The Mech Touch

At the end of the day, Master Dervidian collected enough data and formed enough insights to possess a greater understanding of the transcendence glow.

Aside from tossing Terrans and Rubarthans into the testing chamber and seeing whether they would perish or persist, the incredibly curious MTA Master also conducted a lot of other useful tests.

For example, commandeered the main mech sparring grounds of the Paracelsus Optimus to simulate what had happened during the Battle of Purgatory.

In order to provide the greatest stimulation to the mech pilots that were supposed to fight each other to death, Master Dervidian set up a deathmatch that pitted Terrans and Rubarthans against each other!

"We will give you back the mechs we have confiscated and give you time to refamiliarize yourselves with them as we have partially limited their power. After that, you will fight as a team against another team. This match will only end when your team has completely slain your opponents! Show no mercy and do not hold back. It is kill or be killed!"

The five Terrans and five Rubarthan mech pilots all gained a sense of crisis after this announcement. Each of them already knew that their fates were pretty much sealed after they had fallen into the hands of the MTA, but none of them were eager to throw themselves to their deaths!

Although they didn't have the power to retaliate against the mechers, they could at least bring down their rivals!

After that, Ves and the mechers witnessed a small spectacle. Powerful shields encompassed a huge hall that was solely devoted to allowing mechs to fight against each other under controlled conditions.

If Master Dervidian wanted to, he could activate special life-saving tech that shielded or teleported mech pilots when they were at risk.

He did not do so, though. In order to increase the chance of breakthroughs as much as possible, he wanted to stimulate the mech pilots by making them feel closer to death than they had in their lives!

The battle that burst out in the arena turned into a desperate fight for survival. Even though the educated mech pilots all knew they were all being puppeted by the MTA, they simply didn't have the luxury to care about that. Compared to complaining about how they were being used, they needed to worry about surviving this day first!

"All of those mechs…" Ves sighed as he stared down as the Terran and Rubarthan mechs all collided against each other.

Due to the limited space of the arena, there wasn't much room for maneuver for the sophisticated mechs. Instead of trying to play clever maneuvering games, they just charged at each other and tried to blast their opponents with as many melee and ranged solutions as possible!

Despite the outbursts of power, none of the mechs succumbed easily. Each of them were made with alloys that were tougher and more resilient than the Unending alloy that Ves favored so much.

Although Unending alloy was hard enough to be considered a first-class alloy, in truth it was not that impressive compared to the more modern and expensive solutions the powerful Terran Confederation and the Rubarth Empire had developed over the years.

Their science and engineering prowess might not be as great as that of the Big Two, but their long history of technological development along with their formidable research infrastructure meant that they had built up a scary amount of accumulation!

Ves found it incredibly interesting to see so many different Terran and Rubarthan first-class multipurpose mechs fighting against each other up close.

Although the battle was incredibly limited in scale, Ves was able to sense the power and the fury behind each attack and move as if he was standing right next to the mechs.

He had always been a more tactile mech designer by nature. Being able to observe mechs fighting for real provided him with a lot more benefits than observing a stuffy recording.

"The Terran and Rubarthan mechs are truly different from the mechs of the MTA."

Ves gained a greater appreciation of the differences between first-class mechs. The mechs of the first-rate superstates may be inferior to the ones fielded by the MTA, but they possessed their own charms.

Although there was an incredible variety of both Terran and Rubarthan mechs in existence, the ones involved in this battle came from large standardized military units, so the models on display generally reflected the major trends of their respective states.

The Terran mechs were generally more conservative in their design approach. Their mech designers had to abide by a huge list of standards and requirements that heavily constrained their creative output.

Although this limited the diversity of Terran mechs, the advantage was that every Terran model was consistent and reliable.

The logistics of maintaining large amounts of Terran mechs also became a lot easier. Not only did the different models utilize a lot of common parts and materials, the expertise needed to handle them also remained the same.

"This is a good approach for maintaining a huge war machine that is already powerful and dominant." Ves judged.

The traits of standard Terran military mechs fully reflected the powerful state's tendencies.

The Terran Confederation always thought of itself as the center of humanity. Throughout the ages, the fortunes of the empire centered around Old Earth had risen and fallen, but it had always retained a lot of strength.

This had given the Terrans the delusion that they were the most powerful group of humans around.

Having witnessed the fall of many rival human nations and having almost suffered this fate as well, the Terrans were more concerned with avoiding mistakes than to take large risks to increase their power further.

"This is opposite to the Rubarthan approach."

The history and the heritage of the New Rubarth Empire wasn't as good as the star empire that it had rebelled against.

As a consequence, the Rubarthans were much more proactive and forward-thinking than the more risk-averse and tradition-bound Terrans.

This trait reflected on every aspect of their society, and their mechs were no different. The Rubarthan mechs not only contained a lot of new and barely-tested technology, but also featured a lot more diversity in their design elements.

