The Mech Touch

Just kitting out Lucky with the Misfortune Harness did not mean he turned into an expert saboteur.

There was a huge difference between sneaking into guarded facilities in order to surreptitiously munch on exotics in storage and to perform effective sabotage!

What to do first upon entry. How to identify critical components. How to rank them in priority. How to search for key personnel. How to kill them without compromising the other goals of the mission. How to return to the stealth shuttle without getting detected and shot to. Lucky needed to undergo systematic training in order to turn into a capable Black Cat!

Calabast took hold of Lucky, who still wore the black-coated full-body harness, and smiled in an adoring fashion.

"I'll turn you into a true terror after a few days. With all of your capabilities, you'll be able to single-handedly topple entire fortresses! Your abilities are wasted in the hands of Ves."

"Meow!"

As the woman took the gem cat turned commando cat away, Ves completely put Lucky out of his mind and began to cast his mind back to his mech designs.

With two major projects demanding most of his attention, he really didn't have that much time to spend on managing the task force.

Fortunately, the four minor projects demanded much less personal attention. Aside from spending some time on drafting a design and selecting some key components, the assistant mech designers only had to follow his instructions and work out the details by themselves.

While Ves did not have to be personally involved in every decision and implementation, he had to make sure to keep track of the projects and make sure they followed his vision. If the assistants designed without direction, it was impossible to form a spiritual foundation.

Even then, the spiritual foundations of the minor projects were substantially weaker than he was used to. In order to make up for the deficit, Ves had to act wasteful and purposefully transfer a substantial amount of spiritual energy into the incomplete mech designs.

This was a rather forceful and unnatural process of fostering life in a mech design. He felt rather unsure whether the spiritual quality of any of the minor mech designs would meet his standards.

"Well, completing four additional mech designs is better than completing nothing at all. They don't have to be my best work. They just have to meet the LMC's standards."

He already resigned himself to the possibility that all of his minor mech projects wouldn't be as spiritually potent as his major mech projects.

It was like trying to raise several children in a Kinner training camp rather than pouring attention on a single kid in a loving household. The former did the job of training massive amounts of competent adults, but the latter had a considerably higher chance of leading a fulfilling life!

Even so, Ves was very experienced in spiritual manipulation, especially when it came to tying it together with mech design. He had gained an increasing grasp of the rules and mechanisms that affected the formation of spiritual foundations. This meant he could 'game the system' in order to achieve the maximum result with relatively little time investment.

This was important, because the quality, quantity and purity of a mech design's spiritual foundation determined the functioning of spiritual constructs.

A strong, high-quality foundation not only allowed him to form more triggered abilities, but also increase their strength and potency.

A mech design that endured a lot of neglect produced a shaky, spotty foundation that didn't leave Ves with much to work with. Even if he did form a spiritual construct, the triggered ability probably wouldn't meet his expectations.

"I don't have to worry about that at this moment. Their foundations have barely formed."

In the first couple of months, the technical development of the minor projects took primacy. Making the right design choices, structuring the design process and providing guidance to the assistants. The more exotic and exciting implementations came in the later stages when the designs became more solid.

The Chiron, despite its rather low specs, was a very complicated machine. The ability to adapt its shape and change the proportions of its limbs had to be designed from the ground up, which entailed performing a lot of calculations as well as trial and error.

Since Ves decided to reserve the training mech for the Larkinson Clan, he opted to make use of stronger and more premium materials. While this provided the mech cadets with much greater protection against accidents, they were quite expensive and difficult to integrate.

Though Ves found it rather tedious to keep track of all of these changes, Gloriana thought differently.

To her, it was an interesting puzzle!

With Gloriana watching over this minor project with greater attention, the Chiron would definitely become a worthy training mech for the Larkinson Clan.

The Ferocious Piranha was a lot more straightforward. As a spaceborn skirmisher meant to bring the Doom Guard's terror aura to the enemy, the mech just needed to abide by the classic characteristics of its mech type.

It had to excel in mobility, of course. Ves paired the mech design with a very powerful lightweight flight system. As a trade off for its powerful accelerated and quick response times, the wings of the Ferocious Piranha drained energy at a rapid weight, which was quite a serious problem to a machine that couldn't carry a lot of energy cells!

Ves envisioned the Ferocious Piranha to be utilized in rapid strikes, flanking attacks and very quick raids. It had to be able to cross distances in space as rapidly as possible in order to bring its terror glow within the range of an enemy formation.

The damage it inflicted was secondary to the glow it exerted onto the enemy.

That said, Ves did not wish to devolve any of his mechs into glow delivery machines. Therefore, he tried to figure out a way to make his vision for the Ferocious Piranha more distinctive.

