a cockpit without a mech wouldn’t do.
Without a way to communicate with the dwarves, how would Ves be able to encourage them to use their mind voodoo?

As Ves struggled to come up with a solution to this problem, Ketis came to the rescue with another one of her stupid-but-genius suggestions.

”They’re used to bonding with their godling mounts, right?” She said one day.
”Why not create a mech that looks like one of those big lizards and put the test cockpit inside its belly?”

Ves was tempted to smack his face with his gauntlet.
”I should have thought of that.”

These dwarves may not know what to do when presented with a cockpit or a mech, but they grew up alongside their godling mounts for generations!

Ves quickly designed a godling-like mech that was large enough to accommodate the test cockpit.
It didn’t have to be a fully-functional mech.
In fact, Ves crippled most of its functions to save time and to prevent anyone controlling it from doing any damage.

He incorporated some hardware safeties.
When these safeties engaged, the mech pilot wouldn’t be able to move the mech at all!

In order to make the fake godling appear more convincing to the dwarf, he even fabricated a fake scaly hide to cover up the test mech’s metallic surface.

Now, besides its unnaturally immobile state, the godling mech looked like a decent copy of the real thing!

”We can begin the experiment now.” Ves grinned.

While the rest of the Vandals and the Swordmaidens spent their energy on establishing first contact with the ancient city of Samar, Ves holed himself up inside the testing facility.

He first designed a couple of variants of the most common model of neural interfaces utilized by the Vandals.
Over the past few days, Ves had developed many possible solutions, but he lacked the confidence and theoretical backing to know for sure whether they would work.

Ves applied each possible solution to different variants and fabricated them personally in a jiffy.
He then installed them in the cockpit of the godling mech and tested out their integrity.

Ves didn’t know whether these neural interfaces were still safe to use! So before he brought in the dwarfs, he first needed to find out whether the normal two-way man-machine connection would still be stable!

At this stage, Ves required a test pilot.

Understandably, not a single mech pilot wanted to volunteer themselves as his guinea pig!

”Are you crazy?! Do you know how dangerous it is to mess with these neural interfaces? Something like a third of all former mech pilots retired because their cockpits got damaged and screwed up their brains!”Find authorized novels in Webnovel,faster updates, better experience,Please click www.webnovel.com for visiting.

In fact, the actual statistic swung wildly from state to state and from one generation to another.
Overall, as cockpits became increasingly more sophisticated in terms of safeguarding their pilots, the rate of forceful retirements due to a loss in neural connectivity steadily decreased.

It still happened a lot.
So much so that many mech pilots dreaded the thought of being forced into retirement due to suffering from a faulty neural interface.

To mech pilots, losing their piloting ability in this manner was as awful as if they were men suffering from castration!

Still, Ves needed test pilots to get his experiments going, so Captain Byrd came up with a clever solution.

”Whoever slacks off the most or received the worst performance reviews has to volunteer for testing duty!”

This immediately made most of the dutiful Vandals sigh in relief.
Only the worst of the Vandal mech pilots cried and protested, but no one cared about the slackers.
Due to the recruiting patterns of the Vandals, many of their servicemen failed to live up to their responsibilities.

Many of the worst mech pilots had already died as the many battles the Flagrant Vandals experienced up to now had filtered them out.
Those too incompetent to survive simply hadn’t made it as far as the journey to Aeon Corona VII.

Still, some lucky bastards still existed.
These cowardly mech pilots that excelled in nothing but saving their own lives finally needed to make their own contribution to the cause!

Escorted by firm-looking security officers, these unwilling mech pilots entered the testing facility and grudgingly entered the cockpit of the godling mech.

Standing behind a control panel in an observation room looking over the testing chamber, Ves began to commence the initial tests.

First, he tested out the standard neural interfaces that received no modifications at all.
The test pilot didn’t experience anything abnormal.

Once he confirmed that the godling mech worked, Ves proceeded to insert the modified neural interfaces into the cockpit.

The first twelve tests went normal.
Ves deliberately designed the cockpit in a way that made it fast and easy for him to switch out the neural interfaces, so he quickly ran through a score of different neural interfaces.

Something finally went wrong with the thirteenth test.

”AHHH! This friggin’ hurts!”

The test pilot immediately slammed his fist against the button that caused the experiment to halt.
Ves initially didn’t want to give the test pilots the option to stop the test on their own initiative, but Captain Byrd forced him to do so.

Ves frowned inside the observation room.
The telemetry of the cockpit spiked a bit, but he couldn’t make sense of what had happened.

The only way to find out was to ask.
He opened a channel to the cockpit.
”What happened? What went wrong?”

”YOU CRAZY MECH DESIGNER! YOU SHOULD BE ARRESTED AND TRIED FOR WAR CRIMES! MY HEAD IS BROKEN! IT HURTS!”

Ves switched off the comm channel.
”Okay.
Seems like this one is a bust.”

He amended his logs and disqualified the thirteenth modified neural interface.
Whatever he did to this iteration somehow caused an adverse reaction.

The worst thing about it was that Ves didn’t know why.

He shrugged.
”That’s the nature of trial and error.
I’ll just have to discover what’s safe and what’s not by trying them all out.”

As a couple of bots brought the mentally-injured mech pilot out of the testing facility onto a stretcher, the next test pilot looked at the pained form of his comrade and gulped.

”Okay, send in the next test pilot!”

The second test pilot began to cry.

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