The Mech Touch

he next generation.

In this way, the poor and beleaguered Kinner Tribe managed to carve out a niche that no other state was willing to fulfill and stay upright even when surrounded by different threats.

This kind of hard-working attitude against adversity reminded him a bit of the Bright Republic, except the Kinners were subject to much more pressure.

His perspective had become colored by the Societal Revival Theory.
Ever since Lord Javier brutally laid out how the upper echelons regarded human society and their beliefs on how they ought to strengthen it, Ves could no longer go back.

The higher he climbed and the more he saw of the universe, the more he began to agree with the assumptions of the theory.
It was as if he was slowly turning into a stuck-up member of the upper class he had always despised.

”Maybe I ’ll reach a point where I ’m virtually indistinguishable from the likes of Senator Tovar. ” He whispered to himself.

Should he fear this development or consider it as a given? The higher his status, the harder it became for him to sympathise with the masses.
Becoming a galactic citizen starkly separated him from the majority of humans relegated to living out their entire lives as space peasants.

He recognized that his mentality on society and people shifted drastically from the beginning of his career.

”I was so innocent back then. ” Ves reminisced.
”Times were simpler and I didn ’t have all these powerful entities intertwining themselves in my life. ”

He couldn ’t afford to return to that simple mindset.
He might have been happier and more optimistic back then, but he was so naive that his present self wanted to punch his earlier self in the face!

After he spent enough time moping about his mentality shift, he began to dive himself back into work.

Aside from studying up on bestial mechs and smart metal tech, he also went back to the variants he designed for the Skull Architect.

Compared to his own creations, Ves did not really put his full effort into his variants.
He mainly focused on improving the technical and usability aspect while substantially holding back on applying his design philosophy.

Ves nonetheless spent a handful of weeks inspecting the variants and making sure they performed soundly.
His inability to fabricate prototypes of the mechs in order to test their performance in reality hampered him quite a bit, so he substituted that with as many simulated tests as possible.

The new Sub-Skills he picked up recently helped out a lot in eliminating dozens of tiny flaws he had overlooked.

His lack of passion and energy for the variants became evident in his lazy naming sense.

He named his variant of the Caskar Pike the Molar Pike for reasons he didn ’t quite know.

His modifications to the spaceborn missileer were mostly basic.
He reined in its mobility and introduced various quality-of-life improvements to the software of the mech.
His main focus for the Molar Pike was to turn it into a mech that even mech pilots untrained in missile weapon systems could pick it up easily.

For this reason, despite the rather notable drop in maximum performance, Ves expected its effective performance in actual battles to be substantially higher.

”It ’s not as if most pirate mech pilots can draw out even half of the potential of a Caskar Pike. ” He muttered.

He applied the same approach to the Toroz Topaz, a variant of the Toroz Ruby.
Out of all of the Skull Architect ’s designs he had come across so far, the spaceborn striker mech design intrigued him the most.

Although it featured a bloated internal architecture due to being armed with both a shotgun and a pair of heat beam projectors, the base model ’s complicated design neatly showcased the Skull Architect ’s strengths.

Although his design philosophy focused on energy transmission, in practice he diverted towards maximizing efficiency and performance of almost every part.
Which part of a mech did not generate or consume energy?

In effect, the Skull Architect probably faced a choice back when he was a Journeyman.
Should he narrow the scope of his design philosophy and work with a narrow definition of energy transmission, or should he widen it to encompass as many aspects as possible?

Clearly, Reno Jimenez chose the latter, and it eventually drove him crazy.

After interacting with many mech designers, Ves came up with a general rule.

”The more ambitious their design philosophies, the more radical their mech designers tend to become. ”

When Ves applied this rule to himself, he couldn ’t quite figure out his place in the spectrum.
Obviously, his design philosophy was anything but modest, but he himself did not consider himself to be an obsessive maniac such as Gloriana or the Skull Architect.

”I ’m not perfect, but I think I can be quite sane and rational when I want to be. ” He confidently declared.

”Meow. ”

Lucky, who was floating by his side, clearly disagreed.

”Oh, shut up you.
You ’re just a cat.
What do you know about humans? I ’m clearly different! ”

”Meow! ”

Lucky appeared so exasperated by Ves that the cat turned around and phased through the deck.
The pet had enough of his owner ’s self-delusion for one day!

Ves shrugged and resumed his final inspection on his last variant.
He took the Jinven, an aerial marksman mech design, and slapped many of the same solutions he developed for his other variants.
While he also added in some unique fixes, by and large the Skull Architect ’s designs all shared the same flaws.

”Perhaps they aren ’t flaws according to their original designer.
Every mech designer has a different idea on which design choices are right. ”

The resulting variant he lazily called the Airven turned into a mech that any pirate could easily use to become a terror in the skies.

Having finished going over the three variants, Ves transferred the relevant files into an encrypted data chip before placing it in a protective case.

Ves had finally finished his homework.
Now, he needed to submit it to his ’teacher ’.

”There ’s probably a way to pass this chip to a Shadow Courier stationed in the Bloodstone System. ”

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