The Mech Touch

Cassandra Breyer!

The strange undead woman interfered with William's 'Corrective Surgery' at the exactly wrong moment!

Just when Ves was making good progress in resurrecting and reconstructing his shattered spirit, the uninvited meddling of a third-party threatened to ruin his arrangements!

A small but highly-concentrated spiritual projection was messing about with the shards and merged amalgamations, altering them in some indescribable fashion.

No matter what she was doing, it was almost certainly bad!

Ves wanted her to be gone!

"GET OUT!"

He paused his work in reconstructing William's spirit in order to bring his full strength to bear against the intruder. The longer Cassandra messed around, the greater the degree of distortion in the end product!

There were too many cooks in the kitchen. This entire procedure was his show from the start, and he absolutely couldn't tolerate anyone barging in to mess with his creation, especially from a hostile witch like Cassandra Breyer!

He tried to dislodge the intruding spiritual projection several times, yet all of his attempts failed!

The frustrating part of this was that Ves knew he could bring much more strength to bear. Yet Cassandra's seemingly small and weak spiritual projection withstood his brute force attacks as if it was holding an umbrella against the rain!

His heart sank as he ascertained the reason why he failed.

Her spiritual application and technique was far superior to his own! Instead of forming a solid projection, it instead consisted of countless tiny building blocks that chained and meshed together in incredibly complex abstruse patterns that reminded Ves of circuitry.

Such an arrangement bespoke of an extremely deep proficiency in spiritual engineering, the likes of which went far beyond Ves could ever conceive on his own! The disparity between his simple spiritual mallet and Cassandra's incredibly refined spiritual probe was too much!

Ves darkened even further. Did he have to expend some of his F-stone's offensive charge in order to destroy this interloper?

Though he was sure that Cassandra wasn't strong enough to withstand its destructive power, Ves was very hesitant about wasting the F-stone's remaining potency!

Having found no other spiritually-reactive exotic like it, Ves wanted to preserve it as a trump card against truly implacable foes. Right now, using it on something that he should have been able to defeat on his own was an incredible waste!

"I guess I'll fall back to the stupid option then. I don't believe you can withstand my attacks forever!"

If a certain amount of brute force didn't work, then Ves could always employ it again! And again! And again!

Just like how mech armor designed to withstand laser fire would eventually succumb to a bombardment of lasers, Ves believed that Cassandra's defenses still incurred at least some damage with every hit! Total immunity didn't exist in mechs, so it shouldn't exist in the spiritual arena either!

His spiritual energy expenditure increased enormously as he kept hammering and stabbing Cassandra's unusually resilient spiritual probe like crazy. William Urbesh's half-constructed spirit started to stagnate and regress due to being neglected. It didn't help that Ves was acting like a bull in a china shop and tore up some of the surrounding spiritual shards!

He didn't care about the collateral damage right now. All that mattered to him was eliminating this uncontrollable outside factor before it ruined his entire experiment!

Though Ves drew on his P-stone energy reserves like he was thirsty, his efforts finally achieved the desired effect!

At some point, his attacks caused Cassandra's probe to reach a limit! Like an egg, it finally popped and leaked a scattered and unregulated amount of spiritual energy all over William's mind!

Unfortunately, before Ves could clean up the mess, the scattered energy all sank into the loose spiritual shards, merging with them to such a degree it was impossible to dig them out!

"Damnit!"

This was another trap! Even if Cassandra failed to finish her targeted manipulation, she still managed to secure a consolation prize by merging a part of her spiritual influence in William's spirituality!

At this moment, Ves faced a very unattractive prospect. He was half-way through the spiritual restoration process that he could not afford to pause or stop.

Doing nothing or halting the process would quickly degrade the quality and integrity of the spiritual shards.

If Ves decided to try again later, he would have much worse ingredients to work with! Right now, they were still relatively fresh, but if he wanted to try again, the ingredients would have certainly spoiled and rotted by then! He only had one chance to make this right!

"I'm not dealing with a regular spiritual product either. I'm working on a real human life here!"

What would happen to William Urbesh if his body lacked the necessary spirituality? Would Ves still be able to merge William's reconstructed spirituality back to his body if he delayed the matter by a couple of days?

Ves didn't know the answers to these questions, but he could not afford to be reckless on this front.

His keen sense of risk told him that it would be best if he proceeded with the operation as best as possible regardless of the uncontrollable variables that Cassandra introduced.

As an artist and a creator, this was a profoundly awful decision to make. Ves felt as if he spent a lot of time to cool a meal for himself, only for one of his enemies to dump an entire cup of sugar on his casserole!

Would he still be able to stomach the finished product after it had been tampered with to such an extent?

Unfortunately, eating something excessively sweet was better than going hungry!

"What a devious plan, Cassandra. I guess you win this time."

Ves was in a bad mood throughout the remainder of the session. He tried his best to separate his emotions from his work and ensure that William's spirit received the best care possible.

It was difficult.

