The Warrior Mechanic

Now that he had this image in mind, he swiftly got to work. Opening the components section, he was happy to see that there were a large range of things for him to work with.

However, he didn’t feel as pleased about the basic quality of pretty much everything that he laid his eyes upon. The components just seemed quite old and cheap, which meant that the bots the contestants could create wouldn’t even be that great.

This wasn’t a bother, though, since every body that he had to face would suffer from this same issue. They were still all on the same playing field.

Cael was happy to find katana-like heated blades, and he pulled two of the thinnest ones that he could see.

They floated ahead of him, and he had an idea in mind. Heated blades couldn’t be activated very frequently because the energy source needed to be on-site. It also limited how hot the blades could get.

However, with careful enough wiring, Cael could get the swords to feed directly from the mana cores located on the bot. If he could do this, it could drastically increase the temperature of the blades and make them far more destructive.

It was a technique used by certain mechanics and was becoming a popular paradigm for swordsmen bots.

Nevertheless, he minimised the weapons and placed them to the side to begin working on his actual design.

Thoughts of animal-like or six-limbed bots popped into his mind, but Cael put those ideas down and just went for a classic bipedal, humanoid bot.

Cael swiftly began to work on his frame, but he searched through the available metals for his design and was annoyed to see that it was almost just completely Dresium. There was a handful of other metals that were just plentiful enough to make armour or framing from.

He donned an actuator system that maximised speed, alongside power efficiency. This made the bot less explosive, but it wouldn’t then eat into its power supplies as a result.

Cael entered a true workflow; unlike anything he had ever been in before. He had no distractions, and only the panels to keep him alert.

Moving the components together with grace and speed, his design was slowly but surely coming together. Since the components varied so much, they didn’t seem very compatible. Even with his new abilities, he found it hard to place everything together in the right way.

Upon looking back to the clock, he could see that he had somehow wasted 90 minutes already. His focus was so great that he didn’t even bat an eye at the floating clock above him. To keep himself more aware, he dragged it down so that it was almost at eye-level, floating just beside the blue hologram of his design.

However, he told himself that the internals would have to be the main part of this whole crafting process. He made sure to keep the design slim and sleek. Placing the components in just the right areas, he now had to place his mana cores in.

He placed four slotted on the back and made up for this extra weight in its back by placing some more in its abdomen and chest area.

Placing them in the limbs would be a risky game, as it could throw off the bot’s balance and movement. He intended it to be a swordsman as well, so this was a no-go for him.

Finally, he carefully pulled some wiring near the surface of his bot to extend near its palm. This could allow for the heated blade to connect to the wire and receive an energy supply from the bot itself.

Swirling the design around, the basic components and internals were complete. He wanted to make sure to go back and make any tweaks if he needed to, but he felt like most of the work was done already.

Following this, Cael began forming the armour plates that he would need to keep this bot nice and durable.

It was supposed to be a light mediumweight, so he kept the armour plates thin but not too thin. He also didn’t want to make them very numerous and dense. Instead, he wanted a sleeker, cleaner design to cloak the entire base frame.

With armour plates out and the base complete, Cael felt like he could put that to rest for now. Now, he wanted to move onto the programming.

He was met with two programming languages. The first was one called EXO-86, that acted as a low-level programming language that was efficient but took several more lines to complete instructions.

Cael was more versed with the easy-to-use ExoScript, and he swiftly opened the IDE to begin coding.

The libraries given to him were enough for him to describe it as sufficient. He liked the versatility of the code on offer here, and he swiftly began his writing.

He wanted some polished code on the arms to allow it to wield swords well. Along with that, he needed to polish its code for the legs to grant it phenomenal agility and efficiency.

With the blocks of code given to him, his greater creativity allowed him to form intelligent ways to bring them all together. Along with Level 2 Script Sage, he could understand the functions of the code slightly better but didn’t understand it all the way.

As he began, though, he started to feel like he’d neglected his programming too much. Even though the libraries were nice to work with, he had placed his gears mainly in assembly and design.

Looking back to his bot, he felt like the actual body was something that he could be much prouder of compared to the lines of code present in front of him. Cael continued to type with incredible speed, much faster than those without mana could type.

