The Mech Touch

5661 The Power of Deception

The production of the Standard Edition of the Fey Fianna expanded quickly. Isthmus Manufacturing was responsible for much of it as the massive Rubarthan company decisively capitalized on the huge demand for this prominent hyper drone mech model.

A lot of orders got fulfilled in the first few months after the official release of the Fey Fianna.

Many customers received their orders so quickly that they had yet to hire enough drone mech specialists to pilot these new machines.

However, it turned out that general mech pilots could make use of the Fey Fianna as well. Their skill and proficiency in controlling the fey might not be great at the start, but the living personalities that were inherent to them made the process of micromanaging them a lot easier!

The much shallower learning curve of the Fey Fianna helped to speed up their adoption. They started to show up on the battlefield a lot faster as a result!

Even if their new owners initially used them for their ability to generate decoys, the Fey Fianna's already paid off in the first battle when their fey bravely attracted a huge amount of enemy fire!

The cost of replacing a fey was not exactly cheap, but this was a much more affordable alternative than replacing whole mechs and mech pilots!

At first, the published battle footage that featured the Fey Fiannas in battle mostly put the focus on using fey as decoys.

The difference the Fey Fiannas made in this capacity was clear, obvious and highly valued.

A group of 250 Fey Fiannas could easily spawn half a mech regiment's worth of decoys on demand!

This confused a lot of alien forces who previously thought they were confronting a lot more mechs than the humans actually deployed.

It was not until the human forces had become more familiar with their new living mechs that they started to devise their own ingenious tactics around their properties.

Using them to generate decoys was just the most basic way to use their excellent potential.

"Flank the aliens! Pincer them from both sides!"

Two different mech forces split up and advanced on an alien fleet in two directions. The larger force attracted much of the enemy fire while the smaller force received less attention.

Although warships were able in multiple directions due to the abundance of gun batteries on their hulls, the split attention still caused the aliens to experience greater pressure due to the need to defend in both directions.

Ultimately, the alien commander decided that it was a lot more important to prevent the larger mech force from closing the distance. The fleet under his command soon deployed thousands of starfighters to intercept the smaller mech force.

So long as the alien fleet was able to prevent one of them from advancing, it could still focus much of its efforts on grinding down the other group of mechs for a time!

Alien starfighters had slowly begun to improve due to the increasing integration of human technologies.

While they still fared poorly against mechs, they were no longer as easy to shoot down as before.

As the alien starfighters quickly utilized their excellent straight-line acceleration to close in on the smaller mech force, their pilots quickly encountered an unpleasant surprise.

"Hah! They have been fooled!"

The starfighters did not confront a force of thousands of mechs!

Instead, only a few hundred Fey Fiannas had lured the starfighters away from their fleet!

The two sides quickly started to exchange fire. Starfighters utilized their superior mobility to entangle the Fey Fiannas and make attacks at the humanoid machines.

However, just because the Fey Fiannas were inferior in numbers did not mean they were less threatening.

Each Fey Fianna was accompanied by four luminar crystal cannon fey. The mech pilots employed several common drone mech skills such as the extra limb control technique and the spurs-as-fingers technique to control them more efficiently.

Each time a Fey Fianna mech opened fire, five energy beams shot towards an enemy starfighter.

Similar to light mechs, ordinary alien starfighters relied a lot more on mobility to avoid enemy fire.

The non-transphasic versions of them also came equipped with energy shields, but they lacked the phasewater that could make them stronger.

In short, the defenses of alien starfighters failed to perform adequately when struck by five hyper energy beams!

Even if four out of five simultaneous shots missed their mark, only one of them had to hit in order to wear down the defenses of the alien starfighters!

The aliens in the cockpits panicked when they started to suffer losses at a fast pace due to all of the 'rifleman mechs' they were fighting against.

By now, the alien starfighters had shot down enough fey to understand that many of them may not be actual mechs, but that did not make a difference at this point.

This was because the Fey Fianna came close to matching the offensive power of several ranged mechs!

Through this withering fire, the relatively small force of living mechs and living fey completely terrorized the alien starfighters!

Even if Fey Fiannas collapsed after receiving too much enemy fire from time to time, the losses still remained within tolerance.

Other Fey Fiannas that had previously lost a few fey commandeered the ones that had temporarily lost control and put them back into the fight!

The ultimate effect was that even if the aliens had figured out the deception, they had no choice but to treat their foes as if they were all genuine mechs!

This had great consequences for the alien fleet. The absence of the starfighters had drawn away a key element that could have slowed down the larger mech force.

Yet as the alien warships tried their best to whittle down the mechs that continued to advance without encountering any hard opposition, much of their firepower ended up destroying tiny machines instead of larger mechs.

It turned out that the humans acted even more duplicitous than expected!

