The Mech Touch

The first attempt yielded a disappointing result, but Ves already anticipated this outcome.

It was too much to ask for a single copy of the Blinding Mech to debilitate another mech pilot.

Theoretically, it made little sense. The Illustrious One was not as powerful as the Superior Mother and the Blinding Mech wasn't capable of channeling a lot of spiritual energy.

The Blinding Mech was not a prime mech. It did not carry an entire reserve of spiritual energy transferred from the Illustrious One in advance. Even if it did, it wouldn't be of any use as only expert pilots were capable of utilizing such mechs.

There was no way the Hex Army had enough expert pilots to spare on the Blinding Mechs!

Even if it did, the Hexers would never put these precious individuals in cannon fodder mechs!

Each aspect of the Blinding Mech was either cheap or disposable. At its lowest level, the model was merely a vehicle to channel one of the Illustrious One's unique spiritual characteristics.

On paper, this meant that it didn't matter whether the mech was cheap or expensive in construction. Its spiritual characteristics wouldn't be any less potent if Ves designed it as a third-class mech instead.

While Ves wasn't wrong in thinking so, he was hoping a stronger effect than a negligible fluctuation.

"Ready nine more Blinding Mechs."

Once a squad of Blinding Mechs exposed the luminar crystals embedded into their shields, their mech pilots simultaneously triggered the same ability!

This time, the effect on the target mech pilot was a bit more noticeable. While the ordinary mech did not experience anything except for moderate visual flashes, the pilot actually blinked his eyes for a moment.

Yet that was all. While the distance between the observation room and the testing ground was a bit far, Ves could still see that the overlapping Blinding Pulses hardly resulted in a stronger impact.

"Prepare all 40 Blinding Mechs."

It was only when an entire mech company worth of Blinding Mechs activated their Blinding Pulse abilities at once that the target mech pilot experienced actual differences!

"Ahh!"

The mech pilot blinked several times while trying to nurse his head through his helmet. His discomfort was evident as the telemetry transmitted by his mech showed some concerning fluctuations.

The effect was moderate enough to affect the mech pilot's performance in battle, but not enough to knock him out of action entirely.

The Blinding Mech performed much worse than the Ferocious Piranha and the Valkyrie Redeemer in that regard!

"Okay, let's put an expert pilot in front of the Blinding Mechs. Who is on duty this time?"

Catherine Evenson "Ah, let me call up Venerable Tusa Billingsley-Larkinson. He is on standby right now with his prime mech."

The Piranha Prime walked out of a mech hangar with slow, light steps. The mech stepped in front of the formation of Blinding Mechs and simply stood in place.

Ves shifted his gaze to the camera feed of the cockpit. Tusa looked incredibly bored. He didn't want to waste his time on serving as a practice target for an experimental new mech. The only reason why he showed up with his prime mech at all was because someone had to do the job and he happened to get the short end of the stick.

"Let's get this over with, please." Venerable Tusa flatly said.

Though his attitude could use some adjustment, Ves didn't care too much about what the expert pilot thought. The Blinding Mechs had an expert pilot to try their abilities out and that was enough.

"Commence the test!"

The luminar crystal-encrusted shields flashed yet again. Different energy waves washed over the low-intensity resonance shield Piranha Prime.

Nothing else happened!

Ves briefly smiled before he went back to a frown.

The reason for the former was because he confirmed something that was very helpful to the effectiveness of the Blinding Mech.

Though the sensors hadn't been able to detect any spiritual interactions, Ves clearly perceived that the combined spiritual emissions from the Blinding Mechs succeeded in passing through the Piranha Prime's resonance shield!

For some unfathomable reason, the resonance shield failed to designate the spiritual emissions as an attack. The barrier let the spiritual flashes pass through as if they were just harmless rays of light.

This was a pretty confounding interaction. Ves couldn't help but rub his smooth-shaven chin as he tried to figure out how resonance shields worked.

Who or what determined the defensive parameters of a resonance shield? Were all of them the same, or did they only block attacks the expert pilot deemed harmful?

For now, it seemed that the latter was true. Ves never programmed anything related to resonance shields when he developed his prime mechs. They only emerged when expert pilots interfaced with his primer mechs.

This indirectly suggested that a lot of spiritual manifestations were rooted in the mech pilot rather than the mech. The former had to be strong, but the latter didn't necessarily have to be the best.

This was an interesting little insight, but not one that changed the overall outcome of this test.

Catherine issued a single request over a private command channel.

"Venerable Tusa, please describe your experiences during the brief event."

"I… dunno really. I feel like someone flashes me in the eyes, but my mech automatically filtered out the excess luminosity captured by its optical sensors. I still felt a bit strange though. Maybe some of the sensors got damaged during the Battle of Reckoning. Please tell someone to inspect my prime mech after this is over."

"Ahem." Catherine slightly coughed. "Did you experience any discomfort or debilitating effects at all during the brief interval when the Blinding Mechs were flashing their shields?"

"No." Tusa replied in an impatient tone. "I felt a little weird, but not enough to affect me in any way. It takes way more than a strange twinkle to distract me from my goal."

After asking a few more questions which yielded several more disappointing answers, Catherine eventually turned to her superior.

"As you can see, sir, a full mech company of Blinding Mechs failed to debilitate Venerable Tusa Billingsley-Larkinson in any way."

"Have you performed this test on any other expert pilot?"

