The Mech Touch (Web Novel)

"Meoooooww!...."

Lucky squirmed and meowed in panic as Ves dragged him over to the mech workshop. Ordinarily, performing an untested medical procedure should occur in the medical bay or at least Ranya's lab, but a gem cat was a mechanical creature rather than a bio-organism.

Also, the affliction that caused Lucky to continually suffer from indigestion definitely had something to do with the Unending One. When Lucky initially bit the statue, its entire structure was filled with dark energy.

What did that mean?

Ves should be the most suitable person in the fleet who could help Lucky get over his upset stomach!

He grinned and he placed his cat on a worktable. His pet clanked onto the solid surface as his metallic form. Lucky's weak limbs impotently flailed as he tried to escape the machinations of his owner.

"Meoow…."

"None of that, Lucky. I gave you several weeks to get back into one piece, but you have only managed to regenerate your physical wounds so far. It won't be long before we bump into the pirate armada and I don't want you to be left in this defenseless state at that time. This is for your own good!"

"Meooow!"

Lucky obviously didn't agree, but what he thought was inconsequential. Ves had waited long enough but it didn't look as if his gem cat's mineral processing system could handle something as strange as spiritually-charged Unending alloy.

As Ves studied his pet's appearance, he once again became fascinated by the cat's remarkable nature.

Who designed him? Was he unique, or were there other gem cats out there? Did all of them possess a spirit like Lucky?

He figured that his mother ought to know more. Ves did not miss the fact that Lucky behaved very familiar with her in the few times she showed up. Not even her ghost form fazed his cat!

"Well, I'll get those answers sooner or later." He muttered as he stroked his hand across Lucky's smooth surface. "Now, I just need to get you back to normal."

Ves did not bother to pull out any scanners to study Lucky's internals. He had tried many times, but this act never yielded any result.

"That's fine."

He possessed an alternate method of looking inside Lucky. Whatever prevented him from scanning Lucky's body past his exterior did not do much against his spiritual senses.

In fact, Ves wondered if he could use the same trick he used to defeat the anti-copy measure on the Darkbreak module on his pet.

"It should be viable."

Ves began to load the design for the spiritual construct necessary to accomplish this feat. He hadn't neglected this function during the past month. Whenever he had some idle time, he spent at least some of his attention on expanding his kit of temporary spiritual augments. There was no burden to his mind at all as long as he didn't activate any of them. Through this method, he stored dozens of different useful abilities in the storage space of his implant.

Once Ves molded some of his free spiritual energy into a fairly sophisticated spiritual camera construct, he began to activate it. He abruptly gained double vision, causing him to feel a bit dizzy until he closed his physical eyes.

"That's better."

Through his spiritual senses, he interpreted the visual feedback from his spiritual camera. It was much more refined than the cruder version he made at first. Its resolution was higher and it could even record footage rather than still images!

Anything captured by his camera would automatically be translated and dumped into his implant. This meant that he could keep his spiritual camera active without manually needing to translate his spiritual file format into an electronic file format.

In fact, if he was willing to, he could keep all of his recorded data in a spiritual form. This was useful in cases when his implant was restricted or compromised!

While Ves did not think of using his spiritual camera as a means to look beneath the surface of objects, there should barely be anything stopping it from being used that way.

Of course, anything covered by B-stone or a strong spiritual source such as expert pilots were different.

When Ves moved his camera forward until it entered Lucky's torso, his cat shivered all of a sudden.

"Meow..?"

His camera immediately returned completely dark images, so Ves had to tweak its settings to detect alternate input such as infrared radiation.

"That's better."

Ves gained a monochrome view of some of Lucky's insides. As expected, a gem cat's body was not some kind of black box. Instead, Ves encountered a dizzying collection of small but incredibly sophisticated-looking high tech parts.

He frowned. While it was nice to see what Lucky was made of, the problem was that Ves recognized none of the functions of the different components! They were so advanced that only someone extremely well versed in high technology such as Master Willix could make sense of his observations!

Though Ves continually stored everything he saw in his implant, there was little chance he could ever make use of them for a long time.

Perhaps only when Ves was capable of building a gem cat himself would all of this observational data be of use. Until then, it only took up space.

"Well, let's look at his stomach at least. I'm wondering what goes on inside."

As Lucky was a gem cat that converted both raw and refined exotics into gems, the stomach was a key organ or part to him. Ves had long wondered how Lucky's stomach actually broke down all of those varied exotics, many of which possessed dangerous and unusual properties.

Unfortunately, as soon as the spiritual camera entered the stomach, Ves saw nothing but blinding noise!

"Damnit! I feared this would happen!"

There was no way that Lucky could eat many kilograms of exotics and not explode. Aside from his mechanical nature, his cat was just as large as a regular house cat!

For this reason, his stomach part was very likely a dimensional pocket of some sorts. Anything that entered it appeared into a different space with a much larger volume.

