Chapter 651

Ves let Ketis stew for a time after he set her straight about her lack of drive and ambition. How could a mech designer ever achieve greater heights if their fires weren't lit?

A passionless mech designer was as useful as a bot and possessed the imagination of a rock. Ves encountered many of these zombie-like mech designers from the lower ranks of the profession. These men and women had become jaded to their careers and had given up their hopes. They barely made ends meet and worked dead-end jobs as mech repairers or mech appraisers.

A mech designer that exclusively dealt with other people's mech designs couldn't be called a mech designer anymore. The core tenet of their shared profession centered around designing mechs. Once they stopped designing mechs, they cut themselves off from any hopes of advancing.

"And that's fine. Not everyone is cut out to be a mech designer."

Too many people wanted to be mech pilots first and mech designers second. They couldn't help it was it was the Age of Mechs. Genes put a hard limit on the former profession, but the second one came with no such restrictions. Anyone with a degree in mech design or equivalent could call themselves a mech designer.

"There are way too many mech designers. If you count them all up, they are enough to meet humanity's market demand at least a million times over."

What did that mean? It meant if the total number of mech designers in the galaxy was a million times left, enough survivors would be left to meet the current market demand!

A lot of mech designers simply gave up on their primary careers and shifted over to become a cog in the vast machine that represented the mech industry. Plenty of functions required in-depth knowledge of mechs. Coupled with a decent education and a good technical background, they wouldn't be lacking for jobs.

"Still, whoever thought it was a good idea to open the floodgates? Schools are accepting way too many students who want to pursue a career in mech design."

Ves had already formulated some guesses why every school was so liberal about teaching mech design. "It's like playing the lottery. Most mech designers are garbage, but if you keep churning out enough of them, eventually you'll find a gem in the rough. The MTA is looking for something, and it hasn't found it yet after so much time."

The root to this policy lay with the Mech Trade Association. The MTA pushed hard to popularize mechs for reasons unknown to pretty much everyone. The Age of Mechs did not come about naturally. It was forced down the throats of humanity after they almost went extinct at the tail end of the Age of Conquest.

In short, the MTA really liked mechs, and they wanted to spread the love. They wanted to raise lot of mech designers quickly, so they initially subsidized mech design courses at many universities.

After four-hundred years, these subsidies should have long turned into dust.

Instead, the opposite happened. The MTA doubled down and increased their support for mech design classes. A standardized mech design degree quickly came about, which at its barebones required at least four years of study to achieve.

Even with an enormous supply glut due to the abundance of mech designers, the MTA still thought there wasn't enough mech designers!

"Is the secret cabal that's in charge of the MTA smoking stimulants all day?"

As a lowly Apprentice Mech Designer, Ves understood little of what went on at the higher levels. They could have been senile brains in jars making incomprehensible decisions in their galactic ivory tower, but they were impregnable in that position. Even if trillions of people complained about how easy it was to become a mech designer, the MTA had never budged even once in over four-hundred years.

Ves encountered the damage of such an outdated policy many times, most recently in Harkensen III where so many mech designers lacked opportunity and gave up their chance at advancement.

Some mech designers had been born to this profession. Ves counted every Master and Senior among them. Someone like Mayra also fell into this category because she managed to climb all the way up to Journeyman from a poor, frontier background.

Each of them overflowed with varying amounts of genius and passion. Though being naturally intelligent or talented in mech design helped out a lot, it was passion that formed the key. Every mech designer he knew who achieved greatness either loved to work with mechs or based their ambitions around them. Ves had never met a single high-ranking mech designer who hated their job.

"The Skull Architect is the most obvious example of this category of mech designer. Even if he faced many setbacks, he is still an indomitable mech designer who has made ends meet in the frontier."

Intelligence combined with motivation often led to dramatic results, for good or ill. No matter how many deaths the Skull Architect was responsible for, Ves still respected him for his achievements and for his unwavering devotion to his design philosophy.

Ves actually felt a lot of sympathy for the poor chap. Having worked on his Leiner Grey intensively for almost a week, Ves never truly realized what a titanic struggle each Senior had to go through. His inhuman drive nonetheless gave the ruined man a chance to pick himself up and return where he left off.

"Between the losers who have given up and the passionate mech designers without fear, there is a middle category as well."

The naive and the normal people fell under this category. These people hadn't been ground down to dust by the mech industry yet. Some eked out a respectable living as a marginally successful small-time mech designer, or became a peripheral member of a larger design team.

A lot of mech designers fell into this category, but Ves noticed that none of them ended up very far. "Their ambition and passion are restrained. Even if they harbor dreams, they are shackled by their own limitations. Most will eventually slide into the loser category, while the rare few are lucky to find a star to guide them to the passionate crowd."

Right now, Ketis fell under this category. She had actually been slowly sliding towards a darker future without being aware about it. What Ves had done was to pull open the veil and showed her the unvarnished reality of what would happen if she went in either direction. Ves hoped by making the case clear to her that she would pick the right direction to work towards.

"All I can do is give her a little nudge. True passion can only be ignited from within."

He already formed a game plan to guide her into seeking out a greater goal. Mayra must have figured that Ketis could start her soul-searching when she was separated from the Swordmaidens. By bringing her out of her comfort zone, she encountered a lot of new stimuli and a different way of working with mechs. The contrast between the familiar and unfamiliar should lead to a lot of soul-searching in the girl.

"This is why relying solely on apprenticeships and mentorships is a faulty, outdated education model. If mech designers are wizards, locking them up in a single tower and inundating them with only their teacher's perspective will lead to a warped student who doesn't know how to survive once they are kicked out of the tower."

The task placed before Ves basically amounted to solving the issues that festered when Ketis studied mech design under a single person instead of attending a proper school. It had long been known that schools were the best environment to raise a proper, rounded mech designer. Even if Ves himself went to a rather crappy school for mech design, the many teachers at least brought him up with all the correct values, customs and principles.

"In the end, if you want to make it further in mech design, you have to work for it. The advantages of money and connections can only give you a head-start and elevate you up to a point. Not a single Journeyman Mech Designer got to their height by being lazy and entitled."

This was also why the mech industry wasn't dominated by mech designers who were born with silver spoons in their mouths. A quality like passion couldn't be bought. It needed to be developed from within.

"It will be difficult to get Ketis up to the right standard. From what I saw from her unfinished variant, she's too far behind in many aspects."

Still, he looked forward to this challenge. It allowed him to exercise his teaching abilities and gain some experience in that aspect.

He enjoyed the act of teaching. His rare tutoring sessions became a pleasure to him. The perspective of his students provided him with fresh and unconventional perspectives on existing theory.

Inwardly, he felt he himself studied too quickly. He absorbed way too much knowledge in a span of less than three years. Through the System and through abusing his transhuman Intelligence attribute, Ves bulldozed through almost every barrier without sweating for it. He felt somewhat guilty at the ease in which he gained most of his knowledge.

"Maybe that's why I am so enthusiastic about knocking on the Skull Architect's door. He treats his knowledge with the reverence they deserve. Not just anyone can come and grab a copy of his knowledge base."

Ves suddenly realized his motivation had some issues as well. Though he was definitely passionate about mech design, the rapid success he enjoyed so far had distorted his priorities.

"What is my dream? What is my goal? What is my aspiration?"

Just like how Ketis used her closeness with the Swordmaidens as a crutch, so did Ves use the various advantages such as the System as a substitute for a proper aspiration.

"So far, I have several goals. I want to grow powerful enough to help my father. I want to reach the pinnacle of mech design and design the best mech in the galaxy. I want to grow my company into a trans-galactic enterprise whose products are sold in every star sector."

Yet these reasons sounded rather hollow to Ves. Certainly, they were decent goals to strive for, but where was the fire? Where was the passion? Just saying that he wanted to help people out, that he wanted to become the best in the galaxy or that he wanted to be the richest human alive sounded like something a six-year old would say.

"It's just like with the river. I'm making too much light of the challenges in my way. I've grown a bit too conceited at my chances of achieving success."

That wasn't good. The moment he grew too arrogant, he would stop struggling for something greater. He previously used the analogy of swimming against the current or floating downstream a river. If he grew too complacent about his development, then he would certainly lose the drive to swim upstream.

"I've got set a real goal. One that is located at the mouth of the river. It has to be a destination that I want to reach at all costs. What do I truly want? What shall be my lifelong dream as a mech designer?"

Thinking about the motivations that drove the likes of the Skull Architect, Mayra and Ketis stimulated him in a way he had never felt before. Out of all of the goals he set throughout his journey, he realized he already formulated a dream he could work towards.

His Spirituality sang within his mind. It was as if his surroundings fell into darkness. Nothing else existed except for himself and his ultimate goal. This was not a selfish goal, nor a limited one. This was a goal set forth by himself but upon achieving it would comprehensively strengthen humanity as a whole.

Achieving this goal would earn him the recognition of his race and immortalize him forever among the greatest scientists and inventors mankind had ever produced.

A torch lit up in his mind, dispelling the darkness around him and giving him an unprecedented amount of mental clarity.

The dream that he wanted to achieve had always been with him from his early days. He wanted to make mechs come alive. Truly alive, in a way that gave people no doubt that the lives of their mechs were worth as much as their own lives.

"Now this is a goal that is worthy for me to pursue."

Chapter 652

Lately, various distractions and events had slipped him from this dream. He had to shove it aside to address more immediate concerns, but once his life calmed down, he never really got back to it. His duties with the Vandals constantly preoccupied him with more distractions.

He was losing his drive.

"If I hadn't compared myself to the likes of the Skull Architect and the others, then I wouldn't have woken up."

This simple mental aspiration sounded short and simple, but it encompassed all of his other goals. It provided a solid direction to swim towards, enabling him to ignore any side branches that might have seduced him away from his true calling.

Making mechs alive was as impossible and fantastical as the Skull Architect's dream of designing an impossibly efficient and powerful mech! Perhaps the difficulty of achieving it even surpassed the Senior Mech Designer's ambition!

"I like it! If there is anything the Masters and Star Designers have showed the galaxy, it's that nothing is impossible!"

If a path to achieving a goal didn't exist, then a mech designer should make his own! This had always been the creed of higher-ranking mech designers.

"This is why mech designers exist!"

Having reignited his passion, Ves felt unprecedented motivated to design a mech. The only problem was that he didn't have any cause or opportunity to design a new mech!

"Damn, it's like I'm excited and raring to go, but I only have my hand to keep me company!"

The Flagrant Vandals required no new mech designs. Even if they did, only a Senior like Professor Velten had the right to lead the design projects. A small-time player like Ves could only be involved in the testing, optimization and debugging processes, which were hardly tasks that exercised his design skills.

"There's only one project available that I can spend my energy upon."

The Vandals collected all the recoverable fragments of the Vesian stealth shuttles and stored them in a forgotten corner aboard the Shield of Hispania. He intended to start working on them earlier, but his obsession with the Skull Architect's puzzle had delayed his original plans.

"Damn, Avenaeon must be pissed for me to skip the last few days."

He quickly called up the chief engineer of the Shield. Surprisingly, he didn't hold any animosity towards Ves for fudging up his appointments.

"While I'm not a mech designer, I'm still an engineer." The older man explained with a smile. "I've seen inventor types like you get inspired by something interesting before. I've learned that it's best to let people who fall into an inspired state work it out of their system on their own. Think about it. Would you be in a good mood if I abruptly pulled you out of your tinkering?"

If Ves received an interruption at any point while he worked on the Leiner Grey design, then he would have lost the thread of inspiration that had fallen into his lap. It was almost impossible for him to go back to that special mood!

"I'd be pissed and angry as hell. You've done me a huge favor. Thanks for letting me finish what I started." Ves bowed his head in genuine appreciation. "About the stealth project, let's postpone it until later. I've gotten in touch with a potential channel that can be a massive boost to our research. We'll also be arriving at Mancroft soon, so we'll be busy with the final resupply situation."

"Those are my thoughts as well. Mancroft is a rough place, but it's the only opportunity we have left to stock up on key supplies. I suggest you take a look at our fuel stock. From my end, the fleet is definitely short on ship-grade fuels. We simply don't know how far we have to travel in the frontier. Once we run out, all of our fancy hardware will instantly become useless."

Ves nodded in agreement. "That's a good idea. There's only a couple of space stations in the entire Faris Star Region, and they are only open to pirates. Even if we can lean on Lydia's Swordmaidens for help, it's better for us to stay self-sufficient."

The alliance between the Flagrant Vandals and Lydia's Swordmaidens appeared stable on the surface, but a responsible leader needed to take contingencies into account.

"By the way Larkinson, while we can leave the procurement of supplies to Logistics, the space station itself is still worth a visit. Have you visited the black market on Harkensen III?"

"I did. A lot of shady goods and services are traded there. They're rather unusual, but none of them seem useful to us."

"Well, the stuff that ends up in the black markets in the Harkensen System is only a fraction of what the frontier exports to our star sector. A huge chunk of traffic between the frontier and our star sector goes through Mancroft as a stopover point. Lots of interesting goodies from the frontier that you can hardly find anywhere else is on display there. I highly suggest you drop by at the market section of the space station."

"Even if something catches my attention, I'm not allowed to bring anything with me, remember?"

The chief smiled lazily at Ves. "Don't let the rules stop you. If you have to cover your butt for some reason, just write some official paperwork about procuring extra 'supplies' for a super-important project or something. You've been field-promoted to head designer, right? Just fill out a requisition form and throw it into the logs where it will quickly become a forgotten entry in the logs."

"That's an abuse of power, you know."

"Ves!" Avanaeon loudly coughed. "Abuse? What are you talking about? There's no abuse going on here. We're merely engaging in.. proactive inventory management. A bit of creative bookkeeping won't hurt the finances of the mech regiment that much."

"Whatever you say, chief. Let's just say I'll think about it and leave it at that. If nothing else, I'll visit the space station anyway for the experience alone."

After Ves ended the call, he sighed and cast his gaze at the days ahead. This wouldn't be the first time he visited the Mancroft System. Roughly two years ago, he accepted a mission from the Clifford Society to participate in a vast expedition into the frontier organized by House Kaine from the Grey Willow Star Sector.

He remembered that the expeditionary fleet resupplied at Mancroft as well before they crossed the border into lawless space.

"Back then, the expeditionary fleet was so powerful that House Kaine even turned a recommissioned fleet carrier into their flagship."

The might of their expeditionary fleet allowed them to deter a huge amount of pirate raiders. Yet even with all of that power at their disposal, they still encountered lots of setbacks. Their ships and mechs might have scared off the riff raff, but the major pirate factions as well as the alien sandmen were undeterred.

"The frontier isn't safe. The near-disaster of the Groening Mission already proves that every time you enter it, you gamble with your lives."

It was also little wonder that Lord Kaine's expedition found lots of problems in finding willing mech designers to join them as they jumped into the proverbial abyss. Most of them were bookworms, not adventurers! Only a greedy idiot like Ves jumped into the fray without taking stock of the many risks involved.

He suddenly had the sense that history might repeat itself. Would the Flagrant Swordmaidens encounter the same problems that plagued the previous expeditionary fleet?

The more he thought about it, the more he feared the prospect of another tour into lawless space. Even though Lydia's Swordmaidens fit right at home in the frontier, that didn't mean the Flagrant Vandals could rely completely on their ally's home advantage to avoid the crises that might occur in this perilous space.

"The most they can do is rely on their network of contacts and alliances to force the local pirate groups back. They can't do anything if a sandmen fleet decides to suck out all of our energy."

Pirates only formed one threat among many in the frontier. Perils from fellow competitors, alien races and natural hazards only piled up on the misery, causing most prospective colonists and exiles to lose their lives within a decade of setting shop in frontier space.

"They don't call it the untamed stars for nothing. There is no order and guarantee of safety in this wild region of space."

This time, they had the advantage of being accompanied by a local ally. The downside was that the Flagrant Swordmaidens hadn't brought a sufficiently domineering spaceborn fleet. The major pirate factions could easily muster up enough mechs to challenge them head-on, and if they encountered a major sandman force, they could only run as fast as possible.

A quiet day went by as Ves mulled over the threats they might face. Visions of various disasters haunted him at night, which completely obliterated his highly motivated state. He wouldn't be able to design mechs at all in his depressingly worried mood.

His routine morning meeting with the mech designers went poorly as Ves became distracted on what precautions he should take. While it was easy to leave his safety up to the planning of the Swordmaidens and the Vandals, he disliked being at the mercy of someone else. He experienced too many times where all the best laid plans went to hell due to an unexpected occurrence.

Ves developed a healthy respect for the frontier, so he planned to make some additional preparations. "I need to upgrade my personal gear."

Besides his military-issued equipment, he also tinkered together a rudimentary jamming device and stealth detector. While they were small and portable, their range and power left much to be desired.

The root of the problems he had with both devices was that their batteries were seriously deficient. It was like depending on a hamster running on a wheel to power the energy demands of an aircar. The two operated on completely different energy scales!

"I know that better batteries exist."

The Amastendira was the most exquisite example to date. Powered by an infinitely rechargeable battery that possibly drew its juice from zero-point energy, it showed how compact and powerful a battery could become. Naturally, it was impossible for Ves to replicate first-class technology out here in the galactic boondocks.

The shield generator gifted to him by Master Olson formed a more attainable to Ves. He had carefully studied the device extensively without risking its integrity and he found the amazing device possessed a powerful battery made almost exclusively from high-grade exotics.

The total size of that battery could fit in the palm of his hand.

While he didn't have access to any high-grade exotics or the requisite technology to form them into an ultracompact battery, he might still be able to pick something up at one of Mancroft's many markets.

"Still.. high grade exotics costs a lot of money. A single gram of some valuable substance can be worth a billion bright credits. How can I possibly pay for all that stuff?"

Embezzlement? No way something like that would work! Lieutenant Commander Soapstone watched their available funds like a hawk. Small sums might pass by her notice, but a jumbo charge of over a billion credits would easily come to the forefront of her vision.

Should he pay for them out of his own pocket? "That's going to be difficult since I put restrictions on my bank accounts."

He still had a small fortune stashed away in his accounts. Through the dividends the LMC paid out since he left, they should have gained several hundred million bright credits at the very least.

Fortunately, a lot of commerce took place in Mancroft. The space station hosted several sector-wide bank branches. As long as he paid a personal visit and verified his identity, it wouldn't be difficult to momentarily unlock his accounts.

"That takes care of the money. What about the technology?"

Ves furrowed his brows. That would be much harder to get ahold of. An ultracompact battery wasn't exactly common in this area of space.

Chapter 653

The best gadgets came about through a combination of resources and tech. Sometimes, both could be acquired by money.

"Yet not everything can be obtained by money."

He also couldn't go too far in pursuing his private pursuits. He knew that the Vandals put a lot of surveillance on him. The mech regiment's all-encompassing internal sensors caught everything that happened within their ships. Even if Ves stepped outside the Shield of Hispania and did some private business on Mancroft's space station, his actions would still be noted by a hidden bug or a security officer following him from a distance.

"Even if I do some shady dealings, I can't do anything that compromises the Vandals or our upcoming mission."

That limited his options a lot. Ves figured he could still get by with obtaining materials at Mancroft, but obtaining the tech that transformed the exotic materials into powerful but stable batteries was another matter.

Ves turned around his desk and activated his terminal. He logged into the central database to see whether the central database contained a blueprint or a textbook of sorts.

The library didn't contain anything useful. The books Ves had access to only dealt with mech-sized energy cells and battery packs. Miniaturizing them into the size of his palm never fell within the scope of those books.

It was a different case for certain specialist blueprints. Ultracompact batteries showed up several times, as certain gadgets and devices required use of such a powerful component.

Nonetheless, Ves only received permission to read a short description of the blueprints. Accessing the entire schematics and specifications went far beyond his current authorization.

"Damn, what's the point of making me aware of this tech in the first place?!" He cursed. "It's like dangling a carrot before the horse, but never letting the poor creature take a bite!"

He could look at the summary all he wanted, but it contained none of the instructions that enabled Ves to reproduce an ultracompact battery.

Restricted from contacting his other channels, Ves only figured out three possible alternatives.

"First, I can scrounge up some money from the bank branch and hope I can find the technical specs in the black market."

He didn't have much hopes for this option, as tech like ultracompact batteries went beyond most other tech he came into contact with in the Komodo Star Sector. Pirated or bootleg copies of ultracompact battery schematics shouldn't be casually for sale in some dingy booth deep within the bowels of a grungy trade station.

The second option was to beg the Vandals or the Mech Corps to grant him access to the schematics in the central database.

He snorted. "Fat chance any of that will happen. I can't come up with a decent excuse why I need access to this tech."

A bigger issue involved with this route was that Ves needed to gain direct permission from Colonel Lowenfield herself. Due to her possibly complex history with his uncle Ark back when she served at Citadel Havensworth, Ves grew very leery at the thought of conversing with her directly. From everything she had heard about the highly regarded colonel from the Vandals, the woman was as shrewd as a snake.

No way Ves would voluntarily serve himself up to her on a plate. "She probably doesn't have enough clout to grant me the necessary authorization anyway."

What else could he do? His final option involved asking for a favor from someone far more dangerous than Colonel Lowenfield.

"Am I really considering the option of asking for another favor from the Skull Architect?"

The Vandals tacitly approved of his attempt to ingratiate himself with the Skull Architect because the fugitive mech designer wielded a vast amount of influence in the Faris Star Region. Tacitly did not mean full-throated support. The man's notoriety with the MTA made Major Verle apprehensive about establishing formal ties. It wouldn't reflect well on their record.

And this venture depended entirely on whether the Skull Architect possessed the requisite knowledge in the first place. Did Senior Mech Designers from the Friday Coalition had the right to access this tech? Ves leaned towards no because their star sector simply wasn't developed enough.

"I'll have to ask the man when I'm finally granted an audience with him. He's sure taking his time to address his mail."

None of the options so far sounded good. Ves tried to wrack his brains for alternatives. He ruled out contacting his Master, but he gave the Clifford Society a shot. He quickly logged into their virtual portal's marketplace but found no trace of any supremely advanced human-scale tech. The only products available consisted of finished products, and they required an obscene amount of merits as well as a higher rank within the organization to obtain.

"Obviously, this isn't tech that Apprentice Mech Designers are supposed to get into contact with." He concluded after reading the unspoken message behind these restrictions.

His best bet appeared to be making a possible deal with the Skull Architect. If Ves guessed right that Reno Jimenez possessed the specifications or at least the theory on how to build an ultracompact battery, then he had the opportunity to trade for these goodies.

"The biggest issue here is that I have to offer something worthwhile to convince him to trade for those tech specifications."

Ves grew weary at the thought of entering into a bargain with a man that once ordered the death of an expert pilot. Someone who possessed so few scruples that he even dared to have designs on a demigod would surely not be satisfied with mere trifles.

"Even so, it's impossible for me to give what he really wants."

Knowledge of Spirituality and a rudimentary understanding of the X-Factor were some of his most prized assets. If someone else knew more about Spirituality than him, then they certainly weren't around here to compete against him. As the only holder of these secrets, Ves possessed a monopoly on this aspect.

Holding a monopoly was lucrative. And dangerous. Ves put most of his hopes in the advantage that he gained, and planned to milk it for all it was worth until his enterprises grew to encompass the entirety of human space!

The potential profits and sales he could achieve from this advantage was enough to make the rich princes from the galactic center salivate. That made this arrangement extremely dangerous to Ves. Almost every mech designer would kill to possess this knowledge.

Therefore, for safety and profit's sake, he needed to figure out another way to please one of the most powerful mech designers in the Faris Star Region.

Sometime later, Ves received a short call from Mayra aboard the Jaded Sword.

"Larkinson, my mentor has finally gotten in touch with me."

The moment he waited for had finally arrived. "What's the verdict."

"He declined to tell me. But the news is good. He informed me he wants to conduct a secure conversation with you at the soonest. You better contact him quickly, because he doesn't suffer tardiness gladly."

Ves frowned a bit. "What does he consider secure?"

"He doesn't trust the quantum entanglement nodes aboard your mech regiment's ship. And for a discussion as sensitive as I think it is, he won't be satisfied with ours either."

"If the Skull Architect doesn't trust any quantum entanglement node, then how can I get into touch with him in the first place?"

"You can book a secure comm booth at Mancroft Station. The Independent Harbor is one of the few places which hosts a Tzianti crystal. Have you heard of it before?"

"I can't say that I have."

"Well, a Tzianti crystal is a relic from the long-dead Tzianti race that used to live in the frontier. They work on an entirely different principle than our quantum entanglement nodes, but the effects are similar that they can establish point-to-point real-time communications. The major downsides are that these crystals are very large and unwieldy and their bandwidth is awful. They strain and crack from use and it takes a generous application of expensive materials to repair these cracks."

"If they're so unwieldy, why use them at all?"

"Because the MTA, CFA or any of the other big organizations aren't listening in. The other end of the nodes aren't installed in a central facility which is under their management. Each end of the crystal is accounted for and under constant guard. It's primitive compared to quantum tech, but it's something the pirate factions have complete control over. There's a crystal at Mancroft that corresponds to a crystal in Malligan's Stop."

"I see." Ves nodded. "Even if it's a crappy means of communications, it's their only means of instant communications that's outside of the control of the authorities."

The trans-galactic enterprises that mass-produced the quantum entanglement nodes possessed an oligopoly on the technology. With the MTA and CFA's blessings, the alliance that was collectively called the Comm Consortium wasn't shy about throwing their weight around. Not only did it cost a fortune to obtain a node, but the other end of the node always led to a central hub that contained millions if not billions of nodes.

The official reason the Comm Consortium gave out for setting up these hubs was that it facilitated instantaneous communication from across the galaxy. The galactic net wouldn't be so all-encompassing without the node hubs. Yet everyone and their mother knew the true reason the CC set up the hubs was to eavesdrop on every scrap of data that passed through their network. True point-to-point communications couldn't be done through the galactic net because the CC controlled every aspect of the network except for the user end!

Each time one of them called someone up from their comms or accessed the galactic net, they were pretty much doing so in plain view of the Comm Consortium!

Mayra sent him the protocols to establish a Tzianti connection to Malligan's Pitstop. This allowed him entry into any comm facility that possesses a Tzianti crystal that was paired with one at the pirate station.

"It'll mostly be other pirate stations which are connected to each other." She said just before she ended the call. "As far as I'm aware of, the Tzianti crystal at Mancroft is secure. The only way a Tzianti crystal can be read is through a single port drilled into its core. If you're skeptical, the facility allows you to inspect and scan the entire arrangement. Pirates are incredibly distrustful of each other, so these checks happen every day."

That still didn't rule out more sophisticated methods of eavesdropping, but if he could think about it, so could others. Ves simply had to trust the pirates knew what they were doing when they set those crystals up.

After the quick call, Ves prepared for his upcoming visit to Mancroft. He skipped out on visiting the Independent Harbor during the previous expedition because of its terrible reputation and the very real dangers aboard the notorious space station.

Pirates, smugglers, treasure hunters, salvagers and other rough-and-tumble spacers and adventurers congregated to the last port to the frontier. While true pirate scum didn't dare to enter the Mancroft System, the marginal types that received permission to cross over to civilized space were already sufficiently intimidating.

The naive and inexperienced Ves of before had grown up now. Even if only a couple of years had passed, Ves felt as if a lifetime had passed between his two visits of the Mancroft System.

Back then, he would have been shaking in his shoes at the thought of stepping foot on Mancroft Station.

Now? He couldn't imagine why he was so scared in the first place. It was just a black market hub! "Though strangely enough, they are performing all of these shady deals within throwing distance of a CFA fueling station. Well, whatever. If the CFA isn't cracking down on this business, then it's probably okay to step foot on the station."

If anyone dared to find trouble with him, he would deal with them like he did with all troublemakers he came across!

Chapter 654

As the combined fleet of the Flagrant Swordmaidens collectively transitioned out of FTL at the edge of the small Mancroft System, they immediately noticed the company.

The red dwarf system was as sad and lifeless as always. The Mancroft Independent Harbor orbited around a sad-looking rock close to the weak red dwarf that formed the center of the system.

A bit further ahead, a small squadron of CFA warships patrolled the space around their slightly precious fueling station. Though the patrol only consisted of four frigates led by a single destroyer, it possessed more than enough firepower to chew through a third-class spaceborn mech division!

When Ves gazed at the magnified sensor readings of the small but deadly warships, he admired their deadly prowess in space. Their weaponry possessed enough power to tear through combat carriers within seconds. The range of their huge mech-sized missiles could cross entire star systems, while their state-of-the-art sublight propulsion allowed it to outrun the swiftest light mechs by an entire order of magnitude!

"Warships are the natural predators of spaceborn combat!"

Ves loved mechs with all his heart, but he was realistic enough to recognize the primacy of warships as humanity's ultimate weapons of war.

"Ketis."

"Yeah, mister?"

Ves coughed. "Don't call me that. If I'm supposed to tutor you, then you should call me teacher."

The young woman seemed disinterested in acknowledging him as her teacher. She was only a few years younger than him, so she still had trouble getting her mind around the fact that he was so far ahead in their shared profession. It also didn't help that she never interacted much with men.

He didn't care too much about her feelings. As long as she internalized his lessons, she could hate him for all he cared.

"Look at these warships. Even if they consist of the smallest and lightest classes, they are more than enough to wipe out our entire combined fleet off the face of the galaxy. How does that make you feel?"

The girl looked uncertain on how to answer such a question. "It's unfair. Why does the the CFA keep all the good things to themselves? If the people of the frontier were free to operate warships, then we could have gotten rid of the entire sandmen race ourselves!"

Ves shook his head. "I wasn't talking about politics. Put yourself in the perspective of a mech designer. What do you feel about warships?"

"I still feel they're unfair. They're too powerful for their own good. The best mechs we can design won't come close to matching a thousandth of the firepower that destroyer can spit out. It's like comparing a mouse to a tiger. No matter how good the mouse has adapted to its environment, it can't pose any threat against a tiger. And tigers are the least the mouse has to worry about."

"That's a common observation to make." Ves spoke neutrally. ""The largest limitation concerning mechs in comparison to warships is the scale of the machines and their weapons. A main cannon of a battleship can be up to several kilometers long and its main caliber is wide enough to wedge through an entire corvette. Against this awesome might, why not pursue a larger mech frame?"

"Is this a history quiz or something?" Ketis looked exasperated to Ves. "Mayra taught me that we tried once. The Juggernauts, right? The New Rubarth Empire barely got them to work, and they eventually found out it wasn't worth the effort. A single Juggernaut is as powerful as a destroyer or cruiser, but it's as slow as a snail and their size makes them an easy target to long-ranged artillery. It's got all the downsides of a heavy mech but multiplied by at least a hundred times."

The Rubarthans had gotten the Juggernauts to work in some cases, but these titanic mechs generally weren't worth the effort. Developing a single Juggernaut sucked up as much funding as raising another mech division, which could be employed with much greater versatility and flexibility.

"Mechs are not cut out to be warship-sized monstrosities. They are as large as a typical office building in a city district because that is the size that affords them the best balance between mobility, protection and cost-effectiveness. If you look through the history of mechs throughout the generations, you'll notice they've slowly inched upwards in size, as better technology allows them to move faster at the same amount of bulk. Nonetheless, they aren't going to grow to the size of a frigate anytime soon."

"Then what's the point of telling me this?" She growled. "Thinking about this stuff makes my head hurt. Why can't you teach me something that will help me design better mechs."

Ves tutted to her. "That's where you're wrong. It's true that your basic skills need work, but that can be fixed with study and time. What you truly lack is something that can't be learned from a book. Back to the comparison I was making, doesn't it make you frustrated that no matter how well we design our mechs, we can never match up to the power of even the lightest warship classes?"

That wasn't exactly true, as he once heard rumors of cutting-edge mechs in development from the galactic designer that could stand toe-to-toe with warships, but something like that wouldn't show up in the frontier.

"What are you getting at?"

"It's simple. While mechs are prominent and popular right now, in truth they play second fiddle in the defense of humanity. When the aliens decide to go on the offensive against us, it's not our mechs which will save us, but the warships of the CFA. Doesn't it rankle you that mechs are ultimately toys in the greater scheme of things?"

Though Ketis hadn't answered yet, a fire of indignation burned within her eyes. Ves smiled in satisfaction at achieving the desired effect.

"When mechs first came into being, they were new and impressive but could never match up against the power of warships. Four-hundred years later, mechs have become more powerful, but ships fitted for war have not remained stagnant either. Don't you think that this is a huge shame?"

She nodded. "I guess so."

"So do I! Mech designers aren't content to play the supporting characters in the story of human civilization. We call this era the Age of Mechs, yet its very name rings hollow! Won't it be better for us if mechs became powerful enough to defeat warships? It is the common mission of every mech designer to elevate the weapons we design into the ultimate machines of war! Tell me, don't you feel excited about this dream?"

"T-That's preposterous!" Ketis widened her eyes. "Those big battleships are impossible to take down! There's no way a mech can withstand that much firepower!"

"Just because it's impossible today doesn't mean the same applies tomorrow. Mech designers are constantly at work at new designs, new technologies and new combinations. We do this not just to pursue our own interests, but also to push mechs to greater heights."

For the next half hour, Vex explained and rambled a bit about the collective expectations and responsibilities of a mech designer. Being a mech designer was more than about designing a mech, though they at least needed to be proficient at this task to deserve this mantle.

While these huge and seemingly unattainable aspirations never interested most mech designers, Ves believed that everyone who was serious about their profession should at least be aware of it. Mech design had chugged along for more than four-hundred years now without a discernible change in the power balance of mechs.

It was rather depressing when mech designers thought about it. Several centuries of focused research from billions if not trillions of mech designers failed to elevate mechs into the supreme weapons of war the start of the Age of Mechs tried to spark. This failure rankled every mech designer who cared about it. Mechs had failed to live up to the promise as the perfect fighting machine.

Ketis didn't hide her gaping yawn. "This is interesting and all, but are you done yet? This lecture is one of the most boring ones I've ever endured, and I've been through some awful ones when Mayra forced me to sit through those virtual classes."

"I'm doing you a favor, you brat. You need to understand the importance of mech designers in human society."

"Yeah, as if. We Swordmaidens don't need to pay any attention to what goes on in civilized space. You just do your thing and I do my thing and we both won't bother each other. That's how it always goes."

Ves took a tired breath. Getting this brat of a mech designer to soak up the principles he tried to espouse was a bit more difficult than he assumed. He thought he had made a good attempt at shaking her out of her complacency yesterday, but he was very much aware that the process of fixing her up wasn't close to being done."

The vessels of the Flagrant Swordmaidens slowly entered the inner portion of this pathetically small star system. The dim red dwarf burned as lethargically as ever. Though it looked impressive up close like all stars, its low luminosity made it difficult to navigate towards. The only way to reach the Mancroft System was to jump to a closer and brighter star system before dialing in the much-closer red dwarf system.

Nonetheless, despite the difficulty of reaching this oft-frequented but largely forgettable stopping point, a lot of outfits brought their fleets to Mancroft for some reason. More than thirty different organized fleets had parked themselves at a healthy distance from each other in the proximity of Mancroft Independent Harbor.

Ves cursed a bit as he recognized a familiar outfit. "Damnit, what are the Caged doing here?!"

The powerful gang from the Roppo Principality attempted to join forces with the Masters of Combat after departing from the Harkensen System. If the Flagrant Swordmaidens hadn't dropped by to crash their party, then the Caged Masters would have become a force to be reckoned with, especially on land.

Major Verle decided to crush the Masters of Combat at all costs, feeling no qualms about letting the Caged abandon their allies and flee like rats. Though Ves expected the Caged wouldn't give up so easily, meeting them again so soon raised his hackles.

"Do you recognize the outfit the ships of the Caged have partnered with? They aren't transmitting any IFFs that correspond to a state."

Ketis stepped closer to the projection and studied the ships and what little information the sensors picked up. Her eyes narrowed in recognition.

"I know who these bastards are. They call themselves the Red Tongues and they're some of the worst pieces of trash in the neighborhood. The Caged have made a big mistake if they think they can trust their new buddies."

Ves wasn't familiar with any of the pirate organizations from the frontier. "What makes the Red Tongues so reviled by you?"

"Those lunatics all cut off their tongues and transplant the tongue of some disgusting half-ooze half-frog exobeast. Their new tongues are red and they're highly acidic. Their tongues can melt through combat armor if given time."

"Won't they melt their own mouths if they do that?"

"Oh, they would have done themselves a favor if they all died from that, but they aren't completely dumb. Before they transplant the tongues, they put each prospective member through a brutal regime of genetic modification. Their mouths and their digestive systems are all transformed beyond belief. By the time all of the operations are done, a new Red Tongue is born."

"Why go through all of this torture?"

"Because they like to eat. They disdain eating normal food that normal humans eat. Instead, they like to devour creatures while they are still alive, preferably. They get off on the fear of what they are chewing through. Their favorite foods are dangerous exobeasts, but there are rumors that they've acquired a taste for other humans."

Other humans! "They're cannibals?!"

"Oh yeah, but the Red Tongues are really good at covering their tracks. Nobody has ever succeeded in catching them in the act, but they'll slip up sooner or later."

"If these suspected cannibals are as awful as you suggested, why hasn't anyone done anything to them yet?" He asked with evident puzzlement on his face.

"It's complicated. Just like how we allied with a lot of pirate groups, the Red Tongues have taken shelter under one of the biggest pirate factions in the Faris Star Region. The Red Tongues fit right in with them, as they're the bloodiest and most ruthless factions in the local region. There are two major pirate factions in total who have the most say around there. The smaller pirate organizations can't hold a candle against their might and numbers."

Ves could hardly imagine why a pirate faction thought it would be a good idea to shelter a group of suspected cannibals.

Chapter 655

As the Flagrant Swordmaidens brought their combined fleet closer to the only public space station in the star system, some of the fleets around them showed some reaction.

Many fleets proactively moved their parking orbit further and further away. Lydia's Swordmaidens enjoyed a decent amount of notoriety in the frontier, while the Flagrant Vandals always seemed to cause death and chaos wherever it went.

Leaving religion aside, humanity had never fully shed its tendency to believe in superstition. Pirates leaned on them all the time, and right now they came under the sway of the supposed cloud of misfortune that surrounded the Flagrant Vandals.

Ves saw the dots representing the positions of their ships and scoffed at their behavior. In an age like this, almost every form of superstition had been systematically debunked. Nonetheless, humans could be as stupid and impressionable as ever.

"Please tell me a bit more about the pirate factions that rule over the Faris Star Region. Which pirate faction is depraved enough to take these Red Tongues under their wing?"

The horned woman sighed. She unconsciously dragged over her floating scabbard and raked its surface with her fingers.

"I'll give you the short version. Pirates don't tend to like being under the thumb of someone else. By far most of the pirate groups like to stay independent and do their own thing."

"How do these independents manage to stay alive?"

"Well, most of them crash and burn pretty soon. Some are lucky enough to survive through the cracks. Most try and make pacts with fellow pirates. The Swordmaidens are kind of like that. We created a web of allies that looks out for each other in case any of the big boys want to bully one of us."

That didn't sound very stable to Ves. These fair-weather friends only stuck together so long as the situation benefited them. They would certainly drop support for the Swordmaidens if someone threatening enough put blades against their throats.

"The independents number the most, but the most powerful pirates are actually two different pirate blocs. They're massive alliances centered around the biggest pirate groups in the Faris Star Region. The ones that subjugated the Red Tongues is the Ravienne Alliance."

Ves looked up in recognition at the mention of Ravienne. He occasionally saw that name pop up in the news. "I've heard of her name before. Isn't she that madwoman from the Hexadric Hegemony who was so crazy that even her fellow matriarchs couldn't stand her any longer?"

"Ravienne is one of the scariest pirates in the Faris Star Region and you should never refer to her by any insults. If any of her underlings like the Red Tongues hear you call her that, they'll jump on you and tear you apart before sending off your bleeding flesh to Ravienne as tribute."

"She has that much sway in the region?"

"Her influence in unimaginable. Even though she's bloodthirsty and cruel, she's also a brilliant strategist and tactician. The rose up from nothing and took the entire star region by storm when Ravienne's Ravagers became the leader of a new bloc of pirates. By now, the Ravienne Alliance is the largest and most powerful gathering of the vilest scum and trash that call themselves pirates. If you think the Red Tongues are bad, the other subordinate gangs are worse."

The picture she painted of the Ravienne Alliance made them sound both powerful and chaotic. Even their leader was prone to mood swings and outbursts of violence. If not for her former background as a matriarch of the Hegemony, she might have long lost control over her own organization.

"How are they able to stay together?"

"Well, they don't, really. There's lots of infighting going on in the alliance. Every gang wants to prove to the Ravagers that they're crueler and more conniving than the others. They frequently kill each other, but they never seem to run out of fresh blood. Many pirate groups are clamoring to become a member of their alliance."

This sounded awful to Ves. If Ketis described the truth and the subordinate gangs under Ravienne did indeed eliminate the weakest among them, eventually her organization would be left with the toughest, meanest and most adaptable pirates.

Perhaps Ravienne deliberately fanned the flames in order to let natural selection take its course.

"You mentioned there are two major pirate alliances." Ves spoke, not wanting to dig further into Ravienne's gruesome culling methods. "Which pirates are brave enough to fight against Ravienne?"

The Dragons of the Void." She replied. "Hmm? You heard of them?"

"I even encountered them in the flesh several times. They're true bastards who treat their men like cannon fodder. Somehow, they've gotten really good at brainwashing their fellow pirates. Is it true that everyone in their sway gets turned into drones?"

Ketis adopted a distasteful expression. "That's one of their scariest aspects. The Dragons of the Void own a lot of space stations in the local star region. At the end of a raid, pirates still need a place to sell their loot, resupply their exhausted inventory and fix up their damaged mechs and ships. The space stations set up by the Dragons are all placed in strategic star systems. It's easy to enter the system, but not so easy to leave."

"The last time I saw them, they were literally throwing thousands of mech pilots and mechs against several military mech divisions! How come they've brainwashed so many pirates, and how do they get away with it in the first place?!"

"That's one of the hazards of operating in the frontier." She shrugged. "The Dragons of the Void claim they are snatching pirates at their space stations because they broke the rules or can't repay their debt. I don't know if I buy that. Mayra once told me that if the space station is too quiet, the Dragons pick a random pirate group and attempts to take them into custody on some trumped-up charges. Nobody is around at these times to dispute the charges, and nobody has ever succeeded in disproving the accusations."

This situation truly sounded broken to Ves. While the Dragons of the Void would be able to grow powerful enough to flood their enemies with worthless mechs, it didn't sound like they inspired much loyalty.

"I find it hard to believe that any pirate group will voluntarily submit to the Dragons."

"It's never 'voluntary', you can say. The Dragons have a way of pressuring pirate groups into working for them. The Dragon Alliance is much more orderly and organized, but the hierarchy practically never budges. The core members of the Dragons of the Void can issue any orders they want. The vassal pirates serving underneath them do most of the actual work. They're barely better off than their brainwashed cousins because they at least haven't been put through a brainwashing regime."

After Ketis described the two major pirate blocs, Ves finally understood why Lydia's Swordmaidens hadn't taken the initiative to pledge allegiance to either power blocs! Faced with either endless bloodshed or possible brainwashing, it was no wonder that many independent pirate groups tend to stay away from these behemoths.

The last time Ves had visited the frontier, he rode with some foreigners who originated outside of the Komodo Star Sector. The retainers and household troops of House Kaine never really cared about the local powers that be, a mistake that proved very costly to them. Ves barely knew what went on in the frontier back then, so he made full use of being in the company of a native daughter of the frontier.

As Ketis described each of the pirate gangs she recognized from the fleets parked close to the Independent Harbor, the Flagrant Swordmaidens slowly entered their designated position. Each fleet orbited far above the tiny rock that anchored the orbit of the space station.

It took a bit of tricky maneuvering to retain their distance from all of the other parked fleets, but the Vandals and the Swordmaidens eventually reached their designated stops.

Ves noticed that neither of their forces let down their guard. With all of the pirate gangs and shady outfits congregating in the Mancroft System, conflict could break out at any moment. Scores of spaceborn mechs deployed from the hangar bays of the Flagrant Swordmaidens and formed into groups to patrol their immediate perimeter of space.

Inheritors upgraded with anti-stealth detectors happened to deploy as well. As Ves zoomed in on the plot, he called up the telemetry of one of the mechs, making use of his privileges as a head designer. The Inheritor was blasting its sensitive and fragile sensor array at half strength.

Both Ves and Ketis received an alert from their comms. Both of them received an announcement from their commanders.

"Hmm." Ves grunted. "Finally, some common sense. Anyone approved to step aboard Mancroft Station has to go in full combat gear."

Ketis grinned at that. "It's been a long time since I frightened off some rats!"

The Flagrant Vandals were about to step in the frontier, so they needed to play by their rules. One of the biggest differences between Mancroft and Harkensen was that the former didn't guarantee anyone's security.

Oh certainly, the Bosey Clan largely kept the peace, but even if they claimed to be the official rulers of the Independent Harbor, they never did a good job at stopping disputes. Part of it came from their desire to avoid pissing powerful pirates off. As long as the Boseys never made any enemies, they didn't have to deal with a challenge to their regime.

Every visitor that stepped foot on Mancroft was responsible for their own security. Though incidental visitors could hire some of the local mercenaries as guards, the Vandals and the Swordmaidens could take care of themselves.

The Swordmaidens were accustomed to being armed to the teeth whenever they entered pirate stations. Though Mancroft Independent Harbor wasn't a pirate station on paper, in practice there was hardly any difference.

As Ves had plenty of business to do at the Independent Harbor, the Vandals saw fit to provide him with an armed escort of four security officers. In addition, they brought him a custom-fitted suit of combat armor, modified for 'frontier cultural expectations', whatever that meant.

It didn't take long for his escorts to arrive with his combat armor in tow.

"Mr. Larkinson! It's good to see you again!"

Ves recognized the familiar voice. "Lieutenant Nolsen Feray! Aren't you assigned to the Finmoth Regal?"

"They transferred me hear to lead your guard escort. It makes sense since we've already travelled together. I'm familiar with some of your habits. I'll make sure you'll stay nice and safe at Mancroft."

Ves smiled sardonically at his escorts. All of them came in suits of hulking exoskeleton armor that must have weighed as much as a horse. Not only did they came in the most powerful infantry armor in the Vandal armory, the armorers also saw fit to.. add some creative additions.

"What's with the medals, spikes and bling?"

An ordinary suit of exoskeleton armor resembled a smoothed or angular humanoid mech in miniature size. Right now, the burgundy-and-red suits of powered armor gained a lot of decorative golden frills along with the oversized medals pinned to the chest that made it look like they were prepared for a parade. Ves wasn't even sure if half of those medals actually existed in the Mech Corps!

The only addition that made the suits of armor seem like they were not to be trifled with was the extra spikes. They shot out of the shoulder pauldrons, the helmet, the arm guards as well as the leg guards. Hell, they looked nasty enough to bleed out a random passerby in seconds if they accidentally bumped into these sharpened spikes!

The helmets even received a visual makeover. The face-plates had been shaped and painted over to resemble the faces of snarling stylized skulls. The eye-sockets even glowed like ominous red stars.

"If you think our getup is impressive enough, you should see what the armorers have done to your combat armor!"

Chapter 656

When Lieutenant Feray swung his gauntlet, commanding the floating crate behind him to set down on the deck, Ves finally beheld his new custom-made combat armor they prepared for him, even if it was a few months late.

He had long requested a suit of combat armor to replace his unwieldy and inadequate hazard suit. For some reason, he ended up in way too many combat situations for a mech designer.

Fortunately, their impending foray in the frontier had given everyone a kick in the butt. Due to the massive perils involved with crossing over into wild space, every safety regulation and procedure had been checked. Handing over suits of combat armor to the servicemen had been put on the agenda at some point.

While Ves had long looked forward to receiving an armored suit that could endure the rigors of battle, the one he received seemed.. a bit more theatrical than he expected.

Once he brought it out of the crate, Ves was able to inspect the entire ensemble's appearance.

Fundamentally, the full kit of armor had been based around a light combat armor pattern. Light in this context meant the suit was light enough to prevent burdening a servicemen who too much. Small servos and other powered assists helped with lifting the arms or moving the legs, but they were so small and limited that they only served to compensate for the modest added bulk of the armor pieces.

The helmet featured a semi-open design which in normal circumstances left the face open. In an emergency, the face-plate could quickly be affixed in place, vacuum-sealing the suit and allowing its occupant to subsist on the suit's slim oxygen reserves.

Light combat armor had never been designed for mainline infantry combatants. Instead, they were cheap but cost-effective pieces of armor to be adorned by support personnel stuck in the field. It wouldn't be able to withstand the firepower of a rifle for long, but it had never been meant to be a punching bag. The suit was light and fast enough for its wearer to dive to cover if they ever faced an attack.

"Combat armor is supposed to protect. This one adds so much bling to my person that I'm practically inviting trouble if the public sees my appearance!"

The armorer involved with customizing his suit of armor must have possessed an artist's touch. Ves felt sympathetic about any craftsman with a penchant for art because it was part of his mech design repertoire as well. Seeing similar works from others ordinarily put a smile on his face, but the work done to his abomination of a protective suit really wanted to make him pull out his own hair.

The first change was that it shared the same black-and-reddish color scheme of the Flagrant Vandals. Formally, it should have either been coated in a camouflage pattern or the default dark green color scheme of a mech designer. Painting him in the same brush as the Vandals wasn't actually proper, not that anyone this far out cared about the official regulations in the first place.

The part he objected to was the added bling, for a lack of a better word. The armor turned into some demented artist's skewed perception of what a mech designer ought to wear. Engraved with silver lines, depictions of mechs in battle adorned its surface. The armor parts partially lost their smooth organic contours and instead acquired some of the blocky mechanical shapes of a mech.

"At least the extra armor will come in handy when I get shot at." He concluded. "But do I really need to wear this thick and unwieldy cape?"

A rich burgundy cape lined with sharp black accents completed the high noble look. The fabric was thick and fluffy enough to drown half-a-dozen babies. On its back, the emblem of the Flagrant Vandals marked out the wearer's allegiance. The emblem depicted a stylized city in flames, which was apt considering the destruction the Vandals were prone to spread.

"Hopefully Mancroft won't end up in ruins by the time we leave." He muttered before turning to Lieutenant Feray. "Do I need to ask why the armor looks like what a parody of a jumped-up nouveau riche Vesian nobleman would wear?"

The security officers collectively chuffed at that.

"When in Rubarth, do as the Rubarthans do. The Swordmaidens told us that we can't rely on our name and official sanction from the Bright Republic to deter the pirates. The only language they understand is violence, and the best way to make them understand we can't be messed with is to dress like the part. All of these modifications may be theatrics, but don't underestimate the effectiveness of posturing. The Swordmaidens have shown us that a single show of force is enough to stop unscrupulous thoughts."

Ves understood the logic behind this decision. The Flagrant Vandals ordinarily laid low when they weren't out in the field. Then they showed their fangs, but by then it was too late for their victims to save themselves.

The Vandals had a habit of understating their strength and presence when out among the public. Unlike other mech regiments, they did not excel at upfront combat. And while they valued honor and valor like any other military unit, the Vandals prized their lives over their reputation.

In the frontier, the equation was different. Reputation, fame and notoriety all added directly to an outfit's ability to survive. There was no overarching authority in charge of dispensing justice in the untamed stars, so the only form of protection outfits could rely on to deter troublemakers was their ability to look formidable.

It worked for Lydia's Swordmaidens, so it also ought to work for the Vandals.

The light combat armor prioritized protection over convenience, so it didn't disassemble in midair to encompass his body. The armor pieces had to be opened up manually, and getting kitted out took a cumbersome fifteen minutes, though much of that time had been spent on last-minute adjustments.

"This isn't a regular combat armor model." Ves noted as he experimentally tested the dexterity of his gauntlets. "I've worn some before, but they don't feel as sturdy and solid as this one."

Affixing the cape to his shoulders practically doubled his outward stature. There was a reason why capes became the favored addition to nobles throughout the galaxy. Powerful men and women just looked better with a cloth hanging behind their backs.

Despite its complete lack of utility to the cape, Ves had the strange sense he had become a prince of the galaxy. The delusion flooded his imagination and he had to concentrate his mind in order to repress these dangerous thoughts.

"The clothes make the man." Nolsen said as he and his security officers watched Ves take in his new gear. "You're not about to turn into a commando at this rate, though, so don't think you can tear through an entire infantry regiment on your own."

"I know. It's just that this is way better than anything I've ever worn before. I'll never go back to hazard suits again if I can help it. They feel like tin cans compared to this well-crafted kit."

Nolsen taught him the ins and outs of the combat armor. The high-quality suit came with various gimmicks and auxiliary functions that made life a little bit easier for Ves if he ended up in another crisis. Its overall parameters were also very decent, almost matching the protection level of the lowest quality suit of medium combat armor.

"That's everything you need to know, Larkinson. If everything goes smoothly on Mancroft, you probably don't need to use all of these functions."

Ves nodded as he reveled in the confidence boost this suit provided him. He felt more like a soldier than ever before. Its gaudy, exaggerated appearance gave him an intimidating factor that Ves could combine with some of his Spiritual tricks.

"Alright, if that's everything, let's prepare for departure."

The Vandals and the Swordmaidens both kept their delegations small. Only a handful of shuttles from both groups departed from their carriers. Ves shared his shuttle with Lieutenant Commander Soapstone and a couple of other logistics officers as they made their way to one of the public landing bays of the massive space station.

From the outside, Mancroft Independent Harbor looked as haphazard as always. Over the centuries, the original space station gained a lot of expansions and side modules that increased its capacity and allowed it to offer more services. Very little attention had been spent on their care, though, and its scarred, splotched and tarnished exterior bore the marks of centuries of micro-impacts.

In short, it looked exactly like Ves expected a pirate station to look like.

"Soapstone, if I recall, we already stocked up on some extra goods when we dropped off the loot we acquired from the Masters of Combat. Why do you need to step foot in Mancroft?"

The lieutenant commander wore a suit of combat armor that looked nearly identical to his. The bling adorning her armor made Ves think she looked like an admiral.

The woman grimaced. "The Swordmaidens warned us that bright credits isn't a very useful currency in the frontier. The same goes for nova sovereigns, Reinaldan marks and even coalition credits. They all lose their store of value because many pirates don't tend to trust bank servers in civilized space."

"So you're going out to exchange bright credits for hard currency?" Ves probed.

"You guessed it right. Among the hard currencies we can choose, this part of the frontier heavily favors Kavenit coins. We plan to acquire a few crates of K-coins and K-bars to facilitate trade if needed."

Ves winced at the enormous sums of currency the Vandals planned to exchange. "The horrendous exchange rate will waste a lot of money."

"We have no choice. Blame the pirates for not patching into the galactic financial network."

Kavenit was a heavy metallic substance and one of the most common low-grade exotic materials in the galaxy. It was ubiquitous enough that every star sector contained a substantial amount of ores with Kavenit present in their composition.

The exotic saw much use in various low-grade armor. In fact, the HRF armor system that Ves utilized in his Marc Antony series and portions of the Crystal Lord incorporated small amounts of Kavenit. The exotic meshed so well in countless alloys that it always held some value no matter where in the galaxy you travelled that it gained the status of a universal hard currency.

One K-coin as a piece of Kavenit stamped into a coin was called weighed one-hundred grams. The thick but compact coin looked far lighter than it actually weighed. Nobody could mistake its exceptional status when they held it in their hands, though the material's outer appearance only shone like dulled steel.

A standard K-bar made out of Kavenit was worth as much as a thousand K-coins. In turn, a massive K-slate that could only be lifted by machines was worth as much as a thousand K-bars.

"Working with hard, physical currencies is a pain in the butt." Soapstone complained. "Hauling around the K-coins and K-bars is a chore and tempts every pirate in the vicinity to rob us. We have no choice, though. The only other alternative is to barter goods with goods, and that's an even bigger headache to us than working with these primitive coins and bars."

Ves adopted a sympathetic face, but he paid a lot of attention as well. If he wanted to expand his dealings with the frontier, he needed to become familiar with matters like this. "How much is a K-coin worth these days?"

"The 'official' galactic exchange rate amounts claims that 370 bright credits can get you a single K-coin. Given the sharks we are about to approach, we'll likely have to pay upwards of 375 bright credits for a single K-coin."

That was a pretty massive hit, but neither the Vandals nor the Swordmaidens could do anything about that. Nobody offered a more favorable exchange rate in Mancroft.

Chapter 657

A small convoy of shuttles slowly entered one the shuttle hangars of the Independent Harbor. After a little hitchup with what passed around for traffic control, they diverted to a VIP section and touched down amidst hundreds of other parked shuttles.

The passengers exited with their bodies fully enclosed in their protective suits of armor. While the Vandals came out with a bit of discomfort due to their gaudy and spiky additions to their armor, the Swordmaidens comfortably jumped out of their craft like it was another stroll.

Whereas the Flagrant Vandals largely adopted a uniform color scheme in dark and burgundy tones, the Swordmaidens expressed a lot more individuality. They switched out their vacuum undersuits and exobeast pelts for solid suits medium and heavy combat armor.

Though they shared the same green and blue color scheme, the Swordmaidens heavily customized their armor pieces with tribal markings and exobeast bones from deadly predators they slew by with their own swords. Skulls of real or imagined exobeasts prominently adorned their helmets.

Naturally, their broadswords and greatswords took up a prominent place on their backs. The floating scabbards keeping them sheathed fitted neatly into a standardized slot to the rear. This kept the weapons safe from prying hands.

The average bulk of the two forces differed substantially. The Vandal security officers escorting their VIPs all wore full suits of exoskeleton armor. They were power incarnate, and their heavy weapons possessed enough firepower to mow down a mob of hundreds within seconds.

The Swordmaidens only brought out a couple of suits of exoskeleton armor on their own. Most of their Swordmaidens made do with heavy armor, but that was still formidable enough in their own right.

As they walked towards the decontamination checkpoint, Ves turned his helmet towards the medium combat armor suit worn by Ketis. "I thought you Swordmaidens are fans of personal combat. Why not make more use of exoskeleton armor?"

"A sister is more machine than woman if they wear those suits." She replied over the comm channel. Right now, the entire hangar area was exposed to vacuum. "The exoskeleton armors are strong, but slow and inflexible. They're meant to carry heavy caliber cannons and the like. That's also how we make use of them. As for swordplay, exoskeleton armor is completely incompatible with it. It's as unwieldy as a heavy mech with a dagger."

Ves winced inside his helmet. The image of a heavy mech swinging around a dagger with agonizing slowness offended his sensibilities.

"Got it. I guess it makes sense that you Swordmaidens favor combat armor which is more compatible with your combat style."

"Our bodies have all gone through extensive genetic modification." Ketis added. "We may look like half-alien freaks to you, but we can swing our swords with enough force to split five men in half without any servo-assists."

Ves believed her boast. They had already shown how much damage they could inflict on their flight decks.

The Flagrant Swordmaidens both arrived at the decontamination checkpoint. If there was one thing the dangers of the frontier had taught the pirates, it was that germs could be found in every planet with life. With so many wild and untamed planets in the Faris Star Region, pirates and treasure hunters constantly contracted the rarest and most unusual diseases.

While Ves never had to worry about infections after his ordeal at Groening IV, the same couldn't be said to the rest. Even the Swordmaidens for all their genetic manipulation became prone to new alien diseases that ordinarily passed harmlessly through human bodies.

This led to the absurd situation where the decontamination protocols for pirate stations worked a bit better than those on regular space stations.

The pirates learned the hard way that spreading a single potent germ might turn entire ships and space stations into empty hulks!

The entire detour took some time, but nobody complained. The medical experts employed by the Bosey Clan took their responsibilities seriously and hardly batted an eyelid at all the unusual half-alien physiques they needed to inspect.

Once they passed the health inspections, they entered the space station proper. Each of them retracted their helmet face plates and shut off their internal air supply to conserve their oxygen.

