The Mech Touch

"NOOOOO!"

"THIS CANNOT BE!"

"MURDERER!"

"HEXFIEND!"

"HONORLESS DOG!"

The reactions from the soldiers of the Sundered Phalanx as well as the citizens of the Gauge Dynasty conveyed an incredible amount of fury and dismay!

In fact, many other Fridaymen who hailed from the other coalition partners also exhibited similar reactions!

The loss of the Neo Amadeus was a great shame but not a completely unacceptable defeat.

The loss of Saint Jeremiah Gauge, a relatively young ace pilot who still had a bright future ahead of him was much more devastating!

Ace pilots were pretty much one of the few weapons of mass destruction that states and private organizations were allowed to employ on the battlefield.

Each of them formed a massive deterrent and elevated the comprehensive strength and prestige of their respective states.

Ace pilots lived for a long amount of time. While it was extremely troublesome to prolong the lives of expert pilots, it was a different case for those that had successfully experienced their second apotheosis.

As ace pilots came closer to turning themselves into energy-based life forms, their bodies became a lot more malleable to their power.

Even if they knew nothing about biology, just baptizing their biological human bodies with their willpower for many years was enough to transform their mortal coils in order to extend their lifespans!

In fact, expert pilots were capable of doing this as well, but their resonance strengths were too low for them to make any major differences.

Though the lifespans of ace pilots still varied wildly due to the differences in their domains and usage of their powers, it was not that difficult for them to live for up to 300 years without receiving any specialized treatments!

Of course, everything had limits and it was extremely hard for ace pilots to push themselves past this point.

Their only way to break their lifespan limitations was to advance to god pilot and attain immortality!

Of course, no one in the Friday Coalition ever thought that their ace pilots had a chance of becoming a legendary god pilot that would earn recognition from the entirety of human society.

It was already enough for Saint Jeremiah Gauge to be able to serve the Gauge Dynasty and by extension the Friday Coalition if he was able to pilot ace mechs for two whole centuries!

Now, in a time where Jeremiah's promising career had been cut short after fighting his first true battle as an ace pilot, many Fridaymen mourned this devastating loss!

What was worse was that the defeat of Saint Jeremiah and his Neo Amadeus immediately exposed the rest of the Sundered Phalanx and the intact parts of the Kosic Ring to the power of the victor!

Patriarch Reginald Cross did not experience any of the negative emotions of the people he hurt with his actions.

Instead, he experienced ultimate bliss for winning this duel and starting his glorious career as an ace pilot on the strongest footing possible!

Few ace pilots had the privilege of defeating an equal of theirs on the battlefield, let alone claiming their adversary's life as well!

Decades or even a century could go by before an ace pilot would ever be able to fight a serious battle against one of their peers.

This wasn't the case for Patriarch Reginald.

This victory had greater meaning to him than anyone else in his position. His confidence in his strength and skill had boosted to an incredible height. No one would be able to question his battle worthiness anymore. He was no longer a dubious ace pilot who mainly relied on the unreasonable strength of his ace mech or the assistance of external helpers to defeat his enemies.

It was all him! Reginald knew for certain that he fought and killed Saint Jeremiah by himself. No living mech and no design spirit had ever bailed him out like they did for the other mech pilots fighting on the main battlefield.

Even now, he could feel an extremely close and intimate connection to his Mars.

All of the previous instances where he piloted the Mars couldn't compare to how closely he was able to understand and control his ace mech!

He intuitively understood that even if he was separated from his Mars, he could always call it back to his side as long as it wasn't completely broken!

This was an exceedingly rare experience for ace pilots. Only those that had reached the end of their current phase would think about bonding themselves to their ace mechs to this degree, and it always took at least several years to complete the first phase of the Mech Body Merger Process.

Reginald actually suffered from a lack of information because he hadn't put much effort into studying the Mech Body Merger Process.

However, that did not stop him from enjoying and benefiting from the consequences of his actions!

"I… have become the Mars."

Strictly speaking, the Mars had become Reginald as well, but since he had gotten rid of its living personality, the phrase had little meaning anymore.

What was important was that the Mars became a part of him in a way that made him feel as if he could actively mold his ace mech to make it more suitable for him to pilot.

He had already done that to a large degree by baptizing it with his force of will. The Mars had improved in ways that Patriarch Reginald couldn't completely describe, but none of them were bad from his perspective!

His desire to pilot a stronger, tougher and more long-lasting mech had partially been realized due to the transformation that he had managed to spur on. It had played an important role in allowing Patriarch Reginald to win this crucial mech duel!

In fact, his Mars was still changing even now. By defeating the Neo Amadeus in single combat, the ace hybrid mech's god body mechanism was harvesting a lot more spiritual feedback than before!

The amount of people that actively watched the duel from remote and rooted for Patriarch Reginald and his Mars were too many to count!

Though a significant portion of that same audience became dismayed when Jeremiah and his Neo Amadeus lost, more people sincerely admired the powerful Mars and celebrated its success on the battlefield!

Though Reginald cared nothing about the senseless opinions of completely irrelevant strangers, the Mars was different.

As a mech that Gloriana had designed to evolve into a god, the Mars craved the worship of the public.

The more people admired the Mars, the more the ace hybrid mech was able to absorb spiritual feedback through its divine markers!

Even though the vast majority of admirers were both weak and incredibly distant from the Mars, the sheer quantity of spiritual feedback produced by quadrillions of humans was vast!

