The Mech Touch

The Ylvaine Protectorate anticipated the arrival of the Deliverer for many days. Through the three Kronon mech pilots residing at Cloudy Curtain, the leaders of the Protectorate received prior notice of this wonder mech!

The higher ups learned the purpose and some of the specifications of the Deliverer. They also received some excerpts of the testing results of the first and second prototype!

They could scarcely believe what they learned! Yet the proof was undeniable! The Deliverer truly possessed the ability to guide the aim of the mech pilot!

While the Deliverer hadn't exhibited this strength too often, it was enough to form a statistical certainty!

If leaders other than Ylvainans received this information, then they might remain skeptical. In the mech industry, it was not that rare to encounter mech designers who exaggerated or outright lied about the capabilities of their works.

Of course, in many instances, the mech designers did not set out to deceive their customers. They merely believed too much in their own specialties to gauge the actual strength of their applications.

Too many mech designers were prone to overselling the strong points of their mech designs!

After all, those who did the opposite often failed to achieve commercial success! The mech market was too competitive to provide any space for low-key mech designers! Fame, prestige and brand recognition were all essential to stand out in the market!

In this regard, Ves acted rather conservatively. Though he consented to sharing some of the details of the Deliverer to the Protectorate, he did not dare to make any bold promises.

This was because the actual performance of the Deliverer depended on the whim of Ylvaine's spiritual fragment.

Without its assistance, the Deliverer was nothing more than an uneven marksman mech with an oversized gauss rifle!

The Ylvainans nonetheless put their faith in the Deliverer. The Transcendent Messenger and the Holy Soldier already burnished the Bright Martyr's credentials.

Even if they hadn't actually seen the Deliverer in action yet, most Ylvainans who became aware of this upcoming product already believed in its promise!

"The Deliverer will deliver us from death!"

"The Great Prophet acts through the Bright Martyr's mechs! No other vehicle is more appropriate to carry his will than through his mechs!"

"The Bright Martyr hasn't abandoned us! Our faith hasn't been in vain!"

While the Ylvainan people possessed the highest morale out of all of the states in the third line of defense, the constant losses and setbacks grinded away at their hope.

For this reason, the three leading dynasties decided that it wouldn't do any harm of publicizing the Deliverer!

The hype around this mech that promised to end the Sand War built up overnight! With reputation of the Bright Martyr backing up his upcoming product, hardly any Ylvainan doubted that the Deliverer would become a dud!

After reaching an easy consensus, the Protectorate immediately prepared to make use of the Deliverer as fast as possible!

The Curin Dynasty approached some of the best and most pious Seniors to ready their best production lines. Both the government and the mech industry pooled their efforts together to build up a stockpile of materials needed to build the Deliverers!

While some of the rarer exotics required to produce the Executor rifle were very hard to get, as long as the Ylvainans united together, none of these problems posed a hindrance!

The top generals of the Kronon Dynasty deliberated on the most appropriate use of the Deliverers.

Initially, they planned to attach them to their existing mech regiments, but after finding out that their glows were as exceptional as the Transcendent Messengers, they changed their mind!

Any mech that bore the Great Prophet's will must not be profaned!

While the Kronons did not intend to treat the Deliverers as special as the Transcendent Messengers, they still intended to form an elite mech troop based completely around the Deliverers!

After entertaining a few suggestions, they finally settled on calling it the Eye of Ylvaine!

This was due to the distinctive third eye featured prominently on the forehead of the Deliverer design!

"The Eye of Ylvaine will gaze upon the enemies of our faith and smite them from existence!"

Once the formation of the Eye of Ylvaine became known, practically every Kronon mech pilot wanted to become a part of this exclusive unit!

Not only did they wish to pilot the mech that promised to save the Protectorate, they also wanted to experience Prophet Ylvaine's grace in person!

While hundreds of thousands of mech pilots aimed to pilot a Deliverer, the selection requirements were extremely strict!

The Ylvaine Protectorate could only produce so many Deliverers at a time. Besides, it was impossible to field a force that consisted entirely of Deliverers! It wasn't economical, as the mechs were very vulnerable on their own!

The Deliverer mechs only promised to neutralize the sandman swarms quickly. There was no way the Deliverers could achieve much effect against the huge and formidable sandman monoliths.

No amount of excellent aim could make their Executor rifles bypass the all-encompassing layers of sand and other particles!

Only brute force worked against the monoliths, which meant that the Holy Soldiers with their cheap and economic Sandbreaker rifles achieved more sustainable results.

At the start, the Kronon Dynasty only intended to field five-hundred Deliverers and test them in action. This was already a very significant investment! If the Kronons weren't so confident in the Bright Martyr and if the war situation wasn't so dire, they would have taken their time!

Only the most deserving mech pilots gained the right to pilot the Deliverer!

The Kronons formed a list of candidates. Every mech pilot who excelled in marksmanship became eligible to pilot the new mech!

However, that wasn't enough! The Poxco Dynasty combed through the candidates and thoroughly inspected their devoutness in the Ylvainan Faith!

It didn't matter if their beliefs differed a little from the orthodox interpretation. As long as they were earnest, they were eligible to wield Ylvaine's might!

