The Mech Touch

When the Paravad drove its powerful beak into the First Sword, the warnet lost connection to the First Sword.

This was a bad sign and usually served as a prelude to the confirmation of the fall of a mech.

Ves' heart had sunk. He knew that it was too unrealistic to keep pulling rabbits out of his hat. After using up one trump card after another, the Larkinson Clan's deck had become a lot emptier.

An overwhelming sense of guilt and loss overtook his mind. Unlike the deaths of a couple of Larkinson expert candidates whose names and faces he barely remembered, Dise was a true friend.

He did not do right by Venerable Dise and the original Swordmaidens. He relied a lot on their strength to save his clan and his own hide but did not provide them much aside from the benefits that other Larkinsons already enjoyed.

The First Sword was finished late in the current round of design projects, so Venerable Dise only had a fraction of the time that Venerable Tusa enjoyed to thoroughly familiarize herself with the strengths and weaknesses of her expert mech.

It was no surprise that Venerable Tusa's performance exceeded that of any other Larkinson expert pilot. With a head start of around half a year, he not only mastered all of the performative nuances of the Dark Zephyr, but also had plenty of time to build up a deep accord with his expert light skirmisher.

On top of that, he also spent much more time in growing his resonance strength. True expert mechs were so much more conducive to the development of an expert pilot than a prime mech.

"Dise…" He sighed.

Ves could not imagine what Ketis was going through at the moment. The loss of yet another original Swordmaiden was another painful loss to someone who already lost a lot of sisters in previous battles.

Not only was losing Dise a great personal loss, but it also negated much of the effort put into designing and fabricating the First Sword. The expert swordsman mech was actually her first swordsman mech that she designed and realized by employing her own design philosophy.

No mech designer wanted to spend all of that blood, sweat and tears to create a fine mech for a specific client only for the machine to fall in its first battle!

Ves had already designed enough mechs to not become affected by such a setback, but he was quite concerned whether Ketis would also be able to take this blow without affecting her passion and enthusiasm for mech design.

In the worst case scenario, this tragic loss might turn into an enduring ache for her that would weigh her down for the rest of her life!

As the interference finally cleared up, Ves and many other people in the expeditionary fleet looked carefully at the result of the Paravad's powerful charge attack.

The fact that this dwarven expert mech lost its hard beak in its strike attempt did not look encouraging!

"How much of the First Sword is left?" Ves clung to his hammer as he watched on with a mixture of dread and hope.

"The First Sword… it's alive! It's still intact!"

Everyone who had the attention to spare looked shocked.

The First Sword, while still bound by the clamping mechanism of the Domingo Daren, was still in the same condition as it was before!

Aside from the ugly arm wound inflicted by the Morko Mark II, the First Sword did not exhibit any other major signs of damage!

The back armor which the Paravad had targeted with its beak was still in good condition. Though it was a bit banged up due to getting hammered by the Domingo Daren's gauss cannons, it did not feature the large and fatal cavity that Ves had expected out of the Paravad's collision.

Ves looked puzzled. "What happened?"

It didn't take much looking to find the answer.

Floating just before the First Sword was the Decapitator.

Previously, the sharp and powerful sword was rendered useless due to the captive state of the First Sword. Sinds the expert mech's arms were clamped down along with the rest of its frame, Venerable Dise wasn't able to swing the weapon at all. Its fingers which still gripped the weapon weren't strong enough to swing or heave the large and hefty blade around.

So how did it move out of the First Sword's grip, and what did it do to rescue the expert mech and most likely its pilot?

Ves took a good look at the floating blade that exuded a very different vibe when it was held in the First Sword's hands.

"…Sharpie?"

He recognized that sharp and distinctive vibe right away. The Decapitator possessed its own unique character, of course, but now Ves had the impression that he was looking at a supersized version of Ketis' Bloodsinger!

"This is impossible!"

Ves resisted the urge to rub his eyes as he stared widely at the blade. It turned out that Sharpie not only crossed a distance of many kilometers to possess the Decapitator, but also channeled enough power to block the Paravad's incredibly powerful charge to the point that it actually bounced back while losing its beak in the process!

"How?"

The sheer amount of improbable and impossible events that took place boggled his mind. A number of very clear rules had been broken in this brief event.

First, how could Sharpie exceed the maximum range that companion spirits were able to move away from their principals by a magnitude of so many kilometers?

Blinky couldn't even go past a few compartments aboard the Spirit of Bentheim!

Second, how was the First Sword able to stop many tons of worth of mech in its tracks, and without suffering any significant counterforce in return? How could the weapon empowered by Sharpie wield such a disproportionate amount of power by itself?

At the very least, the Decapitator should have smacked onto the surface of the First Sword when it was rammed by the Paravad!

Third, how was the sword even able to move by itself? Sure, Ketis' personal weapon was able to fly around, either on its own or with Sharpie directing its flight, but that was because the handle and sheath incorporated powerful low-profile gravitic modules that allowed the handheld weapon float.

No such system was incorporated in the Decapitator. Ves still remembered its design schematics and he had personally witnessed Ketis putting it together step by step as she channeled all of her passion. Though it incorporated a small amount of electronic components, none of them were large enough to be able to lift the enormous blade, let alone wield it as if it was held by an actual mech!

"Impossible!" Ves uttered again as he tried his best to make sense of the situation.

