AN: First Bonus Chapter. If y’all reach the 700-stone goal, another one shall be released this week. Please keep in mind that after this week, this work will be on hiatus as I write more Chapters.

Wherefore, I humbly entreat thee: if thou hast endured even unto this place, grant unto this sleep-deprived man the blessing of an honest review. For such words do help this tale to flourish, that others may likewise discover it, and they strengthen mine heart to continue the labor set before me.

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"Do not wait; the time will never be ’just right.’"

- Napoleon Hill

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Orsen walked us through the yard, the entire time acting as though he were some curator leading guests through a museum he had built with his own hands from other people’s garbage. While we walked, he would gesture toward rows of sorted metal stock with a sense of pride that probably stemmed from knowing the provenance, composition, and structural integrity of every single piece in his possession.

The chain-link fence enclosed maybe two thousand square feet of packed dirt, and every square foot of it had been claimed, categorized, and stacked with precision, something that you wouldn’t really expect from a gonk that almost zeroed himself by crash-landing off a scrap mountain on a homemade scooter-ATV hybrid less than five minutes ago.

"Okay, so the thing anyone from the city doesn’t understand about these mountains is that they’re not random," Orsen said as he skipped ahead of us and turned to walk backward so he could face us while he talked. It was a maneuver that would have sent most people tumbling over the immense amount of bullshit strewn all over the place, but he did so casually and with quite an impressive display of balance. "They think it’s all just garbage thrown into a pile, but fuck me if it’s just that. This shit right here is some preem, stratified, geological pile of gold. Sure, you got a bunch of shit from different eras of the city which dumped different shit, but if you know how to read the layers, you can tell exactly what you’re going to find before you start digging."

"And you said you’ve been mapping them," I said.

"Bata-boom bata-bing," Orsen confirmed, holding up three fingers and nearly walking into a stack of sorted rebar that he sidestepped without looking. "Been doing this shit for three years since my pops got done in by some scavs for his two-bit fuck-a-teet piece of garbled-together chrome. Never liked the fucking bastard anyway, but he left me this shithole and a couple burritos in the fridge, so I can’t complain."

He shrugged his shoulders and chuckled a bit.

’Yeah, this fucker is off his rocker,’ I thought to myself.

"Anyway, I’ve been climbing, digging, sampling, and cataloging just about everything around here for three years," he continued, transitioning from what he had just told us as if it were a weather report. "I’ve got the whole place mapped in my head. The eastern piles are mostly residential garbage and irradiated tech from the corpo dumps. In other words, useless. Half the shit there will give any piece of fab equipment a slow death, and the other half is so degraded it’s not worth the hauling. But the western and southern faces?"

He kissed his fingertips like a chef. "That’s where the industrial liquidation went. Decommissioned factory equipment, structural demo from the old construction projects, military surplus from the corporate wars, give it a year or two, and it’ll probably have some shit from the current war. That’s the good stuff."

"I’m guessing that’s where you source your stuff from," I said.

"Damn right, I pull all my shit from there," he said. "Carefully too. With a Geiger counter and a spectrometer and a healthy respect for the fact that some of these piles want to kill me more than the scooter does, even."

"That contraction of yours wants you dead," Judy said.

"Yeah... we have a complicated relationship," Orsen shrugged.

He led us to the back corner of the yard, and with a theatrical, two-handed flourish that was entirely unnecessary, he pulled back a tarp, revealing what he had.

It was a pile of material easily thirty feet tall, and my Kiroshis started tagging the composition before Orsen had even finished pulling the tarp clear.

There were Titanium, Tungsten, and high-strength steel in the AR500 and AR550 family, the kind of armor plate used in vehicle hardening and ballistic applications. Stacked alongside it, sorted into their own sections, were bundles of aramid fiber, rolls of Kevlar weave, sheets of UHMWPE, fiberglass matting, and a separate bin filled with shattered glass that had been sorted by type and clarity. I still wasn’t set on whether I wanted to do bulletproof glass or if I wanted to take the Locust approach, which was a badlands modified version of the Galena GA32t with metal panes for windows that were hooked up with cameras that projected what they saw onto screens on the inside, kinda like a Rayfield.

It was, in precise and literal terms, everything I needed to build the Widowmaker from the ground up.

I stood there for a moment, cataloging the pile, running compositional analysis on the visible surfaces, and projecting the material against the build requirements I had been working on since the day I found the Mustang. The numbers resolved in my overlay, and they told me that Orsen Trey, this bowl-cut-wearing, mountain-diving, scooter-crashing salvage rat, had unknowingly assembled the exact raw material inventory that my project demanded.

"Holy shit," I said quietly.

