After hearing back from the Rim Guardians, Ves soon put the new development aside and went back to designing his mech.

Progress on the Larkinson mech design barely kept up with the schedule they set. With only three months in total to design a mech that actually consisted of four mechs, Ves could only devote a couple of weeks on each of the configurations!

This was a very brutal pace, now that Ves thought about it. Even with his enhanced productivity upon reaching Journeyman, Ves still required at least two months to design a good mech!

The only reason why their short timetable worked was because of how many aspects the configurations shared in common.

Rather than see it as designing four mechs as one, Ves was truly just designing a single mech with four light variants.

Of course, 'light' being relative here.

It was as if they were designing a naked mech with four different outfits. Each set of clothes altered the properties of the mech in a drastic fashion.

This was anything but usual in mech design. Ves and Gloriana had to overcome so many problems relating to balance, implementation and integration.

Making the clothes 'fit' to the frame was one of the biggest difficulties they faced. If the fit was too tight, then the clothes became a burden to the underlying frame. A tight fit also increased the difficulty of repairing the mech and switching to another configuration.

The other extreme was no better. Making the fit too loose or small weakened the 'clothes'. If they were too light and flimsy, then it wouldn't take much effort for an enemy to render the mechs harmless!

Designing a mech with accompanying clothes was difficult. The unique problems that emerged from designing a modular mech platform presented Ves and Gloriana with plenty of headaches. They never encountered these issues before, and trying to work out solutions for the very first time was a huge burden.

Even as Ves became immersed in the design process, he always made sure to keep an eye on the passage of time. He always had to push his subordinate mech designers to work harder while expecting more from himself. The moment any of them slacked off, the project would definitely fall behind schedule!

Despite the constant worries, Ves never lost confidence. Instead, his passion burned even hotter as the pressure piled up on his shoulders. The deadline that he had set became a goal and an obsession to him. It was not in his nature to break his promises, especially when it came to mech design!

Even though he wouldn't suffer any actual penalties if he exceeded his self-imposed deadline, his mentality would definitely suffer a severe blow if he was late!

With a potential masterwork mech at stake, Ves could only push himself to toil harder and make the most of his design sessions!

Currently, Ves preoccupied himself with the space knight configuration. Though much of its planned design elements had been set in stone, Ves still hesitated over its secondary features.

In spaceborn battles, space battles mostly served as punching bags. They blocked damage so that more vulnerable mechs and assets didn't have to get hit.

This was something the Larkinson mech's space knight configuration already excelled at by virtue of the Breyer alloy integrated in its armor system and internal support structure!

The extra armor cladding affixed to the base platform at many points vastly increased the damage resistance of the resulting mech. The ease of attaching and detaching these modular sections of external armor also resulted in further advantages in battle.

As long as the base layer of armor belonging to the base platform wasn't affected, a space knight could continuously rotate in and out of the battlefield and replace its consumed external armor section!

While it required a lot of training and planning to set up such a rotation, it would definitely extend the space knight configuration's role in battle during extended engagements!

They would just have to fabricate a lot of spare external armor plating and keep them in reserve until it was time to draw upon them. This was something that Ves could easily sustain. Even if his supply of Breyer alloy was cut off, he could always resort to other materials to form different sets of external armor cladding.

This kind of adaptability was very important to forces that might have a reason to head to a place where there weren't any opportunities to resupply like the deep frontier!

Only someone who personally experienced the difficulties of repairing or maintaining mechs under extreme conditions would even think of such a benefit!

Among all of the mech designers, only Ves and Merrill Truman lived through such times. That gave them a shared camaraderie that they didn't have with other mech designers.

Merrill was an interesting mech designer to Ves. Despite her unwilling stay in the frontier, she quickly adjusted back to life as a proper, orthodox mech designer.

With the Komodo Star Sector in great chaos, it hadn't been difficult to arrange a new identity for her. She now went by Merrill O'Brian and underwent a moderate amount of cosmetic surgery to alter her face and adjust her body profile.

This was enough for her to say goodbye to her previous identity!

Ever since she turned back into a proper mech designer, she became completely at ease with her new arrangements. Despite the invisible shackles that bound her to the LMC, she didn't mind working for Ves at all! She recognized what a great opportunity she received and never showed any intention to regain her full freedom.

For his part, Ves stopped regarding her as a pirate designer after a while. She didn't fit the stereotype of a pirate designer anyway.

In fact, her inclusion in the second design team was a major benefit to the project. Her specialty dealt with leveraging imbalances to achieve specific advantages in a mech design.

