The Mech Touch

The emergence of fifteen expert candidates came as a very welcome surprise to Ves. Some of the figures he had long marked out as promising had finally taken the critical and most difficult step of realizing some of their spiritual potential!

For a long time, Ves was completely clueless about what allowed regular mech pilots to become expert candidates.

Mech pilots with spiritual potential were fairly rare, but there were plenty of them in the Larkinson Clan. Part of this is due to the high recruitment standards.

After all, those with spiritual potential usually enjoyed some modest advantages in piloting mechs. Many people interpreted this as an aspect of talent. Those with talent enjoyed greater resources and attention, which also prompted them to put more effort in their training in order to meet the expectations of their peers and teachers.

In prior months, the Larkinsons recruited quite a good amount of these talented mech pilots. Yet so far, none of them had succeeded in breaking through the critical barrier to expert candidate.

As far as Ves was concerned, this hurdle was as pivotal and arduous to overcome as the jump from Apprentice Mech Designer to Journeyman Mech Designer.

It was for this reason that Ves was surprised that not only the Ingvar siblings, but plenty of other Larkinsons broke through!

He noted that a fair amount of the new expert candidates piloted the Bright Warriors he had recently enhanced. Not all of them were 100 or 75 percent saturated. In fact, the expert candidates from the other mech forces such as the Sentinels piloted commercial mechs that Ves had nothing to do with! These expert candidates broke through without the help of LMC mechs!

This caused Ves to make some guesses. Piloting spiritually-enhanced mechs clearly helped, but they were not a critical necessity. Certainly, the astounding battle that involved multiple overpowering god-like entities must have certainly pushed them over the edge, but getting fifteen new expert candidates all at once seemed a bit too exaggerated.

Ves speculated that there was another factor that eased their breakthroughs. Something that applied to all of them, not just the mech pilots of the Bright Warrior model.

His eyes snapped to the huge but opaque vortex spinning lazily throughout space. This damn vortex was an enduring mystery of the Nyxian Gap and something that might even be the cause of the spatial warping.

Could bringing the imaginary realm closer to the material realm be the primary reason why so many mech pilots advanced to expert candidate?

Was the main reason why most spiritually-active pilots never found their opportunities to advance because they weren't in the right environment?

Aside from stimulating their potential through life-and-death battles, perhaps a better and safer way to help them advance was to bring them to areas where the imaginary and the real overlapped with each other!

Of course, that was easier said than done. The Nyxian Gap was an abnormal region where the imaginary realm was already pressed to the material realm. In civilized space, the two realms were more strictly divided, as they should be. Anomalies almost never took place in normal space.

At this time, the mechs piloted by the newly-advanced expert candidates exchanged their first blows against the dark god known as the Inexorable One!

The ranged mechs had already veered away and were firing their laser rifles at the giant grey bird with coordinated attacks. Hot laser beams struck the head of the Inexorable One.

"Aim for the eyes!" Captain Casella Ingvar commanded. "It might not do anything to this huge monster, but it will give us an easy way to concentrate our firepower!"

Usual ranged attacks did nothing to the materialized spiritual body of the dark god. Not even the enriched nuclear missiles launched by the Bright Warriors inflicted any serious damage on the giant bird.

This was different! Though the laser beams fired by the handful of mechs seemed weak, each of them were empowered by resonance. This gave the attacks some bite, just enough to inflict some real wounds on the dark god.

One mech in particular caused Inexorable One a fair amount of grief. The resonance infused in the beam caused it to darken to an extent.

These less eye-catching dark red beams did not light up the surrounding space as much as the other attacks, but they pierced deeper into the dark god's spiritual body.

Not only that, the insidious attacks also contained a corrosive element, causing the wounds to grow more severe.

The eyeballs of the Inexorable One were taking quite a beating!

The Inexorable One intimidatingly spread her wings and released a sharp cry! Though the shrill spiritual waves buffeted the incoming mechs with violent oscillations, the resonance shields produced by forced resonance provided them with adequate protection!

"Cry all you want, you overgrown chicken! We Larkinsons shall never falter!" Imon Ingvar roared as his swordsman Bright Warrior was the first to arrive!

With a sweep of his mech's bright, glowing sword, his mech struck the left wing of the Inexorable One. His blade had barely cut into a giant feather before a small but intense explosion rocked the wound!

Though Imon briefly wondered where the explosion came from, he was too caught up in the struggle to pause. His Bright Warrior agilely moved back as the huge wing attempted to slap his machine aside!

Though the Inexorable One tried to distance herself from the annoying mechs, the melee mechs constantly assaulted her wings. Empowered by forced resonance, the damage output of these mechs had reached a level where the wings were steadily taking more and more damage.

The Inexorable One released another angry shriek! She flapped her wings regardless of the mechs assaulting them. At the cost of incurring some damage, she managed to free her wings long enough to flap them in a peculiar way.

A large amount of vortices emerged around her! The temporarily-empowered mechs all got caught in them. The resonance shields did their best to shield the mechs from these traps, but none of them possessed Venerable Tusa's ability to ignore them outright!

