The Mech Touch



"What?!" Ves reacted with surprise at this highly sophisticated defensive response.

This was an absolutely remarkable way to minimize the amount of modular plating that got destroyed after getting struck with a powerful kinetic attack.

If the Double Up could continually absorb and direct much of the incoming kinetic blows, then the Furia's shotgun wouldn't be able to penetrate the opposition's armor layers fast enough!

"The degree of sophistication and design work that Beatrice Hendrix put into designing this automatic reactive defense system is inconceivable!" Sara Voiken spoke with genuine respect and appreciation. "Even if she is able to adapt one of her existing implementations, for her to be able to apply it to a competition mech in a matter of hours is truly amazing."

The way in which the modular armor plates of the Double Up morphed and adopted many different configurations was truly impressive.

It put the Battle Skirt System that was originally designed for the Maiden of Adversity to shame!

Against a strong offensive hybrid mech like the Furia, the Double Up had plenty of opportunities to demonstrate the defensive prowess bestowed by Beatrix Hendrix.

For example, Bobby Orwell had clearly listened to Ves' suggestion and looked up how to best launch a throwing axe. The Furia ran forward and built up a lot of momentum, but still maintained a pace that was relatively controllable.

The Furia fired its shotgun at the Double Up yet again before rearing up its other arm that already held a throwing axe.

"Fly, axe!"

After taking a special step that pivoted the entire frame of the hybrid mech and channeled a remarkable amount of force from foot to arm, the axe grasped in the Furia's other hand propelled forward as if it had been launched by a catapult!

Clang!

The automated modular defensive system already detected the incoming axe in advance and make the best possible response to stop the spinning projectile from dealing greater damage.

When the axe finally struck a solid object, it happened to strike a transformed physical shield that was set at a strange angle!

This angle was meticulously calculated so that when the sharp axe blade was just beginning to dig into the angled shield, its trajectory and angular momentum ultimately caused it to ricochet and bounce above the Double Up's head!

"What?! That's nonsense!"

Ves had never witnessed such an advanced and responsive application of modular mech armor.

There were good reasons why modular armor systems never managed to catch on in the mech industry. They were considerably more expensive and introduced more points of failure in a mech. They also weren't able to cope against strong and penetrating attacks as well as plain old solid armor plating.

However, from what Ves could observe from Beatrice Hendrix's work, she was able to utilize the fast response and wide adaptability of modular armor plating systems to form the right defensive shape at the right time.

This was an excellent way to compensate for the inherent disadvantages of modular armor systems!

Ves already guessed that Beatrice Hendrix was probably not the first defensive specialist to come up with such an automated defensive scheme. It was too slick and refined to match the work of a relatively young Journeyman.

It made a lot more sense if Beatrice Hendrix was the direct discipline of a Master Mech Designer, thereby allowing her to inherit much of the accumulation of a predecessor.

Even so, for Beatrice to be able to reproduce the effects of automated adaptive modular armor systems to such a degree during a mech design competition still demonstrated an incredible mastery in this tech!

For a moment, Ves deeply desired to recruit this talented mech designer into his clan. Though he had never put that much thought into expanding the Larkinson Clan's mech catalog with mechs that relied on adaptive modular armor systems as their primary form of defense, he did not have any objections to adjusting his plans and accommodating a greater variety of mech models.

The addition of a second defensive specialist in the Design Department would also relieve Sara Voiken from her excessive responsibilities. It was not easy for her to work on so many different mech designs as she was the only viable defensive specialist in the clan.

He just needed to convince her to put her lot with the Larkinsons, which should be anything but easy as she was more than strong enough to go independent.

He needed to investigate whether she was even eligible to recruit in the first place, but all of that could wait for later.

The match between Team Larkinson and Team Hendrix had only just begun!

"Come here, you rat! Stop running away!" Lizzie Cado yelled as her Sensia struggled to catch up to the running Triple Spray.

The light harasser mech was designed in such a way that it could turn its torso and fire its triple-barreled rifle at enemies pursuing from behind.

With a stream of bullets raining in the Sensia's direction, Lizzie could do little else but perform a lot of evasive maneuvers.

The Sensia even had to put its arms in front of its weak point on the chest in order to prevent it from getting struck by a bullet stream!

"These bullets are too unrelenting!"

The only way the Sensia was able to fight back was to holster one of its knives and pull out the weak backup pistol.

The weapon fired a weak laser beam that struck the side armor of the Triple Spray. A small scorch mark appeared on the latter, but it continued to run and gun without any change!

It would take forever for the Sensia to be able to wear down the Triple Spray this way!

It was much more likely for the light mech with the bigger gun to cripple the light mech with the smaller gun.

Lizzie Cado knew that continuing her pursuit of the Triple Spray was a losing proposition.

She should ideally turn around and threaten to attack the rear of Double Up, but that would leave her Sensia wide open to the relentless bullet attacks of the Triple Spray!

In other words, her Sensia was trapped in a chasing action.

Lizzie was not the only one who was locked into an undesirable state.

