The Mech Touch novel Chapter 719

Venerable Rixt O’Callahan, the Flagrant Vandals’ nominal expert pilot, last exhibited a resonance strength of 30 laveres. In his prime, his resonance strength peaked at 44 laveres.

The resonance strength of expert pilots ranged from 1 to 67 laveres.

Though the scale wasn’t quite linear, you could roughly say that three Venerable Karol Xie’s wouldn’t be able to defeat a single Venerable O’Callahan, even if the latter was on his deathbed.

Resonance strength directly amplified several piloting parameters of a mech pilot and their mech. It strengthened their reaction speed and thinking speed. It increased their ability to resonate with the exotics incorporated in their custom mechs, thereby achieving stronger reality-bending feats. It strengthened the resonance shield that most mechs were able to emit from their frame. It added substance to their skills, so that they were far more than fancy-sounding names.

The higher they measured on the lavere scale, the stronger they performed on the battlefield!

If a mech regiment had to choose between a highly specialised but powerful expert pilot to a versatile but weaker expert pilot, they always went for the former.

Who cared about versatility when one single fist hit hard enough to overcome almost all obstacles? A mech regiment mainly fielded a rigid lineup of mechs, all geared towards a small set of strategies. A strong expert pilot who just happened to be a good fit to their strategy practically multiplied their strength by two or three times!

This could only happen with an expert pilot of Venerable O’Callahan’s caliber. As for Venerable Xie with his piddling little resonance strength, the best he could hope for was to employ him as a butcher of cheap enemy mechs. While Xie could still call himself a powerhouse by himself, his lacking top strength meant he wouldn’t be able to serve as a sufficient obstacle against enemy expert pilots.

What was the point of employing expert pilots if they couldn’t even prevent enemy experts from making mince meat out of your rank-and-file?

Still, it wasn’t as if the Flagrant Vandals or Lydia’s Swordmaidens had a better choice. The latter never had the opportunity to hire an expert pilot at all, since virtually all experts could find more than adequate employment in civilized space.

As for the Flagrant Vandals, their poor and destitute status in the Mech Corps left them with an old and dying mummy who had already made his last gasp in an earlier battle against a detachment of the Frosty Meteors. The Vandals might be able to pull out the living corpse for one last hurrah, but that was it. The man would certainly die at the end or even midway into the battle!

"What do you think about Venerable Xie?" He asked Ketis.

The girl studied the profile of the man and made the same verdict as him. "He’s spread himself too thin. Whoever trained him never thought in a million years that Xie could break through as an expert pilot!"

Ves found it amusing that Ketis judged someone else with the sin of spreading their attention thin while she was guilty of the same crime. Still, she had already been spending less and less in daily sword practice, so she was slowly correcting her course.

Ketis had to thank his constant indoctrination effort for that.

"An expert pilot is still an expert pilot. In our current situation, we don’t have any effective response against enemy experts except to throw as many of our mech pilots at them as possible. Like mice biting an elephant to death, even if the expert is finally brought down, we will almost certainly be wiped out in the process. Venerable Xie can help us shore up our strategies against an enemy expert."

"You don’t sound very confident, though."

"It’s the best we can hope for." He shrugged. "Besides, I’m not sure whether Venerable Xie is willing to throw his lot with us. His record states that he’s loyal to Prince Hixt-Klaaster to a fault, to the point of sticking with this hopeless fellow even when his siblings exiled him from civilized space. That kind of loyalty is admirable as well as troublesome. With the sensitive mission that we are on right now, an expert’s assistance practically doubles our chances of survival, but if he’s not trustworthy, it could doom us even faster."

Both Commander Lydia and Major Verle knew the stakes, so they carefully discussed this very issue with Prince Hixt-Klaaster within the private confines of their privacy screens. Ves and the rest could no longer eavesdrop on their conversation. He imagined they were trading many promises and assurances right now.

In the meantime, Ves and various other mech officers quietly passed on their analyses. Ves didn’t have much to say about Venerable Xie as a mech pilot. The other Vandal mech officers likely provided a much more detailed dissection of the man’s quality as an expert pilot.

What Ves did excel at was analyzing mechs. As Xie flaunted a dual specialty on both landbound and spaceborn mechs, he actually possessed two expert mechs!

"That must be an enormous drain on the prince’s resources." He muttered.

The Flagrant Vandals already spent an unhealthy amount of money on maintaining the Parallax Star and its many, many spare parts. Yet that wasn’t as exaggerated as building two fully functional expert mechs for a single mech pilot!

Unfortunately for the Shining Stars, Venerable Xie had fought and failed to defend the colonization fleet against the aggression of the Fire Treaders. The pirates aligned to Ravienne overwhelmed his customized spaceborn rifleman mech, the Meridian Echo, with sheer weight of numbers.

The Fire Treaders stomped the Meridian Echo into pieces by now, and its parts littered the expanding debris field flinging through space.