The Mech Touch

The Komodo War unleashed slaughter on an unprecedentedly greater scale than the Bright-Vesia War.

The two titans of the Komodo Star Sector directly locked horns with each other, pitting enormous amounts of superior mechs and soldiers against each other in a brutal struggle that resulted in horrendous casualties!

The sheer intensity of the fighting presented opportunities for the Friday Coalition and the Hexadric Hegemony to expend all of the resources and combat assets that they accumulated over centuries.

In any single contested star system, the debris of broken mechs and ships that littered space was worth enough money to fund the annual government expenditure of any third-rate state!

There were many contested star systems! And since the Komodo War was still kicking into gear, many more major battlefields had yet to emerge!

The madness and battlelust that affected both sides had made a profound impact on Ghanso Larkinson.

Since the CRC assigned Unit L to the Marrakath System, Ghanso witnessed much of the desperation that had overtaken the Fridaymen and Hexers.

Both sides wanted to take possession of the Crestfallen Stars at all costs! Controlling this string of stars was much like taking possession of a wall.

If the Friday Coalition lost control of this wall, then the Hexers would have much easier access to the interior of its space! The Carnegie Group would especially be exposed as its Fortune Legion, though numerous, was not sufficient enough to defend every star system!

Famed and strategically-important locations such as the famed Leemar System and its many universities already started to panic. While the Leemar Institute of Technology and other famed schools would easily be able to relocate if necessary, losing their original campus grounds to the Hexers would deal a severe blow!

With so much at stake, the Fortune Legion staked their ground and tried their best to repel the Hex Army, or failing that at least bleed the female supremacists as much as possible before losing control of Marrakath III.

The famed Dosth Orbital Defense Matrix had only lasted for weeks before falling into ruin. Successive Hexer assaults had rapidly chipped away at the ring of orbital defenses until most of the pieces either dropped onto the planet or spun aimlessly around the exposed planet.

The walls of Marrakath III had finally been breached! Yet this did not spell the end of the campaign!

Reinforcements kept flowing from the interior of the Friday Coalition. While the Fortune Legion's Opel Trident Mech Army Group formed the main line of defense on Marrakath III, several other mech regiments and mech divisions constantly tried to fight through the contested orbit of the fortress planet and land more mechs and troops on the surface.

The Hexers attempted to do the same! The Hex Army's Wrathful Doves Mech Army Group directly challenged their Fridayman counterparts on every front, and didn't hesitate to call upon other elements of the Hex Army to take over the planet.

The fighting on the surface and beneath the surface of Marrakath III therefore turned into a fast-paced tug-of-war that resulted in the downing of at least tens of thousand of mechs!

Neither side paid too much attention to the constant destruction of mechs. This was because both sides made use of their considerable amounts of industrial capacity to replenish the lost machines.

The Friday Coalition possessed a great advantage as Marrakath III was their turf to begin with. Thousands of underground and well-defended manufacturing complexes constantly took in the salvage scraped from the battlefields and either fixed them up or recycled their parts and materials to fabricate new mechs!

While the Hexers brought down their own production machines onto the territories they conquered, as the intruders they always fell behind.

The only way the Hexers could keep up with the prodigious rate of attrition was to ship more mechs from the Hexadric Hegemony. Though costly and strenuous in terms of logistics, the Hexers were willing to commit as much resources as possible to make the invasion succeed!

Therefore, the losses the Hexers sustained in taking over the fortified positions of the Fridayman had always been several times costlier.

One combatant responsible for making the Hexers bleed was Venerable Ghanso Larkinson.

As an imported expert pilot from a backwater third-rate state, many Fortune Legionnaires initially questioned the Brighter's presence at one of the most critical battlefields of the Komodo War.

Yet as soon as Unit L appeared at several heated clashes, the third-rater that everyone despised continually slaughtered one expert mech after another!

With the fifty quasi-expert mechs that accompanied the Charlemagne, Venerable Ghanso Larkinson quickly accumulated great fame and honor for his impact on the local battles!

By bringing his numbers advantage everywhere, the foreign expert pilot constantly gained the upper hand against isolated or small groups of expert pilots. Unit L alone alone was worth several expert mechs together!

In particular, the sheer quantity of resonance-empowered energy beams that the entirety of Unit L was able to output was particularly deadly against mobility-oriented expert mechs.

Famed expert pilots of the Hex Army had succumbed within a minute of making contact with Unit L as their swift but agile light mechs could not weave their way through a forest of high-powered positron beams!

Several notable female Hexer expert pilots lost their lives against Ghanso, thereby removing several great threats to the Friday Coalition off the board. These unquestionable accomplishments considerably boosted Ghanso's popularity among the Fridaymen defending Marrakath III!

He should have felt honored or gratified for the recognition he received. It was the dream of every third-rater to perform well enough to stand equal to their second-rate colleagues.

Yet Ghanso did not feel happy at all at the moment. The bloodshed inflicted on the people and soldiers of the Carnegie Group as well as the constant deployments took a toll on his wellbeing.

Currently, he sat on a bench in one of the ready rooms of an underground base. He groaned and clutched his head against his palm as he tried to endure the persistent headache that always built up after piloting the Charlemagne.

Piloting a single expert mech was already challenging. Piloting one while simultaneously extending his mind to fifty semi-autonomous mechs was a much bigger burden!

