The Nexus held its breath.
The piecework hung before him in perfect, floating silence: two legs, twin arms, a head, and the torso Karl had bled over until its seams had become as familiar as his own scars. They rotated slowly in the air like suspended planets, each component a chorus of microgears, braided nanite muscle, and interlocking plates. Light streamed through them in shifting bands of cobalt and admiral blue that painted the forge floor in long, quivering strips.
Karl stood small amid the constellations of his own making, palms sweating, lungs settling into the slow cadence of intent. Around him the blueprints hummed like distant engines, and the Trinity Core's pulse at his waist thrummed in close, a faint, intimate drummer tapping with the rhythm of his life.
He whispered, not so much to the forge as to himself, "One connection at a time. Don't rush. Don't let it panic you."
He reached for the legs first. The sockets on the torso yawed open like waiting mouths. Magnetic seals snapped into place, and a low frequency vibrated through the columns of metal. The first leg aligned with the hip-joint with an audible click that echoed like a promise.
Slowly — with the reverence of a surgeon placing a heart back into a chest — he guided the second leg into position. Nanite conduits crawled like veins as they latched into place, calibrating torque ratios, sealing conduits, and running micro-gears into synchronous rotation. The left hip clicked. The right hip answered.
A wash of relief passed over him, warm and sudden. For a breath he allowed himself to smile: the legs were anchored.
But the Nexus is a patient teacher; it does not allow comfort to linger.
The first step tested him. A microscopic misalignment — less than a hair's breadth — pulsed through the right femoral locking node. A soft alarm flared in the air, blue glyphs racing across the floor. The leg trembled, then resisted the torque calibration. The knee joint backed out with a whining stutter.
Karl's hands dropped instinctively. He tasted copper on his tongue and felt the familiar burn of frustration coiling in his throat.
"Fine," he said, voice low. "Fix it."
He dove into the microcode, eyes flashing cobalt as he sifted through the spliced imprint of Erevos and his own improvisations. With fingertip commands he adjusted the gyroscopic weighting and forced the nanites to reform the ring of tension around the knee. The forge answered, responding to the will behind his ripple of Vythra.
A hush, then a soft thunk: the knee locked cleanly. The leg settled, no longer a rebellious limb but an integrated support. Karl exhaled loud enough to fog the air.
Next: arms.
The right arm swung up on a magnetic thread and docked with a fluid grace that would have been beautiful if there were time to admire beauty. The left arm pulsed halfway in, then hiccuped — the shoulder joint took a wrong vector, and the servo gear ground against an unseen shard of mis-synced code.
The backlash yanked a spray of nanite particles into the air. For a moment the left arm swung like a pendulum, the elbow contorting at an angle that made Karl's teeth ache.
"Come on," he muttered. He allowed himself to feel the arm's rhythm: a thrumming under the metal, almost like a heartbeat being born. He let his own pulse match it, guided it with breath. Slowly, his hands coaxed the micro-gears into alignment, smoothing the torque transfer until the joint accepted its partner.
The arm slotted in with a soft, obedient click.
Now the head.
It hung last — small and grotesquely perfect, an emblem of mind yet to be given voice. The neck receptors hissed as the head drifted closer. Energy tendrils prepared the cranial coupling. The moment of approach felt like the last inhale before a plunge.
As it sealed, the entire frame shuddered.
A ripple of distortion — not mechanical, but something like reality jittering — rolled along the spine. The mech shuddered, plates flexing, nanites singing with uncertain harmonics. For an instant the entire construct blurred, and the Trinity Core at Karl's waist whined in protest, its internal gears spinning faster.
His stomach dropped. This was the part where everything could unravel. He placed both hands on the chest plate, as if steadying a living ribcage. He poured a measured flow of Vythra into the core conduits, letting his will warm the caged energy.
"Stay," he said, raw and quiet.
The frame inhaled with him. Modules anchored. Lines of energy snaked into place and latched. The head's visual lenses sparked. A soft light pulsed across the torso like the first breath of a newborn.
Karl stepped back, trembling. The thing stood before him: tall, hulking, and not yet alive but undeniably whole. It was his cradle of metal and memory, bearing the scars of his failure and the fingerprints of his persistence.
He should have been elated.
Instead he saw the ghost first: a fracture seam humming with blue static along the left flank, a micro-resonance that didn't belong. He watched it ripple — the same stutter he had glimpsed earlier — and the hair rose at the nape of his neck.