"The glow alone isn't capable of breaking enemy mech pilots unless the Ferocious Piranha gets very close. The Doom Guard is at least able to back up its threat with a wide-area flamethrower. A light skirmisher only has some piddly knives."

He failed to come up with good ideas for now, so he decided to mull over the decision later. Perhaps his experiences in the Nyxian Gap might provide him with some inspiration.

When Ves turned to the Sanctuary, he deliberately aimed to keep it simple. As an offensive space knight, its primary function was to maintain a zone that dampened glows as much as possible, whether benign or malignant.

Unlike the Ferocious Piranha, the Sanctuary didn't require too many gimmicks or additional flair. As a mech designed to offer sanctuary against volatile spiritual auras, Ves believed he needed to design the mech as something that conveyed silence, purity and tranquility.

"Kind of.. like a religious mech."

His face grew ugly as the vision he formed of the Sanctuary began to resemble the Transcendent Messenger, Holy Soldier and Deliverer mechs.

"This is not going to be an Ylvainan mech!"

Turning it into an Ylvainan mech meant that most of his customers wouldn't be able to make use of it. Customers would have to go through great lengths to hire devout Ylvainan mech pilots in order to make use of its glow dampening field.

"The mech has to be a product that is accessible to anyone. I don't want to exclude the majority of the mech market."

Ves wasn't sure how he could form a glow dampening field from his existing selection of design spirits.

"Maybe I need to create a new one for this. The most suitable candidates are too exclusive to particular groups of mech pilots."

If he created a specific spiritual product that solely focused on suppressing glows, then it would likely be strong enough to meet his demands.

However, he couldn't exactly form a spiritual product that possessed the right spiritual attributes related to suppressing glows out of nowhere. He needed to collect the right ingredients, and that sounded very difficult, especially in a rather chaotic place like the Nyxian Gap.

He scratched his head. This problem sounded fairly thorny. He made a note in his implant to look out for anything they came across or looted from pirates that might contribute to the creation of the right spiritual product for the Sanctuary.

As for the Crystal Lord Mark II, Ves couldn't be more attached to the project. As his second original mech design, he had long daydreamed of what kind of upgrades and changes he wanted to make in order to turn it into a mech that was ready for the modern battlefield!

The crystal aspect of the mech needed to be maintained, or else it wouldn't do its name justice.

As a mech specifically designed to counter other laser-armed mechs, Ves studied the MTA's component library extensively for a better and more practical crystal to place on the center of the chest.

Surprisingly, he found plenty of suitable substitutes to the original alien crystal. These were human-developed products, so they lacked much of the mystery and unknown applications developed by long-dead aliens.

While that made them simpler to make and easier to understand, their power level wasn't as high as he expected.

"The energy absorption and retaliation functionality are both roughly similar to the products of the crystal builder civilization." Ves noted as he continued to browse the list.

He felt it was a bit of a pity to leave aside alien tech for human tech. However, he had no choice, as the alien crystal technology did not progress and advance because all of its original researchers were long extinct.

Unless Ves founded a research institution that specifically deciphered the alien mechanisms of the crystal builder tech, he could forget about obtaining improved alien crystals.

This was something that required a major investment, but Ves wasn't confident at all that it would pay off in the end.

Ves was a mech designer, not a component developer! Swapping outdated parts for newer ones was a normal approach towards updating old designs.

He just felt a bit depressed because the slightly alien nature of the mech was one of its defining characteristics. Its strange head that consisted of numerous holes that shone like stars looked very ominous. The vapor from the Festive Cloud Generator leaking from those cavities added even more mystique to the machine.

Thinking about the obvious alien influences in the appearance of the original Crystal Lord, Ves couldn't help but scratch his head once again.

"What was I thinking?"

The mech simply looked too weird. Compared to many other mech models on the market, the Crystal Lord Mark I clearly didn't look human enough!

From a marketing standpoint, it made a lot more sense to morph the Crystal Lord Mark II into a more classical humanoid mech.

Yet a part of him wanted to resist this change. As logical as it sounded, he felt he would deprive the Crystal Lord line of its alien heritage in a permanent fashion.

Ves did not wish to cripple or warp the original Crystal Leader fragment which his mother had bestowed to him in the past.

It was that simple act of his ghostly mother that originally set him on the path working with design spirits to empower his mech designs!

"A revision of an old design doesn't have to preserve the original traits. That doesn't mean I should do so in this situation."

He needed to think very deeply on the current and future role of the Crystal Lord. Depending on his choices, he could steer the Crystal Lord into a more human incarnation or he may insist on keeping its original alien character.

Even if he settled this choice, he also had to make other changes to the mech. The original Crystal Lord didn't excite the market enough and the Mark II might follow the same route if he did not change more aspects of the mech.

"Does it need another gimmick?"