The Mech Touch

Now that the juregs had been beaten back to the outskirts of the New Cartagena System, Saint Tusa Billingsley-Larkinson enjoyed enough 'free time' to figure out his combat system and build up a proper foundation for himself.

He had already broken through months ago, but it seemed that he had been wasting much of his time while he waited for his Dark Zephyr to get upgraded.

When Tusa looked back on all of the time he spent fighting alongside the expeditionary fleet, he painfully recognized that he had not been doing his best to speed up his progress and work towards his next breakthrough. He still retained a bit of the mentality of an expert pilot and did not think big enough to act like a proper saint.

Just because he remained stuck with an expert mech for a time was not a valid excuse for his lack of progress. There were more ways he could grow stronger than to obsess over his resonance strength.

As far as Tusa was concerned, his mentorship with the Messenger of Silence was definitely worth whatever price that the Larkinson Clan had paid to the Dostoevsky Ancient Clan.

Saint Kalasandra Boojay and Patriarch Reginald Cross were both powerful ace pilots in their own right, but they were clearly strong-headed individuals who committed to their own unique trajectories towards greatness. They were not necessarily following the wrong methods, but what worked for them did not necessarily work for others.

In comparison, the Messenger of Silence was a lot more reasonable despite his infamous mental affliction.

The Terran peak ace pilot did not reject outside input and possessed a sober perspective on all of the theories that people came up with to describe all of the extraordinary phenomena surrounding high-ranking mech pilots.

Saint Dostoevsky also gave Tusa the freedom to figure out stuff by himself and choose his own way forward. The former did not judge the latter for preferring one solution over another.

Every ace pilot was different. Not a single god pilot emerged from saints that tried to copy others.

This encouraged Tusa and increased his motivation towards his latest endeavors.

In the two weeks of relative calm and peace that ensued after the jureg forces pulled back to lick their wounds, Tusa had been setting up the framework of his future God Kingdom.

This was more difficult than he thought, because he needed to extrapolate his current state and develop a reasonable impression of what he would be like once he became a god pilot.

Tusa had to let his imagination go wild and convince himself that it was plausible for him to be able fly his entire god mech through one end to another end of a planet without crashing against anything.

It was difficult for him to build up a complete vision of himself as a god pilot because he would definitely have mastered more abilities by that time. Technology would also progress by a lot, so his god mech should definitely be equipped with more game-changing tech.

Nonetheless, it was not too important for him to build up a complete and detailed image of his desired end state. It was enough to figure out a reasonable direction that called to his heart.

After he followed this methodology, Tusa made an important conclusion about himself.

"My main strength lies in mobility. Movement is everything to me. If I lose the ability to maneuver, I might as well be dead. Sure, it would be nice if my Dark Zephyr also comes with powerful guns, sharp weapons and impenetrate defenses, but I would never want to obtain them at the cost of compromising my mobility."

It was impossible for the Dark Zephyr to maintain a high degree of combat effectiveness if his offensive and defensive capabilities were way below standards, but it did not matter to Tusa if they were not that impressive.

So long as the Dark Zephyr's attack and defensive capabilities remained serviceable, Saint Tusa remained confident that he could rely on his superior mobility to defeat any opponent!

In that context, he could have done a lot better in his first bout against the greater phase lords if he could make his Dark Zephyr move faster and evade more threats.

This was also the source of one of his new problems.

As much as he liked how easy it became to evade attacks after he activated his Free Flight ability, the Biopod Mother had already managed to develop an effective counter.

Tusa even managed to gain the cooperation of the Brusilov Fleet to test his assumption.

Thousands of small, disposable drones proceeded to chase after the Dark Zephyr in an effort to explode and inflict at least some damage to the ace light skirmisher.

If the enemy figured out that the Dark Zephyr had to linger in a limited space in order to apply a space suppression field onto a target, then it was possible to deploy lots of explosive drones and completely surround the place before converging towards the ace mech!

It was pretty easy for the Dark Zephyr to evade the explosive drones if there were no limits on his movement. The living mech was faster than pretty much any mech or machine, so it should never lose in a straightforward race against anything other than fired projectiles.

The problem arose when the Dark Zephyr needed to stay within a limited area of space, which was exactly what imperiled the ace light skirmisher during the last fight.

If the enemy figured out that the Dark Zephyr had to linger in a limited space in order to apply a space suppression field onto a target, then it was possible to deploy lots of explosive drones and completely surround the place before converging towards the ace mech!

As long as the quantity of explosive devices was great enough, there was no way for the Dark Zephyr to escape the torrent of blasts!

There was no easy way to resolve this problem for Tusa and his battle partner.

The Dark Zephyr's limited arsenal was unable to blow them all up. His Saint Kingdom was not strong enough to freeze or weaken the explosive drones either. His defenses were also not good enough to be able to withstand all of these explosions for a long time.

Abandoning the requirement to stay in one place was a viable but highly undesirable way to solve this problem, because Tusa envisioned more scenarios in the future where his Dark Zephyr needed to maintain his position.

Tusa tried hard to see how he could continue to evade massed attacks under the condition of limited freedom of movement.

He failed.

No answer came to mind. He couldn't help but feel that this was an impossible problem to solve.

In the end, he approached the Messenger of Silence and asked for advice.

