The Mech Touch

The Mars was not just any living mech. It was the most powerful living mech that Ves had ever helped to design.

Perhaps other living mechs such as the Quint, the Shield of Samar and the Everchanger might be a lot more further ahead in the growth of their spiritual foundations, but the Mars had been born with a silver spoon in its mouth for one key reason.

The Mars was paired with an ace pilot! The spiritual feedback it was able to harvest from Patriarch Reginald Cross was unimaginably greater in both quality and quantity!

This should have turned the third order living mech into a powerhouse in record time. After all, the spiritual feedback from a pilot as powerful as Patriarch Reginald should have ensured that the Mars would quickly level up to a height where it could provide material help in battle.

Yet instead of letting this come to pass, Patriarch Reginald had been suppressing and dominating the independent tendencies of his mech all this time!

According to his own thoughts and ideals, there was no room for a battle partner in his mind. The Mars must subject to his rule and operate completely according to his own intentions.

Ves initially hoped that Patriarch Reginald would eventually recognize the benefits of cooperating with the Mars as an equal, but that had never happened.

Even now when Patriarch Reginald was locked in battle against a tough and powerful opponent, the stubborn warrior still refused to grant more autonomy and trust towards his own ace mech!

"This fool didn't read the manual of his own mech." Ves groaned in frustration. "No, that's not the right description. He may have skimmed through all of the documentation that I have written, but promptly threw it all away and merrily went on to pilot the Mars like any other ordinary mech!"

If there was one thing mech designers hated the most, it was mech pilots failing to utilize mechs in the correct way!

Mech designers spent a huge amount of time and effort to design mechs from start to finish with specific ideas in mind. A high amount of thought and planning went into every design project to ensure that the end result provided its users with greater strength and more possibilities.

Throughout his career, few if any of his customers and clients ever misunderstood his living mechs.

Every mech pilot was human, so they were all susceptible to the unique and obvious traits of living mechs.

As Ves progressed his design philosophy and slowly improved his work over time, it had become harder and harder for mech pilots to resist the temptations offered by glows and mechs that developed stronger characters over time!

The only clear exception was Patriarch Reginald!

As Ves thought about how he could convince the stubborn ace pilot to embrace a different vision on how the Mars should be piloted, his wife shook her head.

"I told you that it wouldn't work." Gloriana said. "There is a mismatch between the Mars that you have envisioned and the Mars that Reginald wants to pilot. This is your mistake as a mech designer. You have stuck too closely to your own ideas and failed to account for Reginald's insistence on maintaining absolute control over his new machine."

Ves glanced at her projection. "Okay, I may have made a mistake, but that does not deny the strength of my design solutions. Other pilots such as Venerable Joshua, Venerable Orfan and Venerable Dise have been able to amplify their performance to a significant degree by working together with their living mechs and design spirits. As long as Patriarch Reginald is able to cooperate at least half as well with the partners by his side as the aforementioned pilots, his Mars should have been able to teach the Neo Amadeus a lesson!"

"I won't deny that is a possibility, Ves, but you are projecting too much of yourself into Reginald's shoes." His wife crossed her arms. "We have our own ideas on how the mechs we have designed through our efforts should be used, but once we hand them over to their new owners, what happens to them is out of our hands. It is up to Reginald to decide how he wishes to shape his relationship with the Mars. He is well within his rights to ignore your advice and recommendations."

"That's stupid!"

"I do not think so." Gloriana surprisingly said. "Ace pilots aren't simple, Ves. Mechs can be utilized in more ways that their designers have envisioned. In my opinion, the way he makes use of the Mars is more in line with my own interpretation of living mechs. Reginald does not want his ace mech to have any ideas on its own. He instead wants to turn the Mars into his second skin or a form-fitting suit of armor that is able to keep up with his growth and amplify his own methods."

When Ves looked back at the projection that centered around the Mars, he began to see what his wife was talking about.

Several expert mechs that Gloriana designed in the past such as the Star Dancer Mark II and the Blade Chaser Mark II adopted this style of living mech.

Their egos and personalities had become a lot more muted. While this deprived their expert pilots the opportunity to form an equal partnership with their living mechs, the expert mechs molded a lot better to their intentions!

Personally, Ves looked down on this shallower and simpler design approach. Gloriana's second skin interpretation imposed a lower performance ceiling on her works. He was afraid that the Mars had mutated into a similar kind of living mech due to the deliberate actions of its ace pilot!

He let out a depressed sigh. "What is done is done. I have given Patriarch Reginald all of the reminders that he needs. If he still insists on misusing the Mars by dominating it as opposed to cooperating with it, then I hope it still works out for him somehow. It would be extremely bad if he ends up losing because he's too selfish to switch to another approach if his current one isn't working."

The duel between the Mars and the Neo Amadeus had reached its most intense phase at this time!

The ace hybrid mech no longer spammed its ranged attacks as if it was trying to overwhelm its target by relying on quantity.

