The Mech Touch (Web Novel)

The inspections revealed no abnormalities or rule violations. The mechers cleared all four mechs for action.

As the two teams split up and positioned themselves at opposite ends of the mech arena, everyone looked forward to witnessing a different kind of fight from before.

The second challenge match only involved 2 mechs on each side.

Most observers had become a lot more familiar with the Fey Fianna by now. They had watched Ves' presentation the day before and also witnessed the drone mechs winning a tough and exciting match just before.

The drone mechs already proved its capacity to fight and win when the odds were against their favor. The Standard Fey Fiannas might be a bit on the expensive side, but they made up for it by offering a compelling combination between flexibility and hard combat power.

Even a single fey was powerful in itself!

It was only a fraction of the size of a mech, but could fully reproduce one of the functions of the latter!

Whether it was offense, defense, mobility or utility, the Fey Fianna could excel in any of these areas depending on what sort of fey accompanied the main body.

The only major shortcoming aside from its relatively high upfront price of 3 MTA credits per copy was the lack of fey models.

Ves had not spent much time on designing enough varieties of fey to satisfy the needs of every potential customer.

This was why the LMC launched the Fey Shaper Contest a short time ago. The incentives of this little competition should hopefully persuade enough people to earn a living by designing and selling more creative and diverse fey types.

It would have been handy if Ves had more fey models at his disposal. His Fey Fiannas could have won the last match a lot easier if they had access to an offensive fey that was aligned with the wood element.

It didn't matter too much, though. The previous challenge match had proven that elemental disadvantages were not decisive. Mechs had won and lost more battles than anyone could count despite the fact that they should have lost in theory.

What people were much more interested in were the two lancer mechs.

They looked fairly normal at first glance. Ves had designed his fair share of lancer mechs, so he possessed a good grasp of this mech type.

The oddly-named Montebra carried a lot of armor at its front side, which enabled it to resist a lot of damage when it commenced its attack runs.

The quantity of armor was not excessive, though. Part of that had to do with the flight system of the mech.

The flight system of a normal lancer mech was mostly designed to maximize their straight-line acceleration parameters.

This made lancer mechs great at speeding up in straight trajectories, yet also caused them to exhibit poor maneuverability, especially at high speeds.

In any case, the Montebra's flight system clearly betrayed the fact that it was not a pure lancer mech, but rather a compromise between a lancer mech and a spearman mech.

This was not uncommon in the mech industry. Lancer mechs possessed devastating charges but were pretty much useless outside of them. Spearman mechs were good in static battles but lacked the punch to break through enemy lines.

A mech armed with long weapons that could perform both roles decently well was an attractive product to many mech forces!

So what if the Montebra was not able to outperform a pure lancer mech at the same design budget? So long as its brawling capabilities were not too poor, its applicability would definitely be a lot higher!

While all of these factors seemed obvious enough when Ves studied the appearance of the Montebras, he failed to ascertain its more hidden traits.

This was rather annoying. Ves could clearly sense that there was a depth to the Montebras that currently remained dormant beneath its steel gray exterior.

The only signs of 'exotic energy' that he could sense from the Montebras was its strong affinity to the metal element.

A considerable reason why the Montebra was more expensive than a typical second-class mech was because Master Ginevra Hubert-Colmain chose to impart it with higher grades of metal hyper materials.

While she clearly did not go overboard and made the mech completely unaffordable, she had definitely made a lot of compromises in the design in order to turn the Montebras into a metal-attributed machine.

This was a deliberate design choice. It told Ves that metal E energy was bound to play a key role in its upcoming performance.

Ves actually found it a bit strange that Master Ginevra dared to deploy a metal-aligned mech against the predominantly water-aligned Fey Fiannas.

Metal fed water, so the Montebra's attacks were bound to weaken when they struck the Fey Fiannas.

Of course, if the Montebras successfully struck the Fey Fiannas with their lances during a charge attack, the sheer kinetic momentum of the impacts alone was enough to overpower any elemental disadvantage!

Ves did not have the capital to say that these elemental relationships could decide the outcome of battles. The previous match had already disproven this assumption.

Master Ginevra most certainly knew what she was getting into when she issued her challenge yesterday.

The more the Montebras looked like they were at a disadvantage, the more Ves suspected that they had access to a powerful trump card that could change the entire equation!

"The challenge match shall commence in 1 minute."

The countdown started. The mech pilots from both sides made their final preparations as they beheld their opponents on the opposite side of the expansive arena.

"Do you think my Montebras will successfully drive their lances into your Fey Fiannas?" Master Ginevra asked.

"Nah." Ves shook his head. "Lancer mechs excel at breaking slow and unwieldy targets. Everyone knows that. My Fey Fiannas aren't as maneuverable as light mechs, but they are pretty mobile compared to other medium mechs."

This was a clear and obvious fact, yet Master Ginevra did not seem to treat it as an insurmountable obstacle.

