The Mech Touch

g to popularize their use inevitably suffered an ’accident ’.

Nonetheless, the other reason why AIs never saw popularity was that highly skilled mech pilots usually managed to outwit them.
Their creativity possessed limits and they could emulate the spark of spontaneity that veteran mech pilots fostered into their piloting style.

Sadly for Ves and Acolyte Gien, this wasn ’t the case here.
Both of them piloted low-quality mechs in fairly awful conditions.
Despite getting a tune-up from Ves and Mayra, two days wasn ’t enough to repair all the damage and bad design choices their mechs had suffered from.
One of the most important weaknesses of their cheap mechs was that they exhibited fairly low reaction speeds.

This resulted in a substantially slower exchange of blows.
So slow in fact that the AIs and algorithms taking over some of execution of some of the Redemption Rose ’s moves exerted finer control than the mech pilots themselves!

The Evaporating Spear unleashed a flurry of stabs, trying to deter the Redemption Rose from moving into its range, but the swordsman mech wasn ’t deterred.
It willingly absorbed damage to its half-crippled shield arm in order to get into range to deliver a telling slash against the Evaporating Spear ’s chest.Find authorized novels in Webnovel，faster updates, better experience，Please click www.webnovel.com for visiting.

The slash managed to score deeply into its relatively weak armor.
Though the sword slash hadn ’t bitten deep enough to affect the internals, the entire upper chest area experienced a comprehensive weakening that set it up for subsequent attacks.

”Acolyte Gien isn ’t going down without another fight! ”

After suffering a heavy attack, Acolyte Gien became more desperate.
He could die! His only chance at rebirth could be ruined! The man screamed and willingly accepted the pain.
With great effort, he increased his control over his own mech and fought back with a greater semblance of his old piloting skill!

The Evaporating Spear went on the offensive, advancing boldly towards the Redemption Rose, stabbing outwards with its sword all the while.
Acolyte Evie relied heavily on the AIs to parry the incoming blows, preventing the Redemption Rose from suffering even a single scratch.

Yet even with the swordsman mech ’s perfect defense, it took a lot of effort for a sword to block an incoming stab.
The amount of energy and movement exerted by the Redemption Rose surpassed that of the Evaporating Spear.
This stalemate benefited the spear-wielding mech more than the sword-wielding mech, especially because the latter wielded a single-handed sword.

Something catastrophically went wrong for the Redemption Rose at that time.
The sword automatically moved to intercept an attack directed to its left side, but the incoming spear stab turned out to be a feint!

Acolyte Gien deliberately underutilized the use of feints just for moments like this! With great willpower, he directed the spear stab into a swipe that caused it to flick towards the Redemption Rose ’s unguarded right side!

However, while Acolyte Evie couldn ’t react fast enough to pull back the Redemption Rose ’s sword, the AIs didn ’t suffer from that problem and forcefully pushed through her hesitation.

However, Gien ’s control over his spear surpassed the imagination of his opponent.
The spear abruptly shifted to a downwards trajectory!

A double feint!

The Evaporating Spear had held back during the previous two attempts! Only now did it truly push its strength into the attack, even overloading its flight system in an instant to obtain a greater forward push!

At this stage, the Redemption Rose started to hesitate! Its AI momentarily grew confused, but committed another shift despite having changed its mind once before.
However, Evie was still stuck on the first shift! The flood of data entering her mind caused her reaction to be a tad bit slower.

For a single instant, her own reaction clashed against the solution adopted by the AIs! This caused the mech to lock up for a moment as two warring commands fought against each other to move the sword in one direction or another.
The mech couldn ’t decide who to listen to!

Acolyte Gien ’s spear stabbed deeply past the ineffective sword and pierced through the chest armor of the Redemption Rose!

Due to the double-feint, the stab carried less kinetic energy than Gien preferred, but the tip of the spear still managed to penetrate the chest armor and deal a shallow amount of damage to the Redemption Rose ’s internals.

However, even though Mayra removed a lot of defensive power from the space knight, it still retained the robust internal structure of a defensive mech! Its redundancy level was considerate compared to offensive mechs, so despite damaging a few channels and subcomponents, the Redemption Rose hardly lost any power!

The successful attack might have succeeded in damaging the Redemption Rose, but the space knight still retained its ability to fight.
On the other hand, Acolyte Gien had pushed his mind beyond its ordinarily limitations.
The greater performance of his Evaporating Spear came at a fatal cost!

”Aagh..
I..
can ’t..
take..
it! ” He uttered from his cockpit.

The Evaporating Spear never matched its earlier performance.
Gien expended far too much mental energy when he tried and failed to charge down the Redemption Rose.
When the duel turned into an exchange of blows, Gien constantly had to exert his mind to keep up.

In contrast, while Acolyte Evie suffered from a greater flood of junk data, she didn ’t have to think too hard to pilot her mech.
The presence of the AIs in her mech allowed her to issue simple commands to hold the Evaporating Spear off.
Clever commands at the right timing managed to save the Redemption Rose from complete destruction!

”It ’s over! Gien is at the end of his rope, while Evie is still strong enough to last a couple more minutes! ”

The performance of the Evaporating Spear weakened by the second as the strain of controlling the mech manually became too much of a burden for his steadily degrading nerves.

Technically, Evie suffered from the same problem, but the difference was that the AIs cared little about nerve damage.
They functioned just as well if Evie was completely healthy or had almost fried her brains to a crisp!

The battle turned from a battle of wills to a battle between a half-vegetable and a cold-hearted set of AIs.

The Redemption Duel came at an end when the Redemption Rose knocked off the spear from the grip of the sluggish Evaporating Spear.
Defenseless, the lancer mech failed to push the space knight back as it mechanically thrust its sword through the cockpit section.