She could already feel from that weird new mental connection to the Furia that Bobby Orwell was having a lot of trouble dealing with the Double Up. The former was utilizing every weapon in its arsenal to overwhelm the latter, but the knight mech simply did not fall and did everything it could to stop the hybrid mech from going anywhere else.

"We can't keep this up! We are being grinded down by our opponents."

The two mech pilots fighting on behalf of Team Larkinson had both fallen into the enemy's rhythm, and that was incredibly bad.

Both of them therefore recognized that they needed to change the game sooner rather than later.

"Do you want to do it?!" Lizzie asked over a communication channel.

"It is not as if we have any other choice. Our mechs are being countered as we speak."

"We will have to get the timing right. Our actions won't work if we do not show a high degree of coordination."

"Then let us make use of that strange new connection that Larkinson has pointed out to us. I think I have a good understanding of how to use it now that we have been piloting our mechs for a while."

Several seconds passed by as both Bobby and Lizzie made their respective preparations. They shifted their positioning and armed certain weapons.

"Now!"

The Furia's shoulder-mounted missile launchers began to fire their full payloads at the same time!

The lack of warning completely caught the pilot of the Double Up off-guard.

Although the modular armored knight mech possessed a lot of different methods to defend against a variety of incoming attacks, the missiles launched by the Furia were all utility missiles that did not care about any fancy armor systems!

If Beatrice Hendrix had been able to spend more time on designing the Double Up, she would have been able to add a crucial missile interception system or even just a basic machine gun that could shoot down the relatively cheap and fragile missiles before they did their jobs.

Unfortunately, the Double Up was a pure melee mech that was already complex enough due to being a mech inside a mech.

The only other mech that could have intercepted all of the utility missiles was the Triple Spray. Its triple-barreled rapid-fire rifle was well-suited to taking down a lot of missiles in quick succession.

However, the Furia fired all of its missiles at a time where the Triple Up was running away while facing in the opposite direction of its companion mech!

The light harasser mech needed to turn almost 180 degrees in the other direction in order to start intercepting any of the missiles.

"Too late!"

The range between the Furia and the Double Up was not that great so the missiles instantly reached their preprogrammed positions.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

A flood of EMP waves struck the Double Up from multiple directions!

While the knight mech's adaptive modular armor systems were too well-designed and shielded to get affected by these EMP attacks, the relatively weak and basic communication and sensor systems of the Double Up couldn't withstand the excessive electromagnetic discharges and quickly became blinded for a time!

Only its basic optical and other short-ranged sensors managed to retain partial functionality. Communications were down as well, preventing the pilot of the Double Up from coording his actions with the pilot of the Triple Spray!

If this wasn't bad enough, the detonation of the smoke missiles threw the entire area surrounding the Double Up into an obscuring fog where visibility became reduced even further!

The pilot of the Double Up knew that it had fallen into an awful position all of a sudden. He made the one decision that made the most sense.

He turned the Double Up around and ran straight in the last-known direction of the Triple Spray!

The knight mech could not possibly afford to stay in the middle of this smoke area and continue to remain blind and cut off from help!

"Hah!"

It was at this time that the Sensia suddenly emerged in front of the Double Up's path. The light skirmisher had completely abandoned its pursuit of the Triple Spray and readily allowed its rear to get struck by a lot of bullets in order to enter the smoke cloud as quickly as possible..

This not only enabled Lizzy Cado's light mech to shake off the attacks of the Triple Spray, but also put it in a position to intercept the retreating Double Up!

The pilot of the knight mech was not stupid, though. He already predicted this to happen and easily folded both of the arms of the Double Up forward to form a thick anti-puncture shield out of lots of layered modular armor plating.

"Haha! Do you think I'm alone? Think again!"

The Sensia did not back off. Instead, it continued to run forward before unleashing a flurry of light knife attacks that forced the Double Up to maintain its modular shields in a forward-facing position.

This left the knight mech completely undefended from the attacks coming from the rear!

The Furia which had just recently entered the smoke cloud had become partially blinded by the smoke cloud as well. Its sensors may have been upgraded but the overlapping effects of several smoke missiles was too strong to overcome!

Nonetheless, it somehow knew exactly where the Sensia was positioned, and in turn also figured out the position and the orientation of the Double Up.

Bobby Orwell did not hesitate to fire a shotgun slug that struck the unreinforced rear armor of the enemy knight mech! A considerable amount of armor cracked from this hefty blow!

The integrated luminar crystal guns fired next, causing them to inflict light but still significant damage to the rear of the Double Up.

The Furia quickly grasped two of its throwing axes at once and threw them onto the still-exposed back of the enemy knight mech.

Since the Double Up was still pinned down by the Sensia, those spinning axes struck the rear of the enemy machine without any hindrance, causing their blades to dig deeper into the rear armor plating.

After doing all of this, the Furia finally lifted both of its arms and fired both of its wrist-mounted flamethrowers at full blast!

"Aaaahhh!"

While the Double Up was too well-armored to succumb to the flames in an instant, the concentrated fires directed towards its rear were wreaking havoc to its least-defended side!

The cracks in the armor created by the earlier attacks enabled the damaging flames to reach deeper and begin to melt the internal components that were situated close to these weak points!