"Right?" Orsen said, misreading my reaction as general admiration. "Took me eight months to pull this shit together. The titanium alone is from a decommissioned Militech airframe assembly line. Grade 5 aerospace spec, and it’s barely even degraded. The tungsten’s from old industrial counterweights and some military surplus, and the AR plate is structural demo from a facility that got torn down out past Rocky Ridge."

I walked closer to the pile, running my hand along a sheet of AR550 plate, lifting it a bit to feel the dense weight of armor-grade steel. The surface had some oxidation and scoring, but the metal underneath seemed to be fine.

"This is exactly what I need," I said.

"For the Mustang?" Judy asked, walking up beside me.

"Yup," I confirmed. "Every single thing in this pile is on my material list. I can use the AR plates for armor, the titanium for the suspension arms and engine mounts and the firewall reinforcement. Tungsten for the bulkhead and the turret shield, and the composites for the spall liner... And I can find some use for the glass... How long did you say it took you to pull this together?"

"Eight months," Orsen said as I turned to face him.

"And you were just going to sell it piecemeal?" I asked.

"Yeah, unless you got another plan," Orsen said, hooking his thumbs into the waist of his tied-off jumpsuit. "I’ll move it as orders came in. Couple kilos of titanium here, a sheet of AR plate there. The market for this kind of material is slow but steady, mostly small-shop fabricators and gun-runners and the occasional corpo procurement guy who doesn’t want a paper trail."

"What if I bought the whole relevant inventory at once?" I asked

Orsen’s eyebrows climbed. "The whole thing?"

"Fuck no. Not the whole pile," I said. "Just the specific materials I need, in the specific quantities I need. A bulk order."

Orsen looked at the pile, then at me, and I watched the calculation run behind his eyes as if he had just realized that the morning’s social interaction had pivoted into a business opportunity considerably larger than his usual order volume.

"Okay," he said slowly. "Okay, yeah. Let’s talk about what you need, just give me a sec."

Orsen walked towards the little shack in the middle of the enclosed area and came out holding a tablet. We spent the next forty-five minutes walking through the material list, and I laid it out for him piece by piece: the full build requirement that I had been refining and the weight goal I had set, and Orsen listened with professional attention.

"Structural armor first," I said. "AR550 or AR600 plate. I’m going to need roughly sixteen hundred kilos."

Orsen whistled. "Sixteen hundred kilos of armor plate. The fuck are you building, choom? A mobile bunker?"

"That’s the idea," I said. "Then chromoly tubing for the roll cage, reinforced frame rails, crossmembers, roof supports, suspension mounts. I’ll need two hundred kilos of 4130."

"You’re caging it," Orsen said with approval. "Smart. With that much armor weight, you’d fold the unibody in a hard corner without a cage tying it together. What gauge are you running on the main hoop?"

"Two-inch outer diameter, point-one-two wall," I said. "Multi-point tie-in to the frame rails, with gussets at every major node."

"Point-one-two on a seven-thousand-five-hundred-pound car," Orsen said, nodding slowly. "Yeah. Yeah, that’ll hold. But you’d want to triangulate the rear section hard, though, because all that turret weight up top is going to want to twist the roof structure under lateral load."

"That’s why the cradle ties into the cage instead of the roof skin," I said. "The load path runs straight down into the main hoop and out to the frame."

Orsen stopped walking and pointed at me. "Fucking finally, someone who actually understands load paths. Do you know how many people come out here wanting to armor a car, thinking you just bolt steel plate to the doors and call it a day?"

"Yeah," I nodded. "The city has a list of people who will end up zeroed, and I want to make sure I don’t end up on it by someone else’s effort, let alone my own car’s"

"Fair," Orsen conceded. "Very fair."

"Grade 5 titanium next," I continued. "I’ll need two hundred and fifty kilos for the suspension arms, engine mounts, driveshaft, firewall reinforcement, the roof gun support, and the brake brackets."

Orsen put both hands on top of his head, displacing the bowl cut, and stared at me with pure unadulterated joy.

"This is the best day of my life," Orsen said. "Keep going. Please. I need to hear all of it."

I kept going. "The tungsten, seventy-five kilos, which I’ll use sparingly for the firewall, the engine bay bulkhead, the turret shield, the differential armor, and the fuel tank shielding."

"Why tungsten on the fuel tank?" Orsen asked. "That’s expensive shielding for a CHOOH2 cell."

"Because a CHOOH2 cell that takes a tracer round becomes a problem for everyone within thirty feet," I said. "It’s the last line of defense behind the AR plate and the spall liner."

"You really thought about every way this thing could kill you," Orsen said.

"I thought about every way someone else could use it to kill me," I corrected. "There’s a difference."

Orsen pointed at me again, his broken tablet momentarily forgotten. "There it is again. The thinking. God, it’s so refreshing."

