The Mech Touch

The final match was a spectacle!

After suffering multiple defeats, the last biomech to enter the arena finally showed a lot of fight!

The Swarm Monarch was the heftiest biomech to take part in the design duel. Its mass, size and other parameters granted it much greater capacity than any other mech.

Usually, heavy artillery mechs utilized much of that capacity in favor of increasing its defenses, mounting bigger weapons, stuffing more energy cells and ammunition inside its frame and so on. Heavy mechs were able to bear a lot of parts and supplies, but they needed it because they weren't able to fight without all of these goods!

Heavy mechs largely eschewed mobility in order to raise their other strength at a level that was unattainable by medium mechs. They broke the size and mass ceilings of smaller machines in order to provide great value in a single unit.

Some mech theorists predicted that heavy mechs would become the only viable weight class of humanity. This was because heavy mechs were capable of packing much more weapons and armor than other mechs.

Yet reality proved otherwise.

They were slow and lumbering, making them incapable of performing scouting functions and other roles that demanded speed.

They were easy to bombard from a distance because of their inability to displace themselves fast enough.

They were also easily exploited by swifter mechs that could quickly get close and attack their vulnerable rear!

Heavy artillery mechs happened to be the most representative mech types of this weight class, just as how light skirmishers defined light mechs as a whole.

That meant that any heavy artillery mech, including the Transcendent Punisher, suffered from all of the aforementioned weaknesses!

Ves designed the Transcendent Punisher with the Larkinson Clan in mind. He did not invest too much in its ability to fend off melee attackers or light skirmishers because that was not its role.

Heavy artillery mechs excelled at unleashing devastating firepower at medium to long ranges, so their entire designs should strengthen this specialty.

Any other design priority risked weakening the primary function of these mechs. The worst outcome would be to end up with an all-rounder that did not excel at anything!

Perhaps such a mech would be better suited for the arena, but in a battlefield situation many mech forces would rather have a specialized model!

This was why the Transcendent Punisher was suffering right now. Any escort mech could have easily dealt with the ultralight beetle mech that had emerged from the corpse of the Swarm Monarch and jumped onto the rear of the Ylvainan mech!

In fact, even a third-class mech would have been able to defeat this tiny ultralight mech with ease!

Yet due to the Transcendent Punisher's high degree of specialization, the mech was comically unable to fend off the parasite!

With over a hundred beetles crawling through the interior of the Transcendent Punisher, the Ylvainan mech was already starting to lose functionality.

Its rear legs even started to stiffen up, signalling that the control or power transfer to this section was under serious threat!

Nothing Ilse Lieberman could come up with would work. If she had a choice, she wanted to separate or blast apart the rear third of her hexapod mech, but the Transcendent Punisher simply didn't work that way.

Implementing such a function would not only demand a drastic rework of the Transcendent Punisher design, but also take up needless capacity that could have been spent on thicker armor or stronger cannons!

The mech was never designed to function as a self-sufficient unit, so it needed external help in order to solve its current predicament.

Ordinarily, another mech was supposed to come and relieve it from its issues.

Since this was a duel, that wasn't possible.

Yet Ves had other means. Spiritual means. While he was pretty sure that he was not supposed to intervene directly in the match, he didn't feel as if there was anything wrong with his choice.

Just like in the previous case where he manually switched the glows of his Bright Warriors, he was only activating something his mech was already capable of doing. The design duel was still about pitting his work against the work of Dr. Navarro. Ves merely stretched the definition a bit so that it encompassed a wider net of spiritual phenomena.

By borrowing this warped logic, Ves' conscience remained fully intact.

He wasn't cheating. Cheating was trying to do something extra that was not supposed to happen.

What Ves was doing instead was utilizing his existing work to a greater degree!

When his mechs performed normally, they were actually holding back their potential. What Ves was about to do would liberate them and allow them to perform to their fullest!

The logic was simple. Since external influences such as design spirits were part of the strength of the Transcendent Punisher, what if another external influence came into play?

Ves just had a very interesting thought about Dr. Navarro's work.

"The Swarm Monarch relies on organic drones in order to enhance its performance." He muttered.

Mechs like these were not common, but they were useful in many situations, particularly non-combat ones.

Yet there was a good reason why drones hadn't dominated human warfare. Their dependence on algorithms and AIs made them vulnerable to subversion. It was a lot easier to hack a drone than to hack a mech pilot!

Of course, this happened to be a scenario where Dr. Navarro felt extremely confident about deploying the Swarm Monarch.

Perhaps he might have been forced to exhibit a lot more vigilance if he squared off against another biomech designer, but Ves was different! He didn't know anything about biotechnology!

For this reason, there was no way the Transcendent Punisher possessed any countermeasures against organic drones. The living beetles that were wreaking havoc inside the frame of the mech were merrily able to go about their day because there was virtually no chance that the mech possessed some kind of organic hacking module that was capable of subverting their bioprogramming!

