The Mech Touch



As Ves and Juliet fixed up their mechs so that they could fight once again, Bobby Orwell and Lizzie Cado reviewed their performance in their past matches and figured out better ways to use the Sensia and Furia in combat.

All of their efforts produced great results.

The Twin Souls possessed significant advantages over most of the other competition mechs. Their designs were more sound while the physical frames were well put together.

At the level of competition in the Twin Weapons Tournament, these technical advantages translated to slight advantages in speed, defense, shock absorption, reaction speed, range of motion, balancing, firepower, mechanical strength and more.

Team Larkinson also had another advantage that became increasingly evident as it advanced into the later rounds

Its mechs were always in better shape than that of their opponents!

The delay between the rounds had dropped considerably. Only 9 matches were held during the third round and only 4 fights took place during the fourth round.

This mechanism rewarded teams whose mechs were stronger. After all, in theory the greater the disparity in performance, the less damage the winning side incurred.

Less damage meant that the mech designers needed less time to fix up their mechs!

This became a lot more evident during the third round.

When Team Larkinson matched up against Team Polter, the mechs presented by the latter made for an unusual combination!

It appeared that Team Polter had spent all of their time on fixing up their striker mech, which was armed with a shotgun that was larger and more powerful than the one held by the Furia.

The dedicated striker mech also carried a lot more shells, allowing it to fire its formidable weapon a lot more times without worrying about running dry!

Team Polter's light skirmisher on the other hand looked as if it had run through a battlefield and only received patches on its largest holes.

The mech designers could have repaired their damaged light skirmisher to its peak condition, but they chose not to because they needed to ration their time.

The results of their decisions became evident.

Team Polter's mechs started out strong. The striker mech immediately managed to blast the Sensia, causing the light skirmisher to get struck by an uncomfortable amount of pellets.

Bobby Orwell did not delay and immediately fired the Furia's complement of smoke and EM missiles.

However, their effect was surprisingly small!

It turned out that Team Polter had made targeted modifications to their mechs to shield their sensor systems and other vulnerable systems from disruption!

Aside from that, the striker mech that got caught in the middle of the smoke cloud had begun to move away as quickly as possible before anything else happened.

This forced the Twin Souls to fight against the mechs of Team Polter in a more straightforward clash.

The striker mech was clearly the biggest threat to the Larkinson machines. The Sensia was especially vulnerable to its shotgun as it was a direct counter to all light mechs!

However, neither Bobby nor Lizzie concerned themselves too much with the striker mech at first.

"Take out the light skirmisher first!"

While the enemy striker mech tried its best to blast the Sensia to pieces, the Furia unloaded all of its firepower towards the opposing light skirmisher!

The Polter light mech tried its best to evade the incoming laser beams and shotgun attacks. It also did its best to use the striker mech as cover, but with the Sensia circling around to pressure it from another direction, it became more difficult to maintain this strategy!

Eventually, the Furia managed to strike the legs of the damaged enemy light skirmisher, causing it to fumble at a critical moment!

Lizzie Cado immediately spotted an opening and dashed her Sensia forward!

A single knife punched through the thin covering material on the center of the opposing light skirmisher's chest. It proceeded to cut through a number of key components, causing the faltering machine to lose a lot of power all of a sudden!

The rest of the match did not last too long after that. Once Team Polter's light skirmisher had been taken out of action before a minute had passed, the Twin Souls immediately utilized a classic pincer maneuver to terrorize the surviving striker mech.

The well-armored but sluggish machine only managed to fire its shotgun at the Furia a few times before the daggers stabbing into its back finally caused it to shut down as well!

[Impressive yet again! As expected of Team Larkinson. The patriarch is well on his way to winning the championship. His mechs have only incurred surface damage this time, so both the Sensia and the Furia will be as good as new once the mech designers have replaced their damaged armor plating.]

[It ended too soon. Team Polter had more potential than this. Its mechs faltered too soon.]

[The fault does not lie in the mech pilots nor the mechs. It is the mech designers of Team Polter that ultimately bear the responsibility of losing. The designs of their mechs are rather basic but they are fairly solid and reliable given how little time the team spent on them. If the striker mech and the light skirmisher both entered the arena in their peak conditions, then the match should have become much more even than the farce that has just ended.

[Hmmm, I understand where you are going with this. Team Polter's mechs have just gone through a tough match in the previous round, so they had to repair a large amount of broken parts. Team Larkinson mechs had just concluded a difficult fight against the Double Up and the Triple Spray designed by Team Hendrix. Yet once the third round commenced, the mechs of one side are in a considerably better shape than the mechs of the other side. What does this reveal?]

