Though Ves missed designing mechs, he benefited from his forced respite. By taking him away from his previous routine, Ves essentially returned back to basics. Crossing through the territories of the Ordent Republic and the Great Zona Republic in almost complete isolation put him in a calmer state of mind. The days he spent in his low period temporarily suppressed his emotions and caused him to reflect on his prior decisions from a more rational perspective. Though Ves eventually recovered, he felt he had become more self-aware of himself. He knew that many of his decisions were mainly driven by his urges rather than any rational considerations. He could no longer believe in the lie that he was a rational and enlightened mech designer. Compared to a true rational mech designer like Patricia, Ves was pretty much a brat who was very prone to mood swings! While that didn’t sound very flattering, Ves believed this weakness also served as his strength! "Only when my emotions are the strongest will I be able to design my best mechs!" He believed in Patricia’s description that passionate mech designers were able to achieve great feats as long as they were determined enough! In his mind, no amount of logic and rationality could ever match the sheer motivation of a driven mech designer! The lack of doubt and second-guessing often led to mistakes, but also resulted in unimaginable successes that no one could have ever predicted! In order to become a great mech designer, Ves believed his current path was the most suitable one for him. After reflecting on himself over this period, he became more determined than ever to continue as usual. Just looking back at his many accomplishments filled him with pride! With mechs like the Aurora Titan and the Desolate Soldier, Ves fully found his groove! Besides, whatever shortcomings he possessed, working alongside Gloriana mitigated many of them! With her presence, Ves felt free to continue to deepen his specialization, preventing him from getting bogged down by the need to spread his skillset too widely. Ves felt more than ready to return to his organization, however. He missed Gloriana. He missed his double-dealing Benny. He missed his Avatars of Myth. Above all, he missed designing mechs. "At least I’m not lacking inspiration now." He chuckled. Each adventure and each exciting experience always injected him with compelling ideas. Mech concepts and potential visions haunted his imagination. His fingers itched to call up a design interface and draft a brilliant new draft design! Yet he resisted the urge. Instead of expending his creative energies, he wanted to bottle it up in his mind and let it ferment for some time. Only when he was truly ready to design a new mech would he unleash it all and come up with a grand new mech design that surpassed the Desolate Soldier and Deliverer in impact! "Besides, I don’t even know whether I’ll be in the position to design a third-class or second-class mech." All of this depended on what he encountered when he returned to safety. If he returned to safety. His return was anything but guaranteed. After overcoming the Echo Spears and two other ambushes prepared by greedy mercenaries, the Scarlet Rose and the four battle bots all suffered from attrition. The Scarlet Rose endured a lot of weapon impacts. Though none of the arms the mercenaries brought to bear managed to breach her armor, much of her exterior still bore a lot of cracks and ugly marks! This wasn’t necessarily bad in ordinary circumstances. A competent crew could easily patch up the holes and replace some of the damaged plating. Yet that was clearly impossible at the moment. Aside from lacking a crew, the ship couldn’t rest in place long enough to affect meaningful repairs! This essentially meant that whatever external damage the ship suffered, her durability permanently dropped, making it easier for his subsequent enemies to cripple the vessel! As for the battle bots, Ves did his best to patch up the holes and minor battle damage, but the Scarlet Rose simply didn’t carry enough materials to sustain a full campaign. Ves threw a dirty look at Lucky, who was resting on a metal console as if there was nothing wrong in the galaxy! Ever since he gorged himself stupid, his gluttonous cat had done nothing but napping all day! It was as if his cat needed entire months to digest all of his gains! "Where is it even going, anyway? At least give me some gems!" Evidently, Lucky focused all of his efforts on improving his capabilities rather than performing his primary function. His changes became evident when his bone-white exterior began to exhibit tiger stripes. Though these black stripes were still rather faint, they grew more solid by the day. Ves had no idea what these stripes even represented. All of Lucky’s previous changes in appearance directly corresponded to the materials he ate. He became curious what kind of abilities Lucky developed after he finished his evolution. So far, his System sight did not notice any new additions to his pet’s skillset. "You better make it worth it, though!" The stronger Lucky grew, the safer Ves would be. This adventure already proved his cat’s value as a protector who could accompany him where others could not! No matter how much he valued Nitaa, his Kinner bodyguard couldn’t turn intangible like his cat! "Maybe Lucky won’t be my only intangible bodyguard in the future." Ves grinned with anticipation. That was something to look forward to much later on. For now, he should focus on his current circumstances. Right now, the Scarlet Rose already managed to traverse two-thirds of the Great Zona Republic. While unflinchingly sticking to her obscure route sometimes landed her in trouble, the Scarlet Rose nonetheless managed to avoid more formidable ambushes, which was a great win in his book! Yet even as as Ves and his stolen ship continued to foil the best efforts of the mercenaries hired to stop them, his enemies were doubtlessly learning. The