In fact, the Transcendent Punisher didn't possess any virtual security countermeasures against mechanical drones either. Other mechs were supposed to solve this issue, but Ves belatedly realized he had yet to design a mech that excelled at cyber warfare.

"Well, that's another mech I'll have to add to my list." He quietly promised.

Hacker mechs existed under the category of auxiliary mechs. While they usually weren't armed, their frames were packed with auxiliary modules that were geared towards codebreaking, jamming, communication, sabotage and other cyber warfare functions.

While most hacker mechs weren't capable of taking over control of drones on the battlefield, they were usually good enough to disable the small machines or at least debilitate them so that their threat was reduced.

Hacker mechs were also very helpful in capturing enemy ships!

Most ships possessed numerous powerful security systems that made it hell for boarding parties to advance through their hulls. Hacker mechs could interfere with many of these defensive measures and increase the odds of capturing a ship intact.

Of course, there were many other areas where hacker mechs could play a useful role. They were also useful in a defensive capacity. They could be employed to guard a unit against hostile hackers or assist in detecting sabotage.

While hacker mechs weren't all that common in the Yeina Star Cluster, Ves knew they were much more common in the prosperous parts of human space!

In any case, the Transcendent Punisher was not a hacker mech, but that didn't mean that it was helpless against the saboteur beetles.

Ves recently realized that the spiritual foundation of his mechs served as a base that allowed it to channel the presence and abilities of other spiritual entities.

Although this sounded rather obvious, the statement was actually a lot more broad than he initially realized!

As Ves concentrated his mind and reached out to the Transcendent Punisher that was currently in great pain, he began to do something remarkable.

He did not reach out to his other design spirits. While entities such as the Golden Cat, the Solemn Guardian, the Superior Mother and Qilanxo were all powerful, they excelled in different areas.

What Ves wanted to accomplish was something that no other design spirit was capable of doing!

In fact, there had never been a time where any of his mechs were required to perform the function that he was thinking of. It was only when Ves began to get in touch with biomechs and other products of biotechnology that he began to feel the need to be able to interact with these kinds of organic products.

"I'll have to do it myself this time."

Although it sounded crazy, this time Ves utilized himself as a design spirit!

What he did to accomplish this was indescribable. He immersed himself into the spiritual foundation of the mech in the dueling arena and integrated with it to a degree.

He didn't need to become a permanent part of it. He just wanted to get inside long enough to do his job.

The process proceeded a lot more smoothly than he thought. He expected to encounter difficulties because he wasn't actually a design spirit, but it turned out that he was quite suited for this purpose!

"Makes sense. I've created this concept. Everything flows from me. As the progenitor, how can I lack control over my own creations?"

Ves did not entangle himself over this question any further. By adopting a model where Ves treated himself as a design spirit, he began to integrate with the Transcendent Punisher on an unprecedented level!

He began to receive all kinds of vague and profound spiritual input, but Ves wasn't interested in all of this irrelevant data. He instantly filtered them all out and tried to focus on his only purpose.

Using the Transcendent Punisher as a platform, he extended his spiritual influence and sought out every form of life that was currently crawling inside the mech.

Due to the very limited range, Ves easily managed to 'sense' the saboteur beetles chewing through power lines, drilling apart vulnerable components and performing other forms of mischief.

"STOP!" Ves spiritually boomed at these critters!

The beetles didn't listen to his spiritual command.

According to their bioprogramming, the beetles weren't supposed to listen to enemy commands. They were programmed to only obey signals that transmitted the right code at the right frequencies.

Ves didn't know all of that, but his manner of communication was a lot more direct and intimate. He assumed he'd be able to bypass most of the security measures programmed in the beetles, but it appeared the situation was a lot more complicated than he thought.

This was his first time, after all. He was bound to make a mistake.

After a quick examination, he figured out the fundamental problem.

The beetles weren't sentient.

This was a bit remarkable because the beetles were actually quite intelligent. This was by design because they needed to know how mechs worked and how to sabotage them in the most efficient manner possible. They had to learn how to recognize every mech part and be able to make a list of priorities that ranked important and more vulnerable parts higher than ones that were more difficult and not as vital to the functioning of the mech.

This gave Ves an opening.

It would have been a lot more difficult to solve this problem if the saboteur beetles possessed tiny brain capacities and slow thought processes, but this was not the case. The beetles might look small relative to mechs, but they were actually quite sizable when compared to human bodies!

Since they were comparable in size to humans, were they able to think like humans as well?

"Let's find out."

Ves had never done this before, but he was confident in his theories.

He created numerous spiritual products throughout his career. He was familiar with creating life where none existed before.

What Ves intended to do in this instance was not that different from this process. Instead of creating a new sentient lifeform from scratch, he intended to impart sentience to life that already existed!

"How exciting!" He tried his best to contain his enthusiasm.

Ves was actually thinking of performing a spontaneous experiment during an event that was not only viewed by hundreds of thousands of Lifers, but also witnessed by an uncountable amount of other humans!

He simply couldn't resist!