Max sat in the cockpit of his Mecha and stared at the schematic in front of him. He had a replay of all of his previous battles in front of him and a log of every time that he had taken shield damage since nothing had yet managed to take down the might barrier around the Titan class Mecha.

Most of the incidents were due to him relying on the shield while he waded into melee combat, but some were clear limitations on the design.

For one, he could only move the body so fast, but against shielded enemies. He was also limited when they rotated their shield frequencies, preventing his Disruptors from punching straight through to the armor or to the pilots inside the armor.

Max was certain that there was something that could improve that issue, so he dug up all of the weapon data and brought up a maintenance simulation to make changes to the system without immediately activating them.

Over and over, Max tried to find a way around the problem, using Shattered Pride as a target since it was the second most individually powerful Mecha that he had ever personally seen.

Max had run the simulation over fifty times without any major gains when a thought came to him. The Disruptor didn’t have to be just a Disruptor. The weapons emitted a particle beam of sorts that generated the radiation. What if he optimized the beam itself to do damage instead of relying on the primary function?

Max started the simulation again and activated [Optimize], which took far longer this time as the system tried to determine what he was going for with the changes he was making to the weapon parameters himself.

Max felt it take hold and waited as the System did the work for him, wondering what it could do with the data that they had available on such an obscure weapon as the stabilized Disruptors that Cleansing Light used. There literally weren’t any more of them in the known universe, and the System needed data to work with.

The simulation flashed in front of his eyes thousands of times in a second before he got the mental notification.

[Optimization Complete]

Max ran it again to see for himself and got an incredible shock. The beam had been changed in a parasitic way. Any solid matter that it encountered would be left with a stabilized bit of its energy, like electricity, after a lightning strike.

When the beam hit the shield of Shattered Pride in the simulation, the whole shield absorbed the properties of the Disruptor, sending out a pulse of energy and radiation as it broke. That still left the inner layers the same as before, but it was better, and staggering the six Disruptors would let him blast right through in an instant.

Max set the simulation to a Fortress City on par with a planetary Captial of a major Star System and tried again, but this time from an orbital distance with the beams combined.

[Optimization Complete]

Max unleashed the blast and watched in horror as the entire upper layer of the city vaporized in front of his eyes, destroyed by the altered energy of their own shield.

Forget using multiple shots to take down a Fortress City’s shielding. The data said that he had killed nearly a billion residents without breaking the shield, with the complete destruction of the city likely after the next blast.

That was definitely an Optimization worthy of the name.

Max mentally congratulated the System and looked at the rest of the issues with the performance standards he had found.

The defensive Lasers were working exactly as designed and hadn’t let him down, but there was still a bit of lag in the thrusters. Not enough that it would be noticeable to most pilots, but Max wasn’t most pilots.

[Mechanical Upgrades needed. Summon Technician?]

“No, can’t we make this modification ourselves? Maybe just show me how to do it?” Max requested. he was certain that was what Nico’s System had done at the start, just given her directions for mechanical upgrades.

The system was silent for a while, then gave Max an update.

[Unit Optimization 2] Active.

[Updated Schematics available]

Now he was in business. He could now see both what he could do with the optimization of existing parts and what he was likely to do with replacement parts that it recommended or that he tried to insert into the design software.

Max entered the proposed part into the design and then ran the simulation again. The thrusters activated three milliseconds faster and came up to full output nearly twice as fast, with just that one small change.

Max checked it for a while to see if there was a good reason not to use this new part, then found a note in the design logs relating to it. The previous part had been designed with a slower reaction rate to prevent catastrophic failure if the thruster was damaged.

That wasn’t an issue. The new part could react at the previous speeds, giving the safety features time to activate during normal operation while allowing him to overclock it during intense battle if he should choose to.

One more minor annoyance down. Only a few more to go.

The next few that Max came across simply didn’t have a solution. They were ones that Uncle Lu had come across during design, and the materials that could withstand the forces he wanted to apply to them simply didn’t exist, not even in his System’s catalog of structural alloys.

That was a shame, but the new weapons would be a huge improvement for the Mecha at the very least, and they could be achieved without physical modification of the Mecha itself.

[Finalize Proposed Weapon Modifications] Max instructed the System once he left the simulations and returned his mind to the physical cockpit.

[Optimization Complete. Test Fire now?]

No, definitely no firing the Orbital Lance inside the ship.

Perhaps he could improve the comfort of the cockpit a little bit. He hadn’t really personalized Cleansing Light since he got her, and for some reason, it was feeling a little bland at the moment.

Max had the replicator make him a new photo for his lucky pocket on the console of Nico in the gown she wore to her birthday party, and then ordered a new set of bedding and updated the virtual view out of the artificial window.

That should be better once the bedding was in. But it wasn’t the thought of Nico’s outfit during the party that the photo was reminding him of.