The Mech Touch

The rollout of kinship networks happened on a fairly low-key basis.

It was as if the Terrans, Rubarthans, mechers and fleeters still could not put all of their faith in their testing and examinations. They continued to harbor excessive paranoia towards the potential of abuse and only sparingly connected eligible troops first.

Hardly any mention of the Terran Network, the Rubarthan Network and most notably the Human War Network could be found on the galactic net.

Their existence was not exactly a secret to the people in the know, but they all upheld an implicit agreement not to publicize their new tools all that much.

If it turned out that their fears were justified, then they could always remove any mention of their kinship networks and pretend that nothing had happened.

Ves simply shrugged at this behavior and no longer paid too much attention to it. The big players did not really require his input after he had created the initial kinship networks. They all had their own secret cabals of cultivators in their employ, and while their methods and expertise were all over the place, they were able to tinker and modify their kinship networks according to their own needs.

These cultivator scientists were already beginning to diverge their kinship networks from the initial templates developed by Ves. Their primary goal was to make the kinship networks their own by intertwining them with their own their E-technology, thereby making it harder for Ves or anyone who learned his craft to take advantage of any backdoors to infiltrate the networks without authorization.

In fact, the new owners wanted to divorce Ves from their respective kinship networks so much that they booted him from their consultation meetings and kept him at a distance!

This suited Ves fine. Though he was worried that the not-always-professional cultivators employed by the big players might screw up and cause an accident due to improper handling, at least he wouldn't be culpable anymore.

According to the planning, kinship networks would only blow up on a wide scale around the time the Red Collective went into operation. That was also around the time that Ves was ready to release his Carmine mechs.

The confluence of important events around this crucial time period caused Ves to feel rather tense and suspicious. He grew more and more certain that a hidden hand was manipulating variables in order to produce a special outcome less than half a year later.

Ves happened to be a central figure in this vague scheme!

He had several possible theories why a shadow player wanted to produce such a convergence. His best guess was that the Evolution Witch, possibly in collusion with Cynthia Larkinson, sought to enact an important scheme where he played a critical link.

Though Ves had a bad feeling about any dastardly scheme plotted by two powerful and ruthless women, the two women did not share any of their secrets to him. The Evolution Witch was simply not accessible while the Oblivion Empress was preparing for a major gambit in the Nyxian Gap.

Since he couldn't do anything about it, Ves eventually managed to put these concerns out of his mind and returned his attention to his work.

The added responsibilities of becoming a major leading figure in the Red Collective cut into his schedule, but Ves did his best to expand his administration and delegate a lot of bureaucratic obligations to his constantly expanding staff.

In fact, Gavin Neumann gradually took on more responsibilities until he was able to handle almost all routine affairs related to the Red Collective. The man's workload had increased enormously, but he could handle it with his powerful new augmentations.

One common factor that Gloriana and Gavin shared in common was that their modern first-class augmentations both relied on a very rare and precious hyper material known as a Mentalist Crystal to borrow additional 'mind energy' from the environment.

Ves had tasked his Procurement Department to get a hold of these wonderful crystals, but the demand for them was way too high. A lot of rich and powerful figures wanted to update their cranial implants with ones that got enhanced by Mentalist Crystals.

"Forget about it." Gavin plainly told Ves. "There is no way to buy them on the open market. They don't even appear in any of the auctions as they can always be traded to high-and-mighty figures for a fortune. Do you know who is the largest supplier of Mentalist Crystals?"

"No."

"It is the Hunting Association. Mentalist Crystals are only found in the brains of mutated beasts and calamity beasts that have focused on evolving their minds rather than their bodies. They are very rare because uncommonly smart beasts generally do not tend to survive in savage environments where raw strength is a much better guarantee for survival."

"I see. That makes… sense." Ves looked enlightened. "I guess that this is one of the other means the Hunting Association relies upon to establish a strong foothold in our society. No other umbrella organization has so many hunters under their sway. Our clan has established multiple branches on untamed planets and hunting preserves. What are the chances that they can hunt down a clever beast and harvest a Mentalist Crystal?"

"Too low. As I have mentioned before, beasts that grow these crystals in their brains are exceedingly rare. They are also very difficult to find, as one of the go-to means for survival for these physically weak beasts is to hide in the deepest hole they can find. Only the Hunting Association possesses special tracking methods that can possibly uncover these precious beasts. Mentalist Crystals have therefore become strategic materials that are traded for other strategic advantages, such as the right to open a hunting preserve in the territory of another group. Since the demand for these crystals are so high, you will need to offer concessive ones that are just as extravagant in order to get your hands on even a fraction of a crystal."

In hindsight, the Streon Ancient Clan did Ves a much bigger favor than he realized at the time.

The Streons under the leadership of General Axelar Streon freely offered to augment Gavin Neumann with a heavily digitized augmentation suite that was laced with Mentalist Crystal fragments!

