The Mech Touch

5725 New Series of Hyper Gems

Tristan Wesseling was having the time of his life.

Ever since the Age of Dawn commenced, he experienced a renaissance.

His design philosophy, which largely hinged on the use of gems to augment the performance of mechs in an unconventional manner, suddenly acted as if it received a stimulant!

The gems he used to produce in the past were curiosities more than anything. They slightly improved the performance of mechs in a small but slightly distinguishable manner. Their effects were as significant as their size.

In fact, if not for the fact that his gems were so small and easy to install on a mech, nobody would have bothered with making use of his products.

Most people did not appreciate his work for that reason. What did it matter if his products was able to increase the damage output of a rifleman mech by 2 or 3 percent?

Would making the armor of a mech 5 percent more resilient truly extend its lifespan?

After all, if a mech was prone to getting crippled by receiving 3 heavy attacks in the same armor section, a slight boost in defenses did not mean that the mech was able to resist 1 heavy attack more.

This was why only the most detail-oriented customers bothered to make use of his products. His pedigree as a former direct discipline of Master Katzenberg had given him a decent boost in credibility, but that did not help him much when he was unable to take advantage of her umbrella due to his emotional decision to cut off all of his ties to the Friday Coalition.

Though Tristan never regretted the decision to turn his back on the state that raised him and gave him the opportunity to become a young Journeyman Mech Designer, living through the Komodo War and becoming involved with its intrigues had thoroughly disgusted him to the point where he had to leave.

It was tough to stand alone. He still missed the days when he could take shelter under Master Katzenberg's umbrella and knew that many daily problems could easily be solved with a single call.

Yet it was by settling down in Davute and going through the process of leading his own mech company that Tristan truly started to mature as a mech designer.

No one held his hand anymore. He had to balance his finances, invest in expensive facilities and work hard to attract a customer base that appreciated his products.

Fortunately, his background in materials science turned out to be incredibly useful at the start of the Age of Dawn.

When hyper materials started to pop up like mushrooms, every material scientist started to get inundated with requests.

There were so many different variations of materials that became affected by E energy radiation that Tristan had been working non-stop to identify and measure the properties of hundreds of newly discovered hyper materials.

This not only gave him a strong boost in revenue, but also allowed him to grow more familiar with hyper technology.

On top of that, Tristan Design Services built up a lot of useful relations with influential companies based in Davute. Tristan found it a lot easier to solicit further contracts from them now that he had proven his competence, trustworthiness and above all his discretion.

Yet despite all of the hard work he put into raising his reputation in the regional mech industry, Tristan could not deny that his rise had been a lot smoother than it should.

His expression briefly darkened as he thought about it. He was a known friend of Professor Larkinson.

That meant that as long as Ves Larkinson continued to make a lot of accomplishments, more and more people were prone to giving Tristan more slack just because he happened to be acquainted with a rising star!

Suffice to say, this association did not do Tristan's pride any good.

He wanted to stand on his own two feet, but he was realistic enough to know that it was useless to deny connection.

Since people thought he was a personal friend of an impressive tier 3 galactic citizen, then he may as well accept his fate and take advantage of this favorable condition.

Though Tristan had never again betrayed his old friend's trust, he was not above using Ves' name on occasion in order to gain more leverage in a business negotiation.

He was sure that Ves would not mind, so long as Tristan did not go too far with tying everything to his friend.

For a long time, Tristan thought that his involvement with Ves would remain limited to this. The Larkinson Patriarch had clearly moved on from Davute, and he had already relocated to the Terran Alliance so that he could assimilate into first-class society.

It was not as if Tristan needed to borrow Ves' name any further. His growing comprehension of hyper materials and hyper technology finally enabled him to develop a series of hyper gems.

Their appearance changed everything.

No longer were they subtle to the point where thorough lab testing was required to notice their effects.

The gems that he managed to synthesize by combining several exotics and hypers together under extreme pressure were able to do more than slightly enhance the performance of mechs.

They were able to attract certain 'attributes' of E energy.

That alone might not sound impressive enough as that was the common effect of all hyper materials.

What made his gems different was that their separate effects synergized with each other!

For example, mixing in a small quantity of fire hypers into a gem strengthened its original effect of increasing the firepower of energy weapons!

By pairing the right gem effects to compatible attributes, Tristan had quickly amassed over a hundred different formulas for his new series of hyper gems.

Not only did the introduction of hyper materials double or triple the original effect of his gems, they also facilitated the performance of other comparable hyper tech on a mech!

Tristan managed to do all of this while still keeping his gems small and light!

Of course, he could also make his gems larger in order to amplify their effect, but Tristan had found that this produced a lot of diminishing returns.

