I awoke bright and early, tiredly dragging myself out of bed to take another shower for all the cold sweat. Nightmares about spiders were the worst. The entire night, the creepie crawlies crawled into my sleep, digging around underneath my skin. Well, not the entire night. I didn’t get back to my apartment till almost dawn.

I washed out the terrible taste in my mouth with plenty of Jack’s Sun Kicker and checked my arm. It was perfectly healed, leaving not even a speck of tarnished skin. Hmm… maybe I should get some makeup or something to make a fake scar. It’d look a lot more believable than being fully healed after a single night.

The late night and early morning left me horribly cranky as I set the canteen to XtraEnergy Quantum™, though I did feel much better after the shower. And then the interface popped up to inform me of my latest earnings. It was unfortunately little.

「Firearms - 4>5」

I shook my head, sending a splatter of water around, focusing on everything I wanted to do. First thing’s first: armor. I snagged the pieces from where I kept them stashed and looked the sets over. I also took measurements of the Drop Chutes while I was at it.

I pulled out my notebook and spent a couple hours drawing out designs and plans, carefully thinking about everything I would need. Then I headed out to go buy stuff.

— — —

I returned several hours later, arms weighed down by bags and fifteen hundred Rayn lighter than when I left, leaving me with just enough to cover rent and have nearly five hundred spare. Most of that went into getting metal parts made from my friends at Tike Metal Co. and a rather high-end battery pack. The rest went to batteries of various kinds and a small touch screen.

I also took the time to run the doctor’s note by the Inquisitor. He wasn’t in his office, so I just put it on his desk and left quickly. It was funny, for once I didn't show up in uniform and nobody looked at me sideways. Yet when I was in uniform I could feel the eyes of suspicion constantly.

I started with the helmet after throwing my newest stuff to the side. I disassembled it once more, my hand easily going through the motions since I had its reverse-engineered blueprint already memorized. I also took apart my previous mask, taking out and disassembling the breathing apparatus. It was an easy thing to swap out all the parts and implement them into the helmet. It was all something I’d done before.

I put the helmet all back together and threw it on. Breathing was a bit more difficult than it had been due to the slats blocking the filters slightly, but it wasn’t unmanageable. If anything, it was better this way since I’d be able to breathe safely and be protected from rogue bullets.

Next came my changes to the eyes. Thankfully, the original cameras for the piece weren’t the bullet-resistant parts. No, that honor belonged to tiny transparent disks sitting just in front of them. The mask would be just as bullet-resistant with or without the cameras.

I didn’t do anything too drastic, just took the entire camera and LED component out, replacing them with slightly better ones from my spare robotics parts courtesy of ASCorp. It was more of a temporary fix than anything. The robotic cameras weren't fancy by any stretch of the imagination.

I looked the helmet over a couple times, making sure everything looked and acted fine. There was more I wanted to do, such as incorporate actual thermal cameras or something, but for now, the helmet was more of a side project than anything.

How to do this? I wanted to disassemble the armor and the stealth suit and incorporate them into one piece. The easiest way was probably to just wear the stealth suit under the armor. I'd get all the benefits of the thermal absorption threading, though the anechoic side of things would suffer a bit. Not that it mattered too much since I could already get around perfectly quiet without them. And they might add a layer of shock absorption to the armor.

I looked over the heavier set one more time. Its arm braces came down to just over the top of the palm, cutting into a rather sharp point that stuck out just slightly if my fist was clenched almost as if to help a punch. It dipped down to the underside of the arm, fully wrapping around it up to the wrist.

The upper arm was largely exposed until rather unintrusive shoulder guards. They were fairly lightweight as far as armor went, mostly there to ward off glancing blows or direct shots to the shoulders. They didn’t cover fully, leaving plenty of room for mobility.

The chest plate was a full piece, protecting the front and back in almost one smooth sheet of metal. The sides had a scaled plate design that offered fairly good protection and breathability without blocking the maneuverability too much. There was a curved spike protruding up out of the chest plate, covering the neck and chin from the front.

Then there were the greaves. They were solid pieces covering just the front of the legs with straps to hold them in place. They stopped just above the ankle, closer to a shin guard more than anything.

I went ahead and threw on the stealth suit, feeling the fabric constrict around my body into a skin-tight mess. It was a bit trippy looking down at myself and being entirely unable to see any contours thanks to the fabric's resistance to light.

Just to test the fit, I put on the armor too. Immediately, it grew uncomfortable. The pauldrons, chest plate, and greaves pushed down on the pads of the stealth suit, but there were spots where the padding protected areas the armor didn’t such as the thighs.

I took it all off once more, grabbed a knife, and slowly started to cut out the padding. It took a while, mainly because the fabric was tough to cut, but also since I didn’t want to cut into the actual clothing part of the suit. I left most of the padding that wasn't in the way.

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With my adjustments, I tried again to get a much more comfortable fit. It still wasn’t perfect since the armor itself was designed for a, erm, taller person, but I had a plan to get around it slightly. All of that would take some more advanced tools and equipment to make though, so it was on the back burner for now.

I painted the whole thing, liberally spreading it around until the entire armor looked like one formless black mass. I put it back on just to see what it would look like from an outside perspective, and it was downright terrifying. The properties of the paint made it so there weren’t any reflections of light, making it difficult for my depth perception to track. I raised my arms in front of my chest, and they just disappeared, blending into the black mass. It hurt my head as if I was staring into the void itself and not at the mirror.

