Marvaine's birthday party came and went without disrupting everyone's schedule too much.
Ves, Gloriana and a few other lucky mech designers quickly returned to examining the Superpublished design of the Dullahan Project from top to bottom.
Their frighteningly high intelligence and comprehension capabilities enabled them to quickly refamiliarize themselves with their work to a shallow degree.
The mech designers involved in the Dullahan Project were able to come up with superficial explanations for the vast majority of improvements and modifications.
This was far from fully understanding the design choices made by the System. That would probably take much longer, but Ves and the others could do that after they fabricated their first new expert mech.
The main priority at this time was to fulfill Venerable Jannzi's greatest wish and deliver a powerful new expert mech to her. She had been relegated to the sidelines long enough. It was time for her to regain her ability to fight and resume her role of protecting her fellow Larkinsons to the best of her abilities!
Ves was eager to complete this fabrication run. He had spent enough time and effort on the Dullahan Project. He eagerly wanted to finish his current responsibility and embark on other new and exciting projects.
That did not mean that he had lost his appreciation of the Dullahan Project. Its improved design held a lot of promise. Ves particularly became enthralled by its optimized Empowered Blood Sharing System.
The Superpublish function not only corrected a lot of potentially dangerous flaws, but also increased its integration into the frame of the expert space knight in many subtle ways.
Though the Dullahan Project retained all of the traits of a classical mech, the introduction of blood circulation to its internal systems technically turned it into a cyborg mech.
Ves did not know to what extent the Dullahan Project would exhibit the properties of a cyborg mech. He already held an expectation that it would become more alive to a degree.
It might even be possible for the Dullahan Project to evolve its life state and evolve into the fourth order living mech that only existed in theory up to this point!
Ves shook his head. "I shouldn't get my hopes up. Fourth order living mechs are equivalent to ace pilots in terms of spirituality. The gap is too great."
Though Ves held high expectations towards the Superpublished Dullahan Project, the actual combat power of the defensive expert mech was not that mind blowing.
Sure, its defenses received an enormous upgrade, but it was still a melee expert mech that could only make its presence felt within a limited range.
Ves was fine with that. A defensive expert mech could still be a lifesaver in the situations that mattered.
Once Venerable Jannzi grew stronger, her ability to affect the battlefield would become even more exaggerated!
He would have to wait until she advanced to ace pilot before that happened, and that would take a while to say the least.
One of his most important concerns for the fabrication run was whether they could produce another masterwork mech.
Gloriana cared the most about this, but that did not mean that Ves was totally indifferent to the state of her expert mech.
The last major iteration of the Shield of Samar managed to become a masterwork. That provided Venerable Jannzi with a lot of benefits. Her resonance strength grew the fastest among her peers in the Larkinson Clan, with only Venerable Davia Stark rivaling her in growth speed.
Though the design of the Dullahan Project called for recycling much of the parts and materials that comprised the relatively intact head of the Shield of Samar, this was not an upgrade project in the strictest sense of the word.
Ves truly approached this expert mech design project as a spiritual successor more than anything else. The Dullahan Project did not start as a blank slate, but it did not inherit much of the properties of its predecessor either.
From the vast reduction of Unending alloy comprising its frame to the notable increase in mobility, the Dullahan Project performed like a substantially different expert mech in many of the ways that mattered.
"It's almost time."
He and his wife had set up everything a long time ago. The AP-VEX superfab had been fully recalibrated and all of the raw materials required to fabricate the mech were waiting to be used.
Different from the fabrication runs of the past, Ves had to make more extensive preparations than usual.
One of the more annoying aspects about biomechs was that it took a lot of time to grow their organic parts. This downside partially extended to cyborg mech as their organic parts could only be grown, not produced.
While it was possible for the most advanced and specialized materializers to essentially 'print' a complete organic mech from start to finish, this was far beyond the means of the Larkinson Clan.
The custom version of the Empowered Blood Sharing System that Ves had designed for the Dullahan Project stood out in various ways.
Compared to a more generic version of this cybernetic system, the organic tissue of the EBSS integrated in the Dullahan Project was based on Jannzi's DNA.
In other words, the Dullahan Project would essentially carry a part of Jannzi's cloned flesh!
While it sounded creepy, Ves knew that this would help a lot with making Jannzi meld with her new expert mech. The shared DNA and root would minimize the probability of triggering a biological or spiritual rejection response.
Of course, in order to grow enough organic tissue to form the EBSS during the fabrication, Ves had to start with cultivating the flesh and certain key organs a few months prior.
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