Chapter 722 — The Dragoon Mark I
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
Gao Yang needed two seconds to react before an irrepressible grin of delight finally spread across his face.
Amber had been chattering away excitedly a second before, but the moment she saw the look on Gao Song's face, she stopped dead, staring blankly.
She rarely saw Gao Yang make so little effort to conceal his feelings, rarely saw him smile with such open joy.
He hadn't smiled like that even at his coronation.
So an "aircraft" was something that important, was it?
"Let's go have a look together," Gao Cen said, hauling Amber over and striding toward the doorway. "It's at the eastern-suburb test site, right?"
"Oh—oh, right... hey, let go of me, I can walk on my own, don't drag me—don't carry me—don't stuff me under your arm again! I can walk by myself..."
...
At the suburban test site, the Dragoon, having successfully completed its first flight trial, had long since settled smoothly onto the open ground. A crowd of technicians swarmed around the flying machine, checking every part over and over again. Rebecca, as the project's chief director, had thrown herself into the work as well; tools in hand, she circled the mechanical bay, several streaks of grease smeared across her face and her clothes blotched with stains, yet she was smiling more radiantly than anyone on site, as happy as a child.
Maggie stood quietly to one side, watching this busy, jubilant scene, her gaze drifting now and then to Rebecca. Over all these years she had seen every kind of human noble, but a "princess" like Rebecca was truly something she had never encountered in her life.
"Perfect, perfect, not a single flaw! No fractures, nothing loose, no overheating—not one of the problems we had before showed up..." A thaumaturgical technician leaped down from where the dragon-wing servo's connecting shaft was mounted, his face alight with excitement. "The new structure works!"
"Now that's more like it!" Rebecca had also wriggled out from beneath the craft's main fuselage, her eyes sparkling. "All those上千 tests were worth it..."
Maggie knew that the thousand-odd tests Rebecca mentioned had not all been actual flight trials; the vast majority had been completed inside the Origin Laboratory. But even in a simulated environment, the effort every member of the team had poured in was entirely real.
In that brief moment of distraction, Rebecca had already come up to Maggie, her smile blooming like a flower. "Hey, hey, Maggie, how did it feel to fly?"
Maggie blinked, then lowered her head with a touch of slowness, and said with impeccable courtesy, "It felt very... good, Your Highness."
She had never quite grown used to the way this princess behaved with no trace of nobility about her, but no matter what, Rebecca represented the Duke of the North's dignity, and Maggie still had to strive for proper etiquette.
"Don't always hold yourself so stiff! We're not in the city, and Aunt Hedy and Ancestor Yan can't see us, so it's perfectly fine to relax a little." Rebecca clapped Maggie on the shoulder with careless familiarity, and only after her palm landed did she belatedly let out an "Oops." She hurriedly pulled her hand back, glanced at the grease on it, scrubbed it vigorously on her outer robe, then patted Maggie's other shoulder. "No titles in the lab—that's what we agreed on from the very start."
Maggie lifted her eyes to look past the other woman's shoulder, her expression a little strange. "...But, Your Highness, I believe a certain minimum of courtesy is still necessary..."
At that, Rebecca couldn't help puffing out her cheeks. "Why do you sound just like my aunt? Let me tell you, being wound this tight all the time makes you age fast. Aunt is always too tense, and her dark circles get worse by the day; and Ancestor Yan, so dead serious from morning to night—I've even seen his wrinkles..."
Maggie looked up once more, wisely chose to shut her mouth, and quietly stepped back to one side.