The Mech Touch

Everything about the Mars lived up to its promise.

It performed like a veritable war god like its namesake, and that was when it was still technically an expert mech!

Everyone who had the privilege to witness it demonstrate its awesome power in this nameless star system felt incomparably insignificant in front of such a powerful war machine.

"The Mars is like a warship but with only a hundredth of the footprint." Gloriana aptly contextualized the insanely powerful expert mech's performance in combination with its new ace pilot. "If we were testing the performance of a battlecruiser at the moment, I don't think any of us would feel surprised at the power that the vessel is able to demonstrate. We humans are already hardwired to expect superior performance from physically imposing objects. This is also why we tend to fear the phase whales the most out of all of the native races of the Red Ocean."

She made a good point. Everyone indeed developed a general sense of power by looking at the size of a war asset.

The dimensions of a mech or warship turned into a shorthand measurement of their combat effectiveness.

Of course, size was hardly the sole factor that determined their power. Their tech played an important role as well, hence why people started to divide these assets into three different power levels.

On paper, the Mars was classified as a second-class high-tier expert mech. This created the suggestion that it would not perform that much better than the Bolvos Rage.

Yet there were multiple factors that turned the Mars into a completely different beast than its predecessor machine.

The insane tech put into the Mars was one reason. Patriarch Reginald's incredibly breakthrough was another reason.

Together, they produced an incongruous result that completely caused a lot of people's minds to crash as they found it difficult to come to terms with the current performance of the Mars!

Equating it to a warship was a useful way to contextualize the Mars, but the fact that the two were closer in performance than was apparent on the surface also signified how insane it was to possess this combination of expert mech and expert pilot!

As the Mars continued to explore the limits of its firepower by readily engaging its ARCEUS System at different asteroids, the firepower but more notably its endurance truly matched that of a warship that was armed with main cannons that were larger than the frames of entire mechs!

Warships were already strong to begin with. By leveraging the advantage of scale to the utmost, these vessels overpowered their opposition by relying on brute force.

The Mars was different. It was smaller and more maneuverable at shorter ranges. It was also a lot smaller and therefore a lot harder to pin down at range.

This provided it with significant advantages if it was ever confronted by a hostile warship.

Even if the Cross Clan had yet to equip it with a minidrive, the inherent advantages of the mech already enabled it to maneuver around an actual warship with ease. This would allow the Mars to escape the firing angles of the most devastating naval weapon systems!

This was an unreasonable tactic that essentially made it impossible for a warship to defeat the Mars at close range.

Even from a distance, it would be incredibly difficult for the warship to land a lot of hits on a small, fast and maneuverable target.

All of this meant that Professor Benedict successfully attained his goal of developing a mech that was powerful enough to fight against alien warships and powerful exobeasts!

The Cross Clan and the Golden Skull Alliance possessed a lot more options against those types of enemies from now on. It was no longer the case that their entire forces were unable to fight against these native threats.

"Alright, that is enough for the ARCEUS System. It is already beginning to reach its limits after firing so many times." Professor Benedict said.

As much as the ARCEUS System was designed to support extended operation, the intensity in which its weapon systems fired in the past few minutes was a little too much. Everything possessed limits and even a super-expensive transphasic energy weapon system was no exception.

The Mars subsequently tested out its other capabilities. Though it was lacking its shoulder-mounted missile launchers at the moment, it still possessed another ranged solution in the form of its custom shotgun.

Not only was it equipped with a dimensional ammunition drum, the weapon was also capable of firing a variety of different shotgun rounds.

This time, the Cross Clan decided to fill its ammo drum with a mixture of cheap and expensive rounds.

The Mars rapidly flew closer to a nearby asteroid and pointed its weapon straight at the surface.

A silent explosion erupted from the muzzle as it spat out an extremely powerful transphasic slug!

Though the velocity of the projectile was incomparable to that of an energy beam, the transphasic round partially phased through the solid matter of the asteroid while at the same transferring a huge amount of kinetic energy along the way!

The result of this was that the transphasic round was able to penetrate well into the interior of the asteroid without wasting too much of its destructive potential at the outer surface of the target!

"Let's see how much damage a non-transphasic shotgun slug can do in comparison."

The slug created such a giant crater in the asteroid that it was as if it was a planet that had undergone a mass extinction event!

"If the target was a starship, then the non-transphasic round is not effective at taking down the targeted vessel." Sara Voiken observed. "The key to taking out starships in the most effective manner is to disable or destroy their vital systems. Dealing damage to their hulls is not useful in comparison. The only thing that will do is make it easier for follow-up attacks to penetrate into the interior."

In other words, a transphasic round was drastically more effective at taking out large targets than a non-transphasic round.

"How much phasewater did it take to produce that transphasic round?" Ves critically asked.

"...Let's not talk about that."

Unless the Crossers were able to recover the fractured and broken remains of the transphasic slug, firing this expensive projectile was no different throwing a precious drop of phasewater out of the airlock!