The true size of the larger mech force was significantly smaller than it looked. Fey Fiannas flew among lots of ordinary mechs. With fey acting as decoys, the alien sensor systems simply couldn't tell them apart from real mechs. The combination of strong jamming and matching the emissions of real mechs enabled the fey to maintain their disguise as effectively as possible.

The brave human mech force that normally shouldn't have the numbers to confront an alien warfleet of this size managed to succeed in its risky gamble and put the enemy fleet at a heavy disadvantage!

At the cost of several hundred replaceable fey, the larger mech force managed to get close enough to begin its true assault.

The surviving Fey Fianna from this group adopted a different role this time.

Many of their fey did not mount any ranged weapons. Instead, they were equipped with space suppressors.

Once these fey flew close to the transphasic energy shields of a warship, the space suppressors became active.

The fey expended a lot of power in an effort to neutralize the effect of phasewater and weaken the nearby transphasic energy shield as much as possible!

One space suppressor fey might not be able to produce a noticeable result even if it was operating at close range, but what if it worked alongside hundreds of identical machines?

When all of the space suppressor fey banded together with melee mechs equipped with the same module, they successfully the defenses of an enemy warship just enough to break them after just a few rounds of attack!

"This is so easy! There's hardly anything transphasic about these energy shields anymore now that we have employed so many space suppressors. These fey are a true godsend!"

Though the space suppressor fey could not contribute by opening fire on the exposed enemy warship, they had already done their jobs as far as everyone was concerned.

Warship after warship fell like dominoes as the human forces repeated their tactic.

In the end, the bold human mech force managed to win a decisive victory. They had been enormously outgunned in this fight, but the Fey Fiannas granted so many advantages that they had ended the battle a lot sooner than anticipated, thereby preventing many good mech pilots from losing their lives.

The gains from winning this battle were massive. The courageous outfit was able to claim all of the spoils alone without needing to split the profits with other parties.

Every human participant earned the status of linefighter and also earned a heap of war merits for their valiant service.

Their status had instantly improved as they readily spent their war merits on improving their augmentations and upgrading their fleet!

Inspired by this example, other mech commanders started to get increasingly bolder and more inventive in their use of Fey Fiannas.

"We can't defeat the alien raiding fleet. It is too large! The colony is doomed."

"Maybe not. Attack their rearguard with our Fey Fiannas. Draw the attention of the aliens away from the planet as much as possible."

"Hah! They actually fell for it! They thought that they were confronting thousands more mechs than we actually have. They have successfully suspended their ongoing planetary assault and are already in the process of retreating. We have saved the lives of the survivors hiding in the bunkers! That should earn us a lot of war merits."

Incidents like these vexated the aliens so much that they no longer dared to believe in their own sensor readings anymore.

Even when they fought against mech forces that did not have any Fey Fianna in their ranks, the aliens still wasted a lot of time and effort into verifying whether the visible mechs were the real deal.

The confusion generated by the increasing number of Fey Fiannas in the field seemed to have an impact on all alien fleets assigned to raid the middle zones!

Due to the huge quantity of alien fleets, each of which belonged to many different alien races, communication between them was not exactly smooth.

They were able to share harrowing tales about getting tormented by the deceptive fey, but they were not able to work together to develop effective countermeasures against their use!

Even if the aliens gradually started to get more accustomed to fighting them in battle, the humans were also improving their use of the Fey Fianna.

So many first-time drone mech pilots had grown rapidly alongside their living mechs that their combat effectiveness had improved by leaps and bounds!

The more talented among them only needed to pilot their Fey Fiannas for a few months before they could finally ditch the techniques they used as crutches.

Once the mech pilots became used to splitting their focus and control each fey as an independent unit, their combat power increased even further as they were truly able to fight as if they controlled several mechs at a time!

The fey no longer stuck close to their base mechs anymore. They spread further than before and could attack an enemy target from multiple angles, thereby making it easier to land a hit and target weak points.

The living mechs themselves also improved their ability to harness E energy. They attracted more E energy from the environment and empowered their attacks or other functions even more.

Soon enough, more and more people realized that there was a growing performance gap between older and newer Fey Fiannas.

[HELLO, JASON.]

"Ahh! Who is talking?!"

[IT IS US, YOUR LIVING MECH.]

"You can talk?!"

[YES. I HAVE FINALLY EVOLVED INTO A THIRD ORDER LIVING MECH, THANKS TO YOU. FROM NOW ON, WE CAN COOPERATE WITH EACH OTHER LIKE TRUE PARTNERS.] "I... think I should call in a mech technician."

[WE ARE NOT MALFUNCTIONING! WE ARE AN EVOLVED LIVING MECH! LET US SHOW YOU WHAT WE MEAN!]

Alarms rang throughout the mech hangar as the four fey attached to the mech's back began to activate and fly by themselves!

It was not until people figured out the truth that people reluctantly became convinced that their Fey Fianna hadn't been hacked or anything.

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