The Warrior Mechanic

From this new title of his, he had received some pretty basic but neat skills. The first one seemed too slight to be worth much. A 5% decrease for the price of a single type of component wasn’t something he was going to get excited about.

However, what did excite him was the ability he had received. Receiving a weekly report on the market could allow him to adapt and work on designing support bots that would yield the most profits.

Receiving reports on a market was not easy. The Soburg Empire alone was home to over 200 billion people, spread across the planets of the Cria star system and surrounding star systems.

A large proportion of these people, tens of billions, would be active in this marketplace and would create large amounts of data. To analyse such volumes of data in weekly reports wouldn’t be a service accessible to lower level, smaller firms because of the shear amount of processing power needed to do this.

This gave him the slight edge over those competitors of his, but not the larger firms that had such computational resources.

[New Quest!]

[Autonomy]

[Now that you have some experience with designing and selling support bots, now it’s time to take it up a notch. Form a design for an autonomous support bot.]

[Time to Complete: 30 days]

[Punishment: Death]

“This system just never gives me a break.”

First, Cael was looking toward the use of an alteration permit to not have to go through the challenges of starting a design from the ground up.

However, he soon realised that the prices for even the lowest tier of alteration permits for autonomous bots were sky high compared to what he’d had before.

They were tens of thousands of dollars, and that was just a price he couldn’t pay.

Instead, he’d have to form a design from the ground up. It would be a tough job, since he had never done this before. It was much easier to understand the components of the Vulture XR-1 Basic when they had already been assembled in a certain way by another designer.

Now, he’d have to use the components he had access to and form a bot with enough intelligence to be deemed autonomous.

He didn’t want to go overboard, and knew that wouldn’t be an option because he only had 30 days to complete this. He would surely cut corners wherever he could, but the good thing about this was that he didn’t have to pay for an alteration permit to begin making his own design.

Once he had fleshed out an autonomous bot of some sort, he could get right into production without having to worry about any form of license.

He put a pin in those thoughts for now, then went to unlock the schematic for the bipedal system his system had offered him.

Using his 80 of his 100 gained gears, he had been left with a total of 30 gears ready for use, then the schematic was fully unlocked.

[New Schematic!]

[Schematic: Basic Bipedal Locomotive System]

[Type: Locomotion]

[A basic bipedal system designed for short bursts of speed and strength. This system has very poor endurance and energy efficiency, demanding high power consumption for its energy-intensive movements. Requires on-site mana cores for usage.]

As of now, he didn’t have to worry about fabricating this component. For now, he could use it in his schematics, and even his virtual creations. As for the real creation of the component, that would require a level of 3d printing and assembly beyond the capabilities of humans.

Advanced 3d printers were used to flesh out components and armour, but Cael didn’t want to worry about that for now. He’d definitely be sticking to the virtual scene for the time being, as it was much easier to work in and much cheaper.

For this design, he was hoping of begin able to flesh it out at one point. He’d hope to make an attack type support bot, that could fight alongside him in battle.

Something about fighting alongside his own creations excited him, and he couldn’t wait to make that thought a reality.

For the fighting style of the autonomous bot, there were many different types to choose from. Some were large, heavyweight tanks that dealt tons of damage, and had exceptional durability. A drawback of this type, though, was their incredible power demand. Having on-site power sources for these bots was difficult and would increase their weight substantially.

Then, there were the lightweight bots with exceptional agility and speed. These usually had to be more intelligent to take advantage of their nimbler bodies in smart ways. They were more energy efficient, but easier to destroy and lacked a real punch.

Cael didn’t like the extremes of either type, or especially not the heavyweight style of attack bot because they were very expensive to make. Lightweight bots were usually deployed in numbers, where heavyweight tanks would be utilised in units.

From his previous sensory drone, he liked the idea of making a design agile and lightweight. However, he didn’t want to go too far extreme to sacrifice other attributes of his support bot.

The following day, Cael and his classmates were all panting, while facing Arlo, their main teacher. He had his arms behind his back and wore a uniform that looked like a camo outfit, except it was shades of black.

It was customary uniform that was used for those in the military. Much better fabrics and designs had been found for use in the battlefield, and they simply wore these types of uniform to honour those soldiers that came many millennia before them.

“In 2 months, we’ll be going for an event with the Amburg 8th institute. We’ll be performing in the Bayside Centre and each of you will be allowed to fight along support bots of your choosing. We limit you to either 4 sensory bots, 1 sensory bot and 2 non-autonomous bots of other types or one autonomous bot and one non-autonomous bot.”

Amburg was another major city of Saevis, the planet that Cael lived on. It was slightly larger than Carlo City, with a population of 12 million but was much smaller than the empire’s capital city.

The Bayside Centre was a massive arena with a planted forest within, made for exosuit cadets to train their abilities in several different modes of training.

Cael couldn’t stop smiling upon hearing this news.

This was finally his time to fight alongside his own creations, but he then realised that he wouldn’t be able to use the autonomous bot that he was currently designing.

The fabrication of such a design would cost way too much money, and he didn’t have any equipment to even start doing such a thing. Even if he was to use components built by other people, he’d have to create his own armour plates and alloys using high-tech equipment.

He had very little knowledge of metallurgy and couldn’t even begin thinking about how he would start off doing that in the real world. It was much easier in the virtual world, where he could just fuse metals together with no need for special equipment.

The event would be done in teams of 3, and students would be allowed to choose the people to match with. Any leftover fighters would be matched up with the other fighters in the same situation from the other institute. Cael looked around to all his classmates, not even willing to give him a glance.

He sighed, but he knew that this would be the case. They were all talking amongst themselves, trying to form teams for the upcoming event so that they could perform at their best. Knowing the teammates that you would be put together with could allow you to buy support bots to complement your team.

Cael had no knowledge of that and was going to have to go into this event blind. He had no friends at this institute and always had been shunned for his weakness. The people around him had no form of respect for him and assumed that he was still in school because of some shady deal that his parents had made with the institute.

This wasn’t true of course, but Cael had no way to prove otherwise and just had to let the rumours remain.

Once he returned home, Cael immediately began to work. He was stood up in his room once again and could barely see the walls of his room because of the number of floating panels that surrounded him.

They were a blend of the panels coming from his system, and those coming from his projector that gave him access to the ExoTech Marketplace and TechForge Simulation Lab.

In the simulation lab, he had his bipedal system component open and at the ready. On the marketplace, he was scouring through items to try and find the right weaponry to use with his autonomous bot.

He felt like giving it no special weaponry would leave it dangerously bare and give it no real oomph.

He looked to things like wrist-mounted and shoulder-mounted energy blasters. These would project high-power beams of energy, made purely of a condensed form of mana.

They would be a range of colours, which would be the same colour of the mana that it was utilising as a power source. These components usually used their very own mana cores as a power source, because they demanded so much energy.