Ves' mood turned sour the instant he saw that Tusa had used up one of his transphasic grenades.

"This guy"

He had to admit that Tusa came up with a clever trick to ensure that the Quadknife got blasted as close as possible.

Expert pilots possessed extremely powerful intuition and their sense for danger was particularly attuned. This ability already started out strong when they just broke through, but could also continue to develop over time, especially when the pilot fought in many battles as was the case of Venerable Dukes!

The danger sense of melee expert pilots tended to be a bit more alert than normal since they tended to end up in much more life-threatening situations than normal.

In addition to that, those specializing in piloting light mechs honed their alertness to an even greater degree because they literally had to rely on it to keep their relatively thin and fragile expert mech out of harm's way as much as possible!

As a light mech specialist himself, Venerable Tusa knew exactly how difficult it was to trap people like himself.

If the Dark Zephyr pulled out a grenade from one of its holsters and tossed it at the Quadknife, Venerable Dukes would have pulled away his mech the moment Tusa did anything funny.

If that wasn't enough, then the Quadknife would have definitely thrown one of its knives or any other object at its disposal in order to intercept the powerful grenade!

Venerable Dukes may not have invested much time into his knife throwing technique, but as an experienced expert pilot he could still nail a relatively slow-moving projectile!

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In fact, it wouldn't have mattered if Dukes failed to respond in time.

Venerable Hawkes would have definitely covered him in this instance! Her intuition and ability to detect threats was almost just as strong. With her exquisite marksmans.h.i.+p skills, she could easily pepper the grenade with dozens of powerful spikes in an instant!

Tusa already understood all of that in advance.

This was one of the main reasons why expert mechs rarely bothered with grenades. They were expensive, c.u.mbersome and took up precious capacity. They were hazardous to their own carriers as they could always blow up if damaged in the wrong way.

Since most opposing expert pilots easily possessed methods to avoid or neutralize grenades and other dangerous warheads, why bother with them anyway?

Venerable Tusa still insisted on using them though. While his main reason for carrying them was to give him the means to destroy targets that were too large to defeat with his daggers, he firmly believed that he could make them work against expert mechs as well!

He just needed to employ a bit of deception and trickery.

Tusa planned out everything in an instant. He employed the Endless Paths prime ability to create a stand-in that could be real but ultimately turned out to be fake.

Due to his skillful application, the Dark Zephyr that ultimately got stabbed five times at once not only looked real, but also exuded the same glow and the same true resonance without any jarring inconsistencies.

Yet that wasn't the most brilliant application that he employed. One of the biggest breakthroughs that he had achieved in his training in recent years was to master Endless Paths to the point where he could make parts of the 'clones' real and parts of them fake!

Of course, this did not allow him to split his mech in half or anything crazy like that, but it was easy enough for him to seamlessly leave behind the Dark Zephyr's daggers or any other loose equipment that it was carrying at the time!

This was why Venerable Tusa became such a huge fan of grenades. Since pulling them out and tossing them at enemies was such a big tell, the best way to make them more viable in duels against other expert mechs was to skip this entire process!

Essentially, Venerable Tusa developed an entirely new tactic that could quickly be summed up as a false suicide attack!

Just like how crazy soldiers throughout history did not hesitate to trigger the grenades in their hands when they were surrounded by their enemies, Tusa could turn his Dark Zephyr into a highly effective 'suicide bomber' without actually committing suicide!

The power he invented through his own creativity and persistence actually exceeded what Arnold could do by himself!

This should actually not be that big of a surprise. The chubby cat-sized arganid clisenta that Calabast had turned into her pet was a relatively young mutated beast.

He was incomparable to the likes of Qilanxo and Zeigra when it came to age, mental development and combat experience.

His mysterious talent was pretty much an innate ability. Arnold did not understand the principles of its operations at all and pretty much utilized it on autopilot each time he wanted to make a bunch of clones to confuse his enemies and make his escape.

While such a mode of operation was enough to satisfy a simple alien creature, Venerable Tusa was an intelligent human being that also had to prepare for encounters against much more dangerous opponents.

It was quite impressive for Venerable Tusa to succeed in surpa.s.sing the source of this extraordinary capability!

Thanks to this, the Quadknife ended up in such an awful state that it had practically turned into a sitting duck!

Ves and many other mech designers could clearly see that losing all of its limbs was the least of its worries.

Large parts of its internals had either been blasted out of existence entirely or became so riddled with holes and deformations that they could no longer function at all anymore.

The flight system, the power generator, the sensor systems, the communication systems and more had all been rendered inoperable!

The damage would have been worse if the Quadknife was clad with conventional armor plating.

Even though the Gauge Dynasty cheaped out by investing only a few grams or so of phasewater over its entire entire armor system, the Quadknife still obtained enough resistance against transphasic weapons to block a lot of the power of the transphasic grenade.

That was why its half-crumbled frontal armor managed to block the bulk of the damage!

Ves was quite impressed with the performance of the Quadknife's armor system.

