The Mech Touch

In the end, the quality of the Bright Warrior and its four sets of configurations reached a very high level.

Compared to a typical gold label LMC mech, the quality of the mech that Ves and Gloriana produced was clearly better.

They should be proud of what they accomplished!

Yet.. they only felt a mild sense of disappointment. As they put in the final parts and performed a final inspection, nothing about the mech transcended the level of an ordinary product. At most, it contained a lot less production-related flaws.

Though Ves had made peace with the outcome, Gloriana was not resigned to this outcome. Unlike him, the quality of her products was a lot more central to her design philosophy!

Producing a masterwork mech was literally one of her primary ambitions! After all of the effort she invested into designing the Bright Warrior, she was unwilling to let the mech in front of her be the definitive version of the first production model!

A part of her felt tempted to scrap the mech entirely and try again. She dropped it, though. According to Ves, the first time was special. If they fabricated the mech again, they would be able to lean on the lessons they learned before, but lose most of the meaning that came with fabricating the very first complete copy of the finalized design.

The latter was far more important than the former in determining whether the mech they created became a masterwork!

"It's not to be this time." Ves attempted to soothe her frustration. "Almost everything fell in place for this passion project. We stacked the deck in our favor as much as possible. There was scarcely anything we could have done to increase our odds of realizing our ambition even further. It's just that reality doesn't work according to our desires. I fabricated well over a couple of dozen mechs, but I only managed to luck out in creating a masterwork once. The odds were never in our favor."

"I know that!" Gloriana shouted as her frustration boiled over. "We did so much! We especially kept ourselves awake to finish this marathon session in a single continuous run! I expected us to be rewarded for our efforts!"

Ves shook his head and turned away. "Let it be, Gloriana. The first production model is complete. It's not what we hoped, but it is still a mech to be proud of. We can still try again in the future. One day, the stars will align and everything will fall in place."

"You keep hammering on about 'chance' and 'serendipity' as if they are graced by gods! Isn't there a way to make our own chance?!"

"Serendipity is fleeting, but not a fantasy. It exists and operated by its own rules. I'm sure there is a way to demystify it, but neither of us are equipped to decipher its mechanisms. All we can do is roll the dice and hope we get the number we want."

Such a helpless approach basically amounted to a surrender to Gloriana. As someone who wanted to exert as much control as possible, she detested the notion of relying on something as ephemeral as luck or destiny to achieve the outcome she desired!

Gloriana forcefully poked her finger against his chest. "All of that is easy for you to say. You've already succeeded once! You have taken one step closer to attaining the elusive mech touch, while I'm still stuck at the starting line! You did it once. You can do it again!"

He wasn't in a mind to linger at the workshop any longer. Though his body could still hang on for a couple of days, his mind was worn out. All of the work he performed in the preceding days required utmost concentration.

Even if Ves happened to be good in this aspect, he was not a bot!

He turned around and held the hand that was poking him in a firm grip. "Drop it, Gloriana. We made an attempt and it didn't work out. We are no different from 99.9999999 percent of mech designers in this regard. What I managed to accomplish back then was a fluke! Maybe that's the crux about masterwork mechs. You'll never attain them by desiring them! You're trying too hard!"

Gloriana was practically gnashing her teeth. Quality was one of her top priorities. Unlike the ease in which Ves humbled himself and adopted a more tolerant mindset, it was impossible for her to drop her obsession for masterwork mechs!

She pressed closer to Ves and grasped his work uniform!

"You! You! YOU! YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND! THIS IS EVERYTHING TO ME! I HAVE BEEN DREAMING ABOUT THIS ALL THE TIME AND YOU JUST TELL ME TO DROP IT?! I HAVE BEEN PATIENT WITH YOU AND TOLERATED ALL OF YOUR ANTICS, BUT THAT DOESN'T MEAN YOU CAN TRAMPLE ON MY DREAMS LIKE THEY ARE TRASH!"

"I-I-I didn't mean it that way!"

"WELL FIX THIS THEN!"

"I can't!" Ves raised his hands in surrender. "Don't you think I would have tried something if it got us closer to our goal? The fact of the matter is that the quality of our mech is merely good instead of stellar. There is nothing about it that breaks any boundaries or ascends the realm of an ordinary product!"

'THIS SHOULDN'T BE IT! AREN'T YOU GOOD AT CREATING MIRACLES, VES? I KNOW YOU CAN DO SOMETHING! PUMP THIS MECH WITH DIVINE ENERGY, CREATE ANOTHER PROTO-GOD, SACRIFICE SOMEONE'S LIFE TO MAKE IT ALIVE, JUST DO SOMETHING!"

"It doesn't work that way!" Ves shouted. "The Bright Warrior already possesses a distinct spiritual foundation with its own unique attributes! Our respective spiritual energies don't conform to the mech! Besides, spirituality is a different attribute of mechs that don't cause mechs to become masterworks. There are other factors at work that don't have anything to do with spirituality!"

"No no no! I can't accept this!" Gloriana pounded her fists against his chest as tears began to spill from her eyes. Her voice broke down as the disappointment of the situation settled into her mind. "Don't you love me, Ves?! You can fix this! You can make this moment perfect! Isn't there anything you can do to make this right?"