Instead, Patriarch Reginald had chosen to charge and resonate with the weapon systems of his ace mech in order to unleash concentrated power attacks that were powerful enough to run through capital ships!

"I am the embodiment of war!" The Cross Patriarch roared as his Mars launched yet another attack!

The ARCEUS System fired a converging salvo of positron beams that pierced through the Saint Kingdom around the Neo Amadeus and struck the ace swordsman mech right in the chest!

This time, the energy beams not only did a good job at overcoming Saint Jeremiah's domain field, but also neutralizing much of the transphasic defenses of the Neo Amadeus.

The Mars actually succeeded in burning a shallow hole on the exterior of its opponent!

However, the Neo Amadeus did not passively let itself get hit. The reason why it did not attempt to block the incoming salvo with its weapons was because it had already prepared a power move of its own!

As the Neo Amadeus lifted up its weapons with all twelve arms, its domain field began morph until it looked as if thousands of phantom copies of the swords and daggers had materialized from thin air!

This was a more advanced application of domain fields that set ace pilots apart from weaker mech pilots.

Saints possessed a great amount of control over their own Saint Kingdom, and it was well within Jeremiah Gauge's ability to mold his domain field into a sea of blades!

"Thousand-Armed Strikes!"

The Fridayman ace pilot's voice seemed to echo throughout the battlefield despite the fact that sound didn't even propagate over vacuum!

Many mech pilots from both sides briefly slowed their actions as they stared at the power that Saint Jeremiah Gauge unleashed!

The Neo Amadeus advanced towards the Mars and began to stab all of the weapons held by its right arms towards the Mars!

Though the Mars managed to block the most threatening anti-resonance sword with its transphasic age, the ace hybrid mech could do little to stop the remaining 5 daggers from going through!

What was worse was that Jeremiah had simultaneously stimulated the phantom weapons generated by his Saint Kingdom!

Through the Fridayman ace pilot's incredibly effort, the Neo Amadeus succeeded in striking the Mars with a thousand blades at once!

"Ahh!"

The Abasis Armor endured unprecedented strain and almost suffered a breach due to the overwhelming amount of hits it endured in a split second!

Though each individual phantom blade did not inflict a lot of damage upon impact, the sheer quantity of daggers along with the fact that they struck in an incredibly tiny interval meant that Patriarch Reginald could not blindly rely on the defensive strength of the Abasis Armor anymore.

Everything had limits, even a high-quality transphasic armor system that incorporated a whopping 11 kilograms of phasewater!

The Neo Amadeus wasn't done, though. Just as it had successfully struck with all of the weapons held by its right arms, it subsequently began to launch an identical attack with the weapons held by its left arms!

A thousand blades that Saint Jeremiah had condensed out of his own will and resonance quickly followed suit!

This time, Patriarch Reginald no longer concentrated on attacking but instead prepared to defend his Mars against his opponent's actions.

The Mars first lifted up its transphasic shotgun and fired and incredibly powerful burst of pellets that rapidly expanded into a cone that struck a lot of phantom daggers!

Hundreds of them got struck by tiny projectiles that carried a piece of Reginald's willpower.

Since the shotgun pellets were real and solid, they easily overpowered the phantom daggers and made many of them disappear.

The Mars also fired its gauss cannons and ARCEUS System which tore through hundreds more blades.

Even so, hundreds of phantom daggers still managed to strike another part of the exterior of the Mars!

Since the active defensive measures of the Abasis Armor had already been destabilized once, its ability to block this second but weaker massed strike had worsened!

Reginald began to feel a greater crisis from his opponent this time.

Shortly after the Neo Amadeus had attacked with the blades held by its left arms, it prepared to repeat the powerful move again with the weapons held by its right arms!

Though the Mars fired all of its available weapons yet again in order to intercept as many phantom blades as possible, the Abasis Armor finally groaned and exposed a gap that finally caused the ace mech to incur real damage for the first time!

The Mars quickly hopped back and opened up a bit of distance from the Neo Amadeus in order to make it harder to get struck in the same manner for the fourth time!

Patriarch Reginald recognized that he must urgently give the Mars a few seconds for its Abasis Armor to reform its spatial reinforcement and close the gap in its defenses.

Reginald expected for the Neo Amadeus to follow the Mars, but the Fridayman ace mech instead relaxed a bit after its fourth massed attack failed to land on its target.

It was clear that while Saint Jeremiah achieved better results than before, he had expended a lot of willpower and other resources in the process.

"You're not so tough now, aren't you?" Jeremiah taunted as he finally confirmed he found the right approach to deal with the Abasis Armor. "You're too young and underdeveloped to challenge an ace pilot such as myself. You are practically a baby in terms of harnessing the power of your Saint Kingdom!"

Patriarch Reginald's expression grew ugly. As much as he wanted to refute his enemy's words, he knew clearly that he wasn't able to manipulate his domain field to this degree.