The Mech Touch

The airfleet under the command of Ves entered into a slightly awkward state. In a matter of weeks, it had ballooned in size and strength. However, it became increasingly harder to sustain this pattern.

People weren't stupid. Even after a lot of criminals and anarchists took advantage of the situation and inflicted a lot of death and destruction, it was impossible for them to engage in wanton destruction for so long!

These crazed murderers either killed each other off, got cleaned up by a stronger force like Ves' airfleet, or simply sobered up and went into hiding.

The outskirts had calmed down. While many ordinary citizens were in dire need of aid, they were no longer under great threat.

One notable development was that millions of refugees who resided in the downtown areas had fled to the periphery. Many of them didn't dare to take the risk of travelling in biovehicles because any random mech might shoot them down for random reasons.

This has led to an enormous migration of people on foot. They fled from the center of Veoline like a tide of slow-moving ants. Many of them suffered from various indignities along the way, but their situation became a bit better once they started to group up and organize themselves.

The Larkinsons paid careful attention to the refugees passing by the airfleet. Compared to the citizens who lived in the outskirts, the downtown folk were much more desirable.

There was a greater proportion of well-educated professionals among their population. Lawyers, managers and even low-ranking biomech designers could be found among their ranks!

It was easy for the airfleet to persuade these valued human resources to join the Larkinson Clan. After getting caught up in the devastation of the civil war before fleeing through a long stretch of dangerous and lawless streets, their sense of security had sunk to the bottom.

They welcomed any chance of joining a strong and well-armed organization!

Though the Larkinsons had to put the Aspect of Healing to much greater use in order to treat traumatized city folk, Ves was happy with this development. The supply of highly skilled professionals was so great that his Larkinson Clan wouldn't be short of excellent medical doctors, geneticists, implant surgeons, beast designers and other biotech experts as long as he could bring them all back to his expeditionary fleet!

Normally, it would have been much harder to poach these elite personnel. They were largely lifelong employees of established biotech companies. There was no reason for them to quit their promising careers and abandon a state that was entirely geared towards fostering their development!

However, wars had a way of changing people's minds. When shells started flying over their heads, the Life Research Association didn't seem like a good place to them anymore! No amount of support for the biotech sector was worth the risk of death!

"How are we doing in terms of recruitment?" Ves asked as he sat behind his desk.

"We're doing extremely well compared to before, sir." Commander Rivington answered. "Our numbers have just broken through 20,000 members. The stress of absorbing so many Lifers into our clan is enormous, but upon your orders, we have tried our best to pick up every desirable professional that we can find. In fact, many of the refugees have already heard about us and wish to join. We have to slow down and impose a lot of restrictions in order to cope with the current situation. We are nearing our limits, so we have to be a lot more selective than before."

Recruiting more than 20,000 people in a short amount of time was not as great as it sounded at first. This was because only a third of them were actually desirable. The rest consisted of spouses, children and maybe other extended family.

The Larkinsons had no choice but to accept these excess people, and Ves wasn't too upset about the situation. His clan prized family, so he couldn't be hypocritical about it. Besides, the needs of the extra refugees weren't great. They just needed a small amount of space in a vehicle in order to keep them happy.

"Have you managed to pick up any senior professionals?" Ves asked.

Rivington shook his head. "Journeyman Mech Designers and other people at this level have better ways of escaping the current chaos. They are either working for an established organization or they have relied on their guard forces to flee from the city center. They don't need to take shelter with us in order to secure their lives."

"A pity."

Ves already expected as much. It didn't matter. The kind of personnel he had already managed to recruit already plugged the lack of doctors, researchers and other necessary personnel in the Larkinson Clan. In this regard, Ves fully met his original goal for visiting the Life Research Association.

If he was able to leave the planet right away, then he would not feel as if he had wasted his opportunity.

It was just that Ves still felt he was missing out by giving up the opportunity to obtain a vial of high-grade life-prolonging treatment serum.

He constantly reconsidered his difficult decision throughout his day! He felt so bad about backing off that he always had to remind himself that courting death was not a good way to get ahead in life!

He vigorously shook his head. "Maybe I need to spend some time with the Aspect of Rationality."

His mood lightened after he thought about his latest innovation. The organic statues had all demonstrated their value in different ways. The Aspect of Transcendence was a particularly epoch-transforming existence!

Though Ves had reached a bottleneck in his research where he wasn't able prevent his test subjects from dying or failing to arouse their spiritual potential, at least he was heading in the right direction!

For something as promising as being able to induce spiritual potential in people who originally possessed none, Ves was not in a hurry to achieve quick success.

