The Mech Touch

The mounted wargear utilized by the Everchanger not only attracted a lot of attention from the Fridaymen, but also drew plenty of attention from the observers watching the live feeds of the ongoing battle.

The City Breaker already looked shockingly large and powerful. Its firepower was immense and it was bulky enough to withstand a lot of incoming attacks before Venerable Joshua had to end its run.

Its unusually large size, its brief but extremely powerful performance and its exotic crystalline visual design caused a lot of observers to fall in love with this mounted wargear loadout!

“It’s like a mech piloting another mech! Why aren’t we seeing this more often?”

“Is this the complete form of the famous Everchanger? No wonder it is called that way.”

“Don’t you realize how expensive it is to make so much oversized equipment? I don’t know how much it costs exactly, but I bet that the money used to build this gigantic artillery loadout is enough to produce 5 or 6 decent expert mechs!”

The public craved novelty. There was nothing more unique in this battle than the Everchanger utilizing various mounted wargear. A lot of discussion had already erupted around the City Breaker at the start.

The general public mostly wondered where they could see more mechs like this and why it wasn’t more common.

The mech designers and other engineers discussed how useful and practical it was in battle.

The latter group were not that easy to fool. They could clearly figure out that while mounted wargear like the City Breaker might make sense in circumstances where there was a shortage of expert pilots, the costs were far too great!

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“Look at how much mass the artillery mech loadout lost when it was bombarded by the Fridayman artillery mechs. The alloys and other materials used to construct its armor must be considerably expensive if it was able to hold up so well under sustained bombardment. The Larkinson Clan will have to pay a fortune to replace all of the missing armor.”

“The inability to form a resonance shield around this giant mechanical suit is its greatest defect. As we have all seen, it is too vulnerable against massed attacks when its expert pilot isn’t able to extend his resonance shield far enough to envelop the entire construction. You’re better off developing a smaller but much higher-quality expert mech.”

“Wait! The artillery mech is not the only mounted wargear the Larkinsons have developed. Is that… a biomech suit?!”

The Titan-5 Project was a completely different beast from the City Breaker.

The latter mostly looked and functioned like a mech, but at a considerably bigger scale. Many of the same rules associated with normal mechs could also be applied to the City Breaker without much issue.

That was not necessarily the case with the Titan-5 Project.

As the enhanced Everchanger surged towards the Fridayman mech lines while engaging in warp travel, many people tried to figure out what it could do and how effective it would be when fighting against the Sundered Phalanx!

“It doesn’t appear to carry any weapons? Is it meant to fight as a brawler mech?”

“That shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. Look at that golden expert mech that is punching its opponents left and right. The Larkinsons already have experience with designing high-end brawler mechs.”

“How can something so large move so fast? Wait a minute… is the entire meat suit infused with phasewater!?”

The last remark happened to be correct!

One of the most special aspects that made the Titan-5 Project unique and difficult to replicate by other organizations was that its biological construction was largely derived out of repurposed flesh of two different kinds of exobeasts!

A huge amount of tissue samples harvested from the carcass of the astral beast that used to be the previous incarnation of Titania formed the base of the meat suit’s biological construction.

Titania’s flesh was dense, hard, and incredibly resistant towards energy damage.

If her flesh was tough and strong enough to allow the astral beast to survive over 6 millenia in the Red Ocean, then it was definitely strong enough to comprise the main material of the meat suit!

Originally, the Titan-3 Project was solely centered around this biological material.

It wasn’t until a few years had passed that the Larkinson Biotech Institute dared to integrate selected portions of fish-whale tissue into the meat suit!

The best parts taken out of many different fish-whale carcasses that the Larkinson Clan had harvested during the Purgatory Campaign went on to ‘upgrade’ or ‘evolve’ the meat suit depending on how it was interpreted.

It took a lot of expertise and a lot of outside help for the LBI research team to even succeed in performing this process. The blending of two completely different biological matter taken from two completely different alien species was not simple, but Ves funneled so many resources to this R&D project over the years that Doctor Avalon Perris and the other researchers did not want their efforts to fail!

Fortunately, the research team succeeded in blending in augmenting the meat suit with fish-whale tissue.

What was particularly important was that much of the additional flesh was taken from the Phaser fish-whales.

Their phasewater organs were particularly important because they were not only saturated with the key substance, but also contained working biological processes that originally allowed the Phaser fish-whales to engage in spatial manipulation.

Theoretically, the brilliant integration of Phaser fish-whale flesh into the main body of the meat suit should have made it possible for it to fight like the alien creatures that once dominated a part of the Purgatory pocket space.

In practice, the unholy fusion was anything but perfect, and the threshold to perform any phasewater-derived ability was too high!

“It’s like trying to graft gills onto your neck.” Director Ranya explained to Ves one day. “Just because it can allow you to breathe underwater doesn’t mean it will actually do so. It actually needs to be controlled in the right way in order to function properly. Right now, we know too little about the fish-whales and how they activate their phasewater organs to perform all of their spatial manipulation abilities. In fact, it is too premature for us to integrate fish-whale flesh into the Titan-5 Project. Venerable Joshua won’t be able to use the new addition to the fullest.”

