Tony glanced over at Leon’s screen once in the first fifteen minutes and came away satisfied.
Basic mechanical structures.
Foundational material.
The introductory content that anyone picking up engineering for the first time would start with.
Right, he thought, turning back to his own work.
As expected.
And the thing about a genuine competitive challenge — even against a clearly outmatched opponent — was that it sharpened everything.
Tony could feel it: the specific focus that came from having a deadline and a point to prove.
In thirty minutes he’d worked through the propulsion adjustment problem that had been resisting him for two days, arriving at a solution that he knew immediately was better than any of his previous attempts.
He didn’t stop to celebrate.
He kept going.
He glanced at Leon again an hour in and found him reading about circuit architecture.
Tony allowed himself a small, private smile.
Leon had presumably hit the limit of what he could absorb in exoskeleton mechanics and pivoted to something less demanding.
Understandable.
Honestly, better than he’d expected for a business school applicant.
“Finding the armor material a bit dense?” he said, without looking up.
“Don’t push yourself.
This is why genius exists — if everyone could absorb advanced engineering over a lunch break, the field would be rather crowded.” He set down his tool.
“When the Mark II is done, I’ll arrange a demonstration.
You can experience what it actually feels like from the outside.
That’s probably the right entry point for your level.”
Leon, behind him, said nothing.
Tony nodded to himself and resumed work.
U extended the magnifying arm to the right position, and Tony began humming — low, automatic, the kind of humming that happened when the hands were busy and the brain was too occupied to notice it was doing anything else.
Jingle Bells, for no particular reason.
What he didn’t see, because he wasn’t looking:
Leon’s screen was running at the maximum display rate JARVIS could sustain — text and schematics cycling faster than any human reader could track, characters blurring at the edges, charts appearing and disappearing before a normal eye could process them.
The display’s refresh rate was not, it turned out, the limiting factor.
Leon’s eyes stayed level.
Fixed.
Always on the first line of new content as it populated.
He was reading faster than the screen could feed him.
Processing faster than the hardware could output.
The information wasn’t being memorized in the way that required rehearsal or repetition — it was being integrated, organized immediately into a structural understanding that connected to everything he’d already absorbed, adding itself to the architecture the way a completed puzzle piece finds its place without searching for it.
A college-level textbook: thirty seconds.
A complete branch of applied engineering theory: under an hour.
If the universe had chosen to generate visual indicators above people’s heads when they were acquiring knowledge at accelerated rates, the sequence above Leon’s would have been running something like: Level 4, Level 7, Level 12, Level 19—
It would have kept going.
Tony, mercifully, was not looking at any of this.
Three hours in, Leon set down his tablet and stood up.
Tony was in the middle of his thirteenth propulsion test, hovering approximately eighteen inches off the ground with the focused expression that had found the right adjustment and was now refining it.
He had the posture of a man who was certain he was winning.
He glanced at Leon.
“Well, well.” He managed a reasonable impression and hadn’t been watching for this exact moment.
“Does my little brother finally want to wave the white flag?
I’d say there’s no shame in it, but—”
Leon reached up and adjusted his glasses.
Tony blinked.
Leon was not wearing glasses.
He had never worn glasses.
His hand moved with complete confidence to the exact bridge position, two fingers making deliberate contact with nothing whatsoever, and he performed the adjustment with the serene certainty that has just made a decisive intellectual point.
“I’ve finished the foundational research,” Leon said.
“I’m ready to contribute to the build.”
Tony descended slowly, landed with a slight stagger before finding his footing, and looked at Leon with renewed interest.
“All right.
You can carry things.”
He waved toward the main workspace.
“Propulsion’s essentially locked.
We move on to the structural body work — chest, shoulders, joints.
Leon, I need the titanium alloy sheets and the gold-titanium composite stock from the upper rack.
U, keep the precision arm steady on sector four.”
Leon got the materials.
They began to work.
At first, Tony was doing what Tony always did when someone less experienced was in the room — giving instructions, waiting for acknowledgment, occasionally leaning over to redirect when something wasn’t going according to his mental picture.
Leon listened, asked questions, did exactly what he was asked.
Then the questions started changing.
“Why did you run the current path here instead of the direct route?
Is it the heat distribution?”
Tony explained.
Moved on.
“If the joint servo is rated for this torque range, what’s the contingency for a force input that exceeds it by a factor of ten?”
Tony stopped, looked at the joint assembly, and thought about it for a moment longer than he expected to.
“Good question.
We build in a slip mechanism — shear bolt design, here—” He started sketching it.