Rubarthan mech designers had a lot more free reign as the laws governing their industry were much less oppressive.

Even though that regularly led to the release of radical mechs whose concepts rarely worked out in practice, the ones that hit the jackpot usually outperformed the competition by a considerable margin!

Although this sounded great, such an occurrence was extremely rare at this level of mech design. It was far too difficult to develop a winning formula that outperformed existing works that were already great.

"The Rubarthan mechs in this match are good, but not groundbreaking."

They didn't need to be. They all possessed their own quirks that granted them sufficient advantages to hold their own against the Terran machines!

As the brawl progressed, both sides chose to concentrate as many attacks as possible on the weakest and most vulnerable machine on the opposite teams.

As long as they were able to create a small numerical advantage, they could quickly grow their numerical advantage and crush their opponents utterly!

"It appears the Rubarthan team will not be able to hold too long." Master Dervidian accurately noted.

Mechs should have fallen by now if they were fighting in the confined arena in their original states. However, the MTA had performed numerous tweaks on them that deliberately lowered the attack power of their weapon systems.

This caused the mechs to inflict considerably less damage to their targets than normal, which subsequently allowed the machines in trouble to survive a lot longer under the onslaught.

Soon enough, the Rubarthan mech that possessed a lighter configuration than the other machines finally suffered a serious armor breach!

If the Terrans and Rubarthans fought against each other in space, then this swift and agile first-class mech should have been a lot harder to cripple.

It was too bad that the Paracelsus Optimus did not offer that much space for this match!

The damaged machine soon suffered a powerful hit to its exposed internals which quickly caused the machine to slow down. This spelled its doom as it was unable to evade or block the subsequent wave of attacks.

Soon, the machine exploded, causing hot and partially-burned parts to rain down on the surviving machines!

Now that the Rubarthan mech pilots lost a teammate, they began to feel a lot more desperate than before!

"Finish off the weakened Terran mech quickly! We must even out our numbers at all costs!"

As for the Terrans, their small victory gave them a lot of hope of surviving this death match! As long as they cleaned up the remaining opposition as quickly as possible, none of their own would have to die today!

"Pilot Denton, pull back your machine and focus on providing ranged support for the remainder of this match. We will buy as much time for your mech's self-repair systems as possible!"

Second-class mechs rarely came with self-repair functionality. Even if they did, it was questionable whether they could restore their damaged systems quickly enough to make a difference in battle.

In contrast, pretty much every first-class mech possessed at least a limited ability to repair or stop the deterioration of their damaged parts!

Even the worst first-class mechs were able to close up any gaps and stop any leakages by themselves.

Ves called up a projection and configured it to provide a close feed of the damaged Terran mech's internals.

He could see hundreds of tiny bots crawling through the insides. Each of them were acting in unison to remove debris and fix minor faults.

"Interesting."

More advanced mechs possessed more potent repair systems than this, but for a standard military mech, the deployment of miniature repair bots was also a good feature!

The battle between the Terrans and Rubarthans proceeded exactly according to expectation.

The differences between two sides weren't all that great, which meant that any disparity in numbers could not easily be made up! The Rubarthan mech pilots became more and more frantic as they lost a second and a third comrade soon afterwards!

The Terran mechs did not come out of this unscathed, but they cleverly allowed their most damaged machines to fall back so that they would not suffer any further damage!

As the surviving Rubarthan mech pilots endured a lot more pressure because of this, one of them finally reached the critical point!

"I WILL NOT LET THESE TERRAN SCUM KILL US ALL!"

The intense pressure of the battle along with the influence spread by the Aspect of Transcendence placed below the arena deck, one of the Rubarthan mech pilots surprisingly broke through to expert candidate!

As soon as his mech overflowed with forced resonance, the temporarily-empowered machine suddenly burst out with a huge amount of power!

The amplification provided by forced resonance to first-class mechs was even more exaggerated than in the case of second-class mechs!

This was because first-class mechs were much more robust and more capable of handling the huge increase in might!

Due to this, the breakthrough mech became so powerful that all 5 Terran mechs simply couldn't resist the counterattack!

One after another, the breakthrough mech sliced them into pieces with its sword or melted them into big chunks of slag after firing its powerful plasma guns!

In the end, there were no mech pilots left alive aside from the two surviving Rubarthan mech pilots.

Master Dervidian looked incredibly satisfied at this result. "Excellent. The addition of another expert candidate among our captives will provide us with more diverse study opportunities."

While the mecher thought about all of the interesting experiments he could conduct now that he had gained a batch of expert candidates, Ves was glad that the Aspect of Transcendence had proved its worth.

Although it was difficult to prove that the Aspect of Transcendence enabled the Rubarthan mech pilot to advance this time, he had no doubt that the MTA would fully be able to confirm this feature after repeated tests.

This was perhaps the most crucial trial of the Aspect of Transcendence!

Master Dervidian would definitely make a favorable offer to Ves now that it had produced a favorable result!