The interior of the space station was marked with centuries worth of rust, dirt and other marks of age. It was as if the Boseys stopped caring about hygiene once the checkpoints cleared the visitors from any infectious diseases.

Overworked and severely outdated cleaning bots with so many dents that seemed as if they were kicked on a regular basis buzzed over various surfaces. Some of their sensors were so murky and fogged up that they occasionally bumped against their armored feet.

"Annoying gnat!" Ketis grunted, and performed a spendid kick against the poor scrubbing bot that collided against her greaves. The magnificently powerful kick propelled the cleaning bot into the air like a ball and caused it to crash against the partially corroded alloy wall.

Despite the impressive force behind the kick, the bot barely gained another bump. The little thing beeped some nonsensical error tones before resuming its programmed duty of scrubbing off the stains of dirt marring the deck.

"Those cleaning bots are some of the toughest I've ever seen." Ves noted with an interested eye. "The exterior of these bots are actually fashioned out of salvaged mech armor plating!"

This seemed to be a trend throughout the entire space station. Much of the interior structures and compartments were made out of salvaged and recycled ship and mech parts. It made everyone feel as if they entered a junkyard turned into a slum.

As they all entered deeper into the station proper, the Vandals and Swordmaidens split up to run their own errands. Ves separated from Soapstone and the other Vandals on a shopping spree in order to take care of his own matters.

Their appearances had already attracted enough attention already. The exaggerated additions to their armor suits had increased their intimidation factor to the point where almost every visitor parted in their way.

Ves evoked different reactions from his better-armed security escort due to his slimmer form and his billowing cape. The fabric caught easily in the air, but possessed enough weight at the bottom to prevent it from smacking in the face of someone walking behind.

While Ves wasn't the only person in the station who wore a cape, for some unspoken reason only the higher-ranking members of the outfit wore them. This caused many more eyes to stare at Ves, wondering what position a young man like him held to deserve this impressive privilege.

"

The only ones who refused to make way were those who wore similar gear. Men and women from other outfits adhered to the same rules of showing off their prowess, so they all came geared for war.

Each group of armed and armored men tread confidently through the public areas of the space station. Encountering rival groupings on the street led to sparks of tension, but the friction never led to conflict.

The Bosey Clan did not appreciate fighting within their space station. Mancroft was a very useful stopping point to pirates so they generally wanted to keep it intact. Any attempts to sow death and chaos meant making an enemy out of all the pirates docked to the space station.

The glares the other pirates directed to Ves and the Vandals only served to measure their grit. There were plenty of playboys on this station that pretended to be greater than they actually were. The Flagrant Vandals were the real deal, so they stared right back with provoking glances.

"This is getting rather tiresome." Ves muttered after fending off yet another unspoken challenge to their right to carry around so much bling. "If pirates have to deal with this stuff each time they step into public, then I would rather stay back in civilized space."

This sounded absurd to Ketis. "I don't see what the big deal is. Don't you always have to look tough when you pass by some pirates?"

"It's not as automatic to us as it is for you. It's not polite to stare people in the eyes with a greedy expression."

She shrugged. "Sometimes I don't know how you people in civilized space managed to stay alive. How can you scare off muggers when you aren't able to show you're strong enough to beat them up?"

"We have a thing called law and order there. The police or planetary guard will step in if someone tries to rob you in their jurisdiction."

Ketis looked speechless at that. Police? Planetary Guard? What did those words mean?

Ves brushed aside her confusion and activated a navigation app on his comm. With Ketis, Nolsen and three more exoskeleton brutes in tow, he followed the directions projected by his comm towards the only comm center in Mancroft.

They walked past various Bosey guards in heavy and exoskeleton armor. Ves walked up in front of the desk and greeted the clerk.

"I'd like to establish a connection to Malligan's Pitstop via your Tzianti crystal."

The clerk perked up at that. Communicating through Tzianti crystals only happened for important transmissions. "Do you have a referral or a set of protocols?"

"I have the right protocols."

Ves transmitted the files to the clerk, who inspected them before determining they were valid.

"Everything is in order. The Tzianti crystal connected to Malligan's Pitstop is available for your use. The price for a single transmission is currently set at thirteen K-coins per minute. If you wish to inspect them under heavy supervision of our own experts, you may do so for an additional fee of two-hundred K-coins."

Ves almost wanted to slap the clerk's face for charging such a ridiculous. Thirteen K-coins amounted to five-thousand bright credits! Still, Ves had no cause for complaint, as using the crystals introduced cracks that needed special materials to repair. Besides, someone like Ves hardly blinked his eyes anymore when he spent a couple of thousand bright credits.

"We'll pay."

Luckily, he was authorized to use the regimental account for this expenditure. Since he got someone else to pay his fees, Ves might as well take full advantage of it. He requested to make a personal inspection, which the clerk accepted like he already expect it. Ves was not the first customer to be paranoid enough to double-check the comm center's arrangements.

The clerk led him down a stairway and into a heavily-fortified compartment. Roving patrols of Bosey guards occasionally passed them by.

The inspection didn't take very long. Ves was mildly impressed as he beheld the house-sized crystal. He whipped out his multiscanner from the toolbelt he had wrapped around his armor and methodically scanned the entire space.

Due to time concerns, he couldn't spend as much time as he wished, but his inspection was thorough enough to reveal that the Boseys had indeed kept the chamber free from bugs.

At some point further inspections were redundant. His military-issued multiscanner might be better than the civilian models, but its size and power limitations prevented it from performing any deeper or more thorough scans.

"I guess I have to put my faith in the existing arrangements."

Ves was about to have a sensitive discussion with a notorious expert pilot killer. It may have been one thing to slay an expert pilot in battle. It was another thing entirely if an expert died by someone from their own side for 'academic' purposes.

He silently grumbled at the Skull Architect's audacity. If he really wanted to butcher an expert pilot or three, he should have been more patient. The best choice would be to arrange the kidnapping of an expert pilot from the Hexadric Hegemony, the Friday Coalition's hated rivals.

If that wasn't possible, then the weak third-rate states surrounding their territories also had a bunch of expert pilots to spare.

"Though, if that really happened, the MTA will get pissed even more."

Every elite pilot who advanced to expert or higher automatically received protection from the MTA. Wholesale assasination or coercion on these privileged classes always provoked the ire of the Mech Trade Association.

"The Skull Architect was doomed either way."

Chapter 658

Once Ves gave up trying to discover any loopholes to this comm arrangement, he stepped inside a chamber immediately next to the one that held the giant Tzianti crystal. Ignoring its beautiful facets and cut, Ves instead directed his gaze towards the much less impressive looking hardware console.

"The interface is made as simple and basic as possible." The clerk explained with the tone of a practiced spiel. "Old technology is used whenever possible, making it extremely obvious if anything untoward is added to the machinery. You can consult the technical diagrams marked on the wall over there if you want to double-check the guts of the console."

"Do I have to pay more K-coins for that?"

"No. It is already covered by the previous fee you paid."

"Then don't mind if I do."

Though Ves felt tempted to skip the troublesome chore, he fought back his complacency and diligently scanned the entire interface. The low-tech communication device only had one goal, and that was to translate the input and output pouring through the enclosed cable connected to the heart of the Tzianti crystal.

This meant that the Tzianti crystal did all the heavy lifting of establishing real-time communication across many light-years. The hardware interface acted like a translator that processed the signals emanated by the crystal and converted them into a visual and auditory projection.

A mere projection hardly required the latest tech. By building the interface with the oldest and most reliable technical standards, Ves found it easy to understand the entire machine. It virtually possessed no depth at all!

Everything about the primitive arrangement was completely standard, but despite his expectations, Ves found nothing out of place.

Well, he wasn't exactly being forthright with that. While he may not have discovered anything amiss, his multiscanner did find traces of that a microscopic patch of something had been affixed next to the processors responsible for amplifying the Tzianti crystal's raw input.

According to his multiscanner, this incredibly tiny bug had been dissolved into trace elements mere minutes since he first arrived in this chamber. The only reason his scanner detected these traces was because it was a several months-old copy of the latest model of multiscanners from the Mech Corps.

His mouth curled into a minute grimace. If Ves hadn't been paranoid enough to make a detailed inspection, the comm center wouldn't have wiped out this irregularity. A third party would have been able to listen to his dirty dealings with the Skull Architect.

Ves really wanted to activate his jamming device right now, but he left it hanging on his toolbelt. Not only would the interference block the primitive and non sufficient shielded consoles, but the rules also prohibited the activation of a whole laundry list of devices.

He tried hard to withhold his anger. His logic and his desires dictated that he really did not want to cause any trouble. That might spark a conflict with the Bosey Clan, and pissing off the rulers of the space station meant the Vandals and the Swordmaidens might encounter resistance in their attempts at procuring some last-minute supplies.

"I'm satisfied with these arrangements." He finally declared, showing no hint that he observed any aborted mischief.

The clerk made a theatrical bow in front of Ves. "Then I leave you to your private session. Have a good day."

Both the clerk and his guards stepped outside the chamber. After Ves performed one last expedited sweep, he became confident that the chambers contained no more unexpected surprises, at least without bringing in a massive man-sized scanner normally used to identify traces of damage through a mech's exterior.

"There's no way I can delay this any further."

A creeping dread crawled up his back as he faced the console which had already loaded in the communication protocols by the clerk. Only a single press of a button awaited his impending conversation with one of the upper-level figures of the Faris Star Region.

Ves created a strong impression of the Skull Architect in his mind. A Senior Mech Designer, a driven researcher, an ambitious explorer, a strong-willed fugitive, a perfectionist in pursuit of efficiency, a cunning trapper, an impatient madman, what else could he add to the complex sides of the man that managed to survive and thrive in the lawless frontier?

The more he dove into the Skull Architect's story, the more Ves became sympathetic to his cause and drive. Though Ves tried hard to steel his mind and resist this mental contamination, he hadn't entirely succeeded, considering the direction of his recent thoughts.

His disgust at the criminal mech designer's misdeeds became less severe. His sympathy for the man's largely fruitless attempt to impose an impossible level of efficiency in his designs caused Ves to contemplate giving out a hint or two about the X-Factor.

"What am I thinking?!" He shook his head. "These thoughts are dangerous!"

He refocused his mentality and tried to regain clarity in his mind. This was really hard because Ves identified strongly with the Skull Architect. They shared so many traits in common that Ves saw his future self with the older man!

"The design philosophy I'm forming is too radical. Nothing can hide forever. Once I inevitably go public with it, the principles I'm espousing will undoubtedly clash against the sensibilities of the more conservative and heartless mech designers. Will I be driven out from civilized space as well? What if my discoveries and advancements are actively suppressed by my peers?"

This might be his eventual fate in the next couple of hundred years!

Ves snorted in admonishment to himself. "There are still differences! For one, if I am to attract opposition, it will be on the debate floor and on the mech market. The MTA won't send their Compliance Department against me anytime soon. The second difference is that Mr. Jimenez butchered thousands of mech pilots, while the most I"ll be guilty of is offending the sensibilities of close-minded mech designers."

Of course, if the naysaying mech designers started to become an actual threat to his life and career, then he wouldn't mind employing his shadow force against them...

"A shadow force won't come into being out of thin air." He chuckled to himself. "I'll have to secure access to stealth tech first. Obtaining the specifications for an ultracompact battery is also necessary if I want to kit myself and my men with high-powered gadgets."

The key to obtaining these scraps of knowledge was to set a bottom line. Ves reminded himself not to get caught up with the upcoming negotiation. It might take a very long while, but he was pretty certain he could exchange the desired knowledge via the System's Skills. The cost may be unbearably huge, but at least it offered him a viable alternative.

"Stealth tech can actually wait, but learning how to build ultracompact batteries is something which is immediately useful in my current situation."

His priorities should be to secure the latter first. After that, he could try to fish for the former, but if the price became too troublesome, Ves would rather try his luck with researching the stealth fragments or wait until the Mech Corps discharged him so he could return to using the System.

"I'm procrastinating." He uttered. "I can't keep pushing this call back. People are waiting outside the door and I've got other matters on my agenda."

He pressed the button.

A small hum rang through the larger chamber as the massive Tzianti crystal began to shake. It vibrated and also started to glow from within. The faint white glow looked as if the crystal had birthed a star.

The entire phenomenon slowly built up, and eventually reached its limit several minutes later. An invisible wave of something thrummed from the Tzianti crystal and washed over his body life the caress of a feather.

The console lit up. A projection came into view. Unlike the modern projectors that were ubiquitous in the entire galaxy, this one appeared much less life-like. The lag, noise and extremely limited bandwidth turned the projected image into something that resembled a vintage projection from the Age of Stars.

The man that appeared had dark hair just like Ves and looked to be in the prime of his forties. His sharp face and aristocratic demeanor looked down on Ves with a neutral and restrained set of eyes.

His years in exile in the Faris Star Region had marked him deeply. Gone were the clean clothes and the superbly tailored lab coat he routinely wore as a mech designer from the Vermeer Group. Instead, he wore a tight vacsuit surrounding with what appeared to be a pirate admiral's coat dyed in some dark purple shade. The bloody mathematical symbols adorning his coat added a maniacal quality, while the panels of armor interspersed over the garment added some hard armor to complement its unseen defensive measures.

Ves failed to spot a single symbol or mark alluding to skulls or bones among the Skull Architect's clothes. However, the projector happened to capture a pyramid made out of human skulls in the background! The entire pile of skulls seemed to have been stacked into this shape with care and precision.

A mech designer that stacked skulls in his free time was obviously not a normal human being!

Only now did Ves realize the magnitude of what had happened.

Reno Jimenez, the man that gained the mantle of the Skull Architect, the Senior Mech Designer that most people in the Komodo Star Sector thought had died or fled to the other half of the galaxy, accepted a live call from Ves.

For a moment, Ves didn't know what to say. He simulated this conversation many times in his mind, but seeing the notorious mech designer in a live transmission disrupted his rhythm from the start.

The Skull Architect suffered no such affliction. "You are the mech designer who Mayra referred to my doorstep. Mister.. Ves.. Larkinson?"

"Ah, that is correct, sir." Ves immediately adopted a humble tone, though he took care not to overdo his reverence. The last thing he wanted to do was to portray himself as a pushover. "I am honored that you've accepted my call."

The infamous mech designer sneered at Ves. "Honored, are you? Be careful of what you say, Mr. Larkinson. I do not tolerate lies, nor the lips from which they are uttered."

"I speak the truth! My admiration for your work is boundless! The ingenious Leiner Grey design you've sent me has given me endless inspiration." Ves swiftly replied. Political instincts that Ves had always been ignorant of came to life, urging him to stay on the Skull Architect's good side. His deferential stance clashed powerfully against his dashing appearance. "Regardless of the reasons why you've parted from civilized space, experiencing your design philosophy has enriched my perspective."

The Skull Architect's face loosened a bit. Maybe he bought it, maybe he didn't, but the praise spewing out of Ves at least decreased the tension in the air. "Interesting, boy. Master Olson has chosen an interesting apprentice. She's always the lucky one. I don't think she even realizes what a treasure she has picked up. Did you know we used to be colleagues? We even collaborated on a number of designs back in the day."

Ves widened his eyes. He should have made the connection sooner. Both of them hailed from the Vermeer Group of the Friday Coalition. A few decades ago, the Skull Architect was a respectable Senior Mech Designer, and Carmin Olson shared the same rank.

"I wasn't aware, sir. Your record doesn't mention any mech designs with her name on it as a collaborator."

"Records lie." The pirate mech designer stated firmly. "You young ones are too reliant on the galactic net. Unless you've witnessed an event with your own two eyes, always be skeptical. The MTA only tracks public mech designs, which is accurate at your level, but becomes increasingly less reflective of reality once you advance. The best mechs are always designed behind closed doors."

"I see!"

Ves already knew that, but not to this extent. Nonetheless, he adopted a suitably surprised expression, as if this revelation was worth gold to him. For whatever reason, the Skull Architect's mood had swung to a teaching mode. This personality was infinitely better than any of the other possible options, so Ves was content to play the eager student to the generous teacher.

Chapter 659

Despite his appearance as some pirate princeling in dark and menacing armor, Ves acted like an eager pupil in front of the Skull Architect's sage advice. The man who pulled off the pirate look much better than many other mech designers had dropped his belligerent tone. For now.

"Boy, it is clear to me that you are unaccustomed to collaborate projects. Have you ever jointly designed a mech?"

"No, sir, not if you count out competition mechs designed in a matter of days or hours."

The Skull Architect scoffed on the other side of the low-quality comm channel. "Working together with other mech designers to design the best mechs your abilities can produce is a complicated song and dance. It takes trust and sincerity to design a mech that expresses multiple design philosophies without clashing against each other. Done well, and the end product can be the most rewarding mech design that has ever graced from your hands. Done poorly, and the design not only wasted your time, but might lead to a schism with your fellow designer."

"I shall take note of your warnings." Ves dutifully nodded, and he did mentally record the man's lessons. "I have not had the privilege of collaborating with another mech designer, but it is inevitably on my agenda."

"About that topic." The Skull Architect's face abruptly grinned. The man peered closer into the projector, magnifying his face and crowding out the skulls piled in the background. "We are kindred mech designers."

The statement along with the change in expression came out of the blue. Ves became floored for a few seconds. What did the Skull Architect mean by that?

Ves stayed silent, allowing for the other mech designer to explain.

"Our ethos, our willingness to pursue the mysteries of reality, our insatiable curiosity for the unknown, are we not alike?!" The Skull Architect listed out with a cackle. "Haha! Every mech designer that approached me did so with ulterior motives. FIne! I like ambitious mech designers! Yet when they finally demonstrate their designs to me, they are utterly consumed by petty thoughts and personal gains. It is the same for you!"

"I.. ahh.."

"Do not deny it, you whelp!" The man growled at him, before abruptly switching back to a grin."However, compared to those useless pieces of trash, you are from a cut above. Your design for the Leiner Grey has revealed much to me. I can read you like an open book. I must say that the motives I've sensed from your design is close to the ideal that mech designers your age should strive for. I can sense your hunger to transform the entire mech industry! You yearn to prove yourself at the highest level, is that right?"

"That is true." Ves nodded modestly. Even though he already knew that the Skull Architect could read a lot from his work, he felt awfully exposed right now. "The design philosophy that I've been forming goes contrary to many established conventions."

The Skull Architect smirked at Ves. "Your design philosophy.. very interesting. I have sensed an unfathomable depth underneath the surface that even I can't understand. A mech designer at your stage shouldn't be thinking so ambitiously. Yet you do not appear to be someone who adheres to the rules if they become inconvenient. Dangerous. Very dangerous."

A chill ran through his spine as Ves noted the underlying warning. The importance of a mech designer's design philosophy could not be overstated. It was literally the core of their beliefs on how mechs should look like. A critical flaw in someone's design philosophy might irreparably ruin their design careers because the flaws doomed all of their designs.

"Collaborate projects are an essential part of a mech designer's development." The Senior continued, having switched back to teaching mode. "They reveal shortcomings through contrast. They polish the strength of our design philosophies through collisions. They can result in a mech design that is greater than what we are able to design on our own. Let us consider the work you have submitted to me. Compare your Leiner Grey to mine as it was originally envisioned. Which design is better?"

Ves thought a lot on this topic himself, both as a way to judge his disparity with the Senior Mech Designer and also as a way to process the puzzles in his mind that had cropped up. The question of which design won over the other was actually a comparison between visions.

Senior Jimenez envisioned a landbound light skirmisher that stood head and shoulders above similar mech models in terms of performance. It had been designed to function as a high-powered killing machine that almost rivalled the power of custom mechs in the package of a standard product.

Right out of the box, the Leiner Grey had been designed to awe and overcome expectations. The ruinous demands put on the mech pilots be damned, this mech demanded the utmost in order to display its full potential!

"Your vision for your mech is.. extreme." He finally spoke when he saw that the Skull Architect was getting impatient. "It is not a direction which I'm inclined to take. While I like to pursue performance like any other mech designer, I believe the best mechs are those designed from a holistic perspective. A mech is not a closed system in itself. It is an ecosystem which includes the bare mech frame as well as the mech pilot and the support structure that services and repairs the mech. I design an ecosystem, not just a mech."

It was a convoluted way of saying that Ves looked beyond the technical and took note of demands outside this sphere.

The Skull Architect displayed no surprise at his answer. "Elaborate in your own words, please."

"A mech does not operate in isolation. Every movement, every attack, every tactical decision requires a human mind behind the controls. A mech can be defined as a large weapon platform that is largely directed by the human in its cockpit. To me, the mech pilot is an indispensable part of a mech, and should be taken into account from the start whenever I design my own mechs."

"That is an understandable perspective." The Skull Architect murmured. "A mech that is controlled by an AI or some other substitute is a bot. However, the fallacy that you are falling for is assuming you are able to model the reactions of a mech pilot. Your design is suffused by deep insights of a mech pilot's perspective. This can be a blessing, but it can also be a shackle. How can mechs seek to surpass their predecessors if they are not pushing the envelope!?"

The Skull Architect must have been referring to the Masteries that Ves had applied when putting his own spin on the Leiner Grey design. The first-hand insights of several mech pilots continued to exert its influence on almost every design choice.

Ves had no cause to doubt the wisdom gained from them. To hear the Skull Architect question their usefulness was insulting.

However, he also knew what the Skull Architect was trying to say. The man attempted to warn Ves that he might have become too smitten in his gains from his Mastery.

A mech pilot and a mech designer occupied two very different kinds of professions. A good mech pilot might not always be the best mech designer, and vica versa.

"I.. appreciate the inquiry. You have given me some food for thought." Ves eventually answered. "My conviction hasn't changed, though. We design mechs to supply the mech markets and serve the needs of mech pilots. Calibrating our designs to take into account our target market is a fundamental necessity."

"The mech market is not perfect!" The Skull Architect suddenly roared, fury suffusing his very expression! "It is a heavily-regulated puppet show where the mech manufacturers with the biggest pockets muscle out better designs through abusing their superior market power! The overwhelming majority of the mech markets in the galaxy is dominated by the same trans-galactic enterprises that are virtually impregnable in the galactic center!"

To Ves' dismay, the man was just starting with his rant. "Your faith in the so-called mech market is wholly misplaced. You rely too much on the assumption that demand is fueled by humans who can be trusted to act rationally. That is a complete LIE! The market is OVERFLOWING with IDIOTS and IMBECILES who chase after the SHINIEST TOY instead of sound and proper products! The ugly TRUTH is that mech buyers have NO IDEA what they really WANT! If I had my way, each person who buys a mech ought to LEAVE THEIR PURCHASING DECISIONS TO A PREPROGRAMMED AI! THIS WILL ALWAYS RESULT IN THE MOST OPTIMAL AND MOST RATIONAL MECH SELECTION IN NINETY-NINE OUT OF A HUNDRED CASES!"

"THE SECOND FAULT YOU ARE OVERLOOKING IS THAT THE MECH MARKET IS MYOPIC IN SCOPE AND ALWAYS FAILS IN PREDICTING FUTURE TRENDS! EARLIER I SAID THAT MECH MARKETS ARE POPULATED BY ORANG-UTANGS WHO DON'T KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A LIGHT SKIRMISHER AND A HEAVY ARTILLERY MECH. THIS GOES DOUBLE FOR NEW MECH TYPES AND RADICAL INNOVATIONS!"

"Ah, you haven't looked at the market that way, haven't you, boy? THEN OPEN YOUR EYES! Think about assassin mechs! Those stealthy mechs have long been dismissed in the early days because of their COMPLETE lack of armor and their PRIMITIVE implementation of stealth technology. Their stealth barely lasts a minute and they can't suppress alternative ways of spotting mechs such as gravitic sensors. HOWEVER, those who kept developing assassin mechs never gave up, and through the hard work and constant accumulation over several generations, they have FINALLY cracked the code and SUCCEEDED in developing principles to design VIABLE STEALTH MECHS over the decades-long protests of the rest of the mech industry and the stupid consumers who think they know best!"

"The advantages these PIONEERS have built over many years of research and design work have PAID OFF for them in spades! Some of them have gained an immeasurable advantage in this field and they succeeded in transforming their HEADSTART into an ENDURING position of leadership!"

"However, for each success story, there are THOUSANDS if not MILLIONS of outright FAILURES. There are research directions that sound incredibly promising and ambitious, but NEVER see the light of day because their mech designers are INCOMPETENT. However, there are also mech designers who pursue a WORTHY GOAL that if successful, can transform the entire MECH LANDSCAPE! These brave souls require SUPPORT and INVESTMENT, not RIDICULE or PREMATURE CONDEMNATION! MANY GREAT IDEAS ARE SUPPRESSED BY CLOSE-MINDED IDIOTS, WHILE MANY AWFUL IDEAS RECEIVE ENTIRE SHIPMENTS OF MONEY BECAUSE THEIR MECH DESIGNERS ARE BORN WITH SILVER SPOONS IN THEIR MOUTHS!"

"That said, the latter is more of an exception than the rule, because by far the entire mech industry is a SNAIL in terms of innovation! There is no APPETITE for risk-taking and the DRIVE to design radically better mechs is ACTIVELY SUPPRESSED by the tyrannical know-it-alls of the MTA! COUNTLESS VIRTUALLY IDENTICAL MECH DESIGNS ARE PUBLISHED EACH YEAR, AND ALL OF THEM PERFORM NO BETTER THAN THEIR CLOSEST EQUIVALENT! THE FORCES OF INERTIA IS TOO STRONG IN THE MECH INDUSTRY, AND THE UNNECESSARILY HIGH STANDARDS OF VALIDATION BY THE MTA IS TO BLAME! BY RAISING THE QUALITY BAR TOO HIGH, THEY ARE ACTIVELY STRANGLING TOO MANY RADICAL NEW MECH CONCEPTS IN THEIR CRADLE BEFORE THEY CAN BE TESTED ON THE MARKET!"

"APPRENTICE MECH DESIGNER VES LARKINSON!"

Ves practically jumped out of his skin."Y-Y-Yes, sir!?"

"Tell me," The man leaned closer to the sensor capturing his projection until his entire sneering face filled up the projection. "Do you still trust the sanctity of the mech market after hearing what I said?"

"I.."

The rant put Ves on the back foot. He barely followed the threads espoused by the Skull Architect as he vented his biases against the entities he developed grudges against. Ves had never cast his thoughts that deep, and to ask for his opinion immediately after hearing them for the first time was like asking him to design a complete production mech after his first day of attending his mech design classes!

Chapter 660

Some much-needed clarity injected into his mind for a moment. Ves had been put out of his comfort zone after being on the receiving end of a passionate rant.

"Economists of all stripes can write entire virtual libraries on the subject of the mech industry and the mech market. I know what I am. I'm a mech designer. I know what I am not. I have not dived too deeply into questioning the model of the mech market in my mind."

"Is that your answer?" The Skull Architect scoffed in a disdainful manner. "You throw your hands in the air because matters of economy is beyond your scope of expertise? While I have a low opinion of the mech market, they set the rules that mech designers such as you must follow! For better or worse, every independent mech designer that has the power to publish their own designs must conform to market standard, however stifling they turn out to be! Doesn't that rankle you?!"

The man's response gave Ves some much-needed time to formulate a response. While he could have bopped his head and agreed with whatever the wise and mighty Senior said, Ves wanted to preserve his own ideas.

If he let the Skull Architect roll over him, Ves might as well convert to the gospel of the Skull Architect!

Ves calmed his mood and disregarded the other mech designer's high-strung mood. "Let me turn this argument around, if I may. You say that the mech market is made up of conservative copycat mech designers and buyers that are anything but rational. Does that not make the two of us fallible as well? Who are we to tell that we know what is best for mech pilots?"

"That argument may hold some weight if the number of suppliers of mechs is only limited to a handful of mech manufacturers. That is the EXACT opposite of the current market supply! There are so many mech designers attempting to make their mark on the mech market that it is straining the MTA's practically unlimited resources! Hahaha! Serves them right! Those control freaks are being brought down by the weight of their own success!"

The Skull Architect's grievances against the Mech Trade Association must run very deep. Hardly any mech designer dared to say anything ill about one of the two most powerful organizations in human space. Though the MTA presented a friendly and accessible face to the public, Ves heard they were rather firm in keeping the industry under their 'benevolent' supervision.

"My experiences with the Mech Trade Association have been shallow so far." Ves cautiously said. "I cannot say my experiences with them have ended on a bad note."

"You're still a cub in their eyes, Mr. Larkinson. You still need to jump out of the spawning pond before the MTA will start to take you seriously. When you reach Journeyman, their scrutiny on you will intensify by a thousand fold. While the stereotype describes them watching over every mech designer through spy bugs and other high tech means, the real snake is hidden among your employees and associates. Do not trust a single of your man no matter how well you've secured their guarantees. ESPECIALLY do not trust the supposed ironclad contracts of the MTA to enforce non-disclosure agreements!"

"This.." Ves turned speechless for a moment. The idea sounded absurd, yet awfully plausible! "The MTA.. actively violates the confidentiality agreements they are supposed to uphold? This.. they are their own judge! There's nobody in the galaxy that is accountable to the MTA!"

The Skull Architect cackled as if he achieved a victory. "Haha! That's it! There's the rub! Too many mech designers have fallen into their trap of placing total confidence in their integrity and impartiality! The MTA is anything but a sober and united institution. It suffers from the same infighting, nepotism, corruption, incompetence and bias as every other organization ran by humans! As long as humans are involved, the WORST CASE SCENARIO will ALWAYS take place without fail! IT IS IN OUR NATURE TO SCREW UP!"

Ves read the underlying argument. The Skull Architect evidently held a deeper grievance against humans in general. In particular, their irrational and emotional behavior hampered his own research ventures many times.

Still, Ves did not agree with that sentiment. "Humans are fallible, yes. But we are also the race that have managed to conquer half the galaxy during the Age of Conquests. Our many screwups aside, our breadth of life and our wealth of emotions has driven us to greater heights than almost any alien before us has achieved! Although I respect your opinions, I really can't agree with your pessimism with regards to the imperfections of human behavior! Life is inherently dynamic, and while that makes our society imperfect, it's at least better than living like bots!"

His words expressed his beliefs that human diversity of thought and preferences could be a boon for mech designers. After all, if humans always chose to purchase the 'best' mechs on the market, wouldn't they exclusively purchase the optimized-to-death mass market models? Small-time craftsmen and up-and-coming mech designers such as Ves stood no chance of entering the market with his creative but suboptimal mech models.

His words had a measurable impact on the Skull Architect. The pirate mech designer scowled even more, but Ves knew the man's anger wasn't directed at him. The Senior couldn't refute Ves, not without sounding as if humans would be better off if they all turned into emotionless bots.

"Be that as it may, boy, the Mech Trade Association should have been held to a higher standard." Jimenez calmed down. "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who watches the watchers? The MTA and CFA were initially conceived to split their powers and keep each other in check. Instead, they have decided to treat their area of interests as their exclusive domain in exchange for not bothering each other. The MTA is a tyrant within the borders of human space, while the CFA gets to terrorize the frontier on a regular basis. The original balance of powers envisioned at the start of the Age of Mechs is broken, and the cracks have already started to show in this last century."

"I.. I wouldn't know, sir."

"Of course not, you're just a small Apprentice Mech Designer. In our perspective, you are still a child. No matter. You will be apprised of the true state of human civilization when you reach my rank. Let me impart you with a free tip. Once you advance to Journeyman, which you inevitably will, DO NOT participate in any of their initiatives. They are all TRAPS designed to pull you into their .

The way the Senior spoke started to grate on Ves. While he sensed that the Skull Architect genuinely wanted to help him out, the older mech designer actually tried to pursue his own interests.

The Skull Architect was a huge hypocrite. He was guilty of the same kind of political maneuvering and backbiting that hey laid at the feet of the MTA. Ves grimaced a bit at the realization, but he felt no need to confront the very dangerous mech designer of his faults.

"I will take your warning into consideration." He spoke.

If the Skull Architect wanted to plant some doubt into Ves' mind, then he certainly succeeded. Ves could never look at the MTA in the same way again.

With that minor victory in his belt, the Skull Architect grinned and leaned back from the projection. He didn't appear so menacing now, though his garments reminded Ves that the man was more than just a mech designer. He was speaking to a powerful influence among the pirates.

"I misspoke." The man surprisingly admitted a fault. "At the beginning, I stated that we were kindred mech designers. It is clear now that our differences are larger than I have anticipated. Nonetheless, despite our divergent beliefs, we are of one mind when it comes to making progress in mech design. How far are you willing to go to climb up to the next level?"

That was a complicated question that might lead to the question whether Ves had the guts to kill in order to achieve his goals.

"I prefer to keep the damage to the minimum. I am perfectly willing to be flexible if that gets me closer to my goals, but the most important priority is for me to stay alive. I can't do that very easily if I challenge the MTA."

The Senior smiled at him. "I don't expect you to. Not when you haven't experienced how stifling the MTA can be with regards to your research interests. Follow my earlier advice and keep the MTA as out of the loop as possible. The less of a grasp they have on you, the longer you can advance your research without getting caught."

"Noted."

"Hmm.. enough about the MTA. You are still too indoctrinated into worshipping the ground it walks on. If will be difficult for you to recognize the ugly truth when you have not yet touched upon its rotten core."

The man turned around for a moment and rummaged through his pirate admiral's outfit. He drew out a data chip and inserted it into his interface. The low-quality projector split up, showing both the Skull Architect's face and a pair of identical designs.

"Let's discuss your test, shall we?" He began, and pressed a button that highlighted the differences between the mechs. "It is interesting that our Leiner Greys differ remarkably in performance and piloting ease. Where my design excels in the former, yours focuses on the latter. From a technical perspective, the divergence rate between our designs is less than two percent. Yet the impact these differences have on performance is more than fifteen percent! As for the jumps in piloting ease, since this is a subjective criteria, it can't be measured in exact terms, but I estimate that the difference in that aspect alone is over two-hundred percent!"

Ves did not look too surprised at those dramatic figures. As he designed the Leiner Grey Simplified Edition, he always compared it to the Leiner Grey Original Edition in his mind, or at least what these dumbed-down set of designs could achieve.

"The drop in performance is regrettable, but if the piloting experience is at least three times better than before, then I believe this trade-off is more than worth it. My design philosophy cares more about accommodating mech pilots than squeezing the last drops of performance."

The Skull Architect tutted at Ves in disapproval. The man had switched back to teaching mode. "Your casual disregard on the priority to maximize the performance of your mech is one of the most egregious flaws in your mech design. How naive! The notion that you can coast through your career designing artful, ergonomic but ultimately useless trinkets is a reckless one. Wake up! If you had to present your variant of the Leiner Grey before a council of Senior Mech Designers, they would laugh at you in the face before booting you from the hall and from their minds!"

"Performance is relative, sir. The Leiner Grey performs fifteen percent weaker than yours, that can't be argued with, but the potential mech pilots that can actual make use of it is multiplied by at least a thousand times! Usability and practicality are important qualities on their own, and should be taken into consideration as well when deciding what constitutes 'good performance'!"

The older man scoffed for the umpteenth time. Much of what Ves espoused seemed to rub him the wrong way. "Ah, the old 'everything is relevant' argument. Well, I when you bring your 'relatively good performing' mech models to the market, we shall see whether the mech market you place so much affection on possesses any appetite for your products when there are thousands of competing mech models that perform significantly better."

"I'd like to remind you that I am still at the early stages of my career. My mech designs can never match the performance of mainstream mech models and those designed by talented Seniors and Masters. Struggling to compete on them in terms of hard performance numbers is an exercise in folly."

"It is never too early to start chasing after the best! Back when I was your age, I was already dreaming of beating those seemingly perfect mainstream mech models that you so dread competing against. Certainly, many of my early products were failures! But I persisted, and persisted, until I finally broke through to Journeyman and published a respectable mech design that has closed the gap by an enormous margin! These experiences have shaped my design philosophy into a long and sharp spear that I can use to drive directly into my impregnable competitors!"

The Skull Architect confirmed the speculation once a Journeyman formulated a design philosophy, it affected the remainder of that mech designer's career!

"As an Apprentice, your philosophy is still malleable and can be shaped into a different form. Think very hard before you decide on its final shape. The progress you make today will save you years of stagnation in the future!"

Chapter 661

Ves had no idea how an attempt to acquire knowledge of stealth tech and how to fabricate an ultracompact battery spiralled into a full blown lecture and tutoring session.

If he ignored the fact he was wearing a heavily embellished suit of light combat armor that could have been torn straight from a modern day pirate drama, he might have thought he travelled back in time to his student days.

Of course, with a professor like Reno Jimenez instructing him on how to do better, in a pirate admiral's uniform no less, the situation turned into a completely unbelievable event.

Though the Skull Architect may not be the most pleasant individual to converse with, he took a surprisingly patient attitude with Ves when the topic shifted to the technical aspects of their Leiner Grey design.

They did not have to converse that much, since both of them had tasted each other's design philosophies. They also read through each other's design choices and characteristics.

Reading a mech design was a fundamental ability of any mech designer. Ves knew of most of the secrets of the Leiner Grey, and could say with confidence he could reproduce an identical light skirmisher with a seventy percent similarity! The only aspects he failed to get a grasp on were those that concerned higher concepts, areas in which Ves could only begin to touch upon when he advanced to the rank of Journeyman.

As for his counterpart, the Skull Architect might have grasped up to ninety-nine percent of his design style! The two stood at different stages in a mech designer's career. Practically nothing Ves had implemented in his own version of the Leiner Grey could be hidden from an elder mech designer's sight.

Considering the vast experience gap between them, Ves had made several notable errors in his design.

The Skull Architect highlighted the joint sections near the waist. "One of the more egregious loss in performance is the way you handled the leg joints. I can understand why you've thickened these sections, but this size increase leads to a whole cascade of changes..."

The man brutally pointed out several of these major errors, each one illuminating Ves even more. It couldn't be helped, as Ves had been handed over the Leiner Grey design without any manuals or instructions. He inevitably misunderstood some minor details which turned out to have an enormous effect!

As the Senior found nothing else worth noting on, he waved his hand, causing the projections of the designs to fade. "Learn from this experience. Seek out active collaborations. There is no rule in mech design that states that a mech designer ought to work alone. Some of the best mechs come about through combining the strengths of several mech designers. While each contributing mech designer adds another complicating element, the reward is often worth the effort. Tell me, boy, what is your evaluation of your version of the Leiner Grey if it were to be published on the market?"

Ves frowned at this question. "The Leiner Grey is one of the best put-together designs I've had the pleasure of working with, but it makes use of outdated alloys and techniques. It won't gain any traction on the market except for a possible role as training mech, but even then its premium material costs makes it unsuitable for that task. My apologies, it is hard for me to make accurate estimates of the market performance of a second-class mech design."

"The market for second-class mechs is more diverse than the market for third-class mechs. An abundance of wealth and vastly higher budgets allow for greater combinations of exotics to be used. Other than that, the market for more mundane mech types is more similar than you think. Let me put the question in a different context. What if I decided to publish your variant of the Leiner Grey instead of my original creation as its original design all those years ago?"

"That... I have not performed any detailed market research about how the Friday Coalition's mech market worked like. I'm missing too much information to make a confident judgement about is market performance. That said, even if the simplified version of the Leiner Grey performs fifteen percent worse than the purer version, the design's base specs have always been higher than the average. Therefore, the decrease in performance should still put the Leiner Grey in an acceptable range."

"Yet the cost of the Leiner Grey is too high." The Skull Architect jabbed. "The market may be filled with fools, but if the disparity between your Leiner Grey and its direct competitors is too big, introducing this model on the market will result in more losses than gains."

That unfortunately rang more true for Ves than he'd like. What he did was to take a high-performing mech built with high-quality performance and simplified its operation so that it became more suitable for the mass market.

Yet one of the defining traits of a mass market mech was that its price had to be within a reasonable range! This demand directly contradicted with the high-quality components of the Leiner Grey!

Ves had to admit defeat in this aspect. "The Leiner Grey that I've designed won't do so well because it utilizes expensive, high-performing parts that I'm not using to their full potential. If I had more control over the design, then I would have swapped those unnecessarily expensive parts with cheaper ones that can do the job just as well. The impact on performance will be small, but the costs can easily be reduced by a third!"

"A mech that is modified to such an extent can no longer be called the Leiner Grey." The Senior shook his head, as if disappointed at the solution Ves had come up with. "No matter. This is merely an exercise with an outdated mech design. I have no interest in putting the Leiner Grey for sale again. Let us move to a different matter."

Ves already had an inkling of what Jimenez had to say.

From Mayra, he gained the impression that the Skull Architect valued his time highly. He wouldn't waste a single second on Ves if the possible gains from the conversation didn't surpass the opportunity cost of spending time to improve his designs.

Almost mech designer from the older generation that came in touch with Ves gained a good impression of him. Ves didn't fit the mold of an average mech designer, and that tickled their interest.

However, being different didn't matter if Ves couldn't gain any concrete benefits from the contact. He worked carefully to incorporate subtle elements in his Leiner Grey design that may have been picked up by its original designer.

That the Skull Architect already cleared out this much time from his schedule to talk with Ves was a hopeful sign. However, Ves knew very well that he himself did not merit this treatment solely because he put an interesting spin on the Leiner Grey.

The man Ves was talking to was anything but an altruistic teacher. The Skull Architect wanted something from Ves, and the price may be steep.

"The demonstration of your design abilities have caught my interest. It is very strange to sample your work, boy. I sense a small element of Carmin's influence in your design choices, yet you treat her teachings as a supplement to your own style of designing mechs. While your design philosophy is on the opposite spectrum of mine, I can respect the direction have decided to take."

"Thank you, sir."

"I wasn't finished yet. Your design philosophy is woefully immature and just a seed compared to the blooming flower that represents my own. However, strength and maturity aside, the intrinsic qualities of both our design philosophies are incredibly suitable to be combined in uneven collaborative projects! The work you have done with the Leiner Grey has already proved that! Out of every test I've issued, yours is one of the few that brings out different facets to my design while adding value to the product!"

Ves treated the Leiner Grey as a serious design project. The mech had to be usable and marketable. While he hadn't quite succeeded with the latter, that was mainly because he lacked the permission to implement wider changes in the design.

"Mayra brought to me because you have need of something of mine, correct?"

"Yes, sir. I'd like to obtain two pieces of knowledge, if you have them. My first demand is to obtain the design specifications of an ultracompact battery, preferably one that I can fabricate with materials available for sale in Mancroft or in the frontier. My second demand is to obtain practical knowledge of reasonably up-to-date stealth technology. I am in the possession of many fragments of stealth shuttles, but reconstructing them into a working vehicle requires theoretical backing that I currently lack."

He decided to be fairly open in his demands. He doubted that the Skull Architect appreciated any obtuse word games on this matter. Besides, the Senior must have already heard what he wanted from Mayra. The only element that was new was his demand for the design specs of an ultracompact battery.

That must have tripped up the Skull Architect's expectations, because the deadly man began to frown in a severe manner. "Stealth tech is already restricted knowledge. It is unthinkable to pass it along like a piece of cabbage on the street. As for ultracompact batteries.. It is technology that is that is ruinously costly to acquire and even more demanding in its application! Are you certain of your demands? Don't ask for what you won't be able to use yourself!"

"I'm certain, sir. If you can help me acquire them at a reasonable price that is within my means, then I would be very grateful."

The Skull Architect chuckled. "Besides mech designers, we are both businessmen. It comes with the territory. I am not in the habit of giving out favors for free, let alone two extremely valuable pieces of knowledge. I like you, boy, but not to the extent to waive their prices, as there are troublesome repercussions I allow them to be spread."

"What.. are your prices?"

"A simple business transaction." The Skull Architect smirked as the discussion finally reached the most interesting part. "You have already demonstrated the result of what our work can do when we combine our strengths. Our design philosophies are opposite and have little overlap with each other, but this creates the condition for some of the best kind of collaborate end results! The biggest issue that is hampering us is our differences in maturity, so for now the only practical collaborate mech designs that we can produce together is for my design to take the lead and for you to develop a variant!"

Ves widened his eyes. He had never thought that the Skull Architect valued his work so highly that his work might actually become for sale! What the Skull Architect suggested was to do the same he had done with the Leiner Grey but do it with an up-to-date mech design that was part of the man's current mech catalog!

In essence, merely had to accept the offer to become the contributing designer of a pirate mech design!

Many Apprentices and Journeymen dreamed of becoming a contributing designer to a mech design that came from the hand of a Senior. Ves already had a taste of the benefits from working on small but key sections of the Leiner Grey.

If his autonomy extended throughout the entire mech frame, then he would be able to test his own nascent design philosophy against a much more developed one in a controlled environment. This alone had the potential of polishing his design principles and strengthen them in a way that made them more cohesive and competitive!

"This.." He felt really mixed about this offer. It was both an opportunity and a really bad idea. If word got out that Ves not only sought out the Skull Architect, but voluntarily helped the man improve his pirate designs, then Ves was no different from a pirate mech designer himself!

His reputation!

Let alone ruining his reputation, Ves might also suffer the same fate as the Skull Architect and get booted out from civilized space! The cost was too high!

Chapter 662

"I'm honored that you have considered me worthy enough to value my work to the extent of adding it in your catalog." He began carefully. "But.. I cannot afford to associate my name with yours."

The Skull Architect dismissively waved his hand. "A name is a name. I do not even need to mention you in the first place when putting your variant on the market. Many mech designs that are published each day claim to have been designed by a single designer, but have secretly benefited from assistance from other mech designers. The only reason their credit is absent is because they are paid extra to keep quiet or because they've been coerced in some way. In any case, it is no issue for us to leave the market guessing."

"Even so, there are other hindrances plaguing such a collaboration effort. The Leiner Grey design you've handed over to me is a lower-level version that doesn't properly convey the majesty of your design. If my contribution is to be ready for sale, I will have to work on the purest version of your designs. This.."

Ves didn't need to continue. Apprentices were generally kept away from those high-level designs for a good reason. They couldn't handle the profoundness hidden within. Even if he possessed a much higher tolerance due to his Spirituality, it was still a highly unpleasant experience for him to work on something that carried the touch of a Senior.

"These are trivial issues to overcome." The Skull Architect dismissed his protestations. It was in his interest to do so in this negotiation. "Many mech designers dream of contributing to designs of a higher level! Don't think I haven't noticed your eyes light up when I mentioned it. Not only will you be able to experience advanced design concepts that will give you a head-start in designing higher-ranked mechs, you will also be able to hammer your design philosophy into shape!"

"While I admit those benefits sound attractive, the practical limitations remain. I don't dare to study your designs too closely."

"As I said, this problem isn't impossible to solve. Otherwise, collaboration between mech designers of different ranks aren't as prevalent as today."

The Senior Mech Designer patiently explained the methods that would allow them to work on the same design without repercussions. The Skull Architect was responsible for the main design as the lead designer. As the contributing designer, Ves merely had to tweak some aspects to his style. As long as he kept the changes marginal, say, five percent or less, Ves would not have to expose himself too much to the new design.

"You can pace your work over a longer stretch of time. A typical Apprentice can easily perform thirty minutes to an hour's worth of work before requiring rest and recuperation. This can be repeated multiple times in a day. You can also wait until the next day to fully recover your mind and work for a slightly longer stretch of time."

"If I can only work an hour or so a day on a higher-level design, I won't be able to finish it promptly." Ves replied.

"With your proficiency, you don't require too much hours to develop a variant with a divergence rate of less than five percent. I am handing complete designs with nearly complete documentation and logs to you! You will hardly be expected to do your own research and experimentation."

"I will have to experience it for myself, but from my experience with working with another Senior's mech designs, I will not be able to make too much progress every day."

The two quibbled over this issue for a bit before moving on to the Skull Architect's demand.

"The price that I can offer for a concise and modern textbook on stealth technology will not be low. Its market price at the very least amounts to billions, if not trillions of coalition credits. The only way a small mech designer can you can make up for that price is if you collaborate with me on thirty of my mech designs! As for the design specifications of an ultracompact battery, its value and rarity is even higher, so my price for that is fifty of my mech designs!"

Ves practically had a heart attack upon hearing the ridiculous cost for the two pieces of knowledge. He might as well sign over his entire life to the Skull Architect and become his slave!

"T-T-That's preposterous! It's inhuman! It will take decades to work my way through so many designs! Do you even have that many mechs in your catalog?"

"Years. Decades. Centuries. It matters little to me." The Skull Architect brushed off his outrage. "If you can pay me in K-coins or coalition credits, then I am happy to accept them. I haven't offered these two valued pieces of knowledge to more than a handful of mech designers, so you should feel honored that I'm opening up my knowledge bank to you."

The opportunity to work on a Senior's design definitely benefited Ves, but it was not as if he could find other ways to refine his design philosophy. The best way to improve his design ability was to design his own mechs from scratch.

"Please, sir, let's be real here." Ves shook his head. "You value my input because of their research and input value. Also, the mech market of the frontier is very different from the Friday Coalition's mech market. The material quality is mixed, but is generally of a far lower standard, something which I am very proficient with. Also, the vast majority of mech pilots are vastly less skilled than can be found in the Coalition. Your pure designs are geared towards elites, not trash. Catering to lower-skilled pilots is something which I am very adept at already."

Ves put forth a position which stated that his held much higher value to the Skull Architect than the man had initially priced in. Though he may be just an Apprentice, if his suspicions were right, the Skull Architect might have gotten a glimpse of the greater depth within his work.

If that were so, it basically meant that Ves possessed something which the older mech designer badly wanted to experience. This gave Ves the grounds to negotiate better terms.

The Skull Architect grudgingly nodded. "Your words have merit, but remember that I have several alternatives. Many mech designers in the frontier look up to me, and I can pick any of them to perform the same of what I ask of you. I have my students to count on as well."

"They are they. I am I. Each mech designer is unique. If those other mech designers and students of yours possessed a valuable quality, then you wouldn't be asking me. As you have mentioned earlier, our design philosophies are diametrically opposite to each other. With how obsessed most mech designers are regarding the pursuit of maximum performance, I don't think you can find a single other mech designer in the frontier with a design philosophy that resembles mine. Let alone that, but their skills and talent likely leaves much to be desired. This is the frontier after all."

The reason why the Skull Architect acted disdainfully against most mech designers who approached him was because they weren't worth his time.

There weren't many mech designers in the frontier. Those that were exiled to this uncivilized region of space usually consisted of losers, eccentrics or indigenous mech designers, each of which came with a different set of problems. An indigenous with talent like Mayra was very hard to come by.

Ves didn't know this for certain, but he could make an educated guess. He was thankful that he took the time to discuss the awful situation of mech designers in the frontier with Ketis and Mayra.

The lack of schools, security, MTA supervision, a readily-available supply of materials and a stable mech market all hampered the growth and proliferation of mech designers. It was at least ten times harder for mech designers to operate a business here, especially without any backing from the established pirate organizations.

Pirates weren't exactly the best employers either.

The Skull Architect scowled. His face began to take on a frightening aspect. "Do not presume to ask too much. Greed is responsible for the downfall of countless mech designers."

Ves steeled his mind and remained calm. He held his ground and did not show any sign of being intimidated. "I merely wish for fair compensation. My work is of far greater value to you than what the sales of your mechs can bring in. Considering the immense difficulty for me to work on a higher-level design, perhaps working on five designs is suitable."

"Ridiculous! A contribution on merely five of my designs isn't enough to cover the bribes I have to pay! Seventy-five designs, no less!"

A long round of bargaining subsequently took place. Though the Skull Architect possessed an advantage in status, experience, and business acumen, Ves figured out that the older man really wanted to close this deal.

It couldn't be helped! Even though countless mech designers existed in the galaxy right now, only a miniscule fraction arrived at the Faris Star Region. Of this portion, none of them possessed his unique qualities.

His exclusive specialty alone might be unique in this galaxy! With a virtual monopoly on his hands, Ves represented the only hope of solving the fatal flaw of the Skull Architect's high-performing mechs. The Senior Mech Designer practically hungered for his

"Twenty-five designs." An incredibly haggard and angry pirate mech designer said. "This is my last ultimatum. It is a burdensome amount of mechs to work with, and it will still require some decades to work through them all, but this is an extremely generous price considering what you are able to obtain in return."

Ves paused for a moment, weighing the offer in his mind. He really wanted to bargain down the Skull Architect further, but it appeared that contributing to twenty-five designs had reached the bottom line. Anything less might provoke a violent reaction from this unstable mech pilot. Ves still possessed some scruples about the Skull Architect.

He was negotiating with a mass-murdering criminal after all! It felt like dining with a serial killing cannibal. If Ves attempted to suggest they eat all-vegetarian meals, perhaps his chopped-up body would be served up as the next course!

However, Ves sensed it hadn't reached that point yet. His sense of preservation urged him to accept this figure, but his risk-taking instincts urged him to make one more attempt.

Just do it!

"Ten designs."

"FIFTEEN DESIGNS! NOT ONE LESS, YOU LITTLE BRAT! OTHERWISE, I'LL PUT A BOUNTY ON YOUR HEAD AND SIC MY PERSONAL RETINUE ON YOUR TRAIL AND DRAG YOUR BROKEN BODY BACK TO MY LAB SO I CAN CUT OFF YOUR BONES WHILE YOU'RE STILL ALIVE AND INCORPORATE THEM INTO A COMMEMORATIVE LEINER GREY!"

"Agreed!"

Ves did not ask whether the Leiner Grey his bones would be incorporated in was the high performing base model or the simplified variant that Ves had put forth. The Skull Architect might go through with his threat if Ves kept egging the man on! This was one of the most frightening negotiations of his life!

"Ptah!" The awful-looking Skull Architect spat. "You little punk! It seems you finally know your limits! Don't forget your agreement! Collaborate with me on fifteen separate mech designs, and I will wipe out the debt you owe for obtaining knowledge that you came for. Are you happy?"

"Certainly, sir!"

Objectively speaking, it was a generous offer. Subjectively speaking, Ves was underselling his own uniqueness. To a bystander's perspective, the deal heavily favored Ves. In fact, it could be argued that collaborating with a Senior Mech Designer for fifteen times wasn't a price at all, but actually a benefit that could vastly propel Ves to a higher level!

However, Ves truly believed his specialty should be enough to repay the debt he owed to the Skull Architect after collaborating two or three times at most.

Neither side regained their cheer. Both of them felt as if the other secured the upper hand in the negotiation. The fact that neither side ended up satisfied spoke of a decent compromise.

Chapter 663

In the next couple of minutes, the Skull Architect acted decisively once the deal had been reached. He poked at his comm for a minute before he looked up again.

"The documentation on what you came for is being sent through the Tzianti connection right at this moment. I've included only the bare minimum of files on both pieces of technology and cut back on both the duplicates and extremely profound theories that you have no business dealing with at your stage. What I'm already sending should be more than enough to get you by, so don't be greedy!"

"I understand, sir!"

Ves trusted the professional integrity of the Skull Architect to send what he promised. Certainly, if Ves didn't bargain so hard, the Senior may have kept in some freebies, but he got what he paid for. For the price of just fifteen collaborations, he obtained condensed knowledge on two key technologies that formed the essential cornerstones of his future plans.

Due to the low bandwidth of the connection, it took some time for the files to completely transfer. While they could have performed this transfer a billion times faster through the galactic net, that would basically be broadcasting their dirty deeds to the Comm Consortium. Both of them would rather put up with the slow connection.

The Skull Architect seemed less likely to chop Ves up and use his skull as a decorative piece for his next mech now that they closed a deal.

"I am sure I do not need to remind you of the consequences of reneging on your part of the deal. Even your vaunted Master Olson won't be able to protect you from my wrath if you are stupid enough to do so. From what I know of Carmin, she will even take my side! A contract between mech designers requires no guarantee from the MTA to hold force."

"Yes, sir. I have always upheld my contracts. I am not about to break this track record."

"Let us discuss the practicalities of my demands. I won't go easy on you, especially since I only have fifteen opportunities to obtain variants of my designs from your hand.

They got down to the nitty gritty details. As if to compensate for his less-than-stellar deal, the Skull Architect imposed numerous harsh demands and conditions on the work that Ves had to perform on his behalf.

First, the deal needed to be kept a secret from both sides. It didn't benefit Ves at all to be connected to designing pirate mechs. Getting booted out of the rolls of the MTA and being ostracized by the entire mech industry was virtually guaranteed in that event.

Though the repercussions were less severe to the Skull Architect, his deal with Ves may be construed as weakness since he was chasing after the abilities of an Apprentice Mech Designer of all things. For a pirate designer that constantly needed to project strength, it was in his best interests to keep quiet.

Still, out of the two of them, Ves was in the worse position. In some way, Ves had entered a situation where the Skull Architect could possibly blackmail him by airing their dirty dealings to the public.

The risk was only tempered by the fact that evidence was easily fabricated, therefore Ves could still fight back by doubting the evidence or flooding the galactic net with similar stories. In recent days, he learned the best way to fight an accusation was to flood the media space with as much nonsense as possible.

In the flood of data, hardly any useful information could be found!

Besides, if the Skull Architect had any integrity as a mech designer in his bone, then he wouldn't resort to such an unprincipled method. The man's own warning earlier reminded Ves that Master Olson would likely intervene in person if necessary.

He still enjoyed backing of his own, though it was easy to forget that crucial fact.

In a situation where both sides stood to suffer severe losses if they breached the contract, the best option was to play within the rules.

Ves briefly wondered what relationship Reno Jimenez used to have with Master Olson. A few decades ago, they were both Seniors, and from his own words they collaborated on some unregistered designs, likely for the Vermeer Group.

Perhaps they regarded each other as peers back then, but now their statuses couldn't be more different. One was a fugitive pirate designer, while the other advanced to the ranks of an exalted Master.

There was a lesson in their divergent career paths.

The Skull Architect quickly moved on to enumerating his other demands and conditions, with Ves occasionally putting in his own requests.

Time became the second-most important factor. The Skull Architect really didn't wish for Ves to take his sweet time in formulating his variants. Each time Ves received a design, he needed to complete it and send it back within three months.

The entire duration of the contract only held for fifteen years. Within this period of time, Ves needed to complete the handover of fifteen variants of the Skull Architect's designs, or else be regarded as a contract breaker!

Ves was expected to complete his work if given a design, but only one at a time. This obligation would be paused if Ves became indisposed due to his obligations. For example, Ves was still expected to travel with the Vandal fleet for a couple of months, and they would certainly be shutting down their quantum entanglement node and maintain a total communications blackout.

In such a harsh environment, Ves gained some leeway.

Besides time, quality was another major factor. This criteria was harder to determine, but overall the Skull Architect needed to be satisfied with the end product. The performance hit shouldn't be too large.

The mech types being considered in the designs encompassed almost every possibility. The only classifications of mechs that Ves managed to strike from the list of contenders was aquatic mechs and heavy mechs. He possessed little depth in both, and for the former he didn't even master the most preliminary designs.

The only reason why the Skull Architect conceded on those points was because heavy mechs and aquatic mechs never sold well in the underdeveloped frontier region. Setting up an aquatic mech unit was a huge hassle for pirates and the only users of heavy mechs consisted of the larger pirate blocs who relied on their own in-house mech designers.

Overall, the Skull Architect expected Ves to meet every challenge coming in his way without complaint. No matter whether the mech consisted of a spaceborn medium striker or an aerial medium multipurpose rifleman mech, Ves ought to deal with them all with the same level of proficiency he showed with the Leiner Grey.

That might be a tall order to fulfill, but Ves actually looked forward to working with different mech types.

He already benefited hugely from working first-hand with the Leiner Grey! The limited freedom of the previous test provided him with vastly more leeway than he ever enjoyed when he worked with the Inheritor design of the Vandals.

Having worked with two Senior-level light skirmisher designs in pretty great depth, Ves felt raring to go to design his own light skirmisher mech!

Getting a taste of different mech types and gaining proficiency in designing them therefore became a hidden benefit to him. Though the risk was high that he would inherit many of the Skull Architect's design traits, in essence turning him into his second teacher in proxy, the benefits outweighed the costs. Without the guidance of those designs, Ves would have to fumble through each design in an attempt to understand their essence.

