Making the meal didn't take long, as most of its preparation only required heating the packs. But Henry still took his sweet time, heating everything up slowly and adding the spices as he did, trying to embellish or, more likely, create a flavour profile for it.
Instead of taking minutes, the entire process took him almost an hour, following which he ran down to the basement to fetch Jhonny.
He found him in the pod, his face looking so calm while he was unconscious.
Tapping into the feed of the virtual room, he found Jhonny doing sparring against his recorded copy. Of course, he was wearing a replica of his new NX32 exo-suit and winning by a marginal difference in speed.
But Henry thought he shouldn't be cheating on his training with the suit. He agreed that learning to use it proficiently was good, but he should also learn to fight with his own strengths and weaknesses.
It wasn't training if you didn't push your limits, after all. So he decided to give him a little lesson.
Hopping into the second pod, which had been recently installed, Henry hijacked Jhonny's training room.
He quickly replaced his digital copy and took over the training.
Jhonny was none the wiser and only noticed when the fight started stabilizing again.
Henry could use the system and expend some of his lifespan to boost his power at any time, but he rarely used it during training, for the same reason he would prefer Jhonny train without his exo-suit.
He wanted to better himself through effort.
But that didn't mean he wasn't better than a digital copy of himself. Most of his training was done offline, where the copy couldn't get an update.
This meant that the copy Jhonny had been fighting against for all this time was an old one, back from his days of boot camp.
The other sell-off point was when Henry dodged an attack and snickered at the boy.
"You!" Jhonny shouted, jumping back.
But Henry wasn't letting him off the hook that easily.
Darting forward, he kept him from backing away.
"You're tired, I can tell. You are slowing down. Keep your pace, kid!" Henry harried him, as he kept dealing insignificant blows to the kid but consistently hitting joints on the exo-suit.
The suit may have been built from nanites, but that didn't mean it didn't follow the fundamental mechanical engineering laws. It had to make itself in a certain way to exert power in a certain way.
That meant that it had hidden joints. Only a stress test would tell whether they were more or less resistant than normal full-metal joints.
Soon enough, Jhonny felt his suit jam as his leg suddenly locked up, and he halted involuntarily.
"Shit!" Jhonny cursed.
"Got ya!" Henry grinned as he accelerated, winding a wide hook into the kid's head, hitting the temple.
Jhonny was instantly knocked out, even with the suit absorbing a significant part of the impact.
The nanites had to divert toward the jammed part to fix it, and its defences had naturally weakened as a result. And Henry pounced on this flaw.
The pod opened outside the VCP, and an Angry Jhonny hopped out of it, cursing at the other occupant of the room, who was also jumping out of his pod.
"Why do you always have to rain on my parade?! I was winning, and you had to come to ruin everything!" Jhonny shouted, kicking a nearby wall.
"Calm down, kid. I came to fetch you for dinner, and I saw you in there. I just wanted to help with your training. We found another major flaw in the suit. The joints are weak," Henry said, heading to the stairs.
"How can you say that? You kept attacking the same spots! Of course, one would break with time!" Jhonny complained.
Henry halted before the stairs and turned around with a severe look.
"Do you think your enemies won't aim for weak spots? They will try hitting any part of you that can weaken or slow you down. That includes leg and arm joints. Our exo-suits are all built this way. It's something we can't go around.
"Getting used to fighting while protecting those areas is necessary if you start doing armoured combat. The enemy will not target your best-defended parts. I'm showing you how to fight dirty because our enemies will fight that way. This is war, kid. Not a game."
Jhonny glared at Henry, but he knew the man was right. He had seen as much when the commander on Earth had kicked at Henry's legs to pin him down.
"Wasn't there another way to show me this?" he grumbled.
"Not one that would have driven the point across. You may hate it now and for the foreseeable future. But I won't stop fighting dirty until you can defeat me under any circumstances. That's the only way I'll keep you alive and keep my promise to your parents."
Henry said his piece and started climbing the stairs, leaving the angry child in the basement. He only stopped midway, yelling down the stairs, "The food's going to get cold. Get your ass up here!"
Jhonny swallowed his rage, knowing Henry was doing this to protect him. It may be a terrible and degrading way, but it was working.
He could fault the man for many things, but not his ability to teach him things.
In truth, Henry had done the same to his own son as he grew up, and that had caused his ex-wife, his son's mother, to resent him deeply. But his son eventually came around to see what his father had done for him, and they had made up.
And from the article Henry had read that day on Earth, it hadn't been in vain. His son had grown strong and brave.
Henry shook the thought away from his mind, feeling the rage rise inside him at the thought of his son's death.
'They still need to pay for his death. It only ends when they are decimated…'