The Mech Touch
Chapter 7081: Better Larkinsons

Chapter 7081: Better Larkinsons

After greeting the newly returned Larkinsons, Ves led them into the rented banquet hall where they all got to enjoy a taste of Yernstall IV’s delicacies.

Although the EdNet graduates still had not mentally and physically recovered to their old conditions, their attitudes had perked up. Each of them spent half a mech generation’s worth of time in a time-warped virtual reality environment.

Their only mission was to learn as much knowledge from the Red Association’s abundant teaching resources as possible. Despite their new and powerful first-class augmentations, their course load was immense. This especially applied to poorly educated third-raters such as General Verle.

Many of them felt as if they were experiencing a second run of their childhoods. They had been deprived of responsibility over the Larkinson Clan and just needed to cram theories and practice their problem solving skills all day.

The EdNet provided a rich variety of virtual universities and academies.

Some of them focused more on practical work while others delved deep into the heart of every theory.

There were mech academies that taught mech pilots how to pilot first-class multipurpose mechs from the ground up, and there were also officer academies that condensed millenia’s worth of military theory into a 10-year syllabus.

The teachings refined the Larkinsons. Each of them had become a reinvented man or woman. They still retained a part of their old traits, but newer ones had taken shape as well.

The separation between Ves and the EdNet graduates still remained for that reason.

Even now, the latter still acted as if they were time travelers who had been dumped into a completely new universe or timeline.

So much had changed in so few years. They could scarcely imagine how little time it took for the Polymath to go rogue and declare herself an empress and how the Terrans and the Rubarthans gathered the guts to declare independence.

They never imagined that superdimensional matter would overtake phasewater as the next big resource, or how the Larkinson Clan actually controlled a major source of its output.

The Red Collective was still a strange and mysterious organization to them. The virtual reality they resided in was only designed to model the reality of a low-energy environment. While their dormant bodies passively absorbed E energy radiation, their minds remained completely out of contact with this new phenomenon, causing their spiritualities to be weaker on average.

At least they weren’t as weak as the citizens of the Cybernetic Empire, who had to rely entirely on cybernetics to make up for the gaps created by systematic cultivation for the time being.

As the banquet steadily progressed, Ves and Gloriana made sure to circulate around the banquet hall and engage the slightly disoriented EdNet graduates in conversation.

“I have heard that you are in the final stages of completing the Riot Mark III Project.” Dulo Voiken spoke to Gloriana. “It may be too late for me to become a contributing mech designer to the project, but I would still like to offer my services to you. I have focused my time in the EdNet on deepening my specializations. Among my cohort, I am by far the best at designing spearman mechs and polearms. Let me demonstrate my improvements to you and perfect the expert spearman mech that I originally contributed to. It would be painful for me to see him deployed in battle without the optimizations that allows for Venerable Orfan to wield her battle partner as if he was an extension of her will.”

Gloriana, who wore a sophisticated blue dress, contemplated the proposal in her mind.

This was a troublesome request as the addition of a mech designer at this late stage of the project might cause its completion to be postponed.

Yet the opportunity to have her work checked by a passionate, trustworthy and much more competent specialist in spearman mech was too good to pass over. Her perfectionism demanded that she take his offer seriously.

“I will permit you to assist me in the final optimizations of the design, Dulo. Please be aware that the major design choices are already set. To change them at this late stage will cause at least a month’s worth of delays. That is unacceptable. If you have any suggestions to make that require more drastic redesign work, you can save them until we are ready to embark on the Riot Mark IV Project, is that understood?”

Dulo clearly did not like this instruction, but what could he do? While he arguably knew more about first-class mech design than Gloriana, he still remembered his place in the hierarchy. His time in EdNet training had not given him a sense of superiority over those who chose to remain behind.

This was especially the case knowing that Gloriana possessed one of the best cranial implant suites that mech designers could dream of. The Mentalist Crystal fragments embedded in her cybernetic circuitry subtly strengthened her personality and intellectual aura.

None of the mech designers who graduated from EdNet training dared to contest her leadership over the Design Department, especially after they learned how much she managed to learn while still juggling design work and child rearing duties!

What these Larkinsons did not know was that Gloriana had not entirely relied on her augmented learning capabilities to become so knowledgeable in a short amount of time.

She had recently strengthened her qualifications to design first-class mechs by taking advantage of her access to the Mech Designer System.

While she could not afford any of the expensive enlightenment fruits, the cheaper ones that strengthened her fundamentals were much more affordable.

The small accumulation of those budget enlightenment fruits did wonders in strengthening her basic understanding of the principles behind the most common form of high technologies utilized in first-class mechs.

It was practically unfair how Gloriana was able to acquire much of the benefits of EdNet training without subjecting her to continuous staring and years worth of isolation from the rest of the galaxy.

