The skirmish between Norton's Shieldbearers and the Steel Howlers was the first recorded case of a Doom Guard in action.

Not only did a single striker mech manage to repel the frontal assault of at least two mech companies, the disarray it evoked yielded an even greater result!

Commander Norton cleverly developed a plan that made maximum use of the Doom Guard's deterrence effect.

As a veteran of the Sentinel Army, he understood keenly that an enemy that aborted a charge in an abrupt and unplanned fashion was very vulnerable to follow-up attacks!

Just as Commander Feriz and her Steel Howlers turned around and tried to put themselves back together, the Shieldbearer mechs that positioned themselves at the sides suddenly pounced, sandwiching the pirate mechs from two sides!

Casualties rapidly mounted among the beleaguered Howlers as the pirate mech pilots still suffered from the lingering trauma of their exposure to the Doom Guard's aura!

With the striker mech still blocking the way forward, none of the Howlers dared to proceed any further!

Eventually, Commander Feriz realized that there was no profit to be made anymore. In fact, already suffered a lot of losses due to the Shieldbearers pressing her unorganized ranks of pirates from multiple directions!

"Retreat!"

In the end, the ferocious Steel Howlers tucked their tails between their legs and fled without anything to show for their efforts.

Meanwhile, the Shieldbearers earned big! They not only secured a decent amount of salvage and redeemed a number of bounties on the heads of the pirates they captured, but also received a generous combat and victory bonus from their contract. On top of that, their amazing victory propelled their reputation to new heights, allowing them to accept much more lucrative missions!

And it was all thanks to a single new mech.

As soon as this incident was made public, the demand of the mech in question rapidly soared!

More and more incidents where the new mech was put to use emerged onto the galactic net. Journalists who knew exactly what their audience wanted to know eagerly highlighted any battle where the Doom Guard was put to work!

Though a number of blunders and unavoidable defeats took place, most of the stories circulating in the mech publications backed up the promises made by the LMC.

It turned out that the Doom Guard's glow indeed worked remarkably well on pirates! The exaggerated demonstrations at the product reveal had a basis in truth after all!

Orders for the Doom Guard rapidly increased, though the months-long backlog meant that most customers wouldn't receive their copy for a fairly long time.

The LMC was already trying its best to partner up with more third-party manufacturers to meet the spiking demand, but the challenges relating to its production continued to pose a hindrance.

Regardless, money kept rolling in like no tomorrow!

To be honest, Ves was astounded by the amount of gains he made. When he initially conceived of the concept that would become the Doom Guard, he thought it would have a fairly limited market appeal. Striker mechs never sold in huge numbers, particularly the spaceborn models.

Yet due to its attractive combination of strengths, the Doom Guard provided substantially more utility than the typical striker mech. Its terror glow was so new, innovative and useful that the market basically elevated it into its market category!

This was an incredibly positive development. The LMC poured even more resources in facilitating the marketing, sales and support of its latest product.

The enormous publicity surrounding the release of the Doom Guard along with the astonishing successes of its early adopters constantly continued to make the mech model more famous.

In several states, the mech had practically turned into a household topic! Even people who never paid attention to mechs began to learn about this much-hyped product that they would never get to touch in their lives!

All the while, Ves could hardly keep up with the rewards he managed to gain. Though his Larkinson Clan's growing expenses immediately respent most of the earnings, there was plenty of money left to spend.

What surprised him the most was the amount of money the LMC made outside of the star sector. The Doom Guard was its first product that earned a substantial amount of money outside the Komodo Star Sector!

What was remarkable about this new income stream was that it wasn't based on the sale of mechs. At least not at first.

When the MTA validated the Doom Guard design, it set a very considerable price of 400 million hex credits for a standard 10-year production licence.

Any mech designer or mech company that wanted to play around with the unique design had to cough up a considerable amount of money upfront!

Though the mech industry of the Komodo Star Sector already learned the hard way that there was hardly any profit to be made out of developing variants of LMC products, the other star sectors weren't as informed!

A decent number of foreign mech designers with only a passing familiarity with the LMC refused to consider that they would suffer the same fate as the hicks from the frontier star sector!

These thoughts didn't just proliferate in the mech industry of just one star sector. A huge number of mech designers operated in the entire Yeina Star Cluster. Even if just a fraction of them were adventurous enough to invest in a product license, collectively they made for a considerable amount of people!

For this reason, the LMC suddenly earned a considerable windfall just from licensing the Doom Guard design!

Naturally, Ves strongly suspected that there were even more mech designers who simply pirated his design and experimented with it in private, but he couldn't do anything about it anyway.

What mattered was that there were enough upright and hopeful mech designers who wanted to develop their own commercially-viable variants of his Doom Guard design!

"Just look at these suckers!" Gavin exulted during a daily briefing. "We managed to scam over a hundred mech designers throughout the star cluster! That is the easiest 40 billion hex credits that we have earned in a week!"

