The Mech Touch

Ves and his wife took their time to inspect and admire each masterwork mech.

No machine was identical. The more masterwork mechs they saw, the more they became aware of how cleverly the gallery operators selected the individual pieces.

Each masterwork mech told a different story. Some were developed especially for rich scions in the galactic center who went on to enjoy successful careers.

Others were masterwork versions of fairly ordinary mech designs. Their histories were more mixed. A few even took part in losing wars where they had eventually fallen in battle and taken as trophies by the opposition.

The cases where the ownership of masterwork mechs swapped from one organization to another were the most intriguing ones to Ves. As someone who always favored pairing mechs to the same mech pilots, it was interesting to see how mechs with the potential for life developed in a different direction.

From what he could observe, these masterwork mechs also developed more life, but their characters were a little less defined and a bit more general. That made it hard to detect that they possessed any further special qualities at all, but they were definitely present.

That answered at least a couple of questions that Ves always wondered about. This insight alone was already worth the 20 MTA merits he paid for two half-priced day tickets.

"Look! It's a masterwork doom crawler! Let's go and see what it can do!" Gloriana enthusiastically called.

The doom crawler was a popular display piece of the Masterwork Gallery. Although the venue didn't host too many visitors at this time, there were already three people floating in front of the distinctive heavy mech.

Ves spared a brief glance at the strangers. All three of them were mech designers and likely belonged to the same group. One of them, an older woman, was clearly a Master Mech Designer. The other two possessed the spiritual strength that Ves associated with Senior Mech Designers.

All three of them wore bright teal uniforms that were incredibly refined and reminded Ves of first-class materials.

Through various other clues, he deduced that the trio of older mech designers likely came from the galactic center!

Even though the galactic center was incredibly powerful and dominated by first-rate states, a few second-rate states existed between the cracks. The people who tended to live there had access to better tech and opportunities due to the ease in which they could associate with first-raters.

Neither of the two groups took the initiative to greet each other. They were total strangers to each other and the age gap between them was too big.

The older mech designers probably thought that Ves and Gloriana had come in order to look at cool mechs, nothing more. The fact that the couple also brought their baby and pets along further reinforced the impression of a casual day out, which actually wasn't far from the truth!

Ves twitched his mouth. He wondered how these old fogeys would react if they knew that he and his lovely wife both had five masterwork certificates under their belt!

There was no need for him to come up to them and brag, though. Rather than waste his time on posturing for no good reason, it was better for him to study the latest masterwork mech that had caught his attention.

"The Husk Maker has a more sordid history than the other masterwork mechs we've seen." Gloriana stated as she read the info panel. "This masterwork mech did a lot more damage to civilians than enemy combat units."

"That's stating it lightly."

Ves could already sense the dark history of the Husk Maker even before he read a single word from its info panel. The character of a mech, especially a living one, was defined both by its creator and its pilot.

In both cases, the Husk Maker inherited their darkness.

When Ves set aside most details and just wanted to capture a deeper impression of the second-class doom crawler, he gradually understood its nature.

The machine was designed as a murder weapon. Ves didn't know what the eight-legged mech's brilliant designer specialized in, but he or she passed on a strain of madness and despair to the Husk Maker.

When he examined the technical design of the doom crawler, he saw that while it wasn't customized for a single user, it was definitely designed for only a single use in mind.

A lot of wealthy materials and premium tech for its time had been put into this doom crawler. They were so extravagant in fact that it even surpassed the cost of low-tier expert mechs!

While that didn't automatically mean that the Husk Maker could actually beat an expert mech in battle, it possessed a huge advantage against standard mechs!

Due to the extreme investment its designer put in this standard mech, the Husk Maker became incredibly tough, which was one of the defining parameters of a doom crawler.

Not only was it clad with expert mech-grade armor plating, it also featured a large and power-hungry shield generator.

As for offensive capabilities, the Husk Maker was armed with an array of ranged weapons.

First was the missile launcher. This was a fairly standard module for doom crawlers, but the Husk Maker was special in that it actually carried a small arsenal of nuclear missiles!

"Damn, how did this designer get his hands on tactical nuclear missiles?" Ves frowned. "Did he produce them himself?"

This was a fairly real possibility. The tech behind nuclear weapons and most weapons of mass destruction wasn't actually complicated. Any mech designer who possessed decent fundamentals could make them in a typical workshop. It wasn't even that hard to obtain fissionable materials.

The real difficulty lay in hiding the illegal goods. Just one mistake was enough to invite a violent and immediate response from the MTA's Compliance Department!

In any case, a mech designer who deliberately designed a mech to utilize nuclear missiles definitely had a few screws loose in his head. There was no way that someone prepared a mech that was capable of mass murder without acknowledging that there was a real possibility that it would be used for its 'intended' purpose!

The other weapon systems of the Husk Maker weren't as extreme, if only to ensure that it possessed the means to defeat other mechs.

Ves was already familiar with gauss cannons and positron cannons.

What was a little bit more special to the Husk Maker was its arsenal of flammable weapons. It not only featured numerous flamethrowers, but also mounted an array of small mortars at the top.

These mortars weren't designed to bomb mechs or military strongholds from afar. Their payloads weren't capable of penetrating through armor.

