The Mech Touch

When Ves reached out his senses towards the hyper nanomachine plagues, he could feel them as if he was standing in front of an entire army of living mechs.

No, it was different. He bestowed his living mechs with a noble purpose, and that was to help their mech pilots win their battles. From the moment they gained life, they already accepted their mission and committed themselves to serving their future partners, possibly even putting their needs above the demands of their creator!

Ves did not have a problem with that. To reverse this order would be a violation of his professional oath as a mech designer, which was to serve mech pilots. Aside from a few rare exceptions, his machines should never harbor double loyalties. Surrendering control to an individual other than their own mech pilots was a fundamental violation of trust and professionalism!

For this reason, his living mechs generally held great respect towards their progenitor, but never thought to ignore the needs of their own pilots and obey his orders. Even if the more clever and sophisticated third order living mechs could largely fight by themselves as if they were battle bots, they never desired to do so because they valued their identity as mechs. Only by intimately cooperating with their human partners would they give meaning to their own existences!

The hyper nanomachine plagues produced by the Red Association were completely different.

Ves did not possess any knowledge on their background or technical details, but he could paint a picture based on his observations and the little details that Captain Zonrad Reze saw fit to share.

The earlier versions of nanomachine plagues were solely designed to destroy all life and construction on the surface of a moon or planet.

They were largely employed in situations where the use of regular nuclear or antimatter explosives did more harm than good.

They were used extremely sparingly because they were much more dangerous compared to immensely powerful bombs that just produced large explosions!

There had been many incidents in the past where the careless use of self-replicating nanomachines turned into catastrophic gray goo scenarios where the damn tiny machines destroyed entire cities and maybe planets in order to replicate unending copies of themselves!

Nowadays, such incidents did not happen anymore. Humans learned the hard way how to stop the 'plagues' from devouring everything to fulfill their demented programming. People also implemented a lot of safeguard in subsequent smart metal products to ensure such doom scenarios never took place in human space.

Even so, there were still people who came to appreciate the horrifying potential of nanomachine plagues.

Instead of treating them like disasters, they preferred to treat the nanomachine plagues as weapons waiting to be used on legitimate targets!

The Common Fleet Alliance came to embrace the use of nanomachine plagues in limited scenarios.

They were much more handy to use on fortified planets and globes with highly divergent environments.

The nanomachine plagues could also be programmed to ignore specific materials and targets.

This enabled the CFA to cleanse a planet of all aliens with specific genes while leaving harmless organisms intact.

In short, nanomachine plagues saved the fleeters a lot of time and resources!

This was why the fleeters did not deny the use of nanomachine plagues despite their potential to start a doomsday scenario in the wrong places.

It helped that the CFA had much less to fear from them due to their highly dispersed organization and distribution.

Out of control nanomachine plagues could only destroy a single ship or fleet at most. Even if they managed to spread onto ships that subsequently infected others, the mechers and the fleeters employed many countermeasures that would warn them of this threat and trigger a maximum priority response.

The threat that gray goo could spread fast enough to engulf all of human civilization could never be ruled out, but humans had developed so many controls and countermeasures that no one was really concerned about it anymore.

What did this have to do with the hyper nanomachine plagues originally stored inside the vault of the Babylon Excavator?

A lot.

The Red Fleet kept up with the times. The latest edition of nanomachines plagues gained an even higher degree of virulence due to the integration of hyper materials. The boost in performance was not too dramatic, as the application of hyper technology at the nanometer scale was still a rudimentary discipline for the time being. The most obvious effect so far was that the nanomachines had an easier time devouring specific materials. They seemed to draw additional power from E energy radiation and work a little more optimally than before.

Unfortunately, the fleeters had not quite managed to discover a stable and cost-effective way to integrate them with phasewater, which was one of the reasons why the plagues employed against the arche phase lords were having a hard time chewing through the archeshells.

Anyway, hyper nanomachine plagues were quite powerful and efficient at their jobs. The Red Fleet had yet to deploy them on a serious target during the Red War so far, as that may spook the native aliens into employing their own horrifying weapons of mass destruction.

It was quite telling that a reconnaissance cruiser such as the Babylon Excavator still carried a payload of hyper nanomachine plagues regardless. They could come in handy when they stumbled upon a strategic native alien planet that they needed to wipe off the board regardless of the consequences.

When the Red Fleet reassigned the Babylon Excavator to Ves' protection detail, the fleeters never bothered to empty the cruiser's vault of her stockpile of weapons of mass destruction.

This inadvertently gave Ves access to the incredibly fearsome hyper nanomachine plagues!

When he adapted them to his torpedoes, he never thought that he would be able to connect to them again. This was a completely unintended interaction that momentarily took him by surprise.

The reason why he was caught off-guard was because he possessed an uncommonly good connection to the nanomachines that attempted to wreak havoc across the surface of the archeshell.

The comparison to the Saint Commander's modus operandi was a convenient explanation, but it was not quite accurate.

Ves was not able to connect with the nanomachines through the true resonance generated by his willpower.

Instead, he was somehow able to harmonize with the plagues due to two factors.

