The Mech Touch

Ves talked extensively to the research supervisor about the potential of implanting the red fish-whale's important blinking organs in his mechs.

It was not far from easy to accomplish this feat. Ves and his staff had to solve at least two different problems.

First, the blinking organs were designed and attuned to the bodies of red fish-whales. Randomly transplanting them in other machines would go as poorly as putting the Shield of Samar's shield generator inside the frame of a Rigid Wall mech!

In order to make them work with entirely different shells, the Larkinson biotech experts needed to apply many different processes onto the organs. It took a lot of research and effort to figure out the right way to transform the alien organs into a more usable form!

Only this way would they become compatible with human mechs!

The second challenge was to design a mech around these organs. Converting them into usable organic modules was not enough. The mech had to implement special accommodations in order to integrate this weird and demanding organ!

Ves thought about what it would take to design a suitable mech.

He first took a look at the size of the blinking organ. As a key element of the assassin fish subspecies, the organ was not small. It was a lot larger and heavier than a human body!

However, the body of a red fish-whale was no bigger than a mech. Most of its organs were no larger than the parts of a mech.

The blinking organ was roughly the size of a typical mech-grade shield generator.

This meant that it would take a lot of effort and compromises to integrate it on the frame of a light mech. Given how much light mechs need to make the most out of their limited capacities, Ves didn't think it was worthwhile to allocate a precious strategic resource to machines with limited combat power.

Medium mechs were much more suitable. They were inherently more powerful. A medium melee mech such as the new Second Sword model could become twice or thrice as deadly in battle if they gained the ability to blink behind the defensive lines of enemy mechs and wreak havoc on the enemy's rear!

As for heavy mechs… one one hand, they had plenty of internal capacity to accommodate a blinking organ. Assuming the organ was powerful enough to teleport a machine of this size and mass, such a powerhouse could deal a lot of damage if it was able to overcome its mobility disadvantage and show up in an extremely favorable position!

On the other hand, heavy mechs possessed far too many limitations when employed in an offensive capacity. Just the amount of time it took for them to even get close enough to an enemy position to perform an effective blinking maneuver was too long!

There were good reasons why most heavy mechs tended to be artillery mechs and knight mechs. These were mech types that didn't necessarily have to move a lot in order to play a useful role on the battlefield.

Ves turned his thoughts back to medium mechs. When he tried to imagine what kind of mech could make the best use of this blinking capability, he couldn't help but consider the Swordmaidens.

Out of all of the mech legions in the Larkinson Clan, the Swordmaidens were the most oriented to melee offensive combat.

Their training, culture and mech doctrines all emphasized attack and nothing else. While this left obvious shortcomings in their ability to respond to different situations, they were absolutely lethal when they fought under favorable circumstances!

However, Ves knew quite well that the moments where the Swordmaidens could attack unscrupulously without worrying about getting attacked in return were quite minor.

Unlike the Avatars of Myth, the Swordmaidens weren't suitable in meeting toughness with toughness. The former had no qualms about attacking defensive mech formations up front. The latter vastly preferred to assail enemy formation from the flanks.

Depending on the battlefield, it was quite tricky for Swordmaiden mech units to outmaneuver their enemy counterparts and hit them from the sides or rear.

If the opponent possessed enough numbers, it could simply dispatch mechs to block and stall the Swordmaiden mechs.

In this situation, the Swordmaiden units faced a difficult dilemma. They could either risk incurring lots of losses by attacking enemy mechs upfront or continue to procrastinate and maintain their distance.

All of that could be changed if the Swordmaiden mechs possessed a third option!

Ves envisioned an elite group of Swordmaiden mechs. These powerful crack troops were larger, more powerful and more expensive swordsman mechs than the recent Second Sword mechs.

When the elite Swordmaiden mechs approached a hardy mech formation and stopped a short distance away, they only paused long enough for their blinking organs to charge its ability and calculate their displacement.

Once their blinking organs completed their preparations, the swordsman mechs all disappeared from sight, only to appear right behind the enemy mech formation, where they subsequently chopped dozens of mechs apart in quick succession!

When the enemy machines finally reacted by turning around, the elite Swordmaiden mechs blinked a second time and returned to their original positions.

At that time, the teleported mechs could opt to attack the disarrayed enemy unit once again or retreat in order to wait for a better opportunity.

This was one of the most promising uses of the newly-discovered blinking organ.

"What about integrating them in expert mechs?"

The ability to teleport could be a game changer in high-end mech combat!

In duels between expert mechs, the ability to appear at a different spot and attack an enemy expert mech at a vulnerable angle with minimal delay could instantly spell the defeat of powerful enemies!

The blinking organ could also serve as a life saver. Key expert mechs like the Minerva would always be a priority target to intelligent opponents.

If an enemy expert mech expended a lot of effort into getting close, the ability to blink away before a fatal attack was able to take effect could save Commander Casella's life one day!

While Ves believed that every expert mech in the Larkinson Army's lineup could benefit from incorporating usable blinking organs, the problem was that none of them were designed with this feature in mind.

