The Mech Touch

With his father's permission, Ves decided to add two triggered abilities to the Devil Tiger.

The first one was a Corrosion Pulse that was based on the pulsing abilities of some of his other mech designs. Simply put, the ability allowed the Devil Tiger to release a radial wave that possessed a concentrated corrosion effect.

The closer the enemy, the greater its potency! The best part about the triggered ability was that it was capable of ignoring most physical barriers! Therefore, it was a killer move against any machine with delicate internals. Not even warships were immune to this effect!

The ability worked best against materials and in particular against powerful opponents.

In order to complement the Corrosion Pulse ability, Ves added the Primal Roar ability as well.

Based on the roars employed by the dark gods and the fearsome glow of his Doom Guard design, Ves added a way for the Devil Tiger to release a spiritual wave that was able to frighten and intimidate mech pilots.

This was a great way for his father to subdue a large number of enemy pirates. The weaker their wills, the faster they crumbled. Even stronger-willed pirates should experience some difficulties depending on the growth of the Devil Tiger and its design spirit.

Ves didn't have the time to add anything else. He had already accomplished a lot of different improvements in a very short amount of time.

Part of that was because he limited himself to easy changes. At his level of competence, he was able to work quite quickly, taking minutes to accomplish something that would take a typical Apprentice hours to complete.

Another part of it was because he already formulated and stored a lot of different potential improvements in his implant. The benefit of having the Archimedes Rubal was that he could store all of his ideas and build on them whenever he was in the mood to do so. Over years, Ves accumulated quite a lot of them, and now he picked out the most appropriate ones, thereby allowing him to skip hours or days of work.

While he had to work quite intensively to cram all of his desires into the Devil Tiger, he still retained at least some of his focus. He wanted to talk to his father in person for a very long time, and this might be the only window of opportunity he could get in his life.

Once he and his parents went their separate ways, they might not meet each other again. This made it even more important for Ves to cherish this precious moment!

"Dad.. can you tell me who my mother truly is?" Ves hesitantly asked. "She's obviously not normal. Did she used to be part of the Compact?"

"I can't answer that question." His father said as he watched his son work on his mech. "I don't know too much about mother's past. She doesn't want to share too much about it. All I know is that she has spent a long time fleeing from the Compact. She lost all of her companions along the way. The setbacks she suffered and dangers she encountered has marked her deeply. It took a long time for her to recover to an extent. Having you and raising you was a turning point in her life. She was much worse before you were born."

That partially explained why she was so secretive and bossy towards him. Someone who went through a perilous chase across the galaxy must have developed many instincts that were geared towards survival.

"Why did she die early?" He asked. "And how come she was able to get back to life in this form?"

"Do I look like I understand how all of this magic works? While I have long gotten over the shock that people can perform all of these amazing feats, that doesn't mean I understand how it works. I'm just a mech pilot."

"An expert pilot." Ves pointedly replied. "Your sensitivity and understanding towards my mother's magic' should be higher than normal people."

"That doesn't make much of a difference."

Ves momentarily paused his work in order to study his father very closely. Now that he was looking closely, he sensed that his father was different from the other expert pilots that he had encountered.

For one, Ryncol exerted a lot of control over his force of will. He kept an iron grip on it, preventing it from spilling out and affecting the people around him. Whether he did that to avoid influencing his son or because his mother taught him how to do so, it was impressive nonetheless.

What distressed Ves a bit was that his father developed quite an aggressive orientation for his will!

In fact, if he didn't know any better, he felt it was identical to that of Zeigra!

"Dad.. how did you advance to your current rank? As far as I know, you aren't expert pilot material. You are long past the prime age for that. You didn't break through back when you served in the Mech Corps. How come you're completely different?"

In the past, Ves and every Larkinson knew that Ryncol was not comparable to his older brother. Venerable Ark Larkinson advanced early in his career and became a prominent star of the family. This was despite the similar battles they fought in during the previous Bright-Vesia War!

"Your mother 'helped' me, in a way. She told me that I didn't have the qualifications to become an expert pilot, but tried out a method that will allow me to become one by force. It.. it was not something I wanted to experience, but it worked out in the end. I am fully in control of my strength."

"Did she.. merge your mind with the Devil Tiger's design spirit?" Ves asked suspiciously as he observed several worrisome clues.

"I had to fight against the big cat. The two of us were locked in a duel. To prevent him from eating me, I had to be stronger than him in order to absorb him instead."