The only way to take a shortcut in this comprehension process was to undergo another Mastery process. This might be fine for the first few times, but the ruinous DP cost started to grate on Ves. The things he learned from each subsequent Mastery would be less as more and more of his gains started to overlap with his existing insights.

If Ves wanted to round out his catalog with at least twelve mech models, then he didn't need to acquire a mech mastery for each mech type. It might instead become an easy crutch for him. Becoming dependent on this tool would cripple him if he somehow lost access to it or didn't have any time to go through it in the first place.

For some reason, his profound discussions with the Skull Architect prompted him to reevaluate his entire outlook on mech design. Ves never had any cause to doubt his dependency and faith on his Masteries, but the arguments he heard planted some suspicions in his mind.

A mech designer ought to accommodate mech pilots, but at what point did this priority become a detriment?

Too much coddling turned mechs away from their role as brutally efficient killing machines. The last outcome Ves wanted to achieve was to become known for designing big giant cuddly pilotable teddy bears!

Almost an hour passed before they finalized their contract. They covered almost every term and Ves barely had the opportunity to argue against some of them. In any case, working under these restrictive terms was a necessary price to pay to placate the man's anger.

"By now, the transfer of all the files should be done." The pirate designer stated. "In account of your military duties, I have refrained from passing along a design to you. Do note that the fifteen-year timer starts now, and you better find a way to start collaborating with me on my designs as soon as possible."

Ves nodded. "I shall try my best, sir. The Bright-Vesia Wars have never dragged on for more than five to six years."

"Wars are inherently unpredictable, boy. Don't ever make the mistake of seeing patterns in them. A war that operates like clockwork is no war at all. It is a very lethal form of theater."

"Isn't that a point of favor in its predictability?"

"You see, even the best theater performances can sometimes go awry. Minor deviations in the script happens more often than you think, and there may come a time when the plot is derailed completely."

After that ominous note, they finally ended the call. Ves looked up at how long they spoke and saw that he was pretty much engrossed in the conversation for over two hours!

"Damnit, the total bill for this call is almost eighteen-hundred K-coins!"

That didn't sound like much until the strength of the currency came into play. Each coin was worth more than a coalition credit, so the final bill amounted to more than half a million bright credits!

"The beancounters over at the Vandals are going to be annoyed at this expense."

Still, he got what he wanted, so this conversation was definitely worth the money. Ves drew out an encrypted data chip and inserted it into a slot on the console. A short second later, the files sent by the Skull Architect finished transferring through. He put the data chip into a secure pocket on his toolbelt hanging around his armor and began to wipe away his traces on the console.

He outright removed the storage banks that served as the interface's temporary data storage location and crushed it within his armored grip. The storage banks may have been designed to take a beating, but it couldn't withstand his extraordinary strength boosted by the servos of his light combat armor.

He considered chucking it to the nearest garbage chute, but held off. His paranoia warned him that someone could intercept the crushed remains of the databanks and reconstruct them from their fragments.

"It's best to hold on to this junk until I return to the ship where I can melt the pieces down in the workshop." He stuffed the fragments into the empty pockets of his toolbelt.

A deal of this nature and the data he just received was enough to plunge this space station into chaos. Ves needed to let as little people know about it as possible, though this would be hard to achieve against the Vandals whom facilities he needed to borrow to build his gadgets.

"I'll cross that bridge when it comes to that. Besides, I didn't gain anything they already know."

Chapter 664

Ves exited the comm center with Ketis and his four hulking security escort in a contemplative mood. The others waited far longer for Ves to hold his call than anticipated. Nolsen and the other security officers didn't blink an eye at this delay. Their entire job consisted of standing guard for hours on end when absolutely nothing happened.

"You dolt! If I knew you were taking your sweet time talking with Mayra's mentor, I could have spent my time in the arenas!" Ketis growled as she kicked aside another faulty cleaning bot brushing against her armored feet.

The cleaning bots somehow became drawn to her feet. Ves himself only needed to kick aside a single bot so far. Were they being directed?

"So what did you talk about with the Skull Architect that left you stuck there for two hours?" She asked.

"Lots of important matters, none of it your business." Ves replied absently. "Let's drop by the bank. I need some K-coins myself to do some shopping."

Right now, Ves needed to purchase the exotics and other materials required to tinker together an ultracompact battery or three.

While he didn't possess any device right now that could read out his secure data chip, he had already skimmed the shopping list of which exotics and rare materials he definitely needed.

To be honest, Ves didn't even recognize half of the names on the list. They were so rare and short in supply that Ves never had the opportunity of obtaining them. These must be strategic materials that were either under the strict control of the states or only found in the most inhospitable parts of the Faris Star Region.

No matter what, he at least gained a starting point.

"So what's it like to talk with the Skull Architect?" She pestered him from the side grabbing his arm as if she didn't care for her appearance. Were it not for their intimidating suits of armor, they might have resembled a quarrelsome pair of brothers and sisters. "I heard he's really moody sometimes. Did he blow up on you? Did he threaten to sicc his goons on you and bring your body back to his lab so he could slice it up and use your bones as parts for his next mech?"

"How did you know?"

"Hah! Mayra introduced me to her once and I didn't meet his approval." She sighed at that. "The Skull Architect never really did explain to me why, though Mayra made some good guesses. I still fall short compared to my older sister."

Ves put his gauntlet against her armored back, trying his best to avoid her scabbard. "There's no point in comparing yourself to Mayra. The two of you are completely different mech designers. Agonizing over who is better will only make you stuck in the past. It's better if you focus your attention to the future. That's the only way to close to gap."

A mech designer always had to accept the fact that better mech designers existed over their heads. Even Masters faced the same prospect when they thought about Star Designers.

As for that last, exclusive group of mech designers, Ves had no clue whether even the Star Designers needed to bow down in the presence of an even greater mech designer.

The two navigated through the busier sections of the space station. The open streets inside a vast cavernous artificial hollow gave out the flavor of a compact city center. The tallest structures started from the deck and extended all the way to the ceiling, giving the interior of Mancroft the strange illusion that they were underground.

The solidity this illusion imparted upon the visitors and residents of Mancroft caused many of them to feel grounded. This was an extremely valuable effect because it distracted everyone from the fact that they were spinning around in space. They were only one or two hull breaches away from explosive decompression.

Most humans couldn't handle long-term living in space. Even Ves yearned to walk on solid ground. Stepping aboard this space station somehow suppressed this hidden fear inside him. For that alone, this visit already paid off.

The space station was a melting pot of pirates, suspected pirates, treasure hunters, those looking to get a job with them, errant traders looking for a bargain and more. An abundance of people frequented the busy stalls and shops, showing that business was booming right now. The unexpected increase of visitors since last time Ves arrived in Mancroft must have added to the station's current prosperity.

"There are a lot more visitors on this space station than normal." He said as they waited for a small crowd to disperse after noticing Ves, Ketis and their escort. Their combined image intimidated many bystanders into backing off. "Did someone come across a treasure mine in the frontier or something?"

"As far as I know, some pirate group inadvertently leaked the coordinates of a newly discovered star system." Ketis explained, though her tone revealed she wasn't too sure about these rumors either. "Supposedly, the coordinates leads to a desolate star system with its planets baked in extreme heat due to their proximity to the sun. That has given off an intense reaction on the exotics exposed to the surface, baking them in the heat of the full sun for many millennia. Now, they're some of the most heat-resistant exotics available in the Faris Star Region."

Heat-resistant exotics sat high on his shopping list. If he could get his hands on whatever made these treasure hunters mad with greed, then Ves could design a much better ultracompact battery.

"Have the pirates or treasure hunters already returned with a haul?"

"Not here, apparently. The ones who made it back with a haul dropped it off at the nearest pirate stations before going back for another try. The fighting there is becoming increasingly chaotic."

It sounded like the Glowing Planet Campaign all over again, but this time no state-backed military force came in to claim the best ore deposits.

The immediate repercussions of the boom meant that the outfits chasings after the Starlight Megalodon wouldn't face as much harassment from errant pirates. With everyone distracted by the shiny heat-resistant exotic bounty, who wanted to go back to their old life of terrorizing the shipping lines or raiding a hollowed-out settlement?

The only issue right now was that so many shady outfits had congregated at Mancroft right now to load up on supplies and partner up with others before departing for the treasure planet. This not only crowded the space station, but also ratched up the prices for the most commonly-sought goods.

"Why are there so many outfits in Mancroft?" Ves asked.

"It's because this is the most decent place I've seen in a while." Ketis exclaimed with a curious eye towards all the pirates and treasure hunters walking past each other without more than exchanging firm glares. "Shopkeepers are more honest than dishonest here and the Boseys are some of the least ruthless station owners of this region of space."

"How worse off are the other pirate stations?"

"It depends on the owners, but none of them are completely safe. Either the structural integrity is full of holes, or the owners don't hesitate to brainwash you into their loyal minions in the case of the Dragons of the Void. The vendors there all charge ten times more for the same products that you can find in civilized space. Mancroft is actually a great destination to stop over for the Swordmaidens as we're some of the few pirates allowed to cross the border."

Ves suddenly understood why the CFA patrols didn't lay a finger on the shady outfits that visited the station orbiting the next planet over. Mancroft was a reward! It served as a safer, cheaper and more convenient stopping point for pirates that had not yet crossed the line into complete depravity.

Compared to squashing down the pirates en masse, only to see them shoot up in the same numbers a couple years later resulted in little change. However, by letting the Mancroft Independent Harbor operate like now, the CFA could at least provide an incentive for shady outfits to toe the line and keep their excesses to a minimum.

He still found it strange that the pirates boldly dared to visit a star system that is patrolled by actual CFA warships! That was like placing a police station next to a villain's den!

"Why doesn't the CFA do anything to pirates? So far as I'm aware of, the CFA garrisons haven't been doing anything than guarding their bases and going on sporadic patrols."

Ketis shrugged. "That's what all the pirates are thinking. Commander Lydia once told us that the CFA is in the midst of a major policy shift. To what, I don't know, but they're being less heavy-handed about stomping the pirates and have focused more on suppressing the aliens. According to Mayra, the CFA is busy with the MTA trying to keep the Terrans and Rubarthans under their thumbs."

"That's new. Why haven't I heard of that?"

"Why would I know?" She said in an exasperated tone. "I barely know the difference between the Terrans and Rubarthans. All I know is that this slice of space is in the Rubarthan sphere of influence, but if that's so, I hardly notice anything."

This rumor sounded more plausible than anything else Ves had heard so far to explain the CFA and MTA's decreasing presence in society. They used to enforce their laws aggressively at the start of the Age of Mechs, but after a long period of relative peace and stability, they started to fade in the background. This retreat accelerated in recent decades, with Ves questioning many times why the MTA and CFA possessed all that power but refused to bring their fangs to bear.

A simmering disagreement between the Big Two and the two first-rate superstates had the potential to blow up the entire interior of human space! If fighting truly erupted in the open, then both the Greater Terran Confederation and the New Rubarth Empire stood to lose badly!

"Unless.."

The only way these two mammoth human states could fend off the Common Fleet Alliance was by building up their own warships in secret! Yet Ves could not fathom how they could succeed given the CFA and MTA's omnipotence.

Building enough warships to take on a galactic force required an immense amount of resources, manpower and space. How could they ever keep this industry hidden from the Big Two?

A shudder ran through his back. What if after more than four-hundred years of enduring peace, humanity had started to slide back into their own habits? What if a civil war was brewing underneath everyone's notice?

Nothing of the sort had ever been mentioned on the galactic net or any of the major news portals, but Ves knew better than to turn to them to find out the truth. What he did know was that he only heard a single third or fourth-hand rumor from a young Swordmaiden who wasn't exactly the most reliable source herself!

At some point, they happened to reach a street lined with shops selling mechs. Ves slowed down a bit and stared at the storefronts.

He immediately noticed the difference in quality and emphasis of mechs aimed towards proper outfits.

"Not all of them are good mechs."

The shops catering to the visitors that frequented Mancroft largely consisted of budget and bargain bin mechs. Ves spotted hardly any mech that cost the equivalent of over twenty million bright credits. The few high-quality mech models on display seemed more like vanity projects that were meant to awe the opposition instead of defeating them through battle.

While this was merely a single street, Ves figured that the other areas that sold mechs offered similar product ranges. "Demand and supply. The sellers only bother with the products that sell the best."

"What was that?" Ketis asked.

Ves shook his head. "Nothing. I'm just noting the differences between different mech markets."

Chapter 665

"What kind of mechs does the Skull Architect have in his lineup?"

"Well, nothing like this, obviously." Ketis answered. "He's always known for his radically high-performing mechs, though a lot of mech pilots love to complain about them. You can buy five decent mechs for the price of one of his mechs, so he doesn't sell that many mechs. According to Mayra, he still makes a decent killing, and a lot of pirate mech officers favor his mechs. The real reason why he's such a big deal in the Faris Star Region is because he designs some of the best custom mechs that pirates can get."

"For expert pilots? Do the pirates even have those?"

"It's rumored that the big pirate alliances all retain their own experts, but no. At least we don't have any." Ketis shook her head. "Mayra's mentor is merely the best place to go if you just scored big and want to waste it on the best mech you will ever be able to pilot. Each of the Skull Architect's custom mechs have shown off strong fake resonances."

This explained the Senior Mech Designer's success formula in the frontier. With a severe deficiency in higher-ranking mech designers in the frontier, anyone with the ability to design a custom mech was a valued asset to pirates. Excelling in this aspect meant that some of the best neutral pirates in the Faris Star Region wanted to maintain friendly relations with the man.

This desirability gave the Skull Architect the grounds to remain independent. If Ves had learned one big rule about surviving in the frontier, it was that friendships and relationships worked better than any laws or agreements.

Backstabbing someone was hard if that person could call up a dozen outfits to retaliate!

"How far up does he rank among the top-level mech designers in the Faris Star Region?"

"He's among the biggest hitters, if that's what you're asking for, but he's on his own. Both the Dragon Alliance and the Ravienne Alliance each have three or four Senior Mech Designers on retainer, though that's what they say in public. Every pirate is guessing they are holding a couple more Seniors back."

The two pirate blocs of the Faris Star Region sounded really domineering, but there were actually way more independent pirates lurking in both the Faris Star Region and the Komodo Star Sector. Pirates were notoriously independent and unruly, so utilizing too much force against these fierce and headstrong bunch of people would only provoke a backlash.

Ves counted the Skull Architect among their ranks. If he wanted to, the Senior could have easily taken a highly desirable position at the design teams of either alliance. That he stuck it out alone and tried to stand on his own two feet spoke of his resolve to be unaffected by factional strife.

A pure researcher wouldn't be interested in the pursuit of luxury or wealth!

As the Swordmaiden and Vandals slowly browsed past the mech stores, Ves became increasingly depressed at the mechs on sale. Most of them seem to have been designed by listless, robotic mech designers who designed the simplest and cheapest mechs possible.

And that only applied to the brand-new mechs! Much of the stores devoted more of their space to used mechs and salvaged mechs!

"Is this the kind of mechs that are popular among the pirates and the treasure hunters? No wonder pirates always fold so easily. Some of these mechs are literally walking junk piles!"

"Don't look down on these mechs, big boy. There are three advantages to these mechs that make them worth it. First, they're really cheap, and I mean super cheap. The second advantage to them is that their designs all come with high tolerances. It's extremely easy to modify them, and nothing will break down even if you don't have a mech designer to design proper modifications. The third advantage to them is that they're extremely easy to service and maintain in the frontier. This is the most important point as the frontier is seriously a desert when it comes to places where you can service your mechs."

His low opinion towards the mechs on display reverted a little once Ketis enumerated her points. As much as Ves wanted to close his ears, she mentioned valid arguments in favor of these low-quality mechs.

It was hard. Their designs grated against his design sensibilities. The demands Ketis mentioned imposed a particular way of designing mechs that treated them even more like commodities than they ought to be. Their drab appearances, blocky mech parts and lackluster performance fostered no affection from their new owners.

They were merely mechs, built solely for the purpose to be abused as much as possible before being thrown away or recycled down to their base materials like pieces of trash.

"No wonder the Skull Architect focuses on premium mechs. It's probably unbearable for him to design mechs that go beyond his lowest standards." He muttered.

It also illuminated him more of the Senior's intentions for suggesting collaborative projects as a way to repay his debts. While the Skull Architect was certainly out for the variants due to their research and comparison values, the pirate designer could also earn a tidy sum of K-coins by entering the middle segment of the pirate mech market.

He doubted that any of his variants could be dumbed down to the point of competing with these trash models. However, selling them in the price segments above the budget tier should be doable if he was allowed to replace the more expensive components with cheaper ones.

It was a step in the right direction, but it didn't fully solve the Skull Architect's giant void in his mech catalog.

Since he originated from the Friday Coalition, a prosperous second-rate state in the Komodo Star Sector, Reno Jimenez never felt the pressure to design low-tier mechs. There were plenty of buyers for his high-quality mechs!

The mech market of the frontier was the exact opposite of the mech market of a second-rate state. Thrown from paradise to hell, though the Senior did his best to carve out his own niche in the untamed stars, it remained a fact that his design philosophy inherently clashed with what the vast majority of the pirate mech market demanded.

"Let's go." Ves sighed. "I've seen enough."

The press of people on the streets grew increasingly more crowded as Ves neared the bank office. Something up ahead formed a powerful attraction that drew the visitors of Mancroft like a moth to the flame.

Even his bulky security guards experienced some trouble in keeping the riff raff from coming too close.

"What's going on?!"

"Haven't you heard? A grudge match between Deathless Rowland 'Deathless' Ryke and Sonora Hellvoice' Bridges is about to take place in the mech arena! Hurry up, we can't miss this!"

Ves turned to Ketis again. "Who is this Deathless and Hellvoice?"

"Two famous pirate mech champions from rivalling pirate gangs. The Deathless is from the Castle Breakers and the Hellvoice is part of the Omen of Misfortune. Both of their names are among the ranks of famous mech duellists. I'm a fan of the Hellvoice myself." She replied as she perked up her head. "Can we skip the shopping? I really want to witness this grudge match!"

Ves almost moved his arm to whack her head. "No. Absolutely not. We are here on business, not pleasure, and I have plenty of business to conduct. We aren't here for a sightseeing tour. Our comrades back at our combined fleet is waiting for us to finish our errands quickly and return to our ships."

"Oh, come on, I've been stuck on that boring ship you call a flagship with nothing to do the entire week! I deserve some fun, you know!"

"If I recall, you spent the last week working on the test I've handed out to you. Hasn't tinkering with the Caesar Augustus design been enough fun for you?"

"ARRGHGH!" Ketis practically wanted to tear her hair out right now! "You call sitting behind a desk all week fiddling with schematics and numbers for hours on end fun?! What is wrong with you?!"

Ves stopped and turned to the recalcitrant girl. "I'm a mech designer. Someone who designs mechs for a living. While I understand that many people don't enjoy their jobs, it is one of the basic requirements if you want to go far in this profession. Let me tell you right now, I have never seen a Journeyman Mech Designer who doesn't love their job! Each and every mech designer I've met that's at least Journeyman is so driven about mechs that they can work for years on end on a single design for fun if the circumstances allow it!"

"T-That's crazy! How can these mech designers stay sane?!"

"You're asking the wrong question." Ves retorted calmly. "The question you should ask instead is if every higher-ranking mech designer is even normal. At some point, sanity can become a hindrance to progress."

Ves left the young woman with her gaping mouth as he turned around and resumed trying to press through the crowd. Ketis quickly caught up but she still appeared stunned by his radical statement.

He had thought long and hard about this matter ever since he first touched upon the Leiner Grey design. Talking with its designer for almost two straight hours had solidified his suspicions.

A good mech designer needed to let go of their sanity.

Of course, that didn't mean they should all bash their skulls with a hammer. The argument that Ves put forth was that great design could only be shaped by extreme beliefs, which in mech designers was expressed by design philosophies.

A design philosophy was a mental construct that contained the crystallization of a mech designer's rules and preferences for designing mechs. A strong, distinct and unique design philosophy could only be formed by strong, distinct and unique thinking patterns.

To put it simply, a boring and normal mech designer would never think of taking risks. Their designs firmly adhered to common sense and did not deviate too much from the norm. Their thoughts and experiences subsequently shaped their design philosophies into a weak, generic shape that might as well not exist for all the difference it made.

Perhaps this might be the key reason why unadventurous mech designers never advanced to Journeymen.

Normality and common sense served the common people fine, but transformed into hindrances when it came to designing mechs that were outside the norm. For a mech designer to design an exceptional mech, they needed to take risks as well as step outside the comforts of common sense.

That old quote about genius and madness being separated by a thin line rang more true than ever in this theory! Ves even considered them the same thing, only separated by what outside common sense deemed acceptable!

"This may even be the universal root to human advancement!

What separated beasts and bots from humans and their alien rivals? Sentience! Ves believed that Spirituality was intrinsically involved in the advancement of all kinds of professions, not just mech designers and mech pilots.

Whatever differences they may carry, the unifying factor in both was that it required one's mentality to undergo a transformation!

In other words, they needed to depart from the mundane and shift their thinking patterns into becoming something extraordinary!

"Mech designers are like wizards, and mech pilots resemble gods in their evolutionary paths! Different roads lead to similar outcomes!"

This slow and gradual process of retreating from the norm could be regarded as a managed descent into madness!

The key was to retain control over which pieces of sanity a mech designer let go, and which ones they absolutely had to retain!

This was why each higher-level mech designer was so eccentric in various matters. Their unusual thought patterns bled through their normal way of life, and turned them into freaks. Some just hid their abnormalities better than others, but Ves had no doubt that each had been touched with the twin jewels of genius and madness.

"Someone like the Skull Architect has lost grip of his morals, while the rumors surrounding Master Olson make her out to be a spendthrift. That moon-sized Titanium Garden of hers can't be cheap. Compared to them, I haven't even noticed anything weird from other mech designers such as Horatio and Professor Velten."

These differences illustrated that some mech designers controlled their abnormalities better than others. It also suggested that certain mech designers were able to channel their worst sides into more innocuous disorders. After all, between the Skull Architect and Master Olson, casually ordering the killings of thousands was a lot worse than spending too much money!

"If those are the possible excesses resulting from advancing into a higher state, then what is my excess?"

Chapter 666

The grudge match between the so-called mech champions of the Castle Breakers and the Omen of Misfortune consumed the entire Independent Harbor. Practically every pirate, treasure hunter, trader, mercenary and so on had a high inclination of being fans of mechs, and nothing excited them more than witnessing a duel to the death.

It was as if the same thing on Harkensen III happened all over again!

Ves ignored the duelling fever growing hotter around him as he pressed his escorts to push aside the bystanders a little further. The poor interior planning of the space station caused the streets to become more crowded than normal. There were too few routes to the mech arena!

The Vandal security officers had to move exceptionally delicately if they wanted to avoid injuring or crushing any of the clueless visitors pushing against their exoskeleton suits. One wrong move could easily rip a man's arm off his sockets or cave in an entire skull!

"How far is it to the bank?"

"Just five-hundred meters more!"

"Damnit, it will take half an hour to reach it at this rate!"

Meanwhile, Ves turned his mind back to contemplating his recent insights. His latest one happened to sound crazy, but it happened to fit with his observations.

To be a good designer, one had to be crazy!

Every good mech designer he met possessed a lot of depth. Some kept it better hidden than others, but Ves made a bold guess that not a single mech designer above the Journeyman rank could escape this fate!

Not even the Star Designers idolized by trillions of mech designers throughout the galaxy!

When Ves recalled the biographies describing the extremely eccentric behaviors of the Armorer or the Polymath, it all made sense to him. Obsession and faith had propelled these extreme mech designers into reaching a height few humans had ever reached!

If this inescapable rule applied to everyone, did it apply to him as well? How would his fatal flaw look like?

Ves didn't have to wring his mind to obtain his answer. He quickly came to the most probable conclusion. "If there's any negative trait that has defined my career so far, it has to be my penchant for risk-taking!"

Several times now he faced important choices where a rational outlook of the situation should have pushed him to take a safe or normal option.

Instead, Ves acted like an addicted gambler at a shuttle race, and spontaneously put his entire fortune on one of ten racers. With the odds of winning only amounting to just ten percent, it simply didn't make sense for him to place a bet at all!

Somehow, the risks and danger involved enticed him a lot. It threw him into Groening IV, it compelled him to take part in the Glowing Planet campaign, and it was responsible for a lot of unnecessary risk-taking during his time with the Vandals.

Ves craved excitement!

And he couldn't even blame the System on that. Perhaps it had always laid dormant in his mind, but the moment he gained a stroke of sudden luck and obtained his father's gift that allowed him to change his fate, he had been pursuing these moments of serendipity with a feverish breath.

He was being too greedy! He wanted more, and he had a disturbing tendency to disregard all kinds of warning signs in the pursuit of greater profit!

Perhaps in his warped mind, the warning signs had the opposite of cautioning Ves away from a reckless choice.

They instead acted as enticements luring him closer into the abyss!

"Out of every possible negative trait that could have been magnified, the design gods have forced me to embrace the lust for excitement from my Larkinson bloodline!"

Of course, it was pretty dubious to blame his affliction to the metaphorical existence of the Larkinson bloodline. Even within the Larkinson family, many believed their tendency to volunteer for service or seek out other opportunities to prove their courage came from the constant stories their aunts and uncles constantly repeated to the young ones.

Nurture, rather than nature was to blame for their adventurous spirits.

Still, regardless of its origin, the craving of excitement hidden deep within Ves had taken a life of its own. As Ves continued to develop his mind through his experiences and Attribute upgrades, his thoughts grew stronger but also more extreme. While his optimized his mind to design mechs with greater proficiency, the side effects also amplified everything else.

This was the root of the issue. To become a better mech designer, his mind needed to be transformed, and this process was anything but surgical and precise.

Now that he formulated this theory, everything related to mech design became increasingly more sense. The explanation not only explained the eccentric behavior of well-known mech designers, it also offered a recipe to develop a mech designer's mind.

Ves automatically threw a glance at Ketis, who was helping the group push through the crowd. If there was anyone who could test out his theory, it was Ketis, a newly advanced Novice with practically no track record to speak of. She was as blank of a paper as Ves could obtain. Though her personality already exhibited some strong traits, Ves gained the ambition to mold her according to his desired shape!

Instead of designing mechs, Ves graduated to designing mech designers!

The stupendously absurd prompted him to burst out in laughter. "Bwhahahahaha! What genius! This is brilliant! Hahahaha!"

He abruptly stopped laughing when he realized what a fool he was making himself out to be. It didn't help out he looked like a decked-out pirate VIP, either. Nolsen, Ketis and the other Vandal guards looked at him with aghast expressions. How could their normal and friendly-looking mech designer suddenly display an outburst of madness?

"Ahem, let's continue on. We've almost reached the bank."

By now, the grudge match between the two mech champions already commenced. The arena had already filled up to capacity and refused the entry of those who came too late, causing many of them to be bummed out. It didn't help that the arena was part of the underground, therefore no footage of the battle would emerge on the galactic net.

"This isn't fair! If I came one minute earlier, I would have gotten in!"

"Those stingy Boseys deserve to be hanged! Why can't they upgrade that tiny mech arena of theirs!?"

"Let me in! I'm the Hellvoice's number one fan! I can't possibly miss the death match involving my idol!"

The streets around the mech arena became unruly due to the poor arrangements of the space station. Though the Mancroft Independent Harbor profiled itself as a fourth-rate state, in truth its size and capacity barely matched one of the larger space stations of Bentheim!

The space station had been built long ago, and while many modules enhanced its size and structure over time, it had always been done in the cheapest way possible. The best description of its growth was that it occurred somewhat organically, without any of the long-term planning that characterized most cities these days.

The Frontier Bank of Mancroft was conveniently located next to the mech arena complex. The reason for this was evident, as gambling addicts poured in constantly to draw out their money reserves and exchange their illiquid valuables for cold hard K-coins.

Of course, the wealthier among them declined to carry around sacks or crates of K-coins and K-bars around them. That would just provoke a savage feast from the surrounding pirates.

The bank provided a convenient vault for them to stow away their processed Kavenit. Naturally, this service came with all kinds of fees and conditions.

The subject of banking for pirates was a rather complex one. In general, many pirates didn't trust banks with their money, and instead buried them under plots of land at some obscure frontier star system.

Even if they stashed some of their wealth at a bank, they could be notoriously violent when it came to fees and such! It wasn't unheard of for them to go mad and raze an entire bank branch because they had to pay a two percent transaction fee whenever they wanted to withdraw their money or something!

For a frontier bank to prosper, they needed to be more circumspect in their profit-generating methods. One of the major revenue sources of the bank was actually their right to confiscate the belongings of clients who turned up missing or deceased without an heir to take over their spoils.

And even if the deceased selected someone else to inherit their wealth, the bank assuredly received their own cut!

Considering how prevalent pirates died in battles or random accidents in space, Ves could see how Mancroft's bank prospered to the point of becoming one of the main revenue sources of the Bosey Clan. It wasn't as if most pirates cared where their riches went after they died!

"Do you have a bank account here, Ketis?"

"No. The higher ups manage all the money. We've never received a salary or anything like that. Serving as a Swordmaiden is enough of a reward."

Ves silently shook his head. The Swordmaidens indoctrinated their sisters well. All of them had been brainwashed into becoming their slaves without their notice!

"Wait in the foyer while I get my money."

Ves approached one of the humanoid bots that served as one of the receptionists of the bank and proceeded to undergo the complicated dance of accessing his locked bank account. Because his money was stashed at several different banks, it took a lot of procedures as well as the assistance of an actual human manager to complete it all.

Half an hour later, Ves walked away from the bank manager's office 2,500 K-bars richer! This was the equivalent of a billion bright credits! Of course, he wasn't stupid to bring all of that exotic metal out, so he stashed them in the Frontier Bank of Mancroft's vault.

"Stupid exchange rate. I think I lost ten percent of my wealth from that alone."

Even in the future, banks still prospered!

There had been plenty of calls to establish a unified human currency, possibly based around especially valuable exotics or units of energy, but it never caught on. Much like how humanity resisted unification into a single nation, they also wanted to maintain control over their own petty currencies. This led to the current smorgasboard of currencies.

"How many currencies are used in the Faris Star Region?" He asked his now-regular frontier guide.

"Independents like us mostly get by with K-coins. Each of the pirate alliances use their own currencies instead, but no outsider accepts them, so they mostly spend K-coins as well whenever they come out of their space stations."

This made K-coins the dominant currency of this region of space, which was convenient for Ves because he didn't have to waste money converting them into other currencies.

Still, there was one more issue puzzling him. "The purchasing power of a K-coin is very high. How are you able to buy something as simple as a glass of beer with a coin that's worth at least a keg of beer?"

"A few pirates stash the K-coins in a bank and let them handle the payments. Most of us simply break up the coins into fragments and pay them by their mass. Every store on this station has a machine that can take a standard K-coin and shave off enough fragments to cover the payment. Still, most pirates are fools if they trust the shops to calibrate their machines correctly. They mostly break up their coins into fragments beforehand and stuff them into their pockets."

It sounded incredibly primitive. Ves felt as if he had travelled back in time to the point where gold coins became the dominant currency of the land.

The repercussions of this backwards currency handling was very clear to Ves. Every pirate was hoarding their wealth, and they didn't easily trust others to take care of it. Liquidity flowed very slowly in the frontier, thereby indirectly depressing the already anemic mech market.

It truly wasn't easy to do business in the lawless frontier!

Chapter 667

The foundation of most pieces of advanced engineering lay in their material composition. Powerful exotics with myriad effects not accomplishable by mundane metals such as titanium and palladium lent their abilities to achieve powerful effects such as all-encompassing stealth or reaching an unheard of amount of energy density!

In order to simplify the application of mature technology systems, they each listed out recipes of must-have exotics. Without a set number of these exotics in a set combination, the technology couldn't be substantialized.

It was like how someone wouldn't be able to bake an apple pie without getting their hands on an apple.

Of course, one didn't need to follow the recipe strictly if they were proficient bakers. If they wanted to, they could replace the apple component of the pie with pears or berries. As long as the user of the technology knew what they were doing, they could perform endless tweaks on the recipe.

The list of key materials therefore listed out several key materials, each divided into low, medium and high quality tiers. The better the material, the better the performance.

An apple pie tasted better if it was made out of fresh, organically grown apples grown from natural rather than something mass-produced in a cheap, overstuffed greenhouse and then spent months rotting in the middle of maggots and other vermin.

The same applied to applications of any kind of technology. Some of the most crucial pieces of information contained within the condensed data packages the Skull Architect sent over were simple listings of the key materials.

As long as Ves was able to obtain the ingredients, it wasn't a stretch to derive the recipe for an apple pie by himself. Of course, he'd have to spend years baking thousands of pies before he nailed down a good recipe, so he wasn't looking forward to fumbling around in the dark on his own.

Fortunately, while the condensed set of files only contained the barebones principles on both technologies, they were sufficient for Ves to bake at least a basic pair of pies. For now, the basic-level applications already satisfied his simple palate. At this stage, creating something more complex was out of his means.

"I still have to bleed a lot of K-coins in order to gather all the core materials." Ves frowned. "I'll have to budget carefully and bargain hard for the materials that I want."

For now, he didn't have to procure new materials to reconstruct a working example of stealth tech. The stealth shuttle fragments recovered from the battlefield should have already covered it. Up until now, Ves missed the essential theory to make sense of the fragments, but he had just obtained the missing link, so he was already satisfied in that area.

Now, all he needed to shop for was enough low-grade materials to construct at least three basic ultracompact batteries. "I already invented two little gadgets that hunger for energy. I can reserve the third battery for another gadget, or better yet treat it as a spare."

He mentally tallied the number and amount of different lowest tier exotics he had to get his hands on to fabricate three complete batteries, with a small amount of margin to spare for emergencies.

He grimaced a bit. "Even the cheapest form of ultracompact battery is a money-sucking pit."

There was a reason why ultracompact batteries were considered higher technology, ranked even above the predominant form of stealth technology in this region!

Some recipes were intrinsically simple and made do with nutrient packs, while others were more elitist and demanded the use of quality organically-grown ingredients. The differences in cost was massive, but Ves couldn't do anything about it. An ultracompact battery couldn't be called that anymore if Ves resorted to lower-tier materials instead!

Right now, his shopping list consisted of three rare exotics that were rumored to show up in the frontier. Since Mancroft was a trading station, it inevitably sold much of the spoils from treasure hunters returning from the untamed stars. Ves hoped to get lucky and encounter the desired materials.

"Ketis."

"What is it now?" She replied, a little ticked off that she was being used as a walking search machine by Ves all day.

"I'm on the lookout for the following three medium-grade exotics: sulomnium, beta-otricine and Flesha's Tears."

Her eyes widened and her breath shuddered at the mention of some of those exotics. "I haven't heard about Beta-Otricine before, but both sulomnium and Flesha's Tears are some of the most valuable exotics you can score in the frontier! Any treasure hunter that manages to stumble upon a couple of grams of the former and a handful of micrograms of the latter has struck the jackpot! Do you know how much they cost?!"

"Why did you think I dropped by the bank? I know how much they cost, that's why I've pulled out my savings. Ketis, remember what you are supposed to be. Every mech designer is a money-making machine. Acquiring a few hundred-million credits is as easy as breathing to me. Journeymen like Mayra have it even better. They can each become the foundation of a large mech manufacturer in civilized space! As long as you work earnestly to advance your mech design abilities, acquiring expensive exotics will become as trivial as shopping for clothes to regular people."

Ves had ulterior motives when he said those words. He wanted to spark her greed. Unfortunately, he saw no signs this particular vice caught on to Ketis.

As a Swordmaiden who had grown up in a primitive settlement only to be picked up by Lydia and inducted into her organization as a teenager, Ketis never dealt a lot with money before. Concepts of wealth and income disparity was as alien to her as becoming an obedient housewife to a lucky husband.

If Ves wanted to corrupt Ketis into the cult of mech design, then he needed to grasp onto another handle.

No human was perfect. The female mech designer already possessed a possessed a warped personality by dint of her Swordmaiden upbringing. Ves merely had to stimulate the right personality trait to ignite her passion in mech design.

Their group tried their best to pass through the crowd of mech fanatics and head down into a lower deck which mainly sold industrial materials and equipment. Much less people ventured on this station level, which comfortably gave Ves, Ketis and his escort room to move.

As they browsed through shop to shop, thunderous cheers rang throughout the station. The grudge match had come to an end!

"The Hellvoice triumphed over the Deathless! The man who could not be killed is finally slain!"

"The Castle Breakers are claiming that the Hellvoice has cheated! They're furious!"

"Damnit, their fleet is starting to come online! Let's get back to our ships get away!"

Ves quietly cursed. It was just a mech duel. Couldn't the sore losers swallow their pride and take their defeat with dignity? These Castle Breakers sound like a big deal as well. The damage they could do if they went mad was enormous.

Still, the Bosey Clan wouldn't let some random pirate outfit run amuck in the vicinity of their space station. That was bad for business.

Still, the unrest about the outcome of the duel slowly started to spread towards the fans. Grumbling mercenaries walked past obnoxiously loud groups of pirates celebrating their chosen champion in plain sight.

Eventually, the situation came to a head. Just a stone's throw ahead of his group, two pairs of gangers confronted each other in the middle of the crossroad. The surrounding bystanders and vendors smelled a fight, and scurried away like rats! All the storefronts lowered armored shutters in record time, as if they had performed the same action for decades!

"Ves, I'm afraid we can't go further. There is an incident up ahead." Nolsen stated as his faceplate automatically descended onto the helmet. The exoskeleton guards entered battle mode. "This conflict doesn't have anything to do with us, so I highly recommend we detour."

"Let's go, then." Ves nodded. As long as those hooligans were determined to duke it out, there wasn't any opportunity to shop here. "There are plenty of vendors in this space station. We can always find what we want elsewhere."

Ketis spoke up then. "I've visited Mancroft several times before. I know a few big stores that deal in some of the rarer goods, the kind that is normally left under the counter. The ones with the best relation is Big Dickson's, as they're a branch office of the Delta Grind Collective. Their store on Mancroft is right at the junction of that crossroad over there. The Collective does a lot of business with mines and resource deposits. They're some of the bigger material suppliers in the Faris Star Region."

"So if there's any place that has the exotics I need, it's Big Dickson's?"

"Better yet, if I show them that I'm a Swordmaiden, we can get a sweater deal from them! I don't know how much of a discount they're willing to give us, but I've seen Mayra drive down the base prices by about five percent every time!"

That sounded fairly impressive. Ves did not despise this five percent discount, as when it came to bulk purchasing of raw materials, even a two percent discount was significant! The procurement of smaller amounts of exotics was slightly different, but even there the established traders had a tendency to adhere to standard market pricing.

Considering the delays they might face if they let the two rivalling groups posture around, Ves preferred a quicker solution.

Ketis already started to grin as she closed the faceplate of her own suit of medium combat armor. A silent command caused the sheathed greatsword on her back to jump out of its scabbard and land upon her waiting gauntlets. With a firm grip, she experimentally flourished her sword.

"Let's chop up some degenerate scum!"

Ves quickly placed his palm over her shoulder pauldron. "Hold it right there! Let's not resort to violence if we have to. It's sufficient for us to scare them off. After all, what can they do against our armor and firepower?"

"Pff, these guys are trash." She dismissively declared. "We don't need to waste any more time with them. They won't listen to us. If you're afraid they have backers, they don't look like they have ones, or else they would have boasted about it by now."

The two groups of pirate gang members all brandished their cheap rifles and pistols against each other. Almost everyone wore standard vacsuits with regular clothing on top. Only the leaders wore something resembling a suit of armor, but it looked more like something a drunken armorer improvised together.

Ves calmly held Ketis and the rest back while he looked up the figures before him through his comm. He wanted to be certain of their background before engaging them. If it turned out that both of them were backed by the pirate alliances, then Ves would immediately drop his plan and turn around.

"Hmmm, they don't come from any notable outfits at all." Ves revealed as his research bore fruit. "The leftmost group hail from the Riller Dollar while the group to the right are crew members of the Whisper Current. Both are the names of converted carriers. Their outfits are so small that they only consist of a single ship!"

These kinds of pirates were barely eking out an existence in the periphery of human space. A converted carrier was nothing but refurbished cargo hauler or large transport that had reached the end of their lifetime.

After confirming that neither pirate groups had a big brother watching over them, Ves confidently commanded his security escorts to move up. They brandished their heavy caliber rifles and cannons like they wanted everyone to know how much firepower they could pump out. Their heavy, intimidating footsteps clanged against the deck with so much noise that it easily disrupted the drawn-out argument between the pirate groupings.

"Ladies and gentlemen, please, there is no need for you to act like this at this important junction." Ves stepped forward with his caped and armored form. Surrounded by his exoskeleton guards, he looked like a prince under the protection of a quartet of uplifted gorillas. "I have business with the proprietor of that store over there. If you could please take your argument elsewhere, it would be much appreciated."

The vast majority of the pirates at the crossroads displayed varying amounts of fear and apprehension. The escorts along with his sophisticated words gave them the impression that they faced a bigshot, which wasn't entirely wrong!

Chapter 668

Pirates were very sensitive of outer status. The more impressive someone looked, the higher their importance, and thus the higher the cost of offending them. So far, it seemed his plan was working.

"Who are you?" One of the half-drunken pirate sergeants cautiously asked.

"I'm an envoy of the 6th Flagrant Vandals. Have you heard of us?"

"Whuh? Who?"

"Vandals? Never heard of them. Are they strong?"

"I don't know. They sound kind of weak if they haven't developed a rep around here."

"Yeah, maybe this guy is faking it. It won't be the first time some spoiled brat from civilized space has come out here to muck around with us lowlives."

Surprisingly to Ves, most pirates scratches their heads or looked befuddled. These lazy bums didn't even keep up with the news! Practically everyone in Harkensen had heard of the Vandals, but these country bumpkin pirates never even caught wind of their exploits! How shameful!

He realized he made a mistake. He needed to speak the language of the frontier! His hand quickly gestured for Ketis to step forward, which she did.

"Alright you boys, scram already! On behalf of Lydia's Swordmaidens, I'll chop you idiots into pieces right now if you don't get your scrawny butts off this street!"

That caught everyone's attention. More than half of the pirates recognized the Swordmaidens by name or appearance. The huge sword held before her loomed against them as if they could already feel their bodies being cut.

The rivals put down their animosity against each other and tread back against the intimidating forms of the Vandals and the lone Swordmaiden.

"I don't think my rifle can even scratch their coating. That's real exoskeleton armor!"

"Hey boss, let's split. We can whack the bastards from the Riller Dollar later."

The pirates from the Riller Dollar and the Whisper Current already started inching away from each other. Against the intimidating newcomers, their courage had fled their nerves like ice pouring down onto their bodies.

All their instincts warned them that they wouldn't like it when they stayed!

However, pirates weren't known for their intelligence. The more drunken idiots swayed on their feet before turning their weapons at the newcomers.

"Hey missy!" One of them called with an obscene leer. "I could use some company in my bed. Can I interest a tough gal like you to come with me? My buddies can come too! Five K-fragments for the entire night, what do you say?"

Both the pirates and the Vandals halted for a second, amazed at the sheer stupidity of that drunken pirate!

"Damnit, he doesn't mean it, I can apologize, I'll pay five K-coins to make your forget about this, is that alright?"

Ketis shook in her armor which caused her sword to vibrate and emit a tone. Nobody knew what she looked like because she slammed her skull-faced helmet shut, but it was obvious she took the insult badly.

"Shut that fellow up before he runs his mouth!"

One of the loudmouth's comrades already started to bash the man's head with the stock of his rifle, but it was too late!

"Hey doll, stop diddlying around with those Swordmaidens and come aboard the Riller Dollar! We've got real men in our crew, and I bet that each of them will want a piece of you! Why, I know at least three buddies who, uh why are you behind me?"

Crack!

The lewd man's skull practically caved in, but Ketis had already gone mad with fury!

"The Swordmaidens are not your whores! DIE!"

Ketis charged towards the pirates, who to their credit responded quickly and shot back. While the crew of the Riller Dollar held their ground, the pirates of the Whisper Current tried to sneak away.

Fortunately for all of them, Ketis was content to let the crew of the Whisper Current go away scotch-free.

"She's too fast! What does it take to stop her!?"

Ketis arrived in front of their group within seconds! With one huge horizontal sweep, her extremely sharp greatsword cut through the haphazard ranks of the pirates, bisecting three of the unlucky pirates right through their waist!

"Weak!"

She had grounds to say that, because her quality combat armor combined with her quick and unpredictable movements simply made the pirates weep! Blood spilled by the torrents as her sword cut straight through flesh, bone and more with contemptuous ease! The casualties quickly surpassed a dozen, and there was still a lot more to go!

Ves stood back while stuck in the dilemma. It was absolutely idiotic for Ketis to go off like that on a perceived insult. It had obviously been an accidental outburst!

"Don't tell me that being prone to violence is one of her negative traits!"

A mech designer wasn't supposed to throw themselves into battle! If such a trait got magnified, then Ketis might not even live past another decade!

"Don't just stand there, help her clean up the trash!"

Upon his urging, three of his guards began to assist. They moved forward in their heavy suits and started unleashing their heavy rifles at full blast!

Explosive bullets started blasting the pirates into a shower of flesh and blood, while the lasers vaporized and flash-heated the body moisture within their bodies to explosive results!

It was a massacre! Even as the pirates broke and ran, Ketis cackled like a witch and used her superior speed to run them all down and hack their backs into pieces! The Vandals, not wishing to leave an enemy to take revenge, contributed their prodigious firepower into mowing each and everyone of the poor sops.

Ves meanwhile took cover behind the corner of a shop. The armored bulkheads had been built with street fights in mind, so they hardly suffered a scratch even with all of the weapons being fired. Nolsen remained with him to guard against any sneak attacks, not that these pirates were coherent enough to come up with such a plan.

"What an awful mess." He sighed. "Is this what the Swordmaidens do for fun? We could have totally avoided a conflict!"

It was too bad that everyone took their posturing way too seriously in frontier space. Pirates depended heavily on their pride. If they let someone walk away after such an insult, their deterrence value instantly plummeted in half!

From this angle, Ves knew that Ketis wasn't being too selfish or hadn't gone mad just because someone mistook her for a whore. At the heart of it, she was simply defending the honor and reputation of Lydia's Swordmaidens.

"This is still a whacky system."

Pirates were pirates. Some of them simply couldn't keep their mouths shut. Pride and dignity forces pirates to make a stand, thereby decreasing the chance of avoiding a fight. Unless an intermediary stepped in to defuse the tension, an escalation was definitely probable!

"The attrition rate among pirates must be horrendous. If they constantly fight at the drop of the hat because of stupid reasons, it'll be a miracle if they survive!"

The bloodbath quickly ended. The pirates of the Riller Dollar stood no chance against properly equipped men and women in armor. The disparity between the two forces was so enormous that even their overwhelming number advantage didn't avail them much.

As soon as Ketis carved out the spine of the last pirate, the Boseys finally showed up. An entire squad of station guards in exoskeleton armor appeared at the crossroads. One of them retracted their faceplate, revealing a worn dark-skinned face which increasingly grew into a frown as it beheld the carnage.

"Swordmaidens. Figures." He muttered while spitting out a glob of slimy spit. It landed on the coagulating pools of blood and blended in the darkening liquid. "Seems like you Vandals got dragged as well. What's your story here?"

Ves knew that the Boseys must have witnessed the entire events via their sensors, but he knew what was going on right now. While the Boseys were largely ineffectual at stopping fighting aboard their space stations, especially between members of powerful factions, they still had to maintain the pretence of keeping the peace.

Image mattered the most!

Knowing this reason, Ves stepped forward and gave a succinct and neutral summary of the event. While he didn't lie, knowing it was useless, neither did he cast any blame on Ketis. He pushed all responsibility for provoking this conflict on the lewd loudmouth that just couldn't shut up.

The Bosey guard captain spat again. "The crew of the Riller Dollar got what was coming for them. Serves them right for drinking their butts off until they can't distinguish head from tails. Case closed."

With that, the nominal police force of the space station marched off to put out another fire. Numerous incidents had popped up that continued to threaten the peace of the Independent Harbor!

With a flick of her sword, which abruptly vibrated and shook off all the blood staining the blade, Ketis marched back to Ves like a cat who got the canary. "I told you, the Boseys don't care a single whit about spilling blood on the streets as long as it doesn't affect their business. Hell, we're practically doing them a favor chasing them off the crossroads!"

While she may have a point about the latter, as the shops started to retract their shutters and reinforced barriers as soon as the fighting cleared, Ves was still displeased at her eagerness to fight. "Just because these pirates don't appear to have any backers, doesn't mean they can bite us back later on. You killed those people way too easily! If you want to chop someone in half, at least limit your venting on the actual culprit!"

"Yeah, yeah, whatever you say, buddy. This is how we take care of the riff raff in the frontier. Your soft ways will get you killed someday."

He shook his head. "I don't believe that. I'd rather believe that you'll end up dead because you ran headlong into an enemy you shouldn't have provoked."

"Hahaha! That won't ever happen!" She chuckled. "Any pirates who are strong enough to pose a threat to us won't dress like washed-up pieces of trash. Just look at this garbage!"

Her sword gestured towards the gruesome bodies on the floor. Heavy-duty cleaning bots emerged from nowhere and started to drag the bodies and their meager gear to a recycling point. The smaller kickable cleaning bots worked to slurp up all of the blood until the deck returned to its regular rust and patina-marked surface.

"These bunch of people were weak! They deserved to die! Coming here armed with nothing but a bunch of light weapons and a couple of layers of clothes, they had no right to stand in our way!"

"So that's your criteria whether you can slay them or not, Ketis?! If they're clothed like, I don't know, NORMAL PEOPLE, you just chop them off whenever they do something you don't like?"

"No one cares about the trash. Neither you, nor me, nor the Boseys care a single bone about these lowlives. If they wore suits of armor like ours and tote heavy guns in our directions, then yeah, I wouldn't have gotten close to them in the first place. That's the thing, though. In the frontier, we always show off our strength. If you don't look the part, you don't deserve to be treated like the part."

This argument went nowhere, after a bit more admonishing from Ves, he metaphorically threw his hands and gave up. Ketis genuinely saw nothing wrong with what she did. While Ves agreed that the pirates were probably scum that were guilty to various crimes, that didn't mean she earned the right to callously butcher them whenever she wanted. It was reckless, pointless and entirely unnecessary.

"What am I getting into?" He asked to himself.

The more he dove into the frontier, the more he felt the misconception he was travelling back in time. Civilization? What civilization? All pretenses of law and decency for human life could be thrown right out of the airlock! The sons and daughters of the frontier only abided by the rules of the jungle!

And the frontier happened to be the biggest jungle in the galaxy!

Chapter 669

The noises of fighting, shouting and weapons discharges spread out chaotically in the distance. Even in this lower shopping deck which mainly hosted shops and facilities catering towards technical and industrial purposes, the different bars and watering holes attracted drunk pirates like a moth to flame. And when fans of different mech champions showed up in a single place, bodies tended to drop!

The repercussions of this seemingly inconsequential grudge match between the Deathless and the Hellvoice was much more severe than Ves expected!

"Damnit, what is up with these folks?" He asked while he waited for Big Dickson's to completely retract its barricades. The sheer amount of them protecting the shopfront took some time to stow away. "What's the big deal with those mech champions?"

Ketis looked at Ves as if he was a sandman. "You really don't know? They're famous! They're one of the two biggest names at the top of the duelling circuit! Rowland Ryke, otherwise known as the Deathless, is famous for never dying even during the worst matches of his life! That man is an old geezer who made it all the way to his sixties while squashing mech champions left and right throughout his entire career! He's the poster boy of the Castle Breakers, who are even larger than our Swordmaidens!"

"He's sixty years old? And made it out alive through all kinds of mech duels? I have to admit, that's really impressive!"

Even in the rule-bound sanctioned mech arenas, the average mech athlete never risked their bodies when they started to suffer from the first signs of old age. Retiring in their forties became commonplace and expected for these faltering mech pilots.

"What's even more impressive is his duelling opponent. Sonora Bridges rose up from the Omen of Misfortune like a rocket and beat established mech champions one after the other. Everyone knew she was going to challenge the Deathless sooner or later, but she was still too green! She pilots her own custom mech which have these weird sonic attacks, that's why she's called the Hellvoice. The only thing I can't figure out is why the duel turned into a grudge match. That's a duel to the death!"

"Maybe the Deathless mistook her for a whore and asked her to get into bed with him for a couple of K-coins." Ves morbidly joked.

The joke fell flat, especially since the cleaning bots were spraying some deodorizing agent that wiped away the coppery bloody smell and replaced it with the scent of blooming sunflowers.

"Haha." Ketis replied flatly. "Nah, she wouldn't be provoked that easily. I've been following her career, so I know she's always careful about challenging mech champions above her tier. In fact, did you know I met her once? We're a little chummy with the Omen of Misfortune. Commander Lydia made some deals with them a couple of times. Maybe they'll call on us to back them up if the Castle Breakers start to go to war with them. I can easily see that happen!"

Ves almost palmed his face before he remembered that he would be smacking himself with an armored palm. Something like that would definitely dent his softer features.

He still groaned though. "Why can't I go anywhere without anything going wrong?"

"Ves, this space station is looking increasingly hairy." Nolsen spoke up. "Don't underestimate the capacity for stupidity among the people who have spent too much time in the frontier. While regular people back in civilized space know when to back off and get away as fast as possible when they see an exoskeleton soldier, you can't be sure of anything when it comes to pirates. I suggest we immediately return to the fleet and skip the shopping for another time."

"I appreciate your concerns, Nolsen, but Big Dickson's is almost opening up. If we spilled blood trying to reach this store, the least we can do is enter it. Besides, I'm not returning until I obtain what I want."

It took a few more minutes until the store tidied up its interior and let customers inside. In order to convey the right message, he left his security guards at the entrance while stepping inside with Ketis. The woman immediately walked ahead and approached the proprietor of the store.

"Hey Big Dickson! Sorry about the red carpet on the street. Do you recognize me?"

"Pff, you're that brat who follows Mayra around, right?" The skinny fellow behind the counter replied. "You sure grew up the last time you stopped by here. Slain your own exobeast and used its remains to spiff up your armor and all. That makes you a real adult now, right?"

Ketis glowed with pride, though she still looked a bit awkward interacting with a man by herself. "Yeah. Anyway, I'm here for business. My pal over there with the fancy cape wants to get his hands on sulomnium, beta-otricine and Flesha's Tears. Do you have 'em in stock?"

The thin fellow scratched his messy brown beard and his eyes stared off into the air. To be honest, there was nothing 'big' about Dickson at all. If there was anything about him that was big, Ves couldn't find any sign of it so far.

"I think we recently received a shipment of Flesha's Tears. You're lucky it shipped to us recently, because they're always a hot seller. As for sulomnium and beta-otricine, we've got both of them in stock, though not in any great volume. All of them will cost you an arm and a leg, though."

"I have K-coins." Ves took over from here. "As long as you have the goods, I'll take some off your hands. I need 735 grams of sulomnium, 450 milligrams of beta-otricine, and ninety milligrams of Flesha's Tears, all in medium-grade quality. I don't accept any of that sub-standard stuff."

The experienced Big Dickson nodded several times and eyes Ves like he already figured out what kind of customer he was facing. It helped that Ves looked a bit larger than life right now with his extravagant outfit. "Here at Big Dickson's we guarantee our products come from the finest suppliers in the frontier. All of our exotic products are carefully inspected by bots and by hand to ensure our clients leave our doorstep with a smile! We have a range of multiscanners and mineral scanning devices available for you to borrow if you feel the need to inspect our products thoroughly."

"No thanks, I brought my own multiscanner."

He carried a variety of gadgets on his toolbelt. The convenience of carrying them made Ves grew more attached to wearing these kinds of belts. Not only did it allow him to bring his useful stuff while keeping his pockets and hands free, people's perception of him also started to shift. Everyone trusted that Ves knew what he was doing because he wore a toolbelt. Its effect of enhancing everyone's perception of his competence was the same as if he wore a professional white lab coat.

It was another case of function following form!

In other words, as long as Ves looked the part, the people who saw him instantly believed the role he was trying to play!

A couple of decently-constructed lab bots brought three sturdy alloy lockboxes from the store's vault and placed them side by side on the counter. Various codes and other incomprehensible symbols marked the lockboxes.

Big Dickson retrieved a big decryption device from his jumpsuit pocket and held it onto their surfaces, causing them to unfold in a matter of seconds. They revealed numerous transparent thumb-sized cubes, each of them holding a standard amount highly valuable exotics.

The store proprietor then proceeded to measure out the exact mass for each exotic, transferring them into three larger cubes for transportation. He made sure to keep the exotics within their transparent cubes in order to protect them from exposure and to protect the environment from getting exposed by them. These trace exotics were incredibly volatile in the open.

"Here you go. You can measure the mass, volume and integrity of these exotics yourself. You can also bring a third-party appraiser if you want to verify the contents."

"My multiscanner will do." Ves said and proceeded to scan with his own device. He didn't expect a store that looked as big and respectable as Big Dickson's to pull a fast one on him, but it never hurt to make sure. "Looks like it all checks out, though the volatility of your sulomnium and beta-otricine has gone a little stale."

The store owner shrugged. "That doesn't detract from their uses. Besides, the sample of Flesha's Tears is so lively that it makes up for the other two materials. That should compensate for their age."

The negotiation had already begun.

"What's the price."

"2,372 K-bars."

"What?! That's ridiculous!"

"I've already factored in a friendly discount on account of Lydia's Swordmaidens, but that's where we draw the line. Company policy, you see."

No matter how much Ves argued, Big Dickson truly didn't mean to lower the price he quoted at the start.

From his estimates, Ves knew that while the price was on the high side, it was already somewhat fair. By the time these exotics got shipped back to the Bright Republic or the Reinald Republic, the total price might get jacked up by at least twenty percent or more!

If Ves wanted to be really thorough, he should put this deal on hold and visit some of the other stores that sold the exotics he wanted and obtain their price quotes as well. However, Ves figured the differences wouldn't be too big, as these exotics already carried a somewhat static price.

Another factor that played a role was that Ves needed to finish his business quickly. The Flagrant Swordmaidens didn't wish to stick around in the Mancroft System, and the Independent Harbor itself had been thrown into turmoil due to the aftermath of the grudge match.

Ves felt as if he had entered a ticking time bomb that was ready to explode at any moment!

"Fine. Please put the exotics in a sturdy container like those lockboxes if possible."

"That'll cost you an extra K-bar."

Now that was a ripoff.

"Hell no, I'm not that gullible. Ten K-coins!"

"Five-hundred."

"Fifty!"

"Two-hundred-and-fifty!"

"A hundred! No more or I'll take my luck elsewhere!"

"Fine." Big Dickson breathed out in exasperation. "If you want to bring out a lockbox with you, you'll need a decryption key as well. That's an additional hundred K-coins."

"Oh come on, I'm an ally of the Swordmaidens! Give me a break, please. Can't I get a freebie?"

Moments later, Ves stepped out of the premises of Big Dickson's cradling a heavy lockbox with Ketis following behind him like an eager kitten. She made a few attempts at grabbing the lockbox, but Ves firmly kept it in his grasp. He paid 2,372 K-bars and a hundred-and-fifty K-coins for it all! That was practically 900 million bright credits worth of precious materials, two of which was smaller than a strand of his hair! He was not about to entrust his valuables to others!

His waiting security guards took up position around him. "Do you have additional errands to run?"

"No. This is everything I need, Nolsen. Let's get back to the fleet as fast as possible. I'm carrying some very hot cargo."

"That lockbox is very conspicuous. It's going to attract a lot of unwanted attention if you keep holding it like that."

"Then what do you suggest?"

"We should wrap it around a less conspicuous package to camouflage its value."

"Good idea. I think there are some general stores around here that sells various knick-knacks."

Ten minutes and couple of K-coins later, they left another store with a scrappy second-hand cargo bot in tow. The pony-sized bot carried numerous cheap composite boxes containing neat stacks of nutrient packs.