His patience frayed and he was reaching the limits to his tolerance. His distaste in integrating spiritual shards that had been contaminated with a hint of Cassandra's spirituality sat very poorly with him. If possible, Ves vastly preferred to throw away these contaminated shards!

If Ves was creating an ordinary spiritual product, then he would have done so without another thought.

"I can't do that here. I'm not creating something new that begins from scratch. I'm trying to rebuild a human who already exists!"

It was vitally important for Ves to retain as many shards as possible! Any loss, however minor, might have devastating effects on the new William Urbesh!

What if Ves discarded a spiritual shard that was related to his ability to pilot mechs? If William's mech piloting ability incurred damage, then how could he possibly advance to expert candidate?!

Cassandra's scheme went deep. She made it so that Ves had no choice but to accept the tainted ingredients. Regardless of the trap it represented, Ves had no choice but to dive head-in because any other alternative was worse!

Though Ves felt like changing his mind and giving up several times, William's importance to his future plans were far too great for him to quit while he was at this stage!

As Ves breathed more life to William's recomposing spirituality, he finally noticed something remarkable.

Each of his spiritual products always started off on a relatively strong footing compared to other young and underdeveloped spiritual entities.

This was mostly due to the vast amount of energy contained in either the ingredients or the catalyst that Ves provided with his spiritual energy.

The ordinary process of creating spiritual products already injected them with a significant amount of spiritual energy.

The special part about this was that at the moment of creation, there was no rejection. The developing product absorbed any and all sources of spirituality, regardless of how much it conflicted with another source of spirituality!

This was why the shards originating from the cowardly side of William managed to merge seamlessly with the shards from Nyxie's aggressive and domineering side!

What Ves found notable was that aside from the fusion of these two elements, the contribution from both Ves and Cassandra also added into the mix! Aside from contributing some of their spiritual attributes, they mainly gifted the product with a huge amount of spiritual energy!

Both of them contributed in different ways.

Ves provided a large quantity of relatively low-quality spiritual energy. He may not be as evolved as more developed spiritual entities such as Qilanxo and Cassandra, but he had a lot of excess spiritual energy at his disposal!

In contrast, Cassandra only had a tiny amount of spiritual energy at her disposal. Yet the quality of her spiritual energy was so high that its addition soon caused the product's overall quality to grow!

The ultimate result of all of these factors was that William's reconstructed spirit was actually at least an order of magnitude stronger!

"There's more!"

As long as the creation process was still underway, Ves had extensive access to the incomplete product!

He could alter or tamper with any details he wanted! The only problem was that he lacked the knowledge and expertise to know what he was doing most of the time. He wasn't like Cassandra Breyer who was probably capable of making very targeted alterations.

That meant that it wasn't a good idea for him to attempt to reprogram the spiritual shards. It was like trying to mess with the operating system of a mech when he wasn't familiar with the programming language.

"This doesn't apply to everything! There are still some areas that I'm familiar with! I have to make the most out of this temporary period where I'm in complete control!"

Ves suddenly made a very sudden realization. Right now, he was attempting to reforge William's spirituality so that it could support the formation of a force of will.

Why should he wait for the new William to form a force of will when Ves could do it himself? If he acted right away and manipulated William's spirituality to form an appropriate force of will, wouldn't he be able to complete the Rim Guardian Fraternity's mission right away?

His eyes lit up. "This might be a reliable way to create expert candidates!"

Of course, this wasn't quite what he was looking for. Shattering someone's spiritual potential before trying to reconstruct it with an infusion of his spiritual energy would definitely warp someone's personality until they became an entirely different person.

Ves could never bring himself to subject the likes of Melkor Larkinson, Dietrich Krotz and other family or friends to such barbaric treatment!

Everything had a price, and in this case it was way too high.

"Fortunately, it's always someone else who has to pay the greatest price." He smirked.

This meant that this method was still acceptable to mech pilots he didn't particularly care about such as William Urbesh!

Ves focused on turning William into an expert candidate ahead of time.

He recalled the time where Qilanxo forcibly elevated Eloise Pelican from someone who was close to reaching expert candidate into a very potent expert pilot. He replicated some of the methods he witnessed that time and employed his own amateur experiences in imitating a force of will.

It wasn't actually very complicated. Ves just had to grab William's spiritual energy and try and fuse it with his strongest will, emotion or thought.

At this advanced stage in the process, the nearly-complete spiritual product was already starting to connect and affect William's unconscious mind and body.

Since Ves had distorted William's spirituality into developing an obsession for the pursuit of strength, his mind soon started to produce a long of thoughts related to this ambition.

"This is quite convenient!"

His earlier preparation paid off. Ves soon identified enough of William's new obsession and forcibly blended his spiritual energy in it! Though the method was extremely crude and very forced, the inherent compatibility between the two soon sparked a fusion.

William Urbesh finally achieved the goal he always dreamed of. He became an expert candidate!

The only caveat was that Ves wasn't sure how much of the old William would be left by the time he next woke up…