The Mech Touch

A lot of people who had been paying a lot of attention to the Dark Zephyrʼs entanglement with the Quadknife and the Filamon became shocked at the latest turn of events.

In just a brief interval, the Dark Zephyr went from being heavily disadvantaged to partially crippling the Quadknife!

”How did Tusa do it?! The Quadknifeʼs resonance shield isnʼt even broken yet! This shouldnʼt be possible!”

”How much stronger did the Dark Zephyr become after its upgrade?! The patriarch must really like Venerable Tusa to equip this expert mech with so much power!”

”Itʼs not just the expert mech that leveled up. Look at how its resonance shield has turned dark all of a sudden. Venerable Tusa must have figured out a better way to fight!”

Few people knew the actual truth to Tusaʼs drastic performance change. It was natural for people to attribute the differences to the drastic revision of the expert mech.

After all, the Design Department had indeed invested a lot of money and resources into reimagining its old expert light skirmisher.

From the complete overhaul of its internal architecture to the addition of grenades, the Dark Zephyr had turned from a shifty opportunist into a powerhouse that possessed considerably stronger upfront fighting capabilities!

The more knowledgeable and experienced mech pilots knew better. They understood that better specs alone wasnʼt enough to quickly gain an advantage over a powerful opponent.

Too many people overlooked the fact that mechs and pilots formed a single cohesive system.

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It was easiest to strengthen mechs by spending lots of money into their designs, but the latter required a lot of effort from the pilots themselves.

Venerable Tusa shouldnʼt have been able to pull of the advanced and refined fighting and assassination techniques that he had skillfully utilized a moment earlier.

No matter how much of a fighting genius he was, there was no way he had enough time to practice an advanced weapon style and philosophy to the level of a supremely powerful weapon master!

Only an unreasonable item like an enlightenment fruit could allow him to gain so much proficiency!

If not for the fact that he had absorbed the fruit too soon and still needed many years to truly internalize what he learned and optimize all of the techniques to the physical characteristics of his expert mech, perhaps he might have been able to chop off two arms at once!

Venerable Tusa had no reason to complain, though. Depriving the Quadknife of a single arm made a lot of exclusive tactics and moves invalid!

”One down, three to go.” He grinned as his machine circled around and waited for the right timing and angle to renew his assault. ”Now that youʼve lost an arm, is it still right to call your mech the Quadknife? How about we call it the Trioknife instead? Donʼt worry if you donʼt like this new name. Iʼll turn your mech into the Duoknife, the Monoknife and finally the Noknife soon enough, hehehe.”

”YOU BASTARD!”

In contrast to Venerable Tusaʼs gloating, Venerable Dukes had become absolutely furious!

This quick setback was a humiliation to him! Not just that, this setback not only had the potential to set him and his partner on the path to defeat, but also risked collapsing the entire flank!

After all, he and Venerable Hawkes were originally sent to reinforce the Nidin Vergers and prevent his fellow troops from getting overrun.

Now, even if his Quadknife and the Filamon managed to hold on, the Dark Zephyrʼs interference would ensure that the Nidin Vergers did not receive the help they sorely needed.

The Flagrant Vandal mechs had never stopped in their effort to torment the Nidin Verger mechs at this time!

Venerable Dukes might have acquired a reputation for a hothead, but he was extremely sober when it came to battle. His mind churned quickly and rapidly revised the threat level of his current foe.

”Hawkes! We canʼt hold back anymore! We need to put everything we have on the line to destroy this Larkinson expert mech as quickly as possible. This guy is more terrible than we all thought. If we canʼt stop him, he might single-handedly make our troops lose control of the battlefield!”

The pilot of the Filamon had already made the same conclusion. ”Understood. Hold the Dark Zephyr as much as possible!”

The Quadknife dove straight at the Dark Zephyr. Even though it lost a single arm, the Fridayman expert light skirmisher did not suffer any other damage so it was still strong enough to suppress its opponent.

In any case, Venerable Dukes originally began his career with piloting conventional humanoid light skirmishers, so it was no big deal if his Quadknife lost one or two arms.

In his opinion, the Dark Zephyr was still only able to negate the attacks launched by two of the Quadknifeʼs limbs at most, leaving the third one free to land a lot of opportunistic strikes.

The reality was much different from his expectations!

Ever since Venerable Tusa embraced the dark side of his heart, his entire fighting style underwent a metamorphosis.

”Who am I fighting right now?” Venerable Dukes grew confused when he saw that all three limbs of his expert mechs failed to achieve any significant results. ”Itʼs as if Iʼm facing one of my mentors!”

The mentors he referred to were the small number of high-tier expert pilots that were also stationed in Pima Prime.

These legendary soldiers and champions had reached a much higher state of human evolution. Not only that, they accumulated at least 50 years of training and other experiences that vastly enriched their fighting consciousness.

For Venerable Dukes to sense these difficult traits from an opponent that that clearly exuded plenty of youth was inconceivable!

As the Dark Zephyr and the damaged Quadknife kept dancing around in space while exchanging blows with each other, Dukes became more and more alarmed by the monster piloting the opposing mech.

It was one thing if the Larkinson Clan dumped a massive amount of money into an overengineered expert mech.

