The Mech Touch novel Chapter 4159

It only took half a year for Merrill O'Brian, the latest Journeyman to have emerged from the growing ranks of assistant mech designers, to shock all of the lead designers!

No one was more surprised about her unexpected accomplishment than Ves!

Though Merrill had quickly distinguished herself from the other Journeymen due to her highly logical thinking process and approach towards mech design, she was still relatively new to her position.

Everyone expected her to prioritize her own specialty and passion at first in order to give her a solid foundation in being able to contribute to other mech designs.

Her specialty, which she referred to as Imbalance Exploitation, was a rather subtle and convoluted means to generate additional power and raise the efficiency of mechs by developing interesting synergies within their internal architecture.

Her specialization resembled that of Professor Benedict, though where the latter mainly focused on optimizing and improving the electrical energy transmission systems of a mech, Merrill preferred to focus on the mechanical and physical aspects of a mech.

To be honest, Ves found Merrill's specialty to be underwhelming. He couldn't imagine what kind of solid benefits she could provide that could make him choose her over another useful mech designer such as Juliet Stameros and Sara Voiken.

After all, a lot of mechs could use a solid bump in the performance of their flight systems and armor systems. The increase in strength and value was always obvious whenever the two women contributed to any given mech design!

Though Merrill did not yet manage to impress her peers by developing a brilliant new design solution that was related to her core specialty, what she did manage to do was show off the value of having a rational mech designer in the Design Department.

This was why Ves and Gloriana both looked gobsmacked as they studied the first mech that Merrill developed in her free time.

The mech she worked on was a typical landbound knight mech, which was the simplest and easiest mech type that any designer could develop.

It was a good choice for a mech designer that wanted to embark on a new concept or approach, and it also happened to synergize well with Merrill's inherent strengths in mechanical design.

While her knight mech design did indeed incorporate aspects of her core specialty, the main surprise was that it did not look as if she had designed it by herself.

As the two leaders of the Design Department looked up at the knight mech that Merrill had fabricated with the AP-VEX superfab after she had gotten her turn, it became clear that Merrill O'Brian had been working on more specialties than just her own design philosophy!

"It's… alive." Ves spoke with great admiration. "While it is only a first order living mech, it is a proper living mech that is close to my works in the past. The reproduction rate is remarkably close!"

Ves was already accustomed to the fact that he was no longer the only mech designer who could make living mechs. He had interacted with other mech designers such as Gloriana and Ketis so much that they inevitably built up a good understanding of his specialty.

By adopting similar solutions and putting their own spin on them, both Gloriana and Ketis succeeded in designing mech models that were alive, if in a different way than the classical works designed by Ves.

If Gloriana and Ketis chose to focus on their unique takes of living mechs further, then they could do a lot to catch up to Ves when it came to adding less visible properties to their products.

However, no matter how much they tried to imitate Ves, there was no way that they could surpass him when he was in his element!

Both Gloriana and Ketis had already locked themselves into their own specialties, and their spiritual attributes and domains reflected their choices.

Merrill O'Brian should be no different, but the power of rationality was entirely different from anything else that Ves had encountered in the mech industry.

The result of her unflinching efforts to leverage her distinctive strength was the knight mech before their eyes!

"It's an experiment." Merrill admitted. "This is my first formal attempt to imitate your design philosophy, patriarch, so I tried to simplify every possible variable in order to maximize my chances of success. After making many attempts to simulate your design philosophy in my mind, I eventually found a way to do so in a manner that worked."

Ves scratched his head. Her explanation was too simple and missed a lot of essential details. He hardly gained anything useful from her words!

"Do you know that several rational Master Mech Designers of the MTA have attempted to accomplish the same feat as you? None of them succeeded. Despite their formidable expertise and their high proficiency in simulating other people's design philosophies, they never managed to create a true living mech in this style. You are the first rational mech designer to have succeeded in imitating my work! How did you do it, Merrill?! I thought a design philosophy as unconventional as mine simply couldn't be expressed through mathematical formulas and calculations!"

"You are still correct as far as I know, sir." Merrill told him. "However, I think the reason why those Masters failed was because they did not make the necessary adjustments to their approach."

"Explain further, please. What makes your approach different that allowed you to succeed?"

This was an important question. Ves had long thought that rational mech designers were unable to come to terms to his own design philosophy because it was just too weird and relied on rare spiritual attributes that were highly uncommon.

As far as Ves was able to observe, Merrill did not possess any unique advantages that clearly put her ahead of the competition. She was a young and inexperienced Journeyman who was just starting to leverage her rational approach to a greater degree.

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