I went back through, adding the other kind of paint that could light up. What was it called? Adjustable Chroma, maybe? Regardless, it was a tricky process getting it painted onto the right spots without the ability to see contours, but I managed off of feel. The paint also acted as a conduit for electricity, making it so I didn’t have to run wires underneath everything to power the Adjustable Chroma. It made me wonder if I couldn’t use it as wiring for other parts too…

To control the lights, I cut out part of the right arm brace and implemented a small touch screen. It was an incredibly simple thing, though I did have some difficulties getting it to link up to the paint itself. After a few hours of testing programs, and wiring in a couple of the batteries I just bought into a jury-rigged mount of the arm, I finally got it to work.

After hours of grueling work, I put it all back on and tapped a button on the touchpad. In my bathroom mirror, I watched a formless black mass grow three glowing blue eyes in a crescent shape. I adjusted a part on the touchpad, and blue lines spread out all over the mass. They slowly pulsed as if breathing. It was eerie to look at under a light but in the darkness? A shudder went down my spine and I was the one wearing it. Intimidation was about to be far easier to level.

The inability to make out the contours and depth of the armor also acted as a form of protection. Without the ability to see where my armor stopped and the fabric started, it would be impossible to make a shot specifically targeting an unarmed part.

It would be good for intimidation at the very least. As I grew more used to how it looked though, I realized it probably wouldn’t be as good for sneaking around as I thought it would. Pure black surfaces weren’t as common as dull and dark grays, especially in an urban setting. Especially with all the neon. Outside of the city everything was sand, so it would probably stand out even more there, at least during the day.

It was a bit crushing, but expected. The true strength of blackout came with a Diffraction Module, but that was a far-off dream more than anything. They were top-of-the-line, something I doubt I’d be able to get any time soon. Or ever. I’m not even sure I could manage to get one without special ordering it from a fixer or stealing it myself. Maybe it was a bit preemptive to blackout my armor…

Not all was lost though. At night, it would probably be good out in the wilderness. Everything was dark thanks to the smog blocking out natural light, at least everywhere I’d been.

Anyway the last thing I wanted to do, and the thing I spent the majority of my money on, was incorporate the Drop Chutes into the armor. They were damn useful. For now, I didn’t have a plan to help with the heat generation- er, I had a plan, but not the resources to make it. The battery life was something fairly easy to fix up.

I ran the numbers, checking my blueprints several times to make sure everything would line up. I only had one shot at this, unless I wanted to break into the Neo-Joker’s stash house again.

I started by cutting out small holes in the back of the chest plate with my plasma torch, which was as fun as ever to use. Nothing too large, more so just gaps for wiring to fit through than anything.

From there, I broke open one of the drop chutes. I already had the blueprint memorized, so it was rather easy to get it all opened up. That didn’t mean I disassembled it entirely though. While I did have the blueprint memorized, I didn’t exactly know how it all worked together.

For one, the thing relied on something called a Gravitic Chamber to work. I did try to do some research and figure out what Gravitic was, but the most I could find were ghost traces of it in archives and ancient message forums. It reeked of a coverup, especially since I had a device that ran off of it. From the blueprint, I knew it was some kind of crystalline structure that reacted with electricity, but not much more than that.

Anyway, there were four main parts to the Drop Chute. The Gravitic Chamber, Processing Module, The Battery, and the Micro Ionic Thruster. There truly was a lot thrown together in the small device.

I left the Gravitic Chamber, Micro Ionic Thruster, and Processing Modules alone entirely, not trusting myself to be able to fix them if I screwed them up. I did rewire its battery though, linking it to the high-end battery I bought. The battery was about the size of my palm, offering a battery life of one kWh, which is quite a bit of juice, so it should be able to power the Drop Chutes and any other small-scale tech without an issue.

It took a bit of finagling, but eventually, I got the paint to act as a conduit to power the thing. From there, I linked up its activation button to the touchscreen on the wrist.

It was a bit of a pain in the ass to get everything working, mostly since I was still trying to figure out how the Adjustable Chroma paint worked in the first place, and then had to use my newbie Net skills to set up a simple program to run the thing. Eventually, I got the programs all set up so I could just hit a small button on the touchscreen to activate the Drop Chute. I tested it a few times, turning it off and on, but it would need a field test to be sure.

I similarly rewired the other five Drop Chutes through the armor. It was a bit different for the larger one of the set, but only in size. I got it all hooked up without too much of an issue.

Then I went around and welded in the plates I bought from Tike Metal Co. over the Drop chutes, leaving small gaps for them to function. The metal was an exact match for the armor, which had been why it cost so damn much. The welds were a bit ugly since I still didn't have a full-on welder yet and I used a different kind of filler than normal, but they would hold.

After that, I unhooked all the wires and removed the battery as I started up my final effort to get the armor where I wanted it. It was a painstaking process, but I managed to pop the armor out a bit using a mixture of heat and effort right around the middle of the back.

I inserted the battery into that small popped-out space, used some of the leftover padding to create a pocket bolted into the armor, and rewired it all backup. I also welded on an additional layer of armor onto the back side to reinforce it, which took up the last of the metal I bought.

After nearly a full day of working on it, I stepped back and looked over the armor. There were spots here and there, such as the added metal plates, where I’d have to repaint it. All the wires would have to be painted over too, but other than that? The armor looked good. Hell, it looked like a menace.

I messed around, repainting everything once more and stress-testing my new toys. Then I took a quick shower and headed off to bed, my head swimming with things I needed to do soon.