The Mech Touch

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.

Perhaps a lot of human rights advocates would be horrified to see the security officers beating up the dwarves on a regular basis or disturb their sleep at irregular moments. Fortunately, the few of those types among the Vandals had no say in the matter.

Dr. Tillman and some of the other exobiologists regularly visited the dwarves to study their physiques and brain structure in order to understand them better. They even injected the dwarves with various substances, treating them as their guinea pigs which they could poke and prod however they wanted.

Right now, the training sessions hadn't produced any improvements as of yet, but Ves expected that to change as time went on. Just like any exercise, it took repeated attempts to notice a difference.

The Vandal mech pilots already stopped most of their whining. Ves deliberately scheduled the training session so that the Vandals undertook the training at the same time as the Swordmaidens.

When a Vandal mech pilot barely made it through a five-minute training session and watched on as a Swordmaiden lasted for ten entire minutes pretty much affected their self-esteem.

"I can't believe these women are stronger than us! They're pirates! How can they beat us in this area!?"

The lackluster performance of the Vandals when compared to the Swordmaidens shamed them all!

Certainly, the Vandals possessed the edge in terms of mech quality, funding, support services, supplies and more. Yet their training emphasized coordination and formation combat, while the Swordmaidens each focused on their individual prowess.

To Ves, the Swordmaidens were warriors, while the Vandals were soldiers. The two forces pursued different forms of strength.

The Swordmaiden methods adopted the customs of the frontier which highly emphasized individual combat prowess. Each Swordmaiden dreamed of becoming a mech champion like Lieutenant Dise. However, coordination became something of a challenge to these warriors. Once they let loose, even Commander Lydia found it difficult to pull them back.

It was different for the Vandals. One or two mechs may not be more skilled than their Swordmaiden counterparts, but the equation changed when they formed in larger numbers. Their versatility, coordination and initiative gave them a distinct superiority over less coordinated forces. Their clever use of formation and sophisticated tactics allowed them to win against many different opponents.

Ves wondered if it was possible to unify the training methods of the Swordmaidens and the Vandals and form a set of best practices that led to an even stronger mech force.

"Perhaps this is the kind of training regime that produces elites among mech pilots."

Ever since he developed the mental resilience training program, he began to contemplate on how to design a mech pilot. Because that was what a training regime essentially tried to accomplish.

"It's always senior mech pilots who compose these training regimes."

And for good reason. Mech pilots respected other mech pilots, and only those who underwent the same struggles and survived many battles knew best what skills the new recruits had to master to survive the battles to come.

Having freed himself from most responsibilities by delegating them to others, Ves mostly spent his time on supervising the ongoing repair efforts. He only visited the Mind Blender to check up on the progress of the mech pilots and to gain some inspiration for his future direction.

Ves visited the dwarf prison on a whim. Due to the lack of space aboard the heavy transport and their need for more captives to keep the training sessions running, each dwarf only had enough room to lie down on their cots.

When Ves looked through the one-way porthole, the dwarf inside was shivering in the cold as the security officers deliberately plunged the temperature in order to foster its anger.

Dr. Tillman arrived a minute later. "Ah, Mr. Larkinson, I'm surprised to see you here."

"Why would you be? I can imagine that lots of people want to see these dwarves."

She shook her head. "You don't know what is going on their minds. These variant humans are repelling in almost every way imaginable. Looking at them causes them to fear that they might one day turn into something just like them if they lose their freedom. They are the cursed people, after all."

"I don't see that when I look at the dwarves." Ves snorted. "I see them as threats. What do you think the CFA will do to them when they finally come here and find out their special abilities?"

"You think they'll continue to breed the dwarves in order to employ them against mechs?"

"That might very well happen. At the very least, they'll attempt to figure out the mechanics behind this ability to they can bestow them on their own people."

Even though the CFA and MTA split their responsibilities and safeguarded seperate spheres of human space, the two still fought over what direction humanity had to take in the future.

"I wouldn't be so afraid of that, Ves." The exobiologist assured him. "Our studies into the brain structure of the dwarves have shown us that they have incorporated a minute amount of intermediary matter, of the same kind as the murky crystals found in the head of a wild god. Through a process of elimination, we found that there is no other part of their bodies can that effect a remote connection besides this intermediary matter. As far as we know, only the unique circumstances of this planet allows the natives to accumulate this matter."

In other words, once the Starlight Megalodon stopped spewing higher-dimensional particles everywhere, everything that made this planet special would cease to develop.

Ves hadn't thought that far yet. He realized their intervention may cause Aeon Corona VII to undergo drastic changes, destroying the existing order. If the Starlight Megalodon truly stopped releasing the astral winds, then there would be no more beast riders, no more wild gods, no more sacred gods and no more isolation from the rest of the galaxy.

Would the natives regard this change as deliverance or punishment?