The Mech Touch novel Chapter 812

Once Captain Byrd approved of the mental resilience training, Ves returned to the testing facility and converted it to an exercise facility.

In order to save the Vandals the trouble of assembling and disassembling the exercise facility each time they set up camp elsewhere, Ves began to move the cells and the exercise equipment to the cargo space of a heavy transport.

He reduced the amount of space it took to conduct the exercises by decommissioning many old testing equipment. In order to save space and increase the throughput, Ves dismantled the testing mech and stripped it down to the cockpit.

He also fabricated another cockpit so that two mech pilots would be able to ’enjoy’ their training session at the same time. This also allowed him to offer his services to the Swordmaidens.

While technicians and machinists took them away to be recycled, Ves rapidly led a team of other technicians to convert the heavy transport into a mobile exercise machine and long-term prison for the dwarves.

The cells for the dwarf captives became even smaller, leaving them with much less space to sleep, exercise and do anything else for that matter. By now, Ves pretty much wrote them off as humans, so he no longer concerned himself about treating them in a humane manner.

"Ketis! They still haven’t learned how to use the toilet!"

"I’m doing the best I can! The trouble is these dwarves are so used to doing their business anywhere they please that they don’t see the point of toilets!"

No matter how much Ketis whipped and tormented the captive dwarves, they were so dim-witted that they could only ever learn simple patterns of behavior.

Obviously, they still had a few hundred-thousand years to go before their intelligence evolved to a level where they became as smart as humans.

The dreaded mobile mental resilience training facility came into being in this fashion. Officially, the records referred to it as the MMRTF, but a nickname the mech pilots came up with themselves displaced this unwieldy acronym.

Every mech pilot that underwent a ’training session’ referred to the mobile facility as the Mind Blender. Because every mech pilot that underwent a training session left with scrambled minds.

Ves trained a number of technicians to operate the training facility without his supervision. He locked down most of the settings and programmed a number of emergency shutdown procedures should any of the parameters exceed their safety margins.

A doctor also took residence in the training facility who supervised the health of the mech pilots while the dwarves did their best to grind down their minds. Ves mainly included a doctor to reassure the mech pilots that the training wouldn’t go far enough to inflict any serious harm, but for some reason the mech pilots still hated the Mind Blender.

No matter. Captain Byrd set up a rotating schedule which forced every mech pilot to undergo training at least once.

In order to preserve some of their combat effectiveness, the standard training sessions ran for only five minutes or less. While this tired out the mech pilots going through the sessions, it still left them functional enough to return to their duties. They also regained their peak condition a lot faster than if they went through a more grueling training session.

The Swordmaidens surprised him though. Although the Swordmaiden mech pilots heard plenty of horror stories about the Mind Blender from their Vandal counterparts, very rarely did any of them succumb to the strain after undergoing the full ten-minute workout.

Each Swordmaiden mech pilot forced themselves to endure the junk data sent out by the minds of the dwarf captives. Perhaps their contempt for the dwarves had given them strength, because each of them insisted on taking the full ten-minute workout instead of the truncated five-minute session tailored to the Vandals.

The only Swordmaiden mech pilots who failed to last the entire ten minutes before the doctor forcibly shut down the session were let down by their genetic aptitudes. Those with a genetic aptitude in the D-grade piloted the cheap, low-quality frontline mechs for the Swordmaidens.

Though they possessed the grit, their minds possessed a much lower tolerance against an excess of data transmissions.

Watching over the training sessions and witnessing the differences between different levels of willpower and genetic aptitude deepened his understanding of how these two traits played an important role in controlling a mech.

Through his earlier experimentation, he also learned a lot of fragmentary knowledge about neural interfaces. Even without access to theory, he managed to enrich his understanding in this field.

"It’s surprising how much willpower and mental discipline can make a difference." Ves remarked as he stood behind the technicians conducting the experiments.

"Heh." Ketis smirked. "Us Swordmaidens aren’t just for show, you know. Our mech pilots are the best of the best. One in ten potentates that we pick up from the frontier make it through graduation. Many of our trainees gave up along the way, while some of them died during their graduation ceremony. This insures that we can all depend on the mech pilots that are left."

Ves frowned at that. "That sounds really wasteful."

"Not really. Whenever we need new trainees, we just visit a settlement and pick up a bunch of young girls. We don’t pay them anything and it doesn’t take much to feed and clothe them. Besides, I’ve heard that true elites go through even harsher training where only one out of a hundred survives."

It wasn’t actually hard to train a fully-fledged mech pilot, though it always took a lot of time. The greater challenge was to draw out their potential and extract the maximum amount of benefit out of their abilities.

Right now, the two cockpits each contained a Swordmaiden and Vandal mech pilot. They both started the training session at the same time, but the Vandal succumbed just three minutes in while the Swordmaiden clenched her teeth and made it all the way to ten minutes without becoming incapacitated.

Just like Ves trained some technicians to take over operations, Ketis trained the security officers assigned to guard the dwarf captives into keeping them on their toes.

There was an art to keeping the dwarves riled up. Treat them too gently, and they quickly became docile. Treat them too harshly, and they broke to the point where they had given up on their lives.