If there was anything the people on the space station ignored, it was nutrient pack. Cheap as dirt, hard to chew through, awful taste, the list of why people hated them went on and on. Their only merits were that they cost little to produce while containing all the necessary nutrients to survive. They became more palatable if used as raw materials to form imitation meals, but in emergencies that was a luxury they couldn't afford because the processing destroyed valuable nutrients.

Thus, while they were a necessary fact of life in spaceborn environments to the point they were everywhere, everybody hated them. Ves took advantage of these traits and buried his lockbox deep inside the open boxes revealing what they contained on the surface. Not even filthiest pickpockets lifted nutrient packs if they could help it!

"I think that's good enough. Let's head back to the shuttles."

Chapter 670

The group along with their cargo bot trundled along the nearest route back to the shuttle bays. Their progress was hampered by the fact that Mancroft Station's ad hoc upgrades and expansions never planned for rapid transit.

Normal space stations at least incorporated tunnels of fast-moving trains that brought people from one side of the station to the other side within minutes. Other stations, particularly those built within hollowed-out asteroids, allowed the use of aircars which brought people from place to place without disturbing the foot traffic beneath.

Mancroft had to make due with cramped corridors and a schizophrenic station architecture that changed every five-hundred meters or so because of the addition of different modules over the years. Each station owner had different intentions for the Independent Harbor, so Ves could practically read the history off his surroundings.

Throughout their silent journey home, they passed by thousands of frontiersmen and adventurers, each of them wearing different styles of clothes and armor.

Mancroft was a melting pot of cultures, just like Harkensen. The difference between the two was that the latter hosted more people from civilized space, while Mancroft became a microcosm of what the frontier had to offer.

People grouped themselves around their outfits rather than their origins. Pirates who looked as if they grew up on the same dusty planet acted like enemies against each other as they belonged to rivaling pirate gangs. They eagerly forgot their shared birthplace, and shifted all of their loyalty to their fellow comrades and brothers.

Another noticeable difference between the crowds of Mancroft and Harkensen stood out to Ves. A high proportion of the scum on the space station consisted of men. This made sense to Ves, as the conditions and technological conveniences that equalized the differences between the genders was absent in the frontier.

In a more primitive society, women lost more advantages than men. In a society ruled by the law of the jungle, the physical strength of men alone already placed them in a leading role.

Therefore, while female pirates existed, they formed the exception rather than the rule. Those that did join looked like they were able to take care of themselves. Much like the Swordmaidens, the women who were able to escape the settlements and prosper in the stars needed to be at least twice as ferocious as their male counterparts.

Still, male or female, a pirate remained a pirate. Almost none of them earned an honest living. Even in the remote galactic rim, the sheer amount of commerce that took place constantly attracted robbers, who could easily become instant millionaires after pillaging a single unsuspecting shipping vessel!

Sadly, the glamorous life of a pirate was anything but the unrealistic dramas portrayed. Logistical and practical issues such as maintaining your own ships and mechs as well as keeping unruly, badly-educated subordinates in line consumed an awful lot of time and money.

By the time the rank and file finally obtained their share of the spoils, only breadcrumbs landed in their hands. Perhaps their total earnings didn't even surpass one K-coin!

It was no surprise therefore that the pirates on shore leave at Mancroft all sought to distract themselves from their less-than-glamorous career choices. Some were constantly drinking or injecting themselves with stimulants. Some threw what pitiful money they saved on carnal pleasures or the feeble chance to win more money at the gambling venues.

Right now, their gambling woes became the biggest concern to Ves and his increasingly tense security guards. The majority of the pirates placed their bets on the Deathless, a significant portion even going all in! The stupid pirates trusted the Deathless' of never dying on the arena grounds to double their savings.

Gosh, the sheer brainlessness of these dolts rankled Ves. Hadn't they ever heard of making a proper risk-reward assessment? Couldn't they have one little lick of common sense in them? Just because an event was ninety percent certain to happen didn't mean the remaining ten percent could be ignored!

Naturally, clueless idiots who went all-in on their bets vented their frustrations in public.

"My life savings! I lost all my life savings! I was saving them up to pay for my daughter to attend an elite school!"

"The entire grudge match was rigged! It's a conspiracy, I tell you! Both the Boseys and the Castle Breakers are in on it! They took all of our money in one fell swoop!"

"The Hellvoice cheated! The Hellvoice cheated! The Hellvoice cheated!"

"Everyone who lost out, this isn't the end! Don't let the Bosey goons shut us up! As long as we make ourselves heard, the Boseys will have no choice but to return our money!"

A handful of exoskeleton-suited Bosey guard arrived from nowhere and approached the latest loudmouth in an indomitable march. Their loud footsteps thundered against the rusty deck with implacable force, causing everyone's footing to grow to sense the rumblings come closer.

"Look! The riggers of the grudge match are coming to shut us up! Don't let them keep our life savings!"

"ALRIGHT NOW, THIS MATTER ENDS HERE. YOU, COME WITH ME, YOU'LL BE SPENDING THE NIGHT IN THE BRIG!'

"NEVER!" The pirate who lost everything shouted back and yanked out a laser pistol from his shoulder holster.

ZAP!

Before the pirate could even bring his weapon to bear, a shoulder-mounted electrorod from the Bosey guard captain fried the man to a crisp!

Electrorods were short-ranged weapons that could zap people or objects from a distance. They worked instantly, though required a fairly careful aiming mechanism to ensure the electric bolt it projected didn't hit anything it wasn't meant to. If anything went wrong, it could have easily diverted and hit Ves!

Mech-sized electrorods generally didn't show up in third-class mechs because of the high stresses needed to generate an electric bolt strong enough to damage a mech. The melee version of the electrorods, called electrifiers, did show up now and then.

Ves knew a thing or two about electromagnetism, and knew enough about electrorods that the Bosey guard captain could have opted to dial down the power to a nonlethal setting.

Evidently, the patrol leader didn't want to bother with taking the desperate pirate into custody. Right now, everyone stepped back from the epicenter of the incident as the foul smell of cooked human flesh started to proliferate. They also didn't want to implicate themselves!

"Move along, folks!" The guard captain growled. "Unless you want to join your pal that's smoking like a barbeque, I suggest you move elsewhere right this instant!"

The message was clear. The Boseys liked their space station to be orderly, and they really didn't want to hear about refunds!

This kind of scene repeated many times as Ves and his escorts made their way back through the main shopping streets. The closer they got to the arena, the more they stumbled upon the aftermath of brutal executions.

The reign of terror from the station owners succeeded in cowing the reckless gamblers into silence, for now at least. However, whenever Ves looked into the eyes of the aggrieved visitors of the space station, he saw anything but resignation!

Nolsen noted the same thing. "These losers will never be satisfied until they get a refund or bailout."

"Hmph!" Ketis huffed. "I don't get all the fuss. They placed a bet on a candidate who's strong, but not invincible. Didn't they get their just desserts? It's their fault they lost all their money! Serves them right for emptying their entire savings for a gamble!"

Ves kept a wary eye to his surroundings. The people milling on the crowded streets resembled a powder keg that was about to blow!

"It's not as simple as that, Ketis. Think of how much they worked for to accumulate their savings. It represents months and years of serving aboard a crappy ship, risking their lives to rob a trade vessel, fending off assaults from rivalling pirate gangs and more. Almost literally all their lives had been wasted due to one awful decision. Even if it's their fault for making such a stupidly risky bet, these bankrupted pirates don't want to hear anything about why they are to blame. They're looking for a chance to go back in time, or failing that, a scapegoat!"

Pirates embodied selfishness. If anything went wrong, they were never to blame! It was always someone else's fault! The nature of gambling made it so that the most committed suckers sometimes tended to be the people who managed their money the worst.

Gambling was a pretty dubious way to earn more money in the first place. It didn't surprise Ves that the people who were the least qualified to manage their money often splurged out the most!

And underneath it all, a different threat lurked. The shouting about the possibility that the Hellvoice cheated her way to victory came from the most ardent fans of the Castle Breakers.

If the fans all thought this way, what about the outfit itself?

An alarm tone suddenly rang throughout the entire space station! It quickly cut off, but each and every individual stopped what they were doing!

Moments later, word spread out why the space station suddenly rang an alarm. The Castle Breaker fleet had lurched into action! It abandoned its stable orbit in the vicinity of the Independent harbor and started to move towards the ships belonging to the Omen of Misfortune.

"Not good!" Ketis exclaimed. "The Castle Breakers are larger and better than the Omen of Misfortune in almost every way! The Hellvoice's outfit is going to lose badly if it comes to a fight!"

Already, a minor panic broke out in the space station as worried visitors scrambled to get to their parked space vessels and move them as far away from the impending battle as possible! Even though thousands of kilometers separated their ships in orbit, that was still too close for comfort!

Worse, the losers who were irate at losing their money over their bad bets saw an opportunity. Instead of following the visitors who were worried about their rides, the rotten gamblers started stirring up trouble again, brandishing their weapons and shouting calls for refunds!

"Oh, you fools." Ves sighed, already imagining the carnage that would ensue. "Everyone! Projectiles and laser beams will start flying at any moment! Get ready to fight our way out!"

They pulled down their faceplates to form an airtight seal. Ves retrieved his ballistic handgun from his holster and deactivated most of its safeties. While the military-issued firearm wasn't as good as his Amastendira, it was a lot less conspicuous.

The others prepared their weapons as well. Ketis unsheathed her greatsword and flourished her naked blade as a deterrent and a threat. Nolsen and the Vandal guards readied their heavy caliber rifles to fire at the drop of a hat.

None of this was their fault. The Flagrant Swordmaidens just happened to stop by the Independent Harbor just as a prominent grudge match between two famous mech champions commenced.

If Ves knew the significance between the two duellists, he would have suggested to Major Verle to skip the space station!

News continued to pour in from the situation out in space. Ves and the others had to rely on second and third-hand information to learn what went on outside.

"The Omen of Misfortune fleet is on the move! They're trying to run away, but they're failling because the Castle Breakers have a head-start!"

"The Bosey Clan's spaceborn forces have deployed all of their reserves! They're holding their ground before their space station, but aren't moving in to stop the fight!"

"Those useless cowards!"

"Did you expect any different?"

The grumbling of the visitors didn't change the stance of the Boseys. Their highest priority was to keep the peace in the space station and to keep it together in one piece. If they intervened in every petty conflict between two rivalling pirate gangs, then they would have lost all of their men and mechs from attrition within the year!

Too many fights erupted for all sorts of reasons that it was better to stand aside than to play the hero!

Chapter 671

Mancroft Independent Harbor had never been a popular tourist destination like Harkensen for a reason. The Bosey Clan had a much worse track record of safeguarding the lives of their visitors than the Reinaldans. The latter dealt extremely well with minor incidents, and only broke when an attack beyond their wildest expectations occurred on one of their strictest paradise planets.

With angry gamblers looking to force the Boseys to reverse their losses, the last thing Ves wanted to see was someone else trying to stir the pot. Unfortunately, the Castle Breakers didn't get the memo!

"Uhm, Mr. Larkinson?" Ketis stammered all of a sudden from their internal comm channel.

"What is it now?"

"I just got a message from Mayra. She told me that the Omen of Misfortune is asking us for help. Commander Lydia is negotiating with their Misfortune Seer right now!"

"Damnit!" Ves erupted. "I hope to hell that Commander Lydia informs the Seer that they are already preoccupied with other matters!"

"That's not going to pass muster, teacher. We aren't known for abandoning our allies in the lurch. If the Omen of Misfortune are our pals, or if we owe them a favor or something, then we have to lend a hand! Otherwise, our other friends won't come and lend a hand when we call for help!"

Ves was glad that Ketis finally called him teacher, but their current circumstances left him with no time to celebrate. This station might descent into a bloodbath at any moment!

"Well, it's their fault they're being targeted by the Castle Breakers. Didn't you just say they're bigger and stronger than the Omen of Misfortune? Serves them right for provoking a bigger bastard than themselves."

Ketis stubbornly took the other side. "Even if they're too blame, the Castle Breakers are going too far! There's no way they can justify attacking the Omen of Misfortune after losing a public duel! The Hellvoice won the match fair and square?"

"Are you sure about that? Because half of the monkeys screaming out there are yelling that the match was rigged in her favor!"

"Doesn't matter. The Swordmaidens have always backup up our allies in a fight and they have always returned the favor. The only times when we didn't lend a hand was because our friends provoked someone they shouldn't have. That was their own fault and had nothing to do with us."

"And the Castle Breakers? You just told me they're fairly strong."

"Oh, they are, but they shouldn't be able to deploy more than two-hundred spaceborn mechs. If our Swordmaidens combine forces with the Omen of Misfortune, then we'll outnumber the Castle Breakers for sure! And that doesn't count in you guys as well."

"What makes you think the Vandals will participate in this foolish escapade."

"You guys have no choice." Ketis chuckled through the comm channel. "If you don't help us back up our friends, why should we trust you to cover our backs when we travel deeper into the frontier? I know pirates like us get a bad rap when it comes to trust, but it's important to us! Pirates who act like fair-weather friends don't survive very long in the frontier. Besides, what's the risk? As long as we combine our forces, we can beat the Castle Breakers black and blue!"

"If the Swordmaidens can call for backup, then the Castle Breakers call in their own friends as well!" Ves retorted.

"I doubt so. They're acting like sore losers now. There's no way anyone wants to risk their lives to take revenge of the Deathless. He was great when he was still alive, but all that's left of him is a broken body and his broken mech. He's completely useless now."

Backup or not, the Castle Breakers sounded formidable enough to be a handful by themselves. The last thing the Vandals wanted to do was to fight a completely unnecessary battle!

His mind inadvertently cast back to the moment where his group had just arrived at the crossroads one deck down. Back then, Ketis felt compelled to act because her dignity and the burden of reputation of the Swordmaidens expected her to do so.

The situation out in space played out in almost the exact same way!

"Both these stupid fights are about reputation and posturing!" He complained. "Why can't you pirates learn how to swallow your pride and let bygones be bygones?"

"Are you kidding?" She responded in a befuddled manner. "If you don't stand your ground and fight back, everyone is going to walk all over you. We've lost many sisters over the years, but they died gladly to keep the rest of us safe! The rep we built from then still protects us up to today!"

Ves accepted that argument, but he couldn't really fathom it even now. This way of dealing with others sounded intrinsically foreign to someone who grew up in the comforts of a civilized society.

He had no choice but to drop the matter, as it didn't concern him anyway. Let Major Verle and his officers decide whether they should join this circus. All Ves wanted to do was to bring back his purchases to the ship.

"Nolsen, how far away are we from the shuttle bay?"

"Three kilometers. With all the people and debris in the way, it might take an hour or two for us to get through!"

"That's way too long! We need to find a way to hurry up!"

Despite the unruliness of the pirates and other people who lost all their money, Ves harbored no doubt the Boseys had the situation in hand. While they weren't the first owners of the Independent Harbor, they did manage to hold on to it for a few decades, so they should have prepared an appropriate response.

The only problem was that the chances were high that the response involved a gratuitous amount of violence! After all, the simplest solution to a problem in the frontier was to shoot it into pieces!

The shenanigans about to unfold within and outside the space station left Ves with little patience.

"Hey brothers! Wait a moment! We need your help!"

A random gaggle of wasted thugs stumbled into view. They looked as pathetic and ill-composed as the last batch of pirates who Ketis sliced into bloody pieces. Ves already groaned. He was too tired to deal with this nonsense.

Nolsen stepped out with his intimidating exoskeleton armor and brought his huge rifle to bear on the stupid pirates.

"MOVE. OR. DIE." He broadcasted through the amplified speakers in his helmet.

An awkward pause ensued. The drugged-up minds of these lowlives couldn't process the script going awry from the start. Most of them cowered, but there were a couple of pirates who looked so intoxicated that they couldn't even recognize the massive threat posed by four exoskeleton soldiers with enough firepower to lay waste to this entire section!

"YOU DON'T WANT TO MESS WITH US. LEAVE!"

When the thugs dithered because their thoughts moved at the speed of a snail, Ketis growled and started to step forward while brandishing her sword.

This time, Ves latched his gauntlets on to her waist armor, halting her from escalating the standoff.

"What do you think you are doing, teacher?" She hissed through the channel.

"If another fight breaks out here, it can easily escalate to a point where the Boseys are forced to step in. I doubt they'll hold back their trigger fingers when they see us in sight. Don't intervene. Nolsen and his men are professionals."

After a few seconds of trying and failing to persuade the dimwitted thugs to stop blocking the street, the Vandal security officers resorted to action instead. A hidden module in their exoskeleton armor suddenly came to life.

"ENGAGING SONIC ATTACK."

Four ear-squealing screams erupted from the speaker grills of the exoskeleton suits. They thundered in a cone in front of them and blasted the unsuspecting pirates with enough noise to deafen a man twice over! All of their eardrums instantly erupted, and they all collapsed to the deck, in pain and insensate to the outside world!

"PROBLEM SOLVED."

The Hellvoice wasn't the only one who possessed sonic weapons!

In actual fact, sonic weapons had been primarily developed as a way to subdue rioting crowds of humans. The Bright Republic's Planetary Guard heavily favored sonic weapons as an alternative when their fluid projectors ran empty.

The limitations of this weapons were many, though. A modern suit of enclosed armor insulated wearers from painful and deafening noise, and obviously it only worked in atmospheric conditions. In space, sonic weapons turned into nothing but ornaments, because there wasn't any air for sound to travel through!

Fortunately, Ves and the others didn't face such an extreme situation right now. He gestured for the group to resume moving.

Ketis grumbled under her breath for leaving the scum alive, but she hardly cared about them in the first place.

Similar incidents happened three times more along the way. Every hundred meters or so, a different gaggle of lowlives approached the deathly-looking Vandals and asked for their help in storming the Bosey-owned gambling establishment next to the mech arena.

Ves didn't even have to lift a finger for Nolsen and his security guards to move into action. Like a caped prince letting his royal guard clean up the riff raff, the exoskeleton-suited security officers utilized the diverse arsenal of their weapon platform to full effect. From sonic weapons to resorting to blasting the ringleaders with a wrist-mounted laser cannon, the operation of the exoskeleton suits reminded him of multipurpose mechs.

"The scale is different, but the shape is roughly similar. The only difference is that suits of exoskeleton armor are employed as main infantry combatants, while multipurpose mechs are considered jack-of-all-trades that are replete with compromises."

Multipurpose mechs didn't have a good reputation in the galactic rim, but it was a different story in the galactic heartland and the galactic center. Better funding, better wealth and smaller parts with higher performance made it popular to blend many different weapon systems into a single mech.

There, every mech possessed some sort of flight capability. The galactic center even declared landbound mechs extinct!

Every mech designed in those prosperous regions of the galaxy came with at least three different weapons, and some might even carry dozens of small-scale weapon systems!

The mech landscape there was different, and required a different breed of mech designer to navigate the complexity of designing mechs with such a diverse arsenal of weapons.

That didn't mean that the purer, simpler way of designing mechs in the galactic rim was inferior. If there was one thing rim designers were good at, it was pursuing the highest efficiency and squeezing the maximum amount of performance out of a limited set of materials.

In this perspective, what the Skull Architect's design philosophy pursued was the embodiment of every rim designer's hope! He carried the torch of the most cherished dreams of every mech designer who needed to turn trash into treasure!

Ves found it ironic that exoskeleton armor had obvious succeeded in reaching the sweet spot in terms of performance and cost, while multipurpose mechs still had a long way to go in the galactic rim.

Of course, everyone could see that multipurpose mechs would eventually become more practical and ubiquitous as technology levels continued to advance. The days of designing a pure swordsman mech or a pure knight mech would soon become an exception rather than the rule.

These pure mech types still existed in regions where multipurpose mechs became the dominant form of mechs, but only weirdos and eccentrics still stuck to them. Ves found that to be a shame, because mechs specializing in a single weapon system corresponded closer to human limitations.

The birth of multipurpose mechs represented a shift away from the concept of mechs as war machines in human form.

Ves shook his head, returning his mind back to the chaotic streets of Mancroft. The issue of multipurpose mechs would only come to a head at least a hundred years from today. Right now, he needed to worry about making it out of this space station with his life and his cargo intact!

Chapter 672

On their way back to the shuttle bay, they encountered several dangerous situations. Most of the time, Ves and his group only reached the aftermath of a violent incident. People as well-armed as them gunned down the pirates that were stupid enough to get in their way.

Different gangs clashed against each other over when one gang revealed they supported the Hellvoice. Fights between these gangs lasted the longest and led to the most frigid butchering.

Overworked cleaning bots worked overtime to haul away the bodies and clean up the blood. It didn't help that their programming malfunctioned a few times due to the sheer amount of bodies in the way.

Sometimes, the larger cleaning bots mistook living people as corpses, brutally grabbing onto their bodies with razor-sharp pincers and lifting them off in the air as their very living bodies floundered in pain!

The smaller bots on the other hand swarmed by the dozens! They converged at the ankles of people who had waded through the pools of blood and aggressively wiped or sucked away the traces, not even caring if their cleaning routines penetrated straight through the clothes and broke through human skin!

Something very horrendous ensued at that point. The wounds inevitably started to bleed, which put the stupid bots into a supercharged cleaning mode. They intensified their cleaning routines and practically bore through the ankles until the hapless victims couldn't stand any longer!

Upon falling, the bots kept chewing away at their unprotected flesh, their simple artificial minds only fixated on cleaning blood, no matter if it came from a dead or living source!

"What the hell?!" Ketis stammered as her armored foot kicked a pair of small cleaning bots down the corridor. Her sights firmly fixated on the runaway bots and their misguided attempt to clean the space station by cleaning the blood-soaked humans that polluted the the place. "This.. someone should shut them off!"

"It won't work." Nolsen said. "I've already ran my military-grade automatic hacking module on them. Though they look rather cheap, their security suites are impenetrable to me. My guess is that the Boseys were tired of script kiddies hacking the bots to change their programming so they can pull off a prank. They invested heavily in upgrading their software security."

"This doesn't look like a normal malfunction." Ves observed with suspicion. "Any manufacturer of cleaning bots will program their products to ignore living humans. In fact, they should go out of their way to avoid them in the first place to prevent any harm!"

"Well, unless I'm mistaken, these bots have become man eaters now. Look at how they're dissolving that poor guy in highly-acidic cleaning solution!"

Unless a skilled professional hacker was around, these bots would continue to follow their faulty programming!

Ves truly had no clue what was going on. Did some malfunction cause the bots to get stuck in a faulty logic loop, or had some nefarious super hacker twist the programming of the bots as a deliberate attempt at sabotage?

Personally, he leaned towards a case of vandalism gone deadly. Perhaps some juvenile trickster had introduced a tiny error in their programming regarding their treatment of living humans and kept it buried there for some time.

Whatever the case, they needed to be destroyed before they could do more damage! The horrified screams of hapless station visitors already seared his mind with nightmares.

"Nolsen, take down the bots if you can! If we can't hack them, we can kill them instead!"

The security officers didn't argue and immediately opened fire. They mainly fired penetrative kinetic rounds in order to pierce through the tough exterior that protected the bots from kicking and other acts of vandalism.

Sometimes, the projectiles overpenetrated the bots and hit the humans cowering behind, but the Vandals took little mind of these slip ups. They already did their best trying to minimize the collateral damage.

Half a minute later, their weapons ceased firing. Around forty bots lay prone and steaming with several new holes decorating their shells.

They conveniently ignored the dying and the wounded. In any case, it was up to the Boseys to provide medical help.

"There are no more obstacles in the way. Let's continue moving."

They stepped past the dead, dying and wounded as if it didn't concern them at all. Ves had long lost his empathy for random strangers, let alone the folk who frequented the Independent Harbor.

Anyone willing to visit a hive of scum and villainy was either a scum or a villain!

A part of him felt bad for generalizing the entire population of the space station this way, but Ves really couldn't bring himself to care. His mind had already been doused in the blood of the frontier, changing his perspective closer to the standard of the frontier.

Amidst the untamed stars, there wasn't any distinguishment between the guilty and the innocent! The only difference that mattered was whether someone was strong or weak!

As they stepped past hordes of bots that ran out of control, the Vandals destroyed them all with extreme prejudice. Ves and Ketis didn't even have the opportunity to bring their own weapons to bear, as the exoskeleton soldiers proved to be brutally efficient at wiping out the erratic bots.

As they rounded the corner of another street, they inadvertently stumbled upon a pacification attempt by the Boseys!

Armed with exoskeleton armor that was just as deadly as those worn by the Vandal security officers, they fired off their electrorods with casual disregard, as if they didn't care if their electric weapons misfired and arced towards a bystander to the side!

Their rifles and wrist-mounted gun barrels blasted the rioting crowd of pirates with a variety of ballistic projectiles and laser beams. One powerful laser cannon raked half of the crowd with a saber-like beam!

The weapon immediately overheated, but the shock it gave to the survivors had been enough to break their drunken and drug-fueled courage!

"Run! The Boseys are gonna kill us all!"

"Ravienne will hear about this, Bosey dogs! She'll come down on your stupid space station like the wrath of a battleship!"

None of the wailings of the pirates mattered. By now, the only people on the street consisted of trouble makers aiming to force the Boseys into reversing their gambling losses. After losing their entire savings, they pretty much had nothing to lose!

The saner and more careful pirates as well as the treasure hunters and the other visitors all scurried off into one of the many shops and venues before they all barricaded up their entrances.

Naturally, Ves and his escorts formed the exception, because they really needed to return to their shuttle. Whatever the case, the odds were high that the Boseys might paint everyone on the streets with the same brush.

Ves cursed again. "Damnit, let's back off before they shoot us! We can't get into a fight against the entire Bosey Clan!"

They hustled out of the place before the trigger-happy Boseys could direct their weapons in the direction of the Vandals. Ves figured the heavily-armored Boseys already spotted them, but let them go because they were a tough bone to chew.

"Let's follow an alternate route!"

They took a small detour, only to run head-long into a bot apocalypse. They entered a former market plaza centering around a fountain and a sculpture of some self-important Bosey elder.

Such an idyllic location was usually the favorite of romantics and young adults. Now, the entire plaza along with the fountain had been drenched with endless amounts of blood and body parts. More than a hundred bots both large and small performed gruesome butchery on the helpless populace!

"Uh oh, the bots noticed us!"

A quarter of the bots immediately diverted from their dead or screaming prey and moved towards the blood-soaked newcomers. Somehow, the blood splattered on their armor was more enticing to these bots than the fresh blood pouring from the wounds of their helpless victims!

"Don't open fire yet, Nolsen! And you, Ketis, hold your horses and don't swing that sword!"

They could handle a hundred bots, but how many more did they have to destroy? Their ammunition stores only lasted up to a point, and killing these bots was futile as Ves estimated that Mancroft may be hosting up to a hundred-thousand of these machines!

Ves had been so engulfed by the massacres perpetrated by the bots that he almost forgot that they were dealing with bots!

What was a bot? It was an automated machine that ran on pre-programmed instructions. They were often built as cheaply as possible as they broke down fairly often for some inane reason or another. A place like the Mancroft Independent Harbor had no reason to commission high-quality, durable and expensive bots because their own visitors would steal them if that was the case!

Thus, the only threat they faced were cheap, mass-produced bots assembled out of the cheapest parts possible. The only part of value to these bots was their sturdy, vandalism-proof outer shell.

Ves retrieved one of his newly fabricated tools from his toolbelt. The jamming device he fashioned out of his own two hands was a far cry to the one demonstrated by Calabast back at Harkensen I, but it should still do the job at a given range.

"I've got a jamming device that should work effectively against these bots. Their programming might be airtight, but their crappy sensors shouldn't be that good considering they bump into people's feet all the time. Gather within four meters around me if possible."

This proved to be rather difficult as the huge exoskeleton suits really didn't leave much margin for error. Still, they squeezed tightly enough for all of them to be within effective range.

"Alright, I'm about to activate the jamming device! Make sure your suits are hardened against jamming interference and you don't have any fancy systems active! Make sure you switch your visor viewing mode from electronic to optical!"

It wouldn't do to blind his own guards, though Ves doubted the ECM-hardened exoskeleton armor could be affected by a handheld jammer. That was also one of the reasons why he urgently sought to upgrade its power supply with an ultracompact battery!

"Three, two, one, get ready!"

A nauseating field of what felt like supercharged static electricity came into being around the jamming device. The little thing hummed and vibrated even as it emitted an invisible field of electronic mud and fog.

"Will this even work, teacher?"

"Be patient! Don't attack yet!"

The bots that hovered within range neared the four-meter mark. Even before they crossed the line, several already veered off like drunken pirates! The closer they approached, the higher the odds of them going blind!

"It works! The jamming device messes with their sensors and other unhardened systems!"

Everyone breathed a little easier, though Ves noted that the pitiful standard battery of his device wouldn't last very long. He activated a function on his light combat armor, which caused its palm to heat up slightly.

If the tiny battery couldn't supply enough power, then Ves just had to supplement it with his suit power!

"Ignore the bots and pass through them. We don't have to address those dumb machines anymore!"

With the jamming device working its magic, their progress sped up at least threefold. The prevalent amount of bots scouring for blood managed to sniff out the solidifying blood that splattered their armor suits, but whenever they got near, they turned into complete idiots!

One of the downsides was that their cargo bot completely malfunctioned as well! The jamming field was simply too strong for the simple and basic floating bot. Ves heartlessly abandoned the useless bot and dug up his lockbox guarding his exotics from the pile of nutrient packs.

"Let's go!"

They ran through a field of blind and confused cleaning bots. The Vandal security officers managed to kick all of the bots out of the way before Ketis could use her legs to good effect!

"We've almost reached the right pier! The shuttle bay is just ahead!"

The health checkpoint that usually barred the way to visitors bearing infectious diseases had been completely blasted open. The group ran past the destroyed barriers and obstructions. If some kind of infectious disease was spreading around, well, at least their airtight suits of armor kept them safe!

They finally reached the end of the station proper. At this point, they passed beyond the main body of the space station and stepped into one of the exterior modules extending at a perpendicular angle from the surface of the station.

Bosey custom officers already secured the area here. They gunned down rioting pirates and rioting bots alike. The defensive forces formed a defense cordon that enabled each visitor to run back to their shuttles without worrying about being shot at by random thugs or chomped at their legs by rampaging bots.

"We're here!"

Ves could finally turn off his jamming device before it drained his entire suit battery.

Chapter 673

The pier extended for several kilometers out of the space station proper. Ships and transports bringing in bulk cargo that couldn't conveniently be brought via shuttles often docked alongside one of the many piers of the Independent Harbor.

Some even docked at one of the specialized drydocks alongside the more exclusive piers. Whatever the case, hundreds of vetted and pre-inspected ships docked alongside the piers at all times.

Many of them began to evacuate from the troubled space station. Who were they kidding, their ship captains outright dropped all of their obligations and the crew or passengers they left behind on the station and tried to run without proper authorization!

"My Dirthe San Ortha! You thief! Where are you taking my freighter! That's my ship! I paid for it! This is mutiny, I say!"

"Our captain has left us behind! For all his talk about valuing our loyalty, he was the first one to get out!"

All the stranded folk wailed at their misfortune, but Ves and his escorts walked right past their useless forms. The shuttle bay was situated at the very end of the pier, extending directly into deep space.

As they walked the final stretch, Ves asked a pertinent question to Nolsen.

"What do you think just took place? At one moment, a grudge match between two famous mech champions was about to take place. The next, thousands of pirates started to riot about their gambling debts of all things, all the while the previous harmless cleaning bots turned into murderous blood-sucking fiends. At the same time, the Castle Breaker fleet is moving up against the Omen of Misfortune right at this moment, possibly drawing in the Swordmaidens to the conflict as well!"

"You're barking up the wrong tree if you think I have all the answers." Nolsen replied through their comm channel. "However, my gut feeling says that whoever threw the Harkensen System into chaos might have followed us here. They might have even assigned other saboteurs to lay the groundwork. I don't know what their overarching goals look like, but disrupting the entire Komodo Star Sector is definitely on their agenda!"

Calabast! It might have been her, or agents from the same unknown faction that was still shrouded in fog up until today!

The sabotage might have something to do with the game to track down the Starlight Megalodon. This entire hidden game had thrown several star systems into complete turmoil due to the intense greed on the part of the hidden players that controlled their chosen outfits like puppets on strings.

The timing served as powerful supporting proof in favor of this argument. Though Ves failed to identify a direct connection, the timing was far too coincidental for him to dismiss any relations to the game.

The alternative was to blame it all on his rotten luck, but his rational mind didn't believe in such superstitious concepts. The multiverse ran on a particular set of rules, and none of them stated that it should give Ves a bad day because he stepped out of his bunk with the wrong foot or something.

Perhaps the accusations of cheating or match-rigging possessed some merit. If the saboteurs wanted to provoke a lot of unrest, what better way could there be than to rig the overwhelming favorite candidate into a dubious loss?

Did the saboteurs have no shame? They even resorted to something as dirty as tampering with the sanctity of the Mech Games! Ves felt irrationally peeved at Calabast and her shadowy colleagues at desecrating this honored form of dueling with mechs.

And he didn't even know if she and her ilk had even stepped foot in Mancroft!

He shook his head inside his helmet. "I'm spinning theories on threads of conjecture again. There's not enough proof for what's going on! For all I know, all of this madness is the result of a domino effect of bad coincidences!"

Up until now, they only faced scum and bots that his security guards easily dispatched. If the saboteurs seriously wanted to hamper their fellow competitors to the Starlight Megalodon, then they needed to bring the big guns.

Another alarm rang throughout the entire space station. This one sounded much deeper and much more serious.

"HIGHEST PRIORITY ALERT! A BATTLE BETWEEN TWO MAJOR MECH FORCES IS TAKING PLACE WITHIN 100,000 KILOMETERS FROM THE MANCROFT INDEPENDENT HARBOR! THE RISK OF MECH WEAPON DISCHARGE REACHING THE MANCROFT INDEPENDENT HARBOR IS MINOR BUT NOT NEGLIGIBLE! IT IS ADVISED THAT EVERY RESIDENT AND VISITOR MAKE THE APPROPRIATE PREPARATIONS AGAINST LOSS OF POWER, ATMOSPHERE, TEMPERATURE AND GRAVITY."

The warning repeated twice after another, as if the loud droning voice and the alert messages spamming their comms wasn't enough.

Pff! Those dumb pirates probably still wouldn't get the message after all of that prodding.

Fortunately, the visitors at the pier were a little more sober than others. Many had already unfolded their vacsuits into covering their entire body, with a flimsy flexible helmet covering their heads.

The thin vacsuits wouldn't be able to protect them against flying debris, but it at least kept them alive if they got flung out of space.

Mere seconds after the warning message stopped blaring against their ears, a volley of explosive rounds impacted the surface of the space station!

The entire superstructure shook minutely, causing Ves and the others to pause in their steps. They looked at their helmets for a single moment before they simultaneously erupted into a run!

With the space station itself at risk, they had to reach their shuttle as fast as possible!

"C'mon, faster, you Vandal slowpokes!"

Ketis surprisingly turned out to be their fastest runner. She had even sheathed her greatsword behind her back to aid in her running.

Coming up close behind her was Ves. His light combat armor impacted him minimally and these suits had all been designed with speed and agility in mind. The cape flapping behind him billowed in the air and formed a minor annoyance, but Ves was too preoccupied with running to cut the distracting thing off his back.

The slowpokes Ketis mentioned turned out to be the exoskeleton-suited security officers. Some of the slimmer, speed-focused exoskeleton suits could run even faster than Ketis. However, Nolsen and his subordinates had come with heavy-duty exoskeleton armor this time. The toughness of their armor made them impervious to small arms fire, and their heavy caliber weapons and weapon mounts made sure that any opposition turned into shredded meat.

Their suits of exoskeleton armor had been built like sluggers, able to absorb a lot of hurt and reciprocate with overwhelming firepower Speed had been relegated as a distant priority!

Their thunderous footsteps echoed against the decks, but no matter how fast they tried to move, their lumbering forms couldn't surpass the running speed of a senile old man!

The Boseys actually did a great job at intercepting incoming weapons fire. They possessed plenty experience in suppressing trouble makers and the readiness of their spaceborn patrols made their Reinaldan counterparts resemble a bunch of lazy bums.

Wherever the incoming weapon fire came from, the mech pilots who discharged them didn't seem to pay too much attention to where they ended up if they overshot their targets. This reckless degree of weapon handling and muzzle discipline could only be shown by pirates!

"Isn't it too much to ask for them to train their mech pilots properly?"

The pier was largely enclosed and the main battle between the Castle Breakers and the Omen of Misfortune took place way beyond a range visible to the naked eye. Nevertheless, the nature of spaceborn combat effectively compressed all distances when it came to vulnerability.

The Mancroft Independent Harbor might as well be situated a few blocks away from the developing mech battle in high orbit! With hundreds of mechs sparring and exchanging weapons fire against each other, the odds of weapons fire affecting the station was small but very much possible!

One second, everything was okay, the next, a huge volley of laser cannon beams sliced through the base of the pier connecting it to the main station!

"DROP DOWN TO THE DECK AND ACTIVATE YOUR MAG MODULES!" Nolsen instantly shouted.

All of the security officers had been extensively trained in various emergency situations, so they already moved even before Nolsen issued his warning.

To her credit, Ketis moved nearly just as fast. As a daughter of the frontier, she often had to deal with the reality of travelling aboard old, unspaceworthy ships that could keel over at any time. Preparing for these kinds of emergencies was as natural as paying taxes in civilized space.

Ves reacted the slowest. His training in responding to crises only reached a rudimentary level, something which was a severe oversight that he intended to remedy once he was safe. Right now, he awkwardly tumbled to the deck, more propelled by the mag modules of his combat armor than anything else.

The mag modules attached to his boots, knees, palms, elbows and waist secured his entire body to the deck with magnetic force.

He moved just in time, because the giant holes burned through the pier sucked out the air inside the pier like gigantic cleaning bots on stimulants! Many vacsuited visitors helplessly got sucked out along with the escaping air, their cheap suits unable to fix them into place on the deck!

The smarter fellows always stayed close to benches, poles and other solid objects affixed to the deck. They hugged their bodies against the fixtures, holding onto it for their dear lives as there was no guarantee that anyone was going to pick them up once they launched into space!

The situation was slightly more complicated for Ves because he also needed to secure his lockbox and its valuable contents. The lockbox inconvenienced him a lot because it was a large, solid cube the size of a human head.

The only upside to its huge size was that it protected its contents very well. Not only would it be difficult for small arms fire to penetrate the lockbox, it also contained various sophisticated shock-absorbing systems that negated all the effects of rough handling.

Their suits rang an internal alert. Mancroft had broadcasted another emergency message to their comms!

[PIER 34 IS PARTIALLY DISCONNECTED FROM THE MAIN STATION. DUE TO THE WEAKENING OF KEY STRUCTURAL SUPPORTS, PIER 34 MUST PERFORM SEPARATION WITH IMMEDIATE EFFECT. PLEASE REMAIN AT YOUR CURRENT LOCATION AS SEPARATION STARTS. THE BOSEY CLAN DOES NOT AND HAS NEVER GUARANTEED THE SAFETY, SECURITY AND HEALTH OF ITS RESIDENTS AND GUESTS ON THE MANCROFT INDEPENDENT HARBOR. THE BOSEY CLAN APOLOGIZES FOR THIS INCONVENIENCE AND HOPES YOU ENJOYED YOUR STAY AT THE MANCROFT INDEPENDENT HARBOR. PLEASE COME AGAIN.]

The almost worthless corporate message conveyed a key message. The pier they currently resided on was about to be blown away from the main station!

"Brace for, uh, whatever the Boseys are up to! Don't separate!"

The entire flimsy pier structure lurched as a series of drastic procedures took place.

First, the docking clamps holding the parked ships next to the pier retracted all of a sudden. To the docking clamps that couldn't do so because of a loss of power or a faulty connection, they simultaneously blew up or disintegrated into tiny fragments.

Whatever the case, this had the effect of pushing away the parked ships that still hadn't been able or willing to get clear.

The sudden release of the docking clamps forced the dithering ships to make a forceful separation from the unstable pier. They boosted away from the dangerous structure, giving it enough room to commence with the next phase.

Tiny explosions ran through a pier section that was just beyond the checkpoint that the Bosey guards had hastily thrown up. All of them huddled far apart from each other with the mag boots fully online.

After a few seconds of constant explosions, the entire pier lurched as it finally blew away from the main body of the Independent Harbor! The pier had been flung away into space by the final explosion!

The pier lost power and air, plunging it into near-total darkness. The only light came from the giant holes burned by the laser cannons.

Still, that didn't hamper the armor-suited men and woman much. They merely switched to a different observation mode on their visors.

"The pier has lost power." Ves stated the obvious. "But that shouldn't stop us from reaching our shuttle. According to the latest status report the crew sent us, our shuttle is still waiting for our arrival! Come on! It's just a small distance up ahead!"

Chapter 674

Ves figured out a fundamental rule in the galaxy. The further away from the galactic center, the lower the average intelligence quotient of the people he met.

Certainly, exceptions to the rule existed. Great leaders and driven individuals such as his uncle Ark, his grandfather Benjamin, Colonel Lowenfield and every Senior and Master Mech Designer he met soared from the muck and mud.

But these exceptions only emerged from one out of a million or one out of a billion people. Such low odds condemned the vast majority of the galaxy to the vagaries of the stupid.

No matter which mech pilots fired those laser cannon beam that almost separated Pier 34 from the main superstructure of the Independent Harbor, Ves had no doubt that the threat could have come from any of their comrades fighting in space.

What was their fight all about, anyway? It practically made no sense to Ves! The Castle Breakers would be idiotic to force a fight with the Omen of Misfortune in the vicinity of Mancroft Station! Just those errant laser cannon beams alone made them persona non grata to the Bosey Clan!

The gains, whatever they were after, could never match the enormous losses they were about to suffer!

"That's not true, is it?" He rhetorically asked himself as his light combat armor clung for dear life on the free floating pier that had just detonated itself away from the main superstructure. The pier even threw into a light spin that it couldn't compensate for because it hadn't incorporated any boosters! "I can think of one object to gain that is worth fighting for! It may even be an enormous enticement for the Swordmaidens and the Vandals!"

What else could there be than an encrypted data chip from the Starlight Megalodon!

Even if the Flagrant Swordmaidens gathered a sufficient amount of data chips to figure out the route to the derelict capital ship, there was no harm in securing more, if only to deny their competitors the chance to follow the same route!

"Ugh, no wonder Mancroft went to hell in a handbasket. It's possible that there are six pawns in this star system!"

He mentally tallied them up. The Flagrant Vandals. Lydia's Swordmaidens. The Caged. The Red Tongs. The Castle Breakers. The Omen of Misfortune.

None of them sounded weak, though the Flagrant Vandals had the edge in numbers, quality and martial tradition. Yet even then, sheer numbers could easily overwhelm them. Attracting the ire of hundreds of the smaller pirate outfits that congregated at Mancroft at this time would certainly lead to an assured loss.

"The Vandals aren't the top dogs here. They've never been the top dogs whether they are in civilized space or in the frontier."

The older and more established mech regiments in civilized space could easily trounce the Vandals, while the big pirate blocs were enemies the Vandals could not afford to provoke. These complicated circumstances meant that the Vandals shouldn't easily get entangled into random fights.

However, if the Castle Breakers were after an encrypted data chip, then that almost guaranteed an intervention by the Vandals.

"If that's the case, this battle might have a ripple effect. If the Omen of Misfortune can drag in some friends, why not the Castle Breakers?"

The latter pirate gang might have been an independent outfit, but if there was one thing he had learned from Ketis, it was that no independent outfit survived without friends. With the stupid cultural expectation that you backed up your friends if they fell into a spot of trouble and called for help, this battle might very well drag in half-a-dozen outfits more!

This certainly explained why his comm blared out messages sent from the Vandals through their internal network.

Lydia's Swordmaidens answered the call to battle on behalf of the Omen of Misfortune!

The Flagrant Vandals followed their obligation to back up the Swordmaidens and indirectly lend a hand to the Omen of Misfortune!

The Caged and the Red Tongs both joined the side of the Castle Breakers!

A random collection of names representing small, single-ship or double-ship outfits joined the side of the Castle Breakers or the Omen of Misfortune.

The Boseys and everyone else tried to stay as far from this pissing match as possible! They already had their hands full in trying to subdue the unrest and regain all of their crew. They had no time nor desire to join a battle that didn't concern them at all!

The Vandals sent another message to his comm.

[TAKE CAUTION AROUND THE MEMBERS OF THE OUTFITS OPPOSING THE FLAGRANT VANDALS! IF POSSIBLE, TAKE THEM OUT BEFORE THEY TAKE YOU OUT! THE FLAGRANT VANDALS ARE CURRENTLY ENEMIES OF THE CASTLE BREAKERS, THE CAGED, THE RED TONGS,...]

Ves cursed, because weapons fire already flew over his head a few seconds earlier! A small group of pirates in red heavy combat armor had magged themself to the deck further down the pier and spotted the conspicuous Vandals first. Like the idiots they were, they opened fire on Ves and his escorts without considering their relative strengths.

Big mistake!

"Open fire!"

"Wait! They're the Red Tongs!" Ketis shouted over the command channel. "If we fire at them, we'll be

"I don't think they care, Ketis! I'd rather survive this day than risk a puncture in my armor suit! Lieutenant, keep firing! Disable them if you can, but kill them if you have to!"

In a fight like this, holding back was a sin. One benefit of the heavy exoskeleton suits of the Vandal security officers was that its strong legs provided solid and stable magnetic footing. They could even walk upside down in a metal corridor under standard gravity if needed!

Thus, the security officers were virtually unhindered by the free floating pier and its slight uncontrolled spin. They fired their heavy guns at the armored Red Tongs, who numbered around twelve. The durability of their heavy combat armor matched Ketis' combat armor, but that didn't count for much as the heavy firepower overwhelmed them quickly enough.

The numbers advantage of the Red Tongs didn't account for much in the end! The quality difference between heavy combat armor and exoskeleton armor was too vast!

The only complications the Vandal security officers faced was that they needed to protect their VIPs. They positioned their sturdy bodies around the prone forms of Ves and Ketis and made sure to block any angle that could get at the two mech designers from the Vandals and the Swordmaidens.

Ketis and Ves added their own firepower as well, not that it made much of a difference. The medium caliber ballistic pistol Ves fired in the direction of the red-armored pirates hardly managed to land a hit. His marksmanship improved lately, but he hadn't spent enough time to become proficient with ballistic weapons!

Each time he fired his pistol, he managed to control the considerable kickback with his muscle strength with a dollop of help from his armor servos, but the round landed meters away from his intended target!

Laying just next to him, the brightly armored form of Ketis methodically focused her own ballistic handcannon on a single target at a time. Despite her enthusiasm for swordplay, she wasn't a slouch in marksmanship either. Combat practically ran through her veins despite her occupation as mech designer!

"How are you so good at landing those hits?" He asked with evident puzzlement in his tone.

"Hah! It's not me, but my auto aim system built into my handgun and my personal armor! I only have to program in the targets and pull the trigger and the auto aim system will do the rest!"

Okay, he revised his original assessment. Perhaps Ketis wasn't as good of a shot as he thought, but she certainly equipped the right gear for the right situation. Ves should have thought about incorporating an auto aim or aim assist system in his loadout as well!

Still, Ves grew up in a society where dependence on automatic systems was frowned upon. Though the same function existed on mechs, there were too many ways to fool or mitigate its effectiveness. The worst case scenario was that someone managed the hack the auto aim system and configured his enemies as friendlies while switching the statuses of his allies as his opponents!

No automated system was infallible! Plenty of horror stories and cautionary tales had taught humanity the folly of entrusting too much of their work on virtual dummies.

The recent cleaning bot apocalypse was a case in point!

The best solution would be to train his marksmanship the old fashioned way, but then again he risked falling into the same trap that Ketis had stepped into! Ves only had a set amount of time at his disposal. Hours being spent on anything other than furthering or developing his mech design career only wasted his potential.

Fortunately, between the choice of relying on some AI system to do the fighting for him or spending thousands of hours practising his marksmanship in the firing range, a third solution presented itself. Rather than force a non-combatant like himself to defend his life, he could instead follow his original plan and leave that job to the professionals!

The twelve Red Tongs who thought their numbers availed them an overwhelming advantage had all been mowed down by the Vandal exoskeleton wearers. Their armor suits might have been awfully slow, but anything short of another exoskeleton armor or something even heavier had no chance of inflicting any serious damage to their tank-like exterior.

The Vandals achieved another complete win!

Fragments of red armor along with morbid body parts floated around in vacuum. The blood and flesh of the former Red Tongs flash froze in the awful condition of space, limiting the potential mess that could have ensued if the battle took place in a pressurized environment.

"Keep a lookout for more members of the Red Tongs and the other outfits that have arrayed against us. I don't want us to be taken off-guard like that again." Ves spoke in a commanding tone.

"Yes, sir!"

His group began to move forward again. Ves tentatively rose to his feet, but was unable to deal with the shifting inertia caused by the slight spin of the detached pier. He was forced to bend to his knees and crawl forward like a baby.

It was a wholly undignified sight, especially when contrasted against his majestic caped armor!

He felt a little jealous of Ketis, whose combat training and heavier armor afforded her a much steadier footing on the rolling deck.

For a moment, he considered asking for a helping hand from Nolsen, but the security lieutenant already bent down to grasp in inside his strong, armored grip. Though his new position looked a little undignified, it beat crawling on the deck like he was less than one year old!

"Thanks."

"You were slowing us down."

"Heh."

The Vandals and the Swordmaiden cautiously proceeded forward at a clip pace, which wasn't easy under these circumstances.

Fortunately, besides that first group of Red Tongs, no one else summed up the courage to attack their group. After five long minutes, they finally reached the shuttle they initially rode to the space station.

The pilot and its passengers hadn't left them behind!

The shuttle was active with its thrusters and modules ready to go. The passengers slid open the had by a tiny slither, from which the muzzle of a rifle extended out. The shuttle occupants had been on the lookout for trouble.

"We're here! Open up and let us in!"

The hatch slid open, revealing exoskeleton-suited security officers identical to the escorts accompanying Ves. Their hulking forms thudded aside to let the latecomers pour into the shuttle. Immediately, they found themselves on solid footing as the shuttle's artificial gravity asserted itself over the complete lack of the pier's own artificial gravity.

Ves could finally stand on his own power now!

"Thank the heavens for that! Are we ready to go?"

"You're the last delegation to arrive, Ves." Lieutenant Commander Soapstone said from the side. She was clad in a slightly scuffed version of his armor and had already strapped herself into her seat. "Strap in, boys and girls. We're about to blast off!"

They quickly secured themselves to the seats or the bulkheads and deck in case of the exoskeleton wearers. As soon as everyone confirmed they were secure, the shuttle blasted off at the highest maximum acceleration! Ves felt pressed into the seat as the shuttle raced out of the unstable and vulnerable pier with thousands of visitors and Bosey Clan guards still trapped inside!

What met them in space was a chaotic space battle spanning over thousands of kilometers in orbit of the lifeless rock that anchored the Mancroft Independent Harbor.

Getting back to the Shield of Hispania might prove challenging to a single, vulnerable shuttle!

Chapter 675

The shuttle pilot faced an uphill struggle trying to get back to their mothership. Ves, Ketis, Soapstone and their escorts wanted nothing more than to return to the safety of their well-armored combat carrier.

A shuttle in the middle of a space battle might as well be flying naked, because a single hit from a mech-sized rifle could instantly blast it and its occupants into pieces!

Shuttles were meant to ferry passengers and small cargo between different ships and between planets and ships. Their designers built them small, light and energy efficient in order to fulfil a vital logistical role in any fleet or settled planet.

They were expressly ruled out as active combatants in a spaceborn mech battle. They were barely better armored than aircars in their standard configuration. Heavier variants such as combat shuttles may have been used to drop squads of infantry into hostile territory, but the purpose of their slightly less flimsier armor was to protect them against small arms and man-portable missile launchers.

Against the might of mechs, they might as well be naked, because literally any mech could tear them to pieces!

The shuttle jinked from port to starboard, up and down, and spun on its own axis for some reason. The pilot in the cockpit didn't hold back anything in reserves and pushed her shuttle's mobility past the threshold where the antigrav modules and inertial compensators prevented its passengers from feeling any g-forces.

They were basically riding a barely controlled shuttle that was one step away from spinning out of control in an inevitable crash!

"I really hope the pilot knows what he or she is doing!"

"Trust in our comrades, Ves." Soapstone spoke from the side. "This isn't any different from entrusting our lives and our safety to the mech pilots who sortie out into the battlefield every time."

"Yeah, but at least in those cases, I'm safely tucked inside the protective embrace of a big fat combat carrier. Now, I'm riding a supercharged shuttle that is approaching the direction of the main battle in orbit!"

Hundreds of mechs slugged it out on each other, and Ves had no clue how the battle progressed. His limited feed to the Vandal internal network cut off as local jamming from both sides of the conflict threw the local information sphere into turbid noise. The shuttle's sensors captured some of the battle, but it didn't have the resolution or processing power behind it to fully resolve the details of the fight taking place many thousands of kilometers away. The pilot already drew out the full resources of the shuttle to help in navigating the chaotic battlefield!

"Soapstone."

"Yes?"

"Since this battle erupted so suddenly, did you manage to secure the final batch of fuel and supplies for the fleet?"

"Oh, the last batch already shipped out an hour ago. Back then, it wasn't so clear if the Flagrant Vandals would be dragged into this fight. I'm sure the transports have dropped off their cargo at our logistics ships."

At least they didn't have to worry about missing out on their final resupply.

"Did you manage to secure anything else?" He asked.

"A few knick knacks here and there. You're not the only one who went on a detour for personal reasons. The only difference is that I was much closer to the pier when the fighting truly erupted! Wading through all of those malfunctioning cleaning bots was a slog!"

"That's the weirdest thing about this entire incident. I can imagine why the pirates who lost all of their life savings stirred up trouble. I can even imagine why the Castle Breakers would be impulsive enough to attack the Omen of Misfortune out of the blue. What I can't wrap my head around is why the bots were able to rebel in the first place."

He already formed his previous guess that whoever hacked the bots did so as a prank gone out of control or to destabilize the entire Mancroft Independent Harbor. He wanted to hear what Soapstone had to say and if she concurred with his theories.

"Hm.." She paused for a moment. "I don't have a solid explanation about the bots. My experience suggests that it's unlikely that a bug in the programming is to blame. Cleaning bots may look cheap to you, but they are sold and used in every single indoor location in human space. Do you know how many cleaning bots are used in the Bright Republic alone? Some estimates put their total number at five times the Republic's total population, and that is just a conservative estimate!"

"So because a cleaning bot is so prevalent, a lot more care is put into their design than other products?"

"Exactly! They are some of the most bug-tested, optimized and abused bots the galaxy. They are frequently employed in sensitive rooms where matters of great import to a state, planet or company is discussed. Will their buyers allow these bots to clean these sensitive rooms if they are embedded with hidden sensors and recording devices? Absolutely not! Therefore, the integrity and soundness of the hardware and software of cleaning bots endures some of the most rigorous tests in the galaxy."

It made sense. Soapstone rambled a bit about all the certifications a cleaning bot had to go through before being pronounced ready for use. A silly bug like mistaking open wounds on living bodies as a stain to be wiped away really shouldn't have occurred in even the worst cleaning bots on sale today.

Ves nodded in agreement. "So that directs us strongly to the possibility of deliberate sabotage. Still, if cleaning bots are so rigorously tested and developed, how come a hacker managed to penetrate through their ironclad programming?"

Now that he thought about it, it took more than a single whiz kid who knew his way around the virtual battlefield. Cleaning bots were everywhere, out in the open and vulnerable to all kinds of intrusions. Nolsen tried to engage his military-grade automatic hacking module on the stupid bots, but it plainly couldn't find a way to drill through their firewall.

What the cleaning bots lack in hardware prowess, they more than made up for it with exquisite and virtually impenetrable software!

Soapstone announced her conclusion. "It's a premeditated hack, and far too complex to be done by a single hacker with a vendetta against cleaning bots. This smells like the kind of stunt a state-backed intelligence agency would pull off. Only they are sophisticated enough to research and dig out an unpatched bug hidden deep within the programming of the bots."

That partially matched his own guesses. "I concur. Whoever is behind it has plenty of hacking muscle at their disposal."

This also highlighted the risks of becoming too dependent on machines. Fortunately, the Vandals and the Swordmaidens ran their most important systems through manual controls, only relying on machinery to perform bulk calculations or precise movements that couldn't be done by human hands or minds. They were considerably hardened against a virtual attack.

In the worst case scenario, their combat carriers even came with the option of pulling the metaphorical plug! This shut off virtually every digital system on the ship and delegated controls to actual human beings who needed to perform every action by hand.

It was terribly inefficient, but it was better than nothing when faced with an overwhelming hacker on the enemy's side.

As for mechs, they possessed natural protection from most forms of hacking due to their peculiar control method.

The neural interface practically blended the mech pilot's mind with the cold hard circuits and processors of the mech. In that active state, the line between the human mind and the machine mind became a little blurred. It was difficult to say where one reached the end and where the other began.

From what Ves had learned from Iris' tutoring sessions, an active mech was controlled by a hybrid amalgamation that was neither exclusively man or machine, but both at the same time. This led to a lot of strange repercussions that was wildly out of the scope of her tutoring session, but one of the strongest reminders she imparted him was that this amalgamation couldn't be hacked.

"It takes man-machine hybrid to hack a man-machine driven mech." She solemnly spoke back then. "Do you know how weird that sounds? It requires a potentate with the potential to pilot mechs, but instead of pursuing their natural vocation, they instead dedicate their life to becoming a mech hacker."

Mech hacker! This forbidden profession formed the bogeymen of every living mech pilot! If there was anything they feared above all else, mech hackers must be close to the top of their list!

Still, Ves didn't fear their presence here in Mancroft. The MTA loathed mech hackers with the same vehemence against weapons of mass destruction and actively hunted them down whenever they showed up in civilized space.

If any hackers were still present at Mancroft, then they could only work their magic on regular machinery.

Machinery like.. their shuttle!

"Damnit, do you think our shuttle is secure?"

"Hey, calm down Ves." Soapstone gestured him to remain strapped to his seat. "Have some faith in our own gear. We're very thorough in updating the firmware of all of our vehicles and equipment, shuttles included. We also employ our own hackers who are constantly on the lookout for enemy hackers."

He needed that reminder. As a military mech regiment, the Vandals wouldn't be caught off guard by a virtual attack.

As Ves contemplated many possibilities, the shuttle kept juking along the periphery of the battlefield. It was slowly but firmly navigating towards the formation of Vandal and Swordmaiden ships.

As the shuttle flew closer to its mothership, the vehicle had a few close shaves. The most threatening part of their journey came when missiles fooled by ECM systems lost their targets and flew off into random directions. One of them almost engaged a lock on the shuttle, and if not for being shot out of the sky by a distant Akkara on anti-missile duty, the shuttle and its occupants would have been blasted into pieces by a missile designed to wreck starships!

None of the occupants were religious in any way, but they silently prayed to whatever superstition gave them warmth in these trying times.

A sudden thud clanked from the deck. The rough impact almost threw Ves off his seat, and only the straps kept him firmly in place.

"We've arrived at the Shield of Hispania! We're home!"

Everyone sighed in relief or let out a deep breath. Nobody was in a mood to cheer or celebrate considering that they had just run the gauntlet.

"Let's move, let's move, let's move! Everyone out! We need to secure the hangar bay!"

The straps holding him in place automatically disappeared, enabling Ves to get back on his feet. The passengers poured outside the shuttle, upon which Lieutenant Nolsen threw Ves a quick salute.

"My escort mission is over. My menn and I are needed elsewhere, so see you later, Ves!"

"It's been a pleasure, Nolsen!"

