The Mech Touch

Master Goldstein eventually ended the call.

"Mr. Jovy Armalon will likely visit you in person after he has completed his intensive program. You will be able to hold a much more thorough discussion about your work and your future once you are able to talk to him face to face. Until then, please control your enthusiasm. The more you show off your inventions, the greater the possibility of attracting alien scrutiny. Although the puelmer race primarily pays attention to first-class organizations, the aliens will notice your work sooner or later. It is best for both of us if they become aware when it is too late for them to prevent their own extinction."

That was as clear of a message as any. Ves dutifully nodded.

"Understood, Master. I do not plan to spread my latest tech too much. I only developed it with my expert mechs in mind. It is not economical to apply my new work to other mechs."

Master Goldstein looked satisfied. "There is no problem in that case. We will be in touch."

When the Darkbreak module finally became inactive again, Ves paused for a minute before silently leaving the secure communication chamber.

Upon his return trip to the Spirit of Bentheim, he thought about the possibility that aliens might be able to harness his work.

At first, he didn't even believe that such a possibility existed. Ves was a mech designer as well as a spiritual engineer. None of the major alien races seemed to have anything to do with these professions.

However, Ves could only base his judgment on the knowledge that he obtained. Who knew whether there was anything more to the indigenous aliens that the Big Two had withheld from the rest of the public.

There were plenty of brilliant aliens throughout history that had been capable of accomplishing feats that other races had never managed to replicate.

Spiritual sorcery and spiritual engineering were hardly exclusive to the human race. Back in the old galaxy, Ves encountered several pieces of evidence that numerous extinct alien races used to harness the power of spirituality in the past!

It was not crazy for him to guess that there was at least one alien race in the Red Ocean was able to tap into this power!

He recalled that not all of the major alien races that were native Red Ocean had appeared on a wider scale at this time. Their territories and strongholds were mostly located far away from the current frontlines of humanity's invasion of the dwarf galaxy.

It was conceivable that the more obscure alien civilizations would finally fight against the humans once their interests came under threat!

"I can't allow aliens to threaten my good name!"

What if the phase whales or another powerful alien race turned out to be spiritually gifted?

What if that allowed these extraordinary aliens to understand and imitate living mechs and other powerful applications?

No matter how unlikely these possibilities sounded, Ves needed to make extra certain that no dirty alien would be able to use his tech without permission!

Fortunately, it should not be difficult to maintain this guarantee. He just needed to make sure to strengthen his existing safeguards in his various products.

Due to his paranoia, he already developed a habit of 'encrypting' his spiritual engineering products. No matter whether they were literally or figuratively alive, someone who possessed the ability to perceive and interact with spiritual energy should not be able to unravel his work without triggering numerous different safeguards!

"They're not foolproof, though. Someone with sufficient ability might be able to unlock my encryption and learn valuable secrets one day."

This was especially the case when the principles of much of his work were not all that complicated.

The only tricky part that would probably stop most thieves in their tracks was that it was impossible to replicate his work in full without the ability to create new life.

The absence of people who possessed his unique combination of skills and talent should buy him enough time to work towards realizing his design philosophy.

Once he became a Master, it was no longer crucial for him to retain a monopoly on living mechs and many of his other applications.

In fact, given what Ves knew and suspected about Star Designers, it might even be beneficial to his own development if a lot of copycats followed in his footsteps!

"Well, none of this is relevant at the moment. For now, I need to step up my efforts in protecting my intellectual property."

Ves returned to his routine once he arrived at his flagship.

The results produced by the Instrument of Doom during the testing session were so shocking that Ves and Gloriana couldn't help but spend more days on analyzing the data.

They improved their understanding of blessed weapons and used what they learned to draft more blessed weapons for a number of their other expert mechs.

Ves wasn't in a hurry to develop them, though.

"The completion of the Instrument of Doom has met our most urgent demand for more firepower." He told his wife. "The addition of another blessed weapon or two won't increase our effective combat power as drastically as before."

His wife looked confused. "I thought you felt that our clan was horribly inadequate after the disappointing performance of some of our expert mechs during the Battle of Pima Prime. You wanted to address some of the shortcomings that we have identified by upgunning our champions. Why have you suddenly changed your tune?"

He changed his tune because his talk with Master Goldstein made him realize that haste might not always be a virtue!

The Master Mech Designer hailing from the Survivalist Faction explicitly told him that the indigenous alien races were actively trying to steal advanced human technologies.

Ves had taken the time to browse the galactic net for any mention of this, and he found plenty of mentions about increased alien raids!

The major alien races had grown bolder over time.</>

Before, most of them were reeling from the successive blows inflicted by the thunderous offensives of the Big Two.

