The Mech Touch

Offering scholarships to hidden talents was a powerful new initiative of the Larkinson Clan.

No one else paid much attention to it, but Ves valued it quite a lot. It leveraged the fact that as his commercial training mechs continued to proliferate and get sold to more and more mech academies across the Red Ocean, his work constantly got in touch with more and more mech cadets!

Every War Squire was connected to the Larkinson Clan in one way or another. Whether it was through the galactic net where it frequently downloaded software updates from or the MSTS which acted as more than just a spiritual simulation program, the training mech model constantly transmitted a wealth of personal information to the Larkinson Clan's databases.

Originally, the LMC just used all of this input to figure out how to improve its catalog of training mechs in the future.

By collecting, analyzing and tracking the flood of incoming data, the Larkinsons were able to understand the performance of their training mechs and figure out how to improve them in the future.

A change had occurred after the Quint noticed that a few notable talents that he had instructed under the friendly guise of 'Little Five' had developed spiritual potential.

When the Quint made a request to bring over these promising cadets, Ves suddenly realized the greater potential of his network of training mechs!

Ves no longer saw the War Squires as standalone products anymore. Instead, he started to treat them as the nodes of a web.

This 'web' eventually became known as the innocuous-sounding Larkinson Mech Pilot Scholarship Program.

With each War Squire that got sold, the web spread wider and wider. Any 'fly' that got caught would send a signal back to the center of the web where the Larkinson Clan could decide whether to reel in the prey.

What was especially brilliant about this scheme was that the War Squires were mostly distributed among the lower-ranking mech academies at this time.

Aside from the Larkinson-owned First Star Mech Academy, no other impressive institution had switched over yet due to many different concerns and contractual prohibitions.

Ves didn't care about that. The elite cadets who came from wealthy and powerful families were not that easy to grab.

In comparison, the mech cadets who lived on rural planets and attended shabby rural and provincial academies were often underappreciated!

Kids like Mickey Lankos completely went unnoticed due to their average or below-average genetic aptitudes and their poverty.

The former made it so that the underprivileged mech cadets did not receive any scholarships or other forms of special attention at the start.

The latter made it so that they had no good opportunities to unearth their hidden talents.

In short, no one valued these rough gems except the Larkinson Clan who possessed the ability to spot them while they were still young, desperate and easy to fool!

"These mech cadets are all young but they've already developed spiritual potential! It's a crime to leave them to their own devices!"

To a clan leader like Ves, these were prime talents that any armed organization would have loved to recruit at an early stage!

Even though it would take many years or decades for them to reach their greater potential, Ves and the Larkinson Clan were patient enough to invest in them and wait for their crops to mature.

Compared to hiring mature mech pilots, Ves much preferred to recruit younger mech cadets because it was much easier to indoctrinate them into becoming the ideal Larkinson Army soldiers.

Mech academies such as First Star turned into training centers where the mech cadets not only learned all of the skills required to fight in one of the clan's mech legions, but also received a lot of ideological education to make sure they fit the mold of an honorable and courageous Larkinson mech pilot!

Ves did not think he was doing anything wrong. In fact, it was the opposite. He truly considered his new scholarship program to be an act of charity!

After all, if a mech cadet like Mickey Lankos continued to grow up in a colonial backwater like Maylard II, it was extremely unlikely that he would ever reach his full potential.

The L9 Alliance and the Unicum Group did not have enough mechs. Only a fraction of Hopecrest's graduates would gain the opportunity to pilot a mech.

Even then, those graduates would only be piloting shabby second-hand machines that made it a lot harder for mech pilots to develop their latent potential.

The chances of expert pilots emerging from underdeveloped rural mech forces were much lower!

Therefore, the Larkinson Clan's initiative to recruit these buried talents did everyone a favor.

The clan gained a large reserve of mech cadets that had a higher chance of becoming expert pilots than normal.

The young kids not only gained a free chance to study at one of the best mech academies in Krakatoa, but also enjoyed a much easier track to become a part of a wealthy and rising power in the Red Ocean.

Perhaps the only ones who lost out in this transaction were the rural mech forces that might have missed out on obtaining a future expert pilot.

However, Ves didn't care about their plight at all. Most of these shabby organizations didn't value these hidden talents that much anyway.

After the Larkinson Clan's Education Ministry set up the entire scholarship program and started to recruit the first batch of hidden talents, Ves had no complaints about its operation.

It was quite simple to run the new scholarship program. The only requirements were that the clan had to spread a lot of living training mechs across human space and possessed a mech academy to train the incoming cadets.

Right now, the Larkinsons already satisfied both requirements. Ves did not have to do anything except wait for this initiative to bear fruit.

