Published at 7th of May 2026 7:04 am

Chapter 7481 Initial Report on Woodsap Mechs

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The commodore of the Red Fleet pointed out an important inconsistency.

His questioning forced Ves to rethink the situation.

What motives drove the archecruiser captain?

On one hand, his speech made it clear that the alien leader was a loyal patriot of his beleaguered people.

The arche had managed to survive and preserve their society after being driven from their planets because they showed the capacity to unite and work towards their common goals. Collectivism was not an ideal to them. It had become a necessity now that they had become worse off than many other races.

For this reason, their people held an especially dim view on selfishness and individualism. It was taboo in their society to pursue interests at the cost of making life worse for other arche. This should have been a universal principle for both low and high-ranking arche.

Yet this archecruiser captain also voiced beliefs and convictions that flagrantly defied the collective interests of his race.

From preventing the self-destruction of his invaluable archecruiser to compelling so many of his own crew to sacrifice their blood and archeshells to fuel his failed ascension, it became clear that this individual was more complex than his position.

What was his name?

What was his lineage?

What was his place in arche society?

How did he come to become the captain of this archecruiser?

All of these questions and more lingered in Ves' mind.

He suddenly began to imagine more outlandish scenarios that suggested that this entire encounter may have been a conspiracy from the start.

Perhaps a cell of the Cosmopolitan Movement had schemed this meeting between the two races.

Perhaps the arche secretly wanted to form a somewhat clandestine connection with the humans or the Larkinson Clan in particular.

Perhaps the other major alien races had become so fed up by their arche 'comrades' that they purposefully drove the latter into a trap!

Whatever the case, now that Ves had begun to think about these possibilities, he could not entirely dismiss them out of hand.

That did not mean he intended to waste his time on investigating this matter in person.

He was a mech designer, not a detective!

"I will pass on my concerns to our matriarch and intelligence director." Ves eventually told his old 'friend'. "As intriguing as this possible mystery sounds, it is best to leave this case to the professionals. I am only interested in the overall direction of the current campaign and stuff that is relevant to mechs."

The commodore nodded. "That is a wise outlook. I can tell you that our own truth seekers have begun to shift more attention towards the arche. We are harboring increasing suspicions towards this enigmatic race. What we know about them is mostly derived from the other major alien races. We do not have enough information that comes directly from the arche. That opens up the possibility that we are basing our entire strategy towards this race on inaccuracies or deliberate misinformation."

That sounded very probable to Ves. He wondered what the arche still held back from everyone else.

"Please let us know if you find anything alarming."

"We will, depending on the situation."

Once Ves wrapped up every problem about the archecruiser that demanded his personal attention, he was finally ready to return to the Tarrasque.

Before he left, Gloriana held him back for one brief exchange.

"By the way, Ves, do you need Lucky for anything important?"

"No." Ves shook his head. "Why?"

"In the event that the archecruiser captain decided to end his cooperation with us, we need a backup solution in order to preserve our prize. I want to prepare one of the proposals that you came up with before."

"You mean… you want Lucky to eat an entire archeshell belonging to the most senior officer that you can find?"

"Yes."

"This idea has a very low chance of working." Ves shared his own thoughts. "Even if Lucky's body has already converted into archemetal, something as big and elaborate as archeshells are all unique and irreplaceable. Eating the shell piece by piece will destroy at least some of those essential properties. I highly doubt that Lucky possesses the capacity to reproduce those specific traits."

"You may be right, but we do not have any alternatives if you leave aside the proposal to transplant high-quality archeshells onto the bodies of low-ranked arche." Gloriana plainly replied. "I am willing to take my chances with Lucky. Perhaps he will be able to make it work. We still do not understand the working principles of his core systems. What I can state is that they are based on technologies that far surpass anything else we have come into contact with. I half-suspect that he is a product of the far future that an unknown party has somehow managed to send back in time for unclear purposes."

Ves actually entertained this particular suspicion more than once. There was no way a mechanical cat like Lucky could be a product from the Age of Mechs or the Age of Conquest!

Even if human high technology had already reached unimaginable heights during those ages, Ves highly doubted that they could have stuffed so many ridiculous features in such an incredibly tiny physical form!

With the advantage of hindsight, Ves strongly believed that Lucky may have been a superdimensional product from the start!

If this was the case, then it made a lot more sense that Lucky had been built in the future where humanity's grasp on superdimensional technology was far greater than if he was a product of the past where superdimensional matter was practically nonexistent in the Milky Way.

Ves inwardly shook his head.

There was no point spending so much time on this mystery. He did not have enough information to form any definite conclusions. Speculations alone did not provide much benefits.