Nowadays, the indigenous alien empires not only managed to work together and slow the bleeding, but also gained a far greater understanding of their human opponents!

The aggressive puelmers were especially keen on stealing intact samples of human high technology. There had been many more sightings of their smaller but faster raiding fleets in the border regions of the upper zones.

From the perspective of both humanity and the indigenous aliens, the relatively small but incredibly resource-rich upper zones were the only regions in the Red Ocean worth fighting for. Every lesser zone was basically a backwater at best or a wasteland as worst in their eyes.

This was because the sparser and lower-quality resources available in the middle zones and lower zones could not adequately support the buildup and upkeep of a powerful first-class force.

However, this did not mean that the puelmers or other powerful aliens avoided the lesser zones!

Cutting through a lesser zone might allow a fleet to take a shortcut from one upper zone to another upper zone.

A powerful fleet such as the remnants of the pioneering fleet led by Paerian Yorul-Tavik might be on the run and urgently needed to find safe harbor that was away from hostile first-class competitors.

Whatever the case, Ves did not want his clan to perform too ostentatiously and attract too much attention from powerful alien or human groups.

"We should go for quality instead of quantity." Ves provided his wife with an excuse. "The main downside of blessed weapons is that it relies on a limited pool of resources to fuel its power. If we want to avoid overburdening the Phase King, then we should try to adopt a more deliberate and thoughtful approach. We should also be working harder to find other sympathetic materials that can allow us to put our other design spirits to good use. It is too much of a waste to allow them to sit around and do nothing."

His wife didn't have much of an objection to his proposal.

"Hm, if this is the case, then we can also go back to spending more time on our original design projects. The Dullahan Project, the Ghost Project, the Greenaxe Project and the Bloodripper Project are already running behind schedule due to our lack of participation. The expert pilots that are waiting for us to deliver on our promises won't be pleased if they have to wait additional months to receive their much-anticipated machines."

The two therefore proceeded to put their subsequent weapon design projects on a lower priority so that they could make up for lost time in their main design projects.

Ves found it a little jarring to go from designing a crazy experimental weapon project tomore elaborate and deliberate mech design projects.

He had to adapt to a different approach, timeframe and mentality, and that slowed him down at first.

This was far from his first rodeo though, so he quickly found his groove and began to make substantive progress in each of his projects.

He mostly invested his time in the Dullahan Project and the Ghost Project. Both of them were innovative and possessed design aspects that Ves had never worked on before.

Ves found the Ghost Project to be a particularly interesting design challenge. It was the first expert stealth mech that he had ever worked upon.

Since no one in the Design Department possessed a considerable amount of knowledge on advanced stealth systems except for himself, Ves could not lean on his colleagues to delegate important work or rely on their expertise.

Ves had to design the fundamental elements of the Ghost Project from the ground up by himself.

This was a considerable challenge when he could not fall back on prior experience or access to existing expert stealth mechs.

To be honest, Ves felt a bit lost at first.

He possessed experience in participating in numerous different expert mech design projects.

He also possessed a formidable amount of System-granted knowledge. stealth and cloaking systems.

The problem was that Ves couldn't immediately figure out a way to merge the two so that he could form a proper mech design that harmoniously blended these two elements!

"I need to study existing designs of expert stealth mechs." Ves concluded.

That was easier said than done. The galactic net contained a lot of messy information, but the designs he stumbled upon were either incomplete, deliberately flawed or outdated by at least three mech generations.

The latter weren't actually that bad, though. Ves learned many fundamental lessons after studying the aged mech designs, but he needed to understand how the current generation of expert stealth mechs applied some of the latest advances in this field to defeat highly effective sensor systems.

His wife noticed his struggles and offered an easy solution.

"The Hex Army should be able to provide a few designs if you need them." Gloriana offered. "Normally, the designs of stealth mechs and especially those at the expert mech level are supposed to be highly classified information, but I am certain the Hexers are willing to do us a favor. After all, we are the creators of the Valkyrie Redeemer and the Maiden of Adversity. The Hexers are eager to receive the next powerful Hexer mech design from us. Given the credibility and reputation that we have built up, the Hexers aren't afraid that you will leave your debts unpaid."

That was a deliberate image that Ves cultivated in order to attract business partners and avoid turning away customers.

The advantage of developing a good reputation was that it opened many doors that would have remained closed if he was still a nobody, or worse, a scumbag!

The disadvantage of doing this was that it took a lot of work and effort to retain his credibility!

Ves knew that if he issued this request to the Hexers, he must definitely pay back the favor one way or another!

"Let me think about it, honey."