Though it pained Ves' heart to disappoint his girlfriend, there was really nothing he could do to make her happy. The option that he had been contemplating in the back of his mind was embedding one of Lucky's greater gems in the mech to bump its quality past the masterwork threshold.

Yet for that option to work, the quality of the mech had to reach high enough to put it within reach of the masterwork threshold!

It was as if they were trying to build the Tower of Babel. Even if Ves and Gloriana failed to make the tower high enough to reach the heavens, Ves could still pull out a ladder from his pocket to reach their goal, but only if the top floor of the legendary tower almost brushed the clouds!

As it was, even if Ves brought out his ladder and planted it at the top of their current tower, there was no way that Ves could climb on top and stretch out his hand and expect to touch a fluffy white cloud!

"It's not possible. Sorry." He lamely replied.

"YOU LIE!" She went back to pressing her head against his own! "I can spot when you are lying, Ves! The way you avert your eyes and soften the tone of your voice in just that manner are tell-tale signs that you aren't telling me the truth!"

Ves inwardly cursed. Since when could Gloriana sniff out his lies?! To what extent did she study and analyze his mannerisms for her to be able to recognize that he was being less than truthful?! Why was there no justice in this galaxy?!

"I'm telling you over and over again. There's nothing I can do! If I did, I would have done so already!"

"THAT'S NOT AN ACCEPTABLE ANSWER! I know you have a lot of tricks on your sleeve. A young and inexperienced Journeyman like you can't possibly fabricate a masterwork mech so early in your career! Was it truly a fluke like you claimed, or did you pull something off that enabled your success? TELL ME, VES!"

She continued to cry as she sought to grasp any chance of salvaging this day. She put so much hope in this fabrication run that failure hit her much deeper than normal!

It pained Ves to see his girlfriend in emotional distress. He really didn't want to see her cry! It was one of the most painful sights he had ever seen!

"I.. I may have a trick, but…it won't work this time."

"WHY NOT?!"

"I can bump the quality of our meck a little higher, but not enough to reach our desired standard."

"THEN APPLY YOUR TRICK AGAIN!"

"I can't! It doesn't work that way! The trick I have can only be applied once per mech! I already tried to find out if I can stack it, but there is a hard rule against it! One time is the limit!"

"VES! YOU STUPID BOY! LOOK AT OUR BRIGHT WARRIOR!" She grabbed his head and tried to yank it to the freshly-fabricated mech. "DOES THAT LOOK LIKE A SINGLE MECH TO YOU?! IT'S NOT! IT'S A MODULAR MECH PLATFORM WITH FOUR DIFFERENT CONFIGURATIONS! IN OTHER WORDS, IT'S FOUR MECHS IN ONE! CAN'T YOU APPLY THIS SECRET METHOD OF YOURS ON EACH CONFIGURATION?!"

"This.."

Her suggestion astounded Ves! He had never considered this option before!

At first, it sounded ridiculous. Ves had already tried beforehand to embed multiple gems in a single mech, but there was some sort of interference between them that caused them to interfere with each other's effects. The first gem was the only one that took effect! Anything else that Ves added afterwards would only look pretty, nothing more!

Yet.. Gloriana had a point. The Bright Warrior was not a conventional mech design! The name stood for an entire system that encompassed a base platform as well as multiple different modular add-ons that turned it into different mech types!

In short, the Bright Warrior was both a single mech design and multiple mech designs at the same time!

The most crucial aspect about modular mech platforms was that the different configurations weren't mounted on the base platform at the same time! Only one of them was mounted onto the mech at any single time, with hardly any interchangeability between them due to their specialized parts!

This theoretically made it possible for Ves to apply as many gems as the different configurations could handle! He just had to make sure the gems stuck to the specialized parts instead of the common base platform!

Gloriana blinked up at him with an intensity that could burn a mech!

"I know that look of yours. It's viable, right? You wouldn't be contemplating so many ideas if what I said was wrong! IT WILL WORK, RIGHT?! RIGHT?! RIGHT?!"

"I don't know! I don't know if it will stack up the way we want!"

"Then try!"

"I.. don't know. I might waste some very valuable resources if we fail!"

'WE DON'T KNOW IF WE DON'T TRY! JUST DO IT, VES! GET TO WORK AND FIX THIS MESS!"

Being harried so much by Gloriana sent his mind into muddle. He really couldn't maintain his composure when Gloriana was subjecting him to her volatile mood swings!

The reason why he hesitated was because there was no guarantee that the gems would collectively elevate the quality of the entire modular mech platform. It didn't make much sense if that were the case!

What was much more likely to occur was that only a single gem would be active at a time. Depending on which configuration was mounted to the base platform, only that single gem took effect!

With such a disappointing outcome in mind, Ves was very pessimistic about his odds of success! He really wanted to save his stash of greater gems for better opportunities than salvage an outcome that was already doomed!

Gloriana didn't let him, though!

"WHY ARE YOU THINKING ABOUT HOLDING BACK AT THIS STAGE?! FIX THIS NOW!"