The Mech Touch

The mech that took shape at the end of the design session set a new standard for Ves. The assistance provided by his design seed guided his thoughts and accelerated his mental calculations by a considerable margin!

A different way to describe the difference was that his intuition with regards to mechs experienced a qualitative leap. Whereas before he needed to perform meticulous calculations or simulations in order to know whether he made a good design choice, now he could just take one deep look and make a very accurate judgement.

This kind of help was very valuable when Ves was short on time and needed to design a mech on the fly!

Exercising his design seed and his accelerated design abilities gave him a greater understanding of the power of Journeymen.

”No Journeyman is a bad mech designer. Their mastery of the basics is so good that they can work faster and still stay on the right track.”

For normal mech designs, it meant they could shave months off the design process. For competition mechs, it meant that they could maintain a decent quality level despite the rush!

Novices and Apprentices shouldnʼt lose hope, however. As long as they spent enough time on refining and optimizing their mech designs, their works could approach or even surpass the quality of a mech designed by a Journeyman.

”Itʼs just that the time investment is disproportionately in favor of the higher-ranking mech designer.” Ves muttered.

He estimated that a Journeyman could casually output three or four quality mech designs per year. It would take an Apprentice at least an entire year just to develop a mech of comparable quality!

”If the time savings for Journeymen is already so significant, what about Seniors and Masters?”

Even if a Senior was capable of pumping out ten mech designs a year, Ves doubted that they would actually rush to design so many mechs.

Rather than mass-produce a large number of decent mech designs, Ves would rather take advantage of his increased productivity by elevating the quality of his designs even further!

In the same amount of time, the quality of a mech designed by an Apprentice simply couldnʼt compare against the quality of a mech designed by a Journeyman!

One was like a child and the other was an adult! Of course the latter was far more capable of completing the same task!

Amazingly, Ves believed that his design seed could do more than this! Throughout the entire design process, he never felt as if he truly exerted it to its full potential.

It made him question what a design seed truly represented. The name he bestowed it suggested that it was a seed waiting to sprout, but was that really the right description?

”Perhaps instead of a seed, it is more akin to a furnace. Itʼs constantly outputting spiritual waves for some reason.”

Ves never understood the purpose and reason behind this strange effect. The only reason why he left it be was that it at least used up spiritual energy drawn from the imaginary realm instead of his own reserves.

He stopped wondering about the properties of his design seed and instead turned his attention to his finished mech design.

Despite the lack of time, Ves still managed to design a very respectable mech.

While the high technology employed by the Terrans something dazzled and confounded him, a mech designer did not need to understand how the parts of a mech actually worked.

A power reactor was a power reactor. Whether it worked by fusion or some insanely advanced multi-dimensional voodoo, the only properties that Ves cared about was how susceptible it was to damage, how much heat it outputted, how efficient it was in its operation and how much power it could supply to the rest of the mech.

Naturally, Ves took a lot of smaller details into account as well, but it was best not to overthink the matter, especially when he needed to finish a design in a single day!

Ves took the same approach with all the other parts. He had no clue how the Destroyer Sword worked at all, but from the perspective of a mech designer, he could just treat it like a normal mech-sized sword.

He only needed to take a couple of additional complications in mind, such as that the Sword required a power source to function at its best.

Through this process of simplification, Ves avoided getting enthralled with all of the fancy high technology offered by the auto designer. It would do more bad than good if Ves became overly obsessed with stuffing his mech with the most advanced gimmicks available.

The mech that resulted therefore closely matched his vision.

It exemplified simplicity in its capabilities. While it did not incorporate a whole toolbox of solutions, it outperformed most multipurpose mech in every fundamental specification!

The design stood in stark contrast to the feature-rich multipurpose mechs that seemed to offer a solution to every problem!

The concept of two was not only apparent in its mech concept, but also its visual design. While it took up valuable design time, Ves couldnʼt help but add some artistic touches to its design.

”A hero mech should always stand out! A remarkable appearance is a necessity!”

He decided to coat the mech in a simple black and white division. Its left side was dedicated to the sword. The structure of the arm, shoulder torso and artificial musculature had all been optimized to enhance the power, speed and flexibility of one-handed sword moves.

With all the internal volume that Ves had at his disposal, the hero mech could output very strong or very tricky techniques as long as the mech pilot could keep up with the higher parameters!

”This level of power is not something that Axelar is used to in his previous mechs.”

The left side of the mech was dedicated to wielding the Destroyer Sword, so Ves painted it black to symbolize the death and destruction that this weapon implied. When used against any alloy not specifically rated to withstand Destroyer Weapons, the powered sword could cut through anything like a hot knife through butter!

Even the hugely expensive Belisarius with its abundant use of Rorachʼs Bone would instantly be cut in half in front of this Destroyer Sword! The regenerative properties of Venerable Fosterʼs old expert mech would not even have the time to come into play as it was being chopped up in a matter of seconds!

