He shot a murderous glare at the stunned major, then turned on his heel and walked out, leaving the mess behind him with the silent message: Not my problem anymore.
The Second Bureau officers immediately erupted again.
“Yeah! Explain yourself!”
“If you can’t justify it, you’d better be ready to honor the wager!”
Jack called up the full holographic map of the operations theater. His face wore the usual mask of bumbling innocence, but in his eyes flickered Loki’s cold light—the glint that made grown officers feel like idiots.
“If I’m right,” Jack asked softly, “you’ll honor the wager?”
Curran and the major exchanged a nervous glance. Egged on by the others, they finally snapped, “Of course!”
“Good.” Jack didn’t want to waste more words. He pointed at the map. “See that Imperial base, two hundred klicks off the E and H sectors?”
The Second Bureau staff leaned in. Faces drained of color.
A full Imperial armored division. Resting, yes—but two hundred kilometers on a mech’s legs was a two-hour sprint. One infantry regiment holding that line? Pure fantasy.
Jack folded his arms, chuckling low. “Still think pulling your flank reserves isn’t garbage?”
Curran lowered his head, shame burning. The major tried to rally. “If we don’t strip the flank, how else do we plug a three-to-one disadvantage at the front?”
Jack’s grin turned feral. “That’s your problem, genius. My job is pointing out the math. Solutions are supposed to be your specialty. You don’t fix a broken bra by wrapping your damn underwear around it. What kind of staff officer misses redundancies this obvious?”
He jabbed lines across the map with a laser stylus, tossing it back at the major.
If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
“Three divisions crammed onto a ten-kilometer line to hit two entrenched armored regiments on high ground? What do you think mechs are, rats? You’ve left no reserves, no overlapping fire, and missed a fallback wall you could throw up in three minutes behind R sector. A blind cadet could see it.”
They had no words.
Jack dismissed them with a wave, voice full of contemptuous magnanimity, as if shooing flies.
“I won’t even bother making you honor the wager. Today, I’ll treat you like a fart in the wind. Next time you submit a plan like this, I’ll wipe my nose with it and throw it back. Now—get out.”
The Second Bureau staff bolted, dragging the blushing major and ashen Curran with them, grateful to escape public humiliation.
After that day, Sixth Office became hot property. Invitations poured in, favors were begged. Within Operations Command, Jack earned a split reputation:
- To the few who knew the truth, he was a deep, dangerous strategist.
- To the majority—especially among secretaries and aides—he was a vulgar brute, an ignorant loudmouth, a fat bastard who had somehow lucked his way into influence.
And then came launch day.
Crucible: Infinite War—the civilian edition of the war simulation—went live.
Jack had taken leave just to be first into his GM-access pod. His eyes gleamed as the neural gel sealed him in.
The moment the simulation loaded, he nearly cried.
Boot camp. Again.
The drill instructor NPC strode out with a massive blade strapped to his back—an uncanny copy of Sergeant Brock, the bear who’d once broken Jack down in training.
Jack groaned aloud. Even in paradise, I get this bastard again.
Beaten back through drills, he completed training and was issued a rust-bucket: an ET-model training mech, obsolete by a century.
Depressed, he started tinkering. The ET frame could be upgraded, but only through grinding missions and scavenging parts. At the mech depot, pilots queued to convert scrap into “legendary” frames of past wars.
Jack wasn’t impressed.
He picked a different path: Mechanic.
Hidden in the rules was a clause: mechanics could design their own mechs. Combine parts realistically, respecting engineering and physics, and the system would generate a viable frame. Throw junk together, and you’d get a pile of scrap.
That was Crucible’s brilliance—and its cruelty. Without real expertise, without obsessive skill, no one could build anything worthwhile. To most, the mechanic class was an auxiliary role: a cost-saving repairman.
But to Jack? It was a goldmine.
This wasn’t a random game. It was built from the same simulation network he had already mastered. He knew these numbers better than anyone alive. With the right parts, he could cobble together monstrosities the system never intended—machines nastier and stronger than the “holy relics” everyone else worshipped.
After grinding missions, he finally unlocked the specialization: Combat Mechanic. The reward—a gleaming auto-repair arm, cold, heavy, full of promise.
Jack flexed the steel limb, grin splitting his face.
“Back where I belong,” he muttered. “A mechanic once more.”