The first factor was because he bestowed them with life. He took advantage of their hyper material integration and transformed their blank sheets into rudimentary life forms. These living nanomachines may be weak and barely cognizant, but they were still intelligent enough to recognize and respect their progenitor!

This alone was not enough to gain their obedience, however. In order to make the nanomachines more effective, he deliberately infused them with malice and hunger. The living nanomachines were supposed to feed into their destructive instincts and act without any restraint!

Coming into contact with them was like coming into contact with a huge amount of descendants that just happened to believe in the same ideals as himself!

How could these naughty nanomachines hold any respect for their progenitor?

This was why the second reason became a factor.

Ves discovered that the hyper nanomachines unintentionally matched the properties of his domain very well!

Coming into contact with them was like coming into contact with a huge amount of descendants that just happened to believe in the same ideals as himself!

From the perspective of cultivation science, the hyper nanomachines were ruthless weapons created for the purpose of destroying and devouring entire populations. Their purpose cast their existence in darkness, for they could be used to inflict great harm and evil.

By breathing life into the hyper nanomachines, the tiny but sophisticated creations gained a quality that enabled them to surpass their physical and digital limitations. They became greater than the sum of their parts, and became even better at reproduction, which was another powerful aspect of life!

Finally, the root property of these nanomachines was the fact that they were all machines and by extension metal. Even when they were scaled down to an incredible degree, the plagues all consisted of a huge amount of tiny metallic machines, all working in concert with each other!

Ves' domain happened to be split between mechs, life and a little bit of darkness.

Although the definitions were not precisely the same and the proportions were also difficult, the point was that Ves had enough in common with the living nanomachines that he was able to command them as if he was their god!

"What an exhilarating feeling! Is this what Saint Commander Casella feels all of the time?"

Ves became increasingly more distracted, which was normally a taboo on the battlefield,, but he could just not help himself!

Seeing that the living nanomachines were not really doing all that great, Ves spontaneously decided to step in and take control.

He used his spiritual authority over the nanomachines to pass on an instruction.

If the hyper nanomachine plagues abided by their strict programming and their hardware-level restrictions, then they would never follow any suggestion made by Ves.

It would be the height of foolishness to allow enemies to hack the weaponized nanomachines and turn them against their original users!

The fleeters had therefore implanted a lot of restrictive programming in the hyper nanomachines, but how could they have anticipated that their efforts could all be defeated by giving their creations life?

Right now, the simple nanomachines all wanted to obey their progenitor and god, so much so that they chose to ignore the programming codes that prevented them from surrendering control to another individual!

This had drastic consequences, one of which was that the nanomachine plagues spontaneously leapt from the archeshell and condensed into increasingly larger and more ominous swarms!

The shapes of millions of cats blended into each other, causing them to lose shape before reforming again.

All of it was under the control of Ves' Spirituality. It became so easy for him to convey his instructions to the unnaturally obedient nanomachine swarm.

His connection to all of the primitive life inside the nanomachines gave him greater comprehension of what he could do with his authority over their existences.

He could make them do almost anything they were capable of in the first place!

The only major limitation was that he could not override their hard coding. Just as Sigrund was unable to overcome the forced imposition of loyalty to the Common Fleet Alliance, the hyper nanomachine plagues and all of their copies could not exist past their artificial 'expiration date'. nøvel.coɱ

Ves understood why this safety measure existed, but he felt bummed that he wouldn't be able to harness these exceedingly high-quality nanomachines forever!

He shrugged. Oh well. He would just have to squeeze the greater amount of value out of their dangerous states while they were still alive!

Ves gained a spontaneous idea.

Instead of trying to form a giant smart metal cat out of smart metal, he wanted the plagues to synergize with him more effectively!

He spread out his giant arms as if to welcome the embrace of his family. "Come to me, my children!"

The nanomachine plagues instantly flew in his direction!

This behavior alarmed the mechers so much that a few of their first-class multipurpose mechs started to unleash their firepower against the lethal swarm, but Ves quickly urged them to stop.

"Don't! They are under my control! Don't ask me questions on this. Just let me do my thing!"

Major Jankowski and the other mech pilots reluctantly did so even though they sensed how these plagues could quickly break down their mechs if they gained the opportunity.

It was incredibly scary to see these planet-cleansing nanomachines engulf the true body of Ves in a cloud of darkness.

His body only became visible again after a few seconds. The nanomachines had descended on his raiment and broke down the alloys that comprised the improvised suit of armor.

The nanomachines subsequently produced more copies of themselves, thereby giving them enough volume to surround Ves in a brand new suit of smart metal armor!

The only difference was that these nanomachines would not hesitate to eat Ves alive if they ever fell out of his control!

Instead of feeling spooked about this, Ves completely became mad with joy!

This was because he could channel his domain through his new 'smart metal raiment' a lot more effectively than before!

It was as if he spontaneously forged a high-level artifact that was highly compatible with his Spirituality in the field!

"Hahahahaha! Now this is what I have been missing all of the time! Why didn't I think of this before?! This is true power!"

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