The Mech Touch

The Chiron and the Ferocious Piranha Projects both demanded a lot of ingenuity. Despite their third-class nature, Ves knew he needed to invest quite some time on spiritual engineering in order to establish their distinctive spiritual mechanisms.

This wouldn't be easy at all. Ves had to tackle many new problems and invent novel solutions. He had to explore his newly-discovered ability to create spiritual constructs and find a way to realize his desired outcomes for the very first time.

On top of that, Ves had to perform all of this work while also investing most of his time on his major projects! No matter what, the Valkyrie Redeemer and Cat's Paw Projects were simply too important to his interests.

This was why he decided to fill up the remaining slots with less ambitious minor projects.

That didn't mean the remaining two mech designs became less worthy. Ves could still figure out plenty of useful mech designs that didn't require too much work to be useful.

Of course, if he was willing to invest more time and resources into them, they could easily become more powerful, but there wasn't much pressure to do so to be honest.

Gloriana presented the first minor project that he and Ves had decided upon.

"With the increasing prevalence of LMC mechs in the Komodo Star Sector, glows have become more and more ubiquitous. Aside from the Doom Guard, the glows are generally supportive and helpful. However, that does not mean that their presence in an area is necessarily desirable. The LMC has received an increasing amount of complaints that the glows are too obnoxious or aren't welcome despite the mental boost they can provide."

Public spaces, ship interiors and so on often became disturbed when an LMC mech came near. The more LMC mechs showed up, the more disruption they caused, especially when different kinds of glows successively affected the same area.

One minute, a mech technician trying to service a mech suddenly felt dutiful. The next minute, he might become swollen with pride! After that, he gained a very strong urge to protect his fellow comrades.

This was a typical example of what happened in the hangar bays of many carriers that held different LMC mech models.

In fact, a fair amount of complaints even emerged from within the Larkinson Clan! As one of the most prolific users of LMC mechs, almost every carrier hosted a bunch of glows.

Though the existence of the Larkinson Network partially mitigated the effect of glows on their minds, some Larkinsons simply wanted to obtain a reprieve!

Therefore, Ves and Gloriana decided to design a mech that could offer these people a defense, for a price.

Gloriana activated a projection that depicted the proposed mech design. "The Sanctuary Project is a third-class offensive space knight. From a technical standpoint, the mech doesn't come with any notable bells and whistles. It needs to be resilient enough to endure focused attacks, but it also needs to be mobile enough to be at the right place at the right time."

"Most of you are wondering why the Sanctuary Project is necessary when the LMC already sells the Aurora Titan." Ves spoke. "The Aurora Titan is a great mech that can shield the mech pilot and nearby friendlies from the effects of hostile glows, but it is not designed to block friendly glows. In fact, the Aurora Titan's glow is also distinctive and therefore disruptive in certain situations. In order to address the growing complaints, there is a need for another product that can provide the succor that our existing space knight model isn't able to address."

"The Aurora Titan is also too impractical of a mech design to most customers. It's not only incredibly slow, but also very heavy and costly." Gloriana added.

Ves nodded. "This is why we have conceived of the Sanctuary, a mech designed to mitigate or neutralize the influence of any glow in the vicinity. No matter if the other glows are supportive of harmful nature, the Sanctuary can offer some protection no matter their nature."

To be honest, he spontaneously came up with this mech concept after he slept with a B-stone on his bedside table. He truly felt refreshed when he woke up after enjoying an entire night of rest without his mind getting affected by the spiritual disturbances in the Nyxian Gap.

This caused a lot of assistants to look thoughtful. Some of them even began to frown.

Miles asked a question. "Sir.. doesn't that mean you will design a counter to your own specialty? A mech like this might be able to negate everything that you have managed to design up to this point!"

This was a question that Ves worried over right away. Fortunately, he already came up with some answers.

"It's not as severe as you think, Miles. First, the primary effect of the Sanctuary is very difficult to achieve. No matter what, it is difficult to suppress a glow."

Ves manipulated the projection to showcase several scenarios.

An offensive space knight that represented a Sanctuary floated opposite to a Doom Guard.

"In a typical case, the Sanctuary may be capable of suppressing the glow of the Doom Guard. Both of their effects are very strong, and the exact effectiveness depends on how good the mech pilots are and how well they have bonded with their mechs.

The crimson third eye of the Doom Guard dimmed a bit, which signified that its mech pilot experienced some difficulties in melding with the machine.

Two semi-transparent fields appeared into view that visually simulated the expected performance of the glows of the mechs.

The field surrounding the Doom Guard weakened and made way for the field surrounding the Sanctuary.

When the third eye of the Sanctuary glowed brighter, the field surrounding the proposed new mech completely overpowered the glow of the Doom Guard!

"If an excellent mech pilot such as Joshua Larkinson pilots the Sanctuary, then its protective glow will absolutely be able to assert itself. If he pilots the Doom Guard instead, then the opposite will happen."

