The Mech Touch



There were a lot of possible explanations why Ves could work faster and more effectively than his fellow competitors.

The most obvious factor that enabled him to work so effectively was that he had augmented himself far beyond the level of a second-class Journeyman!

The sublimation that transformed his entire being and elevated all of his cognitive capabilities improved his productivity to the point where his performance started to match that of a first-class mech designer!

"What a rich bastard. Did he have to rub his superiority in everyone's faces? Why can't he move to an Upper Zone and take on mech designers of his own size? There is no need for him to show off in front of plebs like ourselves."

"You're just being jealous. Didn't you read his profile? He used to be a third-rater! For a mech designer from a third-rate state to rise to this point in less than two decades is nothing less than a miracle. Whether he has received help or not, you have to see that no other third-class mech designer is able to make so much use out of the opportunities that he has won. He's the definition of a self-made mech designer."

"I wonder how many mechers he has seduced to obtain so many MTA merits to augment himself to this point. I bet he is called the Devil Tongue for more reasons than the obvious…"

A lot of people had the mistaken impression that Ves had stuffed his body with advanced first-class augmentations.

He wouldn't blame them if he heard their remarks. It was his remarkably high productivity that his wife wanted to catch up to him by acquiring her coveted 120 million MTA credits cranial implant!

Although 120 million MTA merits did not sound like an impossible figure to him anymore, in practice it was absolutely remarkable for any human to have that much MTA merits to spare!

Let alone second-raters, many first-raters never had the capability to earn so much in their lifetimes. They would have to settle with lesser cranial implants that weren't able to amplify their cognitive functions to the same degree.

It was rather ironic. Ves' cranial implant was originally an outdated CFA bioimplant that mainly granted him an insanely high amount of memory space.

Other than being able to dump a lot of digital junk inside its astonishing memory banks, it did not actually provide him with a lot of design-oriented conveniences during his work sessions.

Much of that changed during his recent sublimation. During the time he got hit with lots of inexplicable lightning strikes, his entire brain along with the integrated Archimedes Rubal bioimplant transformed in a direction deliberately established by Ves.

The Archimedes Rubal had evolved into a radically different product. It still retained its huge capacity to store a lot of data, but also received considerable enhancements to its processing power and other useful functions.

On top of that, his brain as a whole also transcended to a higher level, allowing him to perform mental calculations and make inferences far beyond the level of a baseline human.

Out of all of the mech designers taking part in this tournament, Ves was convinced that he was the furthest removed from normal humanity!

He normally had mixed feelings about distancing himself from humanity, but at this moment he fully embraced his transhuman advantages.

After going through much of the database of parts and materials, he had performed rapid comparisons and cost-benefit analyses before making the most optimal choices that best matched his vision.

There was nothing particularly special about most of the components and mech systems that he selected for his work. The database did not include anything too remarkable or exotic in isolation. This was likely an attempt to force the participating Journeymen to invest their time in building up their own custom solutions that could grant their competition mechs unique advantages that could not be duplicated by their rivals.

Some mech designers invested their precious design time into formulating better alloy formulas for the armor systems of their mech designs.

Other mech designers sought to increase the mobility of their works by enhancing their legs or mech engine.

Ves spent much of his time on selecting multiple different weapon systems and upgrading them with the help of his considerable expertise.

He did not start from scratch for the most part. There was nothing wrong with taking an existing weapon system and altering their design in order to quickly squeeze out extra power.

The greater challenge was to integrate them into the frame of the hybrid mech as seamlessly as possible. That was absolutely not a simple task.

He started with the easiest weapon module, which was the shoulder-mounted missile launchers.

The extensive rulebook of the tournament heavily restricted the use of missiles and other explosive weapons.

This made sense as the tournament organizers did not want the matches to devolve into a race of which side was able to saturate the enemy positions with as many explosive missiles as possible!

A lot more competition mechs would look like missile launchers on legs if not for this rule!

Ves still went through with adding a pair of small and relatively compact missile launchers because he had no intention of filling them up with explosive munitions.

Instead, he borrowed a page out of some of his previous works and designed these missile launchers to carry a number of utility warheads.

The database offered a selection of EMP missiles, smoke missiles, sensor-boosting missiles and more.

They weren't as useful as they sounded. Ves scrunched his face as he read through the specifications of these utility missiles. Their performance was incredibly weak and could only mildly inconvenience opposing mechs at best.

"Hm. I'm not surprised."

The tournament organizers did not want the entire arena to become filled with blinding smoke or for mechs to turn into crippled machines all of the time.

If anyone wanted to make effective use of these utility missiles, they had to put in the work to upgrade their meager capabilities.

