The Mech Touch

The Riot's abnormally hardy state could hardly escape the sharp eyes of Ves and Gloriana.

There was no way that the Riot could perform so much better for no reason. Before the battle commenced, Gloriana had especially spent time to tune up and perform last-minute checks on Venerable Orfan's expert mech.

Gloriana still remembered the Riot's condition back then. It wasn't much different from its base state.

"Then how can its resonance shield be so much more effective all of a sudden?"

Though expert mechs didn't always make sense, they still abided by a number of general rules. The effective performance of an expert mech was heavily dependent on the strength and mood of the expert pilot.

"Had Venerable Orfan experienced a minor breakthrough of sorts?"

When Gloriana called up the pilot telemetry of the Riot, she quickly dispelled this notion. According to all of the data, Venerable Orfan was excited, stressed and pumped up, but not to an abnormal degree.

The resonance strength meters also showed that Venerable Orfan hadn't progressed much since her last live practise session. The slight increase in resonance strength that she exhibited could be chalked up to the heat of the moment. Battle had always been an extra motivator to any mech pilot, not just expert pilots!

"There's something suspicious at work." Gloriana narrowed her eyes.

BSN-17A was supposed to provide an expert mech with an abnormally strong resonance barrier, but this was starting to get ridiculous! As she poured over the data and analyzed the Riot's defensive performance in greater detail, she also began to notice that many resonance-empowered attacks seemed to lose strength and cohesion all of a sudden.

To Gloriana, it looked like a signal passing through an interference field. Even if the signal strength was strong enough to transmit at least some data to the recipient, the quality of the message must have degraded by a significant degree!

This was a quality that the Riot absolutely shouldn't have! It also didn't conform with Venerable Orfan's resonance properties.

When Gloriana ruled out many different possible explanations why the Riot performed so much more effectively than before, she ended up with a single answer.

Her body shook as she realized a horrifying possibility.

She turned around her chair and activated a direct communication channel to her husband!

"VES! WHAT DID YOU DO?!"

"Uh, what is it, dear?"

"Don't you 'dear' me. Tell me straight. Did you upgrade the Riot recently with a scarce and precious resource?!"

The man on the other side of the communication channel abruptly coughed.

"Erkm.. uhm… we're in the middle of a battle now! If you have anything to say, leave it for later. There's no point in talking if we're all dead because we were too inattentive to attend to our duties. Talk to you later!"

The communication channel cut off from the other side, leaving Gloriana frustrated as she essentially confirmed her suspicions.

"VESSSSS!"

"Miaow!"

Clixie, who was wearing a customized protective suit printed with a decorative pattern, jumped from the table as Gloriana expressed her current feelings!

As for the person responsible for making his wife feel upset, he was doing his best to shove aside his eventual reckoning. He still had a battle to win first. Compared to getting yelled at by his pregnant wife, death was so much worse!

His wife was still pretty sharp for catching on to the fact that the Riot performed a lot better at its current role due to a gem that he had installed on the expert mech.

To be honest, Ves didn't have much expectations for it. The so-called Unstable Chaos Essence as named by the System sounded so iffy to him that he hadn't dared to integrate it to any mech up until it became clear that battle against the Ferril Provincial Army was inevitable.

He had even used it as an improvised spiritual explosive during the Battle against the Abyss because of this suspicion!

Ves didn't know what came over him when he took a risk and integrated it with the Riot, but so far it was working out. The Riot's defense was so unexpectedly difficult to crack by a team of three dwarven expert mechs that he wanted to cheer and clap at Venerable Orfan's excellent performance!

He didn't even care if the Riot blew up or fell apart at the end of the battle due to the repercussions of employing this shady-sounding gem. As long as Venerable Orfan was still alive and intact, he could just recycle whatever salvageable materials remained and fabricate another copy of the Riot design. Expert mechs may be precious, but Ves was more than happy to use them up if the extra power boost increased his chances of winning a crucial battle.

"I hope that doesn't happen, though." He muttered.

Fabricating an expert mech was not only a time-consuming ordeal, but also difficult to accomplish if the Larkinson Clan didn't have the right materials on hand. A lot of volatile exotics and resonating materials were non-recyclable. Once they were processed in a finished product, they were permanently set and could not be restored because their material makeup had already undergone a non-reversible transformation.

Still, if Ves had the choice, he would not reject this necessity when the alternatives were worse.

"Is the mech truly falling apart, though?"

When Ves accessed the Riot's telemetry, he noticed a faint trend of stress buildup. Delicate parts were being worn out faster than usual, but that might just come from the fact that it was getting beat up on all sides by three different expert mechs!

Once the dwarven expert pilots understood that their current approach wasn't achieving much progress, they switched tactics.

As an experienced mech pilot and combatant, Venerable Orfan had been paying close attention to the approach of her opponents. Up until now, they employed a basic approach that just sought to surround her expert mech from three sides and deal as much damage as possible, hoping to overwhelm their opponent's defenses by sheer volume.

Now, they were doing something else. The Bashravar became the focal point of their new formation and tactics. While the heavy hammerman mech was still awfully slow, it suddenly became a lot harder for the Riot to stay away from the dwarven mech's huge hammer!

