The Mech Touch

The new prime mech projects brought a lot of excitement to Ves and Gloriana. While their current mech design projects were already interesting enough, much of their work blended into a routine at this point.

They already settled most of the surprises and interesting design choices of the current round of mech designs. Aside from some design spirit issues, Ves did not expect to make any drastic changes or revisions to the current iterations of mech designs. All of the prototype testing and number crunching that would take place in the remaining couple of months were solely devoted to refining and polishing their current work.

Therefore, the novelty of designing and fabricating five new prime mechs cast away a lot of boredom.

In order to deliver all of the prime mechs as soon as possible, Ves and Gloriana already decided to split up some of their responsibilities. One of the problems they faced was that the production equipment in their personal workshops needed a lot of time to process Unending alloy. They had to put both workshops into use in order to make the best use of their time.

Unfortunately, diverting so much time on developing their prime mechs would definitely affect the progress of their main design projects.

"It's okay." Ves spoke. "Even though I said that we should meet our deadlines, I don't want to wait a couple of months until we are finally capable of supplying our remaining expert pilots with prime mechs. Every day of practice counts."

Fortunately, they had Juliet. While it wasn't fair to burden her with supervising all six mech design projects, it wasn't as if Ves and Gloriana decided to isolate themselves.

The married couple could still drop by the Design Department every day and perform some essential guidance. Due to the nature of the current phase of the projects, they didn't need to perform all of the calculation and modelling work by hand.

Of course, it was still better if they were present all of the time, but it wasn't strictly necessary. Juliet was always at hand if a project ever hit a wall.

Once they agreed on a plan, the pair immediately went to work.

Gloriana happily stroked Clixie's back as she sat down behind a terminal. Her cat comfortably stretched across her lap and settled for a long petting session.

"Miaow~"

Since Lucky was working together with Calabast every day, Ves was starting to miss his gem cat.

Fortunately, he gained a new pet.

"Bygul, come out here!"

[Mew!]

The physical projectors in his workshop came to life. They projected a distinct electronic cat. Once Bygul appeared into view, the cat floated over to Ves and hung on his shoulder like a needy feline.

Ves scratched Bygul's chin.

"Hehehe. You're a good boy, aren't you? You're not as naughty as Lucky, that's for sure."

[Mew mew mew!]

Once Ves satisfied his cat addiction, he began to tackle his first prime mech.

Due to the need to apply considerable changes or modifications to the Shield of Samar and the Bright Spear Prime, Gloriana took it upon herself to figure out how to apply Unending alloy to their designs.

That left Ves with the relatively easier and more straightforward task of preparing the Bright Sword Prime, the Bright Beam Prime and the Piranha Prime.

The Bright Beam Prime was the most interesting and uncertain of the three of the three prime mechs. Whereas the Bright Sword Prime and the Piranha Prime were merely straightforward adaptations of their current mech design projects, the rifleman mech demanded greater attention.

How would Ves be able to integrate P-stone into Venerable Davia Stark's machine?

"Technically speaking, P-stone is also a prime material. It's actually much better at storing energy than Unending alloy."

The issue was that 40 P-stone didn't amount to a lot of material. It sounded impressive when Ves gathered them all together in front of his body, but compared to the scale of a mech, they were miniscule!

Therefore, any enhancement derived from adding P-stone to a mech needed to be implemented in a targeted manner.

When Ves pulled up the design of the rifleman mech configuration of the Bright Warrior IB, he directed his sights towards the rifle.

"Hmm. Since I'm already at it, I can upgrade the entire weapon while I'm at it. There's no need to make the prime mech as economic as possible."

While it took a lot of time to upgrade the Bright Warrior in a comprehensive fashion, it was not that difficult to perform some quick and easy upgrades to the weapon.

Ves replaced cheaper subcomponents with their more expensive counterparts. He reinforced and expanded the rifle in order to enhance its heat capacity, raise its energy throughput and strengthen its damage resistance.

Even though the rifle became twice as heavy, it became a lot more potent!

Since making the rifle larger meant it gained a lot of extra capacity, Ves filled up the extra spaces with P-stones and luminar crystals.

Ves wasn't sure about how the former would interact with the rifle when Venerable Stark attempted to resonate with the prime material. There was a significant chance that nothing would happen at all because he completely misused the P-stone.

He shrugged. "Oh well. I'll just get back to the drawing board and try again if that's the case."

His lack of understanding on how prime materials and prime resonance interacted with the systems of a mech limited his options. He had no choice but to resort to trial and error to figure out the correct use of P-stone.

Aside from the weapon, Ves also integrated a couple of P-stones to the frame of the mech. He wanted to see if these additions could enhance other aspects of the Bright Beam Prime when it was under the influence of prime resonance.

Once Ves applied some other quick upgrades to increase the performance of the Bright Beam Prime, he implemented a final change.

"Although I don't have any Unending alloy left to offer the best possible protection to this mech, I still have plenty of Breyer alloy to go around!"

