The Mech Touch

Though Yelkin was young, he was remarkably bright as far as Ves could tell. Even he felt tempted to take the teenager under his wing.

In the past, he might have considered someone like Yelkin to be his younger brother of sorts. Ves briefly thought back of his brief interactions with Oleg.

It was different now. He had grown older and advanced to Journeyman. No matter how young he was when he reached this state, no one ever considered a Journeyman to be a youngster anymore.

At his age and rank, he was catapulted to the ranks of mid-level mech designers. He had reached the phase in his career where it no longer made sense for him to be buddies with other beginning mech designers and mech design students.

Instead, an invisible gulf had formed between him and the aforementioned people. As an older, wiser and vastly more successful mech designer, he had to think about starting to take on his own students.

In fact, he already did, though he didn't think he was doing much to guide his current students. Gloriana had already taken on the responsibility of teaching Rennie and Maisie Ann so Ves only had to make sure that Maikel and Zanthar were on the right track.

To be honest, Ves hadn't invested too much in the two young men. Part of that was because the original purpose for teaching them had partially become redundant now that Ves had broken off from the Larkinson Family.

Unlike before where only a trueblood Larkinson must take over his legacy in the future, there were over fifty other individuals in the Design Department who had the potential to carry on his mantle.

Whether Larkinson blood flowed through their veins or not didn't matter to Ves. Anyone who was a member of the clan and connected to the Larkinson Network was trustworthy enough in his eyes.

Still, Ves didn't want to leave a job half-finished, so he simply carried on with instructing Maikel and Zanthar, if only to gain some valuable teaching experience.

One of them might even be successful like Ketis, who was very close to becoming a Journeyman herself.

"Are there any other students studying under Dr. Navarro like you?" Gloriana curiously inquired as she held Clixie to her chest.

"Miaow."

The feline looked quite curious at the huge tree structure. It was as if she was itching to climb it all the way to the top!

"I'm the only one so far. The other mech designers working for Adaptive Solutions are just assistants." Yelkin answered.

"How many assistants are working for his company?"

"Around hundred, more or less. They tend to come and go once in a while. Some gain newer and better opportunities, while others are in the need of employment after they graduated with a degree in biomech design."

Gloriana sent a sharp glance at Ves.

Her message was very clear. If a Journeyman Mech Designer who only sold tens of thousands of mechs a year was able to employ a hundred assistants, why shouldn't they be able to do better?

Ves minutely shook his head.

It wasn't the same. Yelkin's story made it clear that the Novices and Apprentices who chose to work for Adaptive Solutions hardly developed any loyalty or commitment to their employer. They just wanted to earn their paychecks while gaining some valuable experience and learning resources along the way.

Those kinds of mech designers weren't suitable to Ves. They weren't interested in signing on to the Larkinson Clan on a permanent basis either.

While there was nowhere to go right now for any assistant that quit working in the Design Department, it was best to hire loyal and obedient assistants right from the start.

Ves needed people with the right mindset in order to make sure that the design teams operated smoothly without needing to play nanny. This was definitely going to be at least five times as hard if he began to recruit second-class mech designers.

Even the most average second-class mech designers were quite full of themselves! Their overall quality was still leagues ahead of any third-class mech designer due to the stricter entry requirements and greater study load.

He wasn't even sure if he'd be able to recruit enough assistant mech designers that were willing to play by his rules during his stay in Prosperous Hill.

As Ves wondered about his recruitment issues, the group finally passed through a huge entrance.

The interior of the tree-like structure looked similar to how it was outside. However, the atmosphere was different, both literally and figuratively.

The air was completely controlled and sterile in order to minimize the chances that it could affect the mechs being worked on in the servicing halls.

As a facility that was largely devoted to repair, maintain or upgrade the products sold by Adaptive Solutions, it was not set up like a repair facility for classical mechs or machines.

He did not encounter a boisterous hall where bots, production equipment and crews of mech technicians handled a lot of metal parts. Instead, he came across strange pools filled with murky liquid. Biomechs with visible battle damage were partially submerged in each pool.

Nobody attended to these organic machines. The only humans in the hall were a sparse amount of personnel who wore lab coats and checked the consoles installed next to every pool.

Yelkin seemed to know what Ves and the rest were wondering about. He smiled at their puzzlement.

"It doesn't look exciting, but this is how biomechs are repaired."

"I thought biomechs are able to regenerate to some extent. Is it necessary to send some of these mechs back? They don't have a scratch on them as far as I know."

"Any living machine that either incurred heavy damage or lacks the special materials to regenerate their core components need to be sent back to us." Yelkin calmly explained. "They also get sent back if they are in need of getting updated to a newer iteration of their design."

Ves raised his eyebrow. "They actually get upgraded like this?"

"Sure. The mech is already doing most of the work itself. You just need to put the necessary nutrients and energy close enough for them to be able to sustain any regeneration or transformation processes. That's what the pool is for. They are all genetically programmed for this. The supervisors you see are merely there to make sure that no mutations or any other oddities occur. It's easy enough to undo an unintended change when it is just taking place, but it's a lot harder to undo it after the mech has completed its transformation."