They all moved away from the landing deck and exited the shuttle bay in order to avoid getting in the way of busy servicemen. Ves was very much aware that they practically hot-dropped onto a combat carrier in the midst of a running engagement! He eagerly wanted to apprise himself of the situation and see if he could be of assistance.

Ves turned to Ketis. "If I recall, you aren't cleared to enter the command center yet. Since you don't have any formal combat posting, it's best for you to stay out of the way. Go back to our office and stay put."

"But whyyyy? That's boring, teacher! I want to go fight, or at least watch the battle!"

"I can give you the recordings later but right now the Vandals don't have time to entertain your wishes. Go to the office, go to the bunk, or head down to the mess hall and grab some chow if you need to fill up your stomach!"

The Swordmaiden grumbled a bit but she knew she couldn't go against the Vandals on her own. As she grudgingly trudged away, Ves briskly marched towards the upper decks.

Chapter 676

By the time Ves had reached the command center, the battle had reached a climax. Ves made a profound impression on the crew as his elaborate set of armor replete with a thick cape and bloodstains on his greaves made it seem like he had waded through scores of bodies to get here.

"Mr. Larkinson, for the Republic's sake, I can forgive you for entering with your showpiece armor, but clean up your bloodstains before you enter!"

"Ah, my apologies, major! I'll get right on it!"

Ves took a small detour to wipe the stains off his armor. Once he no longer had any spec of blood marring his armored pirate guise, he returned to the command center and sat in the observation seat, which had to readjust its dimensions to accommodate his light combat armor.

He was about to ask what he could do to help, but Major Verle and the rest already seemed engrossed in their own duties. They looked like they had the battle well in hand, so Ves would only disrupt their harmony if he butted in.

He took stock of the situation in space. The Omen of Misfortune faced the brunt of the enemy offensive. However, Lydia's Swordmaidens and the Flagrant Vandals moved to assist by hitting the flanks of the Castle Breaker fleet. This forced them to abort their bullying attempt on the weaker Omen of Misfortune and redirect their spaceborn mechs to defend their vulnerable starships!

Meanwhile, the Caged and the Red Tongs threw themselves in the battle as well, but not so enthusiastically as the Flagrant Swordmaidens. The close-ranged mechs of the Red Tongs guarded over the long-ranged rifleman mechs of the Caged. They focused their efforts on harassing the forces of the Omen of Misfortune, occupying the hapless pirate gang steepled in mystique and preventing them from taking revenge on the beleaguered Castle Breakers.

Smaller pirate outfits flitted at the periphery, their insignificant mechs and firepower barely affecting the greater trend of the battle.

"Seems like the Castle Breakers bit off more than they could chew." He muttered as his eyes gazed over the plot like a roving hawk taking its time to select a suitable prey. "The Vandals already outnumber the Castle Breakers in terms of spaceborn combatants, and it's an even worse for them now that we have the Swordmaidens backing up our forces."

Lydia's Swordmaidens didn't exactly excel in spaceborn combat, but their murderous swordsman mechs made any clash in melee range a destructive endeavor.

As their name suggested, the Castle Breaker's mech doctrine excelled in breaking fortified position. They employed a mix of artillery mechs, cavalry mechs and a substantial lineup of medium melee mechs to crash and exploit any opening they made in an enemy's fortified position.

This was a strong but expensive mech lineup. Normal pirate outfits shied away from such a mech doctrine because it required adequate funding and a talented roster of mech technicians and mech pilots. Only elites among the pirates applied to join the Castle Breakers!

"Still, once they manage to get this lineup together, it can certainly pay back for itself in record time."

A stronger mech roster opened up new ways to earn money. From what Ves briefly found out through a quick search on the galactic net, the Castle Breakers opted to follow the essence of their name. They earned their living by cracking open secure settlements and fortified space stations like they were pinatas and grab all of the goodies that became exposed!

No fortress or stronghold in the frontier was safe against them. Heck, they even drifted into divilized space from time to time to attack distant company outposts. The only reason why they hadn't been banned from civilized space was because they scrupulously avoided civilian settlements in the Komodo Star Sector.

The same couldn't be said for the settlements in the Faris Star Region. The Castle Breakers weren't above raiding, pillaging and enslaving the degenerated descendants of past starfarers that had become stranded in the frontier.

They found a lucrative way to sustain themselves, and with a mech champion like Rowland 'Deathless' Ryke as their standard bearer, they attracted numerous skilled independent mech pilots over the years.

However, the talent of their mech pilots and the above average quality of their mechs was only relative to the predominant standard in the frontier. Their expensive mechs were as brittle sand when faced with the refined and well-designed mechs of the Flagrant Vandals. Their so-called elite pirate mech pilots faltered when they met the disciplined, coordinated Vandals who employed various battle formations to befuddle their individualistic minds!

The chaotic situation aside, the Castle Breakers had no hopes of winning against the Flagrant Vandals. Both sides knew it, so the Castle Breakers had started showing signs of trying to disentangle themselves from the battle they provoked on their own accord.

"It's not so easy to escape responsibility for your own actions!" Major Verle grinned as he leaned closer at the projection of the battle plot. "Captain Rakeshir, drive the fleet forward! Their mobility is their weak point! Let's show them how we Vandals break such a lumbering mech force into pieces!"

"Aye, major!"

The battle had already entered a superheated phase with the Vandals gaining the upper hand from the moment they entered the battle. At no point were the Castle Breakers able to overcome the Vandal superiority in numbers, training, skill or martial tradition. The had already reinvigorated their attempts to back off from the fight, but the Vandals smelled blood right now and wouldn't let them leave!

The combat carriers of the Vandals surged ahead. The Shield of Hispania shook as her sub-light propulsion pushed the flagship into a straight course into the middle of the dogfights between their mechs.

"The mechs of the Castle Breakers have entered into the effective range of our Akkara mechs! Do you wish to give the command to open fire, sir?"

"Not yet!" Major Verle commanded. "Wait until our targets enter into medium range. At this range, our heavy artillery mechs will be liable to hit own our machines."

Everyone impatiently waited for their combat carriers to reach this magic range. The Akkara mechs had already slotted themselves into the bunker hardpoints placed along the hulls of the combat carriers. They were meant to blast their opposition apart, and it didn't matter whether they fought in space or on land!

The Castle Breakers weren't stupid. They saw the heavily-armored carriers of the Vandals coming, and their sensors spotted the heavy mech bunkers as well as anybody else.

Though the Castle Breakers possessed their own artillery mechs, they were one weight-class lighter and couldn't never match blow-for-blow against a heavy mech designed exclusively for the military!

Their retreat grew more frantic. The Vandals tried their best to pester their opponents and lock them into place, but it became harder to hold them as space offered too much freedom of movement to be pinned down like that.

The Inheritors harassed their flanks and rear, cutting off their escape route or at least making it ten times as difficult to pull back. The Hellcats and the random collection of other mech models held their attention at their front, pinning them down and acting as the anvil to the inevitable hammer that arrived in the form of their starships!

In the Age of Mechs, humans weren't allowed to employ warships armed with fixed gun emplacements. Employing heavy mechs in bunkers was in fact something of a loophole, but a minor one considering that their weapon caliber didn't exceed what could normally be employed by mechs.

Many military theorists still called to ban this practice entirely. Some purists even stated that ships shouldn't bear any armaments at all, not even the tiny anti-meteorite guns used to crack apart various space debris in their way.

Their voices gained no traction, fortunately. The loophole remained acceptable, so the Vandals would continue to employ this radical tactic of employing their combat carriers as makeshift warships!

The first ships had already approached close enough to enter into medium range. The Castle Breakers attempted to divert their approach by redirecting their available ranged firepower on the incoming ships of the Vandals, but to no avail! Even their heavy firepower needed some time to penetrate the thick outer layers protecting the combat carriers from damage.

"Our Akkara mechs all confirm their targets have entered within their effective medium range, sir! Permission to open fire?"

"Permission granted! Bombard these Castle Breakers into scrap!"

Low booms thundered throughout the entire ship as the Akkara mechs unleashed their heavy cannons. They skipped on the slow-moving explosive rounds and instead focused on unleashing their arsenal of kinetic and laser cannons.

The kinetic slugs propelled to insane speeds hit the Castle Breaker mechs with a force exceeding the punch of a mech! Their better armored mechs gained ugly dents upon impact that disrupted their initial moves. Their lighter mechs plainly broke apart or lost their limbs upon a direct impact!

The laser cannon beams on the other hand landed instantly on the mechs, transferring an incredible amount of energy, melting and vaporizing the mechs at varying rates depending on their armor. The Akkara mechs always concentrated the fire of their own cannons, bringing two or four massive laser beams to bear on a single mech.

The knight mechs among the Castle Breakers had to abandon their shields because it melted into slag when focused upon by two Akkara mechs, who pointed eight huge laser beams in total against its surface!

Left unprotected by its favorite protective gear, the subsequent volley practically burned through its armor in a matter of seconds. Its pilot hastily ejected from their doomed mech before they burned into ash!

"The Castle Breakers are breaking! Their spaceborn mechs have entered into a rout!"

The intensive bombardment from the Akkara mechs was too much for the elite pirates. Skilled as they were, they were completely in over their heads when they thought they could face a detachment from a military mech regiment in battle. Within the first three minutes upon the entry of the Akkara heavy cannoneers into the battle, the Castle Breakers lost more than fifty spaceborn mechs in quick succession!

Many of their mech pilots managed to eject from their derelict mechs in time, so the actual casualties suffered among them in terms of manpower was fairly low. Nonetheless, the loss of so many costly mechs already crippled their progress for years!

Due to the sheer chaos engulfing the battlefield, the ejected Castle Breaker pilots didn't dare to direct their cockpits to return to their motherships. For better or worse, they had to be left behind to drift away in the wake of the strewn-out debris field that formed a makeshift junk belt around the tiny terrestrial planet in the Mancroft System.

"Sir, the Castle Breaker mechs are fleeing for their lives while their fleet is coursing away from us. Shall we pursue?"

Major Verle faced a bit of a dilemma at this moment. Even though they won this battle easily, it cost a significant amount of time, ammunition and fuel to chase the intact ships of the Castle Breakers. And for what? Breaking their fleet would avail them of some additional spoils, but it took time to process the battlefield and their gains.

Their greater objective lay deep in the frontier, not in this stopover system, Ves thought.

Still, if the Castle Breakers had any involvement in the Starlight Megalodon, then it would be a mistake for the Vandals to let off their prey when they had a knife to their throats.

The Castle Breakers may have lost their entire spaceborn mech contingent, but their landbound mech roster was still intact!

If they combined their forces with an outfit that specialized in spaceborn combat, then they could still become a nuisance to the Vandals later on. The safest and most thorough decision here would be to pursue the fleet and annihilate or force the surrender of their ships.

"We pursue, but cautiously." Major Verle finally decided. "Recover our damaged or fallen mechs and retrieve our ejected mech pilots. Let our combat carriers take the lead. Our Akkara Mechs can safely bombard the Castle Breaker starships without the risk of retaliation. Inform Captain Rakeshir of my intentions."

The fighting may not be done yet, but the battle was essentially over. The Omen of Misfortune was saved and the Castle Breakers had met their inevitable end!

Chapter 677

In the end, the Castle Breakers started a fight they couldn't win. It wasn't their fault for overestimating the friends the Omen of Misfortune could call upon. Perhaps the Castle Breakers knew that the Swordmaidens were liable to back up their pals, but they definitely didn't anticipate the Swordmaidens drag along the Flagrant Vandals in their rush to save their allies.

After being chased by a patient, Vandal fleet, suffering a torment of bombardment that riddled their sublight propulsion into wrecks, the elite pirates eventually saw reality and surrendered with what little grace they had left.

In the meantime, the lukewarm forces of the Red Tongs and the Caged had quietly let off the Omen of Misfortune. They returned their mechs to their carriers and slipped their fleet away to the nearest Lagrange point in rapid time, leaving no opportunity for the Vandals to catch up to them and teach them a lesson.

Every Vandal servicemen felt pissed at the Caged for not heeding their initial warning. The Vandals had already been merciful to them when they let off the Caged in favor of annihilating the Masters of Combat, but they learned nothing from their old mistakes.

Hopefully, the Vandals would have the opportunity to corner the Caged and give them their just desserts.

"The frontier may be big, but we'll catch up to you Roppongans sooner or later."

Since the Vandals performed the greater share of the fighting, they left the duty of policing the prisoners and taking their ships into custody to the Swordmaidens. It was the least they could do after dragging the Vandals in a mess that wasn't any of their business from the start.

"The biggest winner by here is the Omen of Misfortune."

Not only did their up-and-coming mech champion the Hellvoice triumphed over the Deathless in a duel, they also managed to annihilate the Castle Breakers and any chance of retaliation after borrowing the strength of their allies.

Ves had a really foul taste in his mouth at the realization that the Omen of Misfortune basically got away scott-free when they should have felt some pain for their shenanigans.

This warped custom from the frontier which obligated allies to come to the aid to their allies was incredibly prone to abuse. Perhaps the pirates developed their own solutions to this particular problem, but Ves couldn't see any from his limited exposure to the frontier way.

When Ves met with Ketis hours later at his office, he recounted his feelings on the matter to see what she has to say.

"You're blind, teacher." Came her verdict. "Don't you see? You Vandals have proven yourself to be a trustworthy ally! Helping the Omen of Misfortune when you could have ignored our calls for help was an honorable act that will spread from Mancroft and reach the entire Faris Star Sector. Everyone will know that the Vandals and the Swordmaidens are one and the same as long as they travel together."

Ves grudgingly nodded. "That's a benefit, aye, but hasn't this always been the case? The fact is that while we're willing to help the Swordmaidens resolve their own grudges if the battle is winnable, it's another matter entirely when we have to help your other friends."

"Don't underestimate the influence of the Omen of Misfortune. Like us, they have a lot of allies and acquaintances as well. Now that you've saved them from the Castle Breakers, they're obliged to pay back the favor. I think you will find that our journey into the frontier will be slightly easier now that they are in our debt. They excel in intelligence gathering, you know."

"What about the spoils?" he asked. "A lot of mechs got wrecked, and we've managed to capture the Castle Breaker ships mostly intact. What will happen with those?"

She shrugged. "We won't be parsimonious with the spoils. You Vandals contributed the most in the fighting, so your share of it will be the biggest. I think the Omen of Misfortune will surrender all of the claims to the salvage and the prizes, and so will Commander Lydia if you Vandals are pissed for getting caught up in our fight."

Talk of that had already spread throughout the ship. Every servicemen would gain a nice bonus in their bank accounts while the Vandal fleet gained a hefty pool of disposable funds.

After she finished answering his questions, they went to work. Their main duties entailed helping the Vandals processed the damaged and wrecked mechs. In the aftermath of every battle, Ves needed to plan for new repairs and new replacements, and schedule them in the shortest time possible. Right now, they couldn't afford any weakening of their spaceborn mech force.

Much of the work consisted of routine decisions that Ves had already delegated to his deputies and subordinates. It took some extra time to guide Ketis through some of his duties.

She found everything about it boring, of course. "A mech designer isn't an administrator! Why aren't you leaving this to a bureaucrat?"

"A bureaucrat may know numbers, but he doesn't know mechs. As head designer, I not only need to tally the state of our mechs, I am also obliged to draft up a plan to solve our inadequacies. Commissioning new repairs or ordering our mech designers and mech technician to salvage a wreck in bad condition requires an expert's touch."

While non-mech designers could perform the same job that he was doing right now, they would never be as good as Ves. That was because an intricate understanding of mechs was required to allocate mechs efficiently.

The complexity of his responsibilities only grew more burdensome with each mech model the mech regiment employed. For the Flagrant Vandals, that was quite a lot, so Ves actually needed to use his ingenuity and his in depth understanding of mechs to navigate the swamp that was the mech roster of the Flagrant Vandals.

In time, word leaked out of a closed conference between Major Verle, Commander Lydia and the Misfortune Seer. The three top leaders of their respective forces hashed out a quick and dirty deal, of which some of the agreements became public.

"The Omen of Misfortune has agreed to take charge of the mechs and ships the Flagrant Vandals have captured in battle. The spoils officially belong to the Vandals, but the Omen is in charge of liquidating the prices before depositing the proceeds into the financial accounts of the Vandals. The Omen will be rewarded with a five percent cut if they discharge their duties properly, with additional bonuses if they complete their job faster. The Swordmaidens receive a ten percent cut of the total earnings but aren't entitled to any further spoils!"

The deal sounded perfect for the Vandals because they really couldn't afford to stick around. The big ships of the Castle Breakers would be tough to sell, mainly because their size and quality propelled them out of reach of the average outfit commander.

"That's going to be worth quite a few billion bright credits, er, a couple of million K-coins." Ves corrected.

"It's a lot more money than we're used to handling over at the Swordmaidens." The horned mech designer admitted. "They never let me deal with the money accounts, but I know that we rarely get to spend millions of K-coins at once. You're sitting on a massive pile of coins. Where will you spend it all?"

He shook his head. "I don't know. That's up to the brass to decide. However, we have already completed most of our shopping, and our logistics ships are filled to the brim with supplies. The time for shopping is already over. It's time we get a move on into the frontier."

The conflict between the Omen of Misfortune and the Castle Breakers formally came to an end. As far as anyone was aware of, the Castle Breakers were history from now on, as it was unlikely they stashed a second fleet somewhere.

As for the Mancroft Independent Harbor, unrest continued to spill for a day. It took that much time for the Bosey Clan to suppress the rioting pirates and forcefully hack through the faulty programming of their cleaning bots and send out a forceful shutdown command.

The bloodshed was enormous, and most of the treasure hunters had skedaddled out of the star system as fast as humanly possible.

Surprisingly, the pirates hadn't been scared off at all. Besides the departure of a few small-time cowards, the rest remained as if the violent riots and the bots gone postal had just been another tuesday for them. Certainly, these pirates didn't lack for courage.

Of course, the other reason why the pirates stuck around was so that they could board their ships and salvage the remnants from the giant debris field that stretched over the orbit of the terrestrial planet. Neither the Vandals, the Swordmaidens or the Omen bothered the clean up after this trash belt. So they tacitly gave permission for the bottom feeders to take advantage of the free salvage floating in orbit.

In any case, all three of them had overstayed their welcome in the Mancroft System. The Bosey Clan was not amused with their space battle and the spillover effects of it. Their precious space station had been struck by numerous lasers and other weapons fire while three entire piers got snapped off due to collateral damage.

The Bosey Clan constantly sent out messages to them asking for compensation! The Vandals and the Swordmaidens left the matter of compensation to the Omen of Misfortune, who would be staying in the Mancroft System long enough to get rid of all of their captured ships for a good price.

Ves sighed in relief when he heard that. "I was half afraid the Omen of Misfortune wants to tag along with us. Three is already a crowd."

He didn't need Ketis to tell him that the three leaders came to some sort of backroom deal. No matter how you looked at it, the Flagrant Vandals harvested the majority of the gains.

This was the privilege of strength!

Even after they lost half their mechs and mech pilots throughout their escape from the Vesia Kingdom, they were still a force to be reckoned with. The average large-scale independent pirate gang only fielded two to four companies of spaceborn mechs at most.

Those affiliated with one of the pirate blocs tended to be better off. Still, the only way they could resist the invasion of a mech regiment was by mobbing them with numbers. Ves didn't despise this primitive method because history had already shown plenty of times that pirates working in concern could bleed a prey to death.

In any case, the vast majority of the pirate outfits in the frontier consisted of smaller groups than even the Swordmaidens or the Omen of Misfortune. Single-ship outfits consisting of a single converted carrier and perhaps eight dilapidated mechs comprised the majority of the pirate forces skulking in the Faris Star Region.

These dregs failed to prove their courage or ability and didn't have sufficient wealth to upgrade their forces. They lingered at the edge of bankruptcy and ruin. Even if over a hundred of these outfits combined their forces, the Flagrant Vandals could easily mow them down at once.

As long as the Flagrant Swordmaidens didn't meet an outfit from the Ravienne Alliance or the Dragon Alliance, they could continue to throw their weight around with impunity.

"Hopefully the rest of our competitors are like the Castle Breakers as well. Overconfident and way in over their heads."

After processing all of the matters that needed processing, the Flagrant Swordmaiden fleet finally moved out of orbit. They would be departing from the system in half an hour.

Ves remembered that as soon as the fleet entered FTL, they would disable most of their quantum entanglement nodes. At that time, communication with the other ships in the combined fleet would be cut off.

"I should make a call for Mayra before that happens."

Chapter 678

Ves raised his office privacy shield so that Ketis couldn't listen in. He then called the Swordmaiden Journeyman Mech Designer, who was currently stationed aboard the Jaded Sword. A tired-looking Mayra appeared over the comm.

"Mr. Larkinson! I've heard what happened down on the station from Ketis! I'm glad to see you safe and alive. Thanks for shepherding her out of there. I know she can be a wildcat sometimes."

"No problem, Mayra. I've promised to take her under her wing, so protecting her is par for the course."

She looked hopeful at that. "Did you manage to succeed in getting into my mentor's good graces?"

"Good graces? Maybe... sort of." Ves smiled ruefully at her projection. "I'm not sure he's entirely pleased with me, we're both a little too strong-willed to get along with each other. However, we were both professional enough to set aside our feelings and come to a deal that is mutually beneficial to us. So yes, I've managed to secure what I set out to obtain. My deal with you has become valid as well. On my honor as a mech designer, I will instruct your protege Ketis to the best of my abilities."

"That's fantastic!" Mayra exclaimed. "The old pervert has been in a rather bad mood lately, so it's surprising to hear you managed to worm your way in your heart. Are you willing to share the details of your deal with my mentor?"

Ves could hardly imagine the angry curmudgeon as a jolly old perverted grandfather. The image simply didn't register in his mind.

"I'm sorry, Mayra, but the details are classified. It's in our best interests to let as little people know of what we agreed to as possible. Suffice to say, I think we will both be the better out at the end of the ride."

The Skull Architect warned him in the sternest terms what would happen if they leaked out the deal. Ves had more to lose in this regard, because he really didn't wish to publicize the fact he became a co-designer to a wanted pirate mech designer!

Still, if Mayra paid any attention to her mentor's activities, then the new designs that he published would probably provoke her interest. Since she already studied the work he had performed on the Leiner Grey, she must surely be able to recognize his own work.

Mayra would surely be able to guess what was going on, but that was a matter for later.

She tactfully shifted the topic. "You've already spent a week with Ketis. You even went through a couple of battles with her. What's your impression of her?"

Well, that was a sensitive matter. Ves paused for a moment to gather his thoughts and figure out the best way to describe his analysis without offending the Journeyman.

"Ketis is.. a handful, to say the least. If I may be honest, her education is rather incomplete. She's decent in her theory at her level, but she lacks both practical experience and a wider perspective on what it means to be a mech designer, as you already know. The most important trait I'm missing from her is the raw passion for mech design. She doesn't actually enjoy it enough to make it her life's calling."

This was an old refrain to Mayra. "The fame of a Swordmaiden warrior is much stronger among us than the respect afforded to a mech designer. It's my fault, I think. I didn't make the job attractive enough. I only focused on cramming as much textbook contents in her head as possible. She fought back hard against me sometimes, which may have led to the current situation where she's lukewarm towards mechs."

"She also lacks the institutional upbringing that is common in schools. Every graduate from a university or institution is a rounded mech designer. Not all of them live up to the job, but those that do are able to keep their head on straight without getting distracted by other priorities. Ketis is far from dedicated to a career in mech design. She still performs her daily sword practice routines for several hours spread out over the day. That's something that I'm trying to get her to tone down."

It would be a struggle, he knew. The values the Swordmaiden instilled when she was in her impressionable teens would always mark her personality. What Ves sought to do was to find a better balance. Anything was better than spending half of her day on sword practice when she could have spent it on improving her mech designs.

"I'm satisfied with what you've observed. I think we both know that motivating her to develop her mech design career is the key to her transformation into a proper mech designer. I've tried years to foster interest in her, but the silly girl is still dreaming to become a warrior. I can only hope a different environment away from her sisters who are constantly encouraging her to join in on sword practice will show her how the rest of the galaxy works."

"It's a sound theory, and I think it has a good chance to succeed." He nodded absently. "Don't worry, Mayra, I'll try my best to win her over to the splendor of mech design. By the time our partnership is at an end, I hope I'll be able to return her to you as a mech designer who can genuinely contribute to the prosperity of your outfit."

They discussed a few other matters, not just about how to educate Ketis, but also their upcoming operation. Mayra definitely knew more about it than Ves, considering she was part of Commander Lydia's inner circle. She passed on some vague hints to Ves for that reason.

"It's uncertain how far we have to travel in order to reach our intended destination." She explained in a light tone. "It could be weeks, it could be months, we might even be driven beyond the outer borders of the Faris Star Region. We'd be entering true uncharted space at that point."

That alarmed Ves a bit. "Is that realistically possible?"

"That's the thing. None of us knows. We are sailing blind in the abyss and only have a single lighthouse to go on for directions. This is uncharted territory for both of our forces. Why do you think it's necessary for your Vandals to work together with my Swordmaidens? Alone, we don't stand a single chance against the perils we might encounter on our journey."

"That sounds... as if our leaders have no idea what they are doing."

"That is more correct than you believe. Yet despite our fears, we have no choice but to advance into the unknown. You'll find out soon enough."

Ves nodded. "After our fleet enters FTL, we'll quickly cross the border demarcating the Komodo Star Sector from the Faris Star Region. Major Verle promised us that we'd hear the full truth by then. Heh, it's easy for them to do so after they cut of all but one of our communication lines to the rest of the galaxy."

Restricting the quantum entanglement nodes meant that the Vandal fleet would also lose access to the central database of the Mech Corps. Only a lesser internal database remained, but it didn't store as much designs, intelligence and other precious data that Ves occasionally referenced.

They would be isolated for real in an area of space where the law of the jungle prevailed. Even a reckless mech designer like Ves shook in his boots at the thought.

The call soon ended after running out of topics to discuss. Even as allies, the Swordmaidens and the Vandals operated their own fleets. Their relationship hadn't grown close enough to share resources, personnel or technology with each other.

Ves soon stared at the lockbox containing his promised goodies. It had been difficult to bring it out of the space station intact, but he succeeded in bringing the expensive exotics back to his ship, where he could employ them in any way he could. The Vandal workshops were at his disposal.

"First, I need to figure out how to build it. That's not going to be easy."

Just because he got his hands on the key materials didn't mean they comprised of the entire battery. He still needed to go over the research material and figure out a way to turn theories and diagrams into a complete blueprint of an ultracompact battery. One that worked with the materials he had on hand aboard the Shield of Hispania.

Besides that, he also had to spend some time on tinkering with the long-disused stealth shuttle fragments. Letting them rot in some storage box down in the cargo hold was a waste of their potential. Ves figured that the barebones stealth tech primer that the Skull Architect had passed on would be difficult to understand without something practical in his hands.

Lastly, he hadn't forgotten about Ketis nor his regular mech designer duties. Even though it seemed the maintenance department of the fleet pretty much ran on autopilot at this stage, the system that held it together was exceedingly fragile and could easily topple over if they came across a problem that they couldn't solve.

Such situations allowed Ves to show Ketis the value of a mech designer in solving these matters for any outfit.

If Ves couldn't find any problems, then he would instruct her in a more traditional way. He could always tip something over and have Ketis fix the issue if needed, though that would be mean to the mech technicians that worked hard to get everything right.

The feeling of manipulating Ketis and molding her into shape as his ideal form of mech designer enticed him like nothing else. Only designing his original mech designs felt better than this!

"It truly feels as if I am designing a mech designer."

The absurd thought had gained traction in his mind. It sounded weird but oddly fitting for a mech designer in a leading position like him. Ves owned his own mech company, but he failed to expand his design team beyond himself. Sooner or later, he would establish a team of mech designers that could help lighten the design burden for him. Perhaps they might also lend their own brand of expertise to his design!

"The good ones are already hired out even before they graduate. I'll have to settle on the dregs."

Besides attempting to win over his colleagues in the design teams of the Flagrant Vandals, Ves would likely have to pick up some failed mech designers from the street as well.

Metaphorically, of course. A mech designer was still an overqualified mech technician, so it wasn't as if they ever starved on the streets.

Still, these mech designers who had gone bankrupt or who failed to start their own businesses would come with a host of issues. Ves needed to learn how to deal with different personalities, attitudes and aptitude for mech design.

Ketis served as the perfect prototype in his attempt to find out if he had what it took to be a master manipulator.

"That sounds way too nefarious. It's an inaccurate description as well to boot. What can I call myself instead? Mech designer designer? Designer of mech designers?"

Designing mech designers sounded like a paradox to Ves. Humans weren't designed. They were nurtured. Yet his design philosophy centered around the premise that mechs possessed life equivalent to humans.

Therefore, if Ves could design mechs, then it should have been possible to design humans as well.

"That sounds dumb."

A human grew over time, while a mech was static. A human birthed from an embryo in an organic fashion, while mechs needed to be fabricated by assembling mechanical parts.

Just because Ves drew them on the same height in terms of intrinsic value didn't mean that humans should literally be treated like mechs.

A better analogy would be to equate the teaching and nurturing of a mech designer to the modification of an existing mech. No matter if it was a cheap mech, an expensive mech, a tall mech, or a short mech, as long as the mech designer possessed some skill, he could reshape it in any other form he wanted, to a certain degree.

"Hm, maybe calling myself a teacher will do."

Chapter 679

As soon as the Flagrant Swordmaidens transitioned into FTL, a preplanned series of actions took place.

First, every ship except for the Jaded Sword and the Shield of Hispania effectively trashed their quantum entanglement nodes. They decisively trashed a score of the expensive, fragile devices worth at least 100 million bright credits for the cheapest versions.

Ves had to wince at the thought. Trashing so much quantum entanglement nodes meant that both forces needed to spend billions in bright credits to replace the modules after they returned from the frontier.

"It's a good thing we raided the Castle Breakers. Selling their surviving ships and mechs should earn us more than enough to compensate for the cost of replacing the nodes."

Because each ship traveled through FTL, they had no way of communicating with each other outside of exiting FTL. A new set of protocols came into force. Something like martial law came into effect where servicemen needed to be more careful of what they blathered out of their mouths and where the officers began to enforce discipline more strictly.

They were truly alone in the stars, at least when the ship plunged into the higher dimensions of FTL travel. Strange things happened when ships became isolated for long stretches of time. Even if the vast majority of the rank and file were never allowed access to the galactic net, the thought that their higher ups still let the rest of the galaxy know they were alive served as a comfort to the Vandals.

Losing this safety blanket made the Vandals nervous and restless. How would you think if you were stuck on a boat that was flung across many lightyears away from the nearest human-occupied star system?

Isolation bred madness. Everybody knew that. Sure, the Vandals could cope by socializing with each other, but their nerves and their anxieties might grow to an uncontrollable level. Illusions and hallucinations might start to settle in among their worst. The darkness of space might creep up to them, surrounding them in a miasma of terror and the endless black night.

Darkness. Empty. Alone.

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is the fear of the unknown."

A common superstition among spacers and the spaceborn was that terrors lurked in the dimensions that most physicists thought was empty or filled with formless energy. The dominant form of FTL travel that their race stole from the aliens worked by breaching beyond the four material dimensions.

Though many smart people claimed to know what happens in these higher dimensions, nobody truly knew. It wasn't as if they could take a recording from the observation deck, because what was visible from inside the ship simply couldn't be perceived by human or electronic eyes.

It might be that every vessel that plunged into FTL was blissfully swimming in a dimensional sea surrounded by enormous planet-sized alien horrors, each possessing enough power that a single sneeze was enough to snuff the life of a star!

Though these figments of imagination sounded silly to a sober person, long isolation in space tended to lead spacers into darker train of thoughts.

These space horrors didn't exist, did they?

...did they?

A shudder ran through his back. Just because they couldn't prove the existence of these gigantic alien space tyrants, didn't mean they never existed. Maybe human means and technology simply hadn't developed yet to the point where they could force these sleeping terrors into view.

The act of waking them up from their endless slumber may in fact announce the end of the existence of the human race.

The insatiable curiosity of humanity for the unknown would ensure such an event came to pass.

Death. Lifeless. Nonexistent.

"That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die."

BONK!

"Ouch! What was that for, Ketis?!"

Ves turned around his spinny chair to face the naughty little Swordmaiden, who guiltily withdrew her offending fist that had playfully bumped against his skull.

"You were daydreaming or something, teach. There was a funny look on your face and all, and you started muttering about death and crap like that. That's not funny at all."

He sighed. "Don't call me a teacher if you don't intend to treat me like one. Haven't you learned how to respect your teachers?"

She shrugged. "Hey, when I'm feeling energetic, I sometimes hit up Mayra for a spar or two. She doesn't look like it, but she's a nasty kicker with her legs."

Ves palmed his face. This time, it was safe, since they both shed their extravagant suits of armor and returned to their normal uniforms. Ves in his dark green mech designer uniform, and Ketis with her vacsuit and exobeast pelt combo.

"I'll have to add some extra lessons to your schedule, then. I know it's a faint hope, but I hope you can get around to living like a mech designer from civilized space."

A snort escaped from her nose. Her sneer made it abundantly clear what she thought about the soft and weak nerds who spend every waking moment of their lives in some stuffy design studio drafting endless sketches or performing complex mathematical calculations for their next simulations.

Such an image hardly appealed to her at all. Ves knew that he had a long way to go before he could drag her kicking and screaming towards the light.

He looked down on his comm, which faintly displayed a clock. It is almost time for the general meeting. They're finally going to tell us what this operation is all about. I've been told that you're not allowed to attend, so you're going to have to fend for yourself for now.

"Who told you that?!"

"Just sit here and wait for me to bring back the news. I'll pass on anything to you that isn't classified."

Ves left the scowling Swordmaiden mech designer behind and marched over to the conference room. It was packed to bursting this time, and because almost every quantum entanglement node was down, every person present was a living breathing human.

Because the conference room couldn't possibly fit the entire crew, not to mention that it would have been reckless gathering each and everyone of them in a single vulnerable location, the rank and file would be informed of the essentials by their immediate superiors who were currently present in this room.

An unprecedented air of serious fell among Major Verle and the Vandal cadre.

The import of the situation dawned upon each of them. None of the Vandals present were stupid. They saw the hints of what was coming, and might have extrapolated what might be in store for them. There couldn't be that many reasons why the battered and diminished Verle task force needed to be sent to the frontier instead of the frontlines of the latest Bright-Vesia War.

"Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Vandals," Major Verle began. "The time has come for you to learn the nature of our clandestine operation. I have carefully held this secret close to my chest along with a small number of officers because of the sensitive and outlandish nature of the mission. Even now, I am only allowed to illuminate a small part of what we are after and why we must enter the frontier."

The conference room dimmed, and a projection came to life.

Ves knew this image. He knew it well.

"T-That's a CFA battleship!"

"She's an old one." A ship officer said. "I recognize this style. She's several hundred years old. They don't make battleships like they used to these days."

The bold lettering on her sides revealed the august name of this venerable creation.

"The Starlight Megalodon." Someone whispered. "Isn't that an old wife's tale? The missing battleship? She's gone off the deep end two or three hundred years ago."

The Starlight Megalodon. A fully-fledging capital ship whose main guns could crack a moon and whose superweapons possessed enough might to fracture a terrestrial planet. This was not just a weapon of the stars. It was a weapon capable of bringing enough firepower to match the flare of a star down on a single target.

She was a hammer in the hands of the Common Fleet Alliance, meant to hammer down the nails that represented the stubborn alien races that lived in the periphery just outside human-occupied space.

Just like other human ships, her hull was shaped like a fish or a reptile without limbs or fins. Long, perhaps a little fat, but not wide enough to present a huge profile when facing the front, the battleship ranged at least eleven kilometers long.

Her main cannon emplacements jutted out from almost every direction. No matter what direction she faced, she could at least bring a single main cannon to bear upon her opponent.

Her armament layout might not have been the most efficient in terms of offensive power, but she was built like a cosmic brick. The most amazing feat was that her entire eleven-kilometer exterior was clad in the highest-quality compressed armor plating!

The sheer amount of medium and high-grade exotics used in the mass-fabrication of the armor plates would have been enough to upgrade every mech in the Bright Republic with high-quality compressed armor!

And that was just one estimate. A more ridiculous estimate stated that the Starlight Megalodon carried enough compressed armor to clad the Friday Coalition's entire mech roster with the substance!

These unfounded estimates illustrated the sheer extravagance put into their construction. With a strong emphasis on defence, the Starlight Megalodon served as a defensive bulwark as well as a battering ram to any fleet centered around her presence.

Major Verle smoothly picked up after the alarm died down. "This is the CFA's Starlight Megalodon. Let me tell you why this missing battleship is relevant to our operation."

Their commanding officer briefly described what Ves already heard or derived from Calabast's spiel. Nothing in their explanation diverged very much. They both stated that the Starlight Megaladon had long been presumed missing, but that descendants in FTL-capable shuttles randomly popped up in the frontier for some reason.

The major skipped the part about the encrypted data chips and their necessity in tracking down the current location of the derelict battleship. He simply stated that the Vandals and the Swordmaidens combined possessed the means of navigating towards that hidden treasure.

Everyone still sat stunned in their seats as the revelations surpassed every rumor that had been bandied about by bored spacers with an overactive imagination.

The major finally came to the part where he declared their actual objective. "Make no mistake. The Starlight Megalodon is a vault of technology that the Bright Republic still hasn't mastered despite several hundred years of progress. If we can obtain a smidgeon of their tech library, we can advance the Mech Corps by leaps and bounds! Our primary objective for this excursion is the Starlight Megalodon's primary data banks!"

Pretty much everyone bought it hook, line and sinker. If Ves hadn't heard the cynical truth from Calabast, maybe he would have fallen for it as well. Right now, Ves faked an expression of shock and puzzlement on his face. It wouldn't do for the Vandals to find out he already knew the dirty details well before the rest of the crew got to learn the truth!

"The foundation of human civilization is the technology that we master. Yet is it fair for the CFA, MTA and the first-rate superstates to hoard their technological superiority from us?! Just because we are situation near the edge of the galaxy doesn't make us the refuse pit of the human race! We deserve a fair share of the technological spoils, and if the galactic center is too conceited to give us a leg up, then we will take it from their forgotten ship! Do you know why? Because we are the Flagrant Vandals, and we take what is ours!"

"We take what is ours!" The rest of the crowd echoed the motto.

Ves refrained from joining in. He wasn't a genuine Vandal, after all. The rest would excuse him for holding back while the rest were swept up in the fervor of robbing a derelict battleship from the CFA.

He keenly noted that Major Verle never mentioned anything about the life-prolonging serums and medicines even once. The topic of side objectives that boarding parties would grab as 'targets of opportunity' was the most he had to say about that.

The mech officer couldn't let the rank and file know they were about to risk their lives so that some old geezer back in the Republic wanted to life a few hundred years longer.

Chapter 680

The meeting unfolded exactly according to his expectations. The brass saw fit to explain the bare necessities to the lower ranks. Feed them enough information to clear the doubt in their minds, but not too much that they would start asking questions again.

The matter about the life-prolonging serums never came up as a focal point of the conversation. In fact, Verle never even released those words from his lips in the first place!

The rest of the meeting devolved into a lecture on the policy changes, the need to keep the rank and file calm and complacent, and the possibility of encountering a pirate ambush at every FTL transition.

"Make no mistake. We are traversing the true breadth of lawless space. The Mech Corps has always recommended that only entire mech divisions are strong enough to withstand the predation of the pirates and the sandmen in the Faris Star Region. Since our combined allied force is far short of matching the firepower of ten-thousand mechs, we shall have to lean on the connections and expertise of Lydia's Swordmaidens to tide us through the untamed stars."

Shortly after that, Major Verle dismissed his cadre and ordered them to return to their stations to enlighten their subordinates with a shortened version of his spiel.

The secret was truly out now.

"Mr. Larkinson, a moment if you will." The major called out.

As the other officers and chiefs left the conference room, Ves was left alone with the major. He had no idea why the mech officer called him out specifically this time. Did the man suspect that Ves had spoken with Calabast? He might land in hot water if that were true.

"Lieutenant Nolsen Feray told me that you spent your time on Mancroft Station pursuing private pursuits. By private pursuits, I mean objectives that have no discernable relation to your current responsibilities as head designer of this task force. What do you have to say for yourself?"

If Ves was still the slightly fresh-faced rookie mech designer who arrived aboard the Vandal fleet at the start, he would have stammered or put out some lame excuse or something. The guilt would be evident in his expression.

It was different now. He became a lot more jaded after being exposed to the realities of how the different parts of the galaxy was run. The fleet's entry into the frontier only emphasized the fact that Ves was moving to a place far removed from the ideals he held at the start of his service.

So his chosen form of response was to be nonchalant about his indiscretions. He disrespectfully shrugged his shoulders and plainly spoke out his reasons.

"With all the danger I've been subjected to lately, I feel that I need to increase my ability to preserve my life. It's not that I don't trust the Vandals, but they are first and foremost a mech regiment geared for raiding and harassment operations. At best, they can moonlight as a mixed reconnaissance unit. The fact of the matter is that you Vandals are ill-suited to face the many unorthodox threats we have barely overcome up to now and that we will continue to face in the frontier."

If Major Verle was expecting an excuse, he didn't expect this kind of answer delivered in this manner.

"We may have let you down a few times, Mr. Larkinson. I admit that you have saved us just as much as we saved you, but that is the nature of service. I cannot have you run around pursuing your private errands while your official duties to the Vandals is starting to backslide. Some mech designers have expressed concerns that you are spending less and less attention to your basic duties. You are failing the expectations we have placed on your shoulders."

Urgh. Ves knew exactly who these unmentioned-by-name mech designers were. Mercator or Trozin or both had stabbed him in the back yet again. Perhaps he needed to sic Ketis on them and tell the enthusiastic Swordmaiden that they have volunteered themselves for sparring practice.

"Major Verle," Ves breathed deeply. "Before you believe the words of political animals in the form of mech designers, perhaps you should ask your chief technicians and the other mech designers what they think about my leadership. You'll undoubtedly hear that the situation is well in hand, and that my well-crafted schedules and timetables is keeping the entire maintenance department on track with finishing the high-g modifications to the landbound mechs within a standard month. If you place any of the other overconfident mech designers in my position, they'll almost certainly falter and screw up, delaying the modification work by at least a month, if not two."

Major Verle had no way of confirming his retort at this moment, but he was sure to follow through in his investigation.

Ves wasn't worried. He might have embellished some matters here and there, but the fact that the mech designers and mech technicians all worked at high levels of productivity couldn't be denied.

"So you claim that the design teams and the maintenance department can do just fine without you? Doesn't that make your position redundant?"

"I'm a delegator, not a micromanager." Ves calmly replied. "Every mech designer is kind of a geek by nature. That doesn't necessarily make them good leaders, but they are perfectly capable of following a set list of instructions if presented with one. My leadership style is to draft those instructions beforehand, implementing several what-ifs scenarios and I've incorporated some decision trees if they ever face the issues I've predicted beforehand. If they can't handle a problem, they've been instructed to kick them upstairs. As the mech designer at the top, I'm always ready to tackle the thorniest issues that crop up."

This was the way he ran his current posting and it was also how he ran the LMC. An argument could be made about the merits of this hands-off leadership style that depended heavily on delegation to keep the entire machine running.

Sometimes, a problem started small in the early stages, but snowballed into a complete calamity by the time it came to the attention of Ves. Other times, a chronic problem became a serious issue, but never escalated to the point where his subordinates brought it up to his attention despite dealing massive damage over time.

Ves simply consoled himself that he would make a thorough inspection once a month or something. With so many side projects demanding his time, he didn't feel the need to babysit the Vandals that much anymore.

His short meeting with Major Verle ended on a slightly disharmonious note. He made it clear that the Vandals were aware of his distractions and lack of attention to his core duties. All the while their combined fleet was traveling through one of the most perilous parts of space.

For his part, Ves spoke some platitudes about being more attentive to his duties. He intended to follow through with that statement, too, though in truth it was mostly lip service. His current responsibilities hardly required more attention than he already gave them. He expressly arranged matters so that he would be able to affect the most change with the least amount of work.

"I am one of the most productive mech designers in this fleet." He boasted shamelessly, and even employed his Spirituality to enhance his aura of sincerity. "There is nothing I care about more than to insure that we make it to the Starlight Megalodon alive."

Ves displayed the appropriate amount of surprise and uncertainty at the mention of the battleship's name. He acted just like someone who had just heard about the lost ship for the very first time.

Verle placed a hand on his shoulder. "The Starlight Megalodon won't be found so easily, and we will meet plenty of dangers along the road. The most acute threat comes from a handful of outfits who are in the possession of the same information that we've obtained. Every meter of the Starlight Megalodon is a treasure to us. Prepare yourself and prepare our mechs for what may arguably the hardest battles in the war."

Ves stared at the mech officer's solid back as he marched out of the conference room with a stoic gait. "I'm not the only one who is shouldering everyone's expectations."

He couldn't quite figure out whether he successfully fooled Major Verle. He didn't even know if the mech officer forgave him for his recent inattentiveness.

Despite his lackadaisical attitude towards his official duties, he very much looked forward to his impending transfer, which sounded by all accounts like a promotion.

"I can't ruin my opportunity by slacking off at the last moment."

He mentally shifted his own schedule around so he spent a little more hours on his so-called duties and a little less time on his side projects. He hadn't abandoned any of the latter, though. Completing them yielded him a vast understanding of many new matters and directly enhanced his ability to survive whatever the frontier threw at him. Ves was determined to survive his second excursion to the frontier!

He left the conference room and returned to his regular office compartment and met an irate and impatient Ketis. He did as promised and gave her the rundown of the hunt for the Starlight Megalodon.

"Hey wait a moment." She spoke, furrowing her brow due to the shock of the news. "So what you're saying is that the Vandals and the Swordmaidens and some other outfits found traces of a crashed but INTACT battleship, and they think they can just rob it blind while keeping the CFA out of the loop? Are they crazy?!"

"Hush now. Don't raise your voice. I know it sounds dubious. I'm holding back a lot of questions on my own. However, in sensitive operations such as this, it's not wise to voice out too much of your doubts. We have to trust in our superiors and make sure they can rely on us to follow their orders. Do you understand? You have to be a good soldier to Mayra and the rest."

She understood the seriousness of the matter when phrased in that particular way.

"Okay. Whatever you say, teach. By the way, isn't it about time for you to teach me something? I've been spending my time with you Vandals for more than a week, and practically everyone I've met on this vessel so far is either a brute or a boor! I'm bored!"

Ves sighed. "I suppose that's another matter I've neglected. Sit down. Let's have a discussion today."

They both sat down at their seats. Ves called up a diagram of the incomplete Caesar Augustus variant that she had recently worked on. "Remember this?"

"Yeah." She instantly scowled. "That hybrid knight is one of the most awful designs I've ever worked upon."

"Describe to me your biggest frustration with this design."

"It's that overstuffed internal structure! Whoever came up with this design is a moron who wants to have it all for his design but doesn't have the space to stuff it inside the frame! It's a miracle the mech is barely able to work at its basic state."

Her frustrations echoed his own back then. "You should cut Jason Kozlowski some slack. This was his first original mech design and he published it amid great expectations. Although his first published design fell flat within the mech industry, he eventually managed to climb back up and went on to have a successful mech design career. He's accomplished far more than what you achieved at your age."

"Didn't you tell me he some kind of rich playboy who's backed by his daddy's company? If I had his advantages, I could have designed a mech that's ten times better than that monstrosity!"

Ves shook his head. "It's easy to boast. If you are so certain about that, why not prove it to me? I'll put you into a virtual workshop and let you go to town with a set of stock component licences. Will you be able to cobble together a mech design that's at least equal to the Caesar Augustus?"

She fell silent at that. Of course she couldn't back up her words.

"Designing your first original mech is an intimidating process that has halted many young mech designers in their tracks. Yet it is the first hurdle they must overcome if they wish to achieve greater things." Ves leaned forward over his desk and stared at Ketis with eyes burning with intensity. "My plan is to whip you into shape and make you ready to design your debut original mech!"

Chapter 681

"Forget about your duties and obligations for a moment. Just assume that the Swordmaidens are fine without you. Let's say that you are retiring from this piracy business in order to start your own mech business. What will your first design look like?"

The question threw Ketis off a loop. "I'd never abandon the Swordmaidens like that!"

"This is a hypothetical. A what-if situation. A thought exercise." When Ves noticed that Ketis didn't get the point, he took up a firmer tone. "Just play along damnit!"

"I.. I can't imagine such a future. I don't know what to do by myself."

"As a fully-qualified mech designer, there is always one thing you can do. You can start a mech business. That's the hypothetical we are playing with today. For simplicity's sake, let's assume you bought a fake passport and acquired a new identity in civilized space. You've become a citizen of the Reinald Republic and set up shop at Harkensen III amidst all the other mech workshops. As a hopeful new entrepreneur, you've got to show the mech industry that you're capable of standing on your own two feet. You spent your first years stabilizing your business by designing a couple of variants. They're successful enough to pay the bills, but you need more if you want to go further. Only an original design will do. What will it look like?"

The narration helped her get into the right mindset. She visualized such an imaginary dream, despite lacking sufficient understanding about how to conduct business in civilized space. She wasn't supposed to chop her sword at someone if they pissed her off, she recalled.

"I'd definitely design a swordsman mech. It's what I do. It's what I know."

"Is it also what you love?" Ves interjected.

She paused. "Yeah. I kind of do. It's the first mech type that I've really worked with, and it's the one I'm mostly in sync with as well. As a sword practitioner myself, I feel like I understand just how it's supposed to fit together. All the nuances about the layout, how the artificial musculature has to be like this or that to maximize the strength behind a sword swing, why you should pay a lot of attention on the feet so that the mech has stable footing, all of that knowledge shows that I know how to design a swordsman mech better than a bunch of nerds like you who never swung a real sword in their hands in their entire life!"

Ves briefly clapped. "That's a good argument! I'm fully convinced that you're able to design a great swordsman mech! Is it your mission to show so-called nerds like me who have never fought a real battle for their lives that you can do the swordsman mech type justice?"

"I.. I don't know. I never really thought about it. All I know is that I feel nothing about the other mech types I've worked with. Tinkering with light skirmishers or medium knights is barely tolerable to me. They're kind of like swordsman mechs who have fallen into the wrong path. It's the ranged mechs that really bother me. I can't design a rifleman mech. I simply can't. I hate them. I hate their entire concept."

That sounded curious to Ves. "Why do you hate the concept of ranged mechs? A rifleman mech is an indispensable part of the mech battlefield, whether it takes place on land, in the air or in space. I've seen you wield a pistol back on Mancroft Station, so I don't see why you object to mechs doing the same."

"That was a necessity. I only carry around my pistol because the Swordmaidens have learned too many times that there are plenty of cowards out there who will want to snipe us off at a distance."

"Don't you think the same applies to your swordsman mechs? Their lack of ranged armament makes them vulnerable to outfits that field mechs that excel at range. For example, the Caged that we let slip away for the second time. They'll be back for a third round, mark my words, and we better prepare our mech roster to counter their hit-and-run tactics."

"I just don't like working with mechs armed with guns, alright?!" Ketis shouted in an exasperated tone. "I'm not as wordy as you, teacher. I can't explain the way i feel the way I do."

"Let's go back to swordsman mechs then." Ves quickly shifted back to the main topic. "I've noticed you're very enthusiastic about them. This could be your calling, Ketis. Your aptitude along with your familiarity with both swordsman mechs and the people who tend to specialize in piloting them can be a real boon in your career. You possess advantages in this aspect that few can surpass. Does the notion of running your own business around swordsman mech sound like an attractive prospect to you?"

To Ves, the life experiences of Ketis might have been one-dimensional and heavily slanted towards swordsmanship and everything connected to it, but every cloud possessed a silver lining.

Her eccentricity in her heavy favoritism regarding swordsman mechs should be something that Ves should foster at any cost. There were worse pursuits a mech designer could specialize in, and he couldn't see any other way Ketis would want to put her heart and soul into for the rest of her career.

She finally gathered her thoughts into words. "I think I'd very much like that. It's still something I don't see happening, though. I love the Swordmaidens too much to abandon them. I've grown up with them for most of my life and I want to pay back everything that they've given me. From my sisters, I've learned how to become strong. From Mayra, I've learned how to design mechs. From the Swordmaidens, I've learned how to gain the respect I thought I had lost."

Ves understood that hypotheticals like this worked poorly on Ketis. She couldn't keep her mind divorced from the Swordmaidens. It was as if she feared she would be struck by a cosmic beam if she stopped thinking about her sisters for more than a dozen seconds!

Still, the brief mental exercise exposed her inner thoughts and feelings regarding her favorite type of mechs. Ves could work with what he uncovered.

"If you can't imagine a life without the Swordmaidens, then let's forget about the previous fantasy. Let's imagine you are with your sisters for your entire life and that it's five or so years in the future. Say that Mayra is getting on in her age and she contracted some kind of frontier injury or disease that has left her sick and infirm. She's in no shape to design a mech anymore! The last thing she commands you to do is to design a new swordsman mech that will replace the main mechs of the Swordmaidens. What will you design?"

Ketis had to wrap her head around the drastic changes in narrative. She furrowed her brows again and thought hard and deep. "I really hate it if something awful happens to Mayra. I hate you for putting that image in my mind."

"Don't use your accusations as an attempt to divert from this exercise. Something like this might very well happen in the distant future, so it's best you get your act together now rather than later. Put your mind back in that hypothetical future. Mayra has tasked you with designing a new mech, if only to prove that the Swordmaidens haven't lost their advantages in fielding their own internally developed designs. What is the mech you are going to design?"

"Does it have to be a spaceborn or landbound mech?"

"Let's limit this to landbound swordsman mechs for now. I've seen the Misty Slasher, and it's much more complex than you think. At the very least, designing something comparable to your internally developed spaceborn swordsman mech design is out of the cards for you. I think a simple landbound swordsman mech is more relatable to your own training and experiences."

"If that's the case, then I'd design the best swordsman mech for the Swordmaidens as possible!"

"I'd be careful with using words like 'best'. Take your budget and your material limitations into account."

"Uh, right." She shook her head. "Okay, I'll design a itty bitty better landbound swordsman mech then. It's going to be shaped like a woman and have a really huge sword and it's gonna be plated in the strongest armor and it has legs for days that can run so fast it can catch up to light mechs in a sprint and it will have Mayra's miniboosters attached to its frame that can give it an even greater boost and—"

"STOP!"

Ves held out his palm while nursing his forehead. "Take a few breaths and think of what you just said. What did you just describe?"

"My ideal swordsman mech."

Thud!

Ves slammed his palm against his desk. "No you idiot! I just told you to think, not to blurt out the first thing that comes from your mind. I'll give you a full minute to reflect on what you just listed out. I hope to hear something more sophisticated than what a five-year old kid might say."

The minute stretched on while an awkward silence fell over the office. Ves glanced at Ketis scrunching her nose while she worked her muscle-brained mind why Ves called her an idiot. Sometimes, he couldn't believe that Ketis was actually qualified to call herself a Novice Mech Designer.

"Okay. That's it. A minute has passed. What do you have to say for yourself?"

She looked a little contrite. "I described a mech that can't possibly exist. There's no way I can design a mech that's fast, strong, tough and is jacked up with boosters and still be within the means of the Swordmaidens to produce."

"I'm glad that common sense has returned to you. I know you haven't often used it, and that's fine. I've seen many mech designers who have forgotten about their common sense. But it's best to remind yourself to go stay grounded every once in a while. Now, a basic rule when designing mechs is that you can't let your fantasies run wild. You have to work with the resources within your means."

Ves elaborated about this point in a basic lecture. Because Ketis had never been fully responsible to manage a business, workshop of mech department of her own, she had no concept of working under these kinds of limitations. The worst enemies of a mech designer in the galactic rim was their limited budget! When they had a finite amount of money at their disposal, they could only obtain so much licenses or acquire so much production facilities.

One difference popped up between mech designers working under the auspices of the MTA and in the frontier. "Say, Ketis, how do you mech designers in the frontier handle licensing issues? Do you pay any licensing fees at all when you make use of someone else's mech or component designs?"

She looked at him as if he spoke an alien language. "Are you kidding? Who the hell wastes K-coins on licenses. They're just a stupid way you civilized people invented to make some extra money. I don't know a single mech designer in the frontier who has ever paid a fee on designs. Whenever we need one, we just crib one from each other or from the galactic net. If it's there, just take it and make use of it. Haha, paying for licensing. That's a funny story."

He couldn't expect anything better out of pirates. They thumbed their noses at the MTA, of course they would ignore the licensing system that had helped many mech designers in civilized space from profiting off their innovations. It was obvious that Ketis did not respect the sanctity of intellectual property as much as Ves or any other mech designer who grew up in civilized space.

"I see I need to fill up your knowledge gaps before we can proceed with more profound lessons." He said. He waved his hands, transferring some files to her comm. "Let's adjourn the lesson for today. Read these textbooks by tomorrow. I expect you to be able to answer my questions when I quiz on them tomorrow afternoon."

Ketis' eyes widened at her homework. "This is three whole textbooks! How am I going to read through all of them before tomorrow!?"

"That's the nature of studying. Don't whine. None of the books are about science. They're actually describing the particulars of running a mech business. A lot of the contents of the books are taken up by elaborate explanations and examples of fundamental business concepts. Just take a look and you'll see."

"AARRGH! TEACHER!"

Chapter 682

It was the first day since the Flagrant Swordmaidens crossed over into the Faris Star Region.

"Fuel supply is topped off. Other supplies are ample. Crew morale is buoyed by the recent victory, but it is starting to look shaky due to the bombshell revelation of the Starlight Megalodon. Some of the starships have sustained armor damage which remains largely unpatched. Our mechs are as numerous as they can get and they are mostly in a decent condition. The relationship between the Vandals and the Swordmaidens is shallow but promising. The distance from civilized space is just a single hop away."

The status report he composed in his mind served as a marker to remind himself of the overall state of the Vandal fleet.

Ves left Ketis to sink her teeth in fundamental textbooks on microeconomics, marketing and management theory. He spun back on his chair and cast his mind on his own business activities.

Now that he addressed every urgent issue for the day, he could finally take a breather and take stock of his recent benefits and burdens.

Ves eyed the lockbox again. The sulomnium, beta-otricine and Flesha's Tears he secured formed the nucleus of his self-developed ultracompact battery, but he was a long way from fabricating them. He turned on his privacy screen before turning on his terminal. He loaded in the condensed documents enumerating some very complex and abstruse theory on how ultracompact batteries worked.

It was a far cry from a readily available design. A disconnect still existed between pure theory and a solid set of design specifications that Ves could upload into a 3D printer and have it fabricate the components on the spot.

"The Skull Architect hasn't made this easy for me. He took out way too many useful derivations that I could have used to cobble together a design without needing to bother with all the advanced theories."

Fortunately, Ves already possessed a broad body of knowledge, possessed Senior-level Physics to boot. Achieving true understanding of the research papers and extracts related to ultracompact batteries might have taken months and years for an average Apprentice Mech Designer, but Ves was confident he could master half of it within a week and understand the essence of it within a month.

After briefly skimming through the files on ultracompact batteries, he switched to the files containing similar documents but this time on stealth technology. Despite containing relatively more reading material for him to study, the scope of stealth technology was much bigger. What Ves obtained from the Skull Architect represented just the tip of the iceberg.

In essence, he only obtained a bare summary of the relevant theories related to stealth tech. If Ves wanted to construct a working prototype that applied the principles explained in the documents, then Ves might not even be finished yet in five years! He needed to perform hundreds of experiments and compose several textbooks worth of research in order to obtain the necessary theoretical foundation and transform it into an applicable blueprint.

His existing knowledge helped accelerate the learning and development processes, but couldn't entirely substitute for missing data. Ves needed to painstakingly construct them from his own efforts.

"Luckily, I have another advantage that will severely shorten the time I need to master this tech."