Ves chose to do so. He had worked on mechs with comparable capabilities before. The Valkyrie Redeemer and his more recent Buzzy Bee both possessed functions that could blind the sensors or disrupt the electrical systems of opposing machines.

He allocated much of his formidable design capabilities into altering the key working mechanisms of these utility missiles.

There was no need for him to reinvent the entire wheel. The missiles themselves were fairly basic but serviceable. He just needed to modify the warheads themselves.

For example, he improved the effectiveness of the EMP missiles by reducing its range, increasing its energy density and upgrade horribly basic and outdated components with more modern advancements.

He did the same for the smoke missiles. He increased the volume of particles the missile could carry while also using the materials at his disposal to formulate an entirely new particle formula that was substantially more effective at its job.

It took a lot of specialized knowledge in ECM systems and materials science in order to be able accomplish the latter. Ves also had to rely heavily on his enhanced cognitive abilities and his intuition in order to solve these problems as quickly as possible.

On top of everything else, he couldn't forget about modifying and upgrading the sensor systems of both the hybrid mech and the light skirmisher!

It would be embarrassing if his own machines would get blinded by their own disruptive measures!

Ves wasn't entirely pleased with his solutions. He knew extremely well that he could have improved the effectiveness of the utility missiles and the sensor system by 20 if not 40 percent if he spent a lot more time on exploring alternative solutions and optimizing their implementations.

Unfortunately, Ves had chosen to add a lot more systems to his hybrid mech, so he reluctantly moved on to other modules.

The next weapon system he decided to work upon was the wrist-mounted flamethrowers.

He wanted his hybrid mech to possess the fighting power of a striker mech, as he expected a lot of enemies to take the speed route like his own team.

Flamethrowers were excellent choices because they not only reduced the maneuvering space of light mechs, but also dealt fantastic damage to internal components if they could get past the exterior armor layers.

Normally, this was difficult to achieve because the armor systems of modern mechs were great at insulating heat and energy. It took a lot of time for flames to melt through solid heat-resistant armor and expose the internal components that were much more susceptible to extremely hot flames.

The introduction of an obvious frontal weak point had changed the equation!

As long as the flames were able to breach the relatively flimsy material that covered this gap, they could deal all manner of ruinous damage to circuitry, power lines and delicate mechanical subcomponents!

The damage potential of flames towards internal components exceeded that of a kinetic projectile or a laser beam in that sense!

The flamethrowers that Ves decided to add to the wrists of his hybrid mech were relatively weak in order to save on capacity.

In his opinion, the flamethrowers should solely be used to hinder light mechs and finish off vulnerable machines by targeting their frontal weak points.

There was no need to add large propellant tanks to the hybrid mech so that it could light the entire arena on fire.

Of course, Ves made a few focused adjustments to the flamethrowers. He added a setting that concentrated its output so that it could melt through light armor plating as long as the narrow jet of fire struck its mark.

He also changed the propellant formula to increase its density and make it more potent. He had to reinforce the components of the flamethrower in order to prevent them from melting, but he did not need to make too many changes as the hybrid mech wouldn't be able to spray fires for long.

While he would have liked to increase the longevity of the flamethrowers, he could not do so without compromising the mobility of his hybrid mech.

Speed remained a priority for his hybrid mech. He wanted it to catch up to the light skirmisher as best as possible so that the two competition mechs could run circles around most of their adversaries.

Once he completed the missile launchers, he moved on to adding two integrated luminar crystal guns into the upper torso of the hybrid mech.

A hybrid mech could not call itself a hybrid mech if it did not feature integrated weapons into its massive torso!

While the addition of these integrated weapons added extra weak points to the hybrid mech, Ves believed that the tradeoff was worth it. The hybrid mech already possessed a huge gap in its frontal defenses, so the addition of two more didn't seem to alter the fundamental equation.

His hybrid mech just had to utilize its superior offensive capabilities to take the initiative and finish off its opponents before the enemy could do the same!

Unlike the other modules that he had added to his mech design, Ves had to design the compact integrated luminar crystal hardpoints from scratch.

This was one of the instances where Ves truly showed what he was capable of! While he wasn't able to design a version of his latest generation of luminar crystal weapons, he was still able to come up with a simplified variant in record time.

The dumbed down version of luminar crystals weren't all that powerful, but any additional offense helped a lot in a fight. They were remarkably energy efficient and took up less space than conventional energy weapon systems.

More importantly, Ves was able to fabricate the simplified luminar crystals with the native capabilities of the superfab without relying on any confidential or proprietary technologies, so he wouldn't inadvertently break his deal with the MTA either.

"It will have to do." He sighed as he completed his integrated energy weapon designs in less time than anyone expected!