The Mech Touch

"Even I am barely able to resist the temptation to cut open my head and stuff a hyper material inside. Do you know how useful it is to attract more E energy radiation?"

"It sounds dangerous." Gloriana said. "Everything I have learned about hypers suggests that dosing yourself with E energy radiation risks exceeding your safe tolerance level. Once you begin to get exposed to more exotic radiation than you can handle, the probability of suffering random accidents as well as malignant mutations increases dramatically. This is already bad enough if you implant a hyper material inside your arm or leg, but if any accident occurs within the center of your brain, a quick death is not the worst outcome."

Her concerns were valid. Most of red humanity was just beginning to get to grips with materials that had formed after being infused with the power of heaven. The properties derived from specific elemental variations of E energy produced all kinds of wondrous but unpredictable effects.

This was the start of the Age of Dawn. Just as they did during the starting years of the Age of Mechs, a lot of researchers and developers had no idea what they were dealing with! They mostly attained their results by trial and error!

Suffice to say, this approach usually yielded a lot more errors than successes!

Ves did not feel too concerned about it, though.

"The treatment that I have bartered for you is top-notch, Gloriana. The implant development company won't be treating you as an ordinary test subject. You are a client and a VIP no less. As the wife of a tier 3 galactic citizen, the implant engineers won't dare to employ any truly untested tech in your custom cranial implant. Technological progress is happening really fast right now. A lot of the products in development seem dangerous at the moment, but most of the risks will subside in a couple of months as our scientific community quickly learns what is wrong and what is right. Hyper materials are part of our future. Don't miss out on it. It will be much more troublesome to upgrade your implant once it has been installed into your brain."

Ves truly believed this was the best way to boost the capabilities of his wife.

Out of their immediate family, Gloriana was the most ordinary of them all. Ves started out relatively normal, but he went through so much evolution and modification that he had turned into a hybrid that possessed at least some of the traits of a primordial human.

Their children were much further ahead in this regard. The gifts bestowed by the likes of Gaia and the Superior Mother along with other superior conditions caused them to come much closer to the state of a primordial human!

In fact, as primordial humans were much more diverse due to their ubiquitous capacity for self-evolution, his children might have actually crossed this important threshold!

What mattered was that Ves and his children were easily able to improve their basic capabilities through cultivation. Their dependency on augmentation had dropped because they could essentially make themselves stronger by utilizing deliberate cultivation methods.

This was not always a benefit. The downside to relying on cultivation was that it produced many mysterious alterations that interacted poorly with many forms of augmentations, especially when applied afterwards.

Foreign implants became prone to malfunctioning while genetic modification treatments could completely ruin or regress some of progress attained through cultivation!

In short, people like Ves that had surpassed a significant stage of cultivation could no longer safely augment themselves further!

With the power, influence and connections that Ves had at his disposal nowadays, it was trivially easy for him to arrange a customized cranial implant upgrade for himself.

When Ves conducted research on the kinds of premium first-class implants that his wife could benefit from, he felt incredibly envious of their power and capabilities.

The implants optimized for mech designers did more than offer a lot of processing power and data storage. They went further and literally rewrote entire parts of the human brain so that they could massively improve and optimize a lot of cognitive processes relevant to their profession!

Ves could not even hope to understand these deep and profound changes. Only the foremost experts on human neurology and implant development understood what was taking place!

Cranial implants that produced such extreme effects were almost always custom in nature. A standardized product could not account for all of the unique and diverse brain configurations of baseline humans and most particularly designer babies.

The difficulty of installing them became exponentially more difficult if the intended recipient already bore an existing cranial implant!

Only first-raters possessed the tech, resources and expertise to safely boost Gloriana's base capabilities to an insanely high level.

Though his wife needed to be patient, once she completed her long-awaited upgrade, her productivity would likely become insanely high!

Her work speed would exceed that of any other second-class Journeyman Mech Designer by a noticeable margin, all without compromising the quality of her results!

Her ability to devour new knowledge would improve substantially as well, as her integration with her new implant had pushed forth the digitization of her mind to an even deeper level!

If Gloriana failed to promote to a first-class mech designer despite receiving a customized first-class cranial implant, then she might as well quit mech design entirely and raise her children in peace!

Ves felt a lot of pressure at her impending upgrade. He knew that he needed to find a way to upgrade his own design capabilities, but his odd evolution track prevented him from employing the easiest and most common solution available to mech designers.

He needed to rely on his own efforts to increase his internal processing power. This was difficult, but there had to be a way to make this happen. He deeply suspected that Divine Blacksmiths were able to turn a part of themselves into supercomputers.

There was no other way for them to be able to forge the most advanced and demanding armaments in ancient times!

