The Mech Touch

When the Minerva traveled back to the Spirit of Bentheim that was located far to the rear, the expert command mech received an honor guard of first-class multipurpose mechs dispatched by the Red Association.

That was on top of the fixed escort of Living Sentinel mechs that always accompanied Casella's machine!

There were legitimate concerns that the native aliens might seek to end Saint Casella's life before she had any time to make use of her newfound strength and vastly expanded command field.

As long as there was a phase lord out there that was willing to take a dangerous gamble, he or she could opt to make a precision teleportation strike and smash apart the Minerva now that she was at her most vulnerable state in years.

The ascension of a new ace pilot among red humanity spelled bad news to the native aliens.

Ace pilots were very hard to deal with. Ordinary phasefighters and warships practically stood no chance against their ace mechs. The most they could do was to rely on overwhelming firepower and huge numbers to exhaust their Saint Kingdoms and drive their mechs away… for a time.

The only proper counter to ace mechs was to deploy other champion units against them. The native aliens did not have any direct equivalent to these powerful machines, so they had little choice but to deploy their phase leaders instead.

It was true that the phase leaders among the major alien races outnumbered the number of ace pilots in active service. Nobody knew the precise figure because not even the aliens possessed a full tally of all of the phase lords and phase whales that were still alive today.

The problem with relying on these phase leaders was that only a minority of them were fully geared towards warfare.

There were many phase lords that only made the risky effort to transform their bodies because they wanted to raise their status and increase their lifespans.

These politicians, researchers, artists and other highly placed dignitaries were not too bad in a fight, but they simply did not possess the training or the killer mindset needed to fare well on a dangerous battlefield.

Then there were all of the phase whales that got bored of their long lives and simply decided to sequester themselves in their own obscure pocket spaces.

One of the flaws of the phase whale race was that it was very individualistic. The phase whales had a very poor sense of community. The Red Cabal used to be a much less prominent club before the Red War forced the ancient phase whales to form a more organized form of resistance against the extragalactic invaders.

While the Red Cabal successfully persuaded more phase whales to answer the call of duty, there were even more that remained completely ignorant that the Red Ocean had moved far away from the Milky Way Galaxy!

So many phase whales remained in hibernation and would not wake up until hundreds if not thousands of years had passed!

In short, the native aliens could only mobilize a fraction of the absolute number of phase leaders in the Red Ocean.

This made the rise and fall of individual ace pilots and phase leaders quite important to both sides.

Any small change in the balance could easily cause entire battlefields to tilt towards the other side.

For example, the attackers and defenders of the Arvest Lima System already began to revise their calculations on the likelihood that the important strategic node would fall!

Even if the native aliens were aware that it usually took a year or so before a newly ascended ace pilot received an ace mech that could properly channel his increased strength, that did not offer enough consolation.

Ace pilots still received the benefit of gaining access to a proper Saint Kingdom, though in a weaker form than normal.

Saint Tusa Billingsley-Larkinson still had to wait a few months for his Dark Zephyr to receive his much-anticipated upgrade, but already he had been razing hell on the battlefield!

The same should apply to the newly christened 'Saint Commander', but the native aliens feared that her immediate impact would be even worse.

This was because she was one of the rare command-oriented ace pilots!

Instead of investing all of their power towards strengthening themselves and their ace mechs, they instead radiated their power towards their subordinates.

Though exceptions such as General Ark Larkinson existed, Saint Commander Casella Ingvar was absolutely a more classical representation of this ace pilot sub-type.

What did this all mean?

Casella essentially did not have to wait until her Minerva got upgraded to a super-duper fancy ace mech for her to start flexing her vastly expanded Command Field!

Sure, her performance in subsequent battles wouldn't be as exaggerated as when she was affected by forced resonance, but she still posed a massive concern even if she could replicate just 25 percent of her previous performance!

Once the Larkinson Clan got around to supplying her with a proper ace mech that was fully attuned to her Command Field and other capabilities, the prospect of having to fight against tens of thousands of 'quasi-expert mechs' and over a hundred 'psuedo-expert mechs' terrified the hell out of alien leaders and strategists!

Suffice to say, the Saint Commander's name would likely show up on a prominent position in the alien bounty lists before the day had passed.

Killing Professor Ves Larkinson may still be a greater priority to the Red Cabal, but eliminating Saint Commander Casella most definitely became a secondary priority to its strategic interests.

As long as she developed her power over a few years, the amount of ordinary mechs she would be able to empower would only increase. Being able to qualitatively improve a hundred thousand mechs was already enough to completely turn around losing battles!

