One hour and forty minutes.
Miko said it the way she said everything practical — flatly, without judgment, as simple fact.
Then she set her kit on the bench and started working without waiting for a response, her hands moving across A-01’s right shoulder with the particular efficiency of someone who’d decided that the most useful thing they could do was stop talking and start doing.
Kai watched her work for three seconds, then picked up his own tools and started on the sensor recalibration that didn’t require her hands.
They’d fallen into this rhythm over four days of shared work — not assigned, not discussed, just developed, the natural distribution of two people who both understood what needed to happen and didn’t need to negotiate about which part was whose.
“Primary joint integrity at seventy-one percent,” Miko said, not stopping.
“I can’t repair the brace in this window. Not properly — not to spec.”
“What can you do?”
“I can rig a temporary load-distribution solution that buys you margin without giving you the full repair.” Her voice had the focused quality it got when she was working through a problem in real time.
“Not a brace — a stress relay. Different architecture. Spreads peak impact load across three secondary attachment points instead of concentrating it at the primary mount. It’s less elegant than a proper brace but it’s faster and it gives you a better safety margin for whatever Cole does to that shoulder.”
“Trade-off?” Kai asked.
“Twelve percent of available combat Flux for the relay to maintain structural rigidity. The relay needs active Flux to hold — it’s not a passive mechanical solution.”
Noah looked up from his tactical display.
“Cole’s match history shows no instances of extended engagement beyond forty-five seconds at peak output. Twelve percent Flux cost over a forty-five second window is survivable.” He set the display toward Kai.
“The bigger issue is his attack pattern. Devren Cole doesn’t rely on precise targeting. He applies overwhelming force to the Frame’s center of mass and lets the structural damage accumulate. He doesn’t need to hit the shoulder specifically — he just needs to hit you enough.”
“So it’s not the shoulder that’ll lose us the match,” Kai said slowly.
“Not directly. The shoulder makes the margin worse, but the actual threat is cumulative structural damage from a build you cannot out-tank and cannot trade hits with directly.” Noah’s voice was, as always, stripped of emotional weight, just analysis, just the problem.
“You need this fight to stay mobile. Every second you spend in a static exchange costs you more than it costs him.”
“Staying mobile on a compromised shoulder burns more Flux than normal positioning,” Miko said, from inside A-01’s shoulder housing.
“Moving fast under damage puts torque stress on the relay even with active Flux support.”
Kai sat with the nested problem, all its competing pressures arranging themselves into the shape of something he recognized: a system with no clean solution, only trade-offs that could be managed or mismanaged.
He’d built his whole career out of systems like this.
He’d been building it since he was twelve years old, standing at a workbench on Ring-9 with a machine that shouldn’t have worked anymore and deciding to figure out what it would take.
“Okay,” he said.
“Build the relay. We accept the twelve percent Flux cost. Staying mobile is worth more than preserving the reserve, because if we stand still this match ends early anyway.”
Miko’s hands didn’t pause.
“Noah — the terrain configuration for the second round. Is it the same urban layout?”
“Gravity Maze,” Noah said.
“Variable gravity zones across the arena. It changes every forty-five seconds on a preset pattern.” He pulled up the configuration map.
“Cole’s primary tactic requires stable footing for maximum force application. In gravity-variable zones, his effective power drops approximately thirty percent from optimal because his drive system can’t compensate as cleanly for shifting ground conditions.”
“We use the zones,” Kai said.
“Fight in the unstable gravity sections, move through the stable sections fast enough that he can’t lock targeting on us.”
“His turning radius in variable gravity is approximately four seconds from intent to execution,” Noah said.
“You have better response time than that. Probably.”
“Probably,” Kai repeated.
“Probability is not certainty,” Noah said, without apology.
“But it is the best available information. Working with it is better than not working with it.”
Rex, who had been eating in the corner with the focused efficiency of someone refueling, leaned forward.
“Can I say something?”
“You’re going to regardless,” Kai said.
“I just want to point out,” Rex said, “that Cole walked through his first round in under two minutes. The guy he fought didn’t land a single meaningful hit. Cole wasn’t even running at full output.” He paused.
“I’m not saying this to scare you. I’m saying this because I think you need to go into the next match knowing that ‘winning by not standing still’ is a genuinely hard game to play against someone who can end a fight in two minutes when he’s not trying.”
“I know,” Kai said.
“Good. Just checking.” Rex settled back.
“Also, Miko, you’re incredible, I watched you do the relay concept in your head in about fifteen seconds.”
“Twenty,” Miko said, from inside the shoulder housing, with the flat precision of someone who kept track.
“I’ve been thinking about this configuration since the first round ended.”
“The relay architecture she is describing,” ARIA said, “is something I have not seen in contemporary engineering literature. It is, in fact, closer to a load-distribution approach used in some Architect-era design documents I retain in fragments. I did not suggest it because I was uncertain the tooling available in this bay could execute it. Ms. Tanaka appears to have arrived at the same architecture independently.”
Miko’s hands stopped, briefly.
“Architect-era?”
“We can talk about that later,” Kai said.
“Later. Forty-one minutes remaining.”
Miko’s hands resumed.
The relay took shape under them with the careful speed of someone building something they understood completely, each component seated with precise intentionality rather than haste.
Kai worked alongside her on the secondary calibrations, and they worked in the same near-silence as before, the silence of two people with a shared problem and a shared sense of what mattered.
Thirty-two minutes later, the relay was complete.
Kai ran a quick diagnostic.
The Flux draw was eleven point eight percent — slightly under Miko’s estimate.
The stress distribution mapped exactly as she’d described, peak impact load spreading across the three secondary points.
“It’ll hold?” he asked.
Miko closed the housing.
“For one match. Maybe two if you don’t take more than three heavy direct hits.” She looked at him directly.
“Don’t take more than three heavy direct hits.”
“I’ll make a note,” Kai said.
“I mean it, Kai.” Her voice dropped, just slightly, the professional focus giving way to something more direct, more personal.
“The relay is good work but it’s not a repair. If it fails mid-match, there’s nothing underneath it. The primary joint will go and you’ll lose the arm.”
“I know,” he said.
And he did know.
He could see it in the diagnostic display — the margin between survivable and catastrophic was real, and the relay was paper over a wound that hadn’t healed, not a cure.
But the alternative was going into the match knowing the shoulder was already compromised, with no buffer at all.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Really. This bought me something I needed.”
Miko looked at him for a moment, and the expression on her face was complicated in a way she didn’t hide — something between satisfaction at the work and concern about what the work was protecting him for.
“Come back with it intact,” she said.
“I spent a long time on it.”
“Deal,” Kai said.
The match call came through the staging bay speakers three minutes later.