The Larkinson Clan fled the Kesseling System in defeat. Dozens of Larkinsons lost their lives in the desperate attempt to defend their fellow family from the aggression of a foreign state with a vendetta against their clan leader.

The clan members left the Ylvaine Protectorate with seething fury and overwhelming grief. Many began to doubt their choice of joining the Larkinson Clan as opposed to remaining in the Larkinson Family.

The large but haphazard fleet of light carriers, transport ships and civilian ships moved to the Hegemony side of the star sector in low spirits. The enterprise that Ves dreamt of erecting within a decade rested on shaky ground as criticism unceasingly circulated among the ranks of Larkinsons.

Months later, the fleet that closed in on the Cinach System looked completely different. Not only did it enjoy the escort of a formidable force of Penitent Sisters, its ships had also transformed in appearance!

A lot of mechs and vessels sported brand-new coating. The Scarlet Rose, the Barracuda and the other vessels of the Larkinson Clan boasted a geometric pattern of red and white.

The ships of the Avatars of Myth adopted the same scheme but with bright yellow as their primary color. Their mechs continued to stand out with their golden coating.

The Living Sentinels adopted the same as its sister troop but with grey and silver as their primary colors.

The vessels dedicated to the LMC stood out with their sky blue colors with an added touch of stylistic clouds decorating their surface.

The ships of the Black Cats, which included the Swordmaidens, stood out from the rest of the clan with their predominant black-and-grey coating. It was as if they were screaming to the galaxy how shady they were and how much they wanted to hide!

Aside from some discordant elements such as the Glory Battalion and the Penitent Sisters, the ships and mechs of the Larkinson Clan clearly looked as if they operated under the same banner!

If their coordinated appearances failed to impress on observers that they shared a common identity, then the emblems affixed to their sides certainly made that clear!

Aside from the individual logos of the various organizations, the most prominent symbol adorning every ship barring Calabast's spy organization was the emblem of the Golden Cat!

Due to the choices that Ves had made during the founding of the clan, every clansman began to wear the emblem that was shaped like the visage of a cat in gold with pride! That same pride extended to their ships where the emblem of the Golden Cat served as a prominent brand of their allegiance!

Ves had much to be glad about. During the couple of months after their haphazard flight from their former base operations, the Larkinson Clan not only regained its optimism, but also ballooned in size and strength!

He smiled as he lovingly held the Larkinson Mandate in his grasp. Whenever he physically held the book, he gained a very good view on the spiritual network. With the clan surpassing 10,000 members, the spiritual network had expanded in scope and strength!

"Meow."

Lucky playfully floated around the book while licking at the Golden Cat who seemed to be brimming with energy these days!

Nyaaaa...

Though the recent growth had been very beneficial to the Golden Cat's rate of growth, there were lots of signs that she was having difficulty handling the strain!

She spent most of her time dozing off these days as she began to master new techniques to handle the added burden and responsibilities. Taught by Qilanxo and formed from her instincts, her new techniques allowed her to split herself up and expand her awareness, thereby transcending her existence from an individual to something akin to an unconscious collective!

Ves found her transformation to be very fascinating. He studied her evolution frequently and observed all of the changes up close.

It was like witnessing the evolution of a god.

The profound changes altered her state of mind. While she was still a young and naive spiritual cat at heart, she also contained an unimaginable repository of collective wisdom! This larger gestalt served as a series of parallel processors that allowed the Golden Cat to maintain her full attention in multiple places with ease!

Anywhere her spiritual influence managed to reach, she could instantly pay attention to what was going on in the vicinity!

An important detail here was that her influence not only encompassed the living Larkinson clansmen, but also the inanimate objects that carried her glow!

So far, that only amounted to the Bright Warriors and the Larkinson Mandate, but Ves hoped to imbue her glow in more objects in the future so that Goldie would essentially be able to act as the clan's omnipotent monitoring system!

"What are you grinning about?" Gloriana asked.

Ves snapped out of his musing. He was currently taking a small break from a taxing design session at the design lab.

""I was just thinking how far we have come since we departed the Kesseling System. We successfully managed to reverse the downward trend of our clan and grow to a level of strength that we could scarcely imagine a month ago! Just look at the optimism brimming from every new clan member!"

Their assistant mech designers were all smiles these days as they wore their brand-new sky-blue and white uniforms. The emblem of the Golden Cat adorning their backs all conveyed a sense of shared identity.

Ever since they swore their oaths and connected to the spiritual network, the tension between the first design team and second design team lessened.

Despite their diverse origins, the mech designers no longer got hung up as much about their different origins and backgrounds. Regardless if they used to be Brighters and Ylvainans, they shared a lot more in common now than before!

While the secularists and faithful among the design teams still harbored many disagreements, they also regarded each other as brothers and sisters. The sense of fellowship swelling in the LMC's Design Department also took place on many other ships!

