The Mech Touch

　　Although he expected the Enlightened Warrior to produce an elevated reaction from Jessica Quentin, the spikes he was seeing were too much!

　　They also looked suspiciously familiar to Ves. Weren't these readings similar to the ones he observed when he experimented on a lot of dwarves?

　　His eyes widened in alarm. "QUINT! What the hell are you doing!?"

　　More than a hundred kilometers separated Ves from the Enlightened Warrior mech he was testing. This meant that he could not keep track of what was happening to the glow or other spiritual phenomena surrounding his mech.

　　In hindsight, he should have placed it a bit closer to his position. Despite the obvious security risks that entailed, Ves really wanted to obtain a better idea on what was truly going on inside his new mech.

　　From what he was able to infer from Jessica Quentin's life signs, the mech pilot was undergoing a lot of upheaval, so much so that her heart rate and other signs of stress were rising in a similar fashion to the test subjects that he had experimented upon in the past!

　　The more Ves studied the data, the more he was able to see the similarities in the pattern. The rate of increase was so unnatural and alarming that he could only think of one reason why Jessica Quentin's physiological signs were spiking to such an extent.

　　The Quint was subjecting its own mech pilot to the full force of the new mech's transcendence glow!

　　This went way past the safety limit that he had programmed!

　　"How?!"

　　Ves almost began to panic as he thought about how the Quint was able to override the Enlightened Warrior's safety limit.

　　Did the masterwork mech bully the newborn machine? Did the Quint actually hack into the Enlightened Warrior mech and forcibly removed the safety barriers that Ves had put up in order to prevent his new mech model from killing its own mech pilots?

　　If this was true, then that had huge implications for Ves and his relationship with the various spiritual entities he created or recruited over the years.

　　For a long time, Ves and the various spirits that had joined his collection enjoyed a harmonious relationship. Both of them benefited from playing by the rules.

　　As long as Ves kept designing mechs, he would continue to draw upon the design spirits to strengthen his work.

　　This provided the design spirits with spiritual feedback which they needed to sustain their incorporeal existence and potentially evolve further.

　　Why was the Quint different?

　　"It's a mech and not a traditional living organism."

　　Ves used different approaches to create different mechs. When he created a new design spirit by himself, he generally tried to create a form of life that was fairly similar to that of a human. He took their emotions, their motivations, their inclinations and other living aspects into account and tried to make them as rounded as possible while still making sure they fulfilled their primary responsibilities.

　　Whenever he designed or built his mechs, he did not set out to create rounded individuals. He needed them to live for their jobs and fulfill their purpose without any deviations.

　　The reason for adopting a more narrow approach was because his mechs needed to be reliable and consistent enough for mech pilots to count on them. It would hardly be good for his Larkinsons and his customers if every single living mech came out differently despite sharing the same design!

　　Of course, even if the individual mechs started out as near-copies of each other, they eventually diverged from each other as they were utilized by different mech pilots. Each of them slowly developed their own characters and grew in unique ways.

　　The Quint along with the Shield of Samar were the most prominent mechs of this kind. Both of them had deviated so far from the mech model they were originally based upon that they had literally taken a life of their own!

　　Ves considered them to be children that had grown up. They were adults who were old enough to make their own choices, befriend whoever they wished and set their own life goals.

　　Up until now, Ves had never questioned whether his living mechs would continue to act responsibly. The templates that he had set for them already came with a strong sense of loyalty to the Larkinson Clan. Even if they grew in different directions, they all shared the same root!

　　"What about the Quint, though? Has it gone astray?!"

　　The Quint was pretty much the most valuable standard mech in the Larkinson Clan. It was a living relic that could offer a lot of benefits to the Larkinsons as long as it faithfully served the clan as always.

　　The mere suggestion that Ves would have to retire it because it was capable of causing active harm onto mech pilot was painful for him to think about!

　　Yet as clan leader and mech designer, Ves would have no choice but to put the Quint in the mech equivalent of a prison if it ever misbehaved to a severe degree.

　　If Jessica Quentin's head blew up because the Quint couldn't show any restraint, then Ves would get into a lot of trouble with the MTA!

　　He could practically feel Jovy's eyes staring in direction. The MTA Journeyman was sure to observe everything carefully. There was no way that Ves could shirk responsibility if Jessica Quentin actually died in this testing session!

　　While Ves was worrying about the consequences of what was happening, Jessica did not feel as if she was in a bad state at all. It was the opposite. The removal of all distractions and the amplification of her greatest obsessions allowed her to see the truth of who she was for the first time in her life.

　　No amount of introspection and self-analysis could go past her own lies. Like walls, the lies she generated and told herself kept her away from the uglier parts about herself that she didn't want to think about.