"It's too bad the cluster-wide mech industry will quickly learn its lesson." Raymond noted. Due to the importance of this meeting, he decided to take some time off his very busy schedule to attend this meeting. With so much business activity, his leadership was needed more than ever! "There are still plenty of mech designers who studied the disastrous track records of those who tried before."

"Mech designers are all smart and educated." Ves said. "Those with the capability of throwing 400 million hex credits on a single mech production license haven't made it this far by being incompetent."

"While that's true, success is often paired with arrogance." Raymond succinctly noted.

Ves took a look at the list of the people and companies who licensed his Doom Guard design. Most of them did have the capital to be arrogant. Some of them even possessed specialties that synergized well with his product. There was a logic behind their choice.

It was too bad that the volatility of his glows in his mech designs was much more than they thought. Once they began to shift the design away from its original vision, its spiritual foundation would no longer conform as much to the design spirit. It became much harder for the combination of Zeigra and Nyxie to exert their individuals glows through the resulting variant.

"Well, we can still put this windfall to good use." Ves grinned. "I have already decided to expand the operation of the Larkinson Biotech Institute. We need to accommodate and provide a lot of medical facilities to Dr. Ranya and our newly-hired exobiologists, geneticists and medical specialists."

"You've invested 10 billion hex credits already!" Gavin complained. "We could have put that money to many other uses!"

"Augmentations are vital if we want to remain competitive at a greater stage. Merely relying on Ranya alone won't meet the needs of our growing clan. We need to build a dedicated arm within our clan that specializes in all of our medical, biological and augmentation needs."

The Larkinson Biotech Institute was the new incarnation of the Larkinson Exobiology Institute. The name change reflected the expanded scope of the institute. Ves had admittedly neglected it after its previous leader turned traitor.

The worsening financial outlook of the clan left Ves very reluctant to invest in its development.

Yet now that his Doom Guard design generated vastly more money than he had ever dreamt of, Ves could finally allocate money on some neglected priorities!

"He's right, Gavin." Raymond gently said. "The waiting list for augmentation procedures is too long. Too many Larkinsons are requesting upgrades and we can't make them wait too long. So far, we've been able to take advantage of the clinics on Cinach VI, but we won't always enjoy access to them. It's better if we meet this need in-house."

Ves smiled. "I'm glad you understand. The ten billion hex credits that we are investing in the Larkinson Biotech Institute will pay off in spades when it is finally capable of augmenting our clansmen with high-quality second-class implants!"

This was why it was important for him to secure the loyalty and services of Ranya. She possessed a much better grasp on these kinds of implants than the third-raters that made up the rest of the institute.

There was another reason why he invested such a huge sum of money in the institute at once. Part of the money was supposed to be spent on constructing a small but highly secure biolab aboard the Scarlet Rose.

Not only would the compartment be isolated from the rest of the ship, but all of its advanced lab equipment had to be carefully built by hand in order to ensure they did not possess any backdoors.

The high-grade life-prolonging treatment serum had to be studied!

Ves was very interested in cracking the mystery behind its remarkable spiritual properties, while Ranya wanted to decipher some of its profound activities.

Right now, Ves had locked the serum within the B-stone lockbox in the most secure section of the Scarlet Rose's vault.

He only allowed Ranya to study the tiny droplet of serum for only a couple of hours a week.

Ves knew that it held an intense attraction to her, and he used her obsession with it to motivate her. As long as she ran the Larkinson Biotech Institute well, she could gain more time with the sample!

Though Ranya reacted with disappointment with all of these restrictions, she also became more fired up than ever! As far as she was concerned, joining the Larkinson Clan was the best decision of her life!

"What do you want to do with the remaining windfall?" Gavin asked.

"I'll leave that up to the governing organs of the Larkinson Clan." Ves nodded to Raymond. "I know that there are plenty of projects and initiatives that need funding. This is the time to spend it all. There is not much point to skimping on our spending when we might be heading somewhere dangerous."

Ves didn't even preserve his own growing personal fortune. At this time, his fate was closely intertwined with the Larkinson Clan. Strengthening one automatically strengthened the other.

Every hex credit he spent at this time would pay back ten or a hundred times back in the future!

The three continued to discuss the possible ways of spending both the windfall and the growing amount of regular earnings.

Though it was still too premature to acquire an entire fleet of second-class starships, this time it didn't sound as outlandish as before!

"Let's wait until I've designed additional commercial mechs." Ves decided. "As long as our subsequent market offerings are able to coast off the success of our Doom Guard, I will personally reach out to a Hexer shipbuilding company!"

"Meow."

Ves chuckled as he looked down as the cat resting on his lap. "Don't worry. I haven't forgotten about you either. I'll provide plenty food for you as well!"

"Meow!"