Published at 18th of October 2026 8:21 am

Chapter 7602: Proper Finalization

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After concluding his meeting with Gloriana, Ves continued to remain busy with other obligations.

He met with Jovy Armalon, Commodore Zonrad Reze and Formation Master Andrea Vos in sequence in order to get on the same level with the Red Three.

The RA, RF and RC each developed a strong interest in the spoils taken from the death-cursed planet.

Ves and the Saint Commander were able to take advantage of their greed to negotiate a few favorable deals and exchanges with them. Suffice to say, the Red Three would do their part in strengthening the Premier Fleet and preparing it for future hardships.

He also met with the surviving soldiers and attended the burial ceremonies of the fallen.

Thousands of humans had perished in this dark and foreboding star system.

The mood among the people remained grim despite the fact that the Moloch Squadron managed to improve their defensive spell array once again in order to push back the dark miasma a little further.

Many people still remained nervous about their continued stay in the star system. The longer they stayed, the greater the chance that their alien adversaries might come back with an armada that was large enough to overrun their depleted forces!

As much as the higher ups wanted to extend their stay a few days more and use all of that additional time to sift through the massive destroyed temple complex even more, none of it would benefit anyone if the combined fleet ended up destroyed.

A good leader needs to be able to make a proper consideration between risk and reward.

The Saint Commander ultimately chose to wrap up any salvage operations by the end of the 4th day after the conclusion of the battle.

That had given the Larkinsons and their allies enough time to pick up all of the most obviously valuable loot.

While they could have spent additional time on restoring heavily damaged but not completely demolished starships and searching for other high-value loot, the risk of getting confronted by a second major alien force from the Red Cabal was too great.

"The Blackwater Summoner strikes me as an ambitious leader who has invested a great amount of social capital and other resources into the transformation of the Hypeh-Tekas System." Saint Commander Casella explained to Ves in private. "I doubt that he is truly done with collaborating with the foreign deathborn race. Given his status and importance, he is capable of rallying surrounding alien forces into a large retaliation fleet that may be inferior to ours in quality, but can still outnumber us by an order of magnitude. If we delay too much, then we will give our enemy too many chances to catch up and intercept us while we are trying to return to human-occupied space."

"Hm, I have no objections to leaving so quickly." Ves said. "It is just a shame that we won’t be able to dig up more useful scraps from the surface ruins. There are so many hidden gems buried under all of the rubble. The deathborn can teach us much about energy manipulation and E-engineering. The folks over at the Red Collective are so ecstatic about the data that we have transmitted that they don’t have enough researchers to study everything they wish."

It was incredibly hard and time-consuming to decipher a completely foreign paradigm of manipulating E energy, let alone deriving practical applications that could be utilized across the new frontier.

Yet the potential payoff was so massive that the RC was willing to sink a huge amount of resources and manpower in this endeavor!

His chief of staff even passed on rumors about setting up a completely new department that was solely dedicated to deathborn sciences, but a lot of important collies objected to this measure.

The near-defection of the Phase Lord Department served as a negative example of what might happen.

Many collies concluded that it was a bad idea to put a lot of people who studied and eventually followed alien science and traditions in a self-contained department.

Although Ves himself did not think that any human researcher would be stupid enough to worship the deathborn due to researching its works, who knew what kind of hidden traps the M87 natives had built into their structures.

The lack of clarity about the risks and dangers of working directly with alien materials was one of the reasons why the scientists embedded within the combined fleet did not receive permission to handle the alien samples directly!

Out of safety reasons, the eager researchers only received permission to study the sterile recordings or in rare cases manipulate the black stone debris through highly secure bots.

The collies of the Moloch Squadron complained about these restrictions every day, but that did not stop them from discovering wonderful little insights with every passing day!

Ves had visited the avid researchers multiple times a day at first, but then he realized that he allowed this matter to occupy way too much of his schedule.

He decided to hold himself back and allow the collie scientists to do their work in peace for a while. This way, he could digest the highlights of their discoveries in a much more compressed timeslot from time to time.

The combined fleet had already departed the Hypeh-Tekas System.

Nobody wanted to look back or even contemplate the notion of turning around.

Ves had met with the Saint Commander enough times to know that she and her staff had already formulated an elaborate retreat plan.

They had abandoned all offensive objectives in order to maximize the chances of making an orderly return to friendly space.

There was no more need for them to hit alien supply centers or isolated raiding fleets.

The spoils they carried in the cargo holds or bolted onto the hulls of their overloaded starships more than made up for all of the other lost opportunities!

Multiple interested parties from the Terran Alliance and the Red Three expressed a great amount of interest in securing physical access to the unique spoils.

The Terrans even agreed to ramp up their raids and counterattacks against the native alien border systems just to make it harder for the enemy to divert enough forces to intercept the combined fleet!

As long as they held up their end of the bargain, the Terrans earned a much larger proportion of temple debris than what was appropriate for their initial contribution.

The Red Three naturally grumbled about redistributing the pie, but even they did want to see all of the effort go in vain if the lackeys of the Red Cabal successfully prevented the broken black stones from ending up in red humanity’s hands.

During these quiet but tense days of space travel, Ves continued to busy himself with multiple different priorities.