His father rambled on a bit about his experiences. He wasn't good at describing them, but his words offered Ves enough clues to get the gist of how his mother managed to elevate him to expert pilot.

Ves admired his mother! If he interpreted his father correctly, his mother managed to forcefully elevate his father from a spiritually-weak mech pilot into a potent if abnormal expert pilot!

He eagerly took notes and recorded as much of his thoughts and observations into his implant as possible.

While Ves had already found a way to induce mech pilots with spiritual potential to become expert candidates, he didn't have a solution for the majority who lacked this precious quality.

If Ves could enable some of these normal individuals to advance, then that would open up a lot of potential promotion opportunities for his clansmen!

Of course, he also became aware of risks surrounding the method of his mother. Stuffing a piece of his design spirits in the head of a mech pilot was very dangerous, and he wasn't quite clear what techniques his mother employed to increase the safety and success rate of the merger process.

Ves tentatively labeled this theoretical technique as spiritual talent implantation. This was because it could quite literally implant someone else's talent in spirituality to another person!

The implications were staggering, but so were the many possible ways it could go wrong.

From his current understanding of how spirituality worked, this was an exceedingly dangerous move! The recipient would always be weaker than the donor. This meant that the most likely outcome was that the foreign spiritual fragment would instead absorb the recipient and become the body's new occupant!

Ves briefly shook his head. This was not the time to explore this notion any further. There was plenty of time afterwards to delve in this research topic.

"Your mother died due to succumbing to some sort of fatal wound." His father answered one of his earlier questions. "She did not die of a wound to her body. Otherwise, she could have received treatment from a hospital back in the Bright Republic. Instead, one of her pursuing enemies managed to damage her soul. That was how she explained it to me, at least."

That was a plausible, if worrying answer. If the Five Scrolls Compact was capable of harming people's spirits directly, then they were probably very good at assassination! After all, most people and organizations simply weren't on guard against spiritual attacks!

"Do you know the details about her wound?"

"I think she implied that her enemies destroyed or captured a piece of her soul. She has become incomplete ever since that. She's like a breached starship that is slowly venting air. She told me that she can't fix the hull breach. All she can do is to constantly absorb more air from other sources to keep herself alive. Your mother wasn't able to do that during your childhood, so that was why she died early."

That explained a lot of unanswered questions. No wonder his mother wanted to suck him dry all the time. Just as he suspected, her existence literally depended on it! Fortunately, this shouldn't be much of a problem anymore. His mother had not only grown stronger and gained more options, but also gained access to another source of energy.

"Did she ever explain how she lingered after her death?"

Ryncol shook his head. "No. I'm just happy that she has returned. You cannot imagine the delight I feel for having her back. I don't care what she did to return to life, and I am not versed in the details. I think.. powerful individuals like her don't live and die like normal people. I have always suspected that she is older than she appears."

"How old?"

"Maybe as old as your grandfather."

"Are you serious?!"

"That's just a conservative estimate." His father smiled wryly at Ves. "Other times, she comes across as positively ancient. It's rather strange, because she also has some youthful aspects, though she only shows that side of her when she's happy and relaxed."

If his mother used to be a member of the Compact, then Ves could buy the theory that his mother was much older than his father.

His mother was too strong for her apparent age. Her abilities were so sophisticated that he didn't think that she could possess so much power if she was only fifty or seventy years old. It took a long time to accumulate so much power!

Ryncol did not talk about his wife any further, as he could say little else. Ves found it rather strange that his father knew so little about someone he decided to tie the knot with. This was not typical for a Larkinson!

"This is love, Ves. It doesn't always have to make sense. Sometimes, love doesn't need to abide by a checklist in order to work. No matter how old she is or what kind of weighty past she bears, I love her, and she loves me back. Despite her obvious power and height, she never thought or treated me as lesser. We respect each other, and we had you. Aren't you in a relationship yourself?"

Ves hesitantly smiled. "Yes. She is.. quite a personality. We're quite different, but we respect each other as well. I'm about to get married soon as long as I can get back in time to make it for the wedding."

"I heard."

"Will.. will you be able to attend?"

"You know that's not possible. Unless the threat of the Five Scrolls Compact is completely gone, we won't be able to lift our heads out of the depths of the Nyxian Gap. The last thing we want to do is to draw our enemies towards you. While the Compact is able to track your mother and I, it shouldn't know about our current identities. As long as that is the case, you won't attract their attention. Let's make sure it stays that way."