The Mech Touch

When Ves stepped out of his armored transport, he looked up at the regional headquarters of the Hunting Association.

The architecture of the structure stood out from the rest of the urban sprawl. Wheras most structures tended to favor clean lines, ultra-modernity and strong metallic materials, the regional headquarters looked like an aged and ancestral tribal stronghold.

The use of ochre tints, tribal and animalistic architectural details and other anachronisms gave the regional HQ building a distinctly savage and aggressive vibe.

This was a pretty blunt and obvious way for the Hunting Association to convey its stance upon society.

It refused to conform to the prevailing standards of human civilization.

Instead, just the god pilot who founded it, the Hunting Association explicitly sought to impose its own order onto its sphere of influence!

While the HA did not harbor any apparent ambitions to become a hegemon of red humanity, it nonetheless claimed complete dominion over the increasingly more important activity of hunting.

The Hunters selfishly refused any other group from encroaching upon their territory, whether it was the mechers or the fleeters. Any affair relating to the hunting and population management of wild exobeasts on different planets must fall under the jurisdiction of the Hunting Association!

While the rapidly rising organization provided a valuable public service to red humanity as a whole, the problem was that the masses never had a proper say in the founding and the legislation of the current iteration of the Hunting Association.

This was in complete contrast to the Red Collective, which came about due to meeting the overwhelming demand of red humanity. The Interim Leadership Council gathered representatives from both the lower and upper segments of the population in order to ensure that the new superorganization properly conveyed the will of a broad swath of society.

In contrast, the Huntsman took over an old hunting organization and completely reformed it to undertake a responsibility designated by the god pilot himself.

At most, other Hunters fleshed out the rules and regulations of the Hunting Association and set up all of the planetary branches, but nobody had any illusions that it served as the personal arm of a single god pilot.

That ruffled a lot of feathers. God pilot or not, there were still many people who objected to abuses of power and acts of tyranny.

If one god pilot was allowed to run roughshod over the prevailing rules of the game, what about the next one?

Would every god pilot be permitted to ignore proper procedures and civilized conventions from now on? Would the Huntsman's selfish and willful actions set a precedent that allowed any god pilot to act like a warlord?

Many people had different opinions on this increasingly more concerning matter.

Though Ves was supposed to belong to the 'law and order' camp due to his involvement in the orderly process to create the Red Collective, the reality was that he favored the other side instead.

His life and work experiences had jaded him to the power of the masses. Most people were powerless to change the big picture. They lacked the voice, the capital and the strength necessary to force a change that was significant enough to alter the trajectory of human civilization.

Only the high-tier galactic citizens broke through the threshold of anonymity and possessed the power to change the course of human history.

In a time of peace, it may be more acceptable to listen to the voices of the common folk in order to maintain stability and improve everyone's way of life, but the problem was that those times were gone.

In a time where red humanity lost a lot of star systems and was on the verge of losing more precious territories, martial law trumped any civil law. Survival had to be prioritized at all costs.

If a few human rights had to be trampled to save the continued existence of humans in the Red Ocean, then so be it. Keeping the greatest protectors of human civilization happy was a much greater priority than ensuring that the common folk had a say in how their society should be run.

Ves did not set the rules. He could only choose to stay out of this new and sordid game, or take active part in it. There was no other choice.

He chose to be proactive and take part in the game.

He did not reject the trend of warlordism, but treated it as an inevitability. The best he could do was to maneuver through all of the obstacles and establish himself as a warlord in his own right!

Even his attempts to get appointed to high office in the Red Collective was nothing but a transition vehicle as far as he was concerned.

Ves never really cared about the position and title of chief councilor in the first place. He mainly regarded it as a launching pad to build up his own power base and form his own private kingdom of sorts.

A chief councilor could always lose his title and associated authority, but no one could take away the forces that solely pledged their loyalty to him rather than the Red Collective!

In any case, if Ves wanted to build up a power base that was strong enough to hold its own in the Red Ocean, he still needed to borrow the enormous authority and privileges afforded to a leader of the Red Collective.

How he dealt with the problem posed by the Hunting Association would affect a lot of his future plans.

He did not stand to lose everything if he failed to win over the stubborn Hunters, but it would be a lot harder for him to get stuff done with a failure on his record.

Ves briefly thought back on his strategy session with Gavin.

"You cannot afford to go into this meeting with the Hunting Association by relying on your weaknesses. You need to rely on your strengths instead."

"What do you mean by that, Gavin?"