"Rules are made to be broken." The woman spoke in a sagely voice. "This is especially the case in my field of specialty. In all my years of working with exotic energies, I have challenged many facts, broken many rules and rewrote the truths that many humans previously held sacred. I encountered plenty of opposition from more close-minded mech designers due to my controversial research activities. My theories ended up wrong in many of those cases, but that does not diminish my few crucial successes. I am more of a researcher than a mech designer, but whenever I set out to design a mech, my primary goal is to make a statement."

Those were strong words. Ves felt more emotion in her than in the previous minutes. Her conviction was strong. Her confidence in her mechs was unusually high.

The Fey Fiannas were definitely in trouble this time.

"3... 2... 1... START!"

From the moment the second challenge match commenced, the four mechs took action right away!

The Fey Fiannas started to move and fly in order to make themselves as difficult to strike as possible.

The two drone mechs had 6 luminar crystal cannon feys at their disposal. These fey had immediately begun to bombard one of the Montebras with a succession of hot and searing fire laser beams.

The Fey Fiannas themselves also pitched in by firing their luminar crystal rifles.

The Montebras were both equipped with metal-attributed energy shields that appeared to be decently strong, but not quite capable of resisting so many incoming attacks for a long time.

However, the lancer mechs did not remain in place. Their flight systems boosted the Montebras forward, allowing the machines to build up speed and momentum as quickly as possible.

Phoca Arena may be the largest mech arena on Bortele III, but the Montebras could only boost themselves forward for a relatively short time before they already reached the other end!

During this short but intensive period, the Montebras did more than resisting the incoming attacks and trying to build up more and more momentum.

If the lancer mechs could only do this, then they did not have any chance of hitting the fast and agile Fey Fiannas!

In fact, a few seconds after the Montebras had commenced their charge, the Fey Fiannas already deployed another countermeasure.

All of the luminar crystal cannon fey began to release obscuring smoke clouds.

The clouds were never meant to last too long, but they blocked enemy sensors long enough to reveal 8 identical-looking Fey Fiannas!

The offensive fey had activated their decoy functions which caused them to look like actual mechs.

Their appearances as well as their emissions were so alike that the sensor systems integrated in the Montebras couldn't distinguish truth from falsehood at this time!

Not even the weapon discharges could help them identify the real mechs from all of the decoys.

This was because the weapon characteristics of the luminar crystal cannons suddenly resembled the luminar crystal rifles to an almost perfect degree!

As the designer of both weapon systems, it was easy for Ves to make one of them resemble the other. Luminar crystal technology happened to be highly scalable, so Ves did not even have to make too many alterations in order to add this functionality to his Fey Fianna design.

"I can see you have put a lot of effort into strengthening certain capabilities of your lancer mech, but I very much doubt that you have equipped your machine with high-quality sensor systems."

"You are correct." Master Ginevra admitted.

Offensive mechs such as the Montebra were usually designed to go after obvious targets. They were not designed for scouting and reconnaissance, so there was little reason for them to waste valuable capacity to obtain better eyes.

It was much better to rely on other mechs that specialized in this role!

The Montebra model was never designed to fight in isolation. It was meant to become a part of a combined arms force where many different mech models combined their strengths and covered for their weaknesses.

The challenge match did not reflect these circumstances, so the Fey Fianna had an opportunity to make good use of its tricky decoy function!

Ves had no doubt that the Montebras would be able to distinguish the real Fey Fiannas from all of the false decoys in time. So long as their sensor systems continued to gather a lot of data, small flaws and inconsistencies would eventually betray the actual states of the mechs and the disguised fey.

However, there was no time for the Montebras to play the long game. At this moment, 8 luminar crystal weapons continually pummeled the lancer mechs, making it clear that the two melee mechs were on a time limit!

Ves glanced at Master Ginevra and found that the woman did not look concerned for her mechs at all. Did her Montebra model possess a handy function that could successfully guide its lance to the correct target?

"Watch, Professor Larkinson."

A dramatic change suddenly occurred. The two Montebras began to absorb a lot of metal energy from the environment! Two energy vortices appeared closely together as the lancer mechs became saturated with the power of metal!

Yet that did not last for long. Mysterious processes came online that somehow absorbed all of this metal energy and proceeded to convert it into electrical E energy!

"No, not just that!"

The Montebra model not only had the capacity to convert metal E energy into electrical E energy, but also produced a lot of conventional electrical energy as well!

This was a massive surprise! The ability to produce electrical energy from E energy alone was enough to revolutionize a lot of existing human technologies!

However, this was not the extent of the changes.

All of that electrical power meant nothing if it wasn't put to good use.

Different streams of lightning bolts sparked from the two lancer mechs and instantly closed the distance before striking all of the Fey Fiannas and fey at once!

Through this brief electrical contact, the Montebras instantly locked onto the only real mechs among all of the false decoys!

The deception had failed!