The Mech Touch

For a moment, shock reigned throughout the battlefield.

The intensity of the fighting hadn't abated, and many ranged mech pilots continued to focus on pouring down fire at their respective targets.

However, the mech pilots who were idle enough to maintain an overview of the battle as well as the officers who commanded the troops all became astonished as they observed the results of the most powerful and accurate energy beam to have opened fire up to this point.

Even before the empowered light beam attack struck the Azure Vanquisher, those who happened to catch a glance of this attack could instantly distinguish it from the many other laser and positron beams that filled up the space between the two sides!

The diameter of the beam was simply too massive, and the energy readings produced by various sensors spiked so much that a lot of analytical systems couldn't make sense of the data anymore!

Even so, any human that managed to observe the bright white beam surrounded by an angry red corona could instinctively feel an enormous sense of indignant power and righteous fury from the attack.

Venerable Davia Stark's willpower directly pressed on the minds and spirits of each of these observers!

By resonating with her Instrument of Vengeance, she had imbued its high-powered shot with her will and determination to kill!

It was this desire to destroy and kill her chosen target that Venerable Dirkson Tavoren had to resist!

If he was a little more alert and more focused on resisting his opponents, then perhaps his force of will would have been able to strengthen his Azure Vanquisher's ability to resist the incoming attack.

Unfortunately, Venerable Tavoren had been too preoccupied with raising the morale of the troops of the Sundered Phalanx. As impressive as expert pilots could be, their concentration was still limited.

The Fridayman expert pilot had become accustomed to viewing Hexers as rabid but beaten dogs after beating so many of them during the Komodo War.

It was a pity that his biases led him astray. The Hexer mech pilots that survived until this day had all learned and evolved from that past conflict.

They were just as ferocious as before, but they had grown smarter and figured out more ways to beat the Fridaymen.

However, it wasn't the Hexers that pierced through the Azure Vanquisher's defenses and forced the desperate expert pilot to activate the eject command before he suffered the same fate as his battle partner.

It was the Larkinson Clan that destroyed him in the end!

"The intelligence briefings… were wrong!" Venerable Tavoren complained with a pained expression. "They told me that the Larkinson Clan's expert mechs had all received updates, but they never told me that the expert marksman mech gained this much power!"

The Fridaymen already possessed a certain understanding of the performance of the Larkinson Clan's expert mechs. The Battle of Reckoning and the Battle of Fordilla Zentra both provided plenty of data to figure out a lot of properties of the notable expert mechs designed by Ves and his fellow designers.

The mech designers and other analysts in the employ of the Gauge Dynasty even studied what little intelligence they could collect from the Larkinson Army over the years and roughly estimated the performance improvements of every expert mech.

Venerable Tavoren and every other expert mech taking part in this fight had received plenty of briefings on the expert mechs that they would probably have to face.

Yet despite being generous about all of the improvements the Larkinsons had applied to their older expert mechs, the Amaranto and its Instrument of Vengeance demonstrated a level of power that exceeded the upper boundaries of all of the estimates!

At this time, his ejected cockpit took shelter behind a nearby squad of space knights, not that it brought the defeated expert pilot much comfort.

An attack that was powerful enough to pierce through the Azure Vanquisher's resonance shield with surprising effectiveness and drill through its chest armor could also pierce through a bunch of ordinary space knights with ease!

"This is not the firepower that a normal expert mech should possess!"

His mind and will could still remember the magnitude of the attack that the Amaranto had launched in his direction.

As the defeated expert pilot continued to revisit the moment when his expert mech got struck from afar, he eventually figured out the real reason why his expert mech got knocked down in a single blow.

"It's not just the mech that has become a lot stronger. That Larkinson expert pilot is also much more skilled than she has any right to be. How many powerful opponents did she fight in order to become so proficient at sniping? Her entire action sequence was flawless!"

No matter what, Venerable Dirksen Tavoren was still a competent expert pilot. If any other expert pilot sought to fell his Azure Vanquisher in a single blow, then his powerful intuition should have clued him in on the threat.

This didn't happen!

His instincts only screamed an alarm at him when the Amaranto had already begun to discharge the powerful energies it accumulated in its luminar crystal rifle.

That was way too late to make a proper response!

As a hero mech specialist, Venerable Tavoren was familiar with this skill, though he did not master it himself due to his different training priorities.

To be able to target an enemy from long range and strike with precision was difficult but not too troublesome to learn. 

To be able to do all that while giving the enemy target no forewarning at all was a lot more difficult to pull off! Not only did the expert pilot need to perform multiple different techniques, but also become extremely good at holding back the intent to kill while at the same time plotting to assassinate a target in a single shot.

Just the demand to maintain two contradictory intentions at the same time was enough to split the minds of lesser marksman mech pilots!

There were many other details that contributed to the instant defeat of the Azure Vanquisher.