Ves actually regretted that he did not introduce the System sooner to his fellow mech designers.

They could have remained in touch with current events and still improve by leaps and bounds if he invited them to become users of the Mech Designer System shortly before or after the start of the Age of Dawn.

Alas, he was not psychologically prepared to share the System at that time. His reputation and prestige was also not as great as now. Without the Bluejay Fleet or first-class ace mechs charged with his protection, it would have been foolish to even hint at the existence of his mother’s gift.

At least all of the EdNet training provided a bit of cover when more and more of the Larkinson mech designers started to show unusual competences. It was not perfect, but anything was better than nothing.

After chatting with a bunch of mech designers and officers, Ves found himself drifting back to the enchanting form of Calabast.

The woman hardly looked different from the last time that he saw her in person. She always had excellent control over her appearance and presentation. She could come across as unassuming or intimidating by subtly altering her body language and behavior.

This time, she chose to maintain an unassuming but charming appearance that stood out just enough to convey the illusion that she had evolved somehow.

“So what do you think?” Ves asked an open-ended question.

How Calabast interpreted his question and chose to answer it was a test in itself.

“You got out at a good time.” She replied, obviously referring to his decision to resign from office. “It is important to remember that you founded the Larkinson Clan to support your activities as a mech designer. It has grown to the extent that it can already do so without requiring your supervision or leadership. You sacrificed a moderate amount of control to absolve you of most of the responsibilities and burdens that come with leading a prominent clan. That is a good exchange in my opinion. Your status is already great enough that you can easily find willing collaborators and partners for your design projects. You are no longer shackled to your own clansmen.”

Her words rang true to his ears. He couldn’t help but nod.

“The Larkinsons have many limitations. They mean well, but they have yet to catch up to the likes of the Red Association in terms of R&D, strategic resource accumulation, industrial capacity and connections. My design scope has grown so quickly that the clan cannot keep up with my demands anymore. I find myself cooperating increasingly more with the established players.”

“That is good.” Calabast said. “The clan is not forced to take extreme measures to meet up to your expectations. It is not necessarily detrimental if they need more time to take on greater responsibilities. As for you, your growth rate is so fast that it is impossible for you to maintain your policy of self-reliance. Unless you are willing to slow down, you will only become more dependent on the resources of the Red Three and other powerful groups. One point I would like to commend you on is that you have done a good job at maintaining your neutrality. Maintaining friendships with all of the major players without upsetting any of them is a great feat. You have a bright future if you can continue to balance your relations equally.”

Ves sardonically smiled. “It helped a lot that the big players maintained cordial if strained relationships with each other all of the time. They did not like each other, but they weren’t outright enemies. I fear that will change in the future. The need to maintain a united front against two different hostile alien civilizations is keeping everyone in check, but who knows how much covert warfare is taking place outside of public awareness.”

That caused the spy to smirk. “You can bet that the intelligence operatives of the Red Two and the newly independent colonial alliances have already engaged in hostilities. It is clear that the intelligence agencies of the RA and the RF have failed badly. The mechers and the fleeters should be in a hurry to compensate. They are likely doing this by ordering their agents to become more aggressive and unscrupulous in their secretive operations. This is a means to remind others that they still have teeth.”

How… stupid. It sounded as if the mechers and the fleeters had too big of an ego to acknowledge their failure with calm and rationality. They had to lash out just to prove they were still formidable enough.

It reminded Ves of the utterly wasteful and short-lived Crown Uprising. All it did was to expose the Five Scrolls Compact to more people and squander a lot of manpower for very little if any benefit to the secretive cult.

“Well, it doesn’t really matter to us.” Ves said. “Whatever covert warfare is going on behind the scenes has nothing to do with us. We have taken greater responsibility and spent most of our efforts into resisting the invading aliens. I think that has earned us enough recognition and goodwill from other parties. However, there are limits to what we can do. Your return and the return of other EdNet graduates will help, but we are still plagued by many inadequacies.”

“I know, Ves. I have spent years keeping up with ongoing developments. I have many different plans in mind to improve your standing and the standing of the Larkinson Clan, but we can talk about that on another day.”

Not even Calabast was immune to the immense strain that she had gone through in the past few years. EdNet training imposed so much stress on people that they needed to recover for a long time before they could even think about undergoing another session.

Ves missed her company. Despite missing out on many different life-changing events, he still felt he could depend on her assistance to navigate a dwarf galaxy that had become increasingly murkier as of late.

Thank you for reading my work. If you wish to support The Mech Touch, please vote with your golden tickets!

Purchase Privilege for The Mech Touch! Read a varying amount of chapters ahead of regular readers while enjoying a 99% discount on unlocking new chapters!

Join The Mech Touch’s unofficial Discord server: .gg/APB5KCU