The salvaged stealth shuttle fragments pretty much provided Ves with a key. The few portions of the shuttle left intact gave him a useful direction for his theories, allowing him to skip many experiments as the answers were already evident.

He basically possessed both the starting point and the end point of a finished research project. By taking advantage of both, figuring out the middle portion shouldn't be too difficult and not as nearly as time-consuming if the end point was still shrouded in fog.

"It's still going to be a multi-month effort to decipher the secrets behind this particular application of stealth tech." He concluded. "I don't know how long the hunt for the Starlight Megalodon will take.

The time-consuming projects demanded too much of his time, and he wasn't sure if the mission lasted long enough for him to complete them. It would be extremely inconvenient for him if he was transferred out of the Vandals halfway into his project on replicating stealth technology.

He hadn't forgotten about the minor rebuke he received from Major Verle. If the observation system perceived that Ves spent too little time on his core responsibilities, then that might have awful repercussions to his future within the Mech Corps.

Though his draft had been an obligation, it was also an opportunity! Those who worked hard and exploited the advantages given to them by the Mech Corps were able to lay down the groundwork for future prosperity after their military service had ended.

Right now, his posting as a temporary head designer was already sufficient to make every other mech designer employed by the Vandals jealous.

He had to do right by the Vandals, but he also believed in the arguments he put forth to the commanding officer. Many matters did not require his personal intervention anymore. As the top mech designer among this detachment of Vandals, his foresight was pretty great and he had already issued many instructions on how to handle various thorny problems.

Recently, none of his subordinates saw fit to bring any matters to his attention. The system of delegation that he instituted throughout the entire hierarchy under his influence benefited from a lot more autonomy than usual.

Supposedly, the autonomy granted to the chief technicians and lower ranking mech designers enabled them to make nuanced decisions that fit their specific circumstances best on their ship and workshop.

Theoretically, this should have led to higher productivity as top-down decision from someone so far removed from the workshop floor couldn't possibly be as well-thought out and appropriate for the specific problem at hand.

In truth, empowering the lower level workers left the middle managers with a lot of headaches. Ves received status reports from Mercator and Trozin frequently and they often complained how time consuming it was to put out fires started out by incompetent mech designers who vastly overestimated their abilities.

"Hmph." He grunted with satisfaction. "Looks like the system is working fine to me."

With the lower level workers doing the grunt work and the middle managers acting as trouble-shooters trying to keep the system from collapsing, that left the upper management, which happened to be Ves, with very little to do. His main responsibilities at this stage encompassed supervising the organizational system he set up and to be available to solve any implacable problems.

He also needed to take some time to draft up new plans to account for future trends, but that was it, really. Ves could pretty much sleep or lazy about all day and nothing would go wrong.

The only way he could make a significant contribution up to this point was if he visited the workshop compartments in person and used his considerable personal design skills to upgrade the mechs to an artisanal quality level.

"That's a waste of my time."

Upgrading a mech to a ridiculous quality level only affected the overall strength of the Vandal mech force by a minute proportion. A drop in the bucket wouldn't fundamentally make the bucket any fuller, at least not to the naked eye.

Therefore, Ves actually couldn't really figure out what kind of work he should perform to prove to Major Verle that he was being a dutiful head designer.

He scratched his head. "I guess if delegating everything looks too lazy to the people who keep track of me, then I should do the opposite. Some good dose of micromanagement will give me enough busywork to make it seem like I'm actually working."

Ves could maybe do so on the Shield of Hispania, because he could just descend to the lower decks and order some people around while flinging his arms. However, there was only so much he could do on a single ship.

"Hmm, if I recall, the progress on modifying the landbound mechs to cope with extreme gravity is still beset by complications and delays. Those seem like good issues for me to intervene."

Because the fleet was travelling in FTL, Ves only had access to the maintenance department on the Shield of Hispania. He retrieved the current list of ongoing projects on their flagship. Because the Shield mainly carried spaceborn mechs, she only carried a handful of landbound mechs besides their fixed allocation of Akkara mechs.

Ves recalled that he initially transferred some of the most complex landbound mechs to the Shield. He did this in the likelihood that modifying these mechs would prove to be a difficult challenge. The latest status reports he called up showed the depth of this problem.

"Oh yeah, this definitely needs my intervention."

Though normally Ves would have liked the autonomous work groups to figure out their own solutions, Ves forestalled this process when he abruptly butted in and started tweaking the design of an existing mech.

"Hmmm.. this is actually pretty solid work. Ketis could learn a thing or two from the mech designer who came up with this elegant solution. Too bad this mech designer is only good at a couple of things. Engine performance will drop by up to ninety-two percent if the mech is subjected to five g's of constant gravity! That's ridiculous!"

Such a fault would have been caught in simulations or training exercises eventually, but Ves didn't want to risk an oversight. A problem of this nature had to be nipped in the bud immediately.

"It's disappointing that my deputies haven't caught this problem. Are they blind or just that stupid?" Ves cursed his subordinates yet again.

Perhaps what he thought of as pretend work to make it seem like was busy might not be needed after all. If a giant oversight like this hadn't been noticed yet after a couple of weeks since they first entered the design logs, then maybe this phenomenon was more prevalent than he thought!

He spent an entire afternoon on correcting the design and improving the stability of some of its lackluster sections.

At the end of the day, he waved away the revised design, causing it to automatically update in the ship's database. Chief Haine down at the workshop should receive an awfully welcome surprise come the next shift.

This incident illuminated Ves on a severe deficiency in the current allocation of mech designers among the different ships.

"Every mech designer has their own specialties and development track. Even the relatively more rounded mech designers possess certain biases towards one type of mech over the other."

Perhaps one mech designer worked great with landbound mechs, but turned into an absolute wreck if he was forced to work on spaceborn mechs.

Ves himself suffered from the same problem but to a much lesser degree. He published multiple landbound mech designs, so he wasn't afraid of anything when it came to that area. Spaceborn mechs on the other hand was still new ground to him, and he felt much less confident in his ability to design a spaceborn mech with a modern flight system from scratch.

"Then there's mech designers like Ketis."

The Swordmaiden mech designer currently scrunched behind her desk trying to make sense of her microeconomics textbook possessed an extremely focused bias towards swordsman mechs. Her design versatility was so poor it might as well be nonexistent!

"If someone like Ketis is put in charge of a workshop aboard a Swordmaiden carrier, then she'll do okay. It will be different if she's put in charge of mechs aboard a Vandal carrier. She won't be able to manage the diverse mech types with any degree of competence!"

No wonder his deputy designers had to work to the bone lately. Right now, Ves even felt sorry for Mercator and Trozin.

"Damn. Why didn't I take note of this trend before?!"

Certainly, his deputies should have taken note of this development and bring it to his attention. Did they suspect but refrain from voicing their suspicions? "Or maybe they've gone so far deep into solving the smaller problems that they've lost perspective of the big ones?"

As far as he knew, the allocation of mech designers had always been done this way. A single low-ranking mech designer might be stationed on a single ship for years, performing the same work over and over again like some bot.

"I suppose if there are attentive supervisors on the job, the problems won't become too serious. But if I want to free up time for myself, I should shake this entire structure up!"

Chapter 683

The older structure worked when the entire Vandal mech regiment moved in a single fleet. Lower-ranked mech designers could turn to plenty of Apprentices or Journeymen for assistance.

It worked best with better-funded mech regiments. Unlike the Vandals, the other mech regiments employed an ample amount of mech designers. With up to a hundred higher-ranked Apprentices and up to twenty Journeymen employed at a time, a mech regiment did not lack for design muscle.

Even if most of them would spend their time on tinkering with actively developed mech designs, that much mech designers may still be useful even as tech support from a distance.

Besides, Ves bet that the other mech regiments also employed a lot more lower-ranking mech designers as well. Perhaps ten or twelve of them might be assigned to each combat carrier. If they were allocated in a clever manner, their diverse specialties enabled their team to cover a wide spectrum of possible problems.

"Something like this simply isn't possible with the Vandals. We don't have enough mech designers."

Every combat carrier in the Vandal fleet hosted a handful of lower-ranking mech designers. They were barely competent enough to propose and apply some rudimentary modifications. The real work needed to be done by Apprentices who were actually competent, of which the Vandals barely had enough to go around.

With only one high-ranking mech designer stationed aboard most ships, this meant that the variability of mechs between each ship would only diverge over time.

Perhaps one ship hosted a mech designer who knew how to work a flight system like magic. However, he was bad at everything else. The mechs aboard that combat carrier would therefore degrade in performance over time as that mech designer made a mess out of things. The only part about the mechs that didn't suffer a slide in performance was the flight system, which performed significantly better after he had a hand in their improvement.

Ves drew up an entirely new allocation scheme for his subordinates. His solution was simple. The mech designers needed to rotate to different ships every once in a while.

"The low-ranking mech designers can stay. Their adaptability is much more limited. They won't be able to adjust to their new working conditions so easily. Keeping them there will also enable some portion of continuity among mech designers to persist aboard each ship. Replacing one batch of mech designers with an entirely new batch of strangers will lead to too much wasted time in getting them all up to speed."

By rotating the higher-ranked Apprentice Mech Designers, Ves ensured that everyone's specialties would proliferate among the entire fleet.

For example, that expert in flight systems already finished his work on upgrading the flight systems of the mechs aboard his current posting. One day later, that mech designer transfers over to another ship.

She immediately came face-to-face with a different set of mechs with upgraded armor and an improved internal structure. The previous mech designer obviously emphasized their durability, but the ripple effects of his changes affected many other parameters as well, mostly in a negative direction. The entire flight system of these heavier-protected mechs strained to keep them moving agilely in space.

The flight system needed an entire overhaul to keep up with the changes to the rest of the mech, and that recently transferred mech designer came at the right time.

"Moving around the mech designers with different expertises and specialties will prevent the mechs from transforming into one-dimensional variants that is only good at one thing but bad at others."

The fundamental problem at work here was that most mech designers employed by the Vandals didn't possess the foundation or experience to design a mech by themselves. They spent so much time in design teams or collaborative projects that they neglected to shore up their complete ineptness towards certain areas of mech design.

"Every independent mech designer has to be an all-rounder to a degree. Their weakest link can literally drag down their career through the mud."

This was also why collaborative projects became the norm when it came to mech models with higher sales volume. The mech manufacturer that sold the mechs had to guarantee that they could fight and win, and to do so they needed to employ additional mech designers to cover the blind spots of their lead designers.

As Ves only possessed real experience with designing mechs by himself, he looked down on this dependence on others to cover for your weak points. He understood the logic and the merits of these methods, but he figured that the lead designers could easily become complacent about the gaps in his design skills.

A mech designer that became complacent was a mech designer that stopped advancing to a higher rank.

"All these mech designers have gone off the beaten path." Ves shook his head.

His disapproval aside, his fellow colleagues needed to eat too. Starting their own businesses may be a step too far for them, and Ves would have probably failed as well in his own attempt if not for the gift that changed his entire life.

Ves drew up a chart that listed out the available higher-ranked Apprentices at his disposal. He attached their names to their current berths, then shifted them around.

"Hmm, that's too simple. There are some cases where mech designers with similar specialties are visiting the same carrier."

He shuffled the allocation around and developed it into an increasingly more detailed periodic transfer schedule. After at least seven different transfers, each vessel received a mech designer that covered all of the major specialties that their mechs could benefit from. Not a single blind spot in their designs would remain if everything worked as planned.

After finishing this transfer schedule, he wrapped it up into a proposal where he explained the reasons why he thought was necessary to implement. Once he prettied up the words, he sent it on to Major Verle for him to decide whether to go through with it or not. This decision was way too big for Ves to unilaterally decide upon.

Ves smiled and leaned back in his chair. "Now that I've done my work for the shift, the rest of the day is mine."

Right now, the standard time reached the evening hours. The next shift came into force, freeing Ves and Ketis from their duties. Ketis pretty much ran out of the hatch of the office compartment as soon as possible, ostensibly to eat dinner, but really to escape her dreaded homework.

Ves shook her head at her eagerness to escape studying. "Mayra must have sat on her every time she tried to get Ketis to do her homework."

Many servicemen moved to the mess hall at this time. Ves decided to skip eating one of the mess hall's reconstituted meals this time.

"I'm way too short on time."

After some reluctance, Ves bent down and opened up the bottom drawer of his desk. He retrieved a nutrient pack he had stashed there some time ago in anticipation of this kind of event.

Ves looked at the nutrient pack with distaste. "Savoury chili flavor with chunks of imitation beef chunks."

Everyone in the galaxy learnt not to trust the flavor name by heart. Certainly, the nutrient packs tasted fairly similar to its description.. If they came off fresh from rollers of the biosynthesis plant.

Because nutrient packs tended to last for centuries, large organizations had a tendency to order an enormous batch of them from a massive trans-galactic enterprise to take maximum advantage of any bulk order discounts.

The newly-ordered batch was meant to be used up over a period of decades according to the bean counters who came up with these cost-saving deals.

Ves flipped the flat, rectangular package of the nutrient pack over and looked at its synthesis date. "Damn, it's over two decades old. It's gonna taste like dry sawwood at this stage."

With a grimace on his face, he tore open the package of the nutrient pack, revealing its extremely dry contents. Compacted biological nutrients and other weird substances formed a highly-dense bar of pure industrial food as black as coal.

He took a single bite and chewed with great difficulty. "Yeap. Dry sawwood."

He couldn't even taste a hint of chili, let alone the promised imitation beef.

Due to the extreme dryness of its contents, a nutrient pack should never be eaten without a readily available source of hydration. Plenty of starving people had actually died of thirst after frantically eating a nutrient pack without pausing to drink some water!

Water was always at hand, fortunately. Ves picked up an empty cup and held it in the air. A spout from the ceiling deck squirted some water into the cut. Hidden antigrav modules caused it to fall gently into the cup, preventing the liquid from splashing around.

"The things I do to survive." He sighed as he took a quick sip of water before finishing his nutrient pack within minutes.

The meal might not be very appetizing, but the entire routine didn't take up more than a couple of minutes.

"Let's get back to work now."

Many mech designers that wanted to exceed their quotas worked extra hours or entire double shifts in order to deliver an excellent performance for the week. Back when Ves first introduced the rewards they could gain for exceeding their weekly quotas, some had been very enthusiastic about pursuing these goodies.

"It's too bad that it's lost a lot of force by now."

Even the slower-witted among the mech designers found out that borrowing too many textbooks didn't help them out at all. They needed months to peruse and study a single profound book, so what use was there to juggle six of them at once?

Ves scratched his head. Motivating his subordinate mech designers to work overtime was harder than he thought. He needed to figure out a new reward to keep the chumps working like bots that didn't know how to rest.

"I'll figure something out another time."

Right now, with time pressing on his mind, Ves still had his side projects on his plate. "Right. At this moment, piecing together a working ultracompact battery is my highest priority."

Once he replicated a tiny battery the size of his tongue that compressed enough energy to fly an aircar from one continent to another, his ability to protect himself increased by a massive amount.

"A supercharged jamming device can act as a substitute for a stealth device, able to fry or blind even the most shielded electronics when put on maximum power. Such a gadget will help me remain discreet when discussing sensitive matters with other people. A supercharged stealth detector on the other hand will screw over those sneaky bastards from half a ship away with a single high-powered pulse."

He suddenly realized he neglected a crucial factor into the working of such supercharged devices. "My gadgets will fry and melt if too much power is pumped into them in a short interval. It would be like pouring a lake's worth of water through a fragile pipe made out of wood or something."

The pipe would burst instantly, splashing a humongous amount of water over anyone in the vicinity.

If Ves wanted to make full use of the ultracompact batteries, then he needed to go back to the drawing board and comprehensively strengthen the design of his existing gadgets.

More work on his plate. Oh joy.

He spent the rest of the evening making a start on this project. He dove into the fragmented documentation that explained the science that underpinned their workings and understood perhaps five percent of the necessary information necessary to fabricate a working version of the batteries.

"This isn't going to be easy." Ves frowned deeper. Still, he needed to persevere. He always expected this effort to be a slog.

As evening turned into night according to the standard time, Ves rubbed his eyes and swiped away the projection explaining one of the many complex theories that he needed to master.

This was too much! His brain was already starting to pound. It signified that some of the theories involved higher concepts that Ves shouldn't be exposed to. This was far harder than he thought!

"The Skull Architect lied to me! This knowledge is filled with traps!"

Chapter 684

The files on ultracompact batteries had not come in the pure and neutral form as he had hoped. The core part of the virtual documents consisted of slightly outdated but exceedingly complex research papers written by experts and to be read by their peers.

The difference between a textbook and a research paper was profound. The former sought to elevate the understanding of their readers in a particular field, while a research paper published cutting-edge research results that pushed the envelopes of that field.

Certainly, Ves was no stranger to research papers. He read a whole bunch of them back in school, but they usually consisted of classic seminal publications that exerted a historic influence on the development of mech design. His teachers carefully selected the least profound among the papers to bestow to their students, and sometimes even went the extra mile and censored the higher-level concepts that would have broken the prospective young mech designers.

Ves enjoyed no such coddling now. These papers, at least a decade or two old, should have been read by researchers with at least five decades of experience in the field of electrical engineering and the like.

While Ves himself upgraded his Electrical Engineering Skill to Journeyman-level himself, that was far from adequate to decipher the papers written by researchers who dedicated their entire scientific career in advancing the capabilities of capacitors, batteries and energy cells.

The writing style of research papers reflected their dedication and mastery of the field. The dense paragraphs was filled with jargon, resulting in content that contained an extremely high information density.

An average fictional novel was like a feather. Their authors aimed to provide their readers with a pleasurable and comfortable reading experience.

A textbook was like a blanket. Their authors and editors gently eased those new to the contents into the fold.

A research paper was like a brick. The scientists who wrote them simply couldn't be bothered with the long-winded process of using a feather or a blanket to educate their fellow peers. They instead used the bluntest object they could find and smack them against each other's faces.

Those with a big head could take the blows without sustaining any damage and dish them right back with the same amount of strength.

Unfortunately, the people who lacked the smarts and theoretical background to understand the brick would just get their teeth smacked out. Many even sustained worse injuries.

This was the reason why he called these research papers a trap. The Skull Architect meant to torment him with knowledge that was in his grasp yet locked behind a metaphorical mob of angry researchers armed with bricks!

"It's an insidious trap, alright." He muttered with a glowering expression. "He's testing me again."

The Skull Architect had taken some of his measures, and bequeathed him with a test that corresponded to the man's expectations of Ves. It was patently ridiculous because even a Journeyman Mech Designer would get lost in these research papers!

"In the end, I showed off too much of my capabilities. He probably mistook me for a fast learner."

Ves could handle the jargon. He could handle the dense and packed academic writing. What he might not be able to handle was the mental contamination inherent in the papers.

"If mech designers crystallize the essence of their customs, principles, aspirations and biases into their design philosophy, then scientists and researchers have adopted something similar called their research philosophy."

The rules and dangers concerning design philosophy were much more severe than those related to research philosophy. However, even if research philosophy ended up a little milder, it could still be lethal to an immature and undeveloped mind if exposed at full blast.

Ves found to his dismay that even with the advantages of his heightened Intelligence, Concentration and Spirituality Attributes, he still sensed he was subject to mental contamination from the research philosophies buried deep within the contents of the papers.

They were like whispers in the back of his mind. They tempted him to leave mechs aside and devote more research into developing better batteries.

They urged him to side with the different camps that bitterly divided the researchers. One camp advocated that the best batteries were those with the absolute highest capacities. Every other concern could be shoved aside as long as the batteries lasted forever.

Another camp favored maximum energy transmission. They wanted to make batteries and capacitors be able to load and dump as much energy as safe and practical as possible. Maximum capacity could take a backseat in their eyes.

Doctrinal and ideological conflicts divided every field of science. If a theory existed, there were tons of advocates and detractors arguing in favor or against its merits.

Casually stepping in the middle of this debate without any expectation of taking a side was like navigating through a minefield. No matter where he stepped, he would eventually get his by a blast.

In short, Ves estimated that he needed to expend a substantial portion of his mental energy merely to digest a tiny fraction of the knowledge hidden within the research papers.

It required hard work, extreme concentration and a willingness to torture his mentality to get anything useful out of the academic literature.

"At the very least there's a great benefit to be gained at the end."

What Ves obtained were the keys to acquiring a shallow but undeniably broad theoretical foundation into the field of energy storage.

The versatility of mastering such knowledge far surpassed the act of learning a ready-to-fabricate ultracompact battery blueprint!

Mastering the theory allowed him to design any battery according to his precise set of demands and limitations. He could design a cheap ultracompact battery that barely did the job when he was facing many restrictions, which aptly described his current situation. He could upgrade to better battery later on when he returned home and had access to the full resources of his mech company.

Mastering a single blueprint only allowed him to fabricate a single battery without even truly understanding how it worked or if he made a mistake somewhere. It also didn't take into account his context. For example, he could only cry if the design schematics demanded the use of an exotic that was only available on the other side of the galaxy!

"The difference between creation and replication is vast. If there's a viable choice, I would always choose the former over the latter!"

The tech underpinning ultracompact batteries possessed broad applications. Learning how to design a tiny ultracompact battery meant for man-portable equipment was no different from learning how to design the same battery but scaled for mechs.

Of course, such a battery would be prohibitively expensive and wildly inappropriate for commercial mechs in the galactic rim. Ultracompact batteries were rare in the Komodo Star Sector for a good reason.

"Well, it's not like I have to pull all the stops and design the absolute best batteries and energy cells for my mechs."

Even an energy cell that applied ten percent of the theories he mastered from the research material might be enough to boost its energy density by a significant proportion!

Overcome with the potential for greatness locked within the research papers, Ves began to cackle uncontrollably. "Kukuku.. Hahahahaha! HAHAHAHAHAHA!"

!

"Not good!"

He abruptly stopped once he realized how stupid he must have looked. The mental contamination from reading the research papers already started to get their hooks into his mind!

Ves violently shook his head, trying to clear away his current thoughts. "I have to be more vigilant about this matter! Riches and rewards are intertwined with risk and danger. I won't be able to obtain these goodies so easily without paying a price."

He put the research materials aside for another day. Right now, he didn't trust himself to fend off the encroaching mental contamination if he continued his studies.

"I should only study the materials in short bursts of time. I have to bleed off the mental contamination over time."

He decided to turn in for the night, as sleep always worked great in cleansing the mind.

The next day, he fell into a new routine. He received a message from Major Verle about his proposal.

Surprisingly, the mech officer rejected it straight out of hand without any opportunity for Ves to argue for his case.

"Why?" Ves asked, befuddled and a little angry for his idea to be shot down like that.

The brief message stated that Verle found the arguments plausible, but other concerns prevented him from taking it into consideration.

Right now, the highest priority of the Vandals was to maintain the highest state of information security! Shuffling mech designers around every once in a while severely increased the difficulty of keeping a lid on their secrets! The fleet already minimized inter-ship shuttle traffic to an absolute minimum. The more stuff flew in space, the higher the odds of someone discreetly left behind some breadcrumbs.

Another reason why Major Verle rejected the scheme was that both the mech designers and the crew faced too much disruption if they had to become accustomed to new faces. It was especially harsh for the mech designers to leave behind their comrades and acquaintances they befriended over the course of their posting.

One particular line in the message stood out to Ves.

[As we go deeper into the abyss of the frontier, our men and women need anchors to keep them grounded and content. Do not belittle the strength that can be gained from knowing your comrades have your back. Fleet-wide morale is expected to deteriorate over time. Let us not hasten its descent by disrupting the familiar.]

In other words, Ves basically had to suck it up and figure out another solution to the long-term bias problem affecting the mechs aboard different carriers.

"Well, I guess it's back to the status quo."

With most of the quantum entanglement nodes down and inter-ship communication restricted to essential movement orders to keep the fleet together, Ves had no way of transferring the specialties of one mech designer to another ship that desperately needed them. In fact, the only solution that he could think of that might work was to take over the job of his deputies and rotate among the different carriers in person!

"So much for delegation."

Visiting the different carriers in person to wipe the butts of his incompetent mech designers consumed way too much of his time. How would he have any time left to spend on his side projects if he spent most of his nights aboard other starships?

Therefore, after a long moment's thought, he turned to the next best thing. He would personally comb over the designs of all five-hundred mechs from the comfort of his desk. After casually fixing up the most egregious faults, he would attach his corrected design to the delayed data burst the Shield of Hispania sent out to her sister ships at a fixed interval.

"It won't be possible for me to have a conversation with the mech designers who designed such atrocities." He furrowed his brows. "If I don't hammer in the point of how stupid they are, they might not even accept my suggested corrections."

Mech designers were confident of their own designs to a fault. Many took criticism of their work badly, and to see Ves run all over their baby like it was a piece of trash affronted them emotionally like nothing else.

Whenever someone gently provided constructive criticism to their work, they instantly turned into raging mothers who believed their sweet little child could do no wrong. Never mind the kids were actually devils who wrecked the family's aircar.

Ves sighed. "They'll just have to deal with it if they know what's good for them. The current state of our mechs has a lot of room for improvement."

Managing over five-hundred mechs was hard work. The fundamental problem behind their difficulties was that the Vandals simply lacked too many mech designers. The Verle Task Force had always been muddling along for the last half year or so. However, the cracks that slowly built up only started becoming visible now that the issue grew into a major problem.

He was already taking notes of this situation. If he ever became in charge of an independent unit, he would be sure not to repeat the mistakes he witnessed here.

Chapter 685

The Flagrant Swordmaiden fleet emerged out of FTL at the edge of a barren star system. Even before the sensors of their starships resolved their way out of the confusion that followed every transition process, squads of mechs emerged from the combat carriers. The formed into pre-arranged patrols and revolved around the combined fleet in a widening orbit in preparation to meet any threat.

No threats surfaced against the newcomers. The patrol mechs encountered no space mines, no old debris from past space battles, no ambush from a prepared pirate fleet, no storm of sand that served as the prelude of a massive sandmen assault.

By all accounts, the uninhabited star system was devoid of any threats. To be certain, the Inheritor mechs upgraded with the stealth detecting sensor array performed a grid search of the nearby space in the vicinity of the fleet.

"Stand down from action stations!"

Everyone sighed in relief. Safety was not guaranteed in the frontier like it was in civilized space.

Back when Ves served aboard the Ark Horizon for House Kaine, the massive expeditionary fleet practically brute-forced their way to the Groening System. Lord Jeremiah Kaine put so much faith in the strength of his extravagantly equipped fleet that no one could imagine its downfall!

Yet fall it did, and in the most dishonorable way at that. The expeditionary fleet strenuously beat off a major sandmen attack, only to be ambushed by the Dragons of the Void before they could recuperate and replenish their forces!

The pirates were genius for springing their ambush at the weakest point of the expeditionary fleet's mech forces. The proud second-class mechs from the Constance Grand Kingdom that outperformed any pirate trash couldn't put up much of a resistance with their tired mech pilots, their dented and damaged frames and empty energy cells.

A major spaceborn mech force fielding mechs worth the equivalent of at least 500 million bright credits met an ignoble end at that follow-up battle! All notions of fairness had been thrown out the window as Kaine's household troops as a fresh and numerically superior force of pirate mechs overwhelmed them in an instant!

Much of those pirate mechs didn't cost more than the equivalent of 20 to 30 million bright credits! A significant proportion of their thralls probably piloted absolute crap mechs worth only half as much or less.

Ves learned a valuable lesson from this experience. "The frontier never plays fair!"

The nature of combat afforded very little margin for error to those who commanded over mech forces. The stakes were raised in the frontier because there was practically no safe harbor for losers to run to when they lost a battle.

Therefore, both the Vandals and the Swordmaidens never let down their guard. No matter how quaint and quiet the star system appeared, they launched at least a third of their spaceborn mech contingent at all times in order to patrol the perimeter around their vulnerable starships as they cycled their FTL drives.

Ves understood where the serious intensity and violent tendencies of the Swordmaidens came from. Roaming the untamed stars like vagabonds, living in fear of bumping into anything that surpassed them in might, such a life never allowed them to rest and put down their worries.

"No wonder the people from the frontier act like they are one step away from lashing out in violence."

It was no way to live a stable life, yet it served as their means of survival.

A shift in mentality occurred when the two forces started to sort themselves out.

Now that they formally entered the space beyond the rule or protection of human authority, the Flagrant Vandals stopped taking the lead. Oh, they were still the more powerful of the two, but as the example with House Kaine's expeditionary fleet had shown, brute force rarely won out in the frontier.

In fact, the stronger the force, the more they radiated energy. If some dormant sandmen detected the ample amount of emissions escaping from their ships and mechs, they would surely send out a hunting fleet of sentient sand to suck away all of the juice.

This time, the Flagrant Vandals had to depend on Lydia's Swordmaidens to survive the many perils of the frontier.

All of this didn't concern Ves, however. He was still trying to manage the whole mess on correcting the flawed and uneven modifications to the mechs in the Vandal roster. There were over five-hundred mechs, and tackling all of their problems consumed a significant amount of his time even if he sped up his design work and cut some corners.

In his free time, he threw himself into studying both the poisonous research papers related to ultracompact batteries. He also spent some time down at the workshop to make sense of the stealth shuttle fragments with the Chief Engineer, though admittedly he hadn't been able to spend as much time as he ought to on this project.

It all came down to lack of time!

On top of spending his time on his core duties and his side projects, he also became preoccupied with shaping Ketis into the mold he made for her. Unlike a mech design, Ketis was a living being, so he needed to be very delicate with how he eased her into the mold.

"Teacher," Ketis spoke as she looked up with tired eyes from her latest textbook on business strategy. "I've had enough. There's no point for me to read all of these books on how to run a business! I'm never going to start my own mech company. Not every mech designer is like you, you know!"

Ves smirked and steepled his fingers together ass he leaned in over his desk. "That's where you are wrong. No matter what job you do, everything is connected to scarcity. A virtual simulator allows you to play with an unlimited amount of resources. You can play with any design you want, and your imagination is the limit. That's not the case in realspace. Funding constraints, manpower constraints, technology constraints, demand constraints and more all apply whether you are starting your own business or work for someone else. Don't you think the Swordmaidens are the same? If you are to be put in charge of their mechs one day, you need to run your department like you run a business, at least partially."

"I don't get it." She shook her horned little head. "Okay, the book on microeconomics and accounting will help me budget stuff. I can see how that's useful in keeping managing the money. But these other books are a chore to read through! They just blather on and on about this and that about decisions that only senior managers in a big company ever gets to deal with! What does this have to do with mech design?!"

"I already told you the answer, Ketis. I don't like to repeat myself. For now, you can put the book down and come with me. We're going down the workshop compartment."

Her eyes glistened a bit. Compared to being forced to sit behind her desk studying books that might as well have been greek to her, getting her hands dirty with mechs sounded a lot more fun! She hopped to her feet and didn't forget to order her floating scabbard to float behind her back.

She bounced around with an abundance of energy as they made their way down the lower decks of the combat carrier. "What are we gonna do today?"

"You'll see."

They made their way down to the workshop compartment and walked past the busy mech technicians who perpetually needed to fix something. Ves nodded in approval at their diligence. Chief Haine ran a tight ship and she was definitely one of the better chief technicians he had met so far.

Ketis didn't take much notice of the mech technicians at all, despite their curious stares at her exotic form and her prominent exobeast pelt that she wore over her body. In fact, it was like they plainly didn't exist.

He stopped and turned. "What do you think about our mech technicians?"

"Huh? Uhm, they're fine."

"That statement has virtually no value to me. Describing something as 'fine' is meaningless. Let me ask you another question. What are the mech technicians in your outfit like?"

She sneered. "They're pathetic wastes of flesh. They're too weak to defend themselves or to fight on our behalf. We have to do everything for them, it seems. Lydia is too soft-hearted with the dregs she picks up. Sometimes those bumbling fools drop some vital component or makes a mistake when reassembling a mech, forcing Mayra to come down and fix the mess they made."

Ves couldn't believe what he just heard! The worst thing about it was that Ketis spoke her opinions on the Swordmaiden mech technicians in the middle of the workshop compartment with dozens of mech technicians manning the various machines or transferring parts and materials back and forth.

Work slowed down as the mech technicians collectively glowered at Ketis as if she just badmouthed their mothers.

"O-kay. The two of us need a talk, right now!"

He took a firm grip on her arm and insistently dragged her over to the nearest empty office compartment. He practically threw her inside before entering himself and locking the hatch. To make sure no mech technician was listening in, he activated his jamming device that was attached to his toolbelt. A low field that felt like static and mixed with rain enveloped the unused office.

"What was that about?" Ketis glared at him like he drowned his kitten or something. "I didn't do anything wrong! I just talked!"

"Don't you realize the gravity of what you just pulled off? With just a few sentences, you pissed off all of the mech technicians aboard our ship!"

"So what?" The defiance in her eyes never dimmed.

There was something very wrong about this whole matter. Ves couldn't believe she casually disregarded the mech technicians like that. It was as if their opinions didn't matter at all.

"Look, maybe it's a cultural difference between the two of us that's to blame." He surmised as he calmed down a little. "However, that hardly gives you leave to call the mech technicians weak, pathetic or incompetent."

"But that's what they are." She stared straight at his eyes as she spoke those words, looking like she spoke a self-evident truth. "I don't know why you're so caring about those leeches, but where I'm from, even bots are more useful than our mech technicians."

Ves sighed for the umpteenth time. How many times did Ketis confound him already? He had a feeling this wouldn't be the last time she would spring an unpleasant surprise in his face. The things he had to deal with at work.

"I would appreciate it if you keep your disparaging comments about mech technicians to yourself." He finally spoke. "Right now, you are a guest of the Flagrant Vandals, so you will need to become accustomed to our ways. One of them is that you don't piss off the workers who are responsible for doing most of the grunt work in servicing, repairing and maintaining our primary war machines."

"That.. sounds weird." She frowned. Though she was stubborn about a lot of things, she wasn't stupid. Not per se. Perhaps his own behavior finally managed to bore through her thick skull. "I really can't see how mech technicians deserve any respect. I just can't."

"Where does this come from? What is wrong with the mech technicians of the Swordmaidens, and why are you so contemptuous of them? You have to realize that in civilized space, the vast majority of outfits always take decent care of their mech technicians. Even if their importance ranks lower than mech technicians and mech designers, they are a valuable cog in the machine."

Ves couldn't recall any mech outfit that treated their mech technicians poorly. Something like that seemed self-evident.

"Huh. That does sound different from how we do things at the Swordmaidens." Like the uncouth frontier barbarian she was, Ketis dropped her bombshell without any fanfare. "When we're short on mech designers, we go raid some treasure hunters or something and take away their mech technicians. All of them are our slaves."

Slaves. And people said Lydia's Swordmaidens wasn't as bad as many of the other pirate gangs.

Chapter 686

Ves realized that Ketis spent most of her time in his office when she first boarded the Shield of Hispania. He hadn't taken her down the workshops and the hangar bays even once. Due to that, her true opinion on mech technicians never had the chance to come up. Ves simply took for granted that the Swordmaidens ran their maintenance departments like every other outfit he had seen.

He should have known better. The frontier lived in primitive times. Humans living in the Faris Star Region devolved into simpler, brutal means of survival.

Whispers of slavery always surrounded the frontier. Ves didn't expect for it to hit closer to home.

Even Walter's Whalers, the presiding gang on Cloudy Curtain, didn't treat their mech technicians that badly!

"You know what's needed to protect yourself in the frontier?" She said with an indignant tone. She perceived his judgemental thoughts and felt challenged at his disapproving gaze. "Strength! The power to fight! Without strength, how can you defend yourself against the sandmen and the other scum that roam around the stars? The only people of value in the frontier are those who can stand up for themselves and fight."

"And those who can't? The mech designers? The mech technicians? The ship crew? Average people?"

Ketis sneered contemptuously at the mention of noncombatants. "Those who can fight reign over those who can't. The mech pilots rule at the top. The ones who can fight with a gun or sword in their hands are counted among the middle rung of the ladder. Those who can't fight but master rare and valued abilities such as being able to design a mech or command a ship sit right below the warriors. As for those with lesser ability or no ability at all, they're the dregs of the frontier."

"So let me get this right." He said, trying to parse through her words. "The mech pilots belong to the privileged class, the other warriors belong to the fighting class, the mech designers and ship captains belong to the lower class, and the people of lesser skill comprise of the underclass?"

"That's what I said, though I never heard it put in that way."

"This is too extreme!"

Even in civilized space, plenty of people whose fighting abilities were bad earned an incredible amount of respect. From statesmen to business tycoons to scientists to artists and more, human society exhibited a broad spectrum of talent and skill that elevated them to the top.

However, according to Ketis, someone as respected as a medical doctor could barely be counted as a low-class laborer from the impoverished working-class city of Haston in Bentheim!

Instead, the ill-bred thugs and gang members that terrorized the streets and caused a lot of trouble ranked higher than these respected doctors and scientists, just because they could shoot a gun or throw a fist!

This was madness!

Ves voiced his thoughts. "How you pirates stay aloft when you treat your doctors, your technicians, your farmer, your miners and other essential vocations like dirt?"

"You think that because someone is good at something, they automatically deserve respect?" Ketis sneered at his naivete. "Teacher, without the ability to protect yourself and fight on behalf of yourself and your mates, all your smarts and abilities won't save you from a laser beam burning your precious brain to ash. Everything you build or obtain rests on the condition that you can defend your stuff! What is the use of becoming the best mech designer in the galaxy when any group of pirates can easily point his gun at you and force you to work for their outfit?"

He paused for a bit as he became affected by the sheer amount of conviction in her voice. She wasn't being wordy for a random reason. She truly believed in this spiel the frontier had ingrained into her from birth!

"...Is this why you keep up your sword practice so diligently? You value your status of being among the fighting class more than the wonders and mystery of working as a mech designer?"

"Mech designers are cowards who can't be bothered to fight their own battles." She summed up her true thoughts about her vocation in the bluntest fashion possible. "The only reason they aren't dumped with the other mech technicians in the so-called underclass you named is because the good ones help the privileged class of mech pilots fight better."

"And the rest? The lesser skilled mech designers? The mech technicians?"

"We don't have a lot of those in the frontier. Everyone in the settlements who grows up either inherits the work of their parents or gets picked up by a pirate crew. We don't have your schools or workplaces where mech technicians or ship engineers or any of those other difficult jobs can be raised. The only way to get them is to rob them from others that do have these people."

"I see."

Ves should have anticipated such a custom. He had already heard of the harsh conditions at the frontier before, of how it was sparsely populated, of how the settlements couldn't sustain the technology level of modern humanity, of how schools were virtually non-existent.

If he took some time to connect the dots, then he should have figured out how the pirates truly kept their ships, mechs, space stations and other gear and industry running. No matter how well a pirate could fight, their lethality didn't avail themselves when it was time to repair a broken FTL drive.

Still, to treat the people who fixed up their mechs, ships, weapons and other gear like slaves was a step too far to Ves. He couldn't even imagine how the pirates managed to survive when they became completely dependent on their slaves to run their most essential gear. Weren't they afraid of betrayal?

He forcefully calmed himself down. Blowing up at Ketis benefited nobody and would only worsen their relationship. Right now, he lacked too much data to come to a decision.

"Describe the slaves aboard your Swordmaiden ships, please."

"What can I say?" She whimsically twirled her short locks of green hair. "We Swordmaidens are great fighters, but we simply can't find enough women to work as ship ratings or mech technicians. Every other pirate gang including the big two pirate blocs are scrambling for men to fill up those positions as well, so we're hardly unique at that. The only way to get them is by plundering the treasure hunting fleets who never stop coming to our region of space. Some pirates don't have much luck with that, so they cross over to civilized space and assault some lightly defended space station or isolated colony for slaves."

"How are you able to make them stay obedient? It's a simple matter for any mech technician or rating to sabotage the machines they are working with. One misplaced component, one weakened support structure, a few substances in the fuel tank where there ought to be none, and everything quickly comes crashing down."

"That's the easiest part." Ketis grinned. "You just have to teach them a lesson to know who's boss. Back at the Swordmaidens, Lydia only lets us take men whenever we need to top off our support crew. When we first capture them, we beat them up and threaten them a few times. Most quickly understand the new score, but some need firmer handling. In any case, as long as we have some Swordmaidens overseeing our slaves, we can stop most of their attempts at cooking something up."

"That doesn't solve the problem of obedience. You can beat a man down, but you can't extinguish his desire to be free."

His Brighter background came to the fore when he spoke those words. Slavery was one of the big taboos of the Big Two, but the Bright Republic valued freedom more fervently than other states.

"Oh, we have plenty of tricks to account for that in the frontier. Whenever we capture a large batch of slaves, we head over to a space station belonging to the Dragon Alliance. The Dragons of the Void offers us a service where we hand over our slaves for processing."

"What does this processing entail?"

"Heck if I know. The Dragons of the Void messes with their heads somehow. They're always the best at this kind of stuff. After they're done with the slaves, they give them back to us after paying some K-coins for the service. Now, our captives have become proper, obedient if somewhat dull little slaves. We don't have to worry about any antics from our new toys after they go through processing."

The Dragons of the Void. One of the biggest two pirate organizations in the Faris Star Region, and an old enemy of Ves. Their tentacles reached wider than he thought.

Ves closed his eyes and practically pressed his eyelids into his cheeks. Bursts of anger, frustration and resignation flitted through his mind. He pushed them aside in favor of cold, hard practicality.

Right now, he needed to be rational.

"How are the.. Processed men aboard your ship working out for the Swordmaidens?"

"As I've said, they're stupid, dimwitted and lacking in imagination. The only merit to them is that they are human enough to make sense of our command, and they have kept most of their old skills and knowledge. They're barely better than bots in that sense. At least they cry out nicely when you kick them around. Bots don't make those satisfying screams of pain when you smack them up."

Ves tried to imagine the life of a man within the Swordmaidens. Stripped of his free will, brainwashed into obeying the Swordmaidens as if they were goddesses, worked to the bone and for the rest of their lives, what difference was there between death and slavery?

At least Ketis never showed too much contempt at him for being a man. Considering that most pirates in the frontier consisted of men, she knew better than to belittle the masculine side of humanity.

Still, this whole custom revealed one massive vulnerability. One that was great enough to jeopardize their entire mission!

"How many slaves are among your fleet?"

"I don't know. We never keep count of numbers like that. To my guess, it's easily a thousand or more men. Our fleet is smaller than yours and Mayra told me that processing the slaves and whipping them into shape to perform their new duties costs a lot of time and money, so we don't go overboard like the Dragons of the Void."

"Don't you think you are inviting a hidden danger in your outfit by relying on slaves processed by the Dragons of the Void?" Ves pointedly asked. "From what I've been told, the Dragons aren't the friendliest or the most reliable bunch."

"Oh, we know." She nonchalantly shrugged before she grinned like a predator. "That's why we tend to stay far away from their territory once we're done. This is a non-issue. Thousands of pirates have made use of their processing service and not once have we heard of a slave revolt. Besides, if something like that did happen, you have to remember they're mostly weaklings who don't even have the strength to rustle up a single chicken. We can chop them all up within an hour if necessary."

"What if they keep their revolt quiet? What if instead of taking up arms they sabotage your mechs, ships and other stuff? Their ship engineers could easily induce a power reactor to blow, or destroy an FTL drive during transit. How can you prevent such instances?"

"As I said, we're not stupid enough to let the slaves work out of our sight. We've stationed Swordmaidens in each compartment they work at, and we do have some smarter Swordmaidens like me who followed some courses or received some tutoring to know what's going on. As far as I know, almost every other pirate gang run their slaves along the same line."

"And the Ravienne Alliance?" Ves mentioned the other pirate bloc. "I've never heard any mention of brainwashing from their organizations. How do they keep their slaves in line?"

"Oh, that's simple. They do some other freaky stuff. It depends on the outfit, really. The most popular methods I've heard are genetically modifying them into ugly abominations to implanting bombs in their brains that automatically detonate once they run out of the range of their assigned ship."

The way these pirates treated their support personnel was abysmal and prone to catastrophe, but somehow they made it work. Ves heard so many surprises today that he simply didn't know how to respond to this all.

"You pirates live in a messed up society."

Chapter 687

Pirate Empires lied to him! He thought the virtual board game accurately reflected the woes of becoming a mercenary commander or a pirate commander, but in fact it missed such a huge hole!

In hindsight, Ves recognized that their depiction of how to run a pirate gang was overly romantic and glossed over many essential facts. The biggest one being that pirates relied on slavery to fulfill their shortage in technical and support personnel!

Ves already knew that the Dragons of the Void thumbed their noses against the taboo against brainwashing humans. Enslaving them was a logical follow-up to their loathsome behavior.

Yet commercializing their brainwashing facilities and opening them up to other pirates with too many prisoners on their hands sounded absurd. They basically empowered the independent pirate outfits this way.

The suspicion that this was all a trap grew strongly in Ves. With thousands of brainwashed men working on behalf of the Swordmaidens aboard their precious starships, it only took one single mental trigger to turn them against their erstwhile owners!

The paranoia always brewing within his mind rang countless alarm bells right now! Were the Vandals even aware of the hidden danger the Swordmaidens brought onto themselves?

The Vandals shouldn't be that stupid, and neither were the Republic's intelligence services. This practice of enslaving mech technicians and ship crew should have been common among the frontier.

It still sounded idiotic for becoming too dependent on slave labor to perform vital jobs such as servicing their mechs and keeping their ships from falling apart!

Still, now that his shock had subsided, he began to see that Ketis had no involvement in the matter. Lydia's Swordmaidens embodied both the good and the bad of frontier culture and customs evolved over hundreds of years of surviving among the untamed stars.

"I'm sorry for my overreaction, Ketis." He eventually uttered, looking her in the eyes. "You're not responsible for this matter. However, you have to be aware that my reaction to how you treat your technicians is rather mild. There will be many who will express their disgust at you. Can you at least understand why people like me react this way?"

She was at least smart enough to understand that much. "I get it. Slavery is bad. The big bad MTA and CFA doesn't like it when the weak and stupid are owned by their betters. That's despite the fact that you bunch of hypocrites are doing the same thing in civilized space, only you don't call it by that word! From what I heard what goes on in your side of the border, she life of a regular person isn't necessarily better than being a slave."

"It differs from state to state. The Bright Republic and the Reinald Republic are some of the better ones around. You've visited the Reinald Republic before, haven't you? Didn't you notice the people there are free and happy?"

"All I saw were sheep that have deluded themselves that they are kings." She sneered. "They were so weak that they died by the millions once a bunch of terrorists mechs laid waste to Harkensen I. In my eyes, that incident alone proves that you're nothing if you don't have any way to fight back. The Honored Ones enforced their no-mech policy on Harkensen I so much that they stripped you all from the chance to defend yourselves. Didn't we salvage our own mechs down there? That's the only reason why we succeeded in pushing through the spaceport."

She had a point, if only just. Frankly, the Reinaldans had themselves to blame for getting caught with their pants down. Not only did they scale back the readiness of their garrisons to an atrocious degree due to their lack of engaging in major conflicts, they also deprived others from bringing them the means to defend their lives if the authorities dropped the ball.

Which they did. On their on feet. Which hurt them a lot.

He sighed. "Okay, I don't want to argue about this point. I'm not hopeful that you'll ever change your beliefs, but you should at least be discreet about it while you are a guest aboard our ships. We do not run our ships as pirates, so I will appreciate it if you don't treat our mech technicians like you treat yours."

"Why should I? I don't really like them. I'm not going to approach them on my own accord." Ketis huffed.

"Look, despite your feelings about them, interacting, instructing and leading mech technicians is a vital skill to mech designers. If you don't know what they do or what their limits are, how will you be able to take over from Mayra in the future? Perhaps you'll be able to learn how to respect them after you work alongside the Vandal mech technicians. They're not the dummies you think they are. Mostly."

"...Can I still kick their butts if they annoy me?"

Ves chuckled a bit. "Sure. I've done so a few times myself if they need some motivating. Just don't go overboard with it, okay? Kick them enough to bruise or sting, but not enough to break their bones or bring them close to death. And definitely don't employ your sword either! If mech technicians die from your hand for any reason, I'll shove you out of the airlock and kick you back to the Jaded Sword through a spacewalk!"

"Whatever you say, teacher. I'll kick you out into space before you can do that to me. I'm stronger than you!"

After Ves defused the tension, he briefly instructed her on the do's and don'ts when they returned to the workshop compartment. As long as she didn't do anything egregious such as disparaging the mech technicians in public again or mentioning about how they would be treated like slaves back at the Swordmaiden fleet, then the situation could still be salvaged.

They exited the office in a more subdued mood. Ves still mulled over the implications of what he learned about pirate society while Ketis pretended to be contrite.

The little devil. Ves bet she had nothing but contempt when she looked at the Vandal mech technicians.

For their part, the techs returned to their professionalism to keep an even expression around the two mech designers. It looked way too forced to be natural, though. If they had their way, they might have cornered Ketis and confronted her about her slanderous words.

"Morning, Ves." Chief Haine called as she pushed herself forward from her leaning position against the bulkhead. "I just heard an incident happened here. Something about some ugly words being thrown around."

Ketis ignored the burly woman and turned to Ves. "Who is this?"

"This is Carletta Haine, the Chief Technician of the Shield of Hispania. She's responsible for the mech technicians and makes sure that they do a good job."

The guest designer regarded Chief Haine with a mild amount of respect. "It can't be easy keeping your.. people in line."

"It's a skill I've honed over decades of service." The Chief replied simply. Though they only exchanged a couple of words, Haine's dislike of the girl already deepened. "I don't think it is something that you'll ever be able to master. You don't fulfill the requirements to do so. Perhaps you should spend your time elsewhere."

The two women, one as young as as a fresh graduate, another in her older and more wizened years, glared at each other as if they were cats competing for the same mouse.

Ves stood by awkwardly as the women decided to have an impromptu staring contest. Eventually, he stretched out a hand between their eyes, breaking their stupid dominance ritual of forcing the other to avert their eyes first. He didn't have time for this nonsense.

"Chief, please, I've got this in hand. I already set the matter straight to Ketis. This is a delicate situation that requires a diplomatic approach." He begged.

The chief glanced at him with an unreadable expression before turning back to Ketis. "Fine. As long as this missy here give my men an apology, I'm willing to forget the matter."

"You want an apology from me?! Then you have to fight for it!" Ketis growled and placed her hand behind her back until she gripped her greatsword. Apologising without a fight was unthinkable to her! "You. Me. The practice ring. If you can beat me flat, I'll give you your apology. If you can't, then you better stay out of my way!"

Ves audibly groaned and palmed his face. What was wrong with these people!? Perhaps he should have expected a stunt like this from Ketis, but Chief Haine as well?

He quickly spread his gaze across the entire compartment and saw that pretty much every mech technician who wasn't performing any sensitive work had slowed down to listen. Over half of their expression showed approval at their chief's attempt at backing them up.

He understood now. Chief Haine had a responsibility to defend the honor of her mech technicians. Failure to do so meant that the mech technicians would lose faith in her leadership and their morale would plummet.

Both of them remained implacable due to the expectations placed upon them by others! They literally couldn't back down in any circumstances or lose all their respect!

As someone with no stake in the matter, Ves took unilateral action. He approached Ketis, grabbed her arm and dragged her away. "Sorry, chief, but Ketis has some work to attend to! See you later!"

It might not have been an elegant way to resolve the standoff, but it did break the spell between them. The Chief stared wordlessly at their backs before heading towards the exit. Perhaps she already found out that there was nothing to be gained from pressing the matter. Not with Ves around.

As for Ves, he had been ready to employ his considerable physical strength to haul the genetically modified vixen away from her staring contest. Surprisingly, Ketis felt as soft as a pillow. She didn't resist at all, which was completely contrary to his expectations.

Perhaps Ketis became aware of how bad of a situation she was in, and latched onto his move as a way to escape the standoff without repercussions.

"Your chief technician is a formidable woman." She praised. "She can give a lot of Swordmaidens a run for her money."

"Lydia's Swordmaidens don't have the monopoly on strong women, you know. The Bright Republic's Mech Corps employs far more women than the Swordmaidens."

Ves led them over to an inactive 3D printer that he reserved beforehand. "In any case, we need to get back to your lesson. Do you know how to operate one of these?"

"A 3D printer? Sure, though operating them is the job of the sl.. I mean the mech technicians."

"If you have any ambition about mech design, you need to readjust that attitude. Fabricating a mech in person instead of shoving the job to your mech technicians will bring you much closer to your design, or any designs you work with. Part of the errors I see many mech designers make is that they detach themselves too much from the workshop."

"Isn't that supposed to be how we work?" She asked, genuinely confused at his words. "We use our genius to draft up a good design. Then we dump them to the mech technicians and order them to churn out mechs. Nothing in this chain suggests we have to perform manual labor."

Ves really wanted to fix her contempt of mech technicians. He supposed his next assignment for her might fix some of her attitude problems.

"I suppose I won't be able to convince you with words. Fine. I'll just let you have a taste of it yourself." He raised his comm and transferred some files to her comm.

"What's this?"

"It's a design schematic of the Marc Antony Mark I. It's a cheaper variant of Caesar Augustus that you recently struggled with. It's a shame you hadn't been able to finish your variant, so I've transferred the design schematics of my own."

"Oookay. So what am I supposed to do with it?"

"You're going to fabricate a working copy of the Mark I with this 3D printer and assemble it by hand yourself."

"What?!" Ketis shrieked, attracting every mech technician's attention on her again. "Are you daft?! I can't possibly do that! I've never fabricated more than a couple of spare parts! Also, are you allowed to fabricate an extra mech out of the blue just like that?"

Ves grinned at her. "If you're unused to fabricating your own mechs, then this is a good opportunity to get you up to speed. Besides, I'm not telling you to build a full-scale model. Instead, I want you to fabricate a miniature about the length of a human head. I'm also assigning you an imaginary budget. You have to 'pay' for the materials you bring out of the stores. You fail if you run out of money!"

"What happens then?"

"I'll pass you over to Chief Haine and let you work as a mech technician for a few weeks."

Ketis whimpered.

Chapter 688

Ves heartlessly dumped Ketis at the 3D printer and left her to fend for herself for a while. While he could have stayed with her and supervised her attempts at fumbling together a miniature mech, she already relied too much on help from Mayra or someone else.

A true mech designer would be able to design and fabricate a mech by themselves. Ves always believed in this statement.

Too many mech designers transitioned jumped straight into design teams and collaborative projects, leaving them no opportunity to practice all the skills required to independently design a mech.

Perhaps other mech designers saw nothing wrong with that, but Ves found it to be as neglectful as boarding a shuttle that flew up in orbit while its hatch was still open!

In order to brush up her design skills, Ves left her with the vanilla Marc Antony Mark I design schematics. It was up to her to miniaturize it and to replace unviable components with viable ones that worked at that scale. She also had to replace the cockpit with an AI and remote control module.

"It's just like the time I developed that miniature as a gift to Iris."

The act of converting a full-sized mech to a miniature that you could hold in your hand exercised a lot of different design skills at once. It was a convenient if somewhat distorted representation of how to prepare and fabricate a working mech.

Ves mostly breezed through the exercise, but he had a feeling that Ketis might not fare so smoothly. Still, the experiences she gained out of this exercise would lay the foundation for what came next. He hadn't forgotten about his initial goal to try and stoke her passion.

"However, in order to fire up her passion, there needs to be enough fuel to be present to burn. Right now her accumulation is too shallow. She needs to grow up a little more before she's ready to tackle greater heights."

When Ves exited the workshop, he met Chief Haine yet again. The woman had been leaning against the bulkhead next to the hatch.

He groaned. He did not wish to retread the earlier argument.

"If this is about Ketis, please don't argue about it. Let's just move on, okay?"

"You think it's that simple?" The Chief Technician pressed her fists against her hips. "What she did was inexcusable. It's not easy to keep our mech technicians happy, you know. If you think about it, they rank at the top of the technician branches, right next to ship ratings. However, the tragedy about becoming a mech technician is that while there are plenty of ways to specialize in their ability to service mechs, it's almost impossible for them to get promoted to a higher station."

Ves never poked his nose that deeply in the realities of being a mech technician. Sometimes he fell into the trap that he accused Ketis of. It was all to easy for him to treat the low-skilled and low-born mech technicians as bots in human form, as things to be taken for granted.

They were so inconsequential and interchangeable that if all of their mech technicians got killed and a new batch of them came in, there would be no measurable change to the work being done.

"I don't disagree with you, chief." He said in a diplomatic fashion. "I already know all of this. Is it worth your time by repeating this to me?"

"The job of being a mech technician isn't as glamorous or as upwardly mobile as being a mech designer. It's true that while you lot have it harder, at least you get the benefit of upward mobility. That's not the case with mech technicians. No matter how hard we study or how much work we put into the mechs that pass from our hands, developing our specialties only bumps our paygrade by a couple of notches as most. A senior mech technician doesn't receive more respect than a junior mech technician."

"Mech technicians work in the background." Ves pointed out. "They are the bees that keep the beehive running with their dutiful supply of nectar. They are not meant to be queens like mech designers. A mech designer isn't just a technical profession. It's also a symbol and figurehead for a brand of mechs. The ability and design style of an individual mech designer has a huge influence on the quality and properties of his mechs. The same can't be said about mech technicians."

Chief Haine grew a little frustrated at the wall put up by Ves. "Even so, a good crew of mech technicians is vital for mech designers to realize their designs in the best fashion possible! Damnit, Ves, mech technicians matter!"

"Yes, and no."

"What is that supposed to mean?!"

He really didn't want to deal with this nonsense, but interacting with Ketis and her distinct beliefs had put him in a strange mood.

"Although I don't condone the beliefs spouted by Ketis, I think we should be clear that mech technicians are essentially semi-skilled labor. Sure, they need to be handy with machines, but compared to mech designers, they are expected to learn a lot less of the sciences needed to understand mechs. I could even argue that mech technicians aren't able to explain how mechs work. While I value your mech technicians and agree that they should be appreciated, I think it's a mistake to elevate them to a pedestal that's too high for their merits. A tech is a tech."

Her face turned inscrutable as she tried to parse his words. Ves had strayed somewhat from the initial topic that she couldn't figure out how to respond to it. Was he wrong? She wanted to say yes, but deep down she knew better.

She hated Ves for reminding her of those thoughts.

"Ves, I think you should stop talking before you slander my men."

"My apologies. My mind has been muddled lately by the nonsense of our little pirate guest. Are you.. are you aware of the true plight of mech technicians employed by pirates?"

Surprisingly, she nodded. "I'm a chief technician. It's my job to know this stuff. One of the responsibilities the Mech Corps has entrusted to chiefs like us is to stop our subordinates from thinking that working for pirates is a better idea. You always see some idiots every now and then who develop romantic ideas about becoming a pirate. Once I beat it into their thick skulls that they're going to be treated worse than dirt, they'll quickly drop their unrealistic notions."

"How often does it crop up?"

"Oh, it depends on where they work and who employs them. A mech technician in military service is a notch above the rest. The only way you can do better is if you're assigned to be part of the permanent maintenance crew of an expert mech. Even then, once every two months or so, one of my men or women inevitably think they get more pay and liberties if they go pirate. The lengthy tours, the restrictive rules and lack of promotion opportunities always gets to them somehow. Not everyone is cut out for military service."

Certainly, their lot did not seem very attractive to Ves, but they enjoyed higher pay than other types of technicians and they get to work with mechs. As far as Ves was concerned, the latter was already a reward in itself. In the Age of Mechs, many people wanted to work with mechs, but only few became qualified to do so. Becoming a mech technician wasn't hard because it didn't require too much talent or learning ability, but it wasn't easy either as they needed to display an instinctive aptitude with machinery of all kinds.

Someone who didn't feel comfortable with working with machines all day had no right to become a mech technician. In this day and age where humanity became unprecedented dependent on machines of all kinds, a surprising majority of people lacked this essential touch.

Baseline humans evolved too slowly to keep up with their tool-using ways.

The two parted on less-than-stellar terms, but Ves knew Chief Haine would get over it. Her professionalism and sense of duty demanded it. Besides, she knew better than to hold Ves against his own beliefs when many other mech designers thought the same.