For example, the expert hero mech might not excel at defense, but it should have been much more difficult for another mid-range expert mech to penetrate its resonance shield in a single pass.

The strange energy beam type was the main reason why the Azure Vanquisher's most important defensive measure had failed so easily! Whatever damage it inflicted onto a target seemed to form a natural counter to true resonance!

"How many crazy advantages does the enemy ranged mech possess?!"

If only a single of the aforementioned factors applied to Venerable Davia Stark and the Amaranto, then the combination would only be slightly more concerning than normal.

However, the combination of all of these factors produced a package that was greater than the sum of its parts!

The Fridayman expert pilot's eyes shook with apprehension.

Though powerful soldiers and warriors like himself did not experience any fear, he was still capable of feeling concern for his fellow comrades.

Alarm surged through his mind when he imagined his other colleagues succumbing to the lethal beams of this insidious long-ranged mech.

He hastily transmitted his findings to his colleagues over their exclusive communication channel.

"Watch out for the Amaranto's shot! The enemy expert pilot can strike without warning and punch through your resonance shield in an instant! You have to suppress the Amaranto at all costs!"

"We are already on it." Someone spoke. "Our analysts have already figured out that it takes a lot of time and preparation for the enemy expert pilot to prepare such a powerful and precise attack. The enemy won't be able to take us by surprise if we keep her and her expert mech busy enough."

The response from the Sundered Phalanx came quickly when the Amaranto locked onto a different target.

As soon as the expert rifleman mech exposed a tiny part of itself, two fast and power resonance-empowered energy beams launched from within the titan shield of an orbital space station and struck the armored enclosure on the Gorgoneion!

What was remarkable about these mighty energy beams was that they had been fired at virtually the same time from the same muzzle at the same angle!

Venerable Stark already recognized the massive threat to her expert mecht, but just because she wanted her Amaranto to dodge away did not mean that her machine could accomplish this in an instant.

A massive amount of heat and light exploded from the hull section as the laser beam unleashed destruction over the entire area!

The power of that laser beam was not lower than the previous shot fired by the Amaranto!

It turned out that the champions of the Sundered Phalanx were no longer willing to sit back.

The first Fridayman expert mech to fire against the attackers also happened to be an expert rifleman mech, and one that excelled in long-ranged precision attacks no less!

The biggest difference between it and the Amaranto was that the former was controlled by a genuine high-tier expert pilot!

Venerable Kasia Rezkin of the 5642nd Blackend Reaper Mech Division was one of the more famous and successful war heroes of the Komodo War. Her skill along with her powerful resonance strength had allowed her to pick off one vulnerable Hexer expert mech after another.

Years later, her skills had not regressed in the slightest. Her ability to take Venerable Stark by surprise was a testament of her long-ranged assassination capabilities!

What was different from before was that the Sundered Phalanx assigned a brand-new expert mech to her when she arrived in the Red Ocean.

The Star of Liberation shared many common design elements with the Amaranto. As an expert mech that excelled at long-ranged attacks, its armor and flight capabilities were not that impressive.

The true star of the show was the custom high-end Slipdream rifle at its disposal.

Master Johnny Bates led the development of the Star of Liberation. It was already a given that he would design a standard laser-positron energy rifle that was completely tailored to Venerable Rezkin and her expert mech.

It only took one pull of the trigger to put the Amaranto into a lot of distress!

What was even scarier about the Star of Liberation was that its Slipdream rifle needed much less time to discharge another powerful double-beam attack!

In addition, since Venerable Rezkin was much more powerful than Venerable Stark in terms of resonance strength, she was able to amplify the damage output of her Star of Liberation to a much higher degree!

As Venerable Rezkin tracked the Amaranto like a hawk, the latter was no longer able to pull off any further cheap shots.

Whenever the Amaranto maneuvered behind the hull of the Gorgoneion and attempted to open fire at another important target, the Star of Liberation never failed to preempt Venerable Stark's actions by firing first!

Several powerful energy explosions struck the Gorgoneion, though this time the Star of Liberation's attacks first had to chew through her directional energy shields.

Normally, the powerful energy shield generators that the Larkinson Clan had recently installed aboard her capital ships should have been able to resist an entire bombardment, but the Star of Liberation was too unreasonable!

The double laser-positron beam attacks were empowered by so much true resonance that they seemed to overpower the ship-grade energy shields through sheer willpower!

The Gorgoneion's engineering crews panicked as the energy shield generators they took care of already showed signs of reaching their limits.

They weren't supposed to reach this state so soon!

"I am not going to make this easy on you, Stark." Venerable Kasia Rezkin grinned inside the cockpit of her considerably more luxurious mech. "I will not only deprive you of any further chances to snipe my comrades-in-arms, but I will also take shots at your own side's expert mech. I can do everything that you can do, but better!"

This was not an empty boast. The many Hexer expert mechs that had fallen at her hands was the greatest proof of her competence!