5549 The Master Gambler

Once Ves announced everything that he wanted to convey to the public, he finally made way for his first challenger.

There were no official rules for challenge matches as they were informal by nature.

However, they happened often enough during the Age of Mechs for mech designers to formulate a set of customs.

In any public challenge matches, the mech designer that issued the challenge deserved to enjoy his own moment in the spotlight.

Lights began to shine onto four distinct second-class mechs that had just entered the expansive arena grounds!

The Nelerat Mark I proudly flew forward. Each of them primarily functioned as rifleman mechs, but their arsenal and their notable defenses made them look as solid as heavy artillery mechs!

Their most distinctive feature was their excess armor. Unlike other rifleman mechs that generally eschewed armor in favor of mobility, the Nelerat Mark I had taken the opposite approach.

Not only was its frame thicker and more heavily armored than usual, but it also carried additional modular armor that made it looked as if the mechs had turned into industrial mechs all of a sudden.

"Deployable armor." Ves accurately identified.

The rifleman mechs weren't supposed to haul all of this heavy and bulky armor all of the time.

If they ever deployed with all of this additional cargo, they were meant to find a favorable firing location and deploy their excess armor into a small defensive cover that could resist quite a number of attacks.

Even though the Nelerat Mark I carried a lot of excess armor plating, none of them looked particularly expensive. They were all made of fairly cheaper materials that could easily be bought in bulk.

Ves bet that Master Kreshnik resorted to hyper technology to amplify the defensive strength of the deploying armor. That was the only way for this arrangement to make sense.

Another aspect of the Nelerat Mark I that attracted his gaze was the weapons loadout of this rifleman mech.

Instead of arming it with a large cannon, Master Kreshnik instead chose to equip his defensive rifleman mech with two identical gauss rifles.

Ves had to scratch his head at this design choice. It was not a decision that he would have picked as it was quite difficult for mech pilots to handle two external rifles at the same time.

There had to be a clever rationale behind this deliberate design choice, but Ves was unable to figure it out at the moment. He would have to wait until the match commenced before the truth would become clear.

The Nelerat Mark I possessed many other nuances that spoke of thoughtful and deliberate design. Ves gained a much better sense of Master Aulaus Kreshnik as a mech designer.

Much like other first-class mech designers, Master Kresnik preferred to calculate as many possible solutions as possible.

The Nelerat Mark I looked as if Master Kresnik had utilized his cranial implant and all of the processors he could muster from the Red Ocean branch of Pritchard & Terse to calculate and optimize as many aspects of this mech as possible!

That explained why Master Kresnik was so confident in his work.

Large megacorporations such as SKL Mech Industries most certainly had more design teams and processing power at their disposal, but it was impossible for them to allocate all of those resources on a single mech design project at a time!

Just like Ves and the Design Department, many mech companies tended to work on multiple mech design projects at the same time.

Pritchard & Terse evidently chose a different direction. Ves increasingly developed the suspicion that the company under the leadership of its new acting leader had completely put everything else aside and invested all of its resources into a single mech design project!

This enabled Master Kreshnik to concentrate on designing a single mech during the first year of the Age of Dawn.

With no other distractions and obligations in the way, Master Kreshnik could work day after day to turn the Nelerat Mark I into a true hyper mech that had the potential to win awards!

"What an interesting business strategy."

This was an extreme decision. If the Nelerat Mark I failed to catch on for whatever reason, then P&T and its new leader had essentially wasted a crucial year while their competitors released a bunch of profitable mech models during the same time period.

There was no way that Master Kresnik could take over the mech company if that happened!

"This guy is a gambler."

A highly calculative gambler, but a gambler nonetheless.

Ves could tell, because he was a similar sort of mech designer!

Sometimes, he did not even bother to do his math before he made his bets!

As Ves tried to imagine the approach towards designing the Nelerath Mark I, he guessed that Master Kreshnik had tried to spice up his work by making a number of risky gambles.

From the deployable armor to the double gauss rifles, Master Kreshnik boldly gambled on the chance that his creative design choices would pay off in reality!

"Maybe he'll be proven right."

The most remarkable aspect about this new mech was not the aforementioned design choices.

What truly caused Ves to take the Nelerat Mark I more seriously was how many hyper materials had been stuffed into its frame!

Many mech models released in the past half year only reluctantly incorporated hypers into their construction. This was because their previous iterations were designed during the Hyper Generation where all available capacity had been used up by functional parts.

Converting these lastgen mechs into currentgen mechs in a hurry could only be done by removing a few of these functional components and putting hyper materials in their place.

This was a painful sacrifice and one that mech designers hated to make. This was why models such as the Sparrow Storm Mark XII only barely met the definition of a hyper mech.