”Destroyer Weapons are genuine examples of Terran technological might!”

Ves carved and sculpted some generic scenes of destruction and ruination on the left side of the mech.

In order to make a stronger statement, he explicitly browsed the galactic net for footage captured during the latter days of the Age of Conquests.

The horrible archival recordings of planets housing billions of people got blown up just because an insane admiral woke up with the wrong foot off the bed put Ves in the right mood to express the feelings he wanted into his artwork.

The result was that the black-coated side of his hero mech iconified destruction incarnate! The scenes that Ves sculpted throughout the entire surface of the mech all showed various instances of death and ruin!

Although he described the process as sculpting, he did not have the time to manually carve out all of the detailed contours and reliefs. He decided to take the expedient option instead and imported various scenes into the auto designer so that he could apply them onto the exterior of his mech design.

The result was something that already looked like a piece of art.

Ves feared he might have gone a bit overboard on the left side. Anyone looking at the dark, left side of the mech would think that its designer and mech pilot wanted to wipe out the entire galaxy!

He therefore tried his best to balance out the negativity by injecting a lot of positivity on the right side.

The right side was dedicated to wielding the one-handed positron rifle model that Ves selected for his hero mech. While the rifle was both compact and rich with various features, Ves designed the right side of the mech in a way to increase its grip, accuracy, precision and power supply to the maximum!

Those parameters were so high in fact that the ranged effectiveness of the hero mech predominantly depended on Axelarʼs marksmanship rather than hardware constraints!

”This is a mech that can keep up with Axelarʼs growth if he ever throws off his addiction and works on his piloting ability!”

A positron rifle outputted a lot of energy. Especially in an atmospheric environment, all the air particles getting annihilated resulted in a very impressive and dangerous light show!

When impacting a solid object like a shield or the exterior of a mech, a fantastic burst of light spread out. Positron weapons were therefore just as flashy as laser weapons if not more!

Therefore, Ves applied a shiny, white coating to the right side of his hero mech design. While a positron rifle was just as destructive as a Destroyer Sword if not more, the difference was that energy also alluded to creation.

Ves controlled Axelarʼs body to browse the galactic net yet again. This time, instead of viewing macabre scenes of genocide and planetary destruction, he instead browsed footage and articles on the rebuilding and recovery process. What happened to terrestrial planets burned from horizon to horizon? What happened to star systems poisoned by perpetual toxic storms?

As long as planets or star systems wracked by destruction still held any value, humanity always came back and cleaned up the mess. As long as the states or other organizations invested enough resources in the rebuilding process, what was lost could always be recovered!

”Humans are inherently destructive, but that is only one side of the coin. We are capable of amazing feats of creation as well!”

By taking inspiration from the footage of the rebuilding process, Ves sculpted various scenes that alluded to creation on the right side of the mech. Anyone looking at the right side of his hero mech would never think that it was a machine capable of outputting a lot of firepower!

Even though the depictions on the right side of the mech did not entirely fit with the actual purpose of the mech, it nonetheless provided a lot of balance to the conceptual identity of the mech.

Life and death. Creation and destruction. Positive and negative. Day and night. Attraction and repulsion. Ves amplified the duality inherent in every hero mech and themed his entire mech design around polar opposites!

This duality also played out on a spiritual level. Ves possessed a strong affinity for the creation side of his hero mech. He created a lot of mech designs in his career, and some of them went on to sell thousands of copies.

Yet the act of creating mechs only proliferated destruction, as mechs were always used as war machines.

This was why Axelar possessed a stronger affinity for the darker side of the mech. Mech pilots mainly engaged in their destroying his opponents. Mechs also had a penchant for causing a lot of collateral damage in populated areas.

”Also, from a personal standpoint, Axelar has been destroying his life ever since he graduated from the mech academies.”

While Ves constantly tried to be as productive as possible in order to advance his career, Axelar neglected his skills entirely, destroying everything his upbringing prepared him for! The two couldnʼt be more different in this aspect!

To combine black and white in a single mech design was a very difficult concept to realize. From a technical, conceptual and spiritual level, the conflicting sides constantly tried to fight each other!

It took a lot of thought and effort for Ves to harmonize them into a single, stabilized existence.

As Ves regarded his finished mech design again and again, he mentally nodded in satisfaction.

”This is a mech that unifies two weapon systems, two opposite concepts and two opposite spiritual influences.”

The spiritually-augmented image he formed to guide his design process continually fawned over the design as it took shape.

Whether Ves worked on the black side or the white side of the hero mech, at least one aspect of the image resonated with the design in some fashion!

Although Ves hated the analogy, to describe the hero mech design as his spiritual child with Axelar was not inaccurate!

”If Axelar and I had a child, how should we name the baby?”