The Mech Touch

"You want me to do what?"

"You heard me." Ves' projection said. "I want you to suit up and hop into your new expert mech. Didn't you complain about lacking sufficient training opportunities? Right now we have a great exercise prepared for you! Only another expert pilot can give you a good challenge."

"Uhm, I'm not so sure about that, Ves. I mean, while I'm confident in my Dark Zephyr, this doesn't sound like a safe practice."

"It'll be fine, Tusa. You're piloting an expert mech that excels at evasion. Just make sure you don't get hit and everything will be fine. In fact, even if Venerable Stark manages to land a hit, her attacks aren't enhanced by resonance, so your expert mech's resonance shield combined with a solid layer of Unending alloy should be sufficient to block any damage."

The mech designer had a point. Tusa received the privilege of piloting the first expert mech designed by the Larkinson Clan. The Dark Zephyr was everything he dreamed about and more.

Ves was also right that Tusa needed a better exercise. Even though he already received his expert mech more than a month ago, he wasn't able to test his limits as much as he wanted.

The situation would doubtlessly be alleviated once the other Larkinson expert pilots obtained their expert mechs. Only expert mechs could give him proper exercise. An alternative was deploying hundreds of regular mechs against his Dark Zephyr, but the chances of accidents happening was too great and it was not good for morale to subject mech pilots to crushing defeats all of the time.

Tusa recognized that this was a great opportunity for him to test the Dark Zephyr's damage mitigation capabilities. He quickly donned his customized piloting suit and moved down to the hangar bay in order to board his Dark Zephyr.

The special team of technicians assigned to service the powerful expert mech had already prepped it for action. Venerable Tusa hopped into the cockpit straight away and brought his powerful expert mech online.

The slim, dark shape exited the hangar bay of the Spirit of Bentheim and ventured to the testing area that the Larkinsons had set up beyond the immediate perimeter of the fleet. The expert light skirmisher flew right past the envelope of specialized interference devices that had been anchored to their specific coordinates.

"Alright, I'm here." Venerable Tusa told Ves. "When will I be put under fire?"

"Please wait for a moment. We're setting up extra sensors in order to gather extra data on the performance of your mech."

A short amount of time passed before Ves was ready to commence the test.

Both the Dark Zephyr and the Bright Beam Prime were facing each other from a fair distance away. The latter was tasked with landing a hit on the former.

In order to make the competition more fair, Venerable Tusa wasn't allowed to employ any resonance abilities other than a resonance shield for protection purposes. They might change the rules if Venerable Stark managed to land a hit, but until that happened, it was more important to see how the two performed when the playing field was more even.

Due to the substantial amount of damage that the crystal rifle could do to the civilian ships of the Larkinson Clan, the fleet had to adjust its formation to allow the heavier armored vessels to be put in front of them. This way, even if an accident occurred, the crystal rifle should only harm the surface of the Graveyard or a combat carrier.

Of course, Venerable Stark didn't intend to aim her rifle in that direction at all. The back of the Bright Beam Prime would face the fleet throughout this entire exercise, leaving no chance that the crystal rifle would inadvertently damage a friendly ship or mech.

Venerable Tusa also received orders to keep his mech in a specific zone further away from the fleet. He still enjoyed plenty of room for evasion. He just needed to make sure that his mech did not slowly drift outside of his movement zone.

"Commence the test!"

The prime mech immediately began to attack the expert mech!

While the Dark Zephyr's characteristic Perception Distortion resonance ability wasn't active, Venerable Tusa did not exhibit much pressure as his expert mech was incredibly quick to respond to his commands.

"Heh, is this it? I could dodge this shot with my eyes closed!"

Davia Stark did not deign to respond to Tusa's taunt. She was several decades older than him and had moved beyond childish games.

To her, the power of an expert pilot was a burden as well as a reward. She knew she was capable of inflicting great harm to people and was well aware of how she could swing the future of many people with her performance.

Tusa's rather flippant attitude grated on her, but she didn't let that divert her from her current approach.

After test-firing the different modes of her new luminar crystal rifle, she had already gained a general feel of the properties of each of the six different beams.

She decided to start with the humble laser beam. Though it was not as exotic as the other options, it was by far the most efficient and scalable choice.

While part of her mission was to explore all of the capabilities of the prototype weapon, she couldn't deliver a good result if she wasn't even able to land a single hit on the Dark Zephyr.

She knew exactly what she faced right now. Venerable Tusa might be younger than her, but he was still a genuine expert pilot who excelled at evasion. Now that he was paired with an expert mech that completely matched his inclinations, Stark could already foresee that she needed to make many attempts before she could accomplish her first goal!

As a result, the Bright Beam Prime maintained a stationary position in space in order to maximize its accuracy and precision and fired a fairly rapid barrage of laser beams.

Considering that Venerable Stark was facing an expert mech, she had to maximize her chances as much as possible. By disregarding the defense of her own mech and using quantity in order to increase the probability of a hit, she managed to exert considerable pressure against her opponent.

The range between the two wasn't even all that far, which made it a lot easier for her to succeed, yet the opponent she was sparring against wasn't an average opponent!