All of that could wait for the time being. After the couple was done with talking about cranial implants, they moved on to discussing the progress made on numerous important mech design projects.

Gloriana had fleshed out much of the Jupiter Project by herself.

"I haven't met your uncle too many times in person, but I have corresponded with him often enough to lock down the configuration of the Jupiter Project. I am still searching for the appropriate component models. Your recent rise in status has given me access to much better and more experimental mech systems, so I will have to delay the next phase of the design process by a few weeks in order to select from the best available choices."

His wife projected a recent draft of the Jupiter Project.

Ves liked what he saw. The expert command mech exuded a strong and valiant air. Though it possessed obvious command and control modules, the high-tier expert mech was no slouch in direct combat.

"The Jupiter Project inherits much of the configuration of the Travon Exine." His wife explained. "General Ark's current high-tier expert mech does not fit him perfectly, but the Master Mech Designers of the Garlen Empire are not incompetent. Your uncle has also spent years on becoming proficient with its weapon configuration, so he should immediately adapt to his new living expert mech as long as the latter's weapons are similar enough."

This was not an unusual choice. It was much less troublesome to stick to what was familiar rather than try to adapt to a completely different style of combat.

Gloriana continued to explain the overall configuration of the Jupiter Project.

"Ranged combat is important. While Ark and I have discussed whether it is better for his expert mech to equip an external rifle that boasts superior firepower and convenience, we ultimately decided to base the Jupiter Project's ranged armament on a set of integrated transphasic luminar crystal cannon system. This will be his main means of ranged output. We will be counting on you to develop it to a point where it can become effective against alien warships."

Ves looked intrigued. The proposed integrated energy weapon system clearly shared a lot of similarities to the ARCEUS System of the Mars. His wife had participated in its design. Not only that, she also collaborated with Master Benedict Cortez on an infrequent basis whenever the Mars was due for another minor upgrade or overhaul.

Even though the ARCEUS System was a licensed product of Immace Energy Armaments, that did not stop Ves and Gloriana from 'taking inspiration' from many of its interesting design solutions.

They could even take it a step further and license the ARCEUS System or a newer variant of it for the Jupiter Project!

However, neither Ves nor Gloriana proposed this solution because they had advanced their craft to such an extent since the initial development of the Mars that they could develop a completely bespoke integrated energy weapon system by themselves.

The design might be rougher and less optimized at first, but there was much more room for improvement.

Both mech designers knew quite well that the initial version of the Jupiter Project would only last for a short time.

Once General Ark Larkinson successfully advanced to ace pilot, his new living expert mech immediately became obsolete again!

That would be the point where Gloriana truly intended to transform her work into a mechanical monster without equal in the Larkinson Clan!

"The ARCEUS System works well for the Mars because it is entirely based on numerous transphasic positron weapon modules. They are powerful enough to allow Patriarch Reginald Cross exchange fire against most warships at various ranges, though they perform the best at closer to medium ranges." Ves told her. "As for the Jupiter Project, we can make a range of impactful choices. We can make its ranged output flexible by allowing it to switch out its attack phase crystals. However, this will add more complexity while reducing the degree of optimization. It might just be a better idea to stick to just one attack phase crystal."

His wife furrowed her brows. "I know you well enough that you only make stupid suggestions half of the time. Why do you sound as if you are favoring only a single choice? Does it not make sense to take advantage of the versatility of luminar crystal technology? If the Jupiter Project faces a warship, it can quickly dismantle the target's transphasic energy shields with empowered disruptor beams. Once our expert mech has stripped this layer of protection, the mech can switch to positron beams to inflict maximum destruction onto the hull plating and internal hull structure of the enemy vessel. The efficiency of this process will severely diminish if the Jupiter Project can only fire positron beams."

Her argument made a lot of sense. Ves used to hold this opinion as well, but recent changes had caused him to change his attitude on this matter.

The problem was that it was difficult for him to explain his thoughts in a logical manner.

"You are not wrong, honey, but this is the Age of Dawn. Have you seen what the Everchanger managed to pull off with the Gray Lotus? This little weapon represents the future luminar crystal weapons as far as I am concerned! By using aspected hyper materials as the basis of a new variation of attack phase crystal, the luminar crystal weapons will not only be able to draw power from the power reactor of the expert mech, but also ambient E energy!"

His wife widened her eyes!

She had overlooked this important detail!

The reason why she had dismissed the Gray Lotus in her mind was because she had long been accustomed to regarding it as a unique and unreplicable artifact. It relied on a material called Black Demon Steel in order to fire lethal death beams that could at least partially phase through any barrier!

If they could apply similar advancements to the Jupiter Project's integrated energy weapon systems, they could turn the powerful expert mech into a true ship-killing machine!