Chapter Four: Development

Ronin rapidly began altering his calculations to be used on himself and sent his data to Eve, who was sitting at her desk with her head in her hands. She lifted her head up and stared at the data that popped up on her screen and asked aloud, "How long did it take you to do all this?"

Doing some rapid math in his head, he said, "Gathering the information and data took about a week. Developing the insertion method and necessary programming information for the chip took about another week, so altogether about two weeks."

Eve stared at the data and felt as though the ground had dropped out from underneath her. She'd assumed he'd been working on this for months, that this had been the culmination of his whole time in the Bureau, but two weeks! Two weeks to create, research and develop something that had NEVER existed before?

Looking back at him, she asked, "Who are you...really?"

Without looking away from the project he'd pulled up to work on, he said, "My codename is Ronin, I've completed over two hundred projects for the bureau and finished more than fifty new research projects for my own personal interests. I've been here six months now, so I guess I'm still kind of new, although I'm the one who's been here the longest among this current group."

Eve shook in her chair at his quiet summation of his work. Two hundred projects, how was that even possible? Did he sleep at all?

Without her asking, he said, "When I get projects, I take them in sets of ten and work on them all at the same time. I generally try to get official projects finished within a day or so, but sometimes it takes me longer, depending on what they need done."

"Are you even human?" Eve asked incredulously.

Without skipping a beat or even slowing his typing noticeably, he threw a knife that had been sitting on his desk at her, barely missing her head, slicing several strands of hair free.

"That's a knife I developed that takes air through its intakes and uses it to push it faster through the air as it's thrown and flies. I don't mind being mocked or made fun of, but I will not tolerate my humanity being called into question," Ronin responded, his voice even and calm.

Eve felt as though all the air in her body had been sucked out of her. She'd lied back on the lift, of course she knew who Ronin was, at least via rumors, of which there were many. The only member of the new group who received actual projects from the Bureau. There were many among the researchers who called him Death and so many, many more rumors and nicknames. He went by Ronin because even among the Bureau, he cared only about his research, refusing to take any side or back any group.

She'd hoped that the rumors were just that, rumors, baseless, but she could tell there was a fair amount of truth to those rumors. She received a message from Marcus on her V.U.I.. The message read, "Most likely he's trying to threaten you, he won't actually hurt you, but I wouldn't do that again."

She'd never felt this way before though. Fear, the feeling of being insignificant filled her chest for the first time in her life. She was used to being the smartest person in the room, the most prepared. For years, she'd prided herself on being so intelligent that people were loathe to even approach her...but here...here she met not only someone smarter than her, but someone who considered her so far below his notice he hadn't even thought to insult her.

This was a man who needed to die.

She shook the thought from her head and turned, determined to beat him, to develop something that would outshine his part in the project so thoroughly that they ignored him and gave all the credit to her.

Luckily she'd recently begun researching something...dangerous and powerful, a branch of science that many researchers were simply calling "Alchemy". Bearing no connection to the alchemy of the days long past, it was simply so advanced that it seemed like magic. Outlawed by the government entirely due to its tremendous resource requirements, it was considered an immoral affront against humanity. Even here, where laws were rarely followed, alchemy was considered taboo, but it was difficult to track and easy to cover up.

Coming up with an idea, she said, "Hey Ronin...what combat experience do you have?"

He responded, his voice still level, "Absolutely none whatsoever. I've never fought or even really gotten into arguments."

Smiling darkly, she said, "I have an idea then! What better way to demonstrate the success of our joint project than to have one of us become a combat master, with the body to match!"

Leaning back in his chair, he thought a moment and said, "And I suppose that person would be me?"

Before she could respond, he said, "I guess that's fine actually. This was the end result of my research, I've always enjoyed martial arts movies and the like. That's why I started this research, so yeah, I'll do it."

Turning back to her computer without a word, she typed in a request to have fifty pounds of Aether converted to a liquid state and sent to their lab space. She knew exactly what she could do, and it would help her...and deal with him at the same time.