　　Whatever the Enlightened Warrior was doing to her had struck down all of those walls and laid the truth to bare.

　　In fact, it didn't just end at breaking walls. The mech's powerful new glow actually caused the prisoner that was locked deep inside her heart to rise to a more prominent height!

　　At this point, Jessica Quentin couldn't even turn her attention away from it if she wanted to. It had risen so much that she couldn't think about anything else.

　　"So this is who I really am." She whispered.

　　The truth was pretty simple.

　　Jessica Quentin was not a soldier who took pride in serving on behalf of the MTA. Perhaps it was ungrateful for her to think this way, but she never had a choice of choosing who she served with when she was born in a family that already belonged to the Association.

　　In addition, she did not feel a strong sense of belonging to any of the MTA factions even though she was a member of one. Her parents were already aligned to the Survivalist Faction and simply expected their daughter to follow suit.

　　For her entire life, she thought that she had plenty of choice of who she was developing into. Yet it turned out that the few choices she was allowed to make only gave her the illusion of choice.

　　From the moment she found out she had the right genetic aptitude, everyone around her tried to mold her into a mech pilot.

　　Was this bad? Not necessarily. Jessica genuinely loved her profession. Mech pilots were important in the Age of Mechs and it was an honor to become a part of this noble group.

　　Even if everyone around her didn't push her into becoming a mech pilot, she still would have done her best in the academies and training programs.

　　What Jessica felt helpless about was that she had lived her entire life without making enough decisions on her own. She had lived under the direction of various people. Her parents, her instructors, her superior officers and even Master Willix all made decisions on her behalf without seriously giving her a real say in her own future.

　　Perhaps she never felt upset about it before because it was so ingrained in her life, but in her heart the resentment at the lack of consideration continued to build up. After all of these years of living a life she wasn't really satisfied with, all of that accumulated resentment had piled up into a mountain!

　　Now, the mountain was slowly rising higher, causing Jessica to become more and more infused with the burning anger at her lack of choices.

　　The more she thought back on the situations where she acted like an obedient MTA drone who wordlessly obeyed every instruction given to her, the more she fueled her desire to break out of her cocoon and fly free like a butterfly!

　　"I… I know who I am now!" She shouted, whether it was to her mech, the Quint or herself, it didn't matter! "Venerable Tusa had been right all along. It's much more liberating to care about myself than to care for others!"

　　The time became a Speed Demon and served alongside Venerable Tusa Billingsley-Larkinson was actually the happiest period of her life.

　　She admired Tusa. She envied his power. Yet what she found the most impressive about him was that he had the power and the guts to make his own choices in life.

　　Sure, he was still a Larkinson and he never failed to fight for the clan if needed. Yet the way he approached his responsibilities was remarkably different from many other Larkinsons.

　　Tusa always gave everyone a vibe that he was only here by choice. If the Larkinson Clan ever changed in a direction he didn't agree with, he would not hesitate to resign and leave no matter what was allowed or what was right.

　　It was a bold stance, yet one that the Larkinsons tolerated because he was an expert pilot. Everyone in the clan knew that expert pilots were so committed to their principles and beliefs that it was pointless to make them change.

　　Jessica's eyes shone brilliantly as she had found her ticket to freedom.

　　The best way for her to gain autonomy over her own life was to become an expert pilot who was deeply committed to her self-determination!

　　If she gained the strength to command respect from the MTA, then people would no longer dismiss her own opinions!

　　If she showed that she was willing to fight and die for the right to make her own choices, then the MTA would have no choice but to give her what she wanted lest it ruin a potential ace pilot or god pilot!

　　"Power! I can do all of this as long as I have power!" Jessica raised her fist and gripped it as if she was grasping her own destiny! "Only by becoming a demigod will I have the capital to take back control!"

　　Just as the rising mountain was about to burst out from her heart and turn into a butterfly, everything abruptly crashed as the entire cockpit went dark!

　　"AHHHHH!"

　　Jessica held her head in pain as she experienced a much more abrupt reaction to having her mech abruptly lose power while interfacing with it! The transition was so much worse for her this time because of her heightened emotions at the time of the cutoff!

　　Back on the Spirit of Bentheim, Ves maintained an impassive expression as he confirmed that the Enlightened Warrior indeed lost power to all of its systems.

　　Though he was ordinarily against implementing kill switches in his own mechs, he made exceptions for cases like these.

　　Every mech based on a new design was a potential hazard to its own pilot. This was even more relevant this time because he implemented a dangerous solution into the Enlightened Warrior design.

　　Not putting in a killswitch in his first Enlightened Warrior mech would have been stupid if that was the case!

　　"Well, let's see how the test pilot is faring."