Chapter 2: Forging the Titan

Chapter 2: Forging the Titan

The fifty-dollar bill felt laughably thin in Leo’s pocket as he stood before a mountain of oxidized metal. Miller’s Salvage Yard was a graveyard of ambition, where cars, washing machines, and forgotten industrial machinery came to rust in peace. For Leo and Wrench, it was a cathedral.

“Okay, what are we looking for, boss?” Wrench asked, his eyes alight with the thrill of the hunt. He cracked his knuckles, the sound echoing in the metallic silence.

“The heart of it first,” Leo said, his gaze scanning the piles with an analytical intensity that could dissect an engine from fifty paces. “The post. Not hollow tubing. Solid. Something that would laugh at a sledgehammer. Something that would break a baseball bat.”

They spent an hour climbing over heaps of rebar and skeletal chassis, their boots crunching on rusted scraps. Wrench, with his mechanic’s intuition, was the one who found it. Tucked behind a stack of flattened oil drums was a six-foot length of solid steel drill collar, a piece of industrial offcut from some long-dead oil rig. It was three inches in diameter and weighed a ton.

“Holy mother of torque,” Wrench breathed, running a greasy hand along its scarred surface. “You hit this thing, it doesn't move. The planet moves around it.”

Leo grinned. It was perfect. “Now for the housing. It needs to look like junk, but be built like a bunker.”

Their search led them to a forgotten corner of the yard, where they found a small, rusted floor safe, the kind used in old gas stations. Its door was missing, but the box itself was a quarter-inch of hardened steel plate. It was ugly, dented, and exactly what Leo had pictured.

They dragged their treasures to the front, where old man Miller, a man who looked as weathered as his inventory, eyed them suspiciously.

“Drill collar and a busted safe?” he grunted, spitting a stream of tobacco juice near Wrench’s boot. “What’re you kids buildin’, a bomb?”

“Extra credit project,” Leo said smoothly, pulling out the fifty. “Structural Dynamics. We need fifty-five pounds of high-tensile steel.”

Miller squinted, then shrugged. “Forty bucks. And you haul it yourselves.”

As they wrestled the heavy components into the back of Wrench’s beat-up pickup truck, a sleek, black SUV with tinted windows rolled slowly past the junkyard entrance. Leo caught a glimpse of the driver—one of Chad Remington’s lacrosse-playing acolytes. The SUV didn’t stop, but the message was clear. They were being watched.

“Friends of yours?” Wrench muttered, throwing a dirty tarp over their haul.

“They’re making sure we know they’re watching,” Leo said, his jaw tight. “Which means we can’t work in the main student workshop. Not during the day, anyway.”

That night, long after the last janitor had locked up, the engineering building’s sub-level workshop hummed with illicit activity. The cavernous space, usually bustling with students, was eerily silent except for the sharp hiss and blinding flash of Wrench’s welding torch. Sparks cascaded onto the concrete floor as he expertly fused the steel safe to a custom-fabricated mounting plate.

Leo hovered over him, a cheap tablet in one hand, displaying a series of hand-drawn schematics. His design was brutal and efficient. The drill collar would be sunk four feet into a block of reinforced concrete. The mailbox itself was a simple steel box. But it was the inside that held Leo’s secret, the part of the design that would “fight back.” He was working on a spring-loaded internal plate, a simple but violent mechanism.

“You know,” Wrench said, lifting his welding mask, his face illuminated by the cooling metal, “for a guy who gets lost in beam theory, you’ve got a real mean streak.”

“Justice isn’t mean,” Leo countered, his focus unwavering. “It’s just… perfectly balanced.”

A sudden creak from the workshop’s main door made them both freeze. They snapped off the lights, plunging the room into darkness, the scent of ozone and hot metal hanging in the air. Footsteps, light and hesitant, echoed on the concrete. Not the heavy tread of campus security.

A figure stepped into a sliver of moonlight slanting through a high window.

“I figured I’d find you guys here,” a calm, female voice said.

The main lights flickered on. Elara Finch stood by the switch, her arms crossed. She wasn’t wearing her usual smart TA outfit, but a practical hoodie and jeans. Her dark, inquisitive eyes took in the scene—the hulking steel components on the workbench, the welder, Leo’s frantic sketches.

“That’s… impressively ugly,” she said, her lips twitching with a hint of a smile. “Is that a floor safe?”

Leo and Wrench exchanged a nervous glance. “It’s a project,” Wrench mumbled.

“I know what it is,” Elara said, walking closer. Her gaze fell on the heavy drill collar. “My dad told me a student took on his ‘special project.’ He didn’t mention it was going to be an anti-tank emplacement.”

“We’re just trying to help your father,” Leo said, his tone defensive. He didn’t like wildcards, and the professor’s daughter was the biggest one he could imagine.

“I know,” she said softly, her expression turning serious. “I was there. I heard what Chad said after class.” She looked directly at Leo. “I also know his family’s lawyers could turn this into a nightmare for my dad if it looks like he sanctioned a booby trap.”

Leo’s face fell. She was right. He had been so focused on the physics of the problem, he’d ignored the politics.

“But,” Elara continued, a mischievous glint in her eyes, “if it looks like a piece of art… or a particularly robust, student-designed piece of avant-garde architecture… that’s a different story.”

She pulled out a tablet, its screen glowing in the dim workshop. With a few taps, she pulled up a series of detailed CAD models. They showed the same components—the drill collar, the safe—but integrated into a sleek, slightly brutalist design. The housing was cleverly angled to deflect blows, and she’d added aesthetic fins that also served as structural reinforcement.

“Your design is pure aggression,” she explained, her voice gaining enthusiasm. “It works, but it screams ‘I am a weapon.’ My version… it’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It looks like a mailbox. A weird, overbuilt one, sure. But it doesn't look overtly malicious. It gives us plausible deniability.”

She zoomed in on the interior, showing a refined version of Leo’s spring-loaded mechanism, integrated seamlessly into the structure. “And I improved your countermeasure. More reliable, less likely to fail.”

Leo stared at the screen, stunned. She hadn’t just figured out what they were doing; she had made it better. She had seen the flaws in his logic and corrected them with an elegance he couldn't deny.

“Why?” Leo asked, genuinely curious. “Why are you helping?”

“He’s my dad,” Elara said simply, her fierce loyalty shining through. “And I’m tired of watching bullies like Chad Remington win just because they can afford to. Besides,” she added, looking from the schematics to Leo, “it’s a fascinating engineering problem.”

Wrench let out a low whistle. “She’s in. I like her.”

Leo looked at Elara, then at the steel monstrosity on the table, and back to her elegant, deadly design on the screen. His solitary mission for justice had just become a conspiracy. The brute force of his plan was now tempered with her cunning.

He nodded slowly, a reluctant smile finally breaking through his intense focus. “Okay. Welcome to the team.”

Elara smiled back, a genuine, brilliant smile that lit up the grimy workshop. She pointed to the rusted safe. “Alright. Let’s get to work. First thing’s first, we need to make our Titan look a little less like a tetanus trap and more like a Trojan horse.”