Just because Ves disapproved of treating mech technicians like outright slaves didn't mean he became their advocate. Certainly, he enjoyed the appreciation of his own men, but he never once forgot they worked for him, not the other way around.

Mech technicians were never meant to be the stars of the show.

Back in school, Ves became exposed to case studies where mech designers became too chummy with their mech technicians. They passed on an unprecedented amount of authority to the chief technician and the individual mech technicians, so much so that they half-ran the company!

All of the mech companies in the case studies eventually came to ruin because letting mech technicians take charge was like putting a toddler at the helm of a starship. There was no way it would end in anything other than a crash!

"The only way a mech technician can obtain a better future is if they study hard and become certified as mech designers by the MTA."

However, how easy was it to do so? Many mech design students actually dropped out during their grueling years of study. For someone with much less intelligence and much less opportunities to catch up to mech designers might take at least two or three decades.

And what then?

A fifty-year old Novice Mech Designer possessed absolutely no career prospects in the brutal and competitive mech industry.

The only other way they could become something greater than a faceless tech was to become handier with machinery than others and acquire a lot of leadership and administration skills. Once they demonstrated their superiority in terms of getting mech technicians to do as they were told, they stood a good chance at obtaining the certification that upgraded their status.

A chief technician interacted directly with mech designers and possessed a lot of say in terms of how to run a workshop and their crew of mech technicians.

However, no matter how much power they wielded, chief technicians couldn't escape the fact that they were essentially jumped-up mech technicians.

"It's no surprise that some people treat them like slaves. Free or not, they essentially serve the same purpose."

The way the Swordmaidens and the rest treated mech technicians and perhaps mech designers reminded him to be vigilant whenever he stepped into the frontier. Even with the Flagrant Vandals as a shield, Ves still didn't feel very safe in this region of space.

Though his fears frightened him, a small part of him actually relished it. Back in civilized space, Ves always tangled with the fact that he was but one among many mech designers. It was impossible for any single mech designer to stand out from the market unless they became a Senior Mech Designer who already developed a hint of true uniqueness in their design traits.

Reaching this point was way too distance to Ves.

On the other hand, Ves felt as if his recent experiences had brought him increasingly closer to advancing to become a Journeyman Mech Designer. His continued insights cleared up most of the fog surrounding this difficult advancement process.

Ves feared no challenge. He only feared not knowing the way, so the removal of all the fog did him a favor.

Right now, he faced a dilemma of sorts. Of the three fundamental requirements to advance to Journeyman, he was already steaming ahead in terms of shaping and maturing his nascent design philosophy. He also learned more than enough to satisfy the knowledge requirement.

The only sticking point to him was that he possessed few opportunities to increase his utilization of his existing Skills. However, none of the work on his plate sufficiently challenged him to the point where he needed to pull all the stops.

"Also, I somehow fell back into the old trap of hoarding new knowledge again." He shook his head.

He knew that his current studies in ultracompact batteries and stealth technology formed a not entirely welcome detour in his goal to advance as quickly as possible.

Nonetheless, he believed that taking this detour now rather than later would save him a lot of grief, and possibly even his life. With disaster lurking everywhere in the frontier, improving his personal capabilities came first. He could think about advancement after he secured his life!

Chapter 689

The Flagrant Swordmaiden fleet transitioned back into FTL as soon as their drives finished cycling. A period of enforced isolation encroached again. Despite travelling along the same route and at the same speed as the other ships, the Shield of Hispania existed in a completely isolated bubble of higher dimensional spacetime.

No ship ever crashed into another ship during FTL travel.

A subdued mood overcame the crew as they quietly and diligently performed their duties. Ves knew the isolation would only get worse over time. They had barely crossed some lightyears into the frontier at this stage.

A few uneventful days passed by. Ves struggled with his schedule as he had so many activities to do but so little time to devote sufficient time on any of them. He wished he could clone himself by at least three times.

It was too bad that perfect clones of existing people never worked out well. If Ves had a choice, he would have formed his design team entirely out of clones of himself. He'd never have to face trust issues or be wary of betrayal from his own underlings.

"Though if they are exact clones of me, they won't be content with staying under my thumb. I've got to brainwash them as well or otherwise it's guaranteed they'll stab me in the back.

He knew himself too well to rule out such a possibility.

"Pfff. What am I thinking? Cloning myself just to pad my design team? Am I really that desperate for competent mech designers?"

As a temporary head designer, Ves gained a lot of experience in leadership matters. While he may not be as good with people as Chief Haine, he possessed enough confidence to be able to convince a down-on-his-luck mech designer to come work for him in his design team.

Still, mech designers desperate enough to join someone else's design team would never match the ability of an independent mech designer. Ves hungered to assemble a team of true talents, ones who could actually keep up with his progress and drive.

Building such a dream team was a lot harder than it sounded. Just like Ves, who would want to serve under his thumb when they possessed enough ability to start their own business?

It was a paradox. He could easily hire unworthy mech designers, but they wouldn't be able to help him much. As for the worthy designers, their demands were so high that it was impossible for Ves to hire them as a subordinate.

Still, that did not mean nobody came up with a solution to this paradox.

"The only way to rope them in is by treating them as an equal partner. A collaborative project is required, rather than a project led by a design team."

The difference between the two were stark.

A design team explicitly imposed a hierarchy among mech designers. The most capable mech designer became the lead designer, while the much less capable mech designers had to resign themselves to the role of assistant designers.

Those with slightly more ability or brought in just to supplement a specific aspect of the design were normally regarded as contributing designers. They contributed a discrete portion related to their specialty and didn't involve themselves any further in the design.

Throughout it all, the lead designer held the reigns throughout the design process. The mech being shaped by many different hands solely carried his name. The contributing designers only received a brief mention, while the influence of assistant designers was so marginal that they were often left out entirely.

Due to his theories on Spirituality and the X-Factor, Ves favored setting up a design team because the entire team of mech designers had no say in the matter. Only the lead designer's vision counted. This way, Ves would be able to maximize his imprint onto his own design and foster the strongest possible X-Factor.

As for collaborative projects... Ves grimaced at the thought. The lack of control and the need to respect the input of other mech designers as an equal rankled Ves because his design philosophy wouldn't be able to play out to its maximum potential.

A true collaborative project in the classical sense treated every mech designer involved as co-designers. No one had the right to claim the role as lead designer and boss over the others.

The purpose of a collaborative project was to pool each mech designer's strong points while leaving out their weaker aspects. Therefore, no single mech designer was allowed to become dominant, as the more say he had, the more the jointly-developed design inherited his weaknesses as well as his strengths.

The deal Ves made with the Skull Architect entailed something in between the two. Instead of working jointly on developing a design that shared both their strengths, Ves would instead be tasked with developing fifteen different variants of the Senior Mech Designer's existing designs.

While he'd be able to leave a small mark on the variant he developed, the core of its design still bore the DNA of its original creator. Due to all the restrictions imposed by the Skull Architect, the influence that Ves could leave behind only reached the level of contributing designer, which was hardly a glamorous role.

"Still, proving myself or leaving behind my mark isn't my true goal."

Instead, Ves hoped to tackle the incredibly difficult puzzles any of the Senior Mech Designer's designs represented. The challenge spoke to him. Not only would the difficulty force him to flex his design skills in increasingly inventive ways, thereby raising his utilization of his existing Skills, he would also be able to glean the best practices of how to design different types of mechs.

"That's the true benefit there."

Ves had to be careful to avoid becoming mentally contaminated by the Skull Architect's raw and unfiltered design schematics. If not for this hazard that constantly threatened to subsume his design philosophy, he would have instead bargained to gain access to more of the Senior's designs!

"This is one of the hidden benefits of this collaboration."

In the mech industry, a line existed between imitation and creation. Ves always considered himself on the side of creation. Though his past work with the Caesar Augustus heavily steered his design habits and preferred solutions, he wasn't afraid of developing something new when it suited him, or else he wouldn't have developed a rifleman mech as his second original design.

However, as he planned to fill up his mech catalog with at least a dozen product lines that covered all the essential mech types, he would have to stray increasingly further from familiar ground.

Having an example to draw upon and practising with another fully-fledged mech design would do wonders in preparing him to design his own mech of the same type.

Therefore, despite the inherent risks and difficulties involved in paying back the favor Ves owed to the pirate designer, he didn't flinch away from this duty at all.

The only issue weighing on his consequence was whether the Skull Architect commercialized his variants.

"Will he put up copies of my variant for sale to pirates?"

The Skull Architect gained renown as a high-end mech designer in the Faris Star Region. This made his designs desirable but also extremely expensive and so difficult to pilot that only elites possessed the qualifications to touch them.

Ves anticipated that his variants may be released as more accessible products priced towards the premium or mid-range markets.

If priced competitively enough, which Ves had a feeling the Skull Architect would definitely do so to maximize his profits, the fugitive mech designer stood to sell a large amount of mechs.

"The market for pirate mechs is smaller than the mech markets in civilized space. Then again, there aren't many pirate designers either, so my variants faces much less competition."

A troubling and unsettling thought sank into his mind. What if he achieved a far greater market share and commercial success as a pirate designer than a legitimate mech designer?

With the Skull Architect's stature as a venerable Senior, it was guaranteed his products would sell widely if they became a little cheaper and a lot more easier to pilot.

"By the heavens. Is he planning an aggressive expansion into the local black market for mechs?!"

Ves couldn't fathom the scale of such ambition. How many copies of 'his' variants would get sold? A thousand? Far too little. Ten-thousand? A hundred thousand? If the Skull Architect was able to export his designs to the neighboring Star Regions as well as the black markets of the nearby Star Sectors, then it wasn't impossible for the total sales figure to surpass a million mechs!

"Damnit, by my estimate, my Living Mech Corporation has only sold a couple of thousand mechs so far, and I'm only counting mechs rolled off directly from the production lines of the Mech Nursery. The amount of mechs fabricated by the LMC's third-party manufacturers have probably reached the tens of thousands."

Such a success already elevated his mech company into a mainstay of the Bright Republic, but this achievement paled in comparison to what any Senior Mech Designer could accomplish in their sleep!

Even if the Skull Architect faced a severe amount of limitations due to operating out of the impoverished and underdeveloped frontier, Ves had a suspicion that a Senior wouldn't be slowed down too much by such hindrances.

"This is bad."

The more his products landed in the hands of pirates, the greater the chance their designs might get traced back to Ves.

In addition, Ves hadn't yet addressed the elephant in the room.

Pirates being pirates, they were guaranteed to be up to no good if they piloted the powerful variants. If all of them ended up similar to what he had done with the Leiner Grey, then they would all end up very powerful but also remarkably easy to pilot. Carrying the essence of both the Skull Architect and a small but undeniably impactful influence from Ves, such variants were simply too lethal to comprehend!

"Compared to all of those rust buckets most pirates use, the difference is as wide as heaven and earth!"

In essence, by fulfilling his obligations to collaborate with a criminal mech designer, Ves directly became complicit in empowering a large amount of pirate gangs!

The ethical implications of such a consequence were too dire to comprehend!

All the misery and all the killings perpetrated by 'his' customers indirectly bloodied his hands.

It was different from his legitimate business activities. Ves easily ignored the implications of guilt arising from the actions of the customers of the LMC. Every mech his company sold passed through the MTA for certification, and even the purchase contract contained the trade association's stamp. Anyone too shady would never be able to pass muster in front of the MTA.

Of course, a couple of fish always slipped through the net. Ves did not think too hard about those exceptions. In some way, he already factored in the tragedies perpetrated by scum using his mechs.

Ever since Vincent Ricklin massacred his own family with a rudimentary custom mech from Ves, he tried hard not to become affected by such tragedies.

"It's easy to do so if it's limited to a small number of bad apples. No mech designer can't prevent misuse of their own mechs. It's the nature of our business to factor in this possibility."

It became a different story entirely if the basket predominantly consisted of bad apples. A mech sold in a mech market that comprised almost entirely of pirates and all sorts of other scum would undoubtedly use his products for more nefarious purposes.

The issue of responsibility and attribution always plagued mech designers throughout their careers. Even if mech designers absolve themselves of responsibility as soon as they completed a sale, ethically the issue continued to weigh on their minds.

To what extent did they facilitate the misdeeds of their customers? Every mech manufacturer and weapon manufacturer struggled with this question, to the point where no right answer existed even up to this day!

Ves himself had swung from exhibiting a high level of detachment to a high degree of empathy and care to the mech pilots of the mechs that received his touch.

He became emotionally invested in the mech pilots of the Flagrant Vandals because he became responsible for the well-being of their mechs.

However, he cared very little for the customers of the mechs sold by the LMC. His customers handed over money and in return they received a mech. Once they completed the transaction, his customer might as well attack a nursery and kill a hundred little kids and Ves wouldn't lose any sleep over it at all.

After all, what did some crazy mech pilot have to do with him? If the public started blaming the mech designer for enabling the madman by supplying the mech, the same argument could be made about the company that manufactured his clothes or the venue that sold him his latest meal.

So why did he care so much about his pirate customers in the first place?

Chapter 690

Ves put off his thoughts on the matter of complicity like he always did. Some day, he'd be confronted by it and have no choice but to make a definite choice, but for now the issue had not yet become too pertinent.

Besides, the Skull Architect may not have any intentions of commercializing his variants. Perhaps the old man only wanted to study Ves' design philosophy for research purposes.

After all, a sacred design that a sagely Senior had masterfully crafted together would inevitably become spoiled by the crude touch of an immature Apprentice.

It was as if an expert painter finished ninety-five percent of his painting, but left the last five percent to a three-year old kid who drooled onto his shirt. No matter how prodigious the kid was in painting the gaps, unless he was some freak reincarnated master painter, the quality of that five percent was assuredly abysmal in the eyes of the original artist.

So Ves still held out hope that the Skull Architect valued his pride and reputation too much to rely on the work of an Apprentice to earn some extra K-coins.

"Though if the sales potential of my variant is too promising, I don't know if it will stoke his greed."

Mech designers never had enough money! Developing mechs and running an industry constantly demanded more funds to sustain.

A Novice might get by with a couple of hundred million bright credits that they could gain from a loan.

Apprentice almost always required an investment of several billion credits.

As for Journeymen, Ves had no idea how much they needed, but he believed even 100 billion credits might not be enough.

Seniors on the other hand... their vast research projects and huge business enterprises could only be sustained by an uncountable sum of money!

Ves could not even fathom the exact sum, but he knew that this was one of the reasons why Seniors based in the Bright Republic almost never succeeded in advancing to Master!

"When the Skull Architect used to be a respected Senior in the Vermeer Group, money is the one resource he must be lacking the least."

From extreme abundance to extreme poverty, the shift in earnings must have represented such a shock to the man that he might have suffered lingering trauma from that event!

"Damn.. Seniors can't be money grubbers. They can't. It's undignified!"

Would a pirate designer who already became disgraced even care about dignity anymore?

Ves grew pensive at the thought, because he knew what his decision would be when put on the same spot. "Dignity is not the same as reputation. The Skull Architect is playing by different rules now, otherwise he'd go by his real name and not this nickname. Selling some lesser quality mechs under your name is more than worth it if you can rake in the K-coins and spend them on furthering your research or strengthening your position in the frontier."

To mech designers, gathering K-coins was not an end in itself. It represented future benefits in a universal form. While it required time and effort to convert K-coins into something useful, he vastly preferred being able to spend some at all rather than none.

In conclusion, a mech designer that wanted to more than sit on their laurels had to spend lots of money to progress. Someone as ambitious as the Skull Architect once ordered the deaths of more than a thousand mech designers including an expert in order to further their research. Would who was willing to ignore the basic rules of morality really be bothered by lesser desires?

Ves grimaced even further. It was rather eerie to be able to predict the Skull Architect's thought process and logic to such a deep degree.

"We are kindred mech designers."

The statement rang false, yet contained enough truth to stick in his mind.

The root of it lay in the fact that mech design was an art as well as a science. The science provided the building blocks on how to design a mech, but art provided the creativity that connected the blocks into unique and original structures.

A normal artist produced boring, normal art. A maddened, tortured or insane artist produced extreme works of art.

Somehow, the benign intent behind the advancement ladder of mech designers from Novice Mech Designer to Star Designer began to fade away. Left in its place was a vortex of madness, a hungry maw that called out a siren song seducing trillions of naive mech designers to sacrifice pieces of their sanity in exchange for power.

"This is madness!" He spoke, though whether he referred to the trap that lay behind the advancement ladder or what his overactive imagination cooked up wasn't clear. "Mech designers are not sacrificial lambs who willingly lead themselves over to the altar to be butchered!"

Ves forcefully discarded this entire train of thought before it led him deeper into lurid figments of his imagination. Even though all of his spurious deductions sounded compellingly truthful in a horribly morbid fashion, it didn't change the fact that he had no solid proof to substantiate any of these fantasies!

He frowned as he sat behind his desk in his empty office. Paranoia always lingered in his mind ever since his father became a fugitive of some secretive trans-galactic organization that rivalled the MTA and CFA in influence. Yet lately these outbursts of spinning conspiracy theories on the fly was plainly out of the norm for a rational mind that dismissed any claims that lacked solid proof.

"My mentality is.. degenerating? Cracking? Becoming less stable?"

He palmed his forehead, trying to look into his mind. Sadly, his thoughts bounced everywhere except where he wanted them to be. He never possessed the most orderly mind.

"That time when I ate a completely alien exoplant also didn't do my mind any favors. I still don't know what that so-called Heavenly Flower exactly did that makes Dr. Jutland so obsessed about nurturing it. I have a feeling it's not supposed to be eaten raw at all..."

In any case, flower or not, his mind was as ephemeral and disorderly as always so long as he left it alone. His Spirituality made no difference in that aspect. In fact, it might have amplified the disorderly thoughts running in his subconscious mind.

The only advantage of his potent mind was that once he concentrated deeply on something, all of that energy aligned itself to his intentions. He could breathe life to images created in his mind, he could expand his senses and try to sense other people's auras, and he suspected that he might one day be able to affect their emotions as well.

Still, he couldn't maintain his concentration on a single subject every waking moment. Humans simply weren't geared that way.

Ves simply had to accept that this was the price he paid in exchange for the increased capabilities that allowed him to bestow his mechs with a strong X-Factor. He only hoped he could figure out a way to tame his unruly mind and its frequent irrational impulses. Perhaps the Five Scrolls Compact managed to figure out a way to restrain these urges.

"...Or maybe not. By all accounts, the organization is completely made up of crazies and mad scientists."

That sounded remarkably familiar to what Ves had just thought about mech designers. It reinforced the notion in his mind that the Five Scrolls Compact mirrored the Mech Trade Association.

One was in the dark, the other in the light. Both provided vital services to humanity, even if Ves didn't wish to acknowledge that. He had recently determined that powerful men and women would do anything to extend their lives by a few hundred years. As the supposed inventors of life-prolonging treatment, they offered the most attractive incentives to those who were willing to sell their souls to the terrorist organization.

One organization worked with machines, the other with life. Both tried to research the depths of their own fields, often going through extreme lengths as they did. Perhaps the only reason why the MTA remained respectable while the Compact became so ostracised their existence was scoured from the public was that their research demanded too many human lives to progress their research.

"What happened to the Skull Architect is an exception. Most of the research that Senior Mech Designers conduct won't harm anything but a couple of machines, which they can easily replace as long as they have enough money."

This comparison only served to strengthen the suspicion in his mind that mech designers all dabbled with madness. They were only tolerated because they limited their hurt to machines.

Would Ves become as unhinged as Dr. Jutland one day? As someone who treasured and respected mechs, and wished for them to be treated akin to humans, would he be forced to torture his own mechs to further his research in making them come alive?

"I don't believe it will come to that!" He spoke to himself with conviction. He needed to believe in his own statement.

"There's an apt analogy that describes the state of mech designers."

If people likened mech pilots to gods, then mech designers were regarded as wizards. The more they progressed, the more their abilities left the boundaries of science and increasingly took on unknown mysteries that others struggled to explain.

How could average people without a background in science explain it as anything other than magic?

Yet the comparison to wizards may not always be benign. Just as wizards were prone to descending into obsession and madness, so would mech designers and other kinds of researchers.

The MTA fell into the camp of light wizards while the Five Scrolls Compact counted among the dark wizards.

Yet for all their differences, they shared the same fate in the end, because they were mirrored reflections of each other.

"What am I doing here letting my thoughts run wild? I should do something to distract myself."

The whole spat with Ketis and Chief Haine already grated on him. Ves resolutely tried to avoid descending into darker thoughts by resorting to his most familiar trick.

Concentrating his mind on a project.

Ves turned on his terminal and called up the dense and abstruse research papers related to ultracompact batteries. He felt unprecedented motivated to increase his understanding in their contents quickly.

The sooner he was done with this step, the faster he could end his exposure to their mental contamination.

The safer approach might have been to take it slow, but a persistent, low-level influence on his mentality had the potential to be much more insidious due to how it affected his subconscious rather than conscious mind. He could catch any changes of the latter before they spun out of control.

A few days passed by like this while the Flagrant Swordmaiden fleet continued to be in transit to an unknown star system in the frontier.

Perhaps it was the madness tugging at his mind, but Ves progressed quite a bit faster than before. The cracks in his mind may have frayed his emotions and led them to strange outbursts that he consciously needed to suppress, but they also liberated his mind from established logic and rules.

By making incredible leaps of logic that he never would have done with his rationality fully intact, he sometimes progressed by leaps and bounds. Research papers that required three or four days to comprehend their essence only took half a day for him to under!

"If this is the benefit of losing a bit of your insanity, then no wonder!"

Ves at least hadn't thrown out his common sense. Each hour, he took a lengthy fifteen-minute break in order to center his mind and neutralize the damage he incurred on his mind. Some cracks in his mind proved helpful in processing the difficult theories, but he couldn't afford to widen the cracks until his mind permanently became stuck in this state.

He only wanted to take advantage of the state of madness, not revel in it! Though the temptation to embrace it in order to further his mech design abilities was huge, he was able to resist the temptation because he already possessed something better back at Cloudy Curtain.

Ves already had his hands full with his current eccentricities.

Chapter 691

The Flagrant Swordmaiden fleet emerged at the edge of the Mortose Star System. The name received its name from a treasure hunter who once visited this system and profited hugely from a discovery on the only habitable planet in the system.

Just before the transition, Ves had been supervising his student's attempt at fashioning a miniature mech by hand.

Denied the use of an assembly system, Ketis resorted to using her hands along with precision tools to put the tiny parts together. The work required a lot of mental effort because she needed to perform most actions manually rather than let some bots do the work in her stead.

Ves considered this activity as a way to train her severely-neglected assembly skills. A mech designer who couldn't assemble their own mechs was a disgrace to their craft, though he knew not every mech designer thought the same.

Those mech designers could suck it. As long as Ketis studied under him, he would impart her with his own principles, no matter how controversial they might be in the mech industry.

"Arrgh!" The woman burst out as she slammed her fist against the tabletop, causing Ves to wince. "This stupid tool doesn't do what I want! How can it be so imprecise?!"

The impact served as a detriment to her ongoing project, as the vibrations had almost certainly disarrayed the alignment of some of the delicate miniature connections she was in the process of establishing.

One of his big pet peeves were mech designers and mech technicians who had a tendency to lash out physically whenever they suffered a setback. Not only did the outburst accomplish nothing useful, it also damaged the very machines they tried to piece together!

Still, Ves decided to confront Ketis on her bad habit another time. Right now, the fleet would almost be transitioning out of FTL.

"You're getting closer to assembling a working miniature. Your progress is quite decent. I remember at the start where all the parts came off the 3D printer with distorted dimensions."

She grimaced at the memory of that embarrassment. "Don't remind me of that!"

"However, you need to work on proficiency with these precision hand tools. It's obvious that this is the first time you've used them. Have you even read their manuals?"

"What manuals?"

"No wonder." Ves sighed. "Those precision tools aren't as shallow as a simple wrench or as intuitive to figure out as a ubiquitous multitool. They are machines in themselves, machines designed to assemble other machines."

"So what?"

"Anything that I call a machine is complex enough to be worth reading the instructions that come with them. Neglecting to do so will lead to incorrect handling, which will spoil the outcome you've been trying to achieve all along. You were doomed from the start to fail."

"Why didn't you tell me earlier?!"

"Are you such a child that I need to hold your hand each time you go astray? The lesson cuts deepest when you eventually fall flat from your own bad choices. It hurts to be wrong, to fail in an endeavor you tried so hard to succeed. Yet the pain is essential in teaching you right from wrong. You're less likely to fall when you perform the same actions tomorrow, once you read the manuals of course."

Ketis glowered at him, but Ves took no notice of her frustrations. He cared more about unlearning some of the misconceptions she developed during her time with the Swordmaidens. Just because the slaves took up the responsibility of fabricating and servicing mechs, didn't mean the work was beneath a mech designer like her. On the contrary. Ketis should be much more proficient in performing the same kind of work!

Knowing how to fabricate a mech entirely by herself would be a massive boost to her in the future. She could easily take over running a mech workshop from Mayra once she became more familiar with the craftsmanship aspect of being a mech designer.

Not that she appreciated his intentions. Not yet. But she will. Ves grinned devilishly at his student. The act of designing a mech designer amused him a lot, and it served as a nice distraction from his own intensive studies.

"Stow away the gear and dump the partially completed miniature in the recycling bin. You're going to have to do the same routine all over if you want to create a product that's closer to a workable condition."

She seemed partial to her creation, though. She hugged it against her chest like a precious doll. "B-But my budget is running out! I only have one more chance to complete a miniature mech!"

"That's your fault for not being thorough enough and for biting more than you can chew. Will your Swordmaidens accept a botched mech from you? Are your principles so feeble that you would hand over a mech that could malfunction at any time to your comrades and sisters?"

"..No. I would never do that."

"That's why I'm telling you to chuck that failed attempt into the bin." He explained. "This might be practice for you, but it's also a way to instill you with the diligence you need to become a qualified mech designer."

Once she cleared the worktable and stowed away her tools, they exited the workshop compartment and headed to the upper decks. They passed by the armory and retrieved their personal sets of armor from the lockers before changing in them. Many Vandals had already changed into their suits of armor, leaving only a couple of stragglers alongside Ves and Ketis to adorn their personal protection.

You could never be too sure of the threats in the frontier.

Ves was glad that his suit of light combat armor lost the cape and most of its ridiculous surface embellishments. Among the Vandals, he had no need to puff himself up as a noble among pirates.

Naturally, Ketis still wore her exaggerated suit of heavy combat armor that was littered with tribal markings, exobeast bones and other savage accoutrements. Along with her greatsword, she looked as if she walked straight out of a drama that took place in the past when humanity thought that Old Earth was still flat.

"Let's go to the command center."

They entered the heavily-guarded command center where dozens of specialists and officers manned the consoles. Most of them didn't have anything to do yet due to the enforced isolation of every ship in the fleet and the general futility in trying to make sense of the environment during FTL travel.

Each wearing a suit of combat armor despite the inconvenience they brought with them, all the Vandals readied themselves for action the instant the Flagrant Swordmaidens exited the higher dimensions.

The transition came violently, causing both man and machine to lurch. It affected Ves a bit more severely than others due to his physical abnormalities, but he had become somewhat accustomed to suppressing his urge to vomit.

It was a big disaster to vomit inside a vacuum-sealed suit of armor!

A few seconds passed as the crew picked themselves up and diligently performed their pre-planned assignments.

"Every starship of the Flagrant Vandals are accounted for, sir! All of them have transmitted their status to us. None have reported any incidents during FTL travel."

"Sir, our sensors failed to pick up any signals or emissions within the vicinity of our fleet so far!"

"That's not good enough!" Major Verle barked to the sensor officer. "I want to know everything that is going on within a one AU radius around our fleet. Get to it!"

A half a minute later, the sensor officer finally barked out the report they were all waiting for. "Sir, we've picked up a swarm of transponder signals from the inner system! Many of them appear to be transmitted by independent pirate vessels!"

A plot of the local system projected into view and displayed the exact location of the ships present in Mortose. While the ships of the Vandals and the Swordmaidens emerged in the outer slice of the star system, a large but haphazard collection of pirate vessels orbited around Mortose I, the only habitable planet revolving around the main sequence star in the center.

Though encountering a mob of pirate vessels should have been an alarming occurrence, in fact the Flagrant Swordmaidens already expected their presence.

"Is the Temple of Haatumak among the pirate vessels?"

"Yes sir! Our long-ranged sensors have confirmed that she's the largest starship in orbit of Mortose I. She's almost as large as a fleet carrier!"

They expected the presence of the massive Temple of Haatumak. As her name suggested, she served as a literal place of worship to a frontier cult that worshipped a god referred to as Haatumak.

Most Vandals expressed contempt when they first heard about the cult. What were the odds the original founders of the cult invented this 'god' and converted followers in a cynical attempt at fleecing them of their valuables?

Whatever the case, the worship of Haatumak fared better in the frontier than many other cults and two-bit religions due to one unique advantage that was normally in the hands of the big two pirate blocs.

The cultists somehow found a way to hamper the tracking abilities of the sandmen aliens.

As the good-natured cultists that they were, they sold their services to independents who desperately wanted to minimize their chances of getting caught by the sandmen energy hunters that constantly roamed this region of space. Of course, the Haatumak cultists charged a good price for their services, and constantly tried to convert their customers into worshipping their gods.

Due to the size of the combined fleet of Vandals and Swordmaidens, the odds of attracting the attention of the sandmen was very high. They desperately needed the help of the Temple of Haatumak in order to minimize the odds of encountering this implacable alien race. Fighting them was always a chore, and they never yielded any useful materials when they 'died'.

Commander Lydia had been the one to propose visiting the Temple of Haatumak as their first priority when crossing into the frontier. She happened to have her hands on a yearlong schedule of the Temple's journey through the untamed stars.

As the Vandals in the command center reported nothing but routine matters, Major Verle ordered Captain Rakeshir to coordinate with his Swordmaiden counterpart and collectively make their way towards Motose I.

"What can you tell me about the Temple of Haatumak?" Ves quietly asked Ketis. As a daughter of frontier, the Temple shouldn't be foreign to her.

"She's an ugly monstrosity that the fanatics managed to cobble together in a space worthy ship. I don't know why they need all that space, as they don't have the numbers to make use of all that volume. She's the one and only temple to Haatumak. Don't ask me about their beliefs, I don't have a clue what they are. The fanatics are possessive of their god."

"They never disseminated their beliefs in public?" Ves raised his eyebrow.

"Yeah. You need to be inducted into their ranks before you know what you're getting into. The secrecy surrounding their faith doesn't make them very popular."

Ves frowned a bit. A religion that didn't try hard enough to attract worshippers eventually fell into obscurity. "How is the Temple of Haatumak able to stay aloft?"

"Well, the service they offer is one reason. Another reason is that nobody is willing to harm them as long as they sell their abilities in public. If the Temple goes down, the independents have nowhere else to go but the Dragon or Ravienne Alliance if they want to obtain a blessing that hides their ships from the sandmen."

That explained the swarm of pirate vessels orbiting loosely around the Temple of Haatumak. Normally, they couldn't stand to be in each other's vicinity, but now they had gathered around the Temple in a mutual pact to protect her from malicious threats!

"For something as valuable as the ability to hide our ships from the sandmen's long-ranged detectors, they must be charging a very high price to perform their service." He noted dimly. "How much will it cost us?"

"It's... complicated." She replied as her face adopted a mixed expression. "They offer a ruinously expensive price if you want to obtain their blessings with the least amount of hassle. The exact price depends on the size and class of ship, but on average they charged about fifty K-bars per ship the last time we stopped by the Temple."

Ves almost vomited again when he heard that price. "Fifty K-bars is worth as much as an Inheritor mech! To bless the entire Vandal fleet, we'll need to cough up enough money to erect a mech company's worth of Inheritors!"

"That's why nobody is willing to pay such an excessive price. Luckily, the fanatics offer other ways to pay, though the alternatives... well, you should see it for yourself when we get there."

Chapter 692

As the Flagrant Swordmaidens neared Mortose I, their sensors managed to resolve the Temple of Haatumak in her full glory.

When Ves initially heard the secretive cult cobbled up the Temple of Haatumak in a massive starfaring ship and house of worship in one, he expected something like six massive cargo haulers welded into a single abomination.

A cargo hauler basically looked like a set of massive cargo holds thinly held together by the thin superstructure of a ship. To shipwrights, their design exemplified the pursuit of maximizing cargo space while incorporating the minimum amount of structure necessary to keep it all together.

The Temple.. resembled something greater than that. The outer hull must have been a Swordmaiden's wet dream, because she consisted entirely of bones of a massive leviathan-like alien that spanned at least two kilometers if the sensors estimated her size correctly!

"She's a near-capital floating temple chimera ship!" Someone uttered. Others would argue that length-wise she already qualified as a capital ship.

Though the word salad may not have done the savage and crudely fashioned temple ship justice, it certainly described her accurately enough at a single glance. She was a pure expression of the savagery and idolatry that the sons and daughters of the frontier so revered.

Lydia's Swordmaidens could only be regarded as posers in front of the real thing!

"From which creature did those bones come from?"

"Maybe they came from an exobeast that evolved on a gas giant!"

The speculation briefly disrupted the tranquility of the command center. Everyone couldn't help it. Though the Vandals witnessed larger ships before, many of them never saw a chimera ship before.

She was jaw-droppingly crude, but emanated a sense of majesty as well!

The vaguely whale-like set of bones with a lot of eerie limbs attached from the flanks encompassed a core of what used by be cargo haulers. Obviously, the worshippers of Haatumak had done their best to build out and expand, reinforce and even change the inner contours in order to hide their humble origins.

Ves wasn't fooled. He could easily read the traces where the armor covered up the contours of what used to be humble ships that plied the stars while carrying countless tons of goods.

Still, no matter how she started out before, the constant transformations as well as the incorporation of those tough, powerful and intimidating set of bones had given the Temple of Haatumak a status that few vessels in the Komodo Star Sector could match!

The closer the Flagrant Swordmaidens approached, the more the details became clearer to see. The rugged, frontier flavor of the Temple of Haatumak only grew stronger as Ves was able to pick out remains from salvaged ship and mech parts jutting out of the metallic portion of the ship hull.

It was as if the worshippers of Haatumak simply threw a lot of junk at their ship and crudely welded them together!

Certainly, cladding a vessel at least two kilometers long with proper armor cost a huge fortune in K-slates. Even if the Temple of Haatumak raked in a lot of money through rendering their services to the independent pirates, the cost was too prohibitive!

The end result bemused Ves. He appreciated the ingenuity behind her construction. "It's a cheap way to bulk up a ship."

It might be more appropriate for him to regard the Temple of Haatumak as a floating solidified junk yard in engineering terms. Her armor literally consisted of junk, and only acted as armor by dint of their sheer amount.

The immediate consequence of piling up all of that low-quality junk was that the Temple of Haatumak must be one of the most sluggish starships in the Faris Star Region!

While the ponderous bone-covered vessel already settled into a stable orbit around Mortose I, allowing it to swing around the naturally habitable planet with deft speed, everything would change once she started to move out. Those massive thrusters affixed to the stern of the Temple looked as effective as trying to move a mech by putting it on a cart with sturdy wheels and trying to pull it with a dozen men.

Slow.

So slow.

How could this Temple still survive the harsh frontier when she was so slow? Certainly, she'd be able to withstand a great deal of punishment, but if the sandmen dropped into the Mortose System with a significant sandmen fleet, then that moving junkyard of a ship would never be able to get away in time!

When Ves posed the question to Ketis, she returned a surprising response.

"As far as the Swordmaidens are aware of, the Temple of Haatumak has never been attacked by the sandmen."

"How is that possible?!" He whispered back. "The barely sentient sand-like aliens are indiscriminate when it comes to harvesting high-quality energy! A big vessel like the Temple might not contain as much energy as a proper fleet carrier, but she's still enough to sate the sandmen for quite a while!"

Ketis had no answer to that. "Don't ask me. Let alone Commander Lydia or Mayra, even I don't know what's going on with the fanatics. They're really weird and creepy. Mayra told me they were exiled to the frontier several hundred years ago because civilized space didn't want them and their weird beliefs. The Temple of Haatumak on the projector is actually the third temple they constructed!"

"What happened to the previous two Temples? Did they get destroyed?"

"No. They just.. rusted away and degraded over time. They became too outdated even for the frontier."

There was definitely something fishy going on with this strange religion. From the moment Ves beheld the current manifestation of their place of worship, the sight of her rankled in a way.

The Temple brought back some unwelcome memories from his time at Groening IV to Ves. The majesty radiating from the bones embracing her hull resembled the raw might and unquestioned rule of the Kaius, the huge chimera mech built out of the carcass of a hexapod king.

What was it with crazies and their fascination of incorporating remnants of living creatures into their machine? To Ves, the addition only served to impress the ignorant laymen and show off the remnants as trophies. At least the Skull Architect had a deeper reason for incorporating human bones in his mechs, even if he was misguided.

Still, as much as the bones of long-dead alien exobeasts didn't add much to their performance, the sight of it alone turned what should have been a drab, ugly amalgamation of junk into an impressive frontier starship.

"So in a way, the seemingly superfluous decorations are worth it if they succeed in leaving the desired impression."

The Vandals wouldn't have nearly been so cautious and apprehensive about meeting the cultists if they hadn't embellished their ship like that. In a way, he appreciated her artistry as a craftsman. The sight of the Temple made Ves feel better about his own habit of adding artistic embellishments to his mechs when they didn't exactly impact their performance.

"Ships and mechs are machines, but they are also so much more. Their existence and use is undeniably connected to humans."

Some mech designers believed that mechs should be the purest expression of a war machine. Their designs should be stripped of every superfluous part and contain only the bare minimum of what they needed to fulfill their missions.

While their ideology sounded somewhat attractive to Ves, he eventually rejected that school of thought because their emphasis on the science of mech design led them to disdain the artistic side of their profession. Art was a necessary evil in order to inject some brand of creativity in their designs, but as soon as they partook the bare minimum, the mech designers shut themselves off to any further irrational impulses.

Their mech designs tended to be boring and drab, but solid performers on the market. Ves described their designs as utilitarian and focused in their conception. A machine or tool designed for only a single purpose, and nothing more.

"Design can be so much more. Who says a product only needs to fulfill a single purpose?"

In any case, hours trickled past as the Flagrant Swordmaiden fleet came nearer and nearer until they were only an hour away from entering their designated orbit around Mortose I.

"Mr. Larkinson." Major Verle spoke out abruptly. The mech officer had been making plans and discussing their approach to the cultists with Commander Lydia all this while. "I would like to hear your insight on the mechs piloted by the members of the Church of Haatumak. Can we defeat them if necessary?"

The fleet had just come close enough to resolve the hundred-odd spaceborn mechs that patrolled around the Temple of Haatumak. Ves had already begun to analyze them once the first detailed scans came through.

"It's possible for the Flagrant Vandals to overcome the patrol mechs at their current state, but it will cost us, sir." Ves replied with a grim face. "That's only the case if we leave out Lydia's Swordmaidens and the chaotic clumps of pirate mechs deployed from the other pirate carriers. If they all intervene, then even I can't predict the result, other than that we'd be horribly outnumbered."

The independent pirate vessels that volunteered to escort the Temple of Haatumak formed an effective deterrent against anyone wishing to make trouble with the cultists.

Ves inputted some commands in his console which caused the main projector to display three different Haatumak mech models.

"The worshippers of Haatumak employ three distinct mech models, each shaped like bestial or aquatic mechs adapted to spaceborn combat. The first one is this whale or seal-shaped mech."

The biggest and fattest of the mech models grew larger, dominating the available projector space.

"While the mechs are broadcasting their identity and allegiances via transponders, the annoying thing is that they don't mention the name of the mech model. I've never seen anything like their designs before, so it's highly likely the worshippers have developed these mech models in-house."

Sections of the projection of the whale-like mech lit up in red.

"I've taken to calling the biggest and most heavily armed mech model the Gun Whale. It aptly describes their purpose, as the cultists have slapped six integrated limbs that transition into integrated weapon systems above the 'elbow' portion of the limbs. Each limb can bend and rotate in every possible direction, so they're a lot more complex than the run-of-the-mill spaceborn frontline mech."

"Are the weapons formidable?"

"They are, sir." Ves nodded without hesitation. "Don't underestimate them because they aren't as hefty and chunky as heavy mechs. Their firepower can surpass the output of several average rifleman mechs. "What's worse, their aquatic bestial shapes allows the designer to stuff a lot of systems inside the mech, so you can expect the Gun Whale to hit hard and sustain their rate of fire without suffering too quickly from depletion or heat build-up."

"Counters?"

"They're big and heavy. Just like the Temple of Haatumak, that inevitably makes them slow. I think the original designers didn't care too much about that disadvantage because they envisioned them as the Temple of Haatumak's most staunchest guards. Technically, if a melee mech can fly through the intense rain of firepower it can unleash, it can take complete advantage of the Gun Whale's lack of melee armaments. Basically, even if the Gun Whale weighs as much as a medium space knight, its better to treat it as a heavy mech."

This was all he could figure out in a short amount of time. He had a feeling the unorthodox shape of the Gun Whale hid some other surprises, but the only way to find out was to employ powerful active scanners, which the Temple of Haatumak would certainly consider a hostile act.

"What about the second and third mech models?" Major Verle pressed.

"If the Gun Whale is their defensive fire support platform, the latter two act as the offensive arm of their church."

Chapter 693

Ves waved his hand, causing the projection of the Gun Whale to minimize and the other two mechs to fill up the air. "The Haatumak mech models that I've designated as the Snapper Dolphin and the Strangler Squid serve as their melee spaceborn combatants."

"Of the two, the most numerous of them consists of the Snapper Dolphin. While their appearance may suggests they are ranged mechs as they have a pair of laser barrels attached to their flanks, their real purpose is to perform hit and run attacks with their un-dolphin like snapper beaks. I'm not entirely sure of their power, but the extensive musculature that must be hidden underneath its thick neck leads me to suggests they can easily snap an Inheritor mech in half!"

"What are your suggested counters for the Snapper Dolphin?" Major Verle calmly asked.

"Its weaknesses are self-evident. I think any mech officer can figure out a way to counter it considering that its fighting style resembles lancer mechs." Ves shrugged. It wasn't as if these types of spaceborn mechs had never shown up before. "They aren't as well-armored as the Gun Whales, so they rely more on their speed to survive. The dolphin-esque mech frame is fairly inflexible as all of its armaments are permanently directed towards its front. While that makes it a lot stronger than an equivalent humanoid mech in a frontal clash, it can't effectively defend itself from the flanks and rear. Surrounding it or boxing it in with superior numbers is an effective way to leave them with no escape."

Nothing he said sounded anything different from established mech tactics. Ves wasn't a mech officer after all. He only learned some superficial tactics in school and most of his progress in this area came from studying the way the Flagrant Vandals coordinated their mechs and employed their formations.

"And the final mech?"

"The Strangler Squid as I call it is their lightest, fastest and but potentially most lethal mech. It doesn't carry any ranged armaments at all, but it makes up for that with fairly light mass and a powerful flight system augmented with auxiliary boosters. Its main modus operandi seems to close in on a mech and envelop it with its tentacles. I'm not sure what kind of weapon system is hiding in the tentacles, as its articulated construction makes them very poor when used as a sword or club. My guess is that its limbs are either capable of secreting acid or electrifying anything caught within its grasp."

"Can they be countered in the same way as our Inheritors?"

"Effectively, yes." He nodded, acknowledging the similarities between the Inheritors and the Strangler Squids despite their wildly different shapes and design philosophies. "The Strangler Squids don't suffer the directional weaknesses of the Snapper Dolphins. It's fast, agile and the boosters integrated in the tentacles only enhances their overall mobility during critical moments. Just like the Inheritor, it's a cheap design that prioritizes speed above everything else, to the point of outperforming the humanoid design in this aspect."

The squid shape lent itself well to mobility-focused mech designs. The overall shape of squid-like animals evolved from an aquatic environment, which had more in common with moving in space than moving on land.

The legs of the Inheritor mechs really didn't serve any important purposes except to act as makeshift armor, making it more convenient to move in and out of the hangar bay, and to make mech pilots feel more comfortable about piloting a complete human-shaped mech.

"Are there any other insights you'd like to share about the Haatumak's mechs, Mr. Larkinson?"

He collected his thoughts for a few seconds. He picked up a lot of subtleties from the scans, but the problem was that most of his guesses couldn't easily be substantiated. The data he derived from his analysis might not be very relevant to non-mech designers either.

"All three mech designs from the Church of Haatumek carry the undeniable flavor of a mech designer with an aquatic mech background. The Gun Whale, Snapper Dolphin and Strangler Squids might differ from aquatic mechs with the inclusion of flight systems and the ability to operate in space, but I bet their behavior and fighting style will largely resemble their aquatic counterparts."

"What should we be cautious about, then?"

"Aquatic mechs are.. hmmm.. linear. Besides the Strangler Squids, you can expect the other two mech models to prefer to move in straight lines and base their tactics around that limitation."

"This does not sound too dissimilar to the conditions facing normal spaceborn mechs." Verle pointed out. As a mech pilot he should know how difficult it was to change the momentum of a mech already flying in space.

Ves couldn't voice much else without causing more confusion, so he refrained some revealing more information.

In truth, he sensed something strange about their designs. Besides the obvious fact that they appear to be designed by an aquatic mech designer who somehow ended up in space, the designs all carried something foreign. The only problem was that Ves couldn't quite pin down what he found so strange about their designs.

Whoever designed those mechs did a good job at hiding anything that Ves could use to define their design philosophy and where they came from. He suspected that the aquatic mech designer might even be a foreigner who fled all the way to the frontier to escape pursuit.

"Have you ever seen the three mech models in action, Ketis?" He asked.

"Are you kidding? Of course not." She shook her head. "The Swordmaidens never stick around if they could help it. The Haatumak worshippers are way too unsettling. It's like you're constantly being stared at by hungry beasts who are waiting to devour your flesh. When you step aboard the Temple, you'll know what I mean."

The appointment the Flagrant Swordmaidens had made with the Church of Haatumak obligated them to send a delegation of representatives to their Temple. Ves and Mayra were both included on the guest list as they were each the highest-ranking mech designers of their respective forces.

Ketis wasn't invited this time, though she didn't appear to be too upset about this missed opportunity.

"Believe me, you really don't want to stay any longer on their Temple than necessary. Stepping on her decks is like walking into a swamp filled with fog. The smell is disorienting and whatever incense they put in the air is practically being cycled throughout the entire ship! Then there's the worshippers themselves..."

She shuddered, as if reliving a bad memory. "Once I saw them face-to-face, I understood why civilized space kicked them out. Even most people here in the frontier don't want them around here. The only reason why they've been allowed to stay is because of their ability to hide our ships from the long-ranged detection methods of the sandmen."

From what Ves had been told, their delegation would arrive with a light guard but in full pirate regalia. That meant that everyone would be wearing the flashiest outfits imaginable.

He thought that religious nuts wouldn't be affected by someone else's appearances, but evidently he was wrong. The worshippers of Haatumak were still human in that sense.

Some time later, the Flagrant Swordmaidens fell into a stable, higher orbit around Mortose I. The unassuming planet looked remarkably like Old Earth, though a bit less lush.

Mortose I had an interesting history. Treasure hunters originally stumbled upon the planet when it still held a completely alien biosphere, but they found that it just required a little push to make it habitable to humans.

They came back later and employed some cheap and dirty methods to turn it into a human-friendly world. They introduced genetically modified alien flora and fauna that aggressively took over everything native.

The indigenous plants and wildlife had never evolved to withstand a threat from outer space! To them, the introduction of human-related species was an outside-context problem that they never prepared any counter-measures for!

The results could be imagined. Within several decades, almost every trace of Mortose I's original lifeforms had been eradicated, and the planet firmly became inhabitable by humans, to some degree.

To this date, the planet hosted various settlements, each numbering tens of thousands of sons and daughters of the frontier. That didn't sound like much, but that allowed them to hide their settlements from both greedy pirates and energy-hungry sandmen.

The Temple of Haatumak evidently conducted some business with the underground settlements, but she would be moving away after some time.

Ves entered the hangar bay and stepped aboard an armored shuttle that carried their complete delegation. Aside from four largely ceremonial guards in slightly gaudy armor, everyone else appeared ready to attend a costume party!

Everyone had been allowed to step aboard the Temple of Haatumak in heavy combat armor or lighter. For obvious reasons, exoskeleton armor was not allowed.

Because nobody thought they stood a chance if the Church of Haatumak turned against them on their own ship, most of the officers opted to pay a visit in light or medium combat armor.

Almost everyone from Major Verle to Chief Engineer Avanaeon wore suits of armor coated in black-and-burgundy and embellished with silver or golden skulls or other inane symbols. The armorers had a lot of fun applying the nonsensical symbols and surrounding them with meaningless frills onto the surface of their armor suits.

Lush capes like the one that Ves had already worn completed the impression that they were a group of high-ranking pirates with delusions of grandeur.

Some of the Vandal officers found their current appearances to be highly embarrassing! None of them managed to adjust to the culture shift of wearing such attention-grabbing outfits. However, they all understood the necessity of adhering to this local custom, as they needed to impress both the Church of Haatumak and the thousands of pirate visitors that for some reason or another stuck around aboard the Temple.

The shuttle lifted off from the flight deck and smoothly exited the hangar into open space. Strapped into his seat, Ves summoned up a small projection from his armrest that displayed a small glimpse of the many ships and mechs in orbit.

The massive shape of the Temple of Haatumak wooshed by for a few seconds.

"Impressive, is she not?" Avanaeon waved his hand at the projection. "They found a two-kilometer long exobeast skeleton that's in pristine condition and managed to build a functional ship out of old cargo haulers and a lot of junk. That's the frontier in a nutshell."

Ves understood his point. The huge Temple showed that you could still build a functional capital ship without a fancy shipyard or a prohibitive amount of expensive resources. However, despite the practicality of her inner structure, the seemingly superfluous skeleton wrapped around her hull was a cultural necessity rather than a technical one!

"What's in fashion in one star sector may not be comprehensible to another star sector. Extending this rule to unclaimed star regions isn't that much of a stretch." Ves replied.

"Fashionable or not, the sooner we get rid of these clown-like suits of armor, the better!"

A chief engineer and a head designer both shouldn't be wearing armor suits in the first place.

While they commisserated on the idiosynchrasies of the frontier, the shuttle began to approach one of the public hangar bays of the Temple of Haatumak. As the distance closed to within a couple of hundred kilometers, Ves briefly paused his chat with Avanaeon after sensing something remarkable from his sixth sense!

His eyes widened and he focused the projection back on the massive vessel. He actually felt something from the ship herself!

"What am I sensing? It's huge! Is it.. The spiritual remnants of that creature?!"

What he sensed was both massive and and decayed to the point of disappearing from this plane of existence entirely. Ves had never sensed something so powerful yet so hollow. A mass of contradictory thoughts flitted through his mind.

Chapter 694

Ves tried to maintain his composure as the Vandal shuttle touched down on the flight deck next to the shuttle that arrived from the Jaded Sword. He couldn't come up with any conclusion right now.

He suspected that the leviathan-like creature might have been an extraordinary species of exobeasts or even sentient aliens akin to the devoluted aeliotonoc whales he once had the pleasure of seeing on Moira's Paradise. He even enjoyed a steak from the same species!

Trying to compare the flavors he sampled from the spiritually sensitive whales to the massive but stagnant spiritual remnant returned no positive results. The two didn't appear to be related at all.

As Ves mused about the complex flavors he sensed from his sixth sense, the Vandal delegation exited through the hatch of the shuttle and arrived in front of a small greeting party of robed emissaries of the Church of Haatumak.

Everyone retracted their helmets into the neck guard of their varying suits of armor. As guests, they could expect some basic courtesies from the Temple of Haatumak. Being granted the privilege to breathe normal air under normal pressure should be one of them.

Still, some faint sense of wariness urged Ves to unfold his helmet and close his faceplate until his armor hermetically sealed his body from the environment.

He ignored that impulse, though. It would have been terribly undiplomatic of him to act unilaterally like that out of his sense of unease.

As they nestled in the Faris Star Region for over a hundred years, they had fully merged with the customs of the frontier. Every worshipper in sight, which included the flight deck crew, wore some form of light combat armor underneath their garments.

Ves couldn't figure out much about the armor, other than that their contours beneath the robes showed that their wearers added a lot of modular attachments or possessed unique physiques.

The cloth of the hooded robes themselves came in earthy tones, but that was where the mundane ended. Unknown alien script that appeared oddly compelling covered the surface of robes. They weren't static, but rather moved around the cloth as if they were alive.

Sometimes, the script even jumped out of the cloth and took on a three-dimensional shape in the air!

These pulses happened erratically and without rhyme or reason. All of these phenomena added to the mystery surrounding the cultists.

Still, none of the Vandals or the Swordmaidens felt comfortable being in their presence. The closer they got, the more their instincts warned of danger. Even Ves sensed something profoundly amiss with these cultists, though when he tried casting his spiritual sense at them, he only found them to be average humans. Their spirituality wasn't any stronger than that of a civilian.

A resplendently dressed and armored Major Verle stepped forward. Commander Lydia joined him at his side. While Verle only made due with a luxurious cape, Lydia used another exobeast pelt to add to her stature.

They approached the lead robed figure, whose face was obscured in the dark. The dim lighting throughout the entire interior of the Temple didn't help matters either.

"I am Commander Lydia of Lydia's Swordmaidens. Please allow me to introduce Major Verle of the 6th Flagrant Vandals, 3rd Tarry Division of the Southern Mech Army of the Bright Republic Mech Corps."

"We meet again, Commander Lydia." A horse voice exited the robed emissary's mouth. "You may call me the Seventeenth Altar. As for you, stranger from a civilized state, on behalf of the Church of Haatumak, we bless you with the radiance of our watching god. Know that in these silent times, the presence of Haatumak will guide you to the light you Brighters so crave."

Ves felt a vague sense of deja-vu when he heard the so-called Seventeenth Altar speak. Did he know the cultist from somewhere? Had they met before? Or was the cultist messing with his mind with a peculiar speech technique?

"..Charmed." Verle eventually released. He raised his hand in an attempt to shake the Seventeenth Altar's hand, but thought better of it. Obviously his diplomatic training could use some refreshing. "This is not a suitable venue to talk business. Please lead the way."

"Very well. If you will follow us. Do not attempt to deviate from our path. You will die. This is not a warning. This is Haatumak's will."

Two-dozen officers from the Swordmaidens and the Vandals befuddled followed after the emissaries. What struck Ves as he stepped a little closer to the worshippers was the smell emanating out of their bodies.

They reeked like rotting insects and lizard meat gone stale! The atrocious blend of smells seemed to emanate from their very flesh, because there was nothing else the smells could have come from! Though the smell wasn't strong enough to induce physical nausea, none of the guests wanted to stay aboard the Temple any longer than necessary!

The lengthy, rusty and not entirely even corridors of the ship smelled as if it decades of accumulated sweat and other excretions from the cultists had stained the very bulkheads with their brand of smells.

The sounds and noise echoing off the barren corridors and largely empty compartments also added to the pervasive sense of otherness that suffused the Temple of Haatumak.

As a temple, the worshippers hadn't left the bulkheads bare. Random stretches of vague alien script dominated some spaces. At other places, some worshippers had worked the metal bulkheads, treating them as raw material to fashion incomprehensible sculptures of star systems, exobeasts and more alien script.

He could tell that the various depictions carried a profound message. At some of these impromptu works of art and piety, various groups of cultists knelt down and prayed in front of them. They were sometimes joined by pirate guests dressed in similar elaborate armored outfits as the Vandals and the Swordmaidens.

"Haatumak.. I beseech you.." A pirate prayed with a gruff frontier accent. "Bless my next raid.. may the sandmen never find my fleet.. may we plunder much booty.. harvest a rich amount of slaves.. please bless our raiding expedition.."

Ves wanted to slap the head of that praying pirate commander silly. Was Haatumak the god of piracy something?!

"..KhnlnfeheN.. Haatumak! 'UIothenana.. Ken'Haatumak la Kh'tnewAdda.."

If that wasn't bad enough, the robed members of the Church of Haatumak prayed in an entirely alien language.. some even spoke sounds that couldn't be pronounced with a baseline human's voice!

The unsettling, alien voices emanating from their throats disturbed the Vandals and the Swordmaidens even further. Even though the latter group had visited the Temple of Haatumak before, they never got used to the pervasive weirdness that suffused the entire vessel.

It didn't help that the worshippers adhered to the same hygiene and maintenance standards as the rest of the frontier. This meant that visitors encountered sporadic piles of junk and random splotches on the deck along the way to wherever the Seventeenth Altar was supposed to lead them towards.

Ves also observed a complete lack of cleaning bots along the way. Instead, robes worshippers appeared to be manually cleaning the deck with the most low-tech mops he had ever seen. They consisted of a salvaged alloy bar that could have come from a random shipwreck with a dense mop of artificial fibers stuck at one of the ends.

No wonder the corridor looked so dirty. Wasn't the Church worried about epidemics or something? Ves would rather see the return of cleaning bots despite their propensity to spontaneously commit genocide.

"..humzah.. Haatumak.. K'chREnotendada.. Haatumak.."

Their silent torture finally ended when they reached a large hollow chamber set up as a grand hall of worship. The same incomprehensible sights they encountered in the corridors seemed to dominate the entire hall.

Various statues of star systems, alien script and random exobeasts had been forged out of salvaged alloys. The worshippers who fashioned them together never hid the humble origins of their source materials. The visible diversity in their materials added a sense of triumph from adversity to their impression.

The low mantra of worship in alien language sounded a lot more pervasive in the hollow chamber. The echoes only amplified their ability to prevent any guests from relaxing.

The Seventeenth Altar waved his hand, causing his fellow attendant worshippers to disperse. "Please follow me to the Ritual Pit, guests. We must register your entry to our holy temple to the watchers of our venerable lord."

That sounded reassuring. Still, the fact that the Swordmaidens hadn't lashed out or anything demonstrated that this procedure shouldn't be harmful to them. Hopefully.

The Ritual Pit had been constructed through the deck in the middle of the hall. An empty amphitheater-like construction ringed the depression in the deck.

It looked as if someone incorporated a swimming pool in this chamber, only instead of filling it with water or some other normal fluid, the worshippers instead filled it with blood!

The Vandals tried hard not to show their disgust at the intense coppery smell that suffused the vicinity of the pool. Ves looked at the semi-viscous red liquid and tried to imagine how many humans the Church of Haatumak had bled to gather so much blood.

Flanking the unsettling pool, a pair of horse-sized genetically engineered beasts that resembled hounds from hell stood guard. Ves recognized a strong trace of dogs, but he couldn't identify which alien traits they had been blended with that made them appear so bloodthirsty and intimidating.

Oh, they were bloodthirsty alright.

Literally so as one of the hounds lazily plopped its muzzle close to the surface of the pool and started lapping at the blood as if they were drinking off a dog bowl!

An errant thought in his mind suspected that the Seventeenth Altar deliberately walked them through all of the other weirdness they encountered so far just to prevent them from freaking out at the sight of the massive pool of blood!

Ves felt as if they were being treated like frogs dumped into a pan of water that was slowly being brought to boil!

He wasn't the only one who thought so, as the reflexive motions of some of the Vandals showed they too faced a fight or flight response.

Naturally, nobody reacted in the end. They willingly entered the den of the beast. Turning around halfway would thoroughly offend the Church of Haatumak and may make it difficult for them to exit.

The Seventeenth Altar approached the edge of the pool, rummaged in the pockets of his robes and retrieved what appeared to be a nutrient pack of all things!

"Hmm.. strawberry chicken with authentic Rubarthan tomatoes flavor.. forty-three years old.. Good enough.."

The cultist ripped open the top of the pack before throwing it into the pool, wrapping and all!

The pool of blood started to bubble. Not because it heated up, but because something released a breath from beneath!

