Tension started to spread across the press hall. Everyone else fell completely silent as they observed the invisible confrontation between Professor Ves Larkinson and Master Aulaus Kreshnick.
This was not an ordinary challenge.
The journalists invited to this Q&A session may look as if they had become completely frozen, but they were frantically writing or dictating words through their cranial implants.
Each of them smelled drama from this exchange!
Hundreds of journalists began to conduct a lot of research. They dug every piece of information that looked relevant to them and began to weave the details into narrative that may or may not make sense.
It didn't matter so long as it was exciting enough!
Other individuals who intended to issue their own challenges became thoughtful as they observed the man who was lucky enough to issue his own one first.
Master Aulaus Kreshnik should not belong here. He was a dignified and powerful first-class mech designer who had realized his design philosophy a long time ago. He had lived through 5 times as many years as his target, and accrued a lot more knowledge and experience during his long career!
To be appointed as the leading mech designer at the Red Ocean branch of Pritchard & Terse was a testament to his ability and competence in the notoriously competitive Rubarthan mech market!
Why would such an esteemed mech designer travel to a middle zone and issue a challenger against a much younger professional who was not only just a Senior, but not even first-rater?!
This was an incredibly unfair matchup according to the standards of the mech industry!
It was almost as outrageous as Ves issuing a challenge to a lowly Novice Mech Designer!
Ves had every right to refuse such a ridiculous challenge. Let alone a Master Mech Designer, even a Senior Mech Designer of the same age as Aulaus Kreshnik would incur a lot of notoriety for the act of 'bullying' a member of the younger generation!
Yet strangely enough, none of the people in the crowd appeared to acknowledge the inherent unfairness of this possible matchup.
It was not because Master Kreshnik was a bad mech designer that diminished his work or anything.
It was because Ves was too strong of a Senior Mech Designer!
In fact, given all of the feats that made him so famous and notorious in and outside of the mech industry, an increasing number of people questioned whether the phrase 'mech designer' still held the same meaning when applied to Ves.
He was practically an alien freak compared to every other Senior Mech Designer!
The greatest reason why most people did not think that Master Kreshnik was bullying Ves was because of the disparity between their galactic citizenships!
The Red Association designated Ves as a tier 3 galactic citizen and did not receive any pushback for it. Many important power blocs such as the Red Fleet, the Terran Alliance and the Rubarthan Pact did not object to this highly unusual promotion, which effectively meant they approved of this measure.
All of this effectively meant that Ves possessed capabilities that exceeded the vast majority of high-ranking mech designers in the new frontier!
Master Aulaus Kreshnik also happened to be on this list!
Even though he was a 200-year old Master Mech Designer who designed first-class multipurpose mechs all of the time, none of his designs or research results actually contributed all that much to human society.
Whether he refused to share his best results to humanity at large, or simply wasn't competent enough to produce major breakthroughs and advancements in his respective fields, Master Kreshnik simply wasn't valuable enough as a mech designer and a human being.
The best way to understand the differences in status was to imagine how human society would change if any of these people suddenly disappeared one day.
If Ves ever got lost, the damage to red humanity was incalculable! Much of his work was either incomplete or had yet to reach their full potential. The disappearance of his design philosophy may or may not compromise his living mechs, but the loss of his inheritance was a tragedy!
His absence would also stall all of his ongoing developments and research projects. Red humanity would lose the inventor and the most useful guide to many different E-technology applications.
Much of the reasons why the mechers promoted him from a tier 6 galactic citizen to a tier 3 galactic citizen all at once was because he was responsible for amazing innovations such as the companion spirits, design spirits, the transcendence glow, kinship networks and battle networks!
Ves had managed to develop all of these radical advancements before he reached his fortieth birthday!
His future potential was even more monstrous. If people had any idea what sort of crazy ideas he was cooking up in his mind and how likely he was able to realize them in the future, then their evaluation of him might increase even further!
Unfortunately, galactic citizenship was mostly based on current value rather than nebulous contributions in the distant future.
Even so, Ves truly possessed the strength and capital to defend his elevation to a tier 3 galactic citizen. The presentation where Ves introduced the Fey Fianna reinforced this idea ever further.
Compared to a renowned prodigy who had received the personal recognition of numerous Star Designers as well as god pilots, Master Aulaus Kreshnik was practically a nobody.
He was a tier 7 galactic citizen according to his record.
That might sound fairly impressive as it was not easy for many people to become a galactic citizen, let alone rise above tier 9, but this was considered a mediocre result!
Pretty much every Master Mech Designer was able to become a tier 8 galactic citizen. Master Carmin Olson had become one as well, and so did Master Benedict Cortez.
The act of realizing their design philosophies and the inherent capabilities of Master Mech Designers in general already merited this status.
Master Kreshnik was not all that special among other first-class Master Mech Designers, so his galactic citizenship only rose by a single tier as he continued to design a lot of mechs and developed his specialization further.
If the Rubarthan Master ever went missing, then the negative impact of his loss was... negligible.
Sure, Pritchard & Terse might enter into a crisis that might cause the company to collapse, but there were so many other mech companies in the Rubarthan Pact that such an incident could never affect the state of the mech industry.
Not even a crisis as enormous as the Great Severing had caused the business community of the Red Ocean to collapse!
The most serious loss that red humanity would suffer was that the mech industry lost an authoritative expert on energy shield technology.
Perhaps energy shields might not improve as fast as before, but who could tell the difference?
All of these thought exercises clearly highlighted the enormous disparity between the two mech designers.
In fact, people might even be able to argue that it was unfair for Ves to confront Master Kreshnik.
How could a tier 3 galactic citizen possibly condescend to bullying a mere tier 7 galactic citizen?
Of course, the actual reality wasn't as straightforward.
The two did not compete against each other in terms of overall contributions, but their ability to design good mechs.
Ves was unable to translate many of his contributions into the narrow field of mech design.
Master Kreshnik's extensive years of experience and knowledge accumulation became a lot more relevant in this situation!