After repulsing the Paravad's fatal charge, the Decapitator did not remain idle for long. It turned its blade and swung backwards in a remarkably simple motion.

The swing did not possess much force, yet effortlessly sliced through half of the clamps that held the First Sword in place.

If Ves had any doubts that Sharpie was present in the Decapitator, they had all been laid to rest!

On a hunch, Ves activated a live feed that provided him with a view of the main design lab.

"Ketis!"

She was not sitting behind her terminal like the other mech designers. Instead, she had stood up and practically dominated her entire corner of the design lab by channeling her will!

She held her Bloodsinger in her hands and lifted her head up as if to gaze straight through the structure of the Spirit of Bentheim so that she could track something at a distant part of the battlefield.

The power that exuded from her body looked as if she was expending a huge amount of power. Indeed, just after the Decapitator finished cutting enough bonds, Sharpie's influence disappeared from the weapon, causing it to turn inert again.

It had done its job, though. The First Sword was no longer as immobilized as before. It was able to squirm and free up a single limb with caught hold of the floating Decapitator before using its blade to hack the remaining clamps that kept the expert mech lock.

Soon enough, Venerable Dise had managed to free up her precious expert mech from the weakened grasp of the Domingo Daren!

What happened was so improbable that many people were still in shock at this time. Not even the dwarven expert pilots were able to process what had happened.

"Ah, Ketis!"

In the design lab, Ketis had retrieved a much-depleted companion spirit. She had drained so much of her energy and will in that crucial moment of time that there was hardly anything lef in her. She collapsed onto the deck, causing considerable alarm among the mech designers and guards.

She had to be put on an emergency floating stretcher and be carried to the nearest medical bay. With several guards escorting her in person, Ves slowly let go of his concerns for her health.

While the freed and rejuvenated First Sword tentatively resumed the fight against the three Hivar Roarer expert mechs, Ves kept thinking back on what Ketis had managed to do and how it was possible for her to extend her spiritual reach at such a great distance.

"Is it spiritual projection?"

This was a possible answer, but not a satisfying one to Ves. Distances, like any other physical property, were kind of funky in the spiritual realm, so theoretically it was possible for him to exert his influence a lot further than his natural range in the material realm.

Yet even that had limits… at least he thought so. However, Ketis didn't have his spiritual sensitivity and shouldn't be capable of navigating the spiritual realm in the first place.

"Something much different is a work I think." He frowned deeper.

Eventually, Ves put together a simple list of facts.

"First, Ketis is both a swordmaster and a mech designer. She possessed the powers of both."

"Second, the Decapitator is a masterwork mech sword which she has personally designed and fabricated with all of her heart and passion."

"Third, Sharpie is capable of channeling different sword styles but most particularly the one it was born with, which happens to center around sharpness."

When Ves put these facts together, he made a number of highly unusual and potentially mind-blowing inferences.

Take the first point for example. Mech designers were able to extend the influence of their design philosophies to their works. This was why all of the Larkinson mechs out in space were alive and experiencing growth on a spiritual level.

However, what if the mech designer did not just possess a design philosophy, but also a force of will? Was the latter able to piggyback off the former and extend onto a work of the originator's own making as well?

"This isn't a sufficient explanation."

With his control over spirituality, how could he not have discovered such an amazing interaction himself? He could have projected a part of himself to any of the mechs that bore his touch and give them boosts of power whenever he was willing to make an effort!

This brought him to the second point. What made the Decapitator different from many oher products was that it was a masterwork product. Though it was not a mech, to Ketis its sword-like nature was even more significant. No one in the Larkinson Clan was able to design and forge swords better than her, period.

If a masterwork sword of her own making allowed Ketis to treat it as something similar to the Bloodsinger that was by her side, then that had massive implications.

And she certainly did channel her power through her masterwork sword, or otherwise Sharpie wouldn't have been able to cross half the battlefield which broke many assumptions that Ves had made about spiritual interactions!

Ves tried to figure out the key point that made this possible. He quickly settled on the qualities of a masterwork.

He understood very little about what masterworks actually were and what concrete benefits they brought over other products.

Now, he suspected that he uncovered a great secret that most mech designers were clueless about!

"What are masterworks exactly? What kind of property could enable Ketis to reach so far and channel her power through the Decapitator?"

After making a lot of different theories, Ves stopped at an explanation that sounded incredibly illogical but nonetheless appealed to him as a creator.

"What if… masterworks are an extension of their creator? A living extension, maybe."

He didn't know why he came to such an unreasonable, unsubstantiated guess, but it was an explanation that resonated with his mech designer heart.

This theory could explain everything that just happened. If the Decapitator was not just a very well-made product but also a crystallization of someone's spirit and design philosophy, then it would not be inaccurate to state that a masterwork truly carried a significant component of its creator!

"There's a very simple way to test this crazy guess."

Ves fiddled the controls of his projection feeds and activated a new feed that showed the current state of the Quint.

Just like other Living Sentinel mechs, it was currently hanging back while firing its rifle at any dwarven mechs that were doing their best to reach the expeditionary fleet.

When Ves looked at his second masterwork mech, he raised his armored hand and channeled his spiritual energy while trying to reach out to the Quint.

"I am my work, and my work is I. Connect."

He felt a response that could only have come from a mech.