The effective threat posed by the expeditionary fleet of the Golden Skull Alliance would probably multiply by at least an order of magnitude, especially if her super-empowerment was taken into account!

This meant that if the expeditionary fleet fielded 100,000 mechs and put them all under the tender care of the Saint Commander, the native aliens effectively had to behave as if they were facing a massive mech army of 1,000,000 mechs!

It could get even worse for the native aliens. The thing about ace pilots and ace mechs that they always had room to improve. Natural growth along with continuous technological advancements practically ensured that the Saint Commander would become smarter, deadlier and more difficult to deal with over time!

This inexorable growth would probably persist at a fairly high pace until it reached a plateau when the Saint Commander hit the infamous bottleneck of a peak ace pilot.

By that time, the threat posed by Casella Ingvar would probably be so massive that she was only second to god pilots in her ability to smash all opposition and guarantee victory!

Both the humans and the aliens therefore expected great things from the Saint Commander if she was allowed to live.

The huge threat she posed to alien interests in the future caused her Minerva to become targeted by many alien assets.

If not for the fact that diverting their attention to a retreating expert command mech would completely cause their lines to collapse, a lot more alien warships would have opened fire at the distant Minerva by this time!

As it was, the reinforcing mechs and warships of the Red Association had moved in quickly enough to form physical as well as energy barriers around the precious expert mech.

The RA warships also activated their warp interdiction fields at full power in order to block any daring phase lord from conducting any teleportation strikes.

Numerous powerful aliens looked away in dismay as they observed that their window of opportunity had closed.

The next time the Saint Commander reappeared on the battlefield, she would definitely received more fixed protection than before!

As the native aliens lamented the missed opportunity to take out such a powerful strategic adversary, the woman in question had fallen into her own thoughts.

Any ace pilot in her place would have basked in her amazing performance earlier. The power they demonstrated when they were in the temporary state of forced resonance often served as a highly informative and aspirational preview of what it would be like if they piloted an actual ace mech!

Not Casella. Her main fixation centered around her brother. She knew that he died somehow, but she lacked any further details than that. She needed to know what happened that caused her to befall an accident that should have never happened.

Though conventional communications were still blocked for obvious reasons, the Larkinsons had more ways to communicate with each other.

The Minerva happened to be an inherent masterwork mech, so Ves was able to connect to the piece of himself that he had imparted to his excellent creation and form a small spiritual avatar of himself in the cockpit.

"How… how did he die, sir?" Casella asked in a hoarse and morose tone that sounded a lot different from her earlier aggressive tone. "What did General Ark do to drive my brother to his death?"

The avatar of Ves grimaced. "This is not the time and place to hold a conversation like this. I will inform you later once you are safely brought out of the battlefield and aren't interfaced with a war machine that can do a lot of damage. You also need to undergo a mandatory health inspection to ensure that your sudden breakthrough did not compromise your health in any way. Who knows whether you can handle the stress of learning what has happened. Please understand our concerns. This is also somewhat of a developing situation. There are… deviant variables at play that complicates the story."

Casella felt frustrated by the refusal to give her a straight answer, but as a mech commander, she understood the arguments behind this decision. She could not fault Ves or the Larkinsons for being cautious. Her mental state had indeed deteriorated to the point where she may suffer a breakdown of sorts.

"...Fine." She said. "I can wait, but my patience is limited. I will know the truth one way or another."

"I promise that I will be as frank with you as I can. I know you care a lot about this. However, the sensitivity of the information that I plan to share is so high that we need to wait until we can establish secure communications with each other. Perhaps the only way to accomplish that is to hold a face-to-face meeting, but that is so logistically troublesome that I will try to resort to other means."

Casella frowned. All of this sounded suspicious. A more straightforward mission and sequence of events did not merit so much secrecy. She was already able to deduce that something abnormal had taken place that the patriarch really did not want to leak to any third parties.

If that was the case, then Ves' response became a lot more understandable.

"Very well. I look forward to speaking to you, either in person or by remote."

"In the meantime, let's address your immediate future. Now that you have broken through, our Design Department will soon embark on the Minerva Mark… II… Project."

"It should be the Mark II." Casella said in a mild tone. "My expert mech has never received a major revision. She is still fairly new compared to the original six Larkinson expert mechs."

"Ah, that is correct. Your Minerva is still in for a massive treat. So many technological advancements have been made since her original delivery that she will evolve into a much more powerful incarnation by the time our Design Department is done. In order to get a better idea on what direction we should take for her upgrades, could you please explain how your command abilities work after your breakthrough? There are many different kinds of command specializations. I need to know where yours is leaning towards in order to develop a clear vision for your future ace mech.".

"I can do that, sir."

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