All of this meant that Ves couldn't observe what went on inside. This was the true black box portion of his cat.

In the end, Ves didn't really gain much data that helped him devise an effective treatment.

Ves shrugged. "I'll have to resort to guesswork and speculation instead of hard data and solid theory."

Well, it wasn't as if he was a stranger to shooting from the hip. While judging whether an experiment would go well by listening to his intuition, his gut and his whims was not that reliable, it worked for the most part.

The most important support was to back up his guesses with at least some logic.

Ves retracted his spiritual camera and turned his attention to the egg-sized nugget of B-stone in his hand.

Unlike other spiritually-reactive materials, B-stone blocked and repelled spirituality. It was the only material that Ves encountered that possessed this useful property.

He eyed his cat, who was still panicked at the prospect of becoming Ves' next test subject. Lucky had witnessed Ves performing all sorts of depraved experiments when he was swept up in his passion, and right now the glint in the mech designer's eyes did not look reassuring!

"Meow.. meoww.."

"What are you talking about, Lucky? You don't need to call the MTA in order to report a crime against humanity. I'm trying to heal you, not hurt you. Besides, you're a cat, remember? Human rights don't apply to you, silly!"

"Meeooow!.."

"There's no need to approach any of those animal protection societies either. You're a mechanical cat to them, which means they believe you're just a machine that emulates life. It's not their fault they can't determine that you're the real deal."

"Meeeeoooww!!...." Lucky despairingly yowled.

"Look, I don't see why you are trying so hard to get away. My theory is sound! Right now, I believe that the incredibly hard nature of Unending alloy isn't the source of your problems. You managed to eat an entire CFA shuttle. Even if it was three centuries outdated, it was still packed with numerous high-grade exotics and first-class alloys. If you had no problem processing and assimilating all of that energetic stuff, then Unending alloy by itself shouldn't be a challenge!"

Ves had spent some time to scan the physical properties of the statue of the Unending One. While many details remained a mystery, he still learned enough to know that it didn't possess any remarkable properties other than its hardness and spiritual reactivity.

Another reason why Ves believed that the remnant of the Unending One was at fault was due to the traces of foreign energy he sensed from his cat. It was like a small and hidden parasite was trying to worm its way into Lucky.

Perhaps the reason why the Unending alloy that Lucky had eaten did not exit his dimension stomach was out of his own protection. If the semi-processed materials exited the stomach and entered the other parts of his body, the dark energy would be able to sweep and infect Lucky from the inside!

What Ves needed to do was to weaken, restrict, neutralize or annihilate this hostile energy.

"What better way to do that than to resort to B-stone?"

To be honest, Ves wasn't sure it would work the way he hoped. B-stone restrained spiritual energy but did not destroy it. Otherwise, wouldn't Ves be killing his Spirituality if he put his B-stone lockbox over his head?

"That reminds me, I've got enough B-stone to build a proper helmet and suit of armor. I should definitely cross this item off my list."

He wanted to craft an excellent suit of armor for himself and Ketis. He wanted to make use of both B-stone and Unending alloy for this purpose.

As long as he built it to his expectations, he would no longer have to look for replacements for a very long time. With the modular design he envisioned, he could easily replace outdated components and subcomponents with updated versions without needing to disassemble his entire armor!

"Such a fantastic suit will last me for a very long time in the Red Ocean!"

It would have been better if he could add some self-regenerating materials such as Rorach's Bone. While it was possible for him to purchase the lower grades of this material from the open market, it wasn't good enough. He needed the high-grade samples, but those only showed up in auctions if their owners were stupid.

Well, he would get better materials sooner or later, so there was no reason to delay the formation of his suit of armor any further.

"The time where I keep buying or making a new suit of armor only for it to fall behind my growth is over."

As a mech designer, Ves did not specialize in the design and construction of personal armor. However, he believed he could still apply some of the techniques that made his mechs great on this project.

If the Allidus Alliance fleet had brought any Grey Watchers or other powerful cultists along, Ves would be able to give them a nasty surprise with his new gear!

His great desire shoved all of his doubts and concerns aside. Now that Task Force Predator was projected to bump into the pirate armada within the next two weeks, time was running out. He needed to finalize every project related to the upcoming battle as soon as possible.

"Sorry Lucky, but this is going to be a bit uncomfortable for you. Just bear with it, okay?"

Ves decided not to feed the entire B-stone egg at once. He grabbed a small cutting tool and shaved a small sliver the size of a fingernail from the whole.

"Open up!"

"Meooow meow meow!!..."

Regardless how much Lucky protested, Ves turned a deaf ear as he held Lucky's head and rammed the sample straight into Lucky's bottomless gullet!

After making sure that the Lucky didn't cough the B-stone sample out, Ves released the cat and began to look and wait. He had already activated numerous scanners that were programmed to watch out for any changes or fluctuations.

"Hehe.. I'm so excited."