Just as how Venerable Stark didn't have to worry about a lot of variables, so did Venerable Tusa. The light mech specialist was able to devote himself completely to making him and his mech as untouchable as possible!

As a result, even though the Bright Beam Prime unleashed more than a hundred rapid shots, the expert mech remained completely unscathed!

"Hah, if this is all you can do, then maybe I should half my speed!"

Just a second after Venerable Tusa said those words, a laser beam surprisingly grazed the left arm of his expert mech!

"What?! This is impossible! How did you hit me?! This has to be a coincidence!"

Venerable Stark twitched her mouth into a smile as she continued to put pressure onto her target. Even though her subsequent shots went wide, it only took around sixty misses for her to be able to land another hit!

"No! Your mech is a lot slower than mine! How the hell are you able to predict my movements?!"

"Everyone has a pattern." She finally decided to respond. "The more you move, the more I understand your habits. With each of my attempts, I am able to get a greater read on your movements. Watch."

The intervals between hits became shorter and shorter. Even though Venerable Tusa felt professionally challenged to the point where he put an even greater amount of effort into avoiding getting hit, the Bright Beam Prime's success rate continued to increase until it only took twenty attempts to land a successful hit!

"Ahh! If my mech isn't flying so close and if I wasn't prohibited from resonating with my mech, I would have never let my Dark Zephyr get hit by your attacks!"

He wasn't even allowed to activate the powerful boosters of his expert mech, depriving him from the fastest possible solution he could employ to dodge an incoming attack.

Though Tusa felt indignant about trying to perform at his best while having his hands tied, he became more and more invested in trying to 'win' this exercise. He consciously tried to change his evasion patterns and randomize his decisions as much as possible.

It worked somewhat. Venerable Stark needed to make more attempts to land a successful hit, but she quickly adjusted as well and somehow managed to figure him out to a degree.

Before Venerable Tusa could try something else, the Bright Beam Prime suddenly dialed up the power of its shots. Though the next couple of beams went wide, one of them succeeded in nailing the Dark Zephyr!

"Damn!"

Even though the Unending alloy layer of his expert mech should be able to resist the full-powered attack without any issue, Tusa activated the resonance shield of his mech just to be certain.

A strong sky blue corona formed around the black-coated mech. The newly-formed resonance shield easily withstood the impact and hardly showed any signs of strain.

When Ves and Gloriana witnessed the result of this attack from their workstations, they didn't exhibit much surprise.

"Resonance shields are really ridiculous." He commented. "They can resist a lot more attacks than conventional energy shields."

"That's just how it responds against a normal laser beam. Didn't you boast to me that your crystal rifle has a better way to overcome this layer of defense?"

Venerable Stark wasn't in a hurry to resort to this solution. She instead cycled her rifle's attack phase to the other options first so that the Larkinsons could gather plenty of data about their performance.

A succession of positron beams, slicer beams, disruptor beams and kinetic beams lanced out at the Dark Zephyr.

Despite Venerable Tusa's determination to break his patterns and try more inventive ways to avoid the attacks, Venerable Stark seemed to be able to figure him out without fail!

Unfortunately for her, the four different attack phases yielded very little results against the Dark Zephyr's resonance shield.

Due to the expert light mech's limited size and capacity, it didn't carry a lot of resonating exotics responsible for forming this shield. Larger and heavier expert mechs were able to form much stronger resonance shields, but that did not make the Dark Zephyr a pushover!

From its current level of performance, the expert mech's resonance shield could easily resist a barrage of full-powered positron beams. This granted Venerable Tusa plenty of time to perform many different actions.

However, once Venerable Stark switched the attack phase of her luminar crystal rifle to the mysterious-sounding light beam, Venerable Tusa's instincts suddenly detected a threat.

"What the...?"

The Bright Beam Prime began to fire thin white beams of light that caused him to feel increasingly threatened.

When a light beam finally hit the resonance shield, the glowing barrier glowed brightly as it had to expend a lot more energy in order to resist the attack!

"Ouch! That hurt!"

Though the expert mech began to move a bit more frantically, the Bright Beam Prime had become relentless in its fire.

It took a total of just a dozen hits to exhaust the resonance shield!

"That's too quick!" Ves reacted with shock!

He expected the light beam attacks to be more effective against intangible and spirituality-based defenses, but he never expected that just a dozen hits was enough to expend the resonance shield of a proper expert mech.

His wife's reaction was just as dramatic. "If we arm a squad of rifleman mechs with this crystal rifle, wouldn't it be able to strip the first layer of defenses of nearly any expert mech in just a couple of salvos?"

The dramatic results soon caused Ves to feel concerned. He had just proven that he managed to develop a weapon system that was able to counter one of the most important methods that guaranteed the superiority of an expert mech.

Even though expert mechs could rely on other advantages to remain operational in actual battlefield circumstances, this did not detract from the fact that they would have a much harder time if they could no longer rely on their resonance shields!

"Is this.. the real reason why the MTA is limiting the spread of luminar crystal technology?" He wondered.