Ceres Chaos [Exosuit Progression]

The next three months passed in a very specific fashion for Ceres: Training in the military school during the day, VR training at the Gladius in the afternoon, and the occasional riot repair in the inner zones to keep up the rental cost of the workshop and regular attempts at scanning the mysterious box that Uncle Dawn left behind in his.

The inscriptions on the smooth white surface have been changing more rapidly, as though it was counting down to a specific time.

It seems as though each time Ceres visited the box and scanned it, the rate at which the number of inscriptions was being modified was exponentially increasing, almost giving him a feeling like the box was alive and somehow reacting to his regular visits.

He's been verifying this by randomly changing the gap between his visits or attempts on the box, though he still was a bit uncertain.

In terms of VR training, Ceres had hooked onto Shattered Empire, using it to get familiar with various types of exosuits and weapons that he never touched.

He wasn't anywhere close to competing with all types of weapons and exosuits and he still wasn't able to use a mechsuit or warship without heavy AI assistance, but at least he had a basic level of understanding for most of them.

He kept the same nickname of SentinentHamster189 while remaining in the dark to this day about the minor fad in the suicide bombing that he started in his first solo match.

He needed to at least have one primary weapon for both melee and ranged, plus a backup. For the melee weapons, he landed on a spear as his primary weapon.

A spear could help to keep others at bay while he utilizes his speed to gain a terrain or positional advantage over his enemies.

For ranged weapons, he felt that basic mastery of a pistol would be good enough, as he still had his explosives grenades and mines.

His explosives had reached a whole new level, and consistent practice runs with Ardan and Erik only made his repair and modification speed reach a monstrous level for a twenty-year-old kid.

He had already hit the top 10% of trainees in the Gladius rankings for exosuit repair through ranking matches of the same format, earning him a reputation for being a crazy ‘bomber’.

He actually didn't manage to achieve top ranking in his last two matches, as he was considered to be fairly one-dimensional once you knew he was an explosive expert and was countered easily by better exosuit repairers, but he was still one of the better ones where he was hitting way above his age category, seeing as the Gladius rankings were of all ages.

To account for this deficit, Ceres spent a fair amount of time also training with Braton in unarmed combat both with and without exosuits.

Braton was a bonafide unarmed fighting madman, and Ceres became fairly skilled in various martial styles and build on a bit of muscle mass.

Ceres was slightly taller and stronger now after three months of nonstop training and bulking thanks to the free flow of quality nutritional paste from Ardan’s VIP practice room.

Standing at 1.78m with a lean toned tanned muscular body, while still having amber eyes and a clean buzzcut, his build could've now landed him a job as a male stripper in various establishments if he really needed extra cash to keep up the rent of the workshop.

Over the repetitive usage of nerval enhancers, he was confident of getting a good NIER level after the installation, being very close to the cut-off requirement of joining the imperial military as a proper cadet rather than a low-level grunt, which was 1 NEIR.

He still wasn't able to use mechsuits in Shattered Empire, and he wasn't able to use any VR pod that required a nerval jack, but that would all change today because he had finally gotten his nerval jack installed.

Although he had been asleep most of the time of the procedure, he still got to see the various medical robots and advanced equipment in the Zone 4's hospital that could literally grow an entire artificial limb that had 70% effectiveness compared to a real one.

He had been injected with anaesthesia fairly early on in the procedure, causing him to doze off and suffer zero complications. He couldn't strain his nerval jack right after getting it installed, but he could still use the VR Pod that had a nerval plug interface for a single hour or so.

"How was it, Erik?" Ceres asked excitedly as he watched Erik get out of his VR pod, gingerly rubbing the back of his neck.

"It was way better than whatever else we were using before, the response is so much better, and I think I got my NEIR up to 1.2 now!" Erik covered up his nerval jack with a plugger that the hospital provided, which sealed the nerval jack fairly seamlessly to prevent any foreign object or liquid from randomly entering on a daily basis.

"Wow, you jumped that much?" Ceres was shocked. Humans had a base level of 0.65 – 0.75 NEIR, so a direct jump to the cutoff requirement was already a great start.

Ceres could hardly wait, jumping into his VR pod and immediately laid back, letting the nerval plug insert into the back of his neck, sending a sense of cold metal touching his neck and spreading across his body in a shiver.

***

"For your first time using your nerval jack, we will be conducting a series of comprehensive tests to calculate your actual NEIR level" A robotic voice echoed through the VR practice room that Ceres had just logged in into.

Ceres then had to perform a series of movements that quite literally had to flex every muscle he had and any possible movements that his limbs could make without dislocating, including his neck.

He also felt vastly different from his previous months of VR training, every pore on his skin felt alive, feeling each strand of hair on his head being brushed by the various types of rain and wind that the VR room simulated.

A virtual copy of a jungle was created in front of him, forming a dense canopy and overwhelming his senses with the sheer amount of plants, sounds and insects that he could spot from more than 50 meters away.

Even the wings on an insect could almost be seen once every three flaps, making Ceres' reaction speed extremely high. He felt the surface of leaves through his finger, being able to memorize the layout of each imperfection and bump that he ran through.

Questions from school exams appeared in front of him as part of a memory and answering the test, and Ceres could actually tell that his thinking and computational speeds had almost doubled, and so did his understanding of certain theories that previously went over his head.

He felt like he finally caught up to Ardan and Erik on some of the intermediate subjects, but he still felt an impassable gap of understanding for the finer details of exosuit design. He was more of a repair and modification rather than a building-from-scratch kind of guy.