His main focus was finalizing the Arboreal Project.

This was a much bigger ordeal than any of his other design projects. The scale and scope of his Woodsap mechs far exceeded anything else he made before, with the possible exception of his first Carmine mech line.

Even so, the Arboreal Project represented a milestone for his mech design career. It was his first true major collaboration project with a genuine top-tier human power.

The Terran Alliance did not just pay little attention to the development of his Woodsap mechs either.

Spearheaded by the Devos Ancient Clan, a broad coalition of Terran movers and shakers all became invested in this promising and outright revolutionary product line!

They contributed a small but significant portion of their best mech designers and researchers into fleshing out the many variants and creating all of the auxiliary technologies needed to realize the Arboreal Project.

Ves genuinely felt grateful for the Terrans for taking him so seriously. Not everyone was willing to invest so much attention and resources in a mech design project led by a mere Senior Mech Designer.

Though his overall ownership of the Arboreal Project had plunged by a considerable degree due to the proactive contributions of the Terrans, they also elevated his Woodsap mechs far beyond what he could accomplish by himself.

He genuinely believed his Woodsap mechs had become competitive enough to match the combat effectiveness of other popular first-class multipurpose mech models!

Once he and the Terrans formally unveiled the completed Arboreal Project to the Terrans and the public at large, his new works would definitely invite a huge amount of scrutiny.

Master Laila Rebecca Devos already warned him that critics would judge his Woodsap mechs by a much harsher standard than anything he made in the past.

"You are about to enter one of the hardest mech design competitions in reality. Nothing invites more scrutiny from Master Mech Designers and even Star Designers than the initial release of a brand new line or model of first-class multipurpose mechs, especially one targeted for formal military organisations. These are products that compete on a higher level than the Omega Threshers and other cast-offs that your clan has been able to acquire. These are the mechs that people use to calculate the balance of power of entire nations, states and large organizations. Given their supreme importance, the consequences of any fault will be greatly magnified. You must prepare yourself to face a great amount of questioning and criticism. This will happen regardless of your current reputation and popularity because my fellow peers and those who depend on their work are not as easy to fool."

Ves definitely got the message.

This was no longer a one-man or one-group show anymore.

He could not treat this matter as casually as he did whenever he completed a Larkinson-exclusive mech design.

He had to finalize his work properly and comply with a dizzying amount of rules and regulations.

The Terrans had often been accused of being a bureaucratic nightmare, and Ves found first-hand that this was not a stereotype.

There were definite downsides to working with an off-shoot of one of the oldest existing political entities of the human race!

Even if the Terrans periodically reinvented themselves, they still had dozens of laws in their books that still remained unchanged since the Age of Stars!

Fortunately, Ves did not have to tackle this headache-inducing rules maze by himself.

The Terrans themselves had become incredibly proficient at navigating this maze. They had lots of staff that knew all of the ins and outs on how to get a product through this bureaucratic hellhole within a reasonable amount of time.

All of these obstacles actually constituted a strong barrier against outsiders.

Foreigners and those who lacked high-level support from Terran society would definitely get tripped up if they attempted to introduce their products by themselves. Their inability to properly check the boxes and grease the wheels would cause them to face year-long delays if not outright rejection!

"These Terrans really don’t play fair." Ves crossed his arms and remarked with a sneer.

"It is one of the most effective means to keep Terran mechs pure." Alexa Streon explained. "It was never meant to be fair. Many Terrans would rather miss trends and fall behind on the technology curve than surrender our ability to meet our own military demands."

Granted, the Terran mech industry did a fantastic job of remaining competitive despite the overly insular nature of its corresponding mech market.

As Ves did everything he could on his end to read through test reports and perform minor, targeted adjustments to the almost-complete mech designs, he gained a much stronger appreciation of the exacting standards of the Terrans.

The original 120 prototype Woodsap mechs that accompanied the combined fleet into enemy territory was only the first batch.

In reality, the Terrans had grown several hundred more and distributed them to a wide variety of testing grounds and clan-owned mech units.

Each of these parties put the newfangled organic mechs through their paces in their own diverse methods.

While the overall realism of these highly curated tests fell short of what the Woodsap mechs had experienced during the Nemesis Campaign, they went much deeper into collecting data on very specific functions.

These tests uncovered many limits and even more little faults.

Although the flaws were all minor enough that they produced no substantial negative consequences in most cases, it was still possible for them to interact badly in very rare situations.

If the wrong coincidences occurred, the Woodsap mechs might suddenly shut down or whatever!

The Terran mech designers did their best to solve these problems on their end, but since Ves was the ultimate authority when it came to living mechs and elemental Carmine mechs, he still needed to fix some of the bizarre problems himself!

All of the work had grown extremely tedious to him, but he did not complain too many times. He fully understood the necessity of all of the work. It was better to nip these problems in the bud before they snowballed into a major scandal down the line!

"At this rate, it will take a while after returning to human-occupied space before I can finally announce the release of the Arboreal Project."

It was better to be safe than sorry.

He knew that all of this work would pay off in the end. Once the public truly became familiar with his groundbreaking Woodsap mechs, he believed that his other collaboration partners would become much more invested in developing his remaining 4 elemental Carmine mechs!

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