The Mech Touch

Ves grinned so widely that it looked as if he was about to break his mouth!

How could he not be satisfied with the Dark Zephyrʼs insane turnaround and stellar performance?

Even when his Dark Zephyr was fighting against two formidable mid-tier expert mechs, it did not look at all as if it was getting beat up without any chance of counterattacking anymore.

It had firmly reversed its previous trend and wholly taken the initiative by adopting an extremely aggressive approach!

The immediate return on investment of gifting over a valuable enlightenment fruit to Venerable Tusa was a lot higher than Ves expected!

He had vaguely known that the Shadow Dance could instill a person with a powerful and extraordinary fighting style, but he didnʼt expect to see such a massive increase in effective combat power.

”Tusa has truly become unleashed now that he can leverage the properties of his expert mech to a much greater degree!” Ves concluded.

The drastic changes emphasized how crucial it was to cultivate the skills of his expert pilots. It was not enough for him to focus most of his efforts into increasing the performance of his expert mechs.

A part of Ves even felt a bit of regret that he had not chosen for the Mech Pilot Cultivation upgrade track back then. He had a feeling that if he chose to go on this path, he would gain much easier access to functions that could allow him to boost many other mech pilots in this fashion.

”Oh well, what I have right now isnʼt so bad either.”

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Ves had observed many powerful enlightenment fruits hanging on the Tree of Possibilities that could impart all kinds of other powerful skills that were suitable to different expert pilots that specialized in different mech types.

He just had to earn enough Ascension Points or somehow get lucky and win a powerful fruit in his next lottery draws.

”It would be best if I can inject powerful fighting skills directly into the minds of expert pilots through a more controllable method, though.”

That was way too far away for him right now. His previous attempts to achieve similar results were either too risky or did not achieve the desired effect. Without a breakthrough in his spiritual engineering capabilities, it was too difficult for him to develop imitation enlightenment fruits that could give other mech pilots the powerful skills that Tusa had received.

Ves directed his attention back to the impressive show staged by the Dark Zephyr.

The way it fought and the way that Venerable Tusa channeled his willpower made it seem as if he was truly treating the battlefield as a stage for his dance performance.

It was beautiful and entrancing to the point where Ves detected that his judgment was actually being affected at the moment.

The power of Tusaʼs Shadow Dance actually possessed a hypnotic component!

”Perhaps hypnotic isnʼt the right way to describe it. He is somehow deceiving everyone through his performance into lowering their vigilance.”

Ordinary opponents would probably become so entranced by the Dark Zephyrʼs manipulative actions that they would probably be caught off-guard once the expert mech finally sank its daggers into its targets!

Of course, expert pilots such as Dukes and Hawkes would never get fooled this way.

This was why the Dark Zephyr attacked the Quadknife head-on! Tusa clearly wanted to overpower the damage to his opponent while his own mech could still last!

Ves frowned a bit when he took note of how much Tusa was pushing the Dark Zephyr at the moment.

Even with its latest upgrade, the Dark Zephyr had never been designed to fight in this way!

If Ves anticipated that Venerable Tusa suddenly acquired the Shadow Dance Dagger Style a few years ago, he would have altered the requirements of the upgrade project and strengthened specific parts of the mech frame to endure all of the added forces.

The strain on the Dark Zephyr had multiplied by at least two times because of the new combat approach. The Shadow Dance Dagger Style that Venerable Tusa was pulling off imposed multiple heavy burdens to the less resilient parts and systems of the expert light skirmisher.

Even if the Dark Zephyr was built to high standards, it could not keep up this level of intensity for long!

”Iʼm not sure it will last more than five or six minutes at this rate.” Ves estimated.

After that, the Dark Zephyr would ultimately run out of booster fuel. Even if that didnʼt happen yet, its most vulnerable components would have endured so many stresses that it wasnʼt possible anymore to utilize them at 100 percent capacity.

If Venerable Tusa did not heed the warnings and continued to push his Dark Zephyr to this extent, then he was liable to break something important!

This would cause his expert mech to falter and become instantly exposed to his enemies.

In effect, Tusaʼs situation was not as optimistic as it looked. The Dark Zephyr needed to finish off the Quadknife and the Filamon quickly before it ran out of steam, but would the Nidin Verger expert mechs truly be willing to roll over after suffering a single setback?

As the Quadknifeʼs resonance shield had reached a dire state, Venerable Dukes channeled his urgency and his desperate desire to protect his fellow Fridaymen from the evil Hexers into the deepest parts of his expert mech.

This change caused the expert mech designed by Master Ishi Veldam to unleash its hidden power!

Not only did the expert mech grow hotter, but as the Dark Zephyr came close, the Quadknife struck back with considerably greater power and ferocity than before!

This wasnʼt all, though. Aside from resonating with expert mech, Venerable Dukes also resonated with the knives held in his expert mechʼs hands.

These transphasic weapons shook as the phasewater integrated into them became fully excited.

Dukes paid a considerable price in order to maximize the destructive and penetrative power of these weapons!

”Break for me, Zephyr!”

Even though Venerable Tusaʼs expert mech had been on the attack for a while, its resonance shield never recovered.

Instead, it had continued to accumulate damage all this time.

As a result, the latest combination strike from the Quadknife finally broke the Dark Zephyrʼs first and important layer of defense!

”Ha! Weʼve finally cracked open your shell!”

