The Mech Touch

His dastardly plan to subvert Hexer culture sounded incredibly ambitious. Yet it was also not. Ves could have gone overboard, but he decided to err on the side of caution when it came to setting up the Superior Mother.

Originally, the Hexers revered the semi-mythical Superior Mother as a role model of a strong and ideal parent.

Mothers needed to be strong. Mothers needed to be storm. Though the Hexers recognized that mothers also had to bear a lot of love, the way they expressed it was very different depending on the gender of their children!

In Hexer society, girls had to be raised with a combination of strictness and tenderness. Every girl was already 'strong', in a sense. Mothers were supposed to raise their expectations towards their daughters in order to produce strong women that could provide a lot of contributions to the Hegemony.

Boys experienced a different upbringing. Mothers showed a lot more tenderness and softness towards their sons. They didn't push them around too much and were inclined to treat them as if they were younger than their biological ages.

However, mothers always tried to make sure to rein in their rambunctious sons and did their best to suppress any aggression, ego and other 'undesirable' traits from them. With an entire society adopting this singular approach, a lot of Hexer boys grew up to become boys in adult form!

Even if the grown-up boys were considered to be mature enough to handle some simple jobs, the Hexers never allowed them to take on actual responsibility!

This poisonous but pervasive custom was responsible for strangling the potential of many boys in the Hegemony!

Those who possessed the aptitude to become commanders, directors, foremen, leaders and other impressive figures never had the chance to reach these positions.

Instead, male Hexers could only perform the lowest positions that required the least amount of intelligence and skills. No matter their talent or qualifications, they were destined to serve as the lackeys to female Hexers!

Of course, there were some opportunities for boys if they worked hard enough. Only the most exceptional of the bunch received some slightly better opportunities. Journeyman Mech Designers were actually allowed to contribute a bit more to collaborative mech designers, while expert pilots all earned sufficient trust to pilot a powerful expert mech.

Sadly, too few of them exist. Only the very best boys received greater opportunities. The rest were treated as immature, incompetent menials who could never be trusted with anything important!

This was one of the most pervasive biases of Hexer society and one that had always always earned his contempt the most.

As a man, Ves abhorred the way the Hexers made all of these untrue assumptions about his gender!

This was what the Superior Mother was designed to address. If Ves wanted to create a spiritual product that was supposed to appeal and empower Hexer in combat, he might as well go big and tack on some other 'features'!

When he conceived of this plan, he thought back to the time where he first entered the Ylvaine Protectorate and formed Ylvaine's spiritual fragment in order to empower his Transcendent Messengers.

Overall, he succeeded in turning his Transcendent Messengers into holy machines that strongly appealed to the faith of the Ylvainans.

It was just that Ves could have done more if he realized how much influence his Ylvainan mechs exerted over the Ylvainan people.

Though Ves wasn't sure whether the Hexers were as susceptible to this approach as the Ylvainans, in case his Hexer mechs rose to prominence, he wanted the Superior Mother to do more than look pretty.

The Superior Mother was not meant to alter her values and principles when exposed to more and more Hexers.

Instead, it was supposed to be the other way around! Ves wanted the Superior Mother to be a beacon of change. Her Hexer values differed from the most predominant beliefs in several important ways.

The speech he held before he created the ancestral spirit reflected the kind of model figure that Ves wanted to create for the Hexers.

Despite Gloriana's many complaints, Ves put a lot of thought in the ritual. He invited 66,666 local Sentinel men in order to channel a different image of mothers than the one that Hexers adhered to. The fact that they weren't Hexers citizens was intentional!

If Ves really wanted to, he could have paid a lot of money to invite a lot of male Hexers to partake in his ceremony.

He didn't. Other than costing him far too much of his hard-earned money, he did not want to be surrounded by so many Hexers who believed that they were worth almost nothing compared to women!

What Ves truly aimed to instill in the Superior Mother was the idea that there were multiple ways that mothers, and by extension women, could become strong!

It wasn't necessary for women to beat down boys.

What was the greatest purpose of mothers? Nurturing their children!

However, this did not mean that a good mother should raise their daughters into adults while keeping their sons as useless boys!

That defeated the purpose of nurturing children. What Ves instead tried to impart in the Superior Mother was the idea that it was better and more admirable to raise boys into more productive members of society!

"What is more difficult? Raising a son to become an incompetent manchild, or raising a son to become a competent engineer or bureacrat?"

This was the challenge that the Superior Mother posed to Hexers. A mother who failed to raise her children was the opposite of a good mother!

Only those who put earnest effort into raising both their daughters and sons into capable, responsible adults deserved to be called a 'superior mother'!

Ves believed that issuing this kind of challenge in the form of his reinterpreted ancestral spirit would definitely appeal to the competitive spirit of Hexers.

Hexers always held the assumption that it was easier to raise a daughter than a son. The latter was smarter, more talented, more capable and more obedient.