"..."

The Terran peak ace pilot was not surprised by Tusa's inability to come up with a good solution.

Saint Dostoevsky reassured the guest pilot that this was a completely normal problem among ace pilots. None of them were perfect and it was rare for them to have all of the answers.

A solution would come to them in time as long as the necessity was great enough. A combination of frequent experimentation and subjecting himself to the pressure of combat would eventually cause Tusa to gain an epiphany that would culminate in the creation of a powerful new ability that just so happened to solve his greatest shortcoming at the time.

The only problem was that it not only took time, but also luck in order to yield a satisfying result.

"..."

Tusa would also have to make sure he could cope with his enemies and survive without possessing the full toolset he desired.

His mentor did not mince his meaning about this struggle.

"..."

"I get it." Saint Tusa diligently nodded. "No one can teach me how I should fight. Every ace pilot needs to build their own combat system that makes sense to them. Since there is no detailed blueprint, I will have to figure out a lot of stuff through trial and error."

The Messenger of Silence could not teach Tusa the specific abilities he needed to master, but the saint from the Dostoevsky Ancient Clan could still offer feedback as well as more general guidance on how to make progress.

Under the older ace pilot's tutelage, Saint Tusa not only performed specific experiments in the field, but also rewatched all of the archival footage of every battle he fought in the past.

It was a good thing that the Larkinson Clan pretty much stored all of the footage and logs of all of the battles it had fought since Ves founded it back in the Bright Republic.

Tusa felt rather strange as he sat in the cockpit of his Dark Zephyr and watched how his younger and much less skilled version of himself piloted much weaker light skirmishers such as the Blazing Zephyr and the Piranha Prime.

"Damn. These battles bring back a lot of memories." He said.

"YOU WERE MUCH SLOWER AND CLUMSIER DURING THESE BATTLES. IT IS AMAZING TO SEE HOW FAR YOU HAVE GROWN." The Dark Zephyr also watched the footage. "I JUST WISH I WAS BORN BACK THEN SO THAT I COULD ACCOMPANY YOU MUCH SOONER."

Though there were many times where Tusa outright felt embarrassed about how he handled himself a decade or two decades ago, watching the footage of his fights was quite an illuminating experience.

His memories of how he fought those battles did not match up to the actual reality of what had happened. Comparing his old self to his current self created a strong contrast that made it very obvious what he improved upon the most as well as the least.

Though Tusa ultimately failed to gain the epiphany he sought to spontaneously create another powerful ability, he gained a lot of clarity about himself. He knew where he started, how he progressed, and how he needed to improve in the future in order to fulfill his ambition.

The journey from a human to a god was a lengthy odyssey. The final hurdle at the very end was an incredibly difficult 'final exam' that brutally tested all of the ace pilot's hard work and convictions.

As an ace pilot who had progressed to the point where he could essentially go no further unless he applied for this 'final exam', the Messenger of Silence gave Tusa a solemn warning about wasting his potential as an ace pilot.

"..."

Tusa earnestly nodded as he took the lesson to heart. "I understand. Ace pilots can't afford to rest on their laurels and feel satisfied with how far they have come. It takes so much more to become a god pilot that I cannot afford to slack off when I have only reached the midpoint of my evolution. I need to triple or quadruple the work I put in to advance to this point and make sure I hit my next bottleneck from a position of strength as opposed to a position of weakness."

The dreaded final bottleneck deterred many once-confident ace pilots from breaking through right away. They all felt that they would die without any hope of a turnaround if they carelessly took a single step forward.

That was the point where many peak ace pilots frantically began to do a lot of remedial work in order to make up for the opportunities they ignored in the past.

This was one of the most valuable lessons that the Messenger of Silence imparted to Saint Tusa.

The guest pilot ultimately learned that it was better to start training and improving himself at full throttle right from the beginning rather than push it off for later.

By the time his resonance strength reached 1545 laveres, his confidence had probably reached its highest point. If he broke through shortly after reaching this hard limit, then he would initiate the Mech Body Merger Process with great confidence and momentum!

However, if his foundation was not strong enough to give him a good basis of confidence that he would survive the irreversible metamorphosis, then the subsequent years of delay spent on making up for his inadequacies would cause his momentum to fade, thereby making his eventual breakthrough attempt much more precarious than it should!

Of course, the Messenger of Silence was cautious enough to warn Tusa that not everyone ascribed to this theory. There were also others who believed that every peak ace pilot needed to temper themselves for at least a century in order to strengthen their qualifications to the point they maximized their theoretical success rates.

Saint Tusa did not have the patience to wait that long. He loathed the very idea of remaining stuck as a peak ace pilot for an extended period of time. He did not want to become the next Mace of Retaliation and become known as a civilization-wide disappointment and a negative example to all of his peers.

He had his own pride!

Speed also defined his willpower! Tusa was willing to concede other competitions, but he absolutely refused to lose any contest where he needed to be the fastest!

"I am not slow!"

He felt it would be a massive personal failure on his part if he was not the first Larkinson to break through as a god pilot.

He had already 'won' the race to become the first ace pilot of the Larkinson Clan. He would damn well make sure he won the race after that as well, or else he wouldn't be Tusa Billingsley-Larkinson!

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