This was why he favored quality over quantity. The more precious the materials, the greater the performance boost provided by a small gem.

One year after the start of the Age of Dawn, Tristan had fleshed out his signature hyper gems into two distinct product series.

His positive hyper gems were comprised of his original blend of hypers and exotics. They provided performance enhancements through purely positive effects. They were particularly suited for mono-elemental hyper mechs that overwhelmingly relied on the power of a single E-energy attribute to enhance their performance.

However, when his customers started to make use of his positive hyper gems, they found that they did not work well with all hyper mechs.

Tristan worked hard to develop his negative hyper gems as a response.

Different from his original hyper gems, the negative versions actually repelled specific E energy attributes!

This was an effect that was much rarer and more difficult for others to reproduce. They helped to increase the purity of ambient E energy radiation.

There were many uses for negative hyper gems. For example, they allowed a hyper mech that relied heavily on the fire attribute to avoid water-attributed E energy.

Many mech designers recklessly stuffed multiple hyper materials into their mechs, thinking that combining multiple attributes would lead to stronger compound effects.

While they were not necessarily wrong, their products often performed significantly below expectation as their designers vastly underestimated the consequences of putting together two conflicting E energy attributes!

In situations like these, a negative hyper gem developed by Tristan could relieve the worst symptoms and increase the stability of the hyper mech.

It was not a proper solution, but it was better than nothing.

Tristan had even begun to design his own hyper mechs that integrated the properties of his hyper gems much more intricately. His gems were already great, but it was their integration with mechs that needed a lot of work. He wanted to set an example and figure out more optimal methods to merge his gems with different mech designs.

It was during this period that he had decided to tune into the product reveal of the Fey Fianna.

Tristan never missed an event where Ves showed up in public.

His old friend's product reveals were especially compelling, so much so that Tristan tried to learn from example!

"The Fey Shaper Contest?"

At first, Tristan did not have much interest in taking part in this competition. He already had plenty of work on his lap. His mech company was growing at a nice rate, so there was no need for him to leech off the work of another mech designer, much less his fellow native from the Komoodo Star Sector.

Yet… as the Fey Fianna continued to impress the entire mech community with its excellent performance and its rich feature set, Tristan gradually changed his mind.

He could not resist the attraction of boarding a bus that was much more frequented than his own!

While Tristan Design Services had gradually started to become more known in the Davutan mech industry, it was far from becoming a household name in the region, let alone red humanity as a whole.

It was different for Ves! He and his Living Mech Corporation had become so well-known that even the first-raters knew about his amazing living mechs!

The opportunity to participate and earn an opportunity for his work to get presented to a much wider audience was too tempting for Tristan to resist!

His hesitation quickly crumbled. Tristan put down his pride and earnestly diverted a lot of time in developing a living fey that made integral use of his new hyper gems.

While it would have been easy to take one of the default fey designs and slap his hyper gem onto them, he did not think that was sufficient enough to constitute a serious work.

He had not thrown away all of his pride as a mech designer. He wanted to design a new fey that he could be proud of. It had to offer superior performance and other defined benefits to customers who were willing to make use of his work.

As such, Tristan went deeper and tried to elevate a fey far beyond its existing boundaries.

What better fey for him to reimagine than the iconic luminar crystal cannon fey?

The entire fey was built around a weapon system that primarily consisted of crystals!

Tristan had studied his friend's famous luminar crystal weapons in the past.

Although crystals was his specialty, that did not mean he could decipher all of the working principles of luminar crystals. There were too many alien design elements that completely obfuscated their core mechanisms.

However, Tristan still managed to deduce a few clues. This became useful when he tried to reinvent a luminar crystal cannon fey.

His shallow insights into the alien tech gave him an opening to combine his hyper gems with luminar crystal weapons in a productive manner!

It had not been easy to turn it into a solution that was not wasteful. His hyper gems were not cheap, so if they did not enhance the performance of the luminar crystal weapon by a large enough margin, they wouldn't be cost-

effective enough for mass production!

Fortunately, Tristan managed to resolve this problem in time for him to submit his work to the Living Mech Corporation.

As he wore his most formal suit and slowly began to step up to the podium, he felt more nervous than ever now that he came under the attention of his old friend again.

When Tristan looked up to the floating figure, he lamented the extended distance that separated the two from each other.

The metaphorical distance between them had increased as well. While Ves advanced to the rank of Senior and became involved in galaxy-wide affairs, Tristan still remained a Journeyman who struggled to expand his business operations beyond Davute.

Hopefully, his newly developed fey would prove popular enough to attract a lot of customers.

Once a lot more consumers outside of Davute started to experience the benefits of his hyper gems, they would hopefully inquire about his products!

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