[Practical skills matter! If you pull up the records of the mech designers of Team Polter, you will discover that they started out their careers in a design studio. Even after they decided to go independent, they still spent too much time in their design labs and too little time in their workshops. That makes much more of a difference than you realize. Not only is Team Polter slow to repair their damaged machines, its mech designers also do not fully understand how to design their mechs with repairability in mind. Both their striker mech and their light skirmisher take around 20 percent more time to repair than they should due to the inclusion of overly complicated components and the design choices that make the repair and replacement process more tedious and time-consuming than necessary.]

[A mech should not only be judged by their performance when they are in their peak conditions, but also the ease in which an owner can restore its functionality when damaged. Never forget that mechs are machines of war. They are expected to operate in rough terrain and take damage from enemy attacks. Repairability is a particularly important criteria for military mechs. They must be built to operate under the most punishing circumstances. If they get knocked down, they must be able to get back up as soon as possible. No complaints! If a mech model is too much of a DIVA to endure regular punishment, then it should disappear and make way for superior products!]

The panel of experts did well to highlight the value of repairability and explain how relevant it was in a mech design tournament like this, but Ves did not believe the Senior Mech Designers employed by the DUT understood the full picture.

"They're ignorant of living mech side of our works." He complained to Juliet.

"Can you blame them, Ves? Even our pilots don't really know what they are doing yet. Unlike the other Davutan mech pilots that only need to familiarize themselves with the quirks and properties of their competition mechs, Bobbie and Lizzie must also learn how to cooperate with their living mechs."

The mech pilots from the Federal Military of Davute may have encountered living mechs before, but they never piloted them in person as the Larkinson Clan currently did not supply them with any of its products.

Bobby and Lizzie had undergone the equivalent of a crash course in living mechs!

While it helped a lot that Ves had taken the lack of familiarity of the Davutan mech pilots into account when he designed the Twin Souls, there was still a lot of depth to his works!

No amount of simplification could rob his living mechs from their varied and comprehensive features, many of which were rather subtle and obtuse.

The learning curve of living mechs was measured in years, not days. The earliest mech pilots to come into contact with living mechs such as Melkor, Jannzi and the rest of the old gang occasionally experienced surprise as they discovered another useful function of their machines.

This phenomenon illustrated a profound truth.

It wasn't just the mech pilots that were learning to work with their machines.

The living mechs also possessed the capacity to learn and adapt to their mech pilots!

Whenever Ves inspected the spiritual foundations of his two machines, he saw that they had become more and more in tune with their assigned pilots.

This was a normal process that happened everytime a new living mech came into contact with a new pilot.

What was different was that Ves had made targeted adjustments and changes to hasten the process of adaptation.

After all, the combat phase of the Twin Weapons Tournament only lasted for a single day. Team Larkinson only had to win a few more matches to win the entire competition, so Ves had to make sure that the Senia and the Furia did their utmost to assist their pilots in action!

Every period of downtime was another opportunity for Ves to covertly apply targeted adjustments to the spiritual foundations of his competition mechs.

He had worked with living mechs for many years now and he understood more about their nuances than any other mech designer or spiritual engineer.

The normal process of mech-pilot adaption was normally a gradual process that took months before it reached a threshold.

At that point, the fixed mech pilots that utilized the same living mechs on a regular basis would finally feel their machines had become uniquely 'theirs'.

Regardless of the actual status of ownerships of the hardware in question, as far as the living mechs were concerned, they only had a single true battle partner!

The mech pilot and the living mech trusted each other to such an extent that they could nudge each other and communicate wordlessly as if they were soulmates. This was a wonderful experience to the parties involved, and it was always painful to break up this wonderful partnership in order to reassign the pilot and the living mech to different units.

When Juliet learned what Ves was doing, she looked thoughtful.

"I thought that living mechs were akin to dogs that slowly imprint themselves onto their new owners over time."

"That is a decent description of the adaptation process." Ves nodded as he worked to rip out a few broken parts from the damaged rear side of the Sensia. He also tweaked the spiritual foundation of the light mech while he was at it. "Maybe I should call it an imprinting process instead, because the living mechs all start out as little puppies that latch on to the first mech pilot that treat them well."

"If that is the case, Ves, then aren't you interfering with the free will and sanctity of your living mechs? You are essentially brainwashing them into loving their mech pilots more. If you did this to a human, you would become branded as a war criminal. While I am not that well-versed in living mechs, I thought that a man of your principles would have become more reticent about mistreating the machines that you have brought to life."

Juliet brought up a heavy philosophical matter. Ves slowed down a bit as he tried his best to formulate a satisfying answer.