The Mecha combat style that Nico was teaching them was broken down into eight essential attack movements, with eight matching defensive movements, and sixteen combinations of footwork. She insisted that it should only take two weeks for them to memorize these new movements, as they already knew how to operate a Mecha, and then the real training of putting it all together could begin.

Max would have liked nothing better than to go and see how the training was going, but instead, he was resting his seat back as the Moon Base's private shuttle took him to the planet's surface for more meetings.

These ones shouldn't be as bad, as he was only a consultant there, about the capabilities of the Mecha, while the main topic of the meetings was scheduled to be about the procurement of materials and labor to produce them in the numbers that were requested after the stellar showing during the test battle with rookie pilots at the helm.

Because they rarely had enough Heavy Mecha, if any at all, the Reavers had a lot of skilled veteran Line Mecha Pilots, who were certain that they could do even better with them than the recruits did.

That had been a constant annoyance during the first meeting. Captains loved to brag about their troops, and Max had fielded a thousand men with no battle experience for the tests. Half of the first six hours had just been them replaying the battle and telling everyone how they could have done it better.

Max's hopes for a peaceful meeting were quickly dashed though. Where the Commanders bragged about their own forces being able to do it better, this meeting was full of materials vendors and manufacturing plants trying to get approval to substitute materials and cut corners to reduce production costs and increase profits.

They had already done as much of that as they dared to though, and any more, or any substandard materials would lead to catastrophic failures since the integrity of the unit largely relied on a technology that strengthened molecular bonds. If the wrong materials were used, it would not work correctly, and the strength of the unit would drop by over two-thirds, a fact that he had to demonstrate in simulations a half dozen times before the prospective builders gave up and adjusted their quotes to build the unit as designed.

Without approval, they didn't dare to make modifications, since every buyer knew where they lived, and would come to them for answers if they lost a friend due to a manufacturing flaw.

With the demand for Mecha, their profits were going to be astronomical anyhow, but an extra five percent of a few billion credits a day made a huge difference to the owner of the manufacturing facility.historical

After the first full day of marathon meetings, Max had to delay his meeting with Uncle Lu so that he could be coherent for the meeting that they were planning to have, returning straight to his bunk to sleep the morning away before the one meeting that he deemed actually essential.

[Uncle Lu, where are you at? I will come to you for that meeting.] Max asked once he woke up.

[I'm in the VR training hall. The little one is making people cry again, and it was too good not to watch.]

That was enough to pique Max's interest, so he headed down to the training hall where most of the Regiment would be mastering their hand-to-hand combat skills.

"You almost had it that time. Only twenty-seven seconds off the pace, but that's a ten percent increase over your last attempt. Nine more tries like that and you have this. Don't give up on yourself." Nico encouraged one of the Pilots, while a few others who were outside the testing machines and sparring in the ring off to the side tried not to laugh.

Max looked up at the scoreboard and saw that the successful completion time for today's set of maneuvers was one minute. Each combatant faced an enemy mecha who performed a set series of maneuvers based on the speed of the pilot, and if needed, they could add a hologram of what they were supposed to be doing to the simulation so they could watch it and learn.

The fact that the pilot took eighty-seven seconds to complete the one-minute series meant that he was having a particularly bad day, especially after hearing that it was an improvement for him.

"What did she show them today?" Max asked Uncle Lu as he found the old man in the large hall littered with VR pods in orderly rows.

"Nothing at all. This is a continuation of yesterday, that's why some of the pilots have been let out of the simulation to try it in real life to build muscle memory. Everyone that passes today will be doing that tomorrow, and then they will keep adding to it until they are doing a routine that uses all the core maneuvers of the style." Uncle Lu explained.

That was, surprisingly reasonable, given the circumstances. They weren't under any particular deadline, they just needed all their pilots to be combat-ready as soon as possible so that Terminus Trading Company could get back to work and start taking missions to build their funds and reputation.

Thirty-two moves, that was all they had to learn. It sounded so simple, but actually doing them seemed to be much more difficult than he had expected.

"Hey Rage, find me an open pod, I want to try this once I finish talking to Uncle Lu." Max called, then turned to the old scientist.

"There is an office off to the side here, in what used to be a secondary storage area. It is soundproof and all electronics in the room are shielded and not linked to the outside." Max offered.

"Perfect. The details that we need to go over are only minor things really, but they aren't for general consumption." Uncle Lu agreed.