The Mech Touch

5033 The Hidden Stalker

Venerable Zimro Belson closed his eyes as he continued to operate his new expert mech.

He had been waiting to do this for a long time. It had been torture for him to spend all of those months as a newly advanced expert pilot without a suitable mech.

Though he got his practice in by piloting standard mechs and training with the MSTS, they failed to satisfy Ills needs.

Was all of that waiting worth the reward?

Hell yes!

It took a lot of effort for Venerable Zimro to suppress his bursting excitement and maintain an utterly cool and calm mindset.

He continued to resonate with the Phobos to the fullest. He specifically tapped the power of the Emdar Alloy that was integrated into the frame, enabling his expert stealth mech to enter into Silent Mode that suppressed all of his emissions by another measure!

This was crucial to keeping the Phobos near the large alien raiding fleet without getting detected all of this time!

It was not for lack of trying. The partially crippled orven battleship may have suffered badly at the hands of Geist System's fiends, but she was still large and thick enough to boast many redundancies!

If not for the fact that the alien warship only boasted two warp drives, it might not have been possible for the Phobos to cripple her superluminal travel capabilities!

Fortunately, the aged alien homeship was far from the best of what the orven civilization had produced over the years.

Tlie orven battleship's lack of technological sophistication as well as the low number of warp drives turned her into an ideal sabotage target for the Phobos!

Venerable Zlmro Belson was well aware of the risks. This was not the first live deployment of the Phobos, but all of the powerful expert mech's previous sorties comprised of safe practice sessions.

The outcomes of these practice sessions gave Zlmro a lot of confidence in his new machine's stealth performance.

Whenever the Phobos disconnected itself from the command net and entered into complete stealth, hardly any of the mechs and starships of the expeditionary fleet succeeded in detecting the elusive machine!

Zimro had humiliated a lot of pilots and spacers by flying his Phobos at close range and planting cat stickers onto surfaces before making a silent but triumphant retreat!

A lot of people laughed when they saw that the Phobos had succeeded in planting yet another funny cat sticker onto the rear armor of a mech or the nose of a starship!

Tlie Phobos spent weeks on testing the stealth capabilities of his quasi-first-class Seferath AQ-3M against many different detection methods.

No matter whether it was the Larkinsons, the Glory Seekers, the Crossers, the Adelaides or the Boojays, the equipment they used to detect for any stealthed threats often failed to pick up any trace of the Phobos!

It was only when the expert stealth mech strayed too close to an active scanning module that it was possible to detect the sneaky machine's approach!

Of course, it was unrealistic for the mechs and starships to keep their high-powered scanning modules active all of the time.

They were never meant to be used over longer stretches of time. The more delicate parts of these ship systems wore out at an accelerated rate, which would eventually cause them to shut down entirely until they had been serviced.

As such, the Phobos's transphaslc stealth system proved to be highly effective at sneaking up on most targets so long as they had little reason to suspect that there were hostile stealth units lurking around!

Though Zimro had a lot of fun pasting cat stickers onto different machines, he enjoyed less success when he attempted to replicate his success onto various high-ranking mechs!

The Phobos completely failed in every attempt to sneak up onto an ace mech.

The capabilities of the Macharia Excelsia of the Glory Seekers, the Jedda Sandivar of the Adelaide Third Fleet and the Royal Jeem of the Boojay Family were on a whole other level!

Their designs not only Incorporated much more powerful and technologically advanced sensor systems, but were also surrounded by highly sensitive Saint Kingdoms at all times!

The domain fields produced by the ace pilots and amplified by their ace mechs created a large sphere-shaped field around them that prevented even a single speck of dust from passing through unnoticed!

As for the expert mechs of the Golden Skull Alliance, the Phobos produced mixed results.

Whenever Venerable Zimro and his battle partner relied solely on the technological capabilities of the Seferath Seferath AQ-3M, they occasionally got detected in advance.

"Got you!" Venerable Tusa yelled as his Dark Zephyr spun around and tapped the chest of the invisible Phobos! "You've fooled me once, but you can't fool me twice. Your shadow is too obvious!"

A powerful gravity field pushed the Phobos away just as he was about to approach the Bastion.

Venerable Jannzi smirked. "The sensor systems of my new expert mech are much more modern and high-end than the ones installed on the older expert mechs. You won't be able to sneak past by my detection envelope."

Whether the expert pilots relied on their tech or the intuition honed through combat, the expert stealth mech clearly couldn't guarantee success when trying to sneak up against his peers.

The story was much different when Venerable Zlmro started to resonate with Emdar Alloy.

The Silent Mode resonating ability that the designers specifically paired with the Phobos instantly changed the game!

The suppression of every emission not only caused the Seferath active stealth system to exhibit fewer flaws, but also made the Phobos less noticeable in a more metaphysical manner.

"Hey!" Tusa angrily roared as his living mech reported a new addition to the frame. "How did you manage to place a sticker on my Dark Zephyr without my notice? There is no way you should have been able to do that when I was actively paying attention to my surroundings!"

More and more expert mechs started to get pranked as the Phobos defeated all but the most effective methods when he was operating in Silent Mode!

After extensive testing, it turned out that the Phobos was not completely undetectable in this state.