This was already a known glow interaction to Ves. The Aurora Titan only managed to overpower the Doom Guard most of the time because Qilanxo was not only powerful, she also didn't have to waste most of her strength on fending off a rival design spirit.

The projection changed to display multiple Sanctuaries and multiple Doom Guard. Both of them had been equalized so that the overlapping fields that represented their glows entered into a stalemate.

"Numbers play a role as well." He said, and swiped his finger a few times to remove some Doom Guards off the board.

The change quickly caused the Sanctuaries to become more overbearing. Their neutralizing glows completely pressed back the harmful influence of the Doom Guards!

"As you can see, as long as the mech pilots are all the same, if a single Sanctuary can't neutralize a Doom Guard, you can bring a second one. If the enemy fields two Doom Guards, then you can bring three Sanctuaries, and so on! This glow interaction alone will ensure that releasing the Sanctuary will not no matter how many Sanctuaries we sell, there is still a rationale for fielding other LMC mechs. In fact, our more dedicated customers will buy even more copies in order to guard against the appearance of a number of hostile Sanctuaries!"

Even if a lot of customers might decide to give up on other LMC mechs entirely, they still needed to buy a lot of Sanctuaries just to guard against glows!

"Sir, how.. accessible will the Sanctuary be? Will you make it as expensive as the Ferocious Piranha?"

Ves shook his head. "No. The service provided by the Sanctuary has to come with a price, but not one that will evoke too many complaints. For now, I have settled on a price and budget that is similar to that of the Doom Guard, so it will sit firmly in premium territory. Any other questions?"

"Will you design a landbound variant of the mech?"

"It's in consideration. We can develop after we publish the base model."

Catherine Evenson asked a question next. "Mr. Larkinson, as far as we are aware of, the power and potency of glows is not necessarily dependent on the cost and class of mech. Is it possible for a single Sanctuary to neutralize the glow of a Bright Warrior, which costs at least an order of magnitude more money to build?"

"Make that two orders of magnitude." Ves chuckled. "I have already thought of this possibility. The effectiveness of a mech has to be commensurate to its price. If this is not the case, I will make sure to correct it. The glow of a third-class mech should never overpower the glow of a second-class mech. This isn't something that I have considered too much, but every mech that we publish from now on will adhere to this principle."

Perhaps before, it would be difficult to ensure this would happen, but all kinds of possibilities opened up after the discovery of spiritual constructs.

In order to develop a ranking of glows, Ves intended to program a special spiritual construct that grouped the glows into tiers corresponding to their price and class.

For now, Ves mainly wanted to prevent the Friday Coalition from buying or producing his Sanctuaries en masse in order to counter the Hexer mech designs that he intended to design!

Some concerns still existed. Ketis frowned and raised a worrisome possibility.

"Our clan depends heavily on the mechs that you have designed. What if the enemy fields our own mech models against us? Even if the Sanctuary can't neutralize the glows of all of the mechs, what if they field some of the second-class mechs that you have designed?"

That.. was a very realistic possibility. It was a good thing that Ves was already paranoid enough to take this possibility into account. He theorized on it immediately after he came up with a priority ranking for his glows!

He smirked. "Anyone who thinks they can beat me at my own game will never succeed. As the inventor and creator of glows, do you think I haven't developed any countermeasures to them? The Sanctuary design is merely a lesser solution that I have decided to release to the public in order to assuage some of their complaints. I have many other ways to deal with my own products should they turn their weapons against our clan!"

He did not elaborate any further. Though he trusted everyone to keep their mouths shut, the less they knew, the better.

In truth, aside from manually asking his design spirits to deprive their glows from the mechs in question, Ves also intended to bake this function right into the design of his upcoming mechs.

It all came down to the priority ranking construct. Aside from ensuring that the glows of third-class mechs would never be able to overpower the glow of a second-class mech, Ves also intended to add some hidden instructions.

One of the hidden rules stated that any LMC mech piloted by a Larkinson possessed the capability to hard override the glow of a hostile LMC mech.

Another hidden rule stated that as long as an LMC mech directly deployed against a Larkinson or the Larkinson Clan, its glow directly turned against its own mech pilot and any compatriots!

Just like how Ylvaine actively rejected any non-believer from piloting a mech aligned with his faith, every other design spirit was more than capable of rejecting and hindering mech pilots they did not like!

By baking these two rules into every LMC mech design, Ves did not need to be afraid his products would ever cause his own downfall!

Overall, designing the Sanctuary represented another mark of progress to Ves. The invention of spiritual constructs truly enabled him to control and fine-tune the spiritual characteristics of his mechs to a much greater degree.

For the first time in a very long time, Ves finally felt he had regained a lot of control over his own products.

After treading the path of life for years, he finally corrected his course towards the middle by making some progress in the path of determinism.

This was true spiritual engineering!