This was a grand gesture of friendship and trust on the part of the Streons. While Ves deduced that this may be one of the ways that General Axelar sought to repay the original benefactor who helped him obtain his life-changing Ouroboros mech, it was also an invitation to form a closer relationship with each other.

Ves should reciprocate this heavy gift with one of his own in the future. He did not have time to do so at the moment, and the Streons were extremely busy with their own priorities, so it was fine if he delayed on this matter.

One of the issues that could not be delayed was the completion of the first true ace mech of the Larkinson Clan!

This historic occasion also became notable because it represented the creation of the initial first-class mech of the Larkinson Clan.

This was not strictly a work of the Larkinsons alone. The absence of a Master Mech Designer meant that the clan had little choice but to work closely with an external collaborator.

For months, Gloriana had been remotely collaborating with Master Benedict Cortez to design and complete the very tedious and time-consuming affair of applying critical upgrades to the Dark Zephyr Mark III.

The powerful living machine may be just a light mech, but its technological complexity was so exceedingly high that it was a nightmare to disassemble and reconstruct with upgraded archemetal components!

Master Benedict certainly looked a lot crankier than usual when the physical projections of Ves and Gloriana appeared in his private workshop aboard the Cyclical Engine.

One of the good points about working together with Master Benedict was that he had already built up experience with working on a post-living ace mech in the form of the Mars.

His workshop deep inside the factory ship of the Cross Clan had been upgraded with multiple top-of-the-line lab and workshop facilities to better service the Mars. These high-tools also came handy when working on the Dark Zephyr, though Gloriana had to lend multiple specialized archemetal production machines to the Cross Clan in order to complete their latest upgrade project.

"To be honest, the Dark Zephyr Mark III that I have been piloting in the last months is not a bad machine at all." Tusa said. "Sure, the lack of ace mech-grade resonating materials makes me feel constrained, but I was more than happy with the technological performance of my quasi-first-class expert mech."

As the ultimate beneficiary of this critically important project, Saint Tusa was also present in the workshop. The ace pilot stood beside Master Benedict and looked up at his new and improved ace mech with a mix of undisguised awe and wonder.

"To be honest, the Dark Zephyr Mark III that I have been piloting in the last months is not a bad machine at all." Tusa said. "Sure, the lack of ace mech-grade resonating materials makes me feel constrained, but I was more than happy with the technological performance of my quasi-first-class expert mech."

The physical projections of Ves and Gloriana smirked at the same time.

"Oh, believe me, if you thought the Dark Zephyr Mark III was already powerful enough, you haven't seen anything yet." Ves boastfully said. "The Dark Zephyr Mark III Revision 2 Banisher Edition is a completely different beast. The gap in absolute strength between them is as big as the difference between a mutated beast and a calamity beast."

He was not exaggerating!

The Banisher Edition of the Dark Zephyr gained a number of crucial, game-changing upgrades!

Any one of these improvements was already enough to give wings to Saint Tusa, but combining them all together resulted in an outcome that was far greater than the sum of its parts!

"Let's start with the most fundamental upgrade first." Ves said. "In order to convert the base Dark Zephyr into the Banisher Edition, we have ripped out the old parts that were based on Perfidious Steel and Bissonat. This removes your ability to easily misdirect the true location of your expert mech from long-ranged attackers and also amplify the cutting power of your knives. I suppose you can still use your Saint Kingdom to reproduce these effects by relying much more on your willpower, but the efficiency will be so much lower that you won't be able to abuse these effects as well as before, even accounting for all of the other upgrades. The only way to strengthen these abilities is to grow your resonance strength and promote to a senior ace pilot."

Saint Tusa nodded. "When I settled on the Banisher Edition out of all of the upgrade choices that you have presented to me, I knew what I was signing up for. At least I will get a powerful new weapon from this tradeoff, right?"

Gloriana grinned. "That is absolutely correct! Erlemin is a rare and difficult to produce ace mech-grade resonating alloy that is impregnated with phasewater through the ingenious means of the Resonance Smith. Once you resonate with it, you can potentially banish anything to another dimension on a temporary basis. I am told that there is a lot of flexibility on how you can take advantage of the properties of this resonating alloy. It takes little practice to banish relatively small objects, but you need to expend much more effort and apply much finer control in order to partially banish larger objects. The effectiveness of the latter is also heavily dependent on your resonance strength, so do not expect to take out entire chunks of body mass from a greater phase lord at the start."

"I know. I am still at the starting point of my career as a saint. What is important to me is that Erlemin's effectiveness will continue to increase for a long time as I grow stronger. I do not want to replace it with anything else because it has reached a ceiling."

The potential for Erlemin was huge and completely changed the combat approach of the Dark Zephyr.Saint Tusa almost couldn't wait to unleash his improved machine's latest resonating ability against the enemies of red humanity!

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