The Mech Touch

The handover of the Adonis Colossus and the departure of Vincent Ricklin returned some calm to Cloudy Curtain.

While the Mech Corps was still scouring the local asteroid belt for hiding sandmen, Ves felt relieved now that Vincent was out of his life.

Whatever Vincent planned to do with the Adonis Colossus was not his business.

"I can't control Vincent." Ves quietly shook his head. "Now that he received my mech, it is up to him to make the most out of his new asset."

A part of him wanted to keep up with the news in order to track Vincent's performance.

Another part compelled him to wash his hands of the commission and pay no further attention to the Adonis Colossus.

He decided to follow the second approach. All signs pointed out that Vincent would mostly play a symbolic role in battle. It wasn't really worth it for Ves to follow Vincent's exploits.

"I'm not his fanboy!"

Instead of wasting his time on Vincent, Ves preferred to direct his attention to other priorities.

When they arrived at the design lab, Ves gathered all of the mech designers together.

"The Deliverer is not that far away from completion." He said. "Let's try and increase our pace."

With no other distraction, the mech designers began to commit all of their time to designing the Deliverer.

The marksman mech rapidly filled out in the next couple of days. Just as Ves predicted, they encountered no serious problems. They had already settled all of the major design choices. The only thing they needed to do was fill up the gaps, which didn't require much brainpower.

This was very helpful to Gloriana, who was still suffering from a lack of creativity and imagination.

"It's no problem for me to solve these minor issues." She stated to Ves. "I'm already close to getting back to normal. The burden on my mind has become less and less after each prayer session."

"I see. Don't strain yourself, though. I can still do a lot on my own."

She shook her head. "Don't. I don't want to squander the potential of this mech design by reducing our synergy."

So long as she invested fully in her work, the Deliverer was on the right track.

As a marksman mech, its ability to handle the Executor rifle was everything. Even if Ves wanted the mech to rely on its glow to guide its aim, the mech still needed to be accurate enough to land a hit on its intended target.

This required a lot of specialized accommodation. While Ves possessed the necessary theories to adapt the mech to its weapon, Gloriana possessed a much better intuitive understanding in this regard.

Her proficiency in this area was always better than his own. No matter how much knowledge he accumulated with the help of the system, his actual utilization was still rather rudimentary.

Compared to Ves who possessed no special advantages in physical mech design, Gloriana's design philosophy was highly geared towards this kind of design work.

With Gloriana taking the lead, she managed to reduce the spread and improve the accuracy of the Deliverer by thirty percent!

Since the Deliverer was already designed to be accurate from the start, accomplishing this level of improvement was very impressive!

It only took her a few days of focused adjustments to achieve this result!

Her successes lit a fire under his butt. He could not let Gloriana steal the limelight!

He possessed his own strengths!

It was just that his specialty was largely invisible. In order to empower the Deliverer with some special features, Ves applied some of the lessons he learned from designing the Devil Tiger by giving his design spirit some control over its own limbs.

Since Ves decided to incorporate these kinds of gimmicks in his mechs in the future, he decided to formalize the special features into a new structure.

The moment he formed this structure, Ves felt as if he introduced a very impactful innovation in the field of mech design.

For a moment, he had the illusion that he was heralding an entirely new way of empowering mechs!

By granting some control of the mechs to their design spirits, it was possible for the latter to exert some of their strengths!

These special features could be strong or weak. It depended on the nature of the design spirit in question.

In this case, Ves paired the Deliverer mech with Ylvaine's spiritual fragment.

While the spiritual fragment was fairly powerful, it could only bow its head in front of older monsters such as Qilanxo and Nyxie.

However, different from those powerful spiritual entities, Ylvaine's spiritual fragment appeared to excel in prophecy and prediction.

While Ves hadn't managed to verify its powers, the performance of the Transcendent Messengers already showcased their uncanny ability to dodge enemy fire.

Ves therefore decided to explore these strengths and adjust his mech design to explicitly accommodate these extraordinary interactions!

For now, Ves only possessed a handful of design spirits. However, he imagined that he would be able to accumulate hundreds of design spirits, each of which possessed their own strengths and abilities.

The more design spirits he collected, the more special features he could incorporate in his mech designs!

It would probably take decades for Ves to grow his collection to this point. The main issue related to expanding his connection was that he constantly needed to find more spiritual fragments and entities.

This was also why Ves continued to insist on setting up an exobeast reserve. It was far too cumbersome for Ves to track down exobeasts with spirituality or spiritual potential.

Ves decided to share his latest innovation to Gloriana.

"It sounds like magic." She whispered.

"It's not magic." Ves objected. "It's a special feature! Call it a special feature!"

"Why?"

"Because not everyone likes magic. Calling it a special feature is much more harmless to many cultures. It's a neutral description that technically describes what I am imparting to my mech designs."

