The Mech Touch

Ves only possessed a sparse amount of experience with heavy mechs.

Heavy mechs generally tended to be a mech type that only showed up in military mech regiments. Only military mech designers or those working for a company that serviced the military became exposed to heavy mech designs.

Heavy mechs were big, expensive and put an enormous strain on a mech unit's logistical capacity. They also only truly unearthed their potential in major battles and campaigns.

For these reasons, hardly any private outfit wanted to put up with these costly elephants. It was practically impossible to run a mercenary corps at a profit by fielding heavy mechs!

Not just the end users, but also the mech designers experienced headaches whenever they came in touch with heavy mechs.

It took a lot more effort to design a heavy mech. Their far greater mass and volume limits meant that mech designers had a lot more room to work with. This sounded like a great thing as they could stuff all kinds of goodies into their heavy mech designs, but there was a downside to it as well.

"Anyone can fill up an empty mech design. However, it takes skill to turn the mech design into something effective!"

This wasn't the extent of the problems. Heavy mechs possessed very different performance characteristics from medium mechs.

Due to their very pronounced characteristics, heavy mechs were judged by different standards.

Heavy mech designers adopted distinctly different design paradigms.

This posed some problems to Ves. He wasn't entirely familiar with the divergent design paradigms. What was bad for medium mechs might in fact be good for heavy mechs.

However, even if that was the case, Ves still managed to work on the Spyre Helix as if he was a natural with heavy mechs.

With his current capabilities, he easily understood the various nuances and complexities concerning heavy mechs even if he hadn't read any textbooks dedicated to the topic.

Furthermore, many of the Skills and Sub-Skills he acquired from the System also dedicated some portions to heavy mechs. To say that Ves was a complete newcomer to heavy mechs was not quite true.

In addition, the base model of the Spyre Helix was in itself a great teacher to Ves. In fact, having ready access to the physical copy helped his understanding of doom crawlers enormously.

While Ves hadn't derived enough insights to design his own doom crawler, he was more than capable enough to competently modify an existing design!

Since Ves encountered few serious issues in the process of designing his variant, he began to divert some of his attention to other priorities.

He hadn't forgotten about his priority to minimize his connection to the Spyre Helix Annihilator, which he named his variant as its altered design took shape.

He made a conscious effort to obfuscate his design style in his work on the variant. He purposefully made his design style more bland, as if Ves directly adhered to all of the recommendations of the MTA.

Ves believed he had done a good job in minimizing his fingerprints in his work. In his judgement, any orthodox Journeyman Mech Designer could have performed the modifications!

In fact, Ves went a step ahead and tried to inject deliberately different design traits into the Annihilator design.

He went as far as constructing a spiritual mask of a 'different' mech designer before donning it in order to subconsciously lay a trail of false bread crumbs.

Doing this meant that his falsehoods appeared a lot more authentic than if he deliberately tried to insert some red herrings into the Annihilator design!

"Hehehe."

The important point about the false trails was that they came across as authentic! Even if a Senior encountered the Spyre Helix Annihilator, the older mech designer would probably tie its designer to someone completely different than Ves!

"I'm actually really good at this!"

Ves saw a lot of potential with this application of spiritual masking.

In fact, if he put a lot more effort into constructing a mask, he could even impersonate other mech designers!

Ves wondered how far he could take this technique. Perhaps he might be able to imitate another mech designer's design philosophy by stealing their spiritual fragments before merging them into his mask!

"The possibilities.. are frightening!"

Would he be able to apply this technique in other ways? For example, to emulate a collaborative work?

If his suspicions were true, as long as he refined his spiritual masking technique further, he'd be able to design a mech alone that required others to combine their efforts!

It was the ultimate spiritual technique for loner mech designers!

In other words, it was tailor-made for a paranoid, solitary bastard like Ves!

"Ugh!" Ves shook his head inside his helmet.

He was attempting to move away from that! He put so much effort into socializing with other mech designers and recruiting future mech designers lately in order to find willing collaborators and assistants.

He really missed having someone like Ketis on hand to bounce ideas and to offload work he didn't enjoy.

If he had a dozen more subordinate mech designers at his disposal, his productivity would skyrocket!

Unfortunately, Ves didn't have enough time to explore these possibilities any further right now. He was in a hurry to finish the Annihilator so he only adopted a bland and generic design style for simplicity and expedience.

Though it sounded rather basic, his measures were enough to erase all but the most subtle commonalities to his distinctive design style.

In fact, he spent much of the remainder of his design session on going over his Annihilator design in order to scour away any design elements that might possibly tie back to his work!

"I have to be thorough. I can't let a single mistake pass through."

Ves completed his work over the course of just four days, far faster than a typical Journeyman would take.

This in itself was another form of misdirection on his part.

By completing his design work so fast, he basically gave the impression that he was an older and more experienced Journeyman!