Even Gloriana, who still insisted on maintaining both her old and new identities, enjoyed the optimism brimming throughout the fleet! She picked up Clixie and hugged her cat in an outburst of joy!

"Miaow!"

She had good reasons to be happy. Their progress on their mech projects was on schedule. While they hadn't implemented any remarkable innovations, they developed many smaller but ingenious solutions to their new mech designs.

The difference in skill and mastery was very evident when they compared their current level of ability with the level they used to hold before they designed the Bright Warrior.

The gains they made when they designed the modular mech platform and created their first collaborative masterwork mech had finally come to fruition! Just the increase in their mech affinities alone had done much to increase their intuition towards mechs!

If there was one issue which Ves wasn't pleased about, it was that he failed to divert enough time to explore his side projects.

While the striker mech project didn't pose too many problems, the Hexer mech project was a constant source of setbacks and delays!

The energy vampire concept that Ves insisted upon was very hard to implement, particularly when he wanted to hide its offensive utility from his girlfriend!

Trying to stuff this secret functionality into his mech design demanded an enormous amount of time and effort. At the same time, he also had to ensure that his product could function as both a defensive mech and an energy transfer mech!

Both mech designers had to exert the utmost of their knowledge base to find efficient solutions to the problems that emerged during the design process. They even had to hit the books and reference obscure science in order to overcome certain hurdles!

Fortunately, Gloriana was more than up to challenge while Ves easily absorbed new knowledge due to his augmentations. His new Archimedes Rubal implant didn't outright allow him to internalize knowledge instantly like the System, but the processing power it contained accelerated his learning speed by multiple times, allowing him to spend a day to learn knowledge that used to take a few days to a week!

"No wonder Seniors and Masters are able to keep up with knowledge that requires regular people to spend decades or centuries of their lives to study. They are all relying on a combination of genetic modification and cybernetic implants to overcome their limits!"

Human civilization was a knowledge-based society.

Humans were inherently weak, and in the Age of Mechs, that remained unchanged.

That was fine, because the power of their bodies always paled in comparison to the technology they wielded!

Knowledge was the foundation of their success on the intergalactic stage!

While Ves always insisted that the heart was just as important as the mind to a mech designer, the Hexer mech project nonetheless stressed the latter to a much greater degree.

As his first second-class mech design, Ves began to encounter many issues he never worried about before!

"The higher the tech level, the greater the burden on the mind." He remarked.

Ves became a little more sympathetic towards the rational mech designers that dominated the MTA. The amount of knowledge it held on mechs must be so vast and overwhelming that only those who excelled in cultivating their minds and cognitive functions could keep up with the sheer amount of essential learning material!

Right now, the Hexer mech project had reached the half-way point. Its direction had already been set and all of the major design choices had already been made. All Ves and Gloriana needed to do now was to continue developing solutions to the remaining problems so that their new landbound knight mech became ready to be deployed in the Komodo War!

As for the less ostentatious striker mech project, Ves expected to finish it first.

Due to its lack of complexity, Ves handed over many of its aspects over to the design teams, and they did not disappoint. A project of this difficulty was a lot more within their means. As long as Ves and Gloriana made sure to oversee their efforts and review the results, they didn't have to spend too much time to herd this design towards completion!

"Once we hire additional mech designers, we can begin to delegate most of the work of designing third-class mechs to them." Gloriana pointed out. "We still need to set the direction and make all of the major design choices, but the competence of our first and second design teams have already reached a level where we don't have to hold their hands all the time. We only need to spend a bit of our time per project per session to make sure they develop on the right track."

"I know." Ves nodded. "That's my plan as well. I plan to hold a recruitment event at Rawlings University to pick up a lot of young and eager mech designers. While they'll probably be lacking in experience, that is exactly what I need to mold them into the right shape."

With the addition of more design teams, Ves could easily embark on multiple third-class design projects without meaningfully affecting his workload.

This meant that the LMC would finally be able to form a complete product family for the third-class mech market!

Ves hoped to relieve his straining finances with this plan. While the protection of the Penitent Sisters did much assuage his security concerns, their upkeep were bleeding his bank accounts dry!

"Where do we go from here, Ves?" His girlfriend asked.

"I'm not sure. Let's meet with the Larkinson Family and get the reunion out of the way. After we completed our two projects and published the mechs, I suppose we should start looking towards the future."

"You mean earning merits?"

He nodded. "When I explored the Rim Exchange's merit hall, I noticed that the Rim Guardians offered a lot of lucrative missions based in the Nyxian Gap."

"I thought you didn't want to enter this region." Gloriana furrowed her brows. "It was way too risky, you said."

"That was before we received reinforcements in the form of 600 second-class mechs. With a sufficient amount of strength, any risk can be overcome!" Ves grinned.