Fortunately, there was no rule that stated that the Crossers had to keep supplying the hungry shotgun with transphasic ammunition.

As the Mars kept firing the weapon, it began to blast out in many different ways.

One shot released a conventional hail of pellets that rapidly spread out and dug in lots of tiny holes on the surface of an asteroid.

Another shot impaled a target with metal nails that reacted with each other and generated a current.

The next shot bombarded the target with incendiary pellets that rapidly grew hot and erupted into flames.

The performance of each of these projectiles were stronger than usual as Patriarch Reginald was able to enhance their power through resonance.

However, the shotgun wielded by the Mars was only moderately more powerful than the shotgun of the Bolvos Rage.

This showed that aside from the difference in ammunition capacity, the shotgun paired with the newer expert mech was heavily reliant on the quality of its rounds to deal damage.

It was much more economical to rely on the ARCEUS System to destroy the opposition. Energy was cheap and could be generated by tons of cheap and efficient sources. It did not cost a fortune just to fire the energy weapons a couple of times!

Ves shrugged. "It's okay. The shotgun is an extra option against powerful targets."

The ARCEUS System was designed to be the main weapon system of the Mars. It was integrated into the expert mech and was not designed to be removable. Everything else was extra as far as he was concerned.

Once Reginald had his fill with testing out the new shotgun, his expert mech began to pull out its new standard melee weapon, which happened to be a transphasic axe.

After he resonated with the one-handed weapon, the Mars charged at an asteroid and launched a devastating-looking chop!

While the attack did not produce an exaggerated result such as slicing a kilometers-thick asteroid in half, the energy released by the strike managed to pierce right through and penetrate over a hundred meters beyond the surface!

The penetrative capabilities of the transphasic axe was incredible, and fully proved why certain people started to believe that phasewater technology would become a new qualifier in high-end mech combat!

It was a pity that the initial testing session did not leave any room to test how the Mars was able to handle the Whale-Cutting Saber, but that could be done at a later time.

"Let us get the other essential tests out of the way first."

The next few minutes were relatively boring as the Mars proceeded to flex its defensive and mobility capabilities.

First, the Crossers bombarded the Mars while Reginald purposely withdrew his Saint Kingdom.

Though this removed an essential defensive layer from the expert hybrid mech, its Abasis Armor was more than capable of picking up the slack!

No matter whether the frame of the mech was struck by energy beams, solid projectiles or exploding missiles, it remained completely impervious throughout this entire sequence!

In fact, the mech did not even suffer any visual marks as most of the damage hit an invisible spatial barrier that wrapped just above the surface of the expert mech.

So long as it was powered by resonance, the Abasis Armor would always be able to display an unreasonable amount of defensive power!

"Let us see the performance of the shield generator as well."

Even though the Mars incorporated a high-quality compact shield generator, its defensive power was the worst out of all of the options. That was because Professor Benedict did not choose to integrate the mech with a larger defensive module.

Still, the shield generator could still be handy in emergencies, so it was not a useless feature.

"Let's see how fast it can move."

The Pulsvar V-1 flight system stole the show this time. It already provided the Mars with speed comparable to that of the Gatecrasher in its base form.

When it began to activate its transphasic mode, the Mars accelerated up to 200 percent faster in any direction, which made people have the illusion that they were looking at an expert light mech instead of a heavier machine!

The only downside to this mode was that the Mars began to devour energy at a scary rate. This meant that it was not that wise for the expert mech to accelerate at its maximum rate while at the same time output a lot of energy beams with its ARCEUS System.

"The Mars is not designed for hit-and-run attacks." Juliet remarked. "It is meant to enter within effective range of any target before relying on maximum firepower to neutralize the threat."

The Mars was an assault-oriented machine that was effective at pretty much any place on the battlefield, but would feel most at home at short to medium ranges.

With high defenses and a stupendous amount of firepower, it was most ideal at fighting against powerful opponents head-on! The Mars was not a sly skirmisher like the Dark Zephyr or a glass cannon like the Amaranto.

The mech was named after a war god because it was truly designed to embody one in the form of a mech!

Ves and the other mech designers were more than satisfied with the demonstrated performance of their work. They couldn't have asked for any better and there were plenty of areas where the expert mech exceeded their expectations!

Soon enough, the initial testing session was approaching its end.

Only one test remained on the agenda.

"It's time for the exciting part… at least, that was our original intent."

At this stage, the Larkinson expert mechs were supposed to come forth and test how well the Mars was able to fight against a bunch of expert mechs.

Ves previously maintained faint hope that his clan's champions would be able to earn at least some respect before they tapped out of the sparring session.

That hope had faded after witnessing the full might of the Mars with a newly advanced ace pilot.

There was no way that this was anywhere close to a fair fight!

"Do you think our expert mechs will last more than minute against the Mars?" Gloriana asked.

"They better."