three battles he had been through had provided the Fridaymen with enough information to confirm the strengths and assets at his disposal! Ves had a very awful hunch that his fourth and potentially last encounter would be the greatest of them all! At this time, the Scarlet Rose had almost finished cycling her FTL drive. To his dismay, the standard cycling time already began to last longer than the 5 hours it was rated for during standard operations. Extending it by just ten minutes might make or break his escape attempt! Yet what could he do? Though he dabbled somewhat in FTL drive technology, he was far from being able to service this complicated device. What was worse was that if he wanted to effect meaningful repairs, he would certainly have to deactivate and disassemble some of its subcomponents, thereby extending his stay in the star system! Ves did not dare to linger in a single location longer than he really had to! With so many listening posts and scouts tracking his movements, Ves was sure that a lot of hostiles were on their way to his location at this moment! "I hope the FTL drive can last." While it was unlikely that the FTL drive would suffer a malfunction, the longer this flight went on, the greater the chance of calamity. Without an engineering crew, Ves could do nothing to mitigate its deterioration! As Ves contemplated ways to decrease the load on the FTL drive, the bridge suddenly sounded a small alert. The Scarlet Rose detected something unusual had intruded on the ship! "What?" Ves looked confused. "How could anything sneak on my ship? All of her anti-stealth sensors are running at full blast!" Though the load on those sensors was great, Ves did not hold anything back on that end! While their integrity had already started to decrease, they were capable of enduring the strain for now and shouldn’t have any blind spots! "Lucky!" Ves grabbed Lucky’s napping body and shook his cat until the lazy critter woke up. "Meow meow!" "This is no time for you to nap! There’s an intruder aboard the ship!" "Meow?" Lucky became a lot more alert upon hearing that. Ves didn’t have to encourage his pet any longer. Anything or anyone that snuck aboard his ship was a threat! "Let’s see what we are dealing with." Ves muttered as he controlled the monitoring system to show him where the ship discovered something anomalous. The compartment projected in front of him turned out to be the same one which held many of the escape pods. Two prominent spaces should be empty, signifying Aisling and Partricia’s escape. At least that was how it should have been. According to his memory, the Scarlet Rose was short of two escape pods. "Then why is one of the spaces filled?" He questioned. Were his eyes deceiving him? How could one of the spaces which he never filled up with anything else host an escape pod now? Did some kind of rogue bot relocate an existing escape pod? "That shouldn’t be. All the other escape pods are still in place!" Ves carefully counted each and everyone of them through the various monitoring feeds and found that none of them were out of place! The information transmitted from the compartment showed that all of those escape pods belonged to the Scarlet Rose and had never been moved! The only exception was the mystery escape pod that showed up out of the blue! "How did it enter this compartment?!" The Scarlet Rose was fully sealed in normal circumstances. The only way the escape pods could enter and exit the compartment was if the connected hatches opened up, which they would never do under ordinary circumstances! Ves pulled up the logs of the monitoring system and also rewinded the footage backwards on an accelerated rate. He managed to pin down the exact the moment the strange escape pod showed up and registered on the Scarlet Rose’s monitoring system. Just after the ship sounded the initial alert, the empty cavity suddenly hosted a new escape pod! It didn’t slide into the space from the exterior of the ship, nor did some bot transport it from the mech workshop where some kind of production AI had automatically been programmed to produce a replacement. Instead, the escape pod simply showed up in the slot like magic! "Magic doesn’t exist!" Ves firmly declared. "What the monitoring system captured is not necessarily representative of what has actually happened!" The sudden appearance of the escape pod reminded Ves a lot of how it looked like when he abruptly shut off his Full Stealth augment. It could be that this mystery escape pod snuck into the ship from space sometime earlier. It was just that its stealth and other detection avoidance abilities kept it hidden from him and the Scarlet Rose. Ves began to sweat a bit. If a random escape pod managed to sneak aboard the Scarlet Rose, then what about something more dangerous? What if the same vulnerabilities or backdoors that allowed the escape pod to sneak onto the Scarlet Rose allowed for the entry of shuttle carrying elite Fridaymen commandos? "Dammit!" Ves slammed his fist against the armrest of the captain’s chair. "How many backdoors have I missed?!" His control over the ship was anything but complete! By spending much of his time on the battle bots, Ves neglected to continue his gradual conquest over the various systems of the Scarlet Rose. Ves had a feeling this decision might have been a mistake now that the Scarlet Rose unknowingly allowed for the entry of a foreign escape pod! He called up the logs and performed an expansive search. Had the outer escape hatches opened up anytime since he hijacked the ship? The logs didn’t note anything unusual, and none of the footage exhibited any abnormalities aside from some cleaning bots performing their routine duties. "Can these logs even be trusted?!" Ves became more and more alarmed. Had the Scarlet Rose been compromised without his knowledge?! He quickly made up his mind. If he wanted to know the truth, then confronting the unwelcome escape pod was the first thing on his agenda!