As for the latter, Hexer mothers automatically assumed that their sons were trouble in the making. That was also why those mothers did not dare to teach too much to their boys.

Ves aimed to subvert this assumption.

So what if boys were more dangerous? So what if boys held greater potential for death and destruction?

Wouldn't it be an accomplishment if Hexer mothers transformed them into productive, upstanding members of society?

It wouldn't be easy, but the Superior Mother was not called this way for nothing! If mothers aimed to earn the ancestral spirit's approval, then they better do a good job in raising both their male and female offspring!

Those who moved closer to the ideal of the Superior Mother would receive more validation from her glow. Those who still held hateful thoughts about boys would instead perceive a form of pressure that encouraged them to change their ways, lest they become damned!

This was why Ves insisted on putting 666 Penitent Sisters in the zone that represented the phase of damnation.

They were the worst kind of Hexers in the eyes of the Superior Mother.

A mother who withheld love and attention from her son was not a qualified mother at all! By extension, any female Hexer who treated boys as idiots weren't worthy either, because they too carried some responsibility.

Anyone whose thoughts on boys strayed in the direction of the beliefs of the Penitent Sisters were all damned! The Superior Mother's glow wouldn't be as beneficial to them. If they wanted to earn the ancestral spirit's good graces, then they had to alter their views!

Whether this worked or not depended on how popular the Superior Mother became. Ves did not dare to assume that it would become popular instantly.

No matter what, the Hexers were very strong and proud of themselves. A glow that originated from the hands of a boy, a foreigner no less, would definitely become a hurdle!

Nonetheless, the Superior Mother still adopted most of the facets of Hexer beliefs. She still maintained the assumption that women were superior and such. What Ves merely did was to raise the standing of boys.

Aside from that, the Superior Mother was still a Hexer, just one who carried a different interpretation than most. If Ves deviated further from Hexer orthodoxy in her design, he feared his ancestral spirit might not get accepted!

Ves never lost sight of the magnitude of this grand undertaking. In his opinion, what he attempted to do was no nothing less than to redesign existing Hexer culture!

It was impossible to force a group of people to change their mindsets, especially at once. Rather than spark a radical revolution with a high chance of failure, he instead wanted to encourage a gradual evolution that would turn the Hexadric Hegemony into a more boy-friendly state.

Taking half a step forward was better than tripping backwards.

Whether this ambitious plan actually worked or not, Ves had some hopes for his female Trojan Horse.

"Actually, I should call her a Trojan Mare." He muttered.

Originally, Ves figured that even if the Superior Mother failed to catch on, no harm was done. Ves didn't care too much about the Hexers anyway.

Now, reforming them or at least getting them to appreciate the Superior Mother had become a much higher priority!

Ves didn't know what his mother meant by turning the Superior Mother into her incarnation. What exactly was an incarnation anyway?

The only crucial fact his mother told him was that her life was tied to the life of the Superior Mother!

Though Ves wasn't sure whether he should take this statement seriously, he did not dare to assume otherwise.

His mother's life was at stake!

This was an incredibly bad outcome. Ves never thought that something like this would happen!

When Ves designed the Superior Mother in a way that tied her to Hexers, he figured that she was only useful as long as the Hegemony existed.

If the Hexers somehow lost the Komodo War, then much of their culture would probably be gone in time.

At that time, there was no point for the Superior Mother to remain in existence. In fact, Ves wanted her to be gone lest she convert other women into Hexers!

That made his mother's sudden bond with the Superior Mother so crucial. With their lives tied together, Ves had to make sure that the Superior Mother remained alive and well!

The only way to do that was to preserve the Hexers, which basically meant that he could not afford to let the Hexers lose their war against the Fridaymen!

"Goddammnit."

Ves could no longer remain disinterested in the outcome of the Komodo War! Previously, he only wanted the Fridaymen to lose or suffer serious setbacks due to provoking him. In truth, he didn't mind all that much if the Fridaymen somehow managed to gain the upper hand.

He was leaving the Komodo Star Sector anyway. Only Gloriana might shed some tears, but Ves really couldn't care less about her state and people.

It was different this time. Ves, for all his ambivalence towards his mother, still loved her and wanted her to live.

This meant that Ves had to make sure the Hexers survived the Komodo War! Even if they didn't win, they at least had to end the war at a stalemate!

The immensity of this challenge put a lot of pressure on his shoulders.

While Ves hoped the Hexers were strong enough to win the war on their own. If not, Ves had to do his best to prop them up in his own way!

"I already turned around the Sand War." He softly peppered himself up. "This is not much different!"

In truth, the Komodo War was entirely different. Its scale and magnitude was countless times greater. A lot more mechs entered battle, and all of them were vastly more powerful than the pitiful mechs and starfighters used to resist the sandmen.

Not only that, but the Hexers weren't fighting against mentally-challenged sandmen! The Fridaymen were just as smart, if not smarter, and did not expend their war assets on brainless, wasteful assaults.

"They're going to be a lot harder to crack."