The Mech Touch (Web Novel)
chapter-545

The Frosty Meteors employed a number of iconic mech designs. Famed for their durable medium and heavy mechs, each of their designs served as a fine example of their types.

Their prestige mech was undoubtedly the Kenas Oliphant, their heavy space knight. Clad with thick and heavy layers of armor, it had also been paired with fairly powerful flight systems, which gave it a respectable amount of acceleration.

Armed with a sword and tower shield that was even thicker than its chest armor, a single Kenas Oliphant represented a pinnacle in defense. With the help of its flight system, the Kenas Oliphant was also able to keep up with a charging formation.

If the Kenas Oliphant charged into the Flagrant Vandals with its shield held in front, there was no question that the latter would buckle. The impact might even be strong enough to disintegrate a Hellcat!

That wasn't bad enough. The Frosty Meteors brought more. With ten Oliphants charging forth with a disposable ice mass serving as their first line of defense, there was no question that the heavy mechs could smash through even the sturdiest Vandal lines.

There was too much disparity between the two forces. Heavy mechs might be expensive and not very cost-effective compared to the lighter weight classes. Some even argued that they were wasteful toys. In general, to build a single heavy mech ate up the resources of at least three to five medium mechs.

This wouldn't be bad if heavy mechs performed three to five times better than lighter mechs, but the truth was that their specs hardly doubled. Several parameters remained the same, while others such as agility and speed suffered a severe slide. These weaknesses sometimes enabled agile light mechs to dismantle heavy mechs that cost ten times as much with ease.

Nonetheless, heavy mechs served as a powerful singular package on the battlefield. Whether a mech contributed to victory or defeat was the only criterium that mattered.

Against the charge of the Parallax Star, none of the mech pilots of the Kenas Oliphant panicked. Not only did their mechs benefit from an improvised ice shield, their mechs also boasted over alternating alloy formulas.

Their armor system consisted of a sandwich of different alloys. The main protective alloys came in the form of compressed armor while the other alloys only served to absorb shock and thermal energy, thereby eschewing expensive compression treatment.

It was a wonderfully effective and intricate armor system that required weeks of fabrication work just to produce a complete set. It was also fairly affordable for the level of protection it afforded. If not for its propensity for faults, it would have been more widespread.

This armor system was perfect for the Kenas Oliphant because the Frosty Meteors possessed an ample amount of funding, more than enough to cope with the low success rate. Every Kenas Oliphant was a product of hard work and excellent craftsmanship. None of these heavy space knights ever left the production lines in a less than perfect state.

"Give me an Oliphant, and I will tear through the Republic!"

As the standard bearer of the Frosty Meteors, the Kenas Oliphant model carried the hopes and dreams of the Frosty Meteors. Rarely did they falter. Only their best knight pilots received the privilege of piloting a prestige mech, and they knew the parameters of the Oliphant like the back of their hand.

Every pilot of the Oliphant fought with courage, but more importantly they fought with clarity. They had been trained to recognize the signs that the Oliphant neared its breaking point, upon which they would pull back before the mech pulled back before it could break.

This led to an excellent track record over the years since it had been adopted by the Frosty Meteors for this current war. Everyone expected it to emulate its predecessors in the mech regiment.

It should never fall in battle. The only acceptable reason for it to face defeat was if the Frosty Meteors encountered a vastly superior enemy force and needed to retreat in a hurry. They could forgive the Oliphant for being too slow to keep up with a retreat. It was a mech that had been designed to be an unbreakable bulwark or an unstoppable forward vanguard after all. Stepping back was not in its job description.

Yet of all the enemies the Oliphant had been built to withstand, its designers could never account for the myriad of wonders that expert pilots embodied.

"The instant the glowing Parallax Star hit the ice shield, it immediately broke apart before the energy field. The expert mech encountered virtually no obstruction until the tip of its energy field along the lance touched upon the Kenas Oliphant's tower shield.

"Parallax Star! PIERCE FOR ME!"

Propelled by fury and the glory of old, Venerable O'Callahan dauntlessly charged into the heavy knight without any hesitation. He deliberately picked the staunchest and most durable mech of the Frosty Meteors as the beginning of this baptism of fire.

The tower shield, which could withstand the firepower of an entire company of ranged mechs for a significant amount of time, melted before the energy field and broke upon impacting with the tip of the lance. The hole in the shield expanded from a pinprick into a giant cavity that bisected the durable object!

That wasn't all! Just a split-second had passed while the shield gave way before the invincible lance. The Parallax Star hardly lost its momentum and continued to drive its weapon forward!

The lance drove onwards until the energy field and the the physical lance point dug into the chest of the Kenas Oliphant and brute-forced its way through the alternating layers of armor. No matter how many plates was in the way, all yielded before the incredible momentum and unyielding supernatural force of the Parallax Star!

"Charge! Charge without fear! Charge until the ends of the galaxy!"

The lance dug through the most durable mech in the lineup of the Meteors as if it was made out of cloth. An incredibly expensive and incredibly powerful mech lost twenty percent of its torso mass right then and there. Even worse, the incredible kinetic impact and the corrosively hot energy field burned through the heavy space knight's more vulnerable internals. No matter how hardened the internals had been built, all of it had been friend, including its heavily fortified cockpit!