The soupy pools looked like a cross section of an exobeast's stomach. Ves certainly wouldn't want to swim in it. All of the acids and other dangerous materials mixed into the liquid would probably corrode his body in an instant!

Yelkin led the group upwards. Fortunately, they didn't have to take the long way up and ascend via the spiralling surface. They instead entered a large elevator installed near the center of the hollow tree trunk structure.

The ride upwards was fast and smooth. Once they reached at least two hundred meters upwards, they entered a floor that was no longer occupied with any pools.

It was instead set up as an exhibition room where many of Frederico Navarro's mech designs were put on display.

What impressed both Ves and Gloriana was that the mechs put on display were not projections or simple scale models.

"Are they…" Gloriana asked in a fascinated tone.

Yelkin grinned. "That's right. These are actual, physical mechs that are genetically and biomechanically identical to our real products. My teacher has just tweaked their growth setting so that they never grow beyond the scale of a human."

There was a greater meaning in the scale that Dr. Navarro chose for his iconic biomechs. Seeing them put on a raised pedestal where the light shone at them in the most flattering way made them look oddly.. familiar.

"They look like mutated humans." Gloriana straightforwardly remarked.

The biomechs were humanoid in appearance. Each of them looked like people who Dr. Navarro had skinned, causing them to look like the victims of a serial killer. If not for the different pigments of their fleshy surface, it would have been far too easy to confuse them for human bodies instead of scaled-down biomechs!

"I don't see any biomechs with exoskeletons in this display room." Ves commented.

"My teacher is not a fan of that style. Hard exoskeletons interfere with the transformations that he is known for. While covered biomechs do have their place, Dr. Navarro is not in the business of designing them. He is quite content with the flexible mechs he has designed up to this point."

Many biomechs were covered by exoskeletons of sorts. Naked flesh alone was far too vulnerable and soft to withstand attacks by themselves. Flesh was seen as the equivalent of internals in classical mechs, so they should be protected from damage as much as possible. Grown exoskeletons neatly addressed this need.

However, there was another school of biomech design that favored 'naked' or fleshy biomechs. Humanity encountered plenty of exobeasts throughout the galaxy who were able to resist a huge amount of punishment with their muscle density and the toughness of their flesh alone!

By extracting this tissue and researching it to the point where they were able to reverse-engineer and cultivate the hard muscle mass themselves, they could be grown on an industrial scale for use in mechs and other applications.

Ves looked quite impressed at the seemingly 'skinless' biomechs. It was undoubtedly harder to design a good mech without the benefit of a hard exoskeleton.

The latter took a lot of cues from classical mech design. Other than the fact that the materials and production methods were different, classical mechs and covered biomechs shared many of the same design principles, thereby making it easy to succeed in designing one that could achieve commercial success.

In fact, some biomech designers even eschewed grown armor plates and simply bolted on metal plates instead in order to shorten the growing period!

Then there were biomechs that took a more radical turn from conventional mech design.

Uncovered biomechs were significantly harder to design. The defensive properties of fleshy mechs were vastly different. While their surface wasn't as damage resistant, much of their muscle mass exhibited a uniform degree of damage resistance.

A simple analogy to explain the implications was to compare an egg to a block of cheese.

An egg shell was quite hard, but the application of a sufficient amount of force would eventually lead to a breach. Once a hole had formed, the vulnerable internals were highly susceptible to damage.

In contrast, a thick block of cheese offered pretty much the same level of resistance whether it was applied to the surface or deeper inside the biomachine.

The reality was more complicated than that, but this was a convenient way to understand the resistance profile of a fleshy biomech.

As long as the quality of the muscle mass of a biomech was high enough, its damage resistance could easily surpass that of a covered biomech or classical mech!

After walking past a dozen interesting uncovered biomechs, Ves asked another question.

"Is it possible to pilot these mini mechs?"

"Of course, sir. We don't stick tiny mech pilots in them, but it is easy to insert a small transceiver in place of its usual cockpit. A mech pilot immersed inside a simulator pod can remotely connect to these display pieces and control them in the manner of an actual mech."

That sounded interesting, but not entirely practical. While it sounded like a great idea to field infantry-sized mechs, the signal that enabled them to be piloted from a distance could easily be hijacked or scrambled by enemies.

An odd idea suddenly entered his mind.

The reason why both organic and mechanical mini mechs were impractical was due to the vulnerability of their control mechanism.

The ideal solution was for them to be controlled by a tiny mech pilot, but that was absurd for obvious reasons.

Yet what if there was an alternate solution? What if he could stuff a pilot inside these mini mechs who had no body?

For example, Ves managed to harvest the near-complete spirituality of Venerable Foster after the previous battle. What would happen if he tried to integrate it with a human-sized mech?

Would he.. be able to recreate an expert mech on a human scale?