The Mech Touch

What would happen if Ves swapped out the design spirit of one of his mech models?

The answer wasn't obvious to him. Would the altered mech remain as effective as before? Would it suffer from an identity crisis? Ves wasn't sure.

He tried to imagine the outcome of a couple of scenarios.

For instance, what if he pulled out the Solemn Guardian from the Desolate Soldier and put the Superior Mother in its place?

Very clearly, millions of LMC customers would immediately be confronted by a mech that had become a radically different product!

The Desolate Soldier practically lost its only selling point, its powerful and widely-applicable duty-oriented glow.

In its stead was a different glow that was anything but encouraging! Unless the customers were Hexers, which was extremely unlikely considering that the Desolate Soldier was just a third-class mech, a lot of mech pilots wouldn't be able to do their jobs anymore because their own mechs hated them suddenly!

"If I was crazy enough to make this swap, then the LMC will instantly lose its reputation!" Ves shuddered in fear!

It was a very frightening thought that Ves could ruin his entire business empire by performing a single reckless move.

In fact, the LMC barely averted disaster in a similar scenario recently.

When Nyxie perished during the Battle of the Abyss, the Doom Guard suddenly lost the support of one of its two design spirits.

Ves had acted quickly by putting Lufa in Nyxie's place. While that irrevocably changed the Doom Guard's glow, his quick measure succeeded in preserving most of the value of the product.

This was the only real instance where Ves had actually swapped a design spirit.

While this case was a bit complicated due to the fact that the Doom Guard had multiple design spirits, it still provided Ves with a lot of insights.

An unanticipated swap may not necessarily lead to a severe decline in performance. However, even if Lufa managed to rescue the Doom Guard, he did not fit in perfectly with the new mech.

Lufa possessed very different attributes and characteristics from Nyxie. This meant that certain design choices were no longer optimal. Even the name of the mech was no longer accurate!

When Ves was ready to design a successor of the Doom Guard, he intended to apply some extensive corrections and adjustments in order to conform it to this profound change.

That was something that he should consider for later.

For now, Ves had to determine what would happen if Ves hastily swapped out the Golden Cat for another design spirit for the Bright Beam Prime.

This change was needed because Venerable Davia Stark adamantly insisted on maintaining her distance from the Larkinson Clan. While she was willing to fight alongside the Larkinsons against worthy enemies, she did not agree to abandon her heritage and change her loyalties.

This meant that it wasn't appropriate to pair her up with the Golden Cat.

Which design spirit should he choose?

He didn't have many options. He doubted that Venerable Stark would play nice with Lufa, Bravo or the Superior Mother.

Pairing her up with Zeigra also sounded like a poor idea? The deceased Crown Cat's rage and fury would only egg Venerable Stark on, causing her to become even more unstable than before!

"Why am I even considering these options? The answer is actually rather obvious."

Out of all of his design spirits, only two complimented ranged mechs.

Prophet Ylvaine provided an obvious benefit to a ranged mech. The design spirit was able to lend limited predictive abilities to a devout Ylvainan mech pilot. The Deliverer and the Transcendent Punisher had already proven the effectiveness of this mystical enhancement!

Of course, the limitations were also clear. Ylvainan mechs weren't as ubiquitous as before. Ever since the Ylvaine Protectorate defected to the Friday Coalition, it got rid of all of its Holy Soldiers and Deliverers.

This effectively starved Ylvaine of a huge amount of spiritual feedback. Even if a lot of Ylvainan citizens still prayed to it, the revived spiritual entity was not as capable of absorbing all of this worship as the Superior Mother.

In fact, for a prophet, Ylvaine was actually quite incompetent in this regard!

"They're two different entities." Ves muttered. "The Superior Mother inherited Cynthia's energy devouring talents. She's also made with a spiritual network in mind. Ylvaine on the other hand focuses all of his capabilities into prophecy."

If Ves hadn't designed the Transcendent Punisher, Ylvaine would have probably been pushed to the brink of starvation. A handful of outdated Holy Soldiers and Deliverers were far from enough to feed a grown and matured spiritual entity!

In any case, Ves did not need to consider Ylvaine any further. The religious design spirit was very partial towards Ylvainans. Despite the friendly face of the Ylvainan Faith, it was actually quite closed towards nonbelievers.

There was no chance that Venerable Stark would be able to pilot the Bright Beam Prime if Ylvaine took over the mech!

"Then that leaves me with the Illustrious One."

Ves still did not understand the full depth of the luminar design spirit. Part of it was because he knew too little about luminars, whether it was their race, their history or their tech.

Another part of it was because the Illustrious One absorbed the strength of the Blinding One.

Though Ves managed to learn more about the Illustrious One by studying the performance of the Crystal Lord Mark II and working on the Blinding Mech Project, he still did not feel he had plumbed the depths of this strange design spirit.

"Well, whatever. It is an excellent complement to laser rifleman mechs."

What Ves liked about the Illustrious One was that he was a neutral design spirit. Despite his alien nature, he possessed a relatively unbiased attitude against humans.

Ves studied the customer base of the Crystal Lord Mark I and Mark II carefully. It's mech pilots reflected a wide variety of different people. There were male mech pilots, female mech pilots, religious mech pilots, secularists mech pilots and so on who managed to utilize the landbound rifleman mechs well.

