The Mech Touch

Soon after the Boojay Family presented their greatest champion, the Lehrer Foundation finally deployed its own peak combat asset.

"The Infinite Gear has entered the field!"

Gloriana immediately perked up. "Finally. I've been waiting to see an ace mech that dares to go beyond the confines of traditional mechs."

Out of all of the ace mechs that the temporary coalition had at its disposal, Gloriana held the greatest interests towards the machine developed by the Lehrer Foundation.

As a large scientific research and development company, the Lehrer Foundation had the capacity to develop a huge number of advanced mech components and systems.

When it came to the design of its ace mech, the Lehrer Foundation had a hard time choosing what kind of powerful goodies it wanted to add to the configuration.

Should the ace mech be armed with a powerful energy rifle that could flood an enemy with an endless rain of energy beams?

Should the ace mech be equipped with a sophisticated tower shield that could deploy a mighty transphasic spatial shield that could cover an entire area?

Should the ace mech have access to an extremely powerful ECM system that was powerful enough to disrupt the functionality of the electrical components of mechs and starships?

All of these options sounded attractive, and that made it difficult for the decision makers to discard these powerful possibilities.

That was until a mech designer working for the Lehrer Foundation made a bright idea to take maximum advantage of their ace pilot's versatility!

The result was the Infinite Gear, an innovative and extremely complicated ace modular mech.

The central premise to the Infinite Gear was its ability to change its parts and configuration in the field.

It was an ace mech that did not possess a single main form. Its flight system, its armor system, its limbs and its weapon arsenal could all be swapped no matter whether it was resting inside a hangar bay or flying in open space!

According to what Ves knew about the Infinite Gear, its designers treated it as a multipurpose mech in the same vein as a true first-class multipurpose mech.

However, the biggest limitation was that the Lehrer Foundation did not have access to the tech or materials that could realize all of the possibilities of a multipurpose mech.

The Infinite Gear therefore turned into a playground that closely matched the traits of a multipurpose mech but in a more limited fashion.

Instead of having access to a dozen miniaturized weapon systems at once, the Infinite Gear could swap out a rifle for a sword when it transitioned from fighting from a distance to fighting up close.

The special component swapping mechanisms were crucial to enabling the Infinite Gear to change its loadout and configuration in the field.

While people like Ves or Gloriana could develop a comparable solution, they would never be able to make it as fast, robust and reliable as the ones who worked on the Infinite Gear!

The Lehrer Foundation's developers worked so hard to overcome all of the technological challenges that they managed to earn industry recognition for their accomplishment.

When Ves looked at the Infinite Gear, he saw a lot of parallels with the Everchanger.

​ Both of them pursued similar goals. They tried to be as adaptable and versatile as possible in order to remain useful at any time.

The biggest difference between the two was how they expressed their mutability.

The Everchanger primarily functioned as a hero mech that could rely on one weapon or the other in the right situation.

In order to increase its versatility, Ves made it so that it could swap out its design spirit and channel any glow, even the ones that were ordinarily restricted such as the life-changing transcendence glow.

The Infinite Gear did not put any emphasis on changing its intangible properties. Instead, it focused on the opposite approach and excelled at transforming its physical form by swapping out its parts!

It was not only able to swap out its weapons, but also many other external components!

This was extremely helpful in many different situations. For example, if the Infinite Gear ever got struck by a powerful attack that broke a lot of modular armor plating, then the ace mech could simply shed the damaged parts.

In the meantime, the Lehrer Foundation's flagship could launch a batch of replacement armor plates straight towards the Infinite Gear. Once it got close, the fresh and undamaged armor plating would automatically slot into the gaps of the ace mech, thereby making the powerful modular mech as good as new!

As their parents quickly explained what made the Infinite Gear so special, their children all looked impressed.

"It's like playing a mech building game in the middle of a battle!" Marvaine said!

Gloriana smiled. "That's right, my son. That is a good way to look at it. The Infinite Gear can theoretically last forever as long as the fleet that it is attached to has a sufficiently large reserve of high-end parts."

"Doesn't that mean the Infinite Gear can outlast everything else?"

Both Ves and Gloriana chuckled.

"That's not possible." Ves replied. "Ace mechs are extremely expensive. Their parts alone are worth at least several complete expert mechs. The Lehrer Foundation may be rich and successful, but I doubt it has the budget to build up a humongous reserve of variable parts such as a hundred pairs of arms or 50 different mech swords."

"How much money does that cost?"

"Tens of millions of MTA credits." Ves loosely guessed. "Anyway, the Infinite Gear may be highly modular, but it still possesses a single core that cannot be swapped in the field. Once its core internals incur damage, it becomes a lot less viable for the ace modular mech to keep fighting. Modular mechs are also inherently less stable and solid than more conventional mechs, so it is easier to damage its internals."

"That is why modular mechs aren't as popular, right?"

