The Mech Touch

The Filamon had gone through great lengths to stop the Dark Zephyr from taking advantage of the situation and crush the escaping cockpit that held the body of Venerable Osaia Dukes.

As the escape vessel of a mid-tier expert pilot, its speed and defenses were anything but average!

Though at least part of its structure had suffered a fair amount of damage from Tusa's transphasic grenade, it still retained more than enough functionality to make it back to friendly territory.

In fact, Venerable Tusa never intended to kill Venerable Dukes in person. It was enough to destroy the Quadknife and remove an expert mech off the board. The outcome of the battle wouldn't fundamentally change if the expert pilot actually made it back.

After all, what would Venerable Dukes do once he returned? It was extremely unlikely that the Sundered Phalanx just happened to have a compatible expert mech on hand.

The only other way for Venerable Dukes to contribute to the battle was to hop into the cockpit of an ordinary mech, but how could such a combination possibly turn into a battle involving hundreds of thousands of mechs?

Therefore, Tusa really didn't care too much about letting Dukes go. Other nearby Larkinson mech pilots didn't care too much either.

The Hexers were different, though. There were still plenty of Hexer mech pilots that had been paying close attention to the fight between the Dark Zephyr and the two Fridayman expert mechs.

Every veteran from the Komodo War had ingrained an important habit into their minds.

Whenever the cockpit of an expert mech became exposed, they had to do their utmost to destroy it and kill the vulnerable expert pilot within!

"Shoot it down!"

"Yes, ma'am!"

Plenty of Hexer rifleman mechs and other ranged mechs opened fire at the cockpit!

Since the cockpit's mobility and evasion characteristics were nowhere near as good as that of a complete mech, it was easy to land a hit on its shell!

The cockpit actually integrated a small but powerful emergency shield generator, but the transphasic grenade had already broken it in advance.

It was only its transphasic armor plating that prevented Venerable Dukes from getting cooked to ashes by a penetrating laser beam!

"Save Venerable Dukes!"

The Hexers hadn't been the only ones who paid attention to Quadknife's cockpit. The Nidin Verger mech pilots that practically idolized their champions had moved in as quickly as possible.

They might not have been able to interfere in a duel between expert mechs, but they could still save their hero in his darkest hour!

Despite getting beat up by the Flagrant Vandals to the point where they had already lost a lot of mechs, the surviving ones did not hesitate to make a sacrificial play.

Hundreds of Nidin Verger mechs left the battle line, leaving their remaining comrades to fend off the Flagrant Vandals and other opponents that were steadily pressing them back.

The departure of so many Fridayman mechs at once had an enormously bad effect on the comrades they left behind, but everyone seemed to be of one mind on this issue. Not even the urgent instructions from their officers could stop them from doing their best to save the life of Venerable Dukes!

A lot of light mechs quickly arrived in front of the cockpit and formed a shield of metal around it to shield the vulnerable package against any further damage.

The toll they took was great!

Light mechs weren't designed to stand their ground and absorb incoming hits, so the shots fired by distant Hexer mechs easily hit the mechs and scrapped them one after another.

Sometimes, the heroic but impulsive Friday pilots that volunteered for this duty were able to eject from their cockpits in time, but there were plenty that suffered an accident and gave up their lives to buy a brief moment of time for their hero's escape!

Venerable Tusa became strangely impressed and inspired by this collective action.

Just because the Gaugers were his opponents didn't mean he looked down on them. He respected them as soldiers who fought for honor and family. They were not that different from the Larkinsons in that sense.

The only Fridaymen that Tusa truly resented were the higher-ups that had originally sought to bring down Ves and the Larkinson Clan. These ordinary grunts as well as their expert pilots did not bear any of the guilt of the original decision to attack the Larkinsons.

A part of Tusa found it distasteful that the Hexer mech pilots had become so eager to pounce on the weakness of a fellow expert pilot that they instantly attempted to hit Venerable Dukes when he was down.

He couldn't stop it, though. The Hexers followed their own chain of command and he already understood that the hatred between them and the Fridaymen had run too deep to persuade them from changing their current actions.

Besides, the current scenario was highly favorable to the attacking forces! The Quadknife's cockpit essentially acted as bait that allowed the Hexers to quickly reduce the number of enemy light mechs with ease.

The amount of mechs that had been shot down by this time continued to escalate until another party quickly took action!

"LEAVE DUKES ALONE!"

The Filamon had blasted forward in order to act as a more qualified shield for the cockpit. Its resonance shield was still fully intact and could easily resist the barrage of conventional attacks for a decent amount of time.

Not only that, but the Filamon had already begun to fire its powerful rifle against the Hexer ranged mech that threatened her battle buddy.

Dozens of Hexer mechs got impaled by spikes in quick succession, of which many of them happened to pierce straight through the cockpits buried deep inside.

Though the projectiles did not always manage to disable the Hexer mechs in a single go, the Filamon's weapon possessed so much ammunition that it was no problem to spike the targets a few more times in order to be certain!

"Damnit!"

Venerable Tusa's mood dropped as he moved his Dark Zephyr forward in order to respond to the other threat that he was supposed to take care of. He had only started to take action when the famous Dukes and Hawkes duo threatened to slaughter the mechs on his side!