"The Nelerat Mark I is different from all of that junk." Ves immediately concluded.

The four rifleman mechs conveyed the impression that they were four compact mountains that just happened to move.

Even though they were clearly made out of metal, Ves had the weird impulse to treat them as mountains made out of the solid form of rock!

No other hyper mech had managed to produce such a strong reaction from Ves. The Nelerat Mark I had clearly been designed to function as a hyper mech from the onset, and not an average one either.

It was easy enough to design a fairly strong hyper mech by adding a larger than usual quantity of hyper materials into its frame.

The hard part was to unify all of that hyper materials into a more cohesive package that could materially affect the performance of the hyper mech in a highly focused manner!

Even though the Nelerat Mark I was clearly not alive, the mech nonetheless relied on a more sophisticated implementation of hyper technology to produce a phenomenon that was similar to an artistic conception!

"It's akin to an extremely well-designed and well-made low-level artifact."

Just because mechs weren't alive did not mean they were weak. The mech industry had advanced the state of mechs for over four highly productive centuries.

A hundred Star Designers emerged during this time who all made significant contributions to the development of mechs, all while treating their works as lifeless objects.

Master Aulaus Kreshnik made an appearance as well. He moved closer to the central position occupied by Ves.

The man looked proud, and had every right to feel this way. Ves and many other mech designers could already tell that the Nelerat Mark I was bound to perform better than other ranged mechs of its kind that was currently released on the market!

This was the power of an accomplished Rubarthan Master Mech Designer.

Although there were many second-raters in the audience who felt upset that an elitist first-rater chose to go down and compete against their own homegrown mech designers, the Red Association did not prohibit this kind of behavior.

If second-raters were upset about outside intrusions, then they just needed to work harder and design better second-class mechs to fend off the competition!

The mechers only cared about advancing the state of mechs as fast as possible.

First-class mech designers always exerted a high degree of competitive pressure onto the lower markets as they were always willing to earn easy money if the native mech designers were not up to par.

In the current situation, the first challenge match could be interpreted as a duel between a 'real' second-class mech designer like Ves and a powerful first-class mech designer who did not belong in the middle zone like Master Kreshnik!

Of course, this competition took on another dimension when Ves thought about the subtle ties to the Rubarthan Pact's internal political struggles.

Ves had no interest wading into the mud fight between the Smokestack Prince and the Inferno Spear Prince, but it looked as if he did not have a choice in the matter.

"Professor Larkinson." The 200-year old Rubarthan Master Mech Designer kindly greeted Ves upon approach. "Thank you for accepting my challenge. You are just as courageous as your reputation suggests. Few Seniors dare to accept a challenge from a Master, though it could be argued that you are different from the rest of your group. I hope that you will not take my challenge as a personal insult or a condemnation of your skills."

What a diplomatic opening.

Ves smiled back as he shook the Rubarthan's relatively firm hand. "As a mech designer, I enjoy this competition in its purest form. Our feelings and our opinions are irrelevant. Our main purpose is to serve mech pilots, and we do so by designing the strongest and most suitable mechs for their needs. Let our works be judged by those standards, and nothing else. I do not reject your challenge because my Fey Fianna must prove it has the ability to cope with a variety of powerful threats. It sure looks like your Nelerat Mark I's fall into this category. Would you like to introduce your work to the public? Why have you chosen to design a defensive rifleman mech?"

The Master Mech Designer was not afraid of revealing a bit of information about his unreleased work.

"The Nelerat Mark I is the culmination of Pritchard & Terse's effort to design cost-effective counters against small craft and other threats on the same scale. While there has been a concerted effort in the mech industry to increase the firepower of ranged mechs to make them more effective against warships, P&T believes that the native aliens will make much more extensive use of starfighters and more notably phasefighters in the near future. Our enemies are learning from us. They may not be able to imitate our mechs, but what they can do is to increase their production of phasefighters and develop more effective tactics to prevent our mechs from coming close and using their space suppressors to destabilize their transphasic energy shields!"

What a far-sighted perspective on the Red War!

This was reflective of yet another calculated gamble. Whereas most of his rivals had indeed tried to design mechs that performed better against warships, Master Kreshnik consciously went against this current and chose to design a mech that specialized in shooting down alien small craft!

Master Kreshnik must have set this goal before the start of the Hyper Generation. That meant that he did not know at the time that the Red Association would unveil space suppression technology that made melee mechs a lot more threatening to alien warships.

In response to the much greater threat posed by all of these melee mechs, the aliens would most certainly respond by producing a lot of starfighters that were especially designed to counter all of these melee mechs.

Yet before these starfighters could do their jobs, the Nelerat Mark I would be ready to swoop onto the battlefield and shred these alien craft apart with their twin gauss rifles!