The light of a thousand stars shimmered above the orbital space of Cloudy Curtain. Inside a slowly rotating orbital habitat, a teenager stared blankly at his reflection in the thinly frosted window, his golden-brown eyes dull, as though the soul inside him was still catching up with reality.
Name: Ren Vesmir Larkinson. Age: 17. Status: Recovered.
He remembered dying.
Well, maybe not dying in the traditional sense. It was more like collapsing in his cramped bedroom after grinding out his sixth straight month of The Mech Touch, reading deep into the arc where Ves designed the Shield of Samar. His death was embarrassingly mundane—heart failure, triggered by a cocktail of poor sleep, energy drinks, and an unhealthy lack of movement. Typical NEET behavior.
But what came after…
That was where things got complicated.
He wasn't supposed to wake up in the world of his favorite web novel. Certainly not as Ves Larkinson's older brother.
Half-brother, actually. That much he had gleaned from the scattered memories slowly seeping into his brain.
Ren ran a hand through his dark brown hair, still unused to how vibrant and alive everything around him felt. He wasn't in some flashy space opera fantasy. He was in the early, grounded stages of the Mech Era. Industrial steel, rigid classes, and slowly evolving mech technology formed the backbone of society.
He chuckled dryly. "I'm really in The Mech Touch. I'm… actually here."
A heavy realization settled in his chest like cold iron.
He remembered this timeline. If he was seventeen now, that meant Ves hadn't yet graduated from the Rittersberg University of Technology. He was still back on Cloudy Curtain, helping his father's declining repair business. They hadn't even touched design philosophy yet. The System hadn't even appeared.
Which means I still have time.
Time to forge his own path.
Time to live his second life not as a shut-in reader, but as a participant in the very world he obsessed over.
Ren's hands trembled, but not from fear. From excitement.
I want to design mechs.
Not just any mechs. Not like Ves, who would walk the path of spirituality, creating sentient machines imbued with belief and purpose. Ren respected that journey—it made Ves a legend.
But he had his own vision.
From the moment he first read about the Battle of Leemar, from the Siege of Kesseling's Void Bastion to the defense of the Bright Republic's frontier colonies, one truth had burned itself into his mind: ranged mechs determined the flow of war. Precision. Suppression. Artillery. The calm logic of engagement over distance.
A sniper mech waiting in silence. A railgun platform that could split a starship's hull. That was his dream.
Ren Vesmir Larkinson would not copy his younger brother.
He would create mechs that turned war into calculus.
His new life didn't begin with grandeur.
It began in a quiet apartment on the lower levels of the orbital habitat—his temporary boarding place until he moved planetside. With the Larkinson family being modest middle-class, his mother, a former engineering assistant, had taken a job with a small logistics firm on Cloudy Curtain.
His father? Gone. Just like Ves's.
The family had fractured years ago after their father left, unable to shoulder the burden of raising two sons. Ren had left with his mother, while Ves stayed behind with Benjamin Larkinson, their grandfather.
Still, despite the distance, they hadn't grown apart. In fact, Ves had visited him just last week. It was strange—Ren now saw every interaction with the lens of meta-knowledge, dissecting Ves's unspoken desires, fears, and frustrations. He was quiet, driven, restrained. The budding mind of a future titan in the mech world.
And he had no idea what fate had in store for him.
"Ren, have you considered applying to the Mech Institute here on Cloudy Curtain?" his mother asked during breakfast, her voice cautious but hopeful.
He looked up from his tablet. "Yeah. But that's not good enough."
Her brow furrowed. "Not good enough?"
"I want to go to Rittersberg."
Her spoon clinked against her bowl. "That's expensive. And the entrance exams—"
"I know," he said calmly. "But I'll make it."
Because he had no other choice.
He wasn't a protagonist with a golden cheat. No System whispered designs in his mind. He didn't want one, either. He had already read Ves's journey from obscurity to godhood. What Ren desired was the forge. The grind. The craft.
The slow transformation from theory to genius.
Later that day, Ren accessed the public design archives available through the Cloudy Curtain network. They were laughably limited compared to the vast databanks of Leemar or Rittersberg, but it was a start.
He began combing through ranged mech schematics.
Civilian industrial loaders modified with oversized pulse rifles.
Retired Bright Republic scout models with long-barreled beam cannons.
He created a folder called "Lineage" and began saving designs. Not for copying. For study. For understanding the evolution of ranged frameworks.
He worked late into the artificial night, eyes red, posture perfect.
Unlike his past life, he wouldn't waste this chance.
The next day, Ren visited the local scrap market.
It was a dusty, half-abandoned maze of decommissioned mech parts and surplus hardware, where outdated sensors were bartered for fuel canisters, and rusting leg servos stood like grave markers in tight alleys.
There, he met an old man named Brill. Greasy, sharp-eyed, missing two fingers on his left hand.
"You ain't from around here," Brill muttered, squinting at the teenager inspecting a stripped-down long-range targeting module. "What're you looking for, boy?"
Ren didn't look up. "A future."
The old man snorted. "That's not in stock this month."
Ren smiled faintly. "Then I'll make my own."
Brill stared for a long moment, then grunted. "Well, if you're buying that targeting system, I've got an old recoil dampener from a Mark IV Hellcat you might like. Heavy as hell, but reliable."
"I'll take a look."
In that moment, under Cloudy Curtain's pale artificial sky, a new path began to unfold—one not forged by destiny, but by persistence.