Strangely enough, the Filamon did not move from its place at all despite the approach of a threatening expert light skirmisher.

It would be understandable if the Filamon was an expert heavy knight such as the shield of Samar, but it was just an expert harasser mech that possessed little effective combat power at close range!

"Have you gone mad?!"

Venerable Tusa simply couldn't understand what was going on in the mind of Kismet Hawkes at the moment. It made almost no sense for her to plant her expert mech in front of the cockpit of Venerable Dukes.

She would have been better off if she kept the Filamon mobile so that the Dark Zephyr wouldn't be able to get close!

"DON'T COME CLOSE!"

No matter what Venerable Hawkes had in mind, she still recognized that the Dark Zephyr was the greatest threat in the immediate area and immediately began to fire at the incoming expert mech!

Venerable Tusa did not feel pressured anymore. Even though his expert mech was still battered, there was a huge difference between facing a ranged mech from the front as opposed to the rear.

The absence of the tag team dynamic that previously constrained Tusa's actions also allowed him to activate the Untouchable resonance ability again.

Many spikes simply soared through empty space as Tusa skillfully obscured the real position of his expert mech through an optical illusion created with the help of Trisk.

The soft corona around the Dark Zephyr slowly faded from dark gray and back to its original shade of sky blue.

Venerable Tusa did not feel any need to resort to the Shadow Dance to fight his remaining opponent during this phase of the battle.

"Fight me properly, Hawkes. I don't want to bully you. At least play to your advantages."

"DIE, LARKINSON!"

"..."

It did not take much time at all for his expert mech to approach the Filamon, which made Tusa feel even sorrier about this situation.

If Venerable Hawkes was able to maintain her wits, then she should have flown away while engaging her transphasic stutter flight system.

This would have made it much harder for the Dark Zephyr to catch up as Tusa would have to wait until the Stiletto Drive operated long enough to raise its speed amplification to a high enough level.

However, due to the relatively slow acceleration of the Quadknife's cockpit, the Dark Zephyr could have easily caught up to the Filamon without relying on its minidrive.

Regardless of whether Venerable Tusa felt any pity for Venerable Hawkes, he still went in with the determination to tear apart his next target!

Just before the Dark Zephyr could get close enough to attack, the Filamon did not move from its place.

Instead, it activated a new setting that caused its filament rifle to extend an energy bayonet just below its muzzle!

Venerable Tusa initially didn't think much of it, but as his Dark Zephyr attempted to block and overcome his opponent's weapon, he found to his surprise that Venerable Hawkes was quite skilled at wielding its rifle like an improvised spear!

He could sense that Venerable Hawkes spent many hours in training and polishing her ability to fend off opponents up close with her bayonet.

It became a lot trickier for him to fight against the Filamon because he sensed considerable danger from the energy bayonet.

When he took a slight risk in order to inflict a couple of heavy blows on the Filamon's weakening resonance shield, the energy bayonet managed to graze a section of the Dark Zephyr's arm.

Much to his surprise, the energy bayonet partially bypassed the thin layer of Unending alloy and scorched some of the internals underneath!

"Damnit, is everything on an expert mech transphasic these days?!"

Even though the Filamon had turned into a somewhat competent melee combatant, it didn't change the fact that it was primarily configured and optimized for ranged combat.

Its bayonet mode was merely an option of last resort when the Filamon could no longer outrun its pursuers!

Against a true melee mech specialist like Venerable Tusa, the attempt by Hawkes to repel his Dark Zephyr up close was doomed to fail unless she received support!

It was not as if the Sundered Phalanx had given up on Dukes and Hawkes. Enemy ranged mechs occasionally took potshots at the Dark Zephyr, but this was clearly an exercise in futility considering that Tusa always kept his machine mobile!

He wasn't afraid of the Star of Liberation or the Tensars, and he could easily angle his expert mech in a way that put the Filamon or other Fridaymen mechs in the firing line.

Eventually, the Dark Zephyr steadily ground down the Filamon with repeated strikes.

First, the resonance shield popped.

Second, the thin filament rifle broke in half, which also happened to remove its energy bayonet from the equation.

Third, the Dark Zephyr completely ignored the backup knife that the Filamon pulled out and thoroughly thrust its dagger into so many weak points that Venerable Hawkes finally ejected her cockpit from her trusty machine!

"What a pity." Tusa sighed and shook his head.

He felt no accomplishment at all for this successful takedown. While he was confident that he could have taken down the Filamon sooner or later, there was a difference between beating an earnest opponent and beating an opponent that had gone crazy all of a sudden.

"Tusa." Ves opened a direct communication channel to the Dark Zephyr. "Will you let the cockpits of Dukes and Hawkes get away like this?"

"I have no interest in chasing them any further." Tusa decisively answered. "I have my own honor."

"...Suit yourself. Don't dawdle around then. You should provide relief to Venerable Imaris Cross. The sooner we defeat all of the enemy expert mechs at the right flank, the sooner we can tip the battle in our favor and win this battle. Don't let your feelings harm the lives of our mech pilots. The longer this fight goes on, the more our clansmen will perish."

"You don't need to remind me of that, Ves. Let me do my job while you stick to yours."

Venerable Tusa took a brief moment to find his center again and moved in the direction of the Crosser mech units.

He still had plenty of other expert mechs to slay!