It was another thing if that very same overengineered expert mech fell under the control of an expert pilot that could draw out much of the potential of such a powerful machine!

”What is this weapon style? Iʼve never heard or seen a school that teaches these weapon techniques!”

Seeing the Dark Zephyr fight at the moment was like seeing the performance of a vigorous dancer.

The main traits that summarized the Dark Zephyrʼs current movement was high displacement, high attack frequency and angular momentum.

The reason why the Quadknife was no longer able to land solid blows anymore was because the Dark Zephyr moved around a lot harder.

Its evasion patterns had become a lot more confounding and difficult to predict.

Even if Venerable Dukes was able to decipher the Dark Zephyrʼs next moves, he still couldnʼt do anything about it because each of his limbs were no longer able to reach far enough to slam their knives against his target.

In contrast, the Dark Zephyr seemed to have no problems landing frequent hits onto the frame of the Quadknife. By moving around, the former was constantly able to find favorable angles to attack the latter.

Multiple limbs or not, the Quadknife was rarely in the right place and orientation to parry all of the incoming attacks, especially when the Dark Zephyr unleashed them at a rapid frequency!

It was not as if the Larkinson expert light skirmisher was able to speed up the motion of its arms all of a sudden. This was a technical parameter that hardly changed as Venerable Tusaʼs willpower resonated with the expert mech.

What happened instead was that Venerable Tusa employed a lot of spinning and rotation movements in his fighting routine.

While the main reason he was able to pull off these moves without growing dizzy or losing control over his own machine was because he had quickly mastered the art of the Shadow Dance, he could not pull it off to this extent if he piloted the original version of the Dark Zephyr.

Part of the last round of upgrades was a comprehensive overhaul and improvement of its high-impulse multi-directional boosters. Juliet Stameros had incorporated a lot of new technology based on much higher qualities of materials and booster fuel.

These small integrated boosters were originally responsible for giving the expert mech the option of pushing its frame in every possible direction at a momentʼs thought, thereby allowing the Dark Zephyr to excel at avoiding incoming attacks.

This time, Venerable Tusa did not utilize the upgraded high-impulse boosters for their intended purposes.

Instead of using them to enhance the Dark Zephyrʼs defensive capabilities, he repurposed them to amplify his expert mechʼs offensive potential!

By aiming the nozzles of the boosters integrated over the Dark Zephyrʼs frame in different and more unusual directions, Venerable Tusa discovered that he could instantly make his expert mech spin in every way he liked.

Of course, it was far too easy for his expert mech to botch this process and spin in a different way he anticipated.

He had to spend many hours of focused training in the MSTS just to be able to utilize the upgrade boosters without making any serious errors!

Though he still hadnʼt completely mastered this technique as of yet, he did not feel nervous at all even when he was pulling off all kinds of dazzling moves in front of his two main opponents.

The practitioners of the Shadow Dance preferred to work in the shadows if possible, but they were never afraid of exposing their art to the light!

”This is called spin to win, baby!”

It was at this time that Venerable Tusa felt that the Dark Zephyr had come closest to embodying its name.

Due to all of the spinning, it became difficult for observers to distinguish anything solid about the expert light skirmisher anymore.

All people could see was a tornado of dark gray energy continually circling around before colliding against the Quadknife!

Each time the two expert mechs bumped into each other, the increasingly more battered-looking resonance shield of the Quadknife sparked many times in a row as it endured a high frequency of powerful hits!

A dagger strike launched from a mech that was floating in place was not that strong.

The conventional way to increase the damage of a melee mech was to make it move and accumulate momentum.

However, this was difficult to pull off in a lot of mech duels because the enemy wouldnʼt stupidly allow a mech to build up speed as if it had all of the time in the galaxy.

This was why relying on angular momentum was much more suitable in mech combat, and the new fighting style that Venerable Tusa had just mastered was stuffed with moves and techniques that took advantage of the power of the spin!

Faced with the power of an expert mech rotating like a spinning top with blades, Venerable Dukes had lost all breathing room.

Forget about landing an attack on this dark tornado, he couldnʼt even defend his Quadknife properly against the flurry of blows!

”Damnit, how much booster fuel do you have?! How can you keep spinning so much?!”

In the past, the Dark Zephyr indeed had to use its high-impulse boosters sparingly because it was prone to exhausting its booster fuel too quickly.

Juliet Stameros specifically addressed this shortcoming by switching over to a much better and more expensive booster model that was much more efficient!

Each activation only used up a fraction of the amount of fuel as before. The biggest downside was that it cost at least a hundred times more money to replenish the expended fuel, but this was more than an acceptable tradeoff to the wealthy Larkinson Clan.

Venerable Dukes eventually realized this as well. He was close to spitting out his blood.

”Is selling mechs that profitable to your clan?!”

The only major flaw of his opponent was that his resonance strength wasnʼt all that strong. Aside from that, the expert pilot vastly exceeded his peers in almost every other aspect!

This was why Venerable Osaia Dukes decisively abandoned his previous approach which sought to overpower the Dark Zephyr through a combination of superior skill and superior mech capabilities.

? Since he no longer possessed an advantage in either of these two areas, it was impossible to achieve victory through this manner!

Dukes and Hawkes had no choice but to pull out all of their trump cards in advance!