Only Imon Ingvar managed to free his mech. His bright golden resonance shield burned like a star. The spiritual vortex that trapped his Bright Warrior steadily weakened until the mech finally came free.

"Hah! Your tricks don't—URK!"

His mech got caught in yet another vortex. While his shield slowly caused it to burn, it took too long for his mech to regain its freedom!

In the meantime, the Inexorable One managed to slip away. After she finally managed to gain some distance, a rain of empowered laser beams kept hitting her eyes.

Her mounting rage caused her to direct her ire at the ranged mechs.

Perhaps sensing the challenge in the Inexorable One's stare, Casella Ingvar abruptly stopped her fire. "Careful, the big bird is targeting us! Spread out and don't get hit!"

The ranged mechs hastily split up from each other, but that did not stop the Inexorable One from flapping her wings and darting forward!

With a vengeful shriek, the Inexorable One raised her talons forward and caught an unlikely Vandal ranged mech in her grasp!

"No! Eject!"

"I can't!"

After catching her prey, the Inexorable One increased the force applied by her feet. Her sharp talons pierced through the weakening resonance shield of the trapped mech.

As soon as the resonance shield finally popped, the talons cruelly sliced through the mech, instantly slicing it into pieces!

Casella and every other expert candidate momentarily hitched their breaths.

A new expert candidate of the Larkinson Clan had died just a short time after breaking through!

The ranged mech the Vandal expert candidate piloted was just an outdated military mech. Its defensive parameters were not much different from regular third-class mechs. Such low defense was completely useless against an overwhelmingly powerful opponent.

Buoyed by her success, the Inexorable One repeated her attack. She swooped in on another ranged mech and caught it with her talents! The Living Sentinel's resonance shield lasted even shorter than the last one. With a powerful thrust of her beak, the dark impaled the cockpit of the fragile mech and instantly crushed the body of yet another valuable expert candidate!

"Damnit, we need the help of our melee mechs! Help them get rid of the vortices!"

The ranged mechs no longer focused their fire on the Inexorable One and shot at the traps keeping the melee specialists in place. The melee mechs for their part actively attacked the vortices as well, allowing them to get free a bit faster.

Imon Ingvar was the first of the batch to get free. His mech bravely flew forward like a bright golden comet.

"Your opponent is me, you damn bird!"

"Imon! Wait!" Casella called out.

Her brother did not listen to her words. To her, he was acting foolhardy again. Normally, that wasn't much of a problem if the only enemies he faced were pirates, but this time they were fighting against something greater!

The violent approach of Imon Ingvar's mech quickly attracted the big bird's attention. The Inexorable One gave up chasing after another ranged mech and instead swooped in the direction of her latest challenger!

"Help him! Shoot the bird's legs!"

Powerful laser beams raked the bird's legs, but the attacks didn't cause enough damage to dissuade the Inexorable One from going through with her attack.

As the dark god and glowing mech clashed, Imon managed to chop into one of his opponent's feet! A bright explosion exacerbated the damage and crippled the limb for a moment!

Unfortunately for him, the other talon managed to grasp and lock his mech into place. The Inexorable One already began to apply a lot of force. Imon screamed as his forced resonance rapidly faded.

"Imon!"

Casella Ingvar grew more desperate and poured more power into her attacks. Her crude methods did indeed result in greater damage to the Inexorable One's leg, but her forced resonance faded even faster!

With a cruel glint in its damaged but regenerating eyes, the Inexorable One crushed the mech she grasped with her foot!

While her talons managed to dig into the mech, they failed to slice the mech into pieces! A Bright Warrior was vastly more resilient than a third-class mech. Though the mech was slowly being compressed, the cockpit and some of the internals still remained intact.

Seeing that her grip failed to crush the golden mech, the Inexorable One reared her head back as if she was about to peck it with a single, crushing blow.

"LET MY BROTHER GO!"

In desperation, Casella exceeded the safety limits of her mech's laser rifle. She poured all of her will and urgency into the attack.

As soon as she pulled the trigger, a dark beam sliced across space and impacted the Inexorable One's damaged leg!

The powerful attack not only inflicted more damage upon impact, but also corroded and froze a modest portion of the spiritual flesh around the wound. The damage quickly grew severe enough for the limb to snap!

Even though Casella felt more tired than ever, she smiled as she saw a fellow Bright Warrior mech picking up the damaged wreck of her brother mech.

The fight wasn't over yet, though. Angry at the loss of her leg, the Inexorable One attempted to regenerate the limb, only to be stopped by the dark corrosive energy exacerbating her wound.

Seeing that these annoying mechs had dealt more damage than they ought to, the grey bird furiously flapped her wings and attacked another glowing Bright Warrior mech with her beak!

The first peck dimmed its resonance shield.

The second peck popped the resonance shield entirely.

The next pecks after that rapidly caused the chest of the mech to cave in. Just a few seconds later, the Inexorable One's pointed beak rose with a smidgen of blood marring its tip.

It had not taken long for the dark god to fell another promising expert candidate. She was truly inexorable!