“We’ll see about that.” Ves smirked.

There was a reason why Ves was a bit more confident that the latest revision of the meat suit would be able to fight like a Phaser fish-whale.

This was because Ves had connected it with two different design spirits!

The first design spirit was of course Titania, because who else was better at helping Venerable Joshua familiarize himself with the meat suit’s original advantages?

The second design spirit was one that Ves rarely had a chance to use due to how expensive it was to design a mech where he could play a major role.

The Titan-5 Project happened to be an excellent stage for the Phase King to fulfill its responsibility as a design spirit!

Though the former sovereign of the Phase Kingdom had a bit of his memories after the Larkinsons extracted his brain from his enormous carcass, the Phase King did not lose as many memories as Titania.

This meant that the Phase King retained nearly his entire mastery of phasewater usage!

The benefits he could provide was incredible, so much so that Venerable Joshua worked extra hard to build a good relationship with the former fish-whale king.

Ves didn’t know how, but Venerable Joshua easily managed to form a basic accord with a design spirit despite the fact that he and his clan originally killed the Phase King and many Phaser fish-whales!

“Is there any alien that Joshua can’t befriend?!”

It wouldn’t be a surprise if Joshua even managed to become friends with the voribugs one day!

In any case, Venerable Joshua’s ability to get along with the Titan-5 Project, Titania and the Phase King played a crucial role in realizing the incredible potential of the meat suit!

As soon as the enhanced Everchanger approached the battle lines of the 5686th Razor Head Mech Division, Venerable Joshua began to connect and resonate with the fish-whale king!

“Show your power, my friend! Let all of these people know that the king is back!”

A silent roar seemed to emanate from the meat suit as its grayish fleshy surface began to glow and heat up. The Titan-5 Project actively channeled energy into its fish-whale tissue and manipulated them in a specific method imparted by the Phase King.

Soon enough, an actual spatial storm erupted in front of the Everchanger!

“What is this?!”

“My mech can’t defend against this storm!”

“I feel sick!”

“Where are our spatial inhibitors?!”

The damage was not as bad as it looked. Though the spatial storm definitely put hundreds of enemy mechs into disarray, most of the Razor Head mechs were able to endure the unstable spatial fluctuations without losing too much functionality.

The real purpose of the spatial storm was to reduce the readiness of the enemy mechs and mech pilots and allow Venerable Joshua to drive his enlarged mech in the middle of their formation!

“Get out of the way!”

Though the meat suit had dropped out of warp travel, its speed and momentum had grown formidable enough to crash through a line of space knights and spearman mechs before slowing down!

A tragic sight occurred as over a dozen mechs collapsed or tore apart due to the collisions!

The Razor Heads and other Fridayman mechs did not hover around and do nothing, though.

Ranged mechs had been shooting at the meat suit for a while now. The Razor Heads soon joined in and stabbed or chopped their weapons at the oversized biological monstrosity!

Unfortunately for the Razor Heads, their weapons bounced off the meat suit before they could ever touch any flesh.

This was because Venerable Joshua had successfully activated a fairly powerful spatial barrier around the meat suit that served as a decent substitute for a resonance shield!

Though the power consumption of the Titan-5 Project had shot up drastically, the meat suit also came with a huge energy reserve, so Joshua did not worry too much about exhausting the meat suit too quickly!

The activation of the spatial barrier happened to mitigate the greatest shortcoming of mounted wargear when applied to expert mechs.

Though the constant refrain of enemy attacks accelerated the spatial barrier’s depletion, Venerable Joshua still had more than enough time to do a lot of damage!

Right now, it behaved like a wolf among sheep. The powerful offensive melee mechs that characterized the Razor Heads looked completely helpless as the Titan-5 Project punched and kicked their metal frames apart!

Every nearby dense formation of enemy mechs fell apart within seconds as the domineering meat suit made excellent use of its enormous strength and surprisingly respectable speed.

Not a single Fridayman melee mech was able to put up any sort of fight against the meat suit!

No matter how much skill the pilots possessed or how well the Gauge Dynasty’s Masters had designed the mechs, the power disparity was too great!

The Titan-5 Project already came with a huge amount of strength and resilience. When paired with an expert pilot that had trained his fighting skills to a height that was unreachable for mortals, the combination resulted in an unstoppable biomonster!

It quickly became clear that the only way the Sundered Phalanx could stop the Titan-5 Project was to dispatch its expert mechs!

At first, ranged expert mechs such as the Tensars and the Star of Liberation fired a few powerful shots at the meat suit.

Few if any of their attacks yielded results. The defense of the meat suit was too great to overcome in a short amount of time!

Besides, even if the attacks slowly depleted the Titan-5 Project’s spatial barrier, Venerable Joshua could still inflict a lot of damage in the meantime because there was no one stopping his enhanced Everchanger!

This was why the Sundered Phalanx opted to dispatch its melee expert mechs to stop the meat suit’s rampage.

“Watch out, Joshua! There are powerful enemy expert melee mechs on the way. Get ready for a real fight!”

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