At the end of their day on the beach, everyone was in a much better frame of mind, and ready to get back to work with a fresh outlook on life.
The Innu had come up with multiple ideas that they thought might help their development of a weapon that would be able to combat the Energy Beings, and Max had one of his own, courtesy of Nico.
Her team wasn't working on a new batch of data today, they had also moved on to working on weapons systems so that they could get the job finished more quickly and move on to propulsion and chassis design for a new Mecha.
As always, Nico's first love and passion would always be Mecha, and now they were getting closer to the ability to create the ultimate Mecha, the pinnacle of the craft both in this life and through all of human history.
That was enough to get any Mecha lover excited, but Max tempered it with the knowledge that before the timeline had been reset when time altering technology had been deployed, it hadn't been enough, and humanity had still lost in the end.
So, their goal had to be better than humanity had ever done before. If they couldn't, then there wasn't much hope of actually being able to defeat the Energy Beings. Or perhaps there was. If they could shatter all the so-called Renegade Gods into smaller pieces, then they only had to deal with the Greater Energy Beings.
It would be a long and brutal fight, but they might actually win that war of attrition with every species of the Universe on their side as well as the Gods of the Mortal Species, if they chose to intervene and not just wait to see if they needed to make a new species.
When you lived nearly forever and could rebuild a civilization on a whim, things like an eternal war took on a very different connotation. They might favour their species, and would keep renewing them so that they didn't become extinct, but that didn't mean they would fight their peers over every single slight.
Max looked down at the plans in front of him and started to plan how he was going to integrate these ideas into one coherent plan. His System had been calculating it all night, but there was no definitive answer yet, only a series of suggestions that it would refine as he started to work on them.
[Battle Optimization] wasn't perfect for design work, it was more practical and much more efficient once he had a functional weapon in his hands, but as far as System Functions went, there weren't many that could be called better.
So, Max worked out a blueprint that should make the Disintegrator-based Orbital Lance cause a Plasma Reaction at the target, and then break it apart for a fission reaction. Once he got it started, everything seemed to fall in place.
What he needed was about ten wavelengths of the Disintegrator at once, which was no problem if he built the weapon as an array and not a single projector. Then all the desired effects could be combined at once, and he could rely on [Battle Optimization] to show him the programming to optimize the weapon for each desired target material before every shot.
For general use, they would need to program a few dozen different settings, and let the targeting computers pick the most appropriate, but when it was in his hands, he could do so much more with a weapon like that.
The design process was not a fast one, and it was nearly a week of work before Max and his team had their new designs ready for testing in the VR system and not the compilation and analysis program.
So, Max delayed the announcement for one more day, so they could start after their weekly meeting with Nico's team and everyone could discuss how their work was going.
Nico's team had been focusing on the other side of their weapon requirements, the ability to stop the enemy from moving between layers, and to lock their energies in one layer, using modified versions of the weapon that the Darklings had shown them.
Ranarth was overjoyed to see that they still considered the classics to be worth emulating, even when they were working on a whole new way of accomplishing them, and even Uncle Lu had come down for the day to hear their announcements at the weekly meeting.
The combined teams had gathered in the break room with its large projector so that they didn't have to reorganize their workspaces to do the presentation, and Max was standing at the head of the room next to Nico, as their team representatives.
Max cleared his throat. "My team has been working individually to develop a variety of weapon systems, and next week we will be working on integrating them, either as one weapon or on one vessel. So, we will start with my work for the week, a prototype modification to the Orbital Lance that should cause secondary Plasma damage and nuclear fission on impact."
Max brought up the schematics and the predicted output numbers, as well as the preliminary videos that he had generated of the weapon's functions.
Uncle Lu cheered, while a number of the Innu whistled in appreciation.
"Now that is what I call damage. It looks like it's variable enough to work on most targets, and that damage against the Cathedral Ships hulls is insane." Uncle Lu commented with a growing smile on his face.
Ranarth nodded in agreement. "It is a savage weapon well suited to the Eternal War. From what I can see, it should also be able to target the energy patterns of what you call the Demons, and the resultant explosion will destroy their corporeal forms."
"Won't the energy just bleed back into their home layer to slowly reform, though?" One of the Innu asked.
Nico smirked. "That's where our work comes in. Our team worked as one, as there were a limited number of answers to our puzzle. We have an energy weapon that will turn the boundary between layers chaotic. In theory, it will destroy any vessel or Energy Being attempting to transition between layers in the area and scatter them all over creation."