He grabbed the injector he placed on the side of the bench and lifted it up to the bare skin of his neck. With a single pull of the trigger, a small cocktail of chemicals entered his bloodstream.

Minutes later, his headache subsided, but only partially. While he did not return to normal, he deemed his condition sufficient enough to make another sortie.

Before he did so, the projection of one of his minders appeared in the room.

"You are putting great strain on yourself by doing that. Master Huron specifically stated that the master of the current iteration of his asymmetrical neural network cannot deploy into battle more than once every twenty-four hours. Unit L is supposed to fight selectively at critical junctures in battles. It is not supposed to be a rapid deployment force that is sent to put out as many fires as possible!"

"I can't stop." Ghanso replied. "Each Hexer we kill here will spare the interior of the Friday Coalition a lot of suffering. The longer we hold this planet, the greater the losses to the Hex Army. If my contributions can just delay their advance by a day, thousands if not tens of thousands of precious Hexer mech pilots will succumb to our meat grinder!"

Aisling looked frustrated. "You.. expert pilots are so foolhardy! Look, out of all of the expert pilots that we have tried out, you have achieved the best results with our asymmetrical neural network. Your worth to Master Huron and our future product line is far more important than the minor difference you can make in the Battle of Marrakath System. While you have already taken down numerous notorious Hexer expert pilots, the Hex Army has many more to take their place. Marrakath III will fall. There is no doubt about that. Rather than overwork yourself and take too many risks in battle, move past the moment and conserve your strengths to the battles to come."

The war was far from over. It would take years to resolve this deadly conflict, and if both sides remained even for a long time, it was not impossible for the war to last more than a decade!

There would be plenty of opportunities for an expert pilot such as Ghanso Larkinson to distinguish himself in subsequent battles.

Yet taking it easy was never the Larkinson credo.

Ghanso only had duty and honor in his mind! So many other comrades were fighting and dying on the frontlines. How could he possibly ignore all of this suffering?

"I'm heading out, whether you say so or not." He stated with conviction as he tried his best to force out the remnants of his mental strain. "While I respect your great Master, I take orders from the CRC, and my superiors have given me wider discretion on which battles I may join."

This was one of the rewards he gained after his previous dazzling performances. Having killed over five Hexer expert pilots, he had accomplished more than many other Fridayman expert pilots during the Komodo War!

The strength he demonstrated and the fame he accrued during this campaign made it so that nobody treated him like a third-rater anymore.

Even so, Aisling Curver still exhibited a lot of concern. She knew quite well how Ghanso was pushing the limits.

Ordinary expert pilots weren't able to take charge of an asymmetric neural network that comprised of fifty slaves.

One of the biggest enabling factors was the specialized multi-tasking implant that Master Huran had specially arranged for expert pilots such as Ghanso!

The necessity of this implant was also one of the determining factors why other Fridayman expert pilots couldn't take part in Master Huron's experimental new product. They already possessed existing piloting implants of their own!

Even so, this implant could not make up for the pressure mounting on Ghanso's organic brain.

Seeing that Ghanso insisted on his current course, Aisling no longer bothered to persuade him. This wasn't the Hexadric Hegemony where a woman like her could unilaterally take charge of a boy.

Her projection sat down on the bench next to Ghanso and sighed. "You wanted news of the Larkinsons, right?"

The mention of his relatives caused him to jerk his head at her. "Are they all right?"

"I believe so. The Larkinson Family led by Venerable Ark Larkinson is currently performing various boring contracts at the border between Komodo and Vicious Mountain."

"Heh. It looks like my uncle is waiting for an opportunity to bring his family into Vicious Mountain." Ghanso huffed. "Coward. Oathbreaker. He doesn't deserve to be in charge. Our Bright Republic is wounded and diminished. Our home state needs our strength more than ever, but instead of staying behind to resolve our misunderstanding with the government, he just listens to Ves and runs!"

"It's very troublesome if the Larkinson Family actually manages to cross over. Our relations with Vicious Mountain are very shallow and mostly based on trade. We won't be able to tell the Vicious Mountainers to send the Larkinson Family back. At worst, you'll need to enter the neighboring star sector and drag your relatives back while they are kicking and screaming."

Ghanso sighed. "I will do whatever is necessary to correct our family's dereliction of duty. I just hope to gain the Friday Coalition's support when I do so. Even I recognize that it will be difficult to accomplish my goal by myself."

"And you will have it so long as we win the Komodo War." Aisling nodded. "Let it not be said that we do not take care of our guest expert pilots. In the future, you'll be fighting alongside more foreign expert pilots. The CRC is very pleased by the result of its experiment to import third-rate expert pilots such as you. One of our state's biggest advantages is the good relations we maintain with many third-rate states. While most of their mech pilots are useless to us, their expert pilots are rapidly able to adapt to second-class battlefields. Obtaining hundreds, if not thousands of extraordinary individuals such as you will make a huge difference in the Komodo War!"

"That's.. a remarkable plan!"

Ghanso looked a bit startled as she revealed one of the Friday Coalition's latest initiatives to win the war. He realized that this plan might actually work!

The Hexadric Hegemony could never match the Friday Coalition's efforts. How could it when most of the third-rate states under its sphere of influence disliked the female supremacists?

For a very long time, the Hexers mostly ignored the lesser states out of contempt and disgust. There was no way those third-rate states would lend their expert pilots to the female supremacists so easily!

When it came to diplomacy and making friends, the Fridaymen always possessed an advantage!