Counterfeit Hero

Chapter 525: Volume 6 Chapter 21 Five-Win System

Just like the unarmed fighting techniques passed down through millennia, the wisdom of the people endows Mecha control with countless classic techniques.

These techniques, through victories and defeats, have been inherited and modified. Ultimately, they form numerous distinctive schools of thought.

Phantom Stream is one among the countless folk schools, and in history, it was once ranked among the Eight Great Schools.

In the fighting world, Phantom Stream Knights are universally acknowledged for their exceptional leg and footwork. The agile mechas they control attack with incredible speed and dodge unpredictably, famous for their eerie positioning and lightning-fast movements. In the folk mecha fighting world, they are praised as ”one converting to a hundred, as inseparable as a shadow.”

In the current Mecha Control Standards of military forces across various nations, the norms and technical explanations of the ”Jumping Through” maneuver are entirely copied from Phantom Stream’s techniques.

However, having neglected close-combat techniques for too long, the military relies completely on the hand speed of its Mechanical Warriors and the increasingly powerful functions of each new generation of mechas for improvements in these skills. What they do not realize is that folk techniques are advancing every day.

This advancement in control techniques is the unspoken secret of the schools.

By now, however, Phantom Stream has long since declined with the fall of the main sect Li family. Losing the ancestral techniques of the main sect, the disciples of Phantom Stream can only support themselves with some old techniques, their reputation in the folk mecha world declining to become a second-rate school.

When Cosmo was very young, he understood the plight of Phantom Stream from his father Old Smith’s sighs.

If you compare a school to a large tree, the so-called main sect is the trunk. The techniques passed down by the main sect are the roots of the tree.

Without core techniques as a foundation, without the main sect filled with talents as the backbone to research new techniques, and without more young talents joining to continue the school’s heritage and progress, the tree of Phantom Stream would gradually wither, eventually fading into history like some other schools.

The current Phantom Stream has only scattered branches and leaves left. To rebuild Phantom Stream and to become the new main sect of the school, the Smith family has dedicated indescribable blood and effort over the past century.

However, even though the Smith family has become the new symbol of Phantom Stream, their technique research only revolves around Level 1 Skills, never able to touch the core, so the goal of becoming the new main sect and reviving Phantom Stream is still far.

After all, the core essence of millennia-old wisdom, once lost, cannot be recreated by the power of one person or family alone. Just as every modern Mechanical Warrior can use the techniques in the Mecha Control Standards, who can create a new standard?

Cosmo, confident in his genius, would not dare to entertain this thought either.

Precisely because of this, when Cosmo and his father saw the recording of the Magic Beast that a disciple found online, their shock was beyond words.

From the movement technique characteristics, it was evident that the Magic Beast was using Phantom Stream’s techniques. Moreover, they were techniques that not even Old Smith or any other Phantom Stream expert had ever imagined!

In that brief moment, the Phantom that the Magic Beast pulled between several Black Armed units was dreamy and surreal, seemingly both real and illusory. The high-speed footage seemed to disrupt time and space. In one frame, the Magic Beast was still on the left; in the next frame, its body had already appeared on the right.

That was truly one converting to a hundred, as inseparable as a shadow!

Several Black Armed units pursuing the Leray Warrior Mecha were utterly powerless against the Magic Beast’s peculiar, elusive attacks. Such fighting techniques, even if demonstrated by the main sect Li family during Phantom Stream’s peak, would probably be no better.

To find the Mechanical Warrior piloting the Magic Beast, the Smith family immediately ordered all their branches across the universe to investigate. They were both alarmed and delighted that the school’s ultimate techniques appeared outside their circle.

Alarmed that the school’s ultimate techniques manifested in an unknown person without the family knowing; delighted that the elder of the family could unanimously confirm that the Phantom Techniques used by that Leray Mecha Soldier far exceeded the school’s Level 1 Skills and possibly derived from core techniques.

Everyone knew what this meant. A variation of the core techniques meant, by extension, possessing the core techniques. It meant that after a century of decline, Phantom Stream finally had the hope of revival.

With the core techniques, the Smith family was confident they could, within ten years, develop new techniques based on the core techniques and reclaim the pinnacle of the mecha fighting world.

The investigation results, however, put the Smith family in a difficult situation.

The Mechanical Warrior in the Magic Beast was not hard to track. In Leray, he was almost a household name. He was the newly risen national hero of the Leray Federation, Tian Xingjian. A young, chubby Chuckna tribe member. A mechanical repair soldier who rose to prominence miraculously.

The information they could find was limited to that.

Further investigation, even with the highest access the Smith family could obtain in the Leray Federation, yielded answers from the central computer network: ”Top Secret!”

Three S-class top secret. Other than the Supreme Command Department and the President, no one could access any of this person’s records, family, social relationships, education level, or any data.

The Smith family understood that such a person might not attract much attention outside of Leray, but for the Leray Federation, this hero born from the war of national defense was their sculpture! Such an identity naturally warranted tight protection, making it impossible for ordinary people to get close.