This was a very vague description, but it essentially meant that she could find ingenious ways to increase the performance of a mech! The larger and more complicated the mech, the more she was able to increase the force of a sword swing or the thrust of a lance!

"Mechs are composed of a large amount of interconnected components." She described to Ves one day. "The mech engine provides the motive power to manipulate the artificial musculature system, which in itself is a huge collection of parts in the form of flexible strands."

"What does that have to do with your specialty?"

"Newton's third law of motion states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Any force acting from a mech puts stress on a component due to the opposite force acting on it when it makes an exertion. Multiply that a thousand times and you have a mech that is constantly beating itself up on the inside due to all of the recoil it has to endure inside its frame."

Though Ves possessed a deep understanding of Mechanics in relation to mech design, he never viewed mechs from this perspective! It sounded very novel to him even though it was based on a very basic premise!

"So.. does that mean you are trying to find some way to utilize the reactions acting within a mech?"

The young woman nodded. "It's more complicated than that, but in essence you are correct. Trying to get some use out of these reactions and attempting to recycle these forces for other uses has always been of great interest to me. It's a way of achieving greater efficiency that few mech designers have thought of. As long as I'm able to expand upon my ideas and applications, I can make a significant difference in any mechanical design!"

Though her design philosophy sounded promising, her idea sounded very difficult to realize!

"Well, good luck on your advancement. I suggest you keep studying and accumulating more knowledge in the free time you can spare. My virtual library is largely open to you as long as you remain productive. Don't hesitate to browse my textbooks."

Technically, the library belonged to Lady Curver, but Ves claimed it as his spoils of war! It didn't matter to him if he didn't have the right to read or peddle in the exclusive textbooks of Clarion University. It wasn't as if the Friday Coalition would send a raiding force after him to punish his illegal access to its intellectual property!

The conversation soon turned away from her specialty. Merrill didn't know Ves very well, and Ves only possessed a shallow understanding of what she went through.

"How did you survive in the frontier for so long? How did you manage to regain your freedom?"

"I had help." She smiled. "Not every pirate gang in the frontier are brutes. I managed to reach out to Omen of Misfortune who assisted me in parting from my old outfit and set me up as an independent!"

The Omen of Misfortune! Now that was a name that Ves hadn't heard in a while!

"I've had… dealings with the Omen of Misfortune in the past." He said. "I don't know much about them other than that they're friendly with Lydia's Swordmaidens."

Her eyes grew wistful. "I always wanted to join the Swordmaidens. They were everything a woman in the frontier aspired to join! Sadly, I never intersected with their fleet during my stay in the frontier. I wouldn't have been able to join anyway. I heard they only pick up teenage girls and train them up into powerful Swordmaidens. I was too old to be worthy of their notice."

Ves blinked. It seemed like the reputation of the Swordmaidens was a lot more resounding than he thought!

"Do you know what happened to the Omen of Misfortune?"

She shrugged. "I think the Omen was caught off-guard by the sandman invasion like anyone else. They like to act mysterious and claim they can divine the future, but I'm sure they were blindsided. Last I heard, they fled into civilized space like every other outfit with ships. I don't know where to find them. No one bothers to maintain their existing contact methods after entering civilized space. Here, the old alliances and customs of the frontier don't matter anymore. Everyone has received a new start!"

That was true. There was little left of the Dragon Alliance and the Ravienne Alliance that terrorized the Faris Star Region for so many years. They might have been powerful enough to throw their weight around in the desolate regions of the frontier, but they were just easy fodder to the established powers of the Komodo Star Sector!

There was no reason to maintain existing pirate bonds and connections in civilized space. Just like the Swordmaidens had done, many pirate organizations took advantage of the chaos to abandon their tainted identities and start anew as mercenaries!

Ves was sure that the MTA and everyone else knew quite well what was going on. The fact that they didn't do much to plug such an obvious hole was rather curious. Perhaps they didn't think the scattered pirates posed a threat to the established order of the Komodo Star Sector. Perhaps they were too preoccupied with the Sand War and the Komodo War to chase after some trivial pirates.

Whatever the case, their complacency was good for Merrill and the Swordmaidens! Soon enough, everyone would take their new identities for granted!

Before they returned to work, Merrill made an odd remark.

"I miss the frontier, sometimes. It was dangerous, but it was also liberating. There is no MTA watching over your head, no states who wanted to dominate the territories, no rules to tell you what you can and cannot do. There are so few mech designers in the frontier that competition is much more relaxed. If not for how difficult it was to procure materials, I might prefer the freedom of the frontier over the order of civilized space."

"Me too." Ves idly said. "Me too."