The Mech Touch

The Sundered Phalanx officers recognized that they could not cope against the Flagrant Vandals through normal means anymore.

What they needed was an outside factor, and after a brief delay, the higher-ups finally pulled the trigger!

As the Ferocious Piranhas and the Stingrippers continued to team up and abuse their opponents by shamelessly taking advantage of their suppressive glows, the Light Hunters that kept a close eye on this section of the battlefield began to detect alarming indications!

"We're detecting the approach of an expert mech, no, two expert mechs!"

"DISPERSE!"

The Flagrant Vandal mechs immediately suspended their current routines and flew apart from each other in response to the incoming threats, but the Fridayman expert mechs arrived a lot faster than expected!

Surrounded by the tell-tale bubbles of warp travel, two expert light mechs hailing from the Nidin Vergers blasted onto the scene and immediately chopped and shot apart a dozen Flagrant Vandal mechs shortly after they arrived!

Even though it was completely unnecessary, the new arrivals did not hesitate to fully resonate with their transphasic weapons.

This allowed the deadly light expert mechs to completely treat the Flagrant Vandal mechs as air!

The slaughter of so many Larkinson mechs at once immediately lifted the morale of Nidin Vergers and other nearly Sundered Phalanx mech pilots.

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No matter their training and experience, they had inevitably lost their confidence after getting repeatedly abused by the Flagrant Vandals.

Many of them were cognizant enough to figure out that if they failed to stop the Flagrant Vandal mechs, the Larkinson mechs would soon be able to trigger a catastrophic cascade at this flank!

Once the Hex Army and the Golden Skull Alliance took complete control of this side, they could immediately reinforce other friendly units or put so much pressure on the exposed ranged mechs in the rear that many Sundered Phalanx mech units would lose their fire support!

This was why the Nidin Verger mech pilots immediately regained their hope. As long as their expert mechs managed to break the backs of the Flagrant Vandals, they were confident enough in their ability to handle the other enemy mech units!

They even began to chant the names of their war heroes!

"Dukes and Hawkes! Dukes and Hawkes! Dukes and Hawkes!"

Venerable Osaia Dukes and Venerable Kismet Hawkes went a long way back. They had both been unremarkable low-tier expert pilots from before the Komodo War.

Back then, they had been attached to another mech division. They participated in many battles, some of which had been so large and destructive that the units that they had been a part of often had to retreat and reorganize due to all of the losses that they had suffered!

Somehow, Venerable Dukes and Venerable Hawkes managed to stay together and steadily forge a deeper understanding and cooperation with each other.

By the time the Komodo War neared its ending, Dukes and Hawkes had become one of the more notable duos among their kind!

Once the war had ended, the two applied to transfer to the Red Ocean early. They soon moved to the Friday Colonies where they gained a fresh start as the protectors assigned to the 6161th Nidin Vergers.

After witnessing so many mechs of this mech division getting abused by the Flagrant Vandals, Dukes and Hawkes had long grown furious at the Larkinsons!

"Let us show these bastards that they are nothing without their glows!" Venerable Osaia Dukes roared as his eyes practically turned red!

He finally saw an opportunity to punish the Larkinson Clan for inventing glows and providing this capability to the Hex Army.

So many good Fridayman soldiers had perished during the Komodo War, and ‘living' mechs such as the infamous Valkyrie Redeemer carried much of the blame!

"Don't lose sight of our true foes, Dukes." Venerable Kismet Hawkes warned as her light harasser mech needled the Stingrippers to death with its thin kinetic rifle. "There's a nearby Larkinson expert mech that is not looking so friendly at the moment."

"Hah, it's just a single expert light skirmisher. What can it do on its own? We will beat it even if it brings a friend!"

Venerable Osaia Dukes might be brash, but he had reason to be confident. He and his fellow expert pilot had combined forces against Hexer expert mechs many times in the past.

Most of the time, they came out on top due to their individual skills as well as their intimate teamwork!

The bond they developed between each other had been forged in the fires of war. Ordinary pairs of enemy expert mechs could not shake them anymore!

Confident in their superiority, the Quadknife piloted by Venerable Dukes and the Filamon piloted by Venerable Hawkes acted like wolves among sheep!

The famed glows of the Ferocious Piranha and the Stingripper that could easily torment the minds of almost any mech pilot became completely ineffective when they tried to exert their influence on the enemy expert pilots.

The reason for that was that the glows originated from Zeigra, Lufa, Qilanxo and Kalo. Each spiritual entity existed at a higher level than ordinary people, so they could naturally impose their auras onto the weak.

Expert pilots had already undergone one major evolution and substantially closed the gap as a result.

Not only that, expert pilots especially transformed their willpower, making it extraordinarily powerful and resilient.

Not even gods could shake their convictions!

In fact, it didn't even matter whether the Ferocious Piranhas and Stingrippers lost their main gimmicks. Expert pilots were so far ahead that they could still wipe out the Larkinson mechs even if their combat effectiveness had dropped by 75 percent!

Commander Abis Firelight and many other Larkinson officers already knew in advance that the pair of mid-range expert mechs could not be defeated through normal means.