Its highly-trained mech pilot never had the chance to eject! Even before she recognized the imminent crisis, the lance's energy field already burned through the cockpit's protective cover and seared the pilot's body into carbon and ash!

The entire miracle seemed to take forever, but in actuality the Parallax Star had punched through the Kenas Oliphant without any halt. While the impact slowed its momentum, it only lost twenty percent of its peak! Venerale O'Callahan still had enough juice to continue the charge!

"No matter how many mechs I have to knock down, my mech will never falter!"

The Parallax Star might have slowed down a bit, but the glowing lancer mech was still a blur to others. Even Ves couldn't distinguish between the Parallax Star and an asteroid dropping from orbit.

Only the most highly-trained mech pilots among them possessed the cognitive perception to follow the Parallax Star's incredible progress. This was why the second mech in the line fired its rifle straight at the approaching expert mech.

The rifleman mech was a copy of the Caca Similas, an important ballistic rifleman mech of the Frosty Meteors. It wielded a heavy ballistic rifle which could fire both shells and kinetic projectiles of incredible force. The rifleman mech opted for a solid kinetic projectile, as the Parallax Star's incredibly fast approach would only make the impact worse.

It was the right choice to make, but it didn't make any difference this time. Just as the projectile spun into the Parallax Star's chest, the projectile made out of sharp and dense alloys splintered apart like fragile wood before the energy field!

The pilot of the Caca Similas barely had enough time to panic, let alone command his mech to dodge. Even with his brain revolving faster than ever before in his life, his mech simply didn't possess enough reaction speed to make any further moves! Even though the Vesian pilot mentally commanded his mech to eject, it still took at least five-hundred milliseconds for the cockpit to begin its blastoff!

That delay might as well be an eternity in this situation! The force of nature that was the Parallax Star eventually punched through the Caca Similas with even greater ease than before! After all, a rifleman mech could never match the toughness of a heavy space knight!

Even if the Frosty Meteors prioritized the durability of the Caca Similas, which was unusual for rifleman mech, it didn't make any difference before the Parallax Star!

O'Callahan's mech lost a further five percent of its forward momentum, which was fairly neglibile to him. Sadly for him, no other mech floated in its way!

The Frosty Meteors utilized a broad and shallow half-sphere formation that held very little depth. Their original intention was to trap and contain the Parallax Star after it ran out of steam. However, they miscalculated the charging power of the Parallax Star!

While the expert mech inevitably lost some momentum, it was still substantial enough to make it difficult for O'Callahan to steer. It couldn't make any sharp turns to charge down the enemy mechs positioned at the sides. Like a meteor descending upon an innocent planet, nothing could alter its path that was destined to wipe of all forms of life on the globe!

However, O'Callahan didn't feel to disappointed about the lack of targets. The Venerable deliberately chose this angle to charge because there was one more enemy asset in the way.

"The Parallax Star is charging towards an enemy combat carrier!"

What guts! Before the Frosty Meteors could turn around and pelt the enemy expert mechs with their ranged weapons, the Parallax Star already left the sluggish Frosty Meteors in the dust! Instead, it continued to aim its lance point at the closest combat carrier in alignment!

In their initial decision to charge the stranded Vandal task force, the Frosty Meteors decided to keep their ships close. Besides the water-carrying transports that had already departed via FTL, the combat carriers were still needed for command and control as well as to retrieve their mechs if they needed to escape into FTL for whatever reason.

The Meteors gathered a substantial amount of intelligence on the Flagrant Vandals, so they knew that they faced a slippery opponent. If the mechs of the Meteors separated from the combat carriers, then Major Verle would certainly order his light mechs to circle around and sabotage the combat carriers.

The only way to prevent a sneak attack on their carriers was to leave behind some guards or to bring them alone. The Meteors couldn't afford to take too many mechs out of their battle lines so they opted to keep their combat carriers close with their main force of mechs.

This kept the combat carriers safe from harassment, but also exposed them to the ravages of battle. This time, the Frosty Meteors had made a grave miscalculation as the Parallax Star only shifted a few degrees to bring it on a direct collision course against the enemy combat carrier.

"I-Impossible! How can a lancer mech be reckless enough to charge a heavily armored combat carrier!"

The proper way to fight combat carriers was to bombard them from range or to sneak inside their hangar bays and wreak havoc from within.

Venerable O'Callahan directly ignored those roles and brought his Parallax Star into an inexorable collision against the hapless enemy ship! Everyone who thought fast enough to keep up with the action cried madness in their hearts! A lancer mech charging straight against the armored bow of a combat carrier was sheer madness!

Yet the expert pilot would hear nothing of it. His maddened fury drove him to utter hatred against these arrogant Venidse mechs! They probably called him a fossil or the like! Before his charge arrived, none of the mechs of the Frosty Meteors showed any caution to him. No way could O'Callahan tolerate such callous disregard!

"Combat carrier? It's all the same to me!" O'Callahan laughed. "Yield to me!"