The Mech Touch

The Dark Zephyr had crossed an enormous distance in a short amount of time. Its speed wasn't as blazing as other expert mechs, but its skillful expert pilot and its emphasis on evasion allowed it to start its end run without suffering any crippling damage.

Many other expert mechs would have been torn to pieces by the Gauss Baron by now! It was a massive accomplishment for Venerable Tusa to get this close to a hostile expert heavy artillery mech by relying mostly on itself.

However, the hardest part came last. Not only did the Dark Zephyr have to bypass or fight through a horde of dwarven escort mechs, but it also had to find a way to get past the heavily-armored bunker that had taken an enormous beating but still remained fully intact.

Then, Venerable Tusa had to attack the Gauss Baron itself, and he seriously doubted that the expert heavy artillery mech would just roll over and allow itself to get butchered by a human expert mech.

Dozens of different scenarios swept through the expert pilot's mind as he still tried his best to evade as many attacks as possible. While Tusa could readily ignore the impacts from ordinary artillery mechs especially because most of them missed anyway, the Gauss Baron's firepower took an increasingly greater toll on his expert mech.

"Hang on, buddy! We're almost there!"

Numerous internal systems and components have already started transmitting error messages. Though mechs were large and robust enough to be able to function despite suffering from malfunctions, it was a bad sign that the Dark Zephyr had reached this condition.

The line that separated a slightly damaged mech and a heavily damaged mech was quite blurred! This was because even a single malfunction or misaligned element created a vulnerability that could easily be exploited if the system in question received another substantial blow.

All of this meant that Venerable Tusa could not afford to delay his high-risk assault. The longer his expert mech was out in open space, the more opportunities the Gauss Baron and the Slug Rangers obtained to thwart his attack.

When he studied the enemy escort mechs getting pressured by distant artillery bombardment, he did not see many openings that his expert mech could squeeze through in order to reach the target bunker. The bombardment from the Eye of Ylvaine could only yield so many results.

"Then I don't have any choice but to resort to that trick…"

Compared to the Piranha Prime, the Dark Zephyr was a much more capable machine. He would have never had the guts to overcome these barriers when he was still piloting his previous mech.

Throughout this battle, Venerable Tusa had continued to increase his resonance with his own mech. The Dark Zephyr came more and more to life as Tusa depended on it to a greater degree while he was desperate to overcome the attacks launched by the dwarves.

With an entire expert heavy artillery mech doing its utmost to shoot down his expert light skirmisher, Tusa felt more free and untouchable than ever!

"We are untouchable!"

As the end run proceeded, the distance between the Dark Zephyr and the Lemogo Distat had shrunken down to less than fifty kilometers. In space combat terms, this was a tiny distance for a light mech!

A shimmering light blue form rapidly soared towards the flagship of the Slug Ranger. At this point, Venerable Tusa finally decided to activate his expert mech's resonance shield.

He did not activate it because he wanted to preserve the integrity of his mech. The thin layer of Unending alloy had done an admirable job at keeping everything critical in working condition.

Instead, Tusa wanted to borrow the special damage mitigating properties of resonance shields.

A silent impact struck the resonance shield of his Dark Zephyr as the Gauss Baron managed to land another powerful hit despite Tusa's best effort to dodge the attack.

However, unlike before, the Dark Zephyr hardly staggered this time. The resonance shield successfully absorbed a huge proportion of damaging kinetic energy and transferred it.. elsewhere instead of transmitting the force to the expert mech frame.

If that happened, then the Dark Zephyr would have staggered just like before and disrupt Venerable Tusa's rhythm during these crucial moments.

"I'm not going to let you stop me! Hit me if you can, dwarf, but I shall always be free to move how I wish!" Tusa roared as he fully became invested in completing his mission!

As the sight of the Lemogo Distat rapidly grew in the Dark Zephyr's optical sensor readings, Venerable Tusa felt as if he had become incredibly in tune with his expert mech.

He not only utilized the Dark Zephyr in the ways it performed the best, but also conformed to the original design intent of this expert mech.

What Venerable Tusa was doing was exactly what Ves and the other designers had in mind when they spent months developing its design!

This not only made Venerable Tusa happy, but also evoked a lot of joy in the mech itself!

The former's deep investment in his difficult task and the latter's eagerness to fulfill its battle partner's demands caused the two to combine their forces in a wonderful way.

At the final stretch, the resonance shield of the Dark Zephyr had already turned ragged after blocking a couple of powerful resonance-enhanced blows. It was not a space knight or a heavy mech after all, so it did not contain a lot of defensive resonance materials that could add more durability to its resonance shield.

"It's enough!"

Tusa didn't need anymore as by this time his swift and elusive Dark Zephyr had finally reached the last couple of kilometers to the bunker of his primary target!

"Shoot it down! Block its way! Dogpile on it if you must! Don't let it get any closer to the Gauss Baron!"

Alarmed by the lone expert light skirmisher's successful approach, the commanders of the Slug Rangers ordered more ranged mechs to forget about their current assignments and direct their fire towards the Dark Zephyr, but even now the mech's evasive maneuvers were far too difficult for average mech pilots to track and predict.

"This light mech is too confounding!"

"I can't predict his movements!"

"Even if we get lucky, our shots aren't doing anything to this mech!"