"Tusa." Commander Firelight opened a communication channel to the Dark Zephyr. "The Cross Clan is dispatching Venerable Imaris Cross to our boys. If you can wait 45 seconds, you can team up with him to fight against Dukes and Hawkes."

"Don't!" Venerable Tusa Billingsley-Larkinson surprisingly contradicted the legion commander. "I can take care of them by myself. So what if they're the famed Dukes and Hawkes duo? Even without sparring against their simulated expert mechs hundreds of times, I can beat them in my sleep! Tell Imaris to keep supporting his fellow Crossers. We Larkinsons can take care of our business!"

Though Commander Firelight had serious misgivings about Tusa's judgment, it was too late to persuade the light mech specialist to hang back because the Dark Zephyr already charged towards the Filamon!

Since the Dark Zephyr Version 2.0 had equipped its exclusive Morton Tech Stiletto AS-1 Combat Drive before deploying into the field, the first Larkinson expert mech possessed warp travel capabilities.

This allowed it to close a lot of distance in a short amount of time, enabling the expert light skirmisher to get into kill range in record time!

However, long before the Dark Zephyr was able to sink its daggers through the frame of the Filamon, the Nidin Verger expert mech flew straight backwards while engaging its transphasic flight system, thereby significantly increasing the time it took for both mechs to meet each other!

Venerable Kismet Hawkes did not choose to retreat, though. She actively attempted to string along the Dark Zephyr so that her Filamon could fire at the Larkinson expert mech with greater ease!

As a light harasser mech, the Filamon was a ranged expert mech developed by Master Xeona Reizen and Master Alex Canre.

Master Reizen's main input was equipping the Filamon with a new cutting-edge stutter flight system. This innovative mobility solution that not only allowed the expert mech to pull off impressive stutter evasion moves, but also do so while engaging in warp travel!

Master Alex Canre on the other hand was known for his specialization in physical ranged weapons. He took a particular interest in developing smaller and lighter kinetic arms for mechs that didn't have the capacity to carry heavier weapons.

In fact, the name of the Filamon was derived from its unique filament rifle. The kinetic weapon worked similar to a gauss rifle, but instead of shooting kinetic rounds that were designed to punch through armor through brute force, the filament rifle fired thin spikes that dealt much less damage per hit but still retained a lot of penetration power.

The main advantage of the filament rifle was that its firing rate and ammunition capacity was much higher than any equivalent gauss weapon!

Venerable Kismet Hawkes did not feel any distress as her expert mech pumped out hundreds of razor-thin filaments into space.

Most of them didn't even hit anything as the Dark Zephyr proved to be remarkably difficult to hit even to a veteran expert pilot!

Still, Kismet Hawkes was not only a war veteran that had fought against many challenging opponents, but also received an intelligence briefing on the Dark Zephyr.

While the current incarnation of the Dark Zephyr looked a lot different from the records that Hawkes had studied, it should still cling to the same concept.

She already knew about the Dark Zephyr's strange optical illusion trick and did not attempt to land all of her shots at the apparent location and trajectory of the enemy expert mech.

The Dark Zephyr that she was able to observe through her mech was a deception!

The actual coordinates of the Dark Zephyr should be close to its apparent location, and could vary a lot as Venerable Tusa constantly wanted to keep his opponents guessing.

The only way to put serious pressure on the Dark Zephyr when it had activated its Untouchable triggered ability was to saturate the surrounding space with a lot of attacks.

This was exactly what the Filamon excelled at! With the help of her powerful and developed intuition, Venerable Hawkes managed to put a lot of pressure on the Dark Zephyr's resonance shield in a short amount of time!

Even so, the Dark Zephyr was still gaining speed! It would not take long for the powerful Larkinson expert mech to close the distance and return all of the damage it endured and more.

"Dukes!"

"On it, Hawkes!"

The Filamon smoothly turned into an arc even as it continued to accelerate backwards at an impressive pace while keeping the Dark Zephyr under fire.

Just as the Dark Zephyr came close enough to toss a grenade at the expert light harrasser mech, Tusa abruptly had to turn his machine by 135 degrees and lift up its daggers in order to repel a charge attack launched by the Quadknife!

The Dark Zephyr smoothly managed to block two of the incoming knife stabs, but as its name suggested, the Quadknife did not possess two arms, but four!

Venerable Tusa was already aware of this and had already attempted to jerk his Dark Zephyr to the side.

His expert mech succeeded in evading the third knife strike, but the fourth knife managed to get through unimpeded!

The resonance shield surrounding the Dark Zephyr flared as it blocked this powerful charge attack.

Venerable Tusa had to abandon his attempt to run down the Filamon in order to handle its new opponent.

This was because Venerable Osaia Dukes did not let up on his new target! After succeeding in landing at least one attack, the Quadknife seemed to smell blood and continued to launch a flurry of attacks with all four arms!

Though the Quadknife's attacks were no longer as painful due to lack of momentum, the attack speed of its arms were so high that it was as if the Dark Zephyr was fighting against a literal storm of knives!

The Dark Zephyr may be able to comfortably block two of the arms of its opponents in a duel, but four of them were beyond its capacity!

If that wasn't bad enough, the Filamon had already circled around and put consistent pressure against the Dark Zephyr's resonance shield by shooting at its exposed back!

Had Tusa bitten off more than he could chew?