The Mech Touch

It was better for Gavin to show Ves what had changed. Words could not fully convey how differently the Doom Guard behaved.

The first footage showed a Doom Guard in the base of the Larkinson Clan back on Cinach VI. A dozen Larkinson mech pilots stared up at the mech with apprehension.

After receiving some sort of signal, they stepped forward and approached the mech.

Their faces contorted a bit as they got close. Some looked like they were about to punch someone. Others looked as if they were ready to sit down and relax.

The problem was that these conditions only lasted a short time. Just a few seconds later, the people who looked excited had abruptly calmed down, and the people who appeared to be relaxed suddenly became alarmed.

Their progress forward slowed. The closer they approached, the more their emotions became subject to rapid flips. The mood swings also grew stronger at close range, which meant that the mech pilots experienced greater difficulties in maintaining a sober mind!

Everyone had a limit.

The weakest ones stopped halfway or so. They switched from battle excitement to unnatural calm like pendulums. The changes were so extreme that they simply did not dare to move any closer towards the Doom Guards for fear of losing their wits!

The people who possessed better control of themselves managed to go further. Ves noticed that the group of stronger mech pilots should probably be identical to the sort of individuals who were able to approach the old Doom Guard.

A strong mind and will allowed anyone to resist external impacts on their minds.

The next footage showed how the altered Doom Guard might affect the battlefield. In a live practice battle, a number of mechs attempted to swarm the lone striker mech.

The Doom Guard allowed the enemy mechs to approach without activating its flamethrower.

When the enemy mechs came close, their formation suddenly became ragged.

As the mechs neared, the machines seemed to lose control!

"This is different!" Ves widened his eyes.

He became intrigued by the changes. A simple change of design spirits caused one of his existing products to exhibit a substantially different effect.

As Ves continued to track what happened to the mechs that went out of control, he noted that they never recovered until the mechs automatically floated out of the range of the Doom Guard!

At that point, the stricken mech pilots managed to escape the field that induced artificial mood swings.

"Very interesting." Ves turned to Gavin's projection. "The mech pilots were unable to control their mechs?"

"They quite literally lost their minds at the time. The way they describe it, they were turning their heads from left to right and back again so many times that they were unable to look straight ahead."

"I see."

This was a different way of debilitating enemy mech pilots in battle. Rather than scaring them away, it rendered them helpless instead.

This was very fatal in a mech battle! Mech pilots controlled their machines through their minds.

The neural interface enabled mechs to transmit a lot of data to the minds of their mech pilots. In turn, if a mech pilot wanted a mech to do something, they had to transmit a mental signal that the neural interface picked up and conveyed to the mech.

If the mind of the mech pilot became compromised to such a degree that they were no longer able to think straight, then the mech no longer received any proper commands!

"While it has only been a few days since the Doom Guards have changed, the implications are staggering." Gavin said. "First, the mech no longer causes people to turn around and run. This is good because any enemies that get caught in the Doom Guard's glow will likely turn into sitting ducks. It's also bad because in space, the mechs will simply continue to soar into the direction of the enemy. Once the enemy mechs reach the other side, their mech pilots will not only be able to regain their wits, but also wreak a lot of havoc in the middle of the defending formation!"

The old Doom Guard excelled at deterring swarms of mechs piloted by weak-willed criminals.

The new Doom Guard was able to affect entire swarms of mechs as well, but the nature of its effects meant that the pirates were better able to overwhelm an outnumbered opponent!

As Gavin explained all of these repercussions, he did mention a beneficial change.

"Strangely enough, the new Doom Guard is more suited to mental resilience training. Some of the Avatars have already started to subject themselves to the new Doom Guard's glow. They all say that trying to maintain lucidity under these conditions is more effective training."

Ves could see how this was the case. The old Doom Guard's glow possessed a creeping and fluctuating sense of terror that was both inexplicable and unblockable. It was very hard for anyone to wrap their minds around it. This disturbing sense of the unknown was very difficult to cope with, even for the mech pilots assigned to pilot these fearsome machines!

In contrast, the new Doom Guard relied on different emotions to debilitate mech pilots. Instead of trying to unnerve and scare them away, the new glow instead forced them to cope with two familiar but rapidly-changing emotions.

Aggression and calm were two emotions that every mech pilot dealt with on a daily basis.

"Each mech pilot has to exhibit at least some aggression in order to fight better. A mech pilot who isn't aggressive won't be able to commit as much to a battle. That is usually detrimental to their ability to immerse and synchronize with their mechs." Ves noted. "Mech pilots also have to be able to remain calm on and off the battlefield."