The Mars hungrily absorbed it all as if it was a sponge that could never have its fill. No matter what messy thought matter different people directed towards the Crosser ace mech, its god body welcomed it all in order to fuel its long and uncertain ascension towards the third rung of the craftsmanship ladder.

As the Mars clearly enjoyed the worship of other people, Patriarch Reginald spontaneously felt like making a show out of his impressive accomplishment.

The mech slowly rose and lifted up its Whale-Cutting Saber that had run through the cockpit of the Neo Amadeus.

The Mars had adopted a victory pose that was both provocative and domineering!

"MURDERER!"

"Kill this brute!"

"He's so strong!"

"What a fantastic ace mech!"

Everyone had different ideas about the Mars, and Reginald's latest action directly stimulated many of them, allowing the Mars to harvest another spike of spiritual feedback!

As much as Patriarch Reginald felt tempted to continue the show and posture even further, he still remembered that he was still a part of an ongoing battle.

The defeat of Saint Jeremiah Gauge heavily impacted the Sundered Phalanx. Many of its mech troops already weren't doing so well due to all of the setbacks and losses they incurred when fighting against their immediate opponents.

The fact that the Mars was the last intact ace mech on the battlefield immediately caused the commanders of the Sundered Phalanx to assume the worst!

"Victory… may no longer be possible." System Governor Mabrius Gauge spoke as he lamented the loss of his nephew on the battlefield. "Speed up our evacuation plans. While there is still a chance we can secure victory today, if the Mars has enough strength left to intervene in the greater battle, then we must shift our goal towards mitigating our losses!"

Trying to win a battle and trying to minimize losses were two completely different objectives!

The former could still give the Gauge Dynasty a chance to save Pima Prime, while the latter essentially gave their enemies free rein of the crucial port system!

At this moment, everyone wanted to know how much fight the Mars had left. It was not certain whether Reginald and his ace mech were in a condition to exert themselves further.

Ves, who secretly celebrated the completion of his System Mission, quickly regained his composure when he recalled that the battle was not yet over.

In fact, certain powerful ranged mechs had already begun to shoot at the Mars!

Normally, no ordinary mechs dared to attack an ace mech, but everyone had seen how the Neo Amadeus inflicted serious damage to the Crosser machine.

For now, the Mars appeared to be able to resist the attacks launched by lots of ranged mechs by relying on its thin but still fairly potent Saint Kingdom.

Even if the condition of Reginald's domain field was anything but good, his powerful resonance strength was still on another level compared to the resonance strengths of expert pilots.

The Mars did not suffer any damage to its frame even after suffering thousands of hits!

The only attacks that succeeded in causing its thin and shaky domain field to wobble were the resonance-empowered attacks of Fridayman mid-tier and high-tier expert mechs.

In particular, the Star of Liberation posed the greatest threat to the Mars at the moment! The expert rifleman mech packed a lot of punch and its powerful expert pilot was able to impart her vengeful will to the full-powered positron and laser beams fired by her Slipdream rifle!

Patriarch Reginald winced as Venerable Kasia Rezkin's utter hatred towards the killer of Saint Jeremiah Gauge had caused her resonance strength to explode a bit. She had become driven to destroy the Mars and make its pilot pay!

"You annoying fly."

While Reginald was contemplating whether he should start swatting down the Star of Liberation and other dangerous mechs with the surviving armaments of his Mars, Master Benedict quickly uttered a warning.

"Don't fight, Reginald! You've won the most important fight for us, but you paid too much to secure this victory. It will take a lot of effort for you to defeat the opposing expert mechs, and the awful condition of your Mars means that your enemies have a small but real chance of exploiting its existing damage."

"What are you saying, Benedict?" The ace pilot frowned. "These guys think they can pick up a bargain now that my mech isn't as good as before. I need to teach them a lesson and show them that I can still crush them regardless of the state of my machine!"

"You can still do that, but I urgently request you to bring the Mars back to the Hemmington Cross. I have called up an emergency crew of mech designers and mech technicians to resupply your Mars with fully-charged energy cells and conduct emergency repairs onto its damaged frame. By my estimation, your Mars is around 12 percent battle effective in its current state and could drop at any time. We can lift that up to 30 percent after spending just 10 minutes with your machine. That should be more than enough combat strength for you to roll over the remaining elements of the Sundered Phalanx and break open the Kosic Ring!"

Though Reginald really wanted to continue the fight right away, his concern for the Mars trumped his bloodlust.

"Very well… I will go back… but you better do your job quickly. I don't want to make everyone believe that Jeremiah Gauge pushed me to my limits. I am not that weak!"

"No problem. Everything is already in place. By the way, please do me another favor and bring back the cockpit as well as the wreck of the Neo Amadeus back to our flagship. None of the Fridaymen should be able to prevent you from claiming your rightful spoils!"

Reginald's eyes lit up. Claiming a trophy from the remains of his opponents was a time-honored tradition!

"Will do. I promise you shall be able to enjoy the remnants of strong mech to your heart's content!"

The Mars used one of its hands to maintain hold of its saber while using the other to grab onto the Neo Amadeus.

Though his enemies intensified their attacks on the Mars, Reginald did not feel too bothered by the largely ineffectual hits.

He was already wondering what he should take from the remains of the Neo Amadeus in order to make a trophy that commemorated his first victorious ace mech duel!