"Get off my back, you dirty dwarf!" Venerable Orfan shouted as she swung her spear back, causing its flat end to bash against the chest of the Trementine just as it sought to crash its axe onto the rear of the Riot.

The Firemason swept in from behind and above shortly afterwards and fired an extremely hot and large bed of empowered flames that practically turned the entire area behind the Riot aflame!

The sea of fire not only exuded a lot of heat, but also the dwarven expert pilot's will and determination to melt the human expert mech!

"Damn that's hot!"

Though Venerable Orfan wasn't necessarily afraid of this flame sea, the annoying part about swimming in it was that it partially blinded the Riot's sensors. She wouldn't be able to track her opponents as well if many of her sensors became invalid due to the excess readings they registered.

That, and getting cooked was unpleasant to begin with. The Riot's resonance shield already took a lot of beatings so far. Venerable Orfan still needed it intact in order to continue stalling these angry dwarves.

"Hey! Fight me one-on-one if you're man enough! Oh wait, you can't, because you guys are all shorties. You're far from a real man! Are you just as short in your pants as you are in your body length? Because if that is the case, then it's no wonder you dwarves are mad at regular humans all the time."

That seemed to trigger the expert pilot of the expert hammerman mech. In a single outburst, the heavy mech's flight system blasted to life, giving it a temporary but extremely powerful push that accelerated it right into the Riot!

The explosion of speed surprised Venerable Orfan, but not too much. She already anticipated that such a painfully sluggish expert mech would incorporate a solution to its greatest weakness.

"I'm outta here!"

The Riot jerked to the side as much as its mobility could carry it, which wasn't much. The spearman expert mech wasn't exactly known for its speed or agility.

Due to the powerful explosive start of the Bashravar, the Riot failed to dodge the huge and heavy hammer this time. The heavy weapon struck the human expert mech's unstable resonance shield at an angle and finally inflicted enough damage to cause it to collapse.

The only anomaly was that when the shield finally succumbed, it exploded, releasing excess energy in every direction!

The Bashravar which had just succeeded in breaking the Riot's first layer of defense only slightly got shoved backwards. The Trementine which had just attempted to come around the flank in order to hack the exposed Riot with its hefty axe got blown away a little further due to its lighter mass.

THe Firemason was entirely unaffected due to its greater distance. When Venerable Orfan acted quickly to move her Riot out of its predicament, the pilot of the expert striker mech eagerly sprayed it with a jet of concentrated flames!

"Haha, burn now human, burn!"

This time, the flames had a lot more effect on the Riot than before. Now that Venerable Orfan's expert mech had lost its powerful resonance shield, it had also lost the property that allowed the machine to destabilize resonance attacks. The flames stuck onto the Breyer alloy layer of the Riot and immediately began to work away on the material!

The orange expert mech looked as if it had fallen right into hell as the Firemason continued to pour highly flammable substances onto the relatively soft armor layer!

"Burn! Burn! Burn!"

"Shut up, you dwarf!"

Even as the exterior of the Riot was visibly melting apart, Venerable Orfan's eyes turned ruthless as she accelerated her expert mech towards the Firemason, causing the expert striker mech to jerk back and increase the output of its flamethrower.

"Block it before it gets close!"

The Bashravar didn't possess the mobility to intercept the speeding Riot and the Trementine was still too far behind to catch up.

In an instant, the powerful Riot just managed to catch up to the Firemason and struck just as it pulled out a foldable shield from somewhere and formed a hasty defense!

"GET OUT OF HERE!"

With the momentum of the Riot driving its spear forward, Venerable Orfan also resonated with the speartip, causing it to glow as she had finally activated her expert mech's second resonance ability!

With a soundless ding, the spear shattered the Firemason's resonance shield and punched through its thin but still hardy physical shield before finally sinking halfway into the chest plating of the expert striker mech!

The power of this blow was surprisingly powerful!

The Firemason's pilot knew that it was extremely dangerous to stay in close range to the enemy expert mech. He immediately dislodged the pierced shield from the arm of the Firemason and commanded the mech to back off at full speed.

"Do you think you can get away?! I'm not done yet with you, shorty!"

Venerable Orfan smelled dwarven blood and she relentlessly advanced on the Firemason even as her expert mech continued to take hits from all sides.

Even as the Riot managed to poke multiple holes in the Firemason, it was still burning as the expert striker mech wasn't going down without a fight!

Meanwhile, the Trementine managed to catch up several times and chop apart entire sections of the Riot's weakened surface armor.

The Bashravar failed to get close enough to get another attack in, but its slow and steady advance exerted a lot of pressure onto Venerable Orfan.

Even so, she grinned as she controlled her machine to direct relentless aggression towards the Firemason. She ignored all of the attacks that began to scar and burn the exterior of her expert mech.

"Why isn't it as damaged as it looks?"

"There's a second armor layer underneath the surface layer! It's a lot harder and denser!"

"Vulcan's beard! We've been fooled! This is not an offensive mech. It's a defense mech!"