Gavin nodded. "That's what the other Larkinsons who studied the changes think as well. There are already plans from our side to put all of our mech pilots through special training sessions."

"Hehe. They're in for a treat."

The news was not all good, though. Even though the new Doom Guard was still useful, if in different ways, the abrupt and unannounced changes in performance had deep implications for the LMC.

"We sold a product to more than a million customers with the promise that they get what they paid for." Gavin explained with a grave voice. "Right now, that's not the case anymore. Every Doom Guard has changed, resulting in a lot of disruption. The owners who aren't in a position to fight anyone have to change their plans for their copies, so the problem isn't as critical to them. It's the owners who have employed them in battle recently that have incurred many problems."

The assistant transmitted a few angry letters and official complaints to the LMC. Some of the buyers of the Doom Guards had made use of them in battle when their glows abruptly weakened before changing. The changes affected both enemies and friendlies alike, but because they came so suddenly, the damage was very serious to the side that deployed the new mechs!

The disasters sparked by these unannounced changes already resulted in a lot of inquiries. Angry customers wanted to know why their products changed in specification. The mech market became a lot more suspicious about the Doom Guard and other LMC offerings. What if their glows changed too one day?

The emerging scandal presented the LMC with a severe confidence crisis! If the company didn't do anything soon, its stellar reputation for reliability might take a heavy blow!

Ves frowned. This was a serious problem indeed. It was very taboo for mechs to alter so drastically without any reasonable explanation. None of the manuals or documentation ever mentioned that the glows of his products might be subject to change. This was a severe oversight.

"What do you think, Benny?"

"Our mechs are too useful for the mech market to drop. It's just that our customers will become a lot more reluctant to buy our products if this scandal continues to blow up in the news. Our competitors are grasping at this new development with enthusiasm! While it is only a few days, the shift in perception is already permanent. We'll never be able to restore the confidence of our customers to where it was before."

This was a great shame, but Ves accepted it with a stoic expression.

He did not regret flinging Nyxie to one of the pirate warships. Nyxie's outbreak pretty much demolished the Mortis Greyson, thereby weakening the pirates and sparing many lives. The freed spiritual entity also kept the Unending One busy for a time.

All of this was worth the repercussions! No matter how badly the scandal affected the LMC's reputation, his products would always hold some value. Even if people questioned their reliability, at most his mech company might drop prices in order to make up for lost demand.

"Why aren't you worried, boss? This is a serious problem! It's the greatest threat to the company since those worries about brainwashing crept up. Some of the more alarming scenarios even predict that our current sales will be halved as a result of lower confidence in our mech models!"

Ves grinned and waved his hand. All of the projections that illustrated the LMC's difficulties disappeared. "What is lost can be regained. Before, we already earned an astounding amount of money each month. What's the big deal if we earn half that amount? It's still an astonishing number that we can use to invest in our clan. Besides, the public hasn't heard about what happened in the Nyxian Gap. We can use that to force the news cycles to change their reporting."

He began to discuss a new plan with Gavin. The assistant slowly lost his concerns. He became excited instead.

"This can actually work! No, it's already a given that it will work. We just have to package the announcement in the right way." His smile dropped a bit. "Still, that doesn't solve the issue with our current customers. Unlike the public that don't have a chance of buying our mechs, the people who already bought and used our mechs all have legitimate complaints towards us. If we don't do anything, then the first ones who bring their complaints to the MTA will have a very good case against us. You should know how the MTA deals with these matters!"

The MTA disapproved of mechs changing midway for whatever reason. While not every mech had to be extremely reliable, for them to be so poorly-conceived that they transformed into something else was not a positive development.

If it happened too often, then mech buyers throughout the galaxy would become a lot hesitant about purchasing a mech!

This was what the MTA least wanted to see. Anything that caused mechs to be sold less often posed a serious threat to the supremacy of mechs in modern society.

This was why Gavin thought that Ves should be very concerned.

"If you ask me, boss, we should outright compensate the customers who have suffered real losses as a result of this incident. We can make them shut up if we offer them money up to the full price of a Doom Guard depending on how much losses they suffered. For the few cases where the accusers actively deployed a Doom Guard in the middle of a battle, we can selectively buy them off so that they won't take us to the MTA's court."

"How much will this cost?" Ves asked.

Gavin winced. "We sold more than a million Doom Guards, you know. While not every customer has suffered major damage, the ones that did usually demand a lot of money. As for the rest, they need some compensation as well because they are stuck with a product that no longer performs as expected. It doesn't matter if the new Doom Guard is just as useful as the old one. It's different, and it's not the mech we initially sold."

"How. Much?"

"Uhm.. at least 500 billion hex credits?"