The Mech Touch

Ketis did not stay for longer than a day on New Constantinople VIII.

As much as she would like to catch up with Ves and teach more swordsmanship lessons to Andraste, what she truly wanted was to go back to the expeditionary fleet and find the greater meaning of swordsmanship while witnessing the fighting up close.

The development of heavenly swordsmanship was inseparable from the battles being fought in the present. Ketis did not want her new approach towards fighting to remain just as marginal and irrelevant as the current state of traditional swordsmanship.

If she wanted to do what the Heavensword Association failed to accomplish and turn swordmasters into strong, useful and practical soldiers, then she needed to make detailed observations on how modern small craft and warships fought in order to successfully develop brilliant new methods that imitated the strength of existing war weapons!

In the meantime, Ketis fully intended to make use of the Mech Designer System. She had already accepted a batch of Missions and intended to squeeze as much time in her schedule to complete them. She was already planning to open up a new tutoring class for elite Swordmasters and Heavensworders in order to have 5 of them break through as soon as possible.

She already had a plan in mind for the first few hundred AP that she expected to earn. The Skills she intended to learn as soon as she could afford to redeem the enlightenment fruits would go on to boost her progress as both a mech designer and a swordmaster.

Ketis did not consider them as separate and unrelated to each other as before. In order to develop heavenly swordsmanship, she would have to gain a lot of understanding on how to forge sophisticated weapons and understand how to manipulate E energy.

Mech design could serve as a learning platform!

When it came down to it, her humanoid mechs could serve as test platforms for the powers that human swordmasters could wield one day. Hyper technology and E-technology roughly took the place for both personal equipment and cultivation techniques. So long as Ketis designed her swordsman mechs with this equivalency in mind, her work as a mech designer would directly feed back to her work as a swordmaster!

As Ketis neared the end of her visit, she gathered in front of Ves one more time in order to bid a hasty farewell.

"Meow. Meow!"

A certain dark-plated mechanical cat flew in from the distance and threw himself into Ketis' embrace.

The bemused swordmaster already formed a guess why Lucky sought her out at this time.

"Do you want to come with me back to the expeditionary fleet, cutie? She asked while she held the cat in both her arms.

"Meeeow!"

"Are you bored here at Diandi Base?"

"Meeow meeeow!"

"Do you really want to accompany me in battle and fight side by side like in the old days?"

"Meeeeeow!"

"Hihihi." Ketis lovingly grinned and nuzzled the cat. "I would love you take you along. You certainly know how to take care of yourself. The decision is not up to me, though. Only Ves can decide whether I can take you along."

"Meeeeeeeoooowww…" Lucky's ears drooped.

"He is not coming with you." Vers stated as he steadily approached the landing zone. "I need Lucky a lot more than you. There are too few reliable guards by my family's side. The mechers can do a good job, but they are ultimately not Larkinsons. I can let Lucky go elsewhere once my family's security arrangements have improved, but that will probably take a few years."

"Meooow…"

"Don't whine, Lucky. You will get your chance in time. Hopefully, we can put you into our upcoming deep strike fleet."

"Meow meow meow!"

"I know that Bridgehead One is in a lot of trouble at the moment, but I have faith that the bigshots will find a way to restore it. The star system is way too important to keep it in a frozen and isolated condition. If the god pilots and the Star Designers of red humanity are unable to solve a single problem, then it is time to start doubting whether red humanity deserves to win this war."

"Meow meow."

"Regardless of how long it will take for the greater beyonder gate to get ready to be used for a completely new purpose, haven't you forgotten about something, Lucky?"

"Meow…?"

"When was the last time you visited the bathroom? It has been too long in my opinion. I am not letting you go until you have finally purged your internal systems of all of the exceedingly high-quality junk that you have been stuffing through your gullet in the past year!"

"MEEEOW!"

Though Lucky really wanted to leave this boring Terran planet and ride with the expeditionary fleet, Ves ultimately pulled the stubborn cat back.

Ketis watched and listened to the conversation between the two without any intention of intervening.

She certainly would have loved to have a handy and powerful cat like Lucky by her side, but she could live without his help.

"Stay in touch."

"I will." Ketis nodded.

"The following months will be tense. I am currently working on something that is so fantastic that it will shock our entire society. Everything will change at that point. If the reaction to my upcoming work is as bad as I think it is, then our clan will become the center of a new controversy."

"What do you want me to do, Ves?"

"If you have prepared something amazing on your end, then try and introduce it at that time. As long as your mech design or other work is useful enough, it will not only serve as a distraction, but also increase the social capital of our clan. That will do much to mitigate the damage."