"The only problem is that it will probably take a generation before my clan can comprehensively grow stronger after absorbing all of these talented mech pilots."

It took at least a decade to train and prepare the mech cadets for a life in service in the Larkinson Army.

It took an indeterminate time after that for them to break through to expert candidate and become a part of the next generation of heroes of the Larkinson Clan.

Ves did not mind the wait too much.

"I don't have the mech designers to design all of the expert mechs for those potential demigods as of yet." He sighed.

That would probably change in the future when the Larkinson Clan and the Design Department had grown to a much more impressive scale than now. This was why Ves was willing to invest in the acquisition of future expert pilots so early.

It was better to have a sufficient amount of bodies at his disposal when he needed it than end up awfully short-handed twenty or thirty years later!

Not surprisingly, his wife loved this new long-term initiative.

"I need expert pilots!" Gloriana hungrily declared as she gazed at the list of names that Ves had given her. She already started to anticipate what kind of machine they wanted to pilot if they ever broke through in the future. "Each of these pilots will give me more opportunities to practice my craft and follow my ideals. There is nothing else like them and they make for good practice. If I want to reach the point where I can master masterwork mechs to the point where I can fabricate them at will, I need to work on as many worthy projects as possible!"

Gloriana had worked on so many expert mechs already that she was no longer able to get excited at the thought of designing an ordinary custom mech anymore.

Custom mechs designed with regular mech pilots in mind were too weak and limited in her eyes. They suffered from heavy budget constraints which limited the amount and scope of tech that they could integrate.

Even if they raised the budget for a custom mech design project, the limitations of the mech pilots meant that Gloriana had to forgo a lot of powerful features.

It was only when she was able to contribute to the development of a new expert mech that she improved the fastest!

Each new expert mech design project that pushed the boundaries of their existing capabilities and sought to produce new results benefited her in many different ways.

Regardless if she managed to make another masterwork mech or not, each attempt added to her design philosophy and increased her understanding of mechs by another notch.

Ves was not the only Journeyman in the Larkinson Clan who improved by leaps and bounds. His competitive wife made sure that she never fell behind!

In the years that the Larkinsons had tentatively settled on Davute VII, Gloriana contributed or led several notable expert mech design projects.

Taking inspiration from Ves and other mech designers, she successfully introduced a host of new and innovative solutions. While she wasn't able to think outside the box too often, her willingness to go outside her comfort zone and tackle new challenges was the fastest way for her to progress her design philosophy.

It started all the way back in the fifth design round. Ves, Gloriana and the others had decided to work on at least three Larkinson expert mech designs.

Aside from that, they also agreed to contribute to the various expert mech design projects started by their alliance partners, most notably the machines designed for Patriarch Reginald Cross and the Handmaidens of Death.

With so many different expert mech design projects on her plate, Gloriana was pressed for time and had to split her attention between many different priorities.

Not only that, she also had to spend enough time to raise Aurelia while also bringing her second daughter to term!

Though she encountered many challenges, she also found many clever ways to increase her productivity.

She became smarter about tackling work that she needed to do while outsourcing the rest to the expanding design teams.

She relied less on her own mind and more on the powerful first-class processors that were temporarily housed in the Genesis Lab to calculate the most optimal solutions.

She leveraged Alexandria's design network to unite the knowledge, skills and perspectives of different mech designers in order to solve complex multi-disciplinary problems.

In short, Gloriana was trying everything she could to make her schedule work, and Ves appreciated that. Each of the expert mech design projects she became involved in measurably improved in quality because of her insights, her passion, her improved affinity for mechs and most importantly her willingness to experiment.

The development of Vincent Ricklin's much-anticipated C-Man Project was the first opportunity for Gloriana to show that she was just as worthy of a mech designer as her husband.

"A brawler mech is not a conventional mech that you see every day." She told Ves one day. "It is a mech type that is underutilized due to the existence of better alternatives. This rule still applies for expert mechs as any machine at this level can gain substantially more power if they leverage the power of a high-quality weapon. Take the Amaranto and the First Sword for example. Those two expert mechs wouldn't be nearly as impressive if they lost their iconic weapons."

Ves crossed his arms. "I understand your message, but that doesn't tell us how we should tackle the C-Man Project."

"You're right, but it at least tells us that we should not settle for designing a straightforward brawler mech without any added features. The boxing glove concept is a start, but it is not enough. We need to examine the concept of a brawler mech further and determine how we can enhance it by leveraging our own strengths. We need to develop an interpretation of an expert brawler mech that can serve as a new and improved standard of Larkinson expert mechs."

That was easier said than done, but Gloriana truly aimed to break the mold with this project!