The Mech Touch novel Chapter 7136

Chapter 7136: Fighting Qualifications

Ves remained in a foul mood as he sat in the armored shuttle that brought him back to the Tarrasque.

The first meeting with the leaders of the Phase Lord Department unfolded completely outside anyone’s expectation.

In hindsight, he realized that he may not have pushed hard enough. He let the human phase lords take the initiative, from agreeing to use their new monikers as opposed to their original human names to letting himself get completely stumped by the demand to duel their leaders.

Ves became overtaken by their verbal offensive that he could scarcely catch his breath and figure out a coherent response that did not amount to a complete capitulation.

The only positive outcome from his first meeting with the compromised human phase lords was that he did not set any of them off. He did not look forward to fighting his way out of that mess.

As Ves boarded the Tarrasque yet again, he first tried to find out whether Lucky had already completed his infiltration mission.

"Meow."

Ves let out a huge breath after seeing the dark metallic archemetal cat enjoying a rich treat.

Lucky leisurely dipped his head into a bowl. It was filled with a mixed collection of high-grade exotics and hypers courtesy of the Red Collective.

"Did my cat retrieve the data that you wanted?"

"We are still parsing through it." Secret Keeper Zariel-775 placidly said. "Much of the sensitive data is locked behind encryption. The staff of the Phase Lord Department have not lost any of their competence despite following their masters into madness. It takes a considerable amount of processing power and decryption ingenuity in order to quickly crack the contents. That said, we should be able to unlock the first truly valuable data dump before the end of the day."

Ves looked forward to what they might find from the data. He did not have too many expectations, though.

These human phase lords should be well aware that Yernstall was home to some of the best hackers of red humanity.

Perhaps only the Cybers were better at it due to their greater technological advancement, but the mechers and the fleeters were quite good in their own right.

Seeing that it would take a bit more time to learn about the gains of Lucky’s successful infiltration mission, Ves turned his attention back to the main issue at hand.

He looked carefully at the secret keeper. Even now, the man still refused to remove his hood from his head. The way it cast a shadow over his face was so unnaturally effective that not even a direct light could illuminate it. The entire robe was probably an artifact of sorts that was so good at obscuring that it didn’t even register as special from Blinky’s senses!

It didn’t matter.

Though the secret keeper was so well-trained that he did not betray any clues, Ves had a sense that the absence of any reaction already constituted an answer in itself.

"You predicted this outcome, didn’t you?" He made a guess. "You sought me out specifically because I am the only human phase lord that is not a part of their club. You sent me over to that transport vessel on short notice and inadequate preparation because you guys already foresaw that further coaching was redundant. From the start, you already deduced that the only way to truly get those human phase lords to back down was for me to present myself and provoke them into a series of duels, am I correct?"

He had developed this suspicion during the shuttle ride back to the flagship of the Bluejay Fleet.

Ves did not believe that the Secret Department of the Red Collective could miss this possibility.

The spies of the RC had monitored the human phase lords for a long time. They should have compiled entire libraries worth of behavioral models that could roughly tell them how they would respond to different stimuli.

An outcome like the one that just unfolded earlier should have fallen within the calculations of those behavioral models!

Even if the RC was not as obsessively data-driven as the Polymath, the collies were still modern humans who possessed good familiarity with advanced technology. Processing data was an essential part of any serious organization.

The secret keeper at least had the decency to be honest.

"We did anticipate this particular outcome." The collie admitted. "We did not believe the probability that this scenario would unfold was as high as 100 percent, however. We believed that there was only a 46 percent chance that the human phase lords would challenge you to a duel. This result should only happen if they genuinely respect you as their progenitor and if they judge that you are a worthy challenger."

Ves blinked. "Huh? Did I hear that right?"

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