"We did." She nodded. "Venerable Joshua exhibited an even milder reaction towards the Blinding Mechs."

All in all, Ves figured the fundamental problem behind the lack of effectiveness.

The triggered ability was just too weak.

Expert pilots possessed firm minds that could endure a lot of internal and external stresses. It took a lot of disrupting to throw them off-balance.

In its current state, the Blinding Mech would never be able to disturb any expert pilot no matter how many of them were deployed at once.

Ves didn't think the addition of a couple of hundred Blinding Mechs would change the fundamental result. As he had just observed, the intensity of the Blinding Pulse did not scale linearly when multiple of them were stacked together.

Instead, just like glows, the combined effect was only mildly stronger than just a single spiritual emission. The only major advantage was that it became a lot harder to disrupt all of them, which was only useful if the damned ability did anything in the first place.

"You can resume the regular schedule." Ves sighed and turned away from the observation window. "I have seen enough for now. I'll be down at the hangar bay to take a look at the prototypes up close."

Half an hour later, the Blinding Mechs all moved to their assigned places in the hangar bay and powered down. The Living Sentinel mech pilots all exited the cockpits and moved to a debriefing room in order to document their individual experiences.

Ves approached a random prototype and looked up at the tall and heavy machine. Its thick frame and hefty shield exuded a subtle atmosphere that was completely different from that of his other Hexer mechs.

The Illustrious One possessed a very understated glow despite the light shows he frequently generated. Ves didn't even pretend how this worked. He just wanted to focus on the Blinding Mech's spiritual foundation and spiritual construct he shaped to enable its primary purpose.

"Blinding an expert pilot is harder than I thought." He muttered.

"Meow." Lucky echoed as he floated around the Blinding Mech in question.

The cat sniffed the mech up close but immediately flew backwards. Lucky was repelled by the mech! Not a single portion of its bulky frame contained any attractive exotics.

According to his nose, the Blinding Mech was the equivalent of a nutrient pack! Other than filling up his stomach, the mech possessed no other value!

Ves sneered at his pet. "I remember a time where you wouldn't hesitate to eat junk exotics that are primarily used to make third-class mechs. Even if the Blinding Mech is a budget model, it's still a second-class machine!"

"Meow!" Lucky arrogantly huffed while distancing himself from what he considered to be a disgusting meal.

Not even a gem cat valued the Blinding Mech. Ves was quite depressed by all of the bad news surrounding this project. The mech design was an ambitious experiment, but right now Ves didn't see any way of getting it to work.

As Ves experienced many times throughout his mech design career, the simplest problems were also the hardest ones to solve.

"There's a lack of power."

It was impossible to affect change without supplying energy. If there wasn't energy to fuel a reaction, then the effect would always disappoint no matter what it was supposed to achieve.

It was like pitting his Unending Regalia suit against a mech. Even though his combat armor largely consisted of near-indestructible Unending alloy that was worth as much as entire starships, any ordinary mech could easily defeat it by stepping onto the suit!

In this example, the difference in scale resulted in a massive difference in power that simply couldn't be surmounted by the weaker side.

The Blinding Mech was not as small as a personal suit, but from a spiritual perspective it might as well be. It was just an ordinary mech paired with an ordinary mech pilot. This combination didn't even come close enough to matching the spiritual strength of an expert pilot!

"We might need a thousand Blinding Mechs to achieve an effective result against a single expert pilot, and only against a weaker one!"

This was too unreasonable. While the Blinding Mech was designed to be deployed en masse, it took too much resources, manpower and transportation capacity to put the model to use in this case.

When he traveled down to this testing facility, he thought the problem was more technical.

Yet when he examined the spiritual construct and the Illustrious One's interaction with it in detail, he concluded that it was working exactly as intended.

The spiritual parts were all doing what they were supposed to do. The input was just too feeble to achieve a strong enough output.

"This isn't the first time I'm dealing with a lack of energy." Ves grumbled.

Right now, he didn't see any way for him to supply the Blinding Mech with additional spiritual energy. The mech was already straining to draw as much as it could accomplish from the Illustrious One.

It wasn't enough.

"At least my prime mechs have another source of energy."

Those were different circumstances. What Ves needed to do was to achieve a comparable result but without the benefit of prime materials, manual preparations and expert pilots.

"This is impossible!"

Free energy did not just show up out of nowhere! Even the Illustrious One had to divert the harvest he received from the modestly-growing number of mech pilots of the recently-released Crystal Lord Mark II.

While the third-class rifleman mech model had achieved a decent degree of popularity, it was more of a hidden gem at the moment. The original Ferocious Piranha sales hadn't abated yet, so it was still attracting the most attention out of all of the LMC's mech catalog!

For these reasons and more, the Illustrious One could only do so much. Even if he was as strong as the Superior Mother, he wouldn't be able to sustain the effective functioning of the Blinding Mech for long.

"I need another source of energy." Ves concluded.

Yet where could he possibly obtain one? Due to all of the aforementioned limitations, he did not possess anything that could address this vital need.

"Wait a minute." He suddenly paused. "At least one of my battle prizes may be capable of generating energy!"

His thoughts went back on one of his most significant harvests from the Battle against the Abyss. For all this time, he barely paid any attention to it because he was immersed in his immediate priorities.

It wasn't until now that he possessed an actual need for it. For the first time in months, Ves finally thought about the namesake of Unending alloy.