The Eye of Ylvaine officially came into being. Five hundred excellent mech pilots left their old positions to prepare for their upcoming duties!

The fate of the Ylvaine Protectorate rested on their shoulders!

The five-hundred chosen had to go through a lot of training. In order to avoid wasting the opportunities that the Deliverers provided to their mech pilots, their marksmanship had to be as good as possible!

It would be a shame for their mechs to single out a critical target, only for the mech pilots to botch their aim!

With how chaotic sandman swarms tended to be, it wasn't always possible to track a sandman drone once someone figured out that it contained a sandman admiral!

If the Deliverer missed, the exposed sandman admiral would certainly order a bunch of drones to meld together and split apart, thereby forcing the mech pilots to start from scratch!

This training regime only lasted for two weeks, give or take a few days. This was because the mech manufacturers contracted to produce the sacred mechs had delivered their first batches at this time!

Each and every Hunter of Ylvaine as the chosen mech pilots came to be called looked up at the Deliverer mechs with awe and devotion.

Even the guards and mech technicians were stunned into silence!

Some of them had already experienced the glows of the Transcendent Messengers! The glows emanating from the Deliverers felt exactly the same, but much more pure!

While none of the Deliverers emphasized any virtues such as zeal or sacrifice, their seemingly-empty purity brought peace to every Ylvainan!

Everyone bowed in front of the mechs. They completely became immersed by the holiness of these sacred mechs!

The fact that tens of Deliverers arrived together enhanced their holy appeal as their glows overlapped!

Only six Transcendent Messengers existed, and all of their glows were different!

In contrast, the Deliverers were all completely identical as many of the mechs shipped to the various bases that hosted the Eye of Ylvaine came from the same manufacturers!

With the high requirements imposed by the Curin Dynasty, the mech manufacturers did their utmost to achieve a high and consistent level of quality!

The right to produce the Deliverer was a supreme honor to every mech manufacturer! Even Senior Mech Designers did not look down on this design, because they knew they could never make their mechs as holy as the mechs designed by the Bright Martyr!

Each mech designer responsible for the production of the Deliverer took this privilege as a badge of honor! There was no way they wanted to suffer the indignity of losing this contract!

In fact, those who weren't lucky enough to supply Deliverers to the Eye of Ylvaine also produced some mechs for themselves. The LMC officially released the Deliverer as a commercial mech design, which meant that anyone with a licence could legally produce this mech!

Ves didn't want the Ylvainans to restrict the production of the Deliverer too much. Who knew what they would do if they gained the sole right to produce the mechs!

He didn't forget his earlier resentment towards the Kronon Dynasty. In his eyes, the Kronons didn't deserve to monopolize the Deliverer!

Of course, even if various private sector outfits already planned to field some Deliverers, the effect wouldn't be as good.

The Protectorate did not possess a very strong mercenary tradition! For so long, the state had closed its borders to the outside galaxy. There wasn't much to fight for within its borders, and the prestige of the Kronon Dynasty was very high!

A few days went by as the Hunters of Ylvaine got used to their sacred mechs.

While they were already well-prepared, they still needed some time to adjust to their mechs because they became intoxicated by the sacred glows!

Fortunately, it wasn't hard to find the sandmen once the Eye of Ylvaine was ready to bare its teeth!

Taon Melin, a chosen mech pilot of Zeal, was one of the mech pilots who tested the first Delivers in battle.

As a mech pilot specialized in piloting hero mechs, his marksmanship was almost as excellent as those committed to this specialization!

Ever since the Sand War came about, the Transcendent Messengers had mostly been used to lift the morale of the Ylvainan people instead of fighting the sandmen.

The Ylvainans couldn't help it. While the Transcendent Messengers were fantastic on land, they did not come with any flight systems!

Though it was possible to pair them with flight platforms that gave landbound mechs the capability to fly in space, it wasn't worth it because these platforms were too large and vulnerable to damage!

Taon Melin waited for this opportunity for a long time. He always bided his time throughout the Sand War as if he knew his time would come!

A familiar sensation overcame Taon as he entered the cockpit and interfaced with his mech.

As the chosen of Zeal, his ability to connect with the sacred mechs was better than any other Hunter of Ylvaine!

His Deliverer deployed from a combat carrier alongside three other Deliverers!

At this time, battle had already commenced. A large sandman fleet consisting of up to fifteen sandman admirals were bearing down on a major planet housing billions of people!

Thousands of Holy Soldiers and starfighters were desperately fighting to whittle down the swarms and monoliths before they reached their destination. Countless lasers and projectiles impacted sand and metal alike!

Amidst this intensive battle, a handful of mechs with glowing third eyes deployed in the rear of the human formation did not attract much attention.

The mech with the brightest glowing eye slowly aimed its massive rifle at the periphery of the humongous swarm.

A Deliverer fired a single shot.

Just seconds later, a tenth of the swarm abruptly became paralyzed!

The sandman admiral in charge of coordinating their movements had died!

Taon Melin only took seconds to fire his critical shot! Everyone monitoring the first deployment of the Deliverers became stunned by his stellar performance!

Something like this could never be a fluke! Ylvaine was truly on their side!

"We are saved!"