He knew the power of a transphasic grenade the best. A typical expert light mech with a weak or broken resonance s.h.i.+eld should have been torn to pieces when hit at close range.

For the Quadknife to remain this intact by relying on drops of phasewater clearly showed the value of this key material.

Even a minimal application of phasewater was enough to turn a fatality into a crippling wound!

"It seems I need to incorporate a lot of transphasic alloys in the exterior of the c.o.c.kpits of our most important mech pilots in the future." Ves judged.

He and his fellow mech designers only applied this treatment to the newer Larkinson expert mechs, but Ves saw a lot more value in adding this layer of protection to the c.o.c.kpits of the older ones as well.

Ves even thought about expending additional phasewater to reinforce the c.o.c.kpits of mechs piloted by the legion commanders and other important figures.

The best part about it was that he could adjust the ratio of phasewater according to the priority he set on the pilot. Venerable Joshua should definitely enjoy the most luxurious configuration if he had his way!

The poor man's version of transphasic armor systems also seemed useful to Ves. It was a good way to add a bit of extra protection to the mechs piloted by expert candidates and mech officers.

Now that the Larkinson Clan forged a lucrative trade deal with the Hex Federation that allowed the latter to rent the MSTS from the former by paying 5 kilograms of phasewater a year, Ves could completely afford to apply this treatment to the entire Larkinson Army!

As Ves used his implant to look up additional information about this subject, it turned out that a lot of different people had invested a lot of research in 'budget' transphasic armor systems. Their efforts yielded a lot of small breakthroughs, of which many of them still remained exclusive to different states and research inst.i.tutions.

This wasn't a big surprise, actually. Phasewater was still so scarce right now that it was much more important to get more out of every single drop than to dump a bottle full of the substance into a single mech.

Ves had mostly dealt with transphasic products that adopted the latter approach. Powerful research inst.i.tutions such as Morton Tech dealt with upper-tier clients that had the money and phasewater to invest in the development of powerful transphasic expert mechs and ace mechs, but it was the exception rather than the rule.

The compet.i.tion at the lower end of the mech market was much fiercer!

"Interesting."

It was a pity that the Larkinson Clan wasn't qualified to compete in this sector yet. Sara Voiken had already spent a lot of years in trying to master phasewater technology in relation to armor systems, but she could barely make anything worthwhile at this point.

Perhaps Ves should put a higher priority on hiring a genuine phasewater specialist or acquiring a phasewater-oriented research inst.i.tution.

It would have been better if he could obtain an enlightenment fruit oriented around phasewater technology, but whether the Tree of Possibilities might grow one was purely based on luck and the whims of the System.

"The Quadknife's c.o.c.kpit is getting away."

Ves turned his attention back to the battlefield.

It turned out that a small fight had broken out about taking down Venerable Dukes for good!

Moments after the Quadknife's damaged but intact c.o.c.kpit had ejected from the torn and ruined expert light skirmisher, the Filamon floating in the distance had seemingly gone crazy!

"DUKES!"

Venerable Hawkes grew so concerned about her partner's life that her desperation fueled her force of will, brus.h.i.+ng aside the fatigue that she had accrued and bringing her true resonance with her expert mech to another level!

"YOU'LL NEVER GET A CHANCE TO KILL MY PARTNER!" Hawkes roared as she poured her heightened emotions into her glowing weapon!

"Hey! Who do you think I am?" Tusa complained. "It is beneath me to kill a defenseless pilot!"

Venerable Hawkes wasn't in a mood to listen. The powerful corona around the Filamon grew brighter as the expert mech's transphasic filament rifle blasted out an unprecedented salvo of transphasic, resonance-empowered spikes!

Each of them soared across the distance at record speed in an attempt to saturate the entire area around the Dark Zephyr!

"Can't you leave me alone!?" Venerable Tusa cursed as he immediately recognized the threat!

His own desperation pushed his own resonance with the Dark Zephyr to a higher level as well, allowing him to quickly activate his Endless Path ability just a short moment after its first usage.

This time, the Dark Zephyr split up into many different identical 'clones' that each dodged and evaded in many different directions!

Unfortunately, Venerable Hawkes had already accounted for that. The spread of her powerful spike rain covered pretty much every coordinate that the Dark Zephyr could reach. The net was inescapable due to its abnormally high propagation speed!

Nine different apparitions of the Dark Zephyr got stung at once!

Yet just as the rain of spikes could continue to poke the copies that had flown to the rear, an explosion erupted from the Dark Zephyr at the center!

It turned out that Tusa had pulled off the same trick again!

The difference was that he had chosen to detonate a different type of grenade this time. The one that exploded in the end was primarily concussive and forceful in nature.

This meant that it generated a shockwave that rippled out into a sphere and exerted enough force to push out the transphasic spikes in the way!

While the projectiles were too powerful to repel entirely, they at least spread out just enough to spare the real Dark Zephyr that had ended up flying directly away from the rear!

"That was close!" Tusa gasped.