"You always tell everyone that you are a mech designer, and a damn good one at that. Why not try to make use of that? Instead of trying to win over the Hunters with empty words, maybe you can win them over by presenting them with a mech that they cannot resist."

That actually sounded like a good idea. Ves thought about it for a moment, but then recalled the personality of the vice director that he was supposed to meet.

"I don't think this approach will work out as well as you think." He sighed. "A lot of people have taken a liking for my living mechs and especially my Carmine mechs, but this Talas Redmond figure is one of those puritan hunter types. He is the sort that disdains the use of advanced technology to hunt down prey. I can already predict that his attitude towards converting ordinary Hunters into Carmine mech pilots will cause him to blow up in my face. It is as if the Hunting Association has already anticipated this strategy in advance and sought to strangle it in its cradle."

The Hunters may present themselves as savage and uncouth, but anyone who assumed they were stupid was making a big mistake!

Gavin still maintained a lot of confidence in his superior.

"I do not have any brilliant ideas to share with you. I still believe you can do it. You always do. Nobody truly dislikes mechs. I am sure you can come up with a good solution one way or another. It has always been your style to win people over by presenting them with the mechs that they need or appeal to them the most. It is impossible for the Hunters to have no desires. As long as they are human enough to possess their own wants and needs, there is always an opportunity to sell them a product that they initially did not know they needed. Your job is to identify a problem that poses a struggle to Hunters, and offer them a solution that they cannot resist."

"That is easier said than done." Ves scoffed at the time. "As far as I know, the Hunters aren't really short on anything. Their numbers are sufficient, their presence across human-occupied space is ubiquitous and the profit they earn is more than enough to cover for all of their expenses. Perhaps their only major shortcoming is that their Hunters aren't doing enough to fight against the native aliens, but that can be excused by the fact that they are doing a good job in culling the increasingly more threatening exobeasts that are rapidly evolving on untamed planets."

One of the reasons why the leaders of red humanity chose to tolerate the Hunting Association was because it lifted an important problem off their hands.

As long as the Hunting Association properly managed all of the planets with an abundant amount of wildlife, no powerful calamity beasts or speculative god beasts could emerge and destroy any local population centers.

"Wait a minute…" Ves suddenly came up with an interesting idea.

It was just a tentative idea, not a complete mech concept or mech design, but it might just be attractive enough to break through the Hunting Association's reticence!

Gavin grinned when he saw that Ves apparently gained inspiration again. "That's it. This is what you are good at. Even if you end up failing, at least you tried your best. Now go ahead and catch your ride. You do not have much time before the meeting is scheduled to begin."

Back in the present, Ves and his guards entered the regional headquarters of the HA. The workers inside did not dare to neglect their important guest and led him straight up to the top floor.

Once the visitors passed through another door, they entered a large office that also doubled as a trophy room.

Hunters often liked to show off their proudest hunts. The preserved heads of all manner of exobeasts lined the wall. Talons, teeth, skulls and other nasty remains did a good job of conveying the lethality of the natural weapons at the disposal of the hunted prey.

On another wall hung an impressive display of firearms. The majority of them consisted of old but very artfully made old-fashioned slug throwers. The pistols and rifles possessed limited power and ammunition capacity, which forced their users to accurately target a resilient exobeast's weak points in order to secure a kill.

Locked in a large and transparent display case set before this wall was a large amount of melee weapons.

Swords, spears, knives and axes made predominantly out of bright and polished metal gleamed in the light. Each of them conveyed the sense that they had managed to shed the blood and claimed the life of at least one exobeast. Gathering so many hunting weapons together caused the entire collection to convey a subtle sense of threat.

The man who sat behind the desk that was apparently carved from the tusk of a large exobeast exuded a greater sense of threat.

It was quite subtle, but the man clearly possessed an edge that had taken the lives of hundreds if not thousands of exobeasts, none of them weaker than an armed human soldier!

This was a man who devoted himself to hunting long before all of the possibilities of the Age of Dawn became available.

That seemed to matter a lot. The vice director had not gone on too many valid hunts since the start of the new age, but the strength and power he exuded far exceeded the level of a typical Hunter who regularly went into the wild to claim the lives of challenging beasts!

That only left one possibility to Ves.

Talas Redmond received the personal favor of the Huntsman. The god pilot paid special attention to this old man and bestowed him with far greater power than usual.

If this was the case, then there was a large chance that the vice director possessed a much closer relationship with the god pilot than anticipated!

Talking to Redmond was almost as good as talking to the Huntsman himself!

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