"You can have Lucky if you can find him and bring him over to your ship, Gloriana. He's probably keeping our daughter Andraste company I think. However, Lucky has often expressed an intense dislike towards eating organic matter. Technically speaking, archeshells fall into this category. Despite the structural similarities between archeshells and archemetal, the former is conceptually and physically defined as a form of biomatter, similar to keratin-based objects such as hair, nails or horns. This means that you will face an uphill battle if you want to force the gem cat to take a single bite out of an archeshell, let alone the whole thing."

His wife did not look discouraged. "Lucky will obey if he knows what is best for him. I have my own methods of persuasion."

"What if it doesn't yield the results that we are hoping for?" Ves asked.

"Then I will accept that result. This is a low-probability event in the first place. Failure is to be expected. Any other result will be a pleasant surprise."

"I see."

Gloriana had big plans in the days she had left before the archecruiser would finally be sent back to the human side of the border.

She did not intend to waste any further time on explaining her actions to her husband. She simply made a shoo-ing motion before turning away.

Ves left her to her own devices and transferred back to the Tarrasque.

After he returned to the familiar RA cruiser, he finally devoted the rest of his day towards his primary interest.

The performance of the prototype Woodsap mechs.

He paid a visit to Alexa's workplace in order to ask her to take on the special biomechs.

Though she carried numerous heavy responsibilities, Ves had asked her to assist with monitoring the performance of the Woodsap mechs and note down any critiques she might have.

As his direct disciple, Alexa understood living mechs on a deeper level than his wife and many other mech designers.

Yet she also possessed her own thoughts and ideas, thereby causing her perspective to be different enough for her to notice details that Ves might have missed.

Alexa proved her dependability by presenting him with a fairly extensive preliminary report. She transmitted the document which contained a lot of relevant data points.

"They have made a strong first impression." She began as a projection appeared beside her that displayed a few clips at an accelerated rate. "As you can see, the Woodsap mechs have chased after relatively isolated squadrons of phasefighters. In every skirmish, they denied many forms of external assistance, which included help from nearby friendly units as well as Casella's Command Field. They have sincerely tried to rely on their merits to perform on the battlefield, which also includes refraining from connecting to the fleet's shared communication channels and sensor data feeds."

Ves continued to parse through the data. "I noticed that the Woodsap mechs overwhelmingly preferred to engage in ranged combat. They have yet to employ their blades in a serious engagement."

"That is true." Alexa responded. "That is the nature of most skirmishes between enemy strike craft. Alien phasefighter pilots have learned many times that they are at a horrible disadvantage when caught by mechs at close range. They will do their utmost to maintain at least a minimum distance from our forces. For this reason, the mobility of their craft has improved on an incremental basis over time. While our Woodsap mechs are not slow by any means, there are no light mech configurations among them, so it is still a challenge for them to catch up to speeding phasefighters. They can only get relatively close by utilizing coordinated dogfighting tactics."

The initial results highlighted a notable weakness to his Woodsap mechs. Due to the necessity of including a number of essential systems and components responsible for making the biomechs so enduring, it was incredibly difficult for Ves to slim down its design too much.

This minimum capacity requirement placed an invisible ceiling on mobility. Unless Ves was willing to sacrifice a lot of good stuff, there was no way to make a Woodsap mech as fast as a genuine light skirmisher.

Ves and the Terrans he collaborated with knew about this tradeoff and pretty much accepted it as a necessary evil.

"So my Woodsap mechs won't win any races anytime soon." He said without much emotion. "I notice that even if I account for the mediocre mobility of my Woodsap mechs, they are not moving as fluently and efficiently in space as I had hoped."

"That is not a problem related to the Woodsap mechs themselves, sir. Their specifications indeed allows them to turn faster and perform more advanced maneuvers in space. The real problem lies with the test pilots. They are all norms who used to be trained in pure infantry combat. Expecting them to adapt to mech combat in spaceborn environments in a matter of months is unrealistic. Mech cadets spend entire years trying to master the art of maneuvering and fighting with mechs in space."

Given how quickly the Woodsap mech pilots managed to reach a combat ready state shortly after interfacing with their living mechs, it was difficult to imagine that each of them had been complete novices a short time ago.

"The Hibiscus System is doing its work." Ves said with an appreciative tone. "Still, it is becoming increasingly more clear that it is not perfect. As much as it allows inexperienced pilots to control their machines as if the latter were their bodies, it also acts like a crutch that makes them overly dependent on this singular solution. These Woodsap mech pilots have never attempted to make any movements that defy the physical limitations of the human form."

The range of motion and turning angles of many mechs including humanoid ones regularly surpassed that of a baseline human body!

A very simple example of this were mechs whose upper bodies could make complete 360 degree turns, just like tank turrets!

Another example were arms that could bend backwards in a manner that would completely break a human's elbows!

Most mech pilots that graduated from relatively good mech academies tended to learn many of the standard ways such mechs could move in a manner that defied common sense!

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