Instead, they fired small and compact fire bombs that burned anything it came into contact with! The amount of lightly-protected structures the Husk Maker could burn if it was able to keep launching fire bomb after fire bomb was quite considerable!

"A mech designer cannot do the deed himself, though." Ves murmured. "There always has to be an accomplice."

Again, without reading any of the information that could provide him with context, he tried to decipher the character of the mech pilot.

Ves had already figured out that the Husk Maker had only been used for a short amount of time, possibly just a single battle. It had also been reconstructed from a heavily-damaged state.

Its sole mech pilot only fought a single battle.

Yet this single run left a surprisingly strong imprint behind. The masterwork mech had been designed to sow destruction and the mech pilot fully embraced this purpose.

Not only that, but the murderous pilot also completely aligned with the intentions of the mech designer, thereby producing a rare condition where the trinity between mech, mech designer and mech pilot were completely aligned!

If the mech pilot possessed spiritual potential, then he might have actually broken through in this battle!

Fortunately or unfortunately, he lacked this quality. From what Ves could read from the Husk Maker, the powerful doom crawler fought a short but destructive engagement where it continually sustained damage as it fended off a mass of regular mechs.

Yet even as it slowly began to fall apart, it not only managed to put up a decent fight against its opposition, but also launched a lot of fire bombs as well as positron beams and gauss cannons at civilian targets.

Ves guessed that the Doom Crawler must have launched its tactical nuclear missiles at the end when the opposition was already exhausted and became less capable of intercepting the critical payloads.

"Let's see whether my guess is true."

When Ves read the info panel and watched the short and highly edited footage, he found out that his expectations were true.

The Husk Maker was a part of a revenge tale. A certain Senior Mech Designer lived in a fairly oppressive state and lost his wife due to losing out in some kind of political struggle.

That completely triggered the quiet, well-mannered and steady Senior, prompting him to throw away his entire career and all of his ambitions.

Over the span of several years, he secretly designed a doom crawler that was designed to retaliate against the state by hitting an important city.

He not only scouted his targets and selected one that wasn't too heavily defended, but also roped in his son who happened to be a mech pilot!

The evidence gathered after the incident made it clear that both father and son colluded with each other. The Senior created the best murder machine of his life while the son trained how to wipe out the most people in special simulation battles.

Once they finished all of their preparations, both father and son hopped inside the two-person cockpit of the Husk Maker before heading out to start a rampage!

"Damn, what a crazy move!"

It was incredibly crazy for a mech designer to accompany a mech pilot in battle, but if the former no longer cared about staying alive, it made a bit more sense.

With the help of expert advice and guidance from the Senior, the mech pilot was able to utilize all of the options of the Husk Maker to better effect!

Of course, better effect translated into more mass murder. With the usage of the nuclear missiles taken into account, this resilient masterwork doom crawler eventually killed around 500,000 people, which was actually half the target of the father and son duo.

The Husk Maker got taken down too quickly despite its heavy armor. The defenders acted with desperation and worked as a team to disable the Doom Crawler's weapon systems before destroying its legs.

Gloriana sighed as she lightly squeezed the baby in her arms. "What people do for love."

"Do you admire them?" Ves looked a bit shocked.

"Why not? They showed great devotion to the sole woman of their life. It's a pity that they chose to express their love in such a barbaric, violent manner. They needed more women in their lives. An extra daughter would have helped the two refine their plan or convince them to fight against the authorities in a smarter way. If I were there, I would have persuaded these two idiots to defect to an enemy state. They could deal so much more damage over a longer period of time that way."

"Uhhh… okay."

Ves set that all aside. He wasn't here to commemorate the fallen or condemn the mass murderers.

What he cared about the most was how the interplay of strong intent and emotions resulted in a doom crawler that was frankly excellent in many ways. It was a passion project that was at the same level or even higher than his own Devil Tiger!

Another part of what made the Husk Maker so distinctly good was that its creator designed this machine with clearly defined concepts in mind.

Whether consciously or unconsciously, the Senior worked on his project with such a narrow focus that the mech was actually more coherent and alive than any of the masterworks that Ves had seen!

"It's a pity it only saw battle once." Ves sighed.

The Husk Maker could have evolved into a second order living mech if it was piloted for a longer period of time. When piloted by the same vengeful and emotional son, the doom crawler would have surely been able to gain enough living traits to take part in the revenge spree!

Suddenly, an interesting thought came to mind.

Ves could see that despite its short usage and despite its long years of serving as a display model, the Husk Maker was still close to becoming a second order living mech.

If he could play around with it a little bit, he guessed that he could easily lift up to the standard of one of his typical mechs.

Should he do so, though?

The urge kept growing in his heart.

No matter the purpose of its creator, the Husk Maker was the culmination of a mech designer's earnest effort. The Senior truly put a piece of himself into the doom crawler, which indirectly meant a part of this war criminal lived on in this display model.

"Wait a second."

What if he did the opposite?

Instead of reinforcing the Husk Maker's life, he could try to extract it instead!

He had done it before when he harvested small spiritual fragments from the Quint and the Amaranto in order to create Vulcan.

As long as he was careful enough, Ves could do something similar with not only the Husk Maker, but also every other significant masterwork mech in this gallery!

Should he?