At the end of the test, the VR robotic tone remained silent, calculating his NEIR level. After a good moment, in which Ceres experimented with feeling various other objects, the robotic voice finally returned.

"You have achieved a peak level of 1.8 NEIR, please be advised that such a jump will cause undue stress on your brain if immediately heading into active combat. Please be reminded that any user of the nerval jack is not expected to remain at a higher NEIR level than 1 during daily operation or low intensive training.”

“The maximum level of NEIR is only expected to be hit in high-intensity combat situations. Beyond this expected usage for the next year, Zone 4 Seras's General Hospital is not liable for any breakdowns or side effects."

Ceres quite literally jumped for joy. 1.8 NEIR was almost unheard of for him, bordering on values only attained by the Five Families. That was amazing for him, who felt like he was the chosen one finally after years of hard work and slogging it off on daily training since young.

He quickly logged out of the VR pod to boast to the other boys, hugging Ardan on sight as the young sixteen-year-old boy came into the VR pod room.

"Wow, Ceres didn't expect you to get so emotional over losing a ranked match in Shattered Empire." Ardan tried to pry Ceres' face away from him, who was starting to have tears in his eyes.

"I actually achieved a 1.8 NEIR! Thank you, Ardan, if it weren't for your help and your brilliant pretty Little Melody of an aunt for boosting me so much" Ceres genuinely smiled in a rare burst of emotion, catching Ardan and Erik off guard.

Erik felt a bit dismayed at hearing Ceres' NEIR level jump way higher than his but kept that to himself. Ardan was only sixteen, which meant he hasn't installed his nerval jack and didn't really keep track of what today was.

"Wow, isn't Zone 4 expensive? How did the orphanage afford that kind of installation procedure for you guys?" Ardan asked suspiciously, feeling that it was quite weird that an inner hospital would agree to perform the procedure when all other students of the same age from various inner schools would be clamouring for it.

Some inner hospitals even had a 5-year waiting list for such procedures.

"Well, she told us that this year's batch was much smaller than before, seeing as there's only sixty of us which is apparently a far cry from before. And she also mentioned that she was paying part of the procedure out of her own pocket." Erik said.

"She really loves you guys, doesn't she? Better than my mom who hardly visits me anymore..." Ardan sighed, sitting down on a sofa.

"Hey don't worry about it, you still got us as friends forever, right Ceres?" Erik asked, noticing Ceres was still too giddy in his rabbit hole-like imagination of being the chosen one and the hero of his very own story, now that everything was going swimmingly.

“Well, whatever. Let’s head down to the dumpling store to celebrate! Tomorrow we begin our training again!” The three boys cheered and left the room, going to party.

A pod in the room hissed and opened, with Braton falling out of the pod. “Guys I just barely got 1 NEIR, will I be okay?”

The silence replied to him as he realized he had been left behind in the Gladius. “BROTHERS, WAIT FOR ME!”

***

3 hours before curfew, after a hearty meal and celebration at Mrs Qiu's dumpling store with the boys and eventually getting kicked out by Lisa for being too rowdy, Ceres still felt extremely emotional about his drastic increase in 'strength' and headed towards Uncle Dawn's workshop instead of the orphanage bunk.

Maybe the promise was felt a bit ungrounded when Ceres and Erik agreed to try their best for the competition, but now with this result, it was actually getting more and more feasible with his newfound peak of 1.8 NEIR.

Could he achieve something big in his life? Having a former orphan win the competition sixteen years ago was the icing on the cake, fuelling Ceres’s ambition to win it too.

As he neared the workshop, he still didn't really feel like it was his own despite having used it and paying the rent for the past 2 years, always keeping Uncle Dawn in his mind as a top role model for being a mechanic.

Uncle Dawn definitely gave him a true head start on his exosuit repair skills and he couldn't stop wishing that Uncle Dawn was still alive so he could share the good news with him. He was the closest Ceres had to anything that resembled a father.

Entering the workshop again at night, he looked at the same picture of a younger him and Uncle Dawn on the same desk. The desk was still piled with trash, considering Ceres does annual cleaning.

He started to feel that it wasn't right leaving Uncle Dawn's place in such a mess, so he started to clean up the place, grabbing a pair of gloves and trash bags to start collecting the litter that was everywhere.

He spent the rest of the night reorganizing the place, placing mechsuits according to their weight category and roles, while shifting around toolboxes and containers of screws in an orderly manner on the bookshelves.

His eyes finally landed on the mysterious white box that was still in the middle of the Rawes old-gen 3D printer, as he intended to fully scan it again the next day. Ceres stared at his greatest mystery gift from Uncle Dawn but also felt dismayed that it didn't seem to do anything apart from its inscriptions moving a bit.

He had thought that with his nerval jack installation, maybe the behaviour of the box would’ve changed.

Wishing that his only father figure Uncle Dawn would've been alive to share this moment with him, Ceres stared at the box, which somehow represents Uncle Dawn's urn to him, with feelings of sadness welling up in his chest. Somehow he was much more emotional after the nerval jack installation.

Holding back his tears while reminiscing the good memories he had with Uncle Dawn, Ceres picked up the box, not noticing that his gloves already had a few holes in them, too small for human eyes to barely see. They had been dissolved by the black goo in the past.

As his hands touched the box, a small sharp black tip on the millimetre scale formed at the point of skin contact from the surface of the box and injected a stream of black goo into Ceres’s skin while he carried it to the bookshelf, with him being none the wiser.

He didn't feel anything particularly wrong or anything else for that matter, as he continued to dust off and clean up the workshop. The black goo moved through the skin, eventually dispersing till nothing of it was visible on the surface, fully entering Ceres’ body.