This meant that the Illustrious One should neither favor nor disfavor Venerable Stark. In fact, the luminar design spirit cared more about the luminar crystals integrated in the Bright Beam Prime than its mech pilot!

In order to make the Illustrious One feel more at home in a machine that was originally designed with the Golden Cat in mind, Ves had implemented some extensive changes.

Aside from implementing some easy upgrades, he tried to add as many luminar crystals alongside P-stones as possible. Both materials played a key role in the Bright Beam Prime. The former complemented the design spirit and the latter complemented the mech pilot.

When Venerable Stark initially piloted the Bright Beam Prime, the mech did not exhibit any remarkable strengths.

In fact, one of the uncertainties to Ves was whether the 40 P-stones he integrated in the mech and its upgraded rifle would do anything.

Due to the relative fragility of P-stones, Ves had to put them into protective shells, which isolated the prime material from the mech to an extent.

Even so, Ves managed to place them close enough to luminar crystals to be confident that an interaction might take place between the two materials.

This was especially because Ves forced the Illustrious One to fill up the P-stones with spiritual energy!

Unfortunately, the 40 P-stones weren't very large. Even if the material was capable of storing much more spiritual energy than Unending alloy, in the end Ves was only able to fill them up to a fraction of the level of the Valkyrie Prime and the other prime mechs.

If Ves had to make an estimate, the Bright Beam Prime only amounted to around 460 Ves when filled at maximum capacity. That was all the 40 P-stones could bear in the form of raw spiritual energy.

This time, Ves knew for sure that this was not the limit. His P-stones previously bore spiritual fragments and design spirits that should have been very powerful.

The difference was that spiritual entities and spiritual fragments consisted of concentrated spiritual energy. In contrast, free spiritual energy floated in the form of gas particles, which was far from efficient.

Even though that sounded rather bad, one of the advantages of keeping spiritual energy in this looser form was that it could easily be put into use. The Bright Beam Prime hardly exhibited any delay when Venerable Stark attempted to resonate with her mech!

Unlike the Larkinson expert pilots, Venerable Stark possessed much greater resonance strength. Her difficult journey and the hurdles she had to overcome had caused her to develop a strong and aggressive will!

Joshua's resonance strength measured at less than 3 laveres. Davia's resonance strength almost hit 20 laveres!

This did not mean that Venerable Davia was six times stronger than Venerable Joshua. The lavere scale did not work that way.

However, there was no doubt that Venerable Davia was capable of exhibiting much greater resonance than the demigods who had recently broken through!

"Oh my! Look at that! The Bright Beam Prime is practically glowing like an actual expert mech!" Gloriana alarmingly observed from her work station.

The entire observation room became enthralled when Venerable Davia resonated with the Bright Beam Prime. Despite lacking Unending alloy, the resonance shield surrounding the mech was just as bright if not brighter than the resonance shields of the other prime mechs!

This indirectly proved that stronger expert pilots were capable of drawing out a lot more strength out of prime mechs!

"To be fair, this applies to expert mechs as well, so this shouldn't be a surprising result." Ves remarked as he checked the pilot telemetry. "The extraordinary power an expert mech is able to display not only based on the resonating materials it incorporates, but also the strength of the expert pilot. If one of them is weak, they basically act as a limitation that constrains the performance of the combination."

In other words, the other five prime mechs actually possessed a lot more potential than they had shown. It was just that their expert pilots were simply too bad to draw out more than a fraction of their potential!

This was what made the Bright Beam Prime so special. Its expert pilot was so different that Ves managed to gain several important insights by comparing Davia's performance to that of his other expert pilots!

"The contrast is very clear! Venerable Davia is the only expert pilot at our disposal who is much more developed in terms of resonance strength. The Bright Beam Prime should have actually been one of our weakest prime mechs because it doesn't incorporate as much prime material. Yet due to the human factor, it's actually the opposite!"

The Bright Beam Prime soon prepared to fire.

The mech had already fired its custom laser rifle under normal circumstances.

Now, it was attempting to fire while Venerable Stark tried her best to focus the prime resonance on empowering the weapon.

The laser rifle glowed brighter. While the weapon did not expose any of its P-stones and luminar crystals, Ves could practically imagine them interacting together in a mysterious fashion.

"Fire!"

The prime mech unleashed a glowing bright beam that instantly hit a floating piece of scrap and burned straight through over ten meters of different metals compacted together!

Once the beam pierced through the other end, it continued to zap forward at the speed of light until it disappeared in deep space!

The observation room fell silent. Ves and Gloriana froze as they studied the meters that detected how much power the attack held.

"This.. I think the Bright Beam Prime can threaten an expert mech." Gloriana guessed. "It's definitely better than the Giant Killer in this role!"

Ves did not remain fascinated by the power of the prime resonance-empowered attack for long.

"Please fire again, Venerable Stark."

Under his instructions, the Bright Beam Prime unleashed several more full-powered attacks.

The mech was unable to maintain its resonance state any longer after firing its rifle for a third time.

The P-stones had run out of spiritual energy!