Some of the fastest mans users could type at around 1000 words per minute because their fingers and thoughts could simply move so fast.

Cael’s was no where near that level, but it was around 250 to 300 words per minute. This probably meant that he had quite the edge over his fellow competitors that didn’t possess mana.

Now, with 6 hours gone like it was nothing, Cael felt like he had conjured up something that was somewhat functional. His code still looked shabby, and he had run into several errors upon creating it. Most of his time was recently spent just ridding the code of errors instead of trying to fix it up.

However, he had purchased the Rapid Update skill. Using it, he could just fix up his code in a flash, but he wondered if that would be seen as cheating. He was also looking to use the quick-build to finish up his design, but he wasn’t entirely sure.

With eyes on him, he felt conflicted between playing it safe or using his system to his advantage.

“Will I be kicked from this tournament if I use any of the system’s skills?”

“...”

There was no reply.

Cael felt his conflictions and stress only increase even more from receiving this blankness, and he could see that his code would lead to some inefficiencies. He could blame it on the very limited time that he had, but it just felt wrong to give his autonomous bot this sort of code to work with.

He just decided to leave it and focused on getting everything fixed up with the time that he had left.

Meticulously and carefully placing the armour on his bot, he felt much happier with the bot that he had created.

He pulled the katana blades to place them within the holsters that he had given his bot and dragged its extended arms down to give it a final swirl and look.

Cael found a handful of imperfections with the inspection, such as misplacements of armour and complex internal design through the holes in the armour. He had half an hour to try his best to improve his code, but he placed just 10 extra minutes into fixing up the bot as much as he could.

Using his final 20 minutes, he made astounding progress through just using his mind and intellect to make his code as efficient as possible. Even if he did well, 20 minutes wasn’t much in the grand scheme of things.

BEEP! BEEP!

[3 minutes remaining]

Cael stepped away from his code, giving the major functions a final glance. There wasn’t enough time to check through the enormous collection of code, but he managed to make a single improvement before moving over to his design.

There wasn’t any time for him to do anything, just for him to assert that he had done relatively well under the given constraints.

His bot was sleek and like a slim, athletic human being. It wielded two swords, each at the sides of its two legs. Its face was rather humanoid -like the WM-01 Valiant- with glowing yellow eyes to act as sensors. The metals that he had used were of a light silver, and gave this bot a futuristic, metallic exterior.

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

[0 minutes remaining]

As Cael tried to manipulate his design, it remained still and didn’t react to his input. The floating keyboard for his typing had also vanished, and Cael fell onto his cosy bed with slight fatigue.

However, he was a well-trained exosuit cadet. He was sure his competitors had designed their bots from the comfort of beds and chairs, but Cael had mana to invigorate his body.

Just standing around didn’t even give him any feeling of fatigue in his legs.

His system panels appeared once the model was complete, but Cael didn’t feel scared. The panels of his system weren’t visible to onlookers, so he looked on calmly and named his model.

[Design Complete!]

[Name: WM-02 Slasher]

[Type: Mediumweight Attack Bot]

[Evaluation]

[Speed: 50/100]

[Agility: 52/100]

[Strength: 33/100]

[Firepower: 30/100]

[Power Efficiency: 58/100]

[Intelligence: 54/100]

[Maintenance: 47/100]

[Versatility: 40/100]

[Framing: 43/100]

[Overall Rank: 48/100]

His design was completely average, but it wasn’t bad from what they had to work with. The other bots that he was going to be up against couldn’t even possibly be in the 80s or above. The components just weren’t good enough to allow for that.

The face of another person, that looked more like an actual mechanic appeared. He had wild, grey and brown hair with a thick beard. Even with his wilder facial appearance, the man was clad in a clean, grey suit.

“Thanks for your input, competitors. In a few minutes time, we will transport the autonomous bots that we received to the terrains. I am also here to announce that 0.5% contestants that entered have been disqualified due to providing either insufficient code, an unfunctional bot or doing both of those things.”

Cael was surprised to hear that such a figure hadn’t even managed to complete the process. This made himself a little more motivated and confident, as he managed to make an average level bot in that same timeframe.

Maybe, things were looking good for him.