His girlfriend crossed her arms. "Uh huh. It's basically magic or a divine ability by another name. Do you expect to fool anyone with this misdirection?"

"It's not a misdirection, Gloriana! At most, I'm merely omitting some information. The point is that the special features of my mechs can't be hidden. Since the market will be bound to figure out what is up with my mechs, I might as well make them known so that my customers won't be fumbling around."

Ves was taking a gamble here. Seeing as how his glows hadn't attracted too much attention, he was ready to reveal another application of his specialty.

While he was sure he would be greeted with a lot of skepticism at the start, so long as the Deliverer met his expectations, he was sure that everyone would embrace his special features!

"Your mech comes with two special features, right?"

He nodded. "I'm sure you've already noticed my latest additions. I've already explained the first special feature of the Deliverer, which I call Guided Aim. I've only given it a name and added it to my library of special features."

By letting Ylvaine's spiritual fragment guide the aim of the Deliverer, Ves hoped it was enough to wipe out the sandman admirals.

"What is the second special feature?"

"Prescient Movement. It's basically giving my design spirit some control over the limbs and propulsion system of my Deliverer. Depending on the depth of the connection, the design spirit will be able to force the mech to move in response to an imminent attack!"

The scariest part about this special feature was that it could make the Deliverer dodge in advance!

Due to its extreme focus on firepower, its mobility was abysmal. By the time the mech pilot noticed an incoming attack, it was already too late to dodge!

Therefore, granting the Deliverer the power to evade an attack addressed this critical weakness.

Ves had no idea if the sandman admirals would ever learn to focus their firepower on strategically-important targets. If that ever happened, his Deliverer mechs would certainly turn into death traps!

To prevent this potentially disastrous occurrence, Ves had to raise the self-preservation ability of his mech.

By relying on this cheat-like special feature, Ves could avoid compromising the offensive focus of his mech.

"This is a good special feature as long as it works!" Gloriana agreed. "The key is whether it works at all. From what you're telling me, the mech pilot has no control over the activation of this ability. It's solely up to the whims of the proto-god to activate these special features."

"That's a downside, yes. While the lack of control is not exactly ideal, I don't think it's a bad idea. The only way for mech pilots to benefit from the special features is to increase their bond with their mechs and their design spirits."

"Ah. So that is why you made your signature look so responsive to the connection between the mech and mech pilot! You wanted to give your customers an indication to how close they are to their mechs!"

Ves had already accounted for all of this. He wanted to herald a new and improved style of mech design in the new generation.

While he wasn't entirely sure how the market would react to his new style, he hoped that at least some customers would embrace his innovations.

"Maybe you can give your customers a choice." Gloriana suggested. "You can design one mech that possesses these special features and develop a minor variant that lacks these additions."

That was an interesting suggestion.

"I have a better idea. Instead of splitting up my products into two different categories, I might as well keep it as one and add a switch to a mech that controls how much control a mech pilot is willing to share."

He immediately applied this new idea to the Deliverer. He tweaked the internal architecture of the mech to add some hardware switches that possessed the ability to cut off the design spirit from direct control.

Naturally, incorporating these switches was always a risk. As long as the mech sustained severe damage, some of these switches might be forcibly tripped without the mech pilot's consent.

Of course, when a mech suffered from internal damage, it was already in bad shape.

As a result of adding these switches to his current and future mech designs, Ves granted his customers the ability to choose how much they trusted in their mechs.

All of this still required a lot of testing, though. Ves wasn't sure if the Guided Aim and Prescient Movement abilities worked as expected.

If the Deliverer failed to channel these special features, he would have wasted all of the time he invested into its design!

"It won't fail!" He furiously whispered.

He had come into frequent contact with Ylvaine's spiritual fragment during the design process of the Deliverer. The certainty and conviction it conveyed constantly kept his hopes alive.

After a week or so of design work, the design team finally managed to complete the first iteration of the Deliverer.

Its design was functionally complete. While Ves was able to get a good handle on its technical performance by subjecting it to virtual tests, it was impossible to express their special features!

Gloriana did not like this development.

"This is a very significant disadvantage, Ves. The only way to verify your so-called special features is to perform live tests!"

"We'll just have to reserve more time for prototype testing." He shrugged. "It's only a moderate inconvenience. The glows of my mechs are already incompatible with simulations. It's not really surprising that existing models are unable to work with my specialty."

"Is it possible to remedy this problem? Maybe you can create a new model from scratch!"

Ves always wanted to do this, but his understanding of spirituality and all of the stuff associated with it was still at a rudimentary level.

"It's too soon. I don't have a single clue how to virtualize my innovations. Let's just settle with live tests for now."

The LMC soon fabricated the first prototype with two special features.

Ves had already invited some Ylvainan mech pilots to test the prototype!