The Dark Zephyr turned into a nightmare for the Slug Rangers. It was ridiculous how a single expert light mech managed to make the dwarves feel this way, but there was nothing funny about letting a deadly expert mech get close to a fleet.

During the Battle of Reckoning, the Larkinson Clan almost came to an end when Venerable Kelvin Praetor and his Trost had closed in on the Spirit of Bentheim.

If not for the sudden breakthroughs of both Taon Melin and Vincent Ricklin, the battle could have ended in a radically different way.

"A dwarf isn't going to break through right now, right?" Venerable Tusa momentarily thought before throwing this consideration away.

Even if a desperate dwarven mech pilot had reached the pit of desperation and managed to break through, so what? Tusa and his expert mech were in their element right now! The Dark Zephyr's blade was already starting to glow in anticipation of cutting apart an enemy expert mech!

"FORM UP! FORM UP!" A dwarven officer commanded the escort mechs! "Ignore the bombardment and form a wall! Even if your mech gets wrecked, it is still of use even if it only blocks the enemy expert mech for half a second."

The escort mechs did not just physically block the way to the bunker, but an increasing number of regular artillery mechs were frantically trying to flood the zone in front of it with as much ordinance as possible.

As long as the Dark Zephyr got caught in this zone for an extended amount of time, then the sheer weight of fire would definitely put it in a bad condition.

Venerable Tusa only had one shot!

"Stark! Are you ready?!"

"Go for it." The woman calmly replied.

The Dark Zephyr was ordinarily supposed to be a subtle mech, but now it glowed in bright blue as Tusa resonated with it as much as possible!

Just as his expert mech reached the wall of escort mechs, he employed a trick that he had recently managed to perform but wasn't in any of the manuals of the design.

"ENDLESS PATHS!"

Over a dozen different Dark Zephyrs sprung from the original mech as it almost reached the side of the Lemogo Distat!

The Slug Ranger capital ship loomed large as the extra Dark Zephyrs each followed an independent trajectory as they tried their best to pass or circumvent the blockade of mechs.

The opposing mech pilots all thought that the enemy light skirmisher had deployed yet another decoy ability.

Yet these successive expert mechs were not illusions or projections that barely held any substance. When they bulled through dwarven mechs or sliced their blades onto solid matter, each and every one of the Dark Zephyrs inflicted real damage!

In fact, even their resonance and will domains were real!

"Ahh! Isn't this supposed to be a decoy?!"

""The real one is here!"

"No, it's here!"

"They're all real!" A dwarf mech pilot reacted with horror.

Moments later, an incredibly sharp mech knife stabbed straight through the chest plating of his mech and instantly penetrated the cockpit!

"Triggering Alpha 5!" Venerable Leiva shouted as she pulled a special trigger!

In an instant, a massive explosion erupted from the sides of her bunker. The directional explosives were so powerful that many closer dwarven mechs shattered to pieces as they were included in the blast range.

Many of the Dark Zephyrs that looked like illusions but actually performed as if they were fully authentic disappeared as they got swept in the explosion!

As the blast wave slowly faded away, the integrity of the bunker was hardly affected. Instead, the sides looked torn and blackened as the explosives buried in those sections had torn an ugly rectangle in the hull sections around the bunker.

Venerable Leiva Hinder didn't care about the ruined aesthetics. She still remained on guard as she tried to spot where the actual Dark Zephyr had disappeared. From the durability it had shown a moment earlier, the explosive trap shouldn't have been strong enough to shatter it to pieces.

Still, the force of the explosion was so large that even sturdier and more durable expert mechs should have suffered a lot of malfunctions if they came close enough!

"Where are you?"

As Venerable Leiva fully concentrated her attention on her immediate surroundings in order to catch any hint of movement that suggested a lurking enemy expert mech, she almost became surprised when a distant but extremely powerful beam suddenly struck her bunker!

She sensed an extreme threat from this attack!

"MAXIMUM DEFENSE!"

The gun ports of her bunker slid shut and extra layers of armor continued to slide into place.

The resonance shield of her Gauss Baron also flared to life at its strongest setting just in case the earlier measures weren't enough!

Just as her mech began to get surrounded by a dark orange resonance shield, Venerable Leiva looked on with horror as the ultra-powerful beam sliced a wide hole right through multiple layers of expert mech-grade alloy plating as if it was butter!

Though the extremely strange and anomalous attack had expended much of its energy and dealt negligible damage to her mech's resonance shield, the danger had not yet passed.

A smaller but still relatively powerful resonance-enhanced beam shot right through the hole that had just been sliced open.

This time, the modest white beam impacted the powerful resonance shield of the Gauss Baron and destabilized it to such a degree that it was as if the expert artillery mech got struck by a hundred mechs at once!

The resonance shield soon fizzled out as Venerable Leiva was no longer able to resonate effectively with her mech. The powerful blow had inflicted a surprisingly large amount of strain to her will and mind!

"No!"

A third and different beam struck right afterwards! This one was even weaker but splashed onto the energy shield that the Gauss Baron automatically activated with extremely minimal delay.

The energy shield acted as if the expert mech had been struck by an EMP attack and lost a lot of stability.

Now, the only defenses the Gauss Baron had left was its armor, but it was also the most difficult defensive measure to overcome. The high quality of its armor system and its frontal plating was so thick that even the earlier powerful attack wouldn't be able to penetrate through all of this high-quality material!