The Mech Touch novel Chapter 724

Ves had to hand it to Major Verle. Who better than to convert a new expert pilot than the exhuberant Captain Orfan? The landbound mech officer possessed an ego the size of a battleship and possessed a force of will equivalent to elite pilots.

From what Ves had observed of her personality, Captain Orfan already acted like an expert pilot without having the skills to back it up.

Not that she ever took note of her deficiencies. She always pushed on and lived in the present. Despite her rather lackluster foresight, she was an adequate administrator and one of the best combat adepts among the Vandals.

As Captain Orfan grabbed hold of Venerable Xie and led the bewildered expert pilot out of the hangar bay, the rest of the greeting party was left in the dust.

"Okay." Lieutenant Koltov sighed and turned to Ves. "The Pale Dancer is in your care. Please carry out a thorough inspection and treat it appropriately. We will likely be depending on this machine when we make landfall at our destination."

Ves silently nodded, clear of his responsibilities.

Everyone split up to perform their other duties. Ves himself nodded to Chief Keys, who ordered his mech technicians to come and stow away the Pale Dancer.

He continued to admire the majestically white mech as it slowly slid into its new berth next to the Parallax Star. To make some room, Ves ordered the crates of spare parts to be dumped elsewhere.

It didn’t matter because Ves already scheduled for the redundant parts to be taken to the logistics ships for immediate recycling. The sooner those pieces of junk got broken down, the faster Miss Lisbeth got over the fact that she wasted so much resources and time into producing a lot of useless modular components.

"The entire concept of a semi-modular expert mech is flawed. Too many of our engagements are thrust upon us without the time to switch out the wrong parts for the right parts. It just takes too much time to attach the modular limbs to the mech."

More egregiously, Miss Lisbeth actually concocted this scheme on her own, irrespective of Professor Velten’s original vision for her custom-designed lancer mech. The Senior Mech Designer in charge of every design of the Vandals designed a base model along with more than a dozen different variants, each of them suitable to a particular budget and circumstance.

Miss Lisbeth looked at the variants and basically butchered them before picking out the best parts before spending an extravagant amount of resources to fabricate them separately.

Ves understood her logic, but the concept simply failed in practice because the Parallax Star had never truly been designed with a modular makeup in mind.

"It truly takes a lot of courage and self-delusion to think you can improve upon a Senior Mech Designer’s vision."

He suspected that Miss Lisbeth’s ability to work with highly complex expert mechs came from a careless encounter with knowledge beyond her means to understand. An excess of mental contamination must have messed up her mind to the point where she forcibly expressed the design principles of what she inadvertently absorbed in the past.

"I wouldn’t be surprised if she used to work with a modular mech."

In any case, Ketis was currently running the delusional mech designer ragged in the gym compartment, so Ves was able to take charge of her department in her absence. He decided to ruthlessly take advantage of that fact and implement some long-overdue reforms to her flawed regime.

"Chief Keys!"

"Yes, Mr. Larkinson?"

"Once the Pale Dancer is secured, prepare the Parallax Star for partial disassembly."

"Sir?"

"Its design needs a few tweaks. Right now, it is way too big of a machine for Venerable Xie. Not only will he be unable to make full use of the Parallax Star’s capabilities, but the burden of piloting it will actively slow him down. We’ve got to dial back some of its power and implement some limiters to scale back its prodigious power. Professor Velten already prepared a variant that does this as a contingency."

"B-But what about Venerable O’Callahan, sir? Theoretically, he is still able to wake from his artificial coma and deploy into battle one last time."

"The Venerable’s days of soaring into space and wrecking mechs with his magnificent lance charges are over." Ves ruthlessly stomped the man’s hopes. "Rather than keep this powerful reserved for an expert pilot who can collapse in his cockpit at any second, I’d rather take my chances with our new expert pilot who has a track record for reliability."

The callous way Ves referred to Venerable O’Callahan shocked Chief Keys and every mech technician in the vicinity into a numb silence. They never stopped believing in the demigod they worshipped and attended to for years! Years of dedicated service had indoctrinated these Vandal servicemen into full-blown worshippers of a conceited demigod!

The reaction of the mech technicians only spurred Ves on. "What are you looking at? Stop caring about that deadbeat of an expert! They may be called demigods, but they are as mortal and flawed as you and me! Face it, he’s already at the edge of death! While it is admirable to appreciate his service to the Vandals, praying to an absent hero won’t save us from the dangers that we will certainly encounter at the end of this journey. We have a new hero now!"

It took a metaphorical kick in the butt to get the stunned mech technicians to work. Even then, their productivity dipped way below what Ves found acceptable, so he had to admonish a few absent-minded mech technicians to get back to work.

Once he became satisfied at their apparent diligence, Ves found a nearby terminal and loaded in the design schematics of the Parallax Star. A lot of it the more intricate parts required special permission from Professor Velten to access.

Ves used to think the professor classified these portions in order to prevent their weaknesses from falling into the hands of enemies, but now he understood it was for their own protection. Besides someone like Miss Lisbeth and Chief Keys, anyone else would either understand nothing at all or be driven to madness.

"According to his record, he’s supposed to be proficient in lancer mechs as well, but piloting a superpowered version of this mech type is a big jump." _{freēwēbηovel.c૦m}