The new expert stealth mech struggled to remain undetected when trying to approach a target which frequently accelerated at high power and made numerous random changes in direction.

Moving quickly and turning at high angles were all cases where the flight systems of mechs tended to produce the highest emissions and disturbances.

The faster and more erratic the movements of the targets, the more the Phobos risked detection by attempting to get close!

For example, the living mech's chances of successfully sneaking close of the Dark Zephyr dropped by a huge margin whenever Venerable Tusa treated the surrounding space as an imaginary obstacle course.

"I'm not giving you any chance of embarrassing me another time."

Other mechs such as the Bastion relied on their inherent advantages to increase their detection capabilities.

For example, when Venerable Zimro Belson became determined to tag the Bastion at least once, the expert knight mech released a low-powered gravitic pulse that rippled across an invisible shape.

Venerable Jannzi's expert mech diverted maximum power to her sensor and scanning systems and easily exposed the Phobos in Silent Mode!

"Good attempt, but you need to do better, Zlmro." Jannzi taunted.

This fun little game took place whenever the expeditionary fleet transitioned into realspace and needed to cycle all of the FTL drives.

Every starship and every mech constantly had to keep a close watch around their perimeter in order to make it harder for the Phobos to tag them with a cat sticker without notice.

It was a good way to increase the alert level of all of the crew and mech pilots while also giving Venerable Zimro and the Phobos a lot of effective training.

General Verle and his counterparts at the other alliance partners never put a stop to these sessions despite all of the complaints.

It was better to keep all of the personnel on their toes. Hostile stealth units would never be so forgiving as to stick a playful sticker onto a surface!

When the time had come for the expeditionary fleet to confront a fairly powerful raiding fleet, Venerable Zimro Belson and the Phobos finally had a chance to prove their worth!

"The greatest hurdle of eliminating the alien raiding fleets is not to beat them on the battlefield." General Verle briefed the expert pilot. "We can do that as long as we have enough firepower and trump cards at our disposal. The real challenge is to force the aliens to fight a standing battle. These alien raiders aren't stupid. The moment they detect an incoming human fleet that is large enough to inflict heavy losses, their ships will turn around and warp away into the distance. Most of our older starships are not equipped with warp drives or superdrives, so we cannot catch up to them unless we are willing to fight while heavily outnumbered."

It was still possible to defeat the alien raiding fleets when they were fleeing at full speed. Human warp-capable ships such as the recently refitted Spirit of Benthelm could still catch up and rely on its complement of Transcendent Punishers as well as high-ranking mechs such as the Amaranto and the Macharia Excelsia to take potshots at the main thrusters of alien vessels!

So long as the alien propulsion systems incurred enough damage, the affected ships would no longer be able to flee the star system as the warp drive was useless without enough forward movement.

Tills was the tactic employed by most pioneering fleets that had responded to the call of the Red Two to defend humanity's colonies.

However, this was an exceedingly dangerous and risky tactic because the aliens could turn around and eliminate the outnumbered warp or superdrive-equipped starships at any time!

The only way to somewhat mitigate this risk was to maintain a huge distance, but this directly reduced the chances of crippling the mobility of an opposing starship.

If the Larkinson Clan hadn't completed the Phobos, then the expeditionary fleet would have been forced to employ this risky delaying tactic anyway.

Fortunately, the Phobos provided the Golden Skull Alliance with a much more effective option.

As long as the Larkinsons were willing to risk their precious expert stealth mech on a solo operation, there was a great chance of crippling the main warships of the targeted alien raiding fleet!

Venerable Zimro and his Phobos did not disappoint in their debut mission.

While the aliens eventually wised up and activated all of the transphasic energy shields to wrap their warships in a protective bubble, their Job was already done.

The pair sabotaged enough warp drives from enough alien ships to anchor the raiding fleet in place!

The expeditionary fleet was already approaching from afar. It would take a significant amount of hours for the human starships to get close enough to deploy their mechs, but the aliens were unlikely to fix all of their warp drives so quickly!

The best and most rational choice the aliens could make at this point was to split up their fleet and evacuate as many personnel and assets to the fully operational warships. This would allow them to flee the human-occupied star system without losing everything.

"It's too bad they made the wrong choice."

The Phobos continued to stalk the confused alien raiding fleet. The expert mech was capable of keeping up his Silent Mode for many hours.

A surge of excitement ran through Venerable Zimro Belson's mind.

He could feel through his man-machine connection with the Phobos that all of the recent training and the successful sabotage operation had finally enabled the expert mech to grow by another step!

[I have earned my second Ascension Rune.] The powerful living expert mech quietly communicated to his pilot. [Which path should I choose this time? The Path of the Ghost King should enable our fiends to pass through the weaker obstacles if we go far enough.]

Zimro shook his head. "Stealth is the foundation of our success. These battleships can easily overpower our defenses if they can successfully lock our positions. You should go further into the Path of the Hidden Stalker before considering anything else."

The expert stealth mech experienced a subtle metaphysical change. Zlmro could somehow feel that it had become even less easy to detect than before, though he did not know exactly how.

[Done. Would you like to test my new upgrade?]

"Let's go, partner."