“That’s going to add two millimeters to the profile.
You could get the same result with a variable-resistance coupling if you change this bracket geometry.”
Tony looked at the bracket.
Looked at Leon.
Looked at the bracket again.
“…That actually works better,” he said, and modified the design.
He didn’t stop to examine what had just happened.
He was in the flow of it.
The build continued.
At some point around two in the morning, Tony handed Leon a specification and said, “I need this component fabricated to sub-tenth-millimeter tolerances.
Factory lead time is usually a week — we’ll just have to work around it for now.”
Leon examined the spec.
Then he examined his own hands for a moment — not analytically, just checking — and said, “How much of a variance band is acceptable?”
“As close to zero as possible.
Why?”
Leon closed his fist, opened it.
A finished component sat in his palm, shaped to specification by the compression and release.
Tony picked it up.
Measured it.
Measured it again.
“That’s better than the factory spec,” he said.
“I may have overcorrected slightly.”
“This is—” Tony turned it over, measuring a third time out of what was clearly no longer skepticism but pure professional interest.
“Leon.
Leon.
I should have brought you down here four days ago.
Do you understand what you are right now?
You are better than a hydraulic press.
You are better than a CNC mill.
You are better than most of the manufacturing line.”
This was, from Tony Stark, an extremely sincere compliment.
They worked through the night.
By the time the garage windows were showing the first grey of dawn, eighty percent of the Mark II’s body structure was complete.
What should have been months of iterative manufacturing and calibration had been compressed into a single collaborative shift — Tony designing and directing, Leon fabricating with a precision no machine in the building could match, both of them asking questions and receiving answers in a feedback loop that had, at some point in the small hours, stopped feeling like a tutorial and started feeling like a conversation between two people who understood the same things. The source of this chapter is novelping(.)com.
Tony hadn’t noticed when that shift happened.
He was, at this point, operating on accumulated caffeination and genuine excitement — the dark circles under his eyes had deepened to something that would concern a doctor, but his eyes themselves were entirely bright.
“We’re close,” he said, straightening up and surveying the suit’s current state.
“Last phase: connect the suit systems to JARVIS, run the integration calibration, final assembly checks.” He turned to Leon.
“Build me one more current loop for the secondary power path and then we can—”
“No,” Leon said.
Tony turned around fully.
“I’m leaving,” Leon said.
The workshop was very quiet for a moment.
“You’re,” Tony said carefully, “leaving.”
“I said three days to build better armor.” Leon stretched, rolling his neck.
“I’ve learned what I came to learn.
You’ve got an excellent lab and excellent robots and the final integration steps won’t need me for the physical work.” He picked up his tablet.
“I’ll be upstairs.
Come find me when you’re done down here.”
He walked to the stairs.
“Wait—” Tony started.
“You actually—you’re seriously going to try to—”
Tony stood in his workshop, next to eighty percent of a suit of armor, and found himself doing something unusual: running back through the night’s events with the specific attention he applied to data that didn’t initially make sense.
The questions.
The early ones had been genuine novice questions — foundational, slightly tentative.
And then, somewhere around hour three, they’d started being good.
And then they’d started being the kind that made him pause.
And then Leon had looked at a joint assembly and described a superior design approach from the hip, and Tony had implemented it, and he hadn’t thought to ask how Leon knew that.
The fabrication.
Unfamiliar at first — he’d had to correct Leon twice on process.
And then not at all.
And then Leon was producing components that exceeded factory specifications by a margin that Tony had initially assumed was a measurement error.
He grew from novice to expert in one night, Tony thought.
And not just any expert.
An expert who was keeping pace with me.
He sat down.
“Your learning speed,” he said, to the empty workshop.
“Is that—was that the super brain?”
JARVIS, who had been present for all of this and had chosen not to comment until asked, said, “Mr.
Stark, would you like me to compile the timeline of Master Leon’s progress through the archived material for comparison?”
Tony stared at the ceiling.
“He learned everything I know,” he said.
“In a night.”
“In approximately three hours for the theoretical component,” JARVIS offered helpfully.
“The practical application was integrated during your collaborative session.”
“That’s—” Tony stopped.
Started again.
“That’s completely—that’s cheating.”
“I believe Master Leon would describe it as ‘having a super brain,'” JARVIS said.
Tony looked at the stairs Leon had climbed.
Looked at the suit.
Looked at the stairs again.
He picked up his tools.
“Fine,” he said, to no one.
“Fine.
Let’s see what three days looks like.”