes things easier, right?”

The voice of Thomas brought the two SuitMakers up from their well of disappointment. Thomas was right, this did make things easier. But that was just the problem. It was too easy.

“So….” Thomas said, quickly reading the room and trying to change the subject. “Did you guys come up with an idea?”

Axton walked over to the whiteboard which had, by now, been filled with words, doodles, and math, only to be wiped clean and written on again a few tens of times over. The markers were nearly empty by this point, but thankfully the final bits of the design process had been completed. On the board was a rough doodle of what looked to be a cross between a tank from an old but very popular SciFi RTS and an old, pre-collapse Russian Anti-Air vehicle called a 2K22 Tunguska. The design specs had it somewhere in between the Medium and Heavy weight classes, meaning it would be between just over ten tons to exactly eighty tons of pure machine without any ammo weighing it down.

The machine had no name, as that would be determined by the owner, and the design looked exceedingly tank-like. If it was just a tank, they would, at the bare minimum, get an earful, so to get around this the quad treads were positioned in the design in such a way that the theoretical machine could lift itself up on the edges of the treads, move the tracks to different angles from the main body of the mech and if needed, the armored top above the treads could flip down and enclose the edges of the treads in a protective ‘boot’.

This design, if made real, would allow the mech to ‘walk’ by using the articulated track ad tread casings once the ‘boots’ were in place, thus preventing the machine from being called a mere tank. It was a bold design, and neither really knew if there were enough hands available to make it work. After all, there were only two of them and….

Axton and Sally looked at Thomas with a devilish grin, and Thomas started to wonder if he had accidentally wandered into a mad scientist’s lab.

…

On an entirely different world, in an entirely different solar system, in an entirely different in-game nation, a man with flowing golden-blonde hair and a body and face that would make Fabio himself look like an Average Joe appeared. His frame towered over the NPCs around him and the clothes on his body were far, far superior to any worn by any other new player in the game, save for a select few. He, like a certain other real-world (as in, real-world in the novel) oligarch, was just under seven feet tall, yet unlike Thomas, this man was a Caucasian with eyes that were a brilliant violet and hair that stretched down to his lower back.

An NPC approached him and bowed deeply, but the man looked down on the digital construct with utter contempt, which was a far cry from how our boy Axton’s friend viewed things. The man tilted his head for a moment before withdrawing a maul from his inventory. A sadistic smile crossed his face and stayed plastered upon it as he laid into the NPC with more zeal than he had ever shown in any real-world pursuit. Blood and gore splattered against him as he beat the virtual entity to the point where nothing recognizably human remained, and only after a few more minutes of clubbing the dead body after that did the man finally stop.

He stood, drenched in the ichor of his first murder, and shot a glance over at yet another NPC. The victim in question was far younger than the old man who had met such a violent end, easily being just over a handful of Terran Years old. The blood-covered giant approached the young child, who quite rightly collapsed on the ground in sheer terror. The man dismissed his gore-soaked attire and reached out to claim what the real world had always denied him once again, but was stopped by the tutting of a voice behind him.

“I knew you were ravenous, Lord Blythe, but if I had known your hunger for the flesh of these slaves was so intense, I would have brought more… compliant ones for your arrival.”

Donovan Blythe straightened up and rolled his shoulders, which gave the young boy a chance to flee.

“Idiot NPC… You’re spoiling the mood. Besides, I like the resistance. It just makes me more… pleased.”

The boy tried to run over to his prior master, but the woman punted the child back with visible disdain. He face was that of the woman who had nearly made Axton puke back in the Beta, the one with a hideous mockery of a human face that could only have been formed through countless medical practices that would make even Black Market Surgeons sick to their stomachs. The child quickly looked between the two people and then simply broke down and cried. Donovan didn’t mind it in the slightest aside from one thing, and he grabbed the pre-pubescent child by the leg and tossed it over the balcony of the room he was in, cherishing the sound as its screams trailed off into the distance.

“I thought you wanted to play with that slave?” the woman asked in a voice that was clearly bemused by the sight she had just seen.

Donovan Blythe stretched and flexed his in-game body, which was extremely different to his real one. He looked out over the ecumenopolis that was the throne world of the Andromedan Empire and took in the view for a few moments before addressing the previous event in an utterly callous and detached tone.

“I don’t use used goods, let alone damaged products. Bring me something unspoiled and pure, and I’ll be more inclined to think on my future relationship with this faction going forward.”