Their internal architectures were stuffed with other high-end components. Each of them were so intricately designed that moving them aside and pulling out a few unneeded parts would drastically decrease the combat effectiveness of the powerful machines!

Was it worth it to lower the effective performance of his expert mechs by as much as 30 percent just so that they could gain a short-range teleportation ability?

No!

The basic performance parameters of his expert mechs was the basis of their power. If they lost too much combat strength, then they wouldn't be able to obtain victory against tough opponents even if they gained a teleportation gimmick.

"However… who says that the blinking organs need to be integrated inside a mech?"

The alternative to integrating them deep inside the protective frame of a mech was to mount them onto the exterior.

Backpack modules were made for this! While the ones designed for spaceborn mechs were smaller and more limited due to the presence of flight systems, the blinking organs were still manageable enough to be mounted on the rear!

The Larkinsons just needed to research and develop a way to convert a blinking organ into a functional backpack module.

"The blinking organ will be more vulnerable as a consequence, but the benefits are worth the tradeoffs."

As long as Ves and the Larkinson researchers were able to develop this new organic or cybernetic module, it would be a lot easier to mount them on the backs of specific mechs.

The Larkinsons could keep them in storage when it wasn't necessary to make use of them and only bring the backpack modules out when they were about to fight a crucial battle!

While all of this sounded nice, Ves also acknowledged that this plan possessed several flaws.

The element of surprise played a huge role in the effectiveness of the blink-capable mechs.

Just like how the expeditionary forces had adjusted its combat approach after learning about the capabilities of the red fish-whales, other opponents could make their own adjustments to minimize their vulnerability against teleportation strikes!

Ves also worried about the cost of activating a blinking organ.

"How many times can an assassin fish utilize its blinking organ in battle?" He asked.

"An ordinary red fish-whale can only blink twice per engagement, sir." The supervisor answered. "Activating it once will cause it to endure a great amount of stress. Activating it twice will wear it out to the point that it requires at least an entire day of rest as well as plentiful nutrition before it can be utilized again. Each activation will consume a large amount of energy. The only upside is that the process is relatively efficient. The organ will not generate too much while it is performing its main function. The burden of using it is one of the reasons why the body of an assassin fish is relatively large and robust."

"I see."

These were severe constraints that essentially ended his dreams of designing a specialized melee mech that could blink around a dozen times on the battlefield.

The Larkinson mechs that carried this module could only utilize their blinking ability during critical times. Being able to teleport just twice was too much of a constraint!

The only way to break these limitations was to crack the principles behind the blinking organ and develop a better teleportation module.

Suffice to say, this could not be done in an instant.

"How durable are these organs?" Ves asked.

"They are tougher than they look, patriarch. Don't let their appearance fool you. As the key organs of the red fish-whales, they were designed to withstand the rigors of battle. Millions of years of targeted evolution has caused them to become tougher and even more robust."

"That is good news. If they ever become damaged or broken, can they be repaired so that we can utilize them once again?"

The supervisor didn't know the answer to that. She needed to consult her fellow scientists before she could give an answer.

"We have not researched this topic in-depth, but based on our preliminary findings, the blinking organs possess inherent self-repair capabilities. They can heal from battle damage by themselves as long as they are supplied with sufficient quantities of energy, nutrients and possibly phasewater. However, we do not have much confidence in reviving them if they are destroyed. At that point, it is doubtful whether we can salvage what is left and grow a new blinking organ. Until we are able to reverse-engineer this organic tech, we have no choice but to source them from living assassin fish."

This was a major limitation! The inability for the Larkinson Clan to produce these crucial blinking organs by itself meant that there was only a finite amount of them available.

Once they were being put to use, the quantity of blinking organs would slowly drop as one battle after another wrecked a few of them at a time.

The only way to prevent this was to figure out a way to obtain a continuous supply of fresh blinking organs!

"Is there truly no way of artificially producing the blinking organs on the Dragon's Den?"

"No. As I have already mentioned, we do not have that capability. We can only take them from the assassin fish, and they are only available in this pocket space. Before you ask, we have already considered the possibility of capturing live specimens in the hopes that we can breed them aboard the Dragon's Den, but this is a hopeless endeavor."

"Why so?"

"The red fish-whales do not reproduce in a conventional manner. They emerge after a white fish-whale has ingested enough nutrients and grown to the point where they can metamorphose into a new red fish-whale. Even then, the chance that a grunt fish can successfully complete this evolution is low."

Ves grimaced. "In other words… we need to sustain a huge population of white fish-whales in order to birth a continuous supply of red fish-whales."

There wasn't enough space in the Larkinson fleet to accommodate so many violent and hostile life forms!

The only viable way to secure a constant and renewable supply of blinking organs was to capture or gain control over the entrance of Purgatory!

This way, the Larkinsons could treat Purgatory as a giant farm for rare and valuable fish-whales. They would come in every time they needed to harvest another batch of phasewater, blinking organs and other rare or unique resources!