Ves basically went old school with the Bright Beam Prime's design. The original Bright Warrior Version C used to be a bridge mech that relied on its Breyer alloy armor system to withstand powerful attacks.

While he had decided against implementing Breyer alloy in the Bright Warrior Mark I Version B due to his inability and the scarcity of the material, it was no problem to lavish as much of it as he could on a single mech!

He quickly revised the entire structure and armor system. With lots of Breyer alloy applied to the exterior and interior of the mech, the Bright Beam Prime became deceptively resilient!

Although it was not capable of confronting expert mechs and first-class mechs, the prime rifleman mech was more than capable of coming on top in a duel against any other second-class mech!

That was the extent of the changes made to the unfinished Bright Warrior IB design. He transferred his work to Gloriana so that she could work out some of the kinks before he turned to the other two prime mechs.

The Bright Sword Prime was supposed to be a straightforward prime conversion. However, Ves wanted to make sure that Venerable Dise adapted well to the mech.

In order to make sure she was happy with her prime mech, Ves decided to invite Ketis to his personal workshop.

"What do you need me to do, Ves?" She asked.

"Come over here. You've already worked on the swordsman mech variant of the Bright Warrior Version B design. I'd like you to help me customize this variant for Venerable Dise."

"I see. You're right to call on me." She replied as she sat next to Ves. Since she worked on the Bright Warrior IB Project, she was already familiar with its nuances. She immediately outlined some quick adjustments. "The Bright Warrior is designed to accommodate a general fighting style. Most of our Larkinson mech pilots haven't trained in any distinct swordsmanship styles. They're just utilizing a mix of standard techniques and some individual moves that are specific to a state, mech academy or mech instructor. As a result, the swordsman mech configuration is too rounded. It doesn't excel at anything aside from reliability."

This was typical to mass-produced mechs. With thousands of Larkinson mech pilots, it was too difficult to please everyone. The Design Department had no choice but to find the most optimal middle ground as possible in order to ensure that every mech pilot was at least somewhat compatible with the Bright Warrior.

Ketis crossed her arms. "To be honest, our Swordmaiden mech pilots won't like the Bright Warrior. It's too… average. I'm not talking about its quality or its glow or something like that. The Bright Warrior is actually a good design for what it is meant to do. It's just that our Swordmaidens excel in an offensive, momentum-based fighting style. We are used to swinging heavy greatswords, which the Bright Warrior doesn't exactly accommodate."

"Then let's change that." He said. "While we don't have the time to turn the Bright Sword Prime into the perfect Swordmaiden mech, it shouldn't be a problem to improve some of its parameters. We can even reuse the Unending greatsword assigned to her Sword Hunter."

The Sword Hunter was the custom mech that Venerable Dise piloted during the Nyxian Gap campaign. While the older mech was too weak to be of use in second-class battles, its greatsword was too good to pass up! Besides, Venerable Dise was already accustomed to wielding this specific weapon.

The two collaborated well on this project. Ves was pleasantly surprised at his first student's performance. Compared to half a year ago, Ketis demonstrated noticeably better judgement and applied her knowledge in a much more thoughtful fashion!

"You've improved." He complimented.

"Thanks." Ketis smiled back at him. "I worked hard to catch up to you. I've already completed a bunch of swordsman mech designs. Although I'm not proud of them, I've learned plenty of lessons along the way. I'm not as ignorant as before. I think I am getting closer and closer to advancing to Journeyman!"

Ves looked closely at her. Her spiritual potential had indeed grown stronger the last time he inspected her mind. Whether she was one step away from becoming a Journeyman was still in question, though. The gap between Apprentice and Journeyman could not be bridged through steady accumulation. An Apprentice needed to accomplish something significant and impactful in order to break past the final bottleneck.

At least that was what Ves concluded from his own breakthrough experience.

"When are you ready to design your much-anticipated Monster Slayer mech?"

"Not until I reach Journeyman." She raised her fist. Her eyes burned with determination. "My first real mech for the Swordmaidens should not be a graduation project. I want to make sure my Monster Slayer is a full Journeyman-level mech design. Anything weaker is not acceptable."

Ves looked worried at her. "Don't you think that your reluctance to begin a major design project might be holding you back from breaking through? If you keep assisting in other projects while designing some unimportant and inconsequential swordsman mechs in your free time, I'm afraid your breakthrough might be delayed for years."

He had a very strong interest in seeing her advance as soon as possible. The more Journeymen in the Design Department, the more time he could spend on other projects such as working on his prime mechs!

"I get what you're saying, Ves. I've been thinking about this problem as well. I think I might propose a commercial mech design to you. I want to take advantage of the LMC's sales and distribution network to propagate one of my personal works. Is that okay?"

Ves smiled and nodded. "You're welcome to do so, Ketis. As I have stated earlier, any mech designer working for the LMC can apply to let us sell their own products. The only caveat is that it won't be sold under the LMC brand."

"That won't be a problem. While I don't think my work will sell for millions, it's enough to satisfy a couple of thousands of customers!"