It didnʼt really matter to Venerable Dukes that his transphasic power strike failed to inflict substantial damage to the Dark Zephyrʼs frame.

One of the fully-activated knives held by the Quadknife had gone on to stab through several layers of the Dark Zephyrʼs thin exterior.

The transphasic knife should have been able to sink much deeper into the armor of a more conventional expert light mech.

It was only by virtue of the Dark Zephyrʼs Unending alloy armor system that the transphasic knife hadnʼt been able to punch through the armor in a single go. This might not be the case if a larger and stronger expert mech had launched this attack!

”Damn.” Venerable Tusa softly cursed as he suddenly needed to put a lot more focus on evading incoming attacks. ”All of this phasewater tech has really messed up the old rules.”

Unending alloy which Tusa previously considered almost invincible against the same level of opponent suddenly became a lot less valuable with the introduction of transphasic weapons.

Even though the Gauge Dynasty had only been rooted in the Red Ocean for less than a decade, this was more than enough time for its scientists and engineers to master the preliminary uses of phasewater and develop all kinds of interesting transphasic technology.

Due to cost constraints and phasewater scarcity, only mid-tier and high-tier expert mechs received transphasic equipment. The phasewater content in them was also quite low, but even a few grams of phasewater could make a substantial difference in lethality!

It wasnʼt just the Quadknife that possessed this capability either.

The Filamon also posed a much more dangerous threat now that it was possible to target the individual components of the Dark Zephyr!

Venerable Hawkes had gone from an annoyance into a fatal threat towards Venerable Tusa.

This was because the female expert pilot had always sought to attack the rear of the Dark Zephyr whenever possible.

Venerable Tusa had no choice but to move a lot more cautiously. He couldnʼt even spin as recklessly as before as Venerable Hawkes always had a chance to land her transphasic attacks onto the flight system or more importantly the combat drive of the Dark Zephyr.

He truly couldnʼt afford to lose either of these parts!

Though the shadowy Dark Zephyr started to perform all kinds of elaborate evasive movements, Tusa simply couldnʼt prevent his expert mech from getting pierced by thin but extremely penetrating spikes.

A few of them even sunk so deep that they damaged some of the internal components of his expert mech!

The Filamon truly showcased its deadly potential at the moment. Venerable Hawkes just needed to get lucky once in order to cripple or disable the Dark Zephyrʼs flight system, thereby instantly plummeting its mobility to the bottom!

”Iʼll puncture you with my spikes until youʼve become a hedgehog!” Venerable Hawkes cried as she summoned the utmost of her skill to prevent the Dark Zephyr from escaping from her sights.

Her expert harasser mech became so threatening to Tusa that he determined he needed to take it down right away.

Though the Quadknife was more powerful in absolute terms, it was too difficult for it to target the Dark Zephyrʼs rear under normal circumstances.

”I need to break this sandwich!” Venerable Tusa realized. ”The best way to do this is to remove the weakest bread slice!”

The Dark Zephyr collided its daggers against the knives of the Quadknife once again!

Due to the latterʼs transphasic properties, the Larkinson expert mechʼs daggers actually incurred a bit of damage to the flat of their blades.

Normally, Venerable Tusa would have tried to avoid this outcome, but this time he had gritted his teeth and accepted this price in order to borrow from the reaction force.

The push it received from the Quadknife along with the activation of its flight system and the right boosters allowed the Dark Zephyr to bounce away and turn around so that it was able to leap towards the Filamon!

Numerous thin spikes sank into the Dark Zephyrʼs chest and limbs and Tusa had to make sure to shield the more critical parts of his expert mech by tucking in its arms.

Though the Filamon had already attempted to boost away with the help of its combat drive, the Dark Zephyr simply activated its own Stiletto Drive and was able to gain much more speed due to its higher performance level!

Yet before the Dark Zephyr could even get close, Venerable Hawkes resonated extra hard with the flight system of her expert mech.

Soon enough, the Filamon literally seemed to super stutter through space at an appallingly high speed!

The distance between the two expert mechs had multiplied by almost fifty times in a matter of a couple of seconds!

Even though the Filamon couldnʼt maintain this super stuttered movement for long, the results were more than worth it as it had flown well out of grenade tossing range!

”Hah, didnʼt expect that, didnʼt you? You can forget about catching up to me, Larkinson!”

If that wasnʼt enough, the Filamon that had just reached a much safer distance began to prepare another resonance ability.

After Venerable Hawkes spent a few seconds on resonating with her filament rifle, it suddenly shot out a rapid salvo of glowing spikes soared towards the Dark Zephyrʼs position and every immediate space around it at five times their usual speed!

Venerable Tusa and his expert mech barely had any time to react. In fact, he already sensed extreme danger heading in his direction, so he had already started to turn around his expert mech so that its feet pointed towards the Filamon in an effort to minimize its exposed surface area.

Even then, it was too late as three of the powerful glowing spikes managed to punch deep through the Unending alloy!

It was only through skill and rapid thinking that Tusa was able to ensure that two of the spikes ended up puncturing the legs while the final one poked a whole straight through the dagger that his expert mech quickly put in the way.

If the latter one had been allowed to go through, it would have certainly punched through the side of the torso!

”Damnit! You guys are ruining my daggers!”

The worst part about the Filamonʼs latest attack was that it had knocked the Dark Zephyr out of warp travel.

Venerable Tusa could already feel the Quadknife charging towards his expert mech from behind!