A mech designer who was so productive that he designed the Annihilator design according to Finlay's requirements in just four days had to be an old hand in his profession!

Ves even expressed some of his Senior-level Skills in the Annihilator design to reinforce this impression. It was as if he was an old Journeyman who was already midway towards his preparations to advancing to Senior!

All in all, a mech designer who appraised the Annihilator design and compared it to the base model would never suspect that Ves had anything to do with it because he was too young!

In fact, most people would immediately rule him out because he had only advanced to Journeyman very recently!

There were still some holes in this plan. Once Ves completely assimilated his Senior-level Mechanics and Metallurgy Skills, he did not wish to restrain himself once he designed his next mechs.

If it became known that part of his knowledge base had reached the level of a Senior, then there was a possibility that he could still be connected to his Annihilator design.

Yet that was still unlikely.

Ves would worry a bit if the MTA got their hands on the Annihilator's design schematics, but only for a little bit. As for the mech designers that worked for Finlay's faction? Hah! They couldn't even get a single Journeyman to agree to incorporate taboo weapons in the Spyre Helix design!

Anyone less than a Senior or a perceptive Journeyman shouldn't be able to read his work as well as him. If an Apprentice appraised his design, they'd only pick up some surface aspects that were mired with falsehoods.

Only one thing bothered Ves a lot. As he put the finishing touches on his Annihilator design, he silently lamented his inability to express his distinctive design philosophy.

In some ways, it felt incredibly wrong for him to make no attempts at instilling life into the Spyre Helix Annihilator design.

Pretty much every other mech he designed or worked on benefited from his specialty. It felt extremely unnatural for him to work on a mech while trying his best to keep it as dead as possible.

Instead of concentrating his mind in order to concentrate on a distinct vision for his Annihilator design, he instead relaxed it as much as possible so that his mind was filled with chaos.

Though it impacted his productivity to a certain extent, Ves was far too good of a mech designer to let that hinder him. Even if he only spent a portion of his attention on designing his variant, he still did a good job.

Ves still experienced some discomfort, though. If not for his spiritual mask, his mentality would have rebelled much more!

The only part about him that seriously took issue was his design seed.

It turned out his design seed really didn't like it if he tried to muffle his design philosophy!

During many instances, Ves had the illusion that he was tearing himself in two. He tried so hard to pretend to be a different mech designer than 'Ves Larkinson, specialist in Spiritual Man-Machine Symbiosis' that he suspected that he could do some serious damage if he pushed it any further!

Fortunately, four days was short enough that his design seed only became somewhat disgruntled. While it constantly radiated disapproval, it didn't shift or alter in any significant fashion.

Ves mentally wiped his brow as he observed the state of his design seed. He hadn't really considered the damage he could do to his design seed. It seemed like designing a mech without leaving behind his fingerprints was far harder than he thought!

"What do you think?" Ves asked Nitaa.

His bodyguard had remained by his side all this time. She had been keeping an eye on Finlay's men stationed at the mech workshop.

"I am not a mech designer." She spoke. "All I see is a six-legged machine with lots of armor and weapons. Compared to the original design, this one is bigger on the weapon department and smaller on the armor department."

Ves shrugged. He couldn't expect anything more from a laywoman like Nitaa.

Her description wasn't wrong, though. Doom Crawlers were distinct heavy mechs that relied on heavy armor and heavy ranged firepower to lay waste against any opposition in their way.

Ves made a conscious choice to reduce the armor and increase the mobility of his Spyre Helix Annihilator.

The reduction in mass was a necessity since Ves had to make a lot of room to accommodate the larger and more potent weapon systems.

However, reducing the armor and some other stuff from the base model meant that his variant's mech performance index took a substantial dip.

In order to compensate for the loss in armor, Ves had no choice but to raise the mobility of his mech.

With the help of his deep understanding of mechanics, he managed to make his doom crawler variant a little bit faster than before. While the Spyre Helix Annihilator wasn't about to race across the surface of a planet anytime soon, the increase in mobility was still a welcome addition that brought up its performance index back to normal.

"In fact, the difference is a lot more drastic in low-gravity environments."

At 0.53 g, the Spyre Helix Annihilator weighed almost twice as less. How much nimbler did a heavy mech become when they suddenly fought against much less gravity than before?

Perhaps achieving a thirty percent speed boost was very much possible, even on rough terrain.

While this sounded like a huge increase, Ves did not forget that doom crawlers already moved as slow as a snail. Amplifying the speed of a snail by thirty percent just turned it into a faster snail. It was still nowhere near to matching the sprinting speed of a hare.

In any case, Ves no longer believed he needed to do anything to finish the commission.

"It's done!"

Now, he needed to see if the representative of the dark mercenaries accepted the modifications he made to the Spyre Helix design.