Ves and some of the Vandals took an unconscious step back. What kind of eldritch creature did the Seventeenth Altar woke up? Would this monster appreciate being disturbed by one of the most awful foods that humanity had ever invented?

"Arise!" The Seventeenth Altar raised his hands while forming claw-like shapes. "Arise, great envoy of our lord!"

What emerged from the pool of blood wasn't some massive exobeast. Nor did it resemble some kind of inanimate alien object or the like.

No, what actually emerged from the pool was a perfect specimen of a naked human male!

Though only the torso emerged from the surface, the fantastic athleticism of the body along with the naturally handsome contours of the body and face made many women among the Swordmaidens and Vandals stumble.

The only reason why they hadn't become more smitten at the figure was because the gaze of the man looked eerily dead.

Though his body seemed unquestionably functional, there didn't seem to be anything present in the strange man's mind!

"This.. this is a clone!" Someone uttered.

A clone! Of who?! And what purpose did the clone serve?!

Ves figured he was about to find out, because the Seventeenth Altar prostated before the emerged clone. The cultist muttered some alien words that none of the Swordmaidens or the Vandals understood. Hell, they didn't even know if the half-dead clone registered the words either.

Nonetheless, after blabbering for half a minute, the clone began to react. He was actually functional enough to respond to stimuli! Ves had never heard of any successful instances of clones that were able to do something so simple yet so far out of reach!

Every attempt at cloning a human resulted in a brain-dead sack of flesh! This seemed to be a universal rule, and applied to sentient aliens as well as most complex forms of life!

Yet either the Church of Haatumak had cracked the secret somehow, or the man wasn't a clone at all, and turned out to be a half-grown human who for some reason liked to spend his time submerged in blood!

Nonetheless, Ves didn't have any time to think further, because the clone started to make his move. The blood-soaked man's eyes began to shine.

Chapter 695

Not human. The discomfort Ves and the others felt from the figure that emerged from the pool of blood came from the fact that it looked human, but acted anything but like one.

"Witness the glory of Tektak, the Ordained Eyes of Haatumak!" The Seventh Altar shrieked with his horse voice baring at his heavily modified throat. "Bare your soul to him so that he may judge your worthiness in our savior and god!"

Ves had a small hunch. The strange manifestation of Tektak's glowing eyes portended a possible threat to him, yet he didn't know why he felt this way!

What was the purpose of those glowing eyes? He mulled the question in his mind at an accelerated rate, which had the illusion of slowing down his perception of time. The eerie red glowing eyes grew brighter and brighter, but at a pace that gave him a small measure of time to think!

He recalled the recent sights and tried to pin down the reason for the discomfort he had felt ever since he stepped inside the Temple of Haatumak. Why did the ship and her people emanate a faint sense of threat to him, to the point of stimulating his fight or flight response?

The disorientation he suffered from the Temple's various visual, auditory and olfactory cues confused his judgement and made it hard for him to think clearly. The Church of Haatumak deliberately messed with his senses!

He concluded that he couldn't rely on his normal senses at all.

During times like these, he trusted his sixth sense the most. As much as others wanted to deceive his perceptions and mislead him by transmitting confusing signals tailor-made to instill specific detrimental effects, they shouldn't be omnipotent.

These cultists may have been seasoned masters in deceiving his five regular senses, but what did they know about spirituality? Ves tentatively considered himself as an adept of this ethereal, metaphysical field.

He closed his eyes and tried to ignore the stimuli that constantly brushed against his hearing, smell and taste. He disregarded the pool of blood, the reeking smell of copper or the tangy moist taste in the air and focused his attention on his sixth sense.

One critical observation stood out.

He felt it, stronger and closer than ever. The all-encompassing presence locked within the bones thrummed throughout the entire two-kilometer length of the Temple of Haatumak.

The remnant presence only had a vague presence left, minute in the larger scheme of things. Yet it reminded him of another chimera creation, one that left a profound impression in his memories and still impressed him to this day!

The Kaius, the massive mech made out of the carcass of a hexapod king and salvaged parts of wrecked mechs. The deadly chimera mech had been fashioned by a rather unskilled mech designer, but over the years the mad Dr. Jutland constantly tweaked and refined its biological parts until it became a near-unbeatable machine on Groening IV!

If not for his sabotage, perhaps Captain Kaine's Hunting Platoon would have never been able to contend against this beast!

"Why am I recalling the Kaius of all things?"

He churned his mind as fast as possible, hoping to reach an answer before this clone called Tektak unleashed whatever metaphysical mumbo jumbo it had in store.

"Wait a minute.. They're similar!"

The Kaius and the Temple of Haatumak didn't resemble each other at all at first glance. One was a mech made out of dead, rotting but not quite decayed tissue. The other was a massive ship that consisted largely of salvaged ships and alloy junk. The leviathan skeleton enveloping it only appeared to be cosmetic and symbolic in function than anything else.

Yet.. even though back then, his sixth sense hadn't developed up to its current strength, he swore the Kaius carried a similar air to the leviathan remnant. The dignity of the king among their species, the supreme confidence of an apex predator, the lamentation of their fall, all of these feelings were remarkably faint, but present when many other remnants retained no emotions at all.

What tied Dr. Jutland and these weird cultists together? Why did they share the same propensity for working with exobeast remains?

His eyes widened in realization.

The Five Scrolls Compact!

Dr. Jutland may have been an exiled member of that dangerous cult, but certainly he might not be the only one! The Compact, known to be obsessed with tinkering with genetics in the pursuit of longevity, were probably the most formidable researchers in the field of genetic modification!

The other possibility was that the Church of Haatumak may not be exiles at all, but a legitimate off-shoot of the Compact! As a huge underground organization that could rival the MTA in power and technology, their presence was everywhere. For the Church to be one of their hidden arms allowed the Compact to maintain ties with every independent pirate outfit that sought out their services.

Other clues strengthened his conviction.

The worshippers of Haatumak all wore earthen-colored robes that obscured their bodies. The religious symbols and alien script that ran over their surface and sprang in the air in a miniature light show distracted guests from noticing the inhuman proportions and protrusions from some of the figures underneath the robes. Ves bet their actual appearance diverged enormously from the baseline human form!

If the MTA excelled in understanding machines, then the Five Scrolls Compact were the masters of human biology. Everything Ves witnessed so far about the Church of Haatumak gave him the notion that they were certainly up to weird activities.

While that did not necessarily establish a solid connection between the Church and the Compact, it made a certain amount of sense, and it wasn't as if he figured out a better theory.

What mattered was that the Compact, and by extension the Church, liked to mess with biology and their own bodies. It was one thing to strengthen their bodies in order to increase their ability to fight and survive, which the Swordmaidens had done.

It was another thing entirely to experiment on themselves because they worshipped an alien entity and liked to experiment on themselves and others to further their research or something.

Even though Ves still doubted that the connection between the two organizations actually existed, time was running out. He needed to act on this information now before it was too late!

Tektak's glowing eyes became so bright they resembled a binary pair of red suns. Whatever the clone activated should be activating soon, if it hadn't done so already.

Ves quickly tried to figure out what those glowing eyes were meant to observe, and whether Ves might be at risk. The problem was that he just didn't know too much about the Five Scrolls Compact!

So he turned the question around. What was it about Ves that they might be interested in the most?

The System! From his father's message, the System originally belonged to the Compact! Though Ves had no idea why such a wondrous program was related to a secret organization that largely dealt with biology rather than machines, he had no cause to doubt his father's words.

Ves breathed a tiny sigh of relief for leaving the comm which held the System behind on Cloudy Curtain. He possessed nothing on his body which tied him to the System which his father had snatched from their grasp.

Then his breath stuttered again because though he left the System behind, he couldn't leave his body behind!

Plenty of stuff might alarm these cultists if this TekTak picked up their presence. His enhanced Spirituality, his extremely weird Jutland organ, regulator organ that had half-merged with his nervous system and the unknown energy cycle undetectable by normal means might all be exposed by this biological scanner.

"No. Not quite."

The gifts he received from Dr. Jutland might still be explained. After all, the CFA had already taken plenty of scans and tissue samples. They even cloned his entire body! So if the Compact had a halfway decent spy network, then they might have already been aware of the hidden curiosities in his body.

The only secret that Ves truly couldn't leak was his Spirituality. Though he didn't know how he initially came to possess it, Ves knew undeniably that his mental strength received a substantial boost after consuming Dr. Jutland's heavenly flower.

So if TekTak possibly looked out for unnaturally strong mentalities, then Ves needed to figure out a way to obscure it as fast as possible.

His panic had reached a peak until he suddenly figured out a solution.

It was simple! Just think about nothing at all!

Everything he had seen so far had been designed to attract his attention! From the dirty corridors to the massive pool of blood and the weird clone with glowing eyes, they not only confused and disoriented their guests, but they also put them in a flighty condition where their minds became razor-focused on a couple of strong thoughts and urges.

The Church might have intended to prod him into concentrating his mind!

This might be because his Spirituality became a sharp and solid entity when Ves concentrated his mind on a single topic. However, the moment he became scatterbrained, all of that solid mass dispersed into intangible mist.

While this mist still carried a lot of energy compared to what laid inside the mind of a baseline human, it was essentially directionless. With particles of thought energy randomly flitting up and down, back and forth, left and right, the net effect was that his Spirituality didn't exert any pressure on anything.

In essence, his Spirituality became just as hard to detect as any other person's mental energy!

He closed his eyes, ostensibly to avoid the glow of TekTak's blindingly bright red eyes, and mentally jarred his mind into a confusing mess.

It sounded complicated, but Ves was actually extremely good at throwing his mind in a state of disarray. Sometimes, he even suspected that this might even be his natural state of mind.

A few more seconds passed as the brightness continued to increase in luminosity to the point of penetrating past his eyelids. That threatened to distract Ves into focusing his thoughts on the strange entity called TekTak, but he forcibly punched his mentality once again, causing it to break apart into formless mist.

He did it just in time, because an even brighter flash washed over the Vandals and the Swordmaidens! Along with the flash that pricked his eyes even after keeping his eyes pressed shut, his sixth sense also felt a faint wave of formless energy brushing through his body!

Ves worked harder than ever before to keep his mind in a mindless state, which sounder harder than it actually appeared to be. His chaotic mind hosted hundreds of thoughts at a time, tugging his spirituality in so many different directions that it didn't react or hinder the energy wave at all!

The energy wave also passed through his organs and energy cycle like they didn't exist, so Ves figured it was purely geared towards detecting entities that possessed unusual spiritualities.

Perhaps the Church didn't even employ an entity like TekTak to detect anomalies like Ves. The only other humans that might have possibly reacted to the energy wave were high-ranking mech pilots and mech designers.

That should have been TekTak's main purpose now that he thought about it! Someone like Ves may have never been the target at all! Yet if Ves hadn't scatterbrained his own mind, he might have been mistaken as one of them by the worshippers of Haatumak, which could have led to all kinds of awful consequences.

As the wave finally passed and light finally dimmed, everything turned back to normal. The crisis had passed, and neither the Seventeenth Altar or TekTak showed any signs of detecting something unusual among them. While that didn't rule out that they were merely hiding their reactions, Ves figured that this was probably not the case.

TekTak gazed in the direction of the Swordmaidens and Vandals with unblinking eyes as his upper body slowly began to submerge into the pool of water.

The process looked eerie, as the unmoving and unblinking TekTak resembled a lifeless statue that had been thrown into a lake.

The Seventeenth Altar stepped into view, his robe blocking the view of the sinking clone. "The Ordained Eyes of Haatumak is pleased with what they have seen. All of you are qualified to remain aboard our Temple if you are in need of asylum or enlightenment in our ways. If not, I shall bring you to our Coinlord with whom you may arrange a transaction."

"We'd like to pick the latter, please." Major Verle said, his voice not entirely stable. "Time is short, and we are expected elsewhere. We would appreciate it if we can expedite our meeting with the Coinlord."

"If that is what you wish, Brighter."

Chapter 696

Ves maintained a wary attitude throughout his stay aboard the Temple of Haatumak. Even after the Seventeenth Altar led them away from the eerie pool of blood and the human-like entity that resided within, he still remained a little too jumpy for his own good.

Fortunately, his suit of armor and the cape that enveloped half his form helped a lot to hide the nervousness in his body language. As for his face, he consciously focused on keeping it as immobile as possible.

Of course, concentrating his mind on anything risked getting picked up by whatever detection methods the worshippers of Haatumak installed throughout the interior of the vessel.

Still, from the elaborate and deliberate showmanship around the entity known as TekTak, Ves figured that it wouldn't be easy to replicate the same feat. The energy wave that emanated out of TekTak also spread out in an expanding sphere, meaning that if physics didn't completely screw up, the expanding field should have been subject to the inverse-square law.

In simple terms, the energy wave should have lost enough power that by the time the delegations exited the central chamber, it should have been so dispersed it wouldn't be able to do anything about his mentality at all.

So Ves should by all rights relax.

He couldn't. Not when the Seventeenth Altar led the Swordmaidens and the Vandals deeper into the bowels of a ship that was possibly related to the dreaded Five Scrolls Compact.

Considering that the Compact may very well be his archenemy, Ves couldn't afford to let down his guard.

As they walked through a number of corridors featuring the same kind of scenery as before, they finally emerged in a medium-sized compartment that looked cleaner than the rest of the ship. At least here the cultists actually made a decent attempt at matching the efficiency of cleaning bots.

Ves blinked as they met yet another robed fellow sitting at a desk in the center of the largely empty compartment.

"Coinlord, the delegation from Lydia's Swordmaidens and the Flagrant Vandals wishes to discuss.. business with us."

The man called the Coinlord extended a gnarly finger from his voluminous sleeves. "Understood. Begone now."

With that brief exchange of words, the Seventeenth Altar silently stepped outside the compartment, upon which the hatch slid shut.

"I would invite you to take a seat, outsiders, but I am afraid this compartment is lacking amenities."

"We can stand." Major Verle replied in a curt tone. Denying them seats during a business negotiation was a petty move, but the cultists probably didn't care. "We'd like to make a deal."

"Very well. Step closer. I shall bring up the suggested contract so we may discuss the finer points."

Compared to the Seventeenth Altar and the other robed figures, the Coinlord sounded a lot more normal than the others. It probably came with the job if he was responsible for taking care of the business side of running the Church of Haatumak.

Commander Lydia, Major Verle and the Coinlord all huddled around and started to negotiate. Ves idly listened in on the conversation. Besides handing over a substantial but not too painful sum of K-coins, the Coinlord also demanded some inexplicable requests the Vandals and the Swordmaidens were obligated to fulfill.

Many of these requests fell in the range of sending a number of Vandals to pray to Haatumak for three days in a row aboard the Temple.

Another request entailed sending another delegation to conduct a sacrifice to Haatumak. The cultists demanded a human sacrifice, the more the better. This request caused Major Verle and the Vandals to balk, but Commander Lydia calmly stepped in at that point.

"The Swordmaidens will provide the sacrifices. Just like before."

The Coinlord nodded underneath his robes. "Very well. Be aware that your sacrifices do not quite meet our requirements. If you wish to satisfy our lord, you must bring a greater number than you brought before."

"We shall bring half as much on top of the normal quota."

"Acceptable, if only just. I suggest you bring livelier sacrifices next time."

None of the Vandals officers present were stupid. They realized that the Swordmaidens have very well condemned some of their own slaves to death. Commander Lydia bartered away their lives like trading away chickens at a market stall.

Ves almost scooted away from the Swordmaidens. The brief exchange highlighted the fact that while the Swordmaidens may seem friendly to the Vandals, their pirate heritage still ran through their genes. They stuck to morality only when it suited them, and disregarded it whenever it became a hindrance.

As the horse-trading dragged on, his mind began to wander off a little. The presence of Ves, Mayra and the others seemed superfluous. It appeared they only accompanied their mech commanders in order to make them look more impressive. So far, they played no role in the negotiations.

His eyes rolled around the empty compartment and wondered why the Temple of Haatumak built such a huge space only to place a single desk and chair in the very center. The bulkheads were oddly bare. Besides some subtle alien script sprinkled here and there, the entire compartment looked as barren as an empty cargo hold.

Did the Church of Haatumek spend all those resources to build a massive and impressive looking ship, only to scratch their heads when they had to put all of that internal volume to use?

Ves saw nothing in the compartment. His nose and ears sensed nothing either. It was completely empty and devoid of any furnishings, markings or anything else.

The emptiness disturbed him and nagged at him. He wasn't the only one who felt that way, as many of the Swordmaidens and Vandals fidgeted as they stood at attention behind their leaders.

Something was giving him the creeps again. The closed compartment had cut him off from the sounds of the praying worshippers, the sight of strange idols carved out of the bulkheads and the insectoid smell emanating from the bodies of the robed figures.

He should have been comforted by the lack of disturbing stimuli. Instead, their absence had the eerie effect of making him jump at shadows that didn't exist!

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." He muttered silently to himself. He repeated these words because they felt apt to this situation.

This notion predicated on the premise that a threat likely existed, and may be closer than he thought!

He remembered earlier with TekTak that the Church of Haatumak may not be so oblivious to spirituality than the rest of humanity. If the Five Scrolls Compact had already scratched the surface of the secrets behind the spirituality phenomenon, then it may not be farfetched to assume the Church touched upon the same secrets!

On an impulse, Ves exerted his Spirituality and sent out a tiny pulse in imitation of TekTak's move. A ripple emanated from his mind in a small sphere, spreading far enough to cover the entire chamber before dissipating.

He frowned a bit.

His own pulse appeared to have encountered a minute amount of resistance, yet there shouldn't anything in the compartment but air!

He repeated the pulse, and encountered the same kind of airy sensation that he felt whenever he passed over his Spirituality through a human body.

It made him feel a bit suspicious. What was up with the Coinlord and his strangely wide but empty compartment?

Though he carefully pulsed a few more times, varying the parameters of the energy waves his mind emitted, he couldn't figure out anything else. It was as if something was right in front of him, but he was too blind to spot its presence!

Only his sixth sense seemed sensitive enough to detect something amiss, but it couldn't replace his conventional human senses.

"Ah!"

An inspired idea flitted across his mind. If his senses lacked the sensitivity to spot the hidden presence, then why not try to leverage the strength of his Spirituality to enhance its capabilities?

It sounded like a risky idea. He did not wish to mess up his eyesight at this crucial moment. Yet if he simply stood still and pass the time in silence, then decision to do nothing would continue to haunt him for a long time.

He simply couldn't resist the temptation of knowing.

Besides, if he popped his own eyes for some reason, he could simply let the doctors of the Vandals clone a new pair of eyes to replace his old ones.

He carefully released a tendril of spiritual energy from the center of his brains. Slowly and steadily, they extended towards his left eyeball, leaving his right one unaided for the moment. There was no reason to employ both of his eyes at once for this impromptu experiment.

Nothing seemed to happen as the invisible and intangible tendril of energy ran through his left eye. The energy tendril and eyeball existed in two completely different realms. There didn't appear to be any overlap for the energy tendril to latch on.

Ves needed to find a way to interact. He couldn't figure out any other way than concentrating his mind to focus on the idea of the energy tendril enhancing his eyesight.

Surprisingly, it happened easier than he thought. The energy tendril exhibited some kind of rudimentary intelligence as it abruptly enveloped his eyeball and saturated specific tissue with an abundance of its energy.

Was it working?

He blinked.

Then his eyesight changed.

The vision coming from his left eye continued to show a large and empty compartment. Besides the armored and caped forms of the Vandals and Swordmaidens, the only other objects that occupied it was the Coinlord and his desk and chair.

The vision from his left eye showed a very different sight. Though the images from his left eye became a little blurred, he still perceived a massive difference from what his other eye transmitted back to his brains!

His enhanced sight plainly told him that the compartment was packed with dark-robed cultists!

Perhaps a hundred cultists stood side-by-side, filling up every available space and leaving virtually no free space between their bodies!

The cultists stood next to the bulkheads, next to the Coinlord and his desk, next to Commander Lydia and Major Verle, and more alarmly right in front of Ves and the other members of the delegation!

Frighteningly enough, their bodies and their dark hooded faces faced the nearest visible entity, resembling the behavior of metal files when thrown at a magnet. Those closest to the Coinlord stared at the worshipper in charge of business transaction, while the invisible entities that stood only a finger's width apart from Ves stared directly in his face!

He suppressed every possible reaction he could make! He even pressed an internal button in his suit of armor to lock it up entirely so that he could focus on keeping his expression and eye movements as neutral as possible.

He couldn't let the dark cultists know he detected their presence!

His concentration proved to be a great help in this endeavor. He reacted quickly enough to halt his facial twitches before they could fully convey his shock of recognition.

Ves especially fought back his impulse to stare directly in the eyes of the cultist whose face was only five or so centimeters away from his own!

What was going on?! How could so many cultists sneak inside this compartment and remain invisible and undetectable? Despite facing a dark-hooded cultist right in front of his face, Ves did not sense that cultist's breath at all!

Were the cultists even physically present in this compartment? If Ves were to stretch his arm forward, would he bump into their bodies or go right through them as if they existed in another plane?

A small part of his mind doubted whether his left eye wasn't making things up. Surely there couldn't be so many invisible cultists in the compartment? Neither his human senses nor the sensors of his combat armor detected anything amiss! Therefore, Ves started to doubt whether the presence had manifested in the compartment in a physical form.

On an impulse, Ves temporarily unlocked his armor suit and abruptly raised his arm as if to stretch it out of boredom.

He expected his arm to go right through the cultist standing in front of him. He did not expect the cultist to quickly move backwards, avoiding the armored limb entirely.

The robed figure's movement had a ripple effect on his fellow cultists. Every invisible worshipper next to him moved backwards to provide more space, causing the invisible figures behind them to make way as well.

A simple gesture from Ves caused almost half of the cultists to rear back!

Ves seriously became distressed. Were these cultists physically present in this compartment? How could that be!

Chapter 697

Ignorance was bliss.

Ves should have never messed with his Spirituality. Look where that got him. He detected an invisible mob of robed worshippers that pretty much filled up the entire compartment, but couldn't act on the information!

If he spoke out now and warned his comrades, who would believe him? He'd only be tipping off the worshippers of Haatumak, thereby drawing unnecessary attention from them. Nothing good would come from revealing their presence when they didn't appear to be malicious!

From what he could tell, while the invisible figures weren't doing anything other than to stare creepily at the nearest humans, he still felt as if there presence wasn't simple.

Nobody would surround a bunch of people with invisible and completely undetectable cultists for the fun of it!

He eventually decided to pull back his curiosity and deactivate his newly enhanced sight. The compartment appeared blessedly empty and void of any creepy cultists.

As the negotiations began to wind down, Ves tried and failed to come up for a reason why the Church of Haatumak sent so many invisible cultists in this compartment. He simply couldn't explain their behavior at all, from their motivations to how they accomplished this strange feat.

Even among the frontier, their methods were too extreme!

Therefore, Ves concluded that guessing anything about them was an exercise in futility. He'd be driven mad before he could derive any meaning from their actions.

He'd rather explore his new discovery instead.

Spirituality seemed more wondrous and versatile than he thought. He already found out that they were the key to the advancement of mech pilots and possibly mech designers as well. Back home, Lucky managed to learn and retain the ability to turn his mechanical cat-like body intangible, a trick that Ves had never mastered to his regret.

Ves assumed his Spirituality only excelled at creating imaginary entities, but it turned out to be more versatile than he thought.

Did aptitude play a role? Were certain people or entities inclined towards certain applications of spiritual energy than other methods? Or could Ves utilize any possible use as long as he nailed down the correct method?

The difference was profound. If the latter leaned towards the truth, then Ves would someday be capable of performing feats that resembled magic by employing nothing but his mind!

As Ves mulled over this issue, the negotiation finally ended. Both Commander Lydia and Major Verle appeared content with the deal they made with the Coinlord. After making a lot of commitments to participate in various strange rituals, the Church of Haatumak would only charge a modest fee to 'bless' each of their starships.

This was what they came for. As they exited the strangely empty compartment, the two leaders addressed their subordinates.

"We shall be remaining aboard the Temple of Haatumak for three more days." Verle began. "Each of you shall follow a different attendant, who will guide you to different parts of their vessel in order to take part in their worship and other rituals."

The Swordmaidens already knew what was in store, but some of the Vandals groaned.

"I do not expect you to convert to their religion! In fact, it would be better if you'd not! Just remember your instructions. Remain polite and respectful, but don't get hoodwinked! We are both Vandals and Brighters! Remember your heritage, and I'm confident you won't go astray!"

Commander Lydia approached the Vandals. "My Swordmaidens and I have been through their mumbo-jumbo before. The ceremonies the worshippers of Haatumak conduct are unsettling, but harmless. The only way they can harm you is if your conviction is too weak, something which you Vandals shouldn't be too concerned about. Have you seen the pirates along the way?"

They nodded. They came across many random pirates who joined the dark-robed cultists into worshipping some idol or alien script.

"They're the ones who forgot themselves. They abandoned their ship, captain and comrades to become a nameless devotee to Haatumak." She spoke grimly. "If you fall into their trap, don't expect us to rescue you. One of the agreements we made with the Church of Haatumak is that once you become a believer, you are no longer part of our crew."

The Vandals acknowledged the warning but didn't consider themselves to be at risk. Compared to the pathetic, weak-willed pirates that the Church hoodwinked into joining their side, the Vandals were made of sterner stuff.

A few minutes later, a number of lighter robed figures arrived behind the heels of the Seventeenth Altar. The man bowed before the delegation and gestured at the cultists he brought.

"Our acolytes will accompany each of your delegates to their intended destinations. Rest assured that we will take care of your men and women. They will be in good hands."

Even if the guests doubted the goodwill of the Church, they had no choice but to play along.

The slightly hunched and short figure that approached Ves turned out to be an old lady of some sorts. The crone-like figure hid her face underneath the hood of her robes, but her voice as well as her contours betrayed enough to figure out a few clues.

"Head designer Larkinson. I am Acolyte Villis. Your presence is requested at our mech workshop. Follow."

The Vandals and Swordmaidens split up. As a mech designer, Ves figured that the Church wanted to employ rituals related to mechs when it came to him and Mayra. However, another acolyte led Mayra towards a different section of the ship, so it seemed he wouldn't be able to lean on her experience this time.

Acolyte Villis led Ves to a series of corridors and elevators that brought him deeper into the lower decks of the Temple of Haatumak. Along the way, he encountered fewer cultists and worshippers, but the number of altars and symbols painted on the bulkheads never receded.

Along the silent journey, Ves dared not to stimulate his Spirituality. He didn't need to, because his instincts and his passive senses warned him that the invisible watchers never left his presence. He could guess that their presence might have drastically been reduced, but he never felt truly alone with Acolyte Villis.

"Acolyte?"

"Yes, head designer?"

"Are you permitted to answer some questions?"

The robed acolyte shrugged. Ves took that to mean that she had never been forbidden to do so, but that few guests actually took the initiative to do so.

Considering how creepy the interior of the Temple appeared and how strangely the worshippers behaved, Ves didn't blame the others from keeping their mouths shut.

Yet while Ves sensed plenty of latent threats from his surroundings, the worshippers never revealed any signs of actual malice. As long as he stayed under their radar, the robed figures didn't place a lot of emphasis on him. They had no reason to suspect he was anything special.

"Can you tell me about Haatumak? What kind of god is he?"

The acolyte halted in her footsteps. The old crone turned around until her obscured hooded face glanced at Ves. For some reason, he still wasn't able to make out any of her facial features.

The lighting that illuminated the corridors might be rather dim, but it shouldn't have been able to blacken the insides of the hoods completely!

More strange magics was afoot.

"Haatumak.. you'd do well not to pry into matters you are not yet worthy to know."

It seems as if they really prize the secrecy surrounding their religion. Ves didn't know whether they did it for show or if they really believed in the entity they called by that name. He half-believed that all of the theatrics he had witnessed so far were made-up rituals meant to cover up the possibility that they acted as an arm of the Five Scrolls Compact.

He still hadn't obtained any solid proof that the Compact had a hand in the Church, he summed up his courage and kept asking probing questions.

Since asking about Haatumak directly touched upon a taboo, Ves took on a different tack. "Who is the Seventeenth Altar? Why is he called by that title?"

Apparently, the acolyte faced much less restrictions when it came to this topic. She answered calmly but readily.

"The Seventeenth Altar is one of the ninety-nine Living Altars in human flesh. They are one of the most devoted servants of our Church, dedicating both their bodies and their fate to our lord. As the seventeenth-ranked Altar, the man is closer to our lord than many other believers. He is one of the leading shepherds of the acolytes."

"So are they the mid-ranked priests of your Church?"

"I have heard them described in that fashion." The crone responded as they both resumed their journey towards the Temple's mech workshop. "To be more accurate, they are not quite priests. They have taken a step beyond what even the High Priest has taken in our devotion towards our lord. They have offered up their very flesh and bones to be turned into a Living Altar upon which others may offer their sacrifices! You cannot fathom the immensity of such a choice to us!"

Ves blinked a few times. He tried to parse the meaning behind her words. For some reason, a worshipper who went beyond a priest were called Living Altars. The main significance behind this transformation appeared to be to facilitate the rituals the Church regularly cooked up.

What was an altar?

He imagined a table or solid raised surface, upon which random religious props were scattered over its surface. It served as a convenient surface to place down a bowl of holy water or a ritual dagger. They also served as a sacred area upon which various solemn rituals may be conducted by priests.

So what did a Living Altar do?

The image of the table replaced itself with an ugly, old man who subjected his body with an abundance of genetic modification. The so-called Living Altar stood at the spot of the previous altar and bent down backwards until his arms supported his arching body beneath his head.

The Living Altar's rough, uneven stomach served as a makeshift surface this time!

Ves quickly shook his head. Such a sight was stupid. The literal meaning of Living Altar simply made no sense.

Suddenly, a disconcerting possibility sprang within his mind. "Say, what kind of rituals do Living Altars partake in?

The old crone chuckled in a disturbing cackle that sounded like a murder of crows found a carcass to feast upon. "You will regret asking me that question. It is no secret of ours what Living Altars are responsible for. The Seventeenth Altar will be present at the ritual of sacrifice. When your Swordmaiden allies bring their slaves aboard the Temple, do you believe we are content with slitting their throats and let their blood spill on the deck? Haatumak is the watcher, but he also grows hungry!"

"Then.. the Living Altars.."

"You do not need to stammer your words, head designer. At the crucial time, the Living Altars become hosts to Haatumak's Hunger. As the temporary embodiment of a single aspect of our lord, they shall feast upon the flesh that is offered up to us! Only through their assistance will we sate the appetite of our lord! It is a transcendent ritual that acolytes are lucky to attend! Even I only witnessed less than a dozen sacrifices myself."

Ves grunted but did not speak up any longer. He still needed to process the inhuman practices that Acolyte Willis revealed.

The Living Altars were cannibals! They brazenly disregarded the fundamental rule in human society that human life deserved to be treated with dignity!

This MTA and CFA-enforced rule would usually be mentioned in cases where aliens or unscrupulous people enslaved defenseless humans.

However, eating them was worse! It was bad enough that plenty of alien races developed a palate for human flesh. For humans to practice cannibalism was simply a step too far!

Any human degenerate enough to eat the flesh of their own race was no longer be considered as humans themselves!

Chapter 698

The revelation that certain members of the Church of Haatumak developed a penchant for cannibalism barely affected his mood. He had yet to shrug off his shock from other matters related to this cult!

The sooner he got off the Temple of Haatumak, the sooner he'd be spared her horrors!

When Acolyte Villis finally led him to one of the mech workshops of the Temple, Ves sighed in relief at the lack of weirdness.

The tall and wide compartment that encompassed the mech workshop carried a different air from the rest of the ship. It lacked the idols and candles and dim lighting that profoundly disturbed Ves as he walked through the claustrophobic corridors.

Instead, the mech workshop resembled any other mech workshop he'd seen in the larger combat carriers and fleet carriers. With wide-open spaces, various assembly bays upon which to assemble and disassemble mechs with ease, tightly-organized tool storage spaces and a bevy of normal-looking mech technicians wearing shorter and thinner robes that didn't hinder their movements, the entire workshop seemed to run on logic rather than belief.

Besides the errant symbols painted against the bulkheads, the workshop lacked any other overt religious presence!

"Hmph." He unconsciously grunted in approval. Even if the Church of Haatumak believed their god looked upon them with favor, their beliefs wouldn't be able to save their bacon when they encountered a hostile force.

The cultists likely couldn't pray the attackers away with their rituals alone!

The only way to defend themselves against a hostile mech force was to deploy their own mechs. And while mechs came in all shapes and sizes, if the fanatics interfered too much with the maintenance and operation of their mechs, they would probably be dragging down their own defense.

That must have led to the current situation where the most zealous among the worshippers of Haatumak had refrained from extending too many tentacles to the mech workshop.

It demonstrated that the Church of Haatumak could be pragmatic when it came to matters related to their survival.

The acolyte calmly shuffled deeper into the workshop. The passing of the pair elicited no attention from the mech technicians that stoically performed their duties in silence.

The lack of chatter disturbed Ves a bit. He knew mech technicians. They always chatted about inane topics such as the booze they were brewing out of nutrient packs or how much they looked forward to fleecing their comrades in the next card game.

The pair entered a semi-open enclosure that hosted a number of terminals. Various pirates in different sets of outfits silently worked on various designs behind the terminals.

Ves took in their work in a single glance. Each of them were mech designers, and each of them struggled to work with the designs presented before them. This was no wonder, as the mech designers were largely at the Novice level while the designs seemed to have come from the hand of a Journeyman.

Acolyte Villis approached the only figure sitting behind a control panel on a raised dais. Annoyingly, the figure completely hid their form beneath a thick black robe.

"Acolyte Villis." An electronically distorted voice of an old man emerged from the shadows of the hood. "Have you come to bring the latest fool?"

"This is Head Designer Ves Larkinson of the Flagrant Vandals. Mr. Larkinson, this is the Soulless Priest. He is the ranking mech designer aboard our Temple."

Ves bowed his head in respect. "Soulless Priest."

"You may address me as Soulless."

"Very well."

The two stared at each other and took each other's measure.

Ves didn't know what Soulless made of his appearance. He himself tried to peer through the shadows hiding the face of this mech designer who aligned himself with a bunch of crazies that harbored cannibals.

He picked up a few observations. For one, the Soulless Priest's contours suggested that he'd been a bit more restrained when it came to genetically modifying his body. The Soulless distinctly lacked a hulking body shape or some protruding third limb that some of the more disturbing worshippers exhibited.

Aside from that, he cared more about judging the design ability of the Soulless. Ves minutely opened up his sixth sense and tried to sample the man's aura.

He did not pick up much. For whatever reason, the Soulless did a decent job at suppressing his design philosophy, allowing very little of it to leak out.

Still, what little Ves succeeded in capturing confirmed that the Soulless was very likely the aquatic-based mech designer who produced the designs for the Gun Whale, Snapper Dolphin and the Strangler Squids.

The Soulless also exhibited the strength and purity of a Senior Mech Designer, though to a weaker degree than Professor Velten and the Skull Architect. In terms of design chops, the Soulless had barely taken a few steps out of the beaten path while the other two had already progressed so far into the fog that they couldn't even retrace their steps back.

Still, compared to Ves, a Senior was still a Senior. The strength gradation between different Seniors shouldn't concern him at all at this point in his career.

The Soulless nodded again after he finished staring at Ves. The robed mech designer turned his chair and directed his attention back to his control panel, which projected multiple designs at once.

"Acolyte Villis."

"I am at your disposal, Soulless One."

"How many days?"

"Mr. Larkinson is assigned to remain under your direction for a duration of three days."

"Sufficient."

The Soulless one stretched out a sleeve and flicked it towards the old crone. A projection from his console fell into her comm.

"Let Mr. Larkinson take charge of Acolyte Gien Nollet's mech for his upcoming Redemption Duel. I recall it is due to start in two days, so he should best be on his way."

"Understood, sir."

After a small farewell ritual, the acolyte led Ves away from the enclosure and led him towards an assembly bay at the far corner of the workshop compartment.

"Mr. Larkinson. Your task is a pressing one."

He had already gathered that. "As long as it has to do with mechs, I won't shy away from the challenge."

Ves feared the worshippers of Haatumak would demand something crazy from Ves, such as taking a bite out of a recent sacrifice or something. Ves had already heard some examples of the antics the sadistic cultists like to foist upon their guests. It was as if they derived pleasure in the mental suffering of others.

He wasn't sure what his decision would be when faced with the option to partake in human flesh.

If he refused, he risked ruining the deal between the Church of Haatumak and the Flagrant Vandals. If he played along, he'd be breaking what was arguably the second-worst taboo of human society!

In comparison, mechs were safe. Mechs were machines. How could the worshippers of Haatumak possibly screw with mechs?

He was about to find out.

"We have arrived." The crone spoke.

They arrived in front of what appeared to be a salvaged humanoid mech. Ves analyzed the frame of the mech and recognized the characteristic shape of a spaceborn medium lancer mech.

The acolyte emitted a warbling call that caused the handful of mech technicians to put down their tools and form up in front of her. Only one figure took their time to come forth.

"Acolyte Gien!" The crone lost her patience. "Come forward right this instant! Your new mech designer has finally arrived!"

The figure that shambled in front of them wore a half-torn brown robe splotched with crusted blood. The piloting suit the acolyte wore underneath looked as if it had experienced better days, though at least it didn't exhibit any tears or rents that broke its ability to protect its wearer from vacuum.

The most striking feature of Acolyte Gien was that he was the first robed cultist that Ves had met who pulled back their hood! Ves half-expected to see a half-alien monstrosity, but Gien looked disappointingly human.

"Who might you be?" The male acolyte asked rudely.

"My name is Ves Larkinson. I am an Apprentice Mech Designer. From what I understood, I'm to be responsible for your mech for this so-called Redemption Duel."

The acolyte and mech pilot frowned at Ves. "You? A heathen unbeliever is to be assigned to prepare my battle steed? Haatumak preserve my soul!"

Acolyte Gien immediately stomped away without hearing another word from Ves. The mech pilot's abrupt department stunned Ves into paralysis.

"What was that about?" He eventually uttered to his guide.

"Acolyte Gien has violated his oaths and committed a terrible crime. He is sentenced to death. In two days, he will die."

Ves shouldn't be surprised he ended up in another screwed-up situation. "What did he do, if I may ask?"

The crone shook her gnarled head underneath the hood of her darker robe. "Acolyte Gien is a new convert. He has never shown much promise, but performed his duties diligently, until he didn't. He has been caught in the midst of passing off restricted information to a spy."

"If he's guilty of treason, why don't you execute him and be done with the matter?"

"It is a waste to execute an otherwise pious acolyte of ours. Rather than end his life quickly, we prefer for him to redeem himself in the eyes of our lord. The Redemption Duel is exactly that, a mech duel that serves as his one and only chance to earn a second chance to live."

All of this sounded rather convoluted and counterproductive to Ves, but he wasn't exactly in a position to criticize the customs of the Church.

"Is it a duel to the death? Where will the duel take place? Who will be his opponent?"

The crone calmly answered his questions one by one. "The duel will only end if at least one life perishes. The duel shall take place in open space a short distance away from the Temple of Haatumak. His opponent will be another acolyte who violated their oaths."

Ves understood what was going on now. The Church evidently harbored at least two misbehaving mech pilots. The priests could have chopped up their heads in a random sacrifice and have the Living Altars scoop up their brains like ice cream, but evidently they were short on entertainment or something.

Still, it sounded a bit too simple for the cultists to leave it at that. There must be a caveat to this duel.

"I have a feeling this duel isn't so simple as it sounds. What's the catch?" He asked.

The old crone cackled, causing her dark robe to ripple. "The Redemption Duel is no ordinary mech duel. It is a test where the mech pilots must overcome the torture from their own mechs in order to maintain control over them! If their will and tolerance falls short of Haatumak's expectation, then their only fate is death!"

..What?

"What does this 'torture' entail?"

"The technical details escape me, but I am told that the Soulless One has prepared special cockpits to the fallen acolytes. Piloting from one of the modified cockpits is said to be as painful as driving a dozen nails into your skull! Many times, the mental anguish has proven too much to the violators, and their consciousness has shattered entirely, leaving their bodies alive but their souls in pieces!"

Ves tried to remain calm. "I'm to design a mech that is expressly meant to hurt its own mech pilot?"

"Correct." The crone teased out. Ves could practically hear the smirk she must be harboring inside the shadowy void of her hood. "The mech you are responsible for readying for the duel is to be a torture machine first, and a fighting machine second. The mech pilot must suffer for the Redemption Duel to receive Haatumak's blessings!"

The horror of what the Church expected of Ves started to creep up on him. A mech designer always wished the best for their mech pilots. Even the more neglectful designers didn't wish their mech pilots ill!

To be working on a mech that was expressly meant to make their pilot suffer as much as possible went directly against the mech designer's creed!

Chapter 699

Ethics played a significant role in the rules and regulations set up by the Mech Trade Association. Born from the embers of the Age of Conquest, the MTA along with the CFA attempted to impose order on the loose rules against genocide, reckless human experimentation and other crimes against humanity.

From the ground up, the MTA envisioned mechs as a more restrained weapon of war that served the interests of the people instead of the opposite.

Mechs had to be proportional, selective and above all else avoid any possible harm to their own wielders.

The emerging class of potentates enjoyed an elevated status in society. As current and potential mech pilots, each of them were precious and deserved to be treated with reverence.

As for the mech designers that sprung up to accommodate the demands of the mech pilots, their most fundamental goal was to help the pilots fight better. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the interests of the mech designer largely overlapped with the interests of the mech pilots.

They both wanted their mechs to be the best!

Right now, the Soulless Priest demanded the opposite from Ves. If he understood his assignment correctly, then he was expected to work on a torture device in the form of a mech!

"Do you realize the significance of what is being asked of me?"

"We do." The crone replied in an amusing tone, as if lives weren't at stake here. "You are expected to comply. We care nothing for the strictures of the MTA in this region of space. Only the will of Haatumak reigns supreme in this Temple!"

Crazies! Obviously, the fanatics like to make light of the gravity of the situation.

"What are the exact parameters of my assignment?"

Acolyte Villis silently transferred a bunch of virtual documents to his comm. They outlined various demands and restrictions that diverged substantially from what was expected of a normal mech.

The Soulless Priest bestowed the salvaged lancer mech before him with the name of Evaporating Spear. It had been picked up from some abandoned debris field in space a couple of months ago, but hadn't been worked on until a few weeks ago, when it had been assigned to serve as Acolyte Gien's Redemption mech.

A mech designer before Ves made a lot of progress in restoring the Evaporating Spear. However, various parts still needed to be refurbished or tweaked before the mech regained

Ves did not have much time or resources at his disposal. He had access to an internal scrapheap where the Temple of Haatumak stored the loose salvage they picked up over the years. Many of those rusted wrecks and parts were in awful condition.

That was already bad enough, but the restrictions he faced were arguably worse. The mech the Soulless Priest expected from him needed to be battle worthy enough to battle out a duel in space. However, Ves had to do so while working with the special cockpit with the modified neural interface!

As someone who received a few tutoring lessons on neural interfaces, he understood enough of the technical details to know what a travesty the Soulless Priest had produced!

The tampering done to the neural interface looked like a nightmare to Ves. The depraved Senior manipulated the connections that moderated the flow of data between the mech pilot and the mech and damaged the filters that were supposed to block unwanted noise from polluting the channels.

Basically, it was as if the Soulless Priest broke the processing plant that prevent polluted water from flowing into the pipes conveying clean water to various households. The various acts of tampering had systematically disabled enough filters that raw sewage began to leak out into the flow of clean water!

Deviously, the polluted signals channeled by the neural interface wouldn't kill a mech pilot instantly. Instead, they'd overload their brains while heating it up to dangerous levels. Simultaneously, the noisy signals wracked with junk data and other nonsense would make it harder for Acolyte Gien to maintain effective control over the Evaporating Spear!

In fact, at its current state, the Evaporating Spear was basically uncontrollable! It would be as if a promising mech pilot with a B-grade genetic aptitude devolved into a near-cripple with a pathetic E-grade genetic aptitude!

"The increased difficulty in piloting the Evaporating Spear has effectively reached a three-strep drop from the mech pilot's original genetic aptitude!"

Ves could still work with a mech pilot with an E-grade aptitude, but the problem was that according to the documents he received, Acolyte Gien only possessed a C-grade aptitude!

"From C to D is one step. From D to E is another step. E to F is the third step. It only takes three steps to go from average to disaster!"

What was the significance of an F-grade genetic aptitude? Ves possessed the exact same grade! In fact, up to 96.5 percent of every human in the galaxy shared this aptitude!

"Damnit, how can this Soulless Priest foist me upon a mech which effectively turns its intended pilot into a norm?!"

"Remember, Mr. Larkinson, you are not allowed to touch the cockpit at all." the old acolyte reminded him from the side. She had been observing Ves all this while as he started to take in the immensity of this assignment. "While the Soulless One does not demand the Evaporating Priests to win the upcoming Redemption Duel, it must exhibit a worthy struggle! Haatumak will not be pleased if the Evaporating Spear is defeated within seconds because Acolyte Gien failed to move his mech!"

He groaned. Ves wanted to cry out that this assignment was impossible, yet he held back his protests. The Soulless Priest knew what he was doing. Ves wouldn't be able to change his mind on this matter.

Rather than waste his limited time by bleating about the unfairness of it all, Ves would rather move on and make some progress.

"I have another question." He asked the acolyte. "You said the Redemption Duel is a second chance for the winner to live, but how is that possible? The amount of data channeled by the tampered neural interface will irreversibly damage the mech pilot's central nervous system! Even if Acolyte Gien wins the duel, he'll end up as a brain-dead vegetable!"

Acolyte Villis barely stirred from underneath her robe. "You are not responsible for the aftermath. You are only responsible for preparing Acolyte Gien's mech for battle. We have given you access to the tools and means to fulfill your mission."

"What's in it for me? How does my work benefit the Vandals?"

Ves hadn't been paying too much attention to the previous negotiation with the Coinlord, so he wasn't sure why he needed to play along in the first place.

"Insure that Acolyte Gien wins the Redemption Duel, and we will shower you with rewards. Not only will we charge ten percent less K-coins for the services we provide, you are also entitled to a personal boon from the Soulless Priest himself!"

"What does this personal boon entail?" Ves asked with a frown. "No offense, but I'm not sure I want anything to do with the Soulless Priest. We are not exactly alike."

Certainly, the ten percent discount was a significant reward to the Vandals, but Ves did not care too much about their budgetary concerns. The Flagrant Vandals recently defeated the Castle Breakers during their visit to the Mancroft Independent Harbor. Fencing the spoils with the help of the Omen of Misfortune must have netted the Vandals a couple of billion of credits.

Right now, the Vandals shouldn't be too short on liquid funds.

"Remember that you will be competing against a rival guest, who will be preparing the mech of Acolyte Gien's opponent." She said as she summoned a small projection from her comm. "Your rival will be competing for the same reward, one that is coveted by many among the designers of the frontier."

The projection beamed from her comm displayed a fancy-looking invitation card. It allowed its bearer to become initiated in an exclusive black market society called the Angel's Wing Foundation. A stylized angel wing that transitioned from white to black served as their symbol.

He had never heard of this particular club before. "What is the Angel's Wing Foundation?"

The acolyte cackled. "A true son and daughter of the frontier never asks that question! You ask what the Angel's Wing Foundation does? Silly! The Foundation is one of the most exclusive invitation-only black markets in the galactic rim! Their reach stretches across tens of thousands of lightyears! Their black markets are physically present in so many star sectors that they can smuggle anything that can be found in the galactic rim to your doorstep!"

Ves became truly intrigued now. "The Foundation trades in anything? What about mechs? Technologies? Exotics? Slaves?"

"The Foundation does not dabble in the sorts of goods that mech designers are interested in." The Acolyte responded in an amused tone. "Yet before you shake your head and turn away, know that the Foundation is one of the most premier sources of anything biological. It offers the finest gene mod templates, gene boost elixirs, rare and powerful exobeasts and exoflora, biological implants and much, much more!"

Though Ves appeared incredibly excited at what he heard, inwardly he felt a chill. This sounded exactly like something the Five Scrolls Compact would run!

He felt rather strange to hear Acolyte Villis praise the Foundation so enthusiastically. Her enthusiasm for shilling the Foundation matched her devotion to Haatumak.

"The Angel's Wing Foundation sounds like an impressive marketplace. How hard is it to obtain their invitation?"

"Extremely hard. This is a chance that you can only meet, but never seek out. If our Church was not a supplier for the Foundation, we wouldn't be able to extend an invitation to you as a reward for completing your assignment."

Rewarding Ves with an invitation sounded incredibly generous for the Church of Haatumak. If he hadn't suspected that the Church and the Foundation were backed by the same shadow organization, then he would have been grateful for the generous reward.

As it was, Ves figured this was just a case of the left hand passing something to the right hand. It didn't cost the Church anything to hand over this exclusive invitation because they probably possessed a carte blanche to distribute them whenever they felt like doing so.

Still, it wouldn't do for Ves to show that he was clueless. "Why are you so generous with handing out this invitation? Shouldn't you be keeping it to yourselves?"

"As I said, we are already a fixed supplier to the Foundation. They hand over a small number of invitations to us every standard year, but frankly we do not have any preference where they end up. The Soulless Priest has full discretion on how to employ them. He must have approved of you in some way, or wishes you to make a full effort, so he has promised you this invitation if you win."

Hearing the acolyte's answer only furthered his suspicion. In fact, Ves started to doubt if Acolyte Villis was as simple as she looked. Her title and behavior made it seem as if she was just a low-ranking peripheral member of the church, yet her advanced age and her insights made her sound sagely at times.

Ves closed his eyes and paused. While the Church of Haatumak hadn't pushed Ves to participate in a gruesome ritual, this assignment came with a lot of complications that he would rather do without.

First, did he even want the reward? Certainly, Ves always felt troubled by his modified biology. Having been investigated by various doctors and experts including those employed by the CFA and the Friday Coalition, they had all admitted defeat when presented with the radical and incomprehensible Jutland organ.

That piece of semi-alien flesh in his chest represented a ticking time bomb that might explode within a few decades from now. While that didn't sound to bad for a normal person, Ves intended to live at least a few hundred years, so he required an urgent solution for the problem.

Who better to turn to than the masters of biology? The Angel's Wing Foundation had likely been set up as an offshoot of the Five Scrolls Compact. Since Dr. Jutland used to hail from that organization as well, the odds of finding an expert who could permanently solve the biological hazards within his body was a lot higher than engaging with the much less impressive Clifford Society.

Though there were always risks to becoming involved with the Five Scrolls Compact, as long as Ves remained prudent, he shouldn't catch their attention.

He decided to aim for the invitation. No matter what obstacles stood in his way, Acolyte Gien needed to win!

Chapter 700

Countless black markets and closed societies existed in the galaxy. Some opened their doors to anyone that entered. The physical black markets at the Harkensen and Mancroft star systems served as iconic examples in the Komodo Star Sector.

Their barrier for entry was so low that practically any random seven-year old could jump over the fence. To call them black markets besmirched the reputation of all other black markets.

"They're more like the light version of black markets."

Due to their open nature and wide reach, a lot of paupers and poorly-connected power players tended to frequent these markets. This meant that while there would be a lot of customers for sellers to rip off, they weren't all that well-moneyed.

In order for a buyer to get the good stuff, they needed to veer to a more exclusive black market. One which matched buyers and sellers with more discerning standards, and one which could provide much more security and guarantees than a market stall in some dingy market stall at a murky space station where anyone could get shot at for no reason at all.

Ves already experienced the benefits of a higher class of trading platform at the Clifford Society. Its virtual and physical marketplaces were basically highly dignified black markets. Ves could obtain a number of exclusive goods and services that would have landed the providers in trouble if they offered them up to the open market.

Naturally, buyers needed to be somewhat trustworthy and possess enough wealth to make up the demand side of the black markets. The entry requirements to a rim-wide black market should have been quite stringent, but somehow the Soulless Priest judged that Ves possessed the qualifications to make a play at the invitation.

"I'll just have to win this design duel, because that's what the Redemption Duel effectively amounts to. There's no free lunch in the galaxy." Ves whispered to himself as he beheld the Evaporating Spear that stood before him.

The old, rusted frame of the mech looked rather pithy, and Ves knew it would take a lot of work and ingenuity to get it up and running with a modicum of battle effectiveness.

Though the Redemption Duel ostenible centered around a duel to the death between two mech pilots that fought while enduring unimaginable torture, Ves largely disregarded their story and their skill level.

As long as mech pilots were somewhat competent and similar to each other, the outcome of the Redemption Duel depended more on the mech designer than anyone else.

That was because the tampered neural interfaces threw all of the rules out of the window!

Ves stared at the depressed-looking figure sitting slumped at a pile of crates fashioned into a makeshift chair. Acolyte Gien presented a sorry figure with his worn-out pilot suit and his torn and half-broken robes. He was by far the most pathetic worshipper of Haatumak that Ves had encountered so far.

Gien exhibited a nihilistic attitude to his upcoming duel.

To be frank, Ves would be bummed out as well if he found out he'd be put inside a cockpit that wanted to make him taste the feeling of hell while being pushed out into space and be expected to fight for his life while his very nerves and brains burned from all of the overstimulation of signals.

He could not even see the point of winning. What would the acolyte gain from that when he'd be brain dead anyway?

"Don't underestimate our ability to restore the winner of the duel to life." Acolyte Villis responded when Ves puzzled over that question. The old woman continued to follow close to his heels for some reason. "The Redemption Duel is an arduous trial that will test their worthiness in the eyes of Haatumak. Those that perish deserve to perish. Those that survive are deserving of Haatumak's Mercy."

"And what does Haatumak's Mercy entail?" Ves asked, curious of what they would do to restore a braindead mech pilot back to a semblance of life.

"Haatumak's Mercy is a ritual of rebirth. Whoever shall win will be ordained as our newest Living Altar!"

Ves blinked. He could argue that transitioning from a living vegetable to a Living Altar was a punishment rather than a reward. Cannibalism wasn't so bad if you got to live again and received a free pass from your god!

He didn't even ask what kind of freak medical procedure the Church of Haatumak mastered to restore a burnt-out mech pilot back to a semblance of life. As far as Ves knew, almost every case of neural interface-induced overload onto a mech pilot's nerves resulted in catastrophic and irreparable damage!

He had a feeling the answer might upset him even more.

"Ignorance is bliss."

Practically every aspect involving this band of crazy fanatics drove him mad. Ves completely believed the decision to banish them from civilized space was justified. In fact, they should have gone a step further and send a CFA battleship to wipe out the Temple and all of its traces for good!

Then again, these bunch of crazies didn't mistreat their guests too badly and even dangled a carrot in front of his face.

Ves suspected this might be the only opportunity in his life to be offered an invitation to the Angel's Wing Foundation. In order to save his life from a dormant threat buried inside his chest, perhaps the crazy researchers of the Five Scrolls Compact may be his only hope for salvation!

His very life was at stake in this challenge!

"Win or lose, it is not only my pride that's at stake here!"

His motivation to win had skyrocketed!

Yet that was not enough to insure a win at the upcoming Redemption Duel.

He needed to get to work.

Ves looked around and ignored the condemned pilot for now. Rather than wracking his brains over his bum of a mech pilot, he'd rather start tooling with something he possessed an ample amount of familiarity.

He sat down behind a spare terminal and loaded in the documents and design schematics of the Evaporating Spear.

"Hm, what the hell is this travesty?"

A single glance at the schematics displayed an ugly combination of internal parts. They may have been built for lancers or melee mechs, but their synergy was poor and their implementation was even worse. The design resembled making a random grab of mech parts and stuffing them inside a poorly-optimized mech frame!

"This is a third-hand mech!"

Ves could read some of the history of the mech frame from the strange combination of mech parts. It originally started out as an affordable lancer mech. Its design must have come from a pirate designer with absolutely no respect for intellectual property. It seemed as if the initial designer had pirated a bunch of random component licenses that only vaguely had to do with this mech archetype.

The result was a poor-performing lancer mech that due to sheer luck possessed some merits compared to other pieces of trash developed by pirate designers in the frontier.

"Still, whoever designed the initial incarnation of the Evaporating Spear must have been a Novice Mech Designer."

The first incarnation of the Evaporating Spear must have been used for quite a number of years before it suffered a devastating stab in the back that pierced through the flight system and penetrated the cockpit from behind.

This attack had wrecked the Evaporating Spear. However, the clean, surgical strike it suffered left the rest of its frame largely intact. Once the winners of the battle salvaged the wreck, they only needed to replace its flight system and its cockpit while slapping over some makeshift armor plates in the rear to restore the mech to functionality.

"Hooking up a new cockpit to replace the old one is normally a huge issue. However, if the initial mech designer pirated the cockpit model from the galactic net, then the mech designer who restored the mech should have access to it as well."

Yet the restorer hadn't gone for this option. Instead, he tried to insert an entirely different cockpit model inside the empty gaping hole of the mech, to predictable results. Incompatibility problems must have plagued the second iteration of the Evaporating Spear throughout its rebirth.

A few more years passed by until the mech suffered a nasty blow that destroyed its left arms and torso and disabled its power reactor. After drifting in space for a lengthy period of time that spanned up to a decade, the wreck finally fell into the hands of the Church of Haatumak.

They assigned a mech designer to attempt to restore it. By now, the predecessor of Ves succeeded in doing a decent job at patching up the mech. The Evaporating Spear gained a new power reactor as well as a fully restored torso and arm to fill up the left side of the frame.

The only problem was that whoever the Church picked to restore the Evaporating Spear possessed an insufficient understanding of mechs and battle mechatronics. The replaced portions of the mech did not match the original layout of the frame.

"The restoration ruined its balance! The mech is asymmetric!"

There was nothing wrong with an asymmetric mech. However, the Novice originally designed his mech as a symmetrical mech. Throwing its center of gravity and balance out of whack ruined its entire flight and movement profile!

If the Evaporating Spear regained functionality and flew out of the hangar bay right now, its flight would probably lead to make a horizontal loop that resulted in a direct crash against the outer hull of the Temple of Haatumak!

The easiest way for Ves to prevent such a disaster was to tweak the flight system so that its 'steering wheel' permanently slanted a couple degrees towards the right.

"That's an awful fix. A software patch to compensate for a hardware inadequacy will only postpone a disaster in the making."

Ves would never allow such a lazy fix in his original mech designs. However, this time Ves was working with a dueling mech. With only two days to make something battle worthy out of this third-hand junk, he needed to cut a lot of corners to make it within the deadline.

"Well, it's not like this mech is meant to last the battle. The Soulless Priest will probably chuck it out into space once the Redemption Duel is done."

Ves only had to ready the Evaporating Spear for a single performance, rather than a lifetime of battle and use. Having worked with plenty of competition mechs before, he was already used to switching his mentality and set of values to accommodate a rush job.

After spending a precious half hour to analyze the design and decipher its secrets, Ves drew up a plan of action.

First, he needed to finish what his predecessor started and fix up the internal architecture until the mech became capable of activation.

Second, he needed to strengthen the overall frame and patch up the structural weaknesses that had grown as a result of all of the battle damage, neglect, corrosion and botched repairs it accumulated over the years.

Third and most importantly, Ves had to mitigate the ruinous effects of the tampered neural interface so that Acolyte Gien's effective genetic aptitude rose from F-grade to E-grade!

Since the Church forbid him from tweaking with the neural interface or cockpit, Ves had no choice but to tinker with the rest of the frame in order to achieve this effect!

"I'll have to work in reverse to manage this difficult feat!"

Theoretically, Ves figured out at least two methods to overcome this issue.

The root of the problem lay in the fact the neural interface overloaded the mech pilot with an excess of signals, with much of it consisting of junk data that only clogged up the tubes while polluting the data that was actually valid.

"I can either restrict the total flow of data, or find a way to decrease the proportion of junk data being transmitted back to the mech pilot!"

The problem may sound insurmountable at first, but Ves only required a quick moment of thought to come up with a number of viable solutions.