"I will need a hundred and seventy kilos of Kevlar for the interior spall liner that would stop fragments after a round punched through the steel," I continued. "The UHMWPE, a hundred and forty kilos, mounted behind the Kevlar to catch fragments and shave weight. The fiberglass for the hood, trunk lid, rear wing, and interior trim. The carbon fiber, limited use, fifty-five kilos for the driveshaft, aero pieces, dash, and seat shells.

"Carbon driveshaft?" Orsen asked, raising an eyebrow. "You sure about that? Steel’s more forgiving when the torque spikes."

"Yeah. Carbon’s lighter and it fails clean," I said. "Steel will whip when it lets go and take the floor pan with it. I’d rather replace a driveshaft than a spine."

"Huh," Orsen said as he scribbled something on his tablet. "Hadn’t thought about the failure mode that way."

"Work smarter, not harder," I said. "I’ll also need around seven hundred kilos of aluminum for the engine, transmission, differential housing, radiators, intercoolers, wheels, and fuel tank. A hundred and ten kilos of copper for the wiring, the high-current battery cables, the ECU, and anything else. A hundred and eighty kilos of stainless steel for the exhaust, fasteners, and heat shields. And forty kilos of Inconel for the turbo housings and headers, because nothing else would survive the thermal load of a compound-boosted 9.4-liter running at full spool."

"Inconel," Orsen said, scribbling on the battered tablet. "I’ve got some. Came out of a decommissioned turbine assembly. You’re lucky, that stuff almost never shows up in the piles."

"How much do you have?" I asked.

"Sixty kilos, give or take," he answered. "Don’t worry, it’s more than you need."

"Coolio," I nodded. "Now for rubber. I’ll need it for tires, bushings, engine mounts, and seals. And you know what, fuck it. I’ll also take some polycarbonate for the camera housings, sensors, headlights, and taillights. I made up my mind on it, no windows."

I waited for him to finish getting all that down before formally moving on to electronics. "I’m going to need roughly a hundred and twenty kilos of ECU hardware, power distribution hardware, cameras with night vision and thermal imaging, radar, lidar, backup batteries, and display panels.

"And one more thing on the turret," I said. "The Defender’s mounted in the roof, so I’m building a dedicated internal cradle instead of just bolting it to the roof skin. That needs an additional sixty-five kilos of chromoly, twenty-five of titanium, thirty of AR600 armor, plus heavy-duty bearings, an electric traverse motor, and a hydraulic elevation cylinder so that the recoil transfers into the roll cage instead of flexing the roof panels."

Orsen stopped writing and looked up at me. "Okay. So let me tally this up, because this is, and I want to be clear about this, the single biggest order anybody has ever placed with me, and I want to make sure I’m not lowballing myself out of a down payment on a real workshop."

He went quiet for a minute, his thumbs moving across the tablet, and I watched the bowl cut bob slightly as he did the math.

"Alright," Orsen said, turning the tablet around so I could see the breakdown. "Here’s where my prices sit. I’m not going to gouge you, because Judy vouched for you and because honestly I want to see this thing finished, but I’m also not running a charity."

The figures scrolled down the screen in his cramped, all-caps handwriting:

AR500/AR550 steel, eight to twelve eddies per kilo.

Titanium, forty to sixty per kilo.

Tungsten, fifty-five to ninety.

Kevlar, twelve to twenty.

Aramid fiber, fifteen to twenty-five.

UHMWPE, twenty to thirty-five.

Fiberglass, two to five.

Mixed polymers, two to four.

"Those are scrap-market rates," Orsen said. "Way below what you’d pay a legit vendor, because a legit vendor has overhead and taxes, and all I have are a Geiger counter and a scooter."

"A modular terrain traversal platform," Judy corrected from where she was crouched over her own crate, sorting through a bin of copper wiring.

"Thank you, Judy," Orsen said. "A modular terrain traversal platform."

I ran the numbers against my material list, my Kiroshis projecting the totals across my overlay as Orsen talked.

The steel came out to roughly 14,000 to 18,000 eddies.

The titanium, 8,000 to 12,000 eddies.

The tungsten, 3,000 to 6,000 eddies.

The composites altogether, another 6,000 to 10,000 eddies.

And then there was also the aluminum, copper, stainless, Inconel, rubber, polycarbonate, electronics, and fasteners stacked on top of the structural materials.

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Stones make me smile. Chuck them at me, just don’t knock my teeth out.

The infamous P@treon exists for those of you who want to continue reading ahead during this hiatus.

patreon .com/Crimson_Reapr (Don’t be a gonk, remove the space)

They get around 3 long-form weekly Chapters (4.5-6k words each (Though currently that number has dropped because of work and other unforeseen circumstances)