The Mech Touch novel Chapter 741

Ves immediately noticed her special state. Her eyes became dilated as she stared at the generic Vesian-style spaceborn swordsman mech secured in front of her. Her short green hair ruffled a bit as her head tilted upwards and beheld the mech’s proud and unyielding head.

To Ves, the swordsman mech didn’t seem very special to him. It was a cheap model that the Vandals looted in one of their many past raids into Vesian space. Yet despite its relative age and lack of distinguishing strengths, Ves found it to be a basic, dependable mech that survived battles where more extravagant mech models failed.

Frontier outfits generally prefer designs known for being dependable. Mech pilots wanted a trusty battle brother that lasted for years through frequent abuse and lack of adequate maintenance.

Naturally, the Vandals possessed different priority than the pirate gangs who often found themselves short of mech technicians. Yet this mech model exemplified the frontier style the most out of all of the other mechs in the Vandal mech roster.

Ves still remembered the Redemption Duel he took part in back when he stepped foot on the Temple of Haatumak. His hastily-upgraded Evaporating Spear competed directly against Mayra’s Redemption Rose.

Though the conditions of the duel warped the comparison value between their designs, and his mech ultimately lost against her Redemption Rose, he ultimately gained a few lessons out of that battle.

One of them was that he’d been able to sense of Mayra’s design philosophy. While Ves couldn’t be completely certain what that might look like, Mayra definitely incorporated an emphasis on reliability and perhaps a combination of mobility and offensive power.

He had a feeling he only scratched the surface of her principles, but whatever they may ultimately be, her design style reflected the prevailing customs of the frontier.

Yet for some reason, Mayra did not wish for Ketis to follow in her footsteps. While she hadn’t said anything concrete to Ves, she subtly implied that she wanted Ketis to develop a design philosophy that diverged from the classic frontier style.

Ves couldn’t figure out why Mayra wanted that for Ketis, considering the young woman would make for a great mech designer based in the Faris Star Region if she applied herself to her career instead of her training.

While he filled up the gaps in his student’s comprehension of the orthodox mech industry’s institutional norms, he did not expect her to become a bona-fide classical mech designer. Ketis could never compete in the areas the graduates of the Leemar Institute of Technology or Ansel University of Mech Design excelled at due to their fantastic teaching environments.

With teaching facilities worth as much as a large mech manufacturer and Senior Mech Designers as their professors, these highly prestigious schools had been designed from the start to pump out mature mech designers capable of entering the mech industry in their own right.

How could someone homeschooled by a Journeyman with an inconsistent upbringing herself beat those who survived the brutal curriculum of those institutions?

Ves adopted the same strategy for Ketis as he did with the Blackbeak. Instead of competing directly against the established players of a particular market category, he instead turned to a less popular market category or segment.

In his opinion, Mayra didn’t want Ketis to be a pure frontier pirate designer with all the faults that came with it. Ves did not see any hope for her to become an orthodox mech designer either without actually going through a decent school, which was impossible due to her age and her origin.

So why not combine the two? Ideally, Ketis would take the best traits from both approaches to mech design and mix-and-match them to form a hybrid style that became her hallmark. If she combined the meticulousness and the emphasis on consistency in quality with the freewheeling, unrestrained design impulses of the lawless frontier, then something truly great may come out of this combination!

Of course, anything complex that could result in a benefit might also go the other way. A combination of the worst traits.. Ves could hardly imagine what such a result would look like.

The complete immorality of the frontier combined with the intense greed and hunger for market share?

Now that he thought about it, that did sound a bit familiar... a few weeks ago, didn’t he worry about the Skull Architect doing the exact same thing?

...Yeah.

ANYWAY, under his stellar and faultless instruction, his cute little student surely wouldn’t end up as a devil among pirate designers.

She never displayed any ambitions of starting her own business either. While Ves showed her the ropes of what a mech designer needed to take into account when starting their own businesses, he merely wanted to give her a proper grasp on the economics and the cost and resource constraints of building mechs.

From her own mouth, she once described the two most prevalent ways that pirate designers got into trouble.

The first way was to pay too little attention to their own protection. Anyone weak in the frontier never survived very long by themselves.

The second way they got into trouble was to get ripped off or unknowingly incur a huge amount of debt. Many mech designers who emerge from the frontier usually possessed a poor grasp on the business fundamentals of their own profession. It was easy for them to get carried away and before they knew it a black market organization owned their souls!

Ves made sure to instill some basic business sense into her thick horned skull in order to make sure she wouldn’t bankrupt the Swordmaidens or any other future ventures she might pursue.

"Ah!" The woman suddenly cried. "I almost had it! That feeling!"

"Did you get to discover your own design philosophy?"

"Not quite.." She shook her head in regret. "I kind of let my mind spaz out a bit. I was thinking about my sisters, my warrior training, and my Swordmaiden graduation ceremony."

"Your graduation ceremony? Isn’t that the time when you set off to an untamed world and hunted down a big beast on foot armed with nothing but your sword?"

"Yeah." The girl patted the bones adorned on her suit of heavy combat armor. "These bones here and the reddish lizard skin I wear for my regular uniform prove that I’ve personal killed a Wistra dragon! They’re one of the apex predators of a little exoplanet in the frontier. These bones are only a fraction the size of the real thing, you know!"