Ves nodded. "That's correct. There are many more parts, which means that there are a lot more points of failure. The last point that I want to make is that an ace mech is only as strong as its ace pilot. What I mean by that is even if the Infinite Gear can last long enough to keep fighting, Saint Robert Montagne may not be able to keep up. The more he fights, the more he depletes his willpower and wears out his mind. Unless he can keep fighting at a low intensity, he will eventually reach a point where he can no longer empower his ace mech. That is bad because the Infinite Gear will become a lot more vulnerable at that point."

Despite all of these limitations, Ves and Gloriana still considered the Infinite Gear to be a brilliant feat of design and engineering.

It was a mech that they could never design themselves unless they had an enormous development company under their belt. This was because a modular mech like this had an extremely high demand for custom-developed parts that all abided by a common set of standards.

In any case, the Lehrer Foundation may have invested a lot more in the development and the expansion of the Infinite Gear, but what they got in return was better than a more traditional ace mech with a fixed configuration!

"It is interesting to compare the Infinite Gear to the Everchanger." Gloriana said. "They have so many similarities. Both of them are inherently adaptable machines that try to morph themselves in ways that allow them to exploit enemy weaknesses while making sure that their enemies cannot effectively employ their own strengths. The Infinite Gear is far better at executing this strategy on a physical level because it doesn't have as many compromises."

Ves did not entirely agree with her description. "That is only the case if we leave out the Everchanger's mounted wargear options. I already recognized that the Everchanger's inability to change its configuration would be a potential weak point, so I decided early on that it should be able to augment itself by equipping itself with modular external gear. As a result, the Everchanger can swap its gear on the fly as well. The only difference is that it can only do so with external equipment. The swapping process is also a lot slower and clunkier."

His wife snorted. "What the Lehrers have done with the Infinite Gear is expensive and time-consuming, but what you have done with the Everchanger is even more wasteful!"

"At least the Everchanger still has a solid base form that is already a complete mech in itself. When paired with an expert pilot that has a rare life domain like Venerable Joshua, I think my own work will eventually be able to defeat the Infinite Gear if it is able to catch up to the latter's level."

Ves truly believed that this was the case. The Infinite Gear's technical capabilities would probably be stronger, but the Everchanger had access to a lot of useful spiritual options!

There were many other reasons why he believed the Everchanger would be able to come out on top, but it was not necessary for Ves to elaborate any further.

Right now, he was more interested in studying its current configuration.

One of the defining advantages of a modular mech was that it could change into any mech type it wanted as long as the right parts were available.

The Bright Warrior line and the Quint also possessed the same capability, but the reason why they were classified as semi-modular was because they could only swap their configurations in the workshop.

This gave Saint Robert Montagne the freedom to deploy his Infinite Gear in a powerful artillery mech loadout.

Right now, the Infinite Gear possessed many similarities with the Thunderer Mark II. While the former was not as large and did not come with as many guns, it could still function as well as any other ace heavy artillery mech!

The Thunderer Mark II would still be better, though. It was a specialized artillery machine that did not contain any compromises or additional support systems related to modularity.

What was even more important was that Saint Jelmer Osenring was highly specialized in piloting heavy artillery mechs. His skills, his combat experience and more importantly his domain were all dedicated to maximizing the effectiveness of such machines!

Saint Robert Montagne did not possess these advantages. His domain was more geared towards increasing the adaptability and versatility of the Infinite Gear and its many complicated systems. He did not possess the magical ability to impart his ace mech's attacks with a damage enhancing effect that would allow him to do better at this specific job.

This was fine.

While Saint Osenring and the Thunderer Mark II excelled at fulfilling a single role, they became a lot less useful if they were compelled to fight in another way!

For example, if an ace light skirmisher mech managed to ambush the Thunderer Mark II, it would be extremely difficult for Saint Osenring to defeat such a powerful threat. The best he could do was to repel the adversary.

In contrast, Saint Montagne merely had to issue a request to the Lehrer fleet and wait until another set of modular mech parts reached his Infinite Gear.

Once the package arrived, the Infinite Gear could swap out its set of artillery mech parts for a set of striker mech parts and proceed to fight its enemies at closer range without any problems!

The same enemy ace light skirmisher mech would not only lose its prior advantage, but end up becoming extremely vulnerable to the Infinite Gear's wide area attacks!

This was why Ves and many others assumed that the Infinite Gear would be the ace mech that would retain the most relevance as the battle progressed to its later stages.

"Sir! The Gemini Family has finally launched its ace mechs. Both of them have revealed their presence!"

The strongest pioneering group finally unveiled its trump cards. Unlike the others, the Geminis had two ace mechs at their disposal, and they weren't shy about deploying them together.

Since both of their ace mechs were piloted by a pair of twins who also happened to be husband and wife, the synergy and cooperation of the two was bound to be extremely high!

"The Gemini Saints are piloting an ace space knight and an ace rifleman mech. That's a classic combination."

The power and capabilities of just one of them was already strong enough, but once they teamed up with each other, they could overcome much more potent challenges!