He knew that something as fantastic as this could not be done with a rudimentary amount of knowledge and experimental results. Ves had to keep performing experiments, keep trying something new and keep gathering more data in order to progress this long and difficult project.

Perhaps he might not even be able to achieve a truly successful result unless he achieved another breakthrough in his understanding of spirituality and spiritual engineering.

Considering the current circumstances, Ves suspended his experiments. There were way too many people in the airfleet now and who knew if one of them were perceptive enough to notice some clues.

Besides, the supply of convicted criminals had dried up. The airfleet had become so notorious in the region that every malcontent had long moved away!

In essence, the forces under the command of Ves essentially replaced the Planetary Guard as peacekeepers!

Their excellent reputation and good deeds had spread far and wide. No one cared that the Larkinsons were a bunch of foreigners who didn't fully embrace biotechnology. During these troubling times, safety was more valuable than national pride!

Now that he suspended his experiments, Ves suddenly had a lot more time on his hands. Though he could still spend his time on analyzing data, managing his ballooning airfleet and more, a part of him missed the opportunity to engage in his primary passion.

"I'm a mech designer. Why am I not designing mechs?"

Technically, he could do so at any time, but it was pointless. He needed to coordinate with his fellow Journeyman and his design teams in order to start a serious project.

Even if he came up with a fantastic new idea, it wasn't his turn to lead the next round of design projects this time. Gloriana had waited a long time to take the helm in designing the first expert mechs of the Larkinson Clan. She was in charge of coming up with the initial mech concepts and determining all of the important design choices.

If he dared to come up with a competing idea, Gloriana would probably scream in his face!

"Hmm, perhaps I might not be able to design any mechs soon, but that doesn't mean I have to sit still."

The upcoming expert mech design projects would probably be his best products for a very long time. Ves wanted to design an individual mech that exceeded the quality and potential of his Devil Tiger for a very long time!

He saw a lot of hope in his upcoming projects. He had at least six chances to succeed in his aim.

"I have to make sure that Venerable Joshua's expert mech is the best out of the batch!"

He had an opportunity to implement some of his recent ideas. For example, he could apply the principles of prime mechs to them. He could also integrate some organic components in them in order to amplify his design philosophy.

All of this required a lot of thought and preparation. Even if Master Willix promised to provide her assistance to the projects, she was only responsible for solving the problems that were beyond the capacity of Journeymen to deal with. She was not supposed to dictate the direction of the mech design projects!

Still, that was already enough. Ves had to make the best possible use out of this unique opportunity. Master Mech Designers were very busy and they rarely volunteered their services to little Journeymen!

What was even more important was that the upcoming expert mech designs would play a pivotal role in defining the high-end mech power of the Larkinson Clan for years to come.

The stronger his expert mechs, the longer they remained relevant. Ves did not want to design a mediocre expert mech and be forced to replace them a few years later because their power level couldn't catch up to the competition in the Red Ocean!

"Maybe I should find a way to incorporate a battle network in them as well."

Venerable Dise and the Swordmaidens already showed they didn't need to rely on a design spirit to unleash a lot of power.

As Ves mused about creating new battle networks centered around his other expert pilots, his comm beeped an alert.

"What's going on, Casella?"

"The occupied warehouse complex is under attack! A third party has just started to bombard the site!"

"What?! I'll head to the command center straight away!"

Ves dropped his prior ideas and immediately started to think about who would want to attack the paramilitaries. Obviously, this third party must have learned there was something valuable at the complex.

This strengthened his suspicion that the life-prolonging serum that he was drooling over may actually be buried underneath the site!

When Ves reached the command center, he immediately observed the projections. They currently showed several live feeds of hidden scouting drones that his forces had planted in the vicinity of the warehouse complex.

All of them showed a lot of activity! The recently-installed organic turrets along with a number of biomechs armed with ranged weapons were firing their weapons into the sky!

Numerous explosions erupted in midair as all kinds of ordnance attempted to bombard the warehouse complex!

Only a handful of explosive shells managed to reach their destinations, but that was not the extent of the bombardment.

THUMP! THUMP! THUMP!

Powerful kinetic impacts roiled the entire site. Mechs suffered heavy damage and the ground started to get cratered as a lot of purely kinetic rounds slammed onto their targets with unstoppable force!

Due to their extremely high kinetic energy, it wasn't easy to intercept them! They not only traveled incredibly fast, but also couldn't be stopped through regular means.

The paramilitary force was forced to erect energy shields to protect their most strategically-important positions!

However, as dozens of kinetic projectiles slammed into these barriers, the shield generators keeping them up were quickly reaching their limits!

"Who the hell are attacking them?" Ves questioned.

"We've dispatched our scouts. We'll get an answer for you soon enough!"