Ketis nodded in understanding. "Got it. I can't promise my latest work will be ready at that time. It depends on how quickly you release your new invention and how much progress I can make up to that point."

"Just do your best."

After a bit more chatting, Ketis boarded her shuttle that would bring her up to orbit where she would catch a ride straight towards the Arvest Lima System.

Now that Ves had successfully increased Ketis' involvement in his plans, he was ready to tackle other priorities.

The Swarm Project still demanded his attention, and he also had to get ready for the next session of the Interim Leadership Council.

The date of the founding of the Red Collective drew closer and closer. A lot of important people and organizations had completed far too much behind the scenes to derail this important initiative.

No matter what Ves, the Evolution Witch or any other tier 1 galactic citizen thought, too many stakeholders wanted the Red Collective to start its operations within the year!

The start of the Red Tide Collective only increased everyone's sense of urgency. Third-raters and other underprivileged groups wanted to gain an increased say on how red humanity should navigate the intensifying war.

It was impossible for them to get their voices heard through the Red Association and the Red Fleet, so the new Collective was their only hope of gaining a little more control over their own futures.

Personally, Ves questioned whether this could make any difference. The Red Collective needed a lot of time as well as manpower and resources in order to develop into an organization that was equal to the other two hegemons of human civilization.

With the native aliens doing their utmost to batter down the 3rd defensive band and subsequently overwhelm the other two defensive bands, there wouldn't be enough time for the Red Collective to kick into gear and set up the infrastructure for the so-called sects to operate in an orderly fashion.

If the border regions fell sooner than desired, then Ves expected that so much chaos would ensue that the Red Collective would be unable to fulfill its mandate!

Therefore, Ves became less enthusiastic towards the organization that he originally brought to life. All of the talking and dealmaking seemed pointless when the fighting kept encroaching further into human space.

Still, Ves needed to meet his obligations, so he tried his best to show at least a cursory amount of interest in the upcoming sessions.

The good news was that Ves did not have to spend too much of his time on following up on the various developments related to the Red Collective.

He had thrown a lot of responsibilities to his personal assistant, who subsequently allocated a lot of work to a dedicated staff.

Ves returned to his office and called Gavin over so that he could receive another update.

"So what issues on the agenda have been decided and what issues do we have to make a decision on in the next session?"

"Well, the different interest groups have already managed to come to a consensus on many different matters." Gavin responded. "It might not even be necessary to mention some of the issues. You only need to address the most important of topics just so that they can enter the official record. Think about the organizational structure or the degree of centralization of the Red Collective. As for the matters that still need to be decided, there is an ongoing fight on how to pay for all of the stuff."

Ves immediately frowned. "I hadn't thought about that yet. Damn. It's not going to be cheap to maintain the operations of the Red Collective."

"The most restrained plan of the Red Collective does not demand a large footprint, at least in the early years. By keeping the organization lean and by delegating tasks to the participating states and organizations, the Red Collective can run most of its operations without needing to rely on its own army and so on. This is not a long-term solution, though. The Collective can never serve as an equal counterweight to the Red Association and the Red Fleet if the former constantly has to borrow funding, resources, industrial capacity and military forces from the latter two. Only when the Red Collective could fulfill its own needs in those areas would it become a truly respected organization in human space."

That was a sound argument, and one that Ves could not refute.

"It's impossible for the Red Collective to become as strong and self-sufficient as the Red Two." Ves flatly stated. "That will require an extensive redistribution of wealth and territory. There is no way that the mechers, fleeters, Terrans, Rubarthand and other groups will agree to cut off pieces of their own foundation in order to contribute to the rise of the Red Collective."

"Therein lies the problem, boss. Everyone clearly understands that the Red Collective needs a lot of stuff in order to stand on its own two feet, and many groups do want this to happen. What they do not like is to surrender 5 percent or 10 percent of their resources and star systems to make this possible. Only a minority of councilors is in favor of forcing everyone, including our own clan, to make a forced contribution. The rest want nothing to do with it, even if that cripples the foundation of the Red Collective."

This was a huge problem.

Ves could not think up an immediate solution that could brilliantly meet his goal while making everyone else satisfied. A perfect solution did not exist, and all of the imperfect ones were bound to disappoint a lot of people!

"Ugh. Since you have been tackling this issue for a while now, do you have any good suggestions on how to proceed?"

"No." Gavin shook his head. "Even if I do, I do not dare to move further without authorization. Since any decision is guaranteed to upset a lot of stakeholders, only you can issue a verdict on what should happen. Even then, if you try to ram through a decision that too few people can stomach, you will receive so much pushback that you will probably lose your position as chief deputy councilor before the day has come to an end."

"..."

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