The first attempt yielded a disappointing result, but Ves already anticipated this outco.
It was too much to ask for a single copy of the Blinding ch to debilitate another ch pilot.
Theoretically, it made little sense. The Ill.u.s.trious One was not as powerful as the Superior Mother and the Blinding ch wasn’t capable of channeling a lot of spiritual energy.
The Blinding ch was not a pri ch. It did not carry an entire reserve of spiritual energy transferred from the Ill.u.s.trious One in advance. Even if it did, it wouldn’t be of any use as only expert pilots were capable of utilizing such chs.
There was no way the Hex Army had enough expert pilots to spare on the Blinding chs!
Even if it did, the Hexers would never put these precious individuals in cannon fodder chs!
Each aspect of the Blinding ch was either cheap or disposable. At its lowest level, the model was rely a vehicle to channel one of the Ill.u.s.trious One’s unique spiritual characteristics.
On paper, this ant that it didn’t matter whether the ch was cheap or expensive in construction. Its spiritual characteristics wouldn’t be any less potent if Ves designed it as a third-class ch instead.
While Ves wasn’t wrong in thinking so, he was hoping a stronger effect than a negligible fluctuation.
"Ready nine more Blinding chs."
Once a squad of Blinding chs exposed the luminar crystals embedded into their shields, their ch pilots simultaneously triggered the sa ability!
This ti, the effect on the target ch pilot was a bit more noticeable. While the ordinary ch did not experience anything except for moderate visual flashes, the pilot actually blinked his eyes for a mont.
Yet that was all. While the distance between the observation room and the testing ground was a bit far, Ves could still see that the overlapping Blinding Pulses hardly resulted in a stronger impact.
"Prepare all 40 Blinding chs."
It was only when an entire ch company worth of Blinding chs activated their Blinding Pulse abilities at once that the target ch pilot experienced actual differences!
"Ahh!"
The ch pilot blinked several tis while trying to nurse his head through his helt. His discomfort was evident as the teletry transmitted by his ch showed so concerning fluctuations.
The effect was moderate enough to affect the ch pilot’s performance in battle, but not enough to knock him out of action entirely.
"Okay, let’s put an expert pilot in front of the Blinding chs. Who is on duty this ti?"
Catherine Evenson "Ah, let call up Venerable Tusa Billingsley-Larkinson. He is on standby right now with his pri ch."
The Piranha Pri walked out of a ch hangar with slow, light steps. The ch stepped in front of the formation of Blinding chs and simply stood in place.
Ves shifted his gaze to the cara feed of the c.o.c.kpit. Tusa looked incredibly bored. He didn’t want to waste his ti on serving as a practice target for an experintal new ch. The only reason why he showed up with his pri ch at all was because soone had to do the job and he happened to get the short end of the stick.
"Let’s get this over with, please." Venerable Tusa flatly said.
Though his attitude could use so adjustnt, Ves didn’t care too much about what the expert pilot thought. The Blinding chs had an expert pilot to try their abilities out and that was enough.
"Comnce the test!"
The luminar crystal-encrusted shields flashed yet again. Different energy waves washed over the low-intensity resonance shield Piranha Pri.
Nothing else happened!
The reason for the forr was because he confird sothing that was very helpful to the effectiveness of the Blinding ch.
Though the sensors hadn’t been able to detect any spiritual interactions, Ves clearly perceived that the combined spiritual emissions from the Blinding chs succeeded in passing through the Piranha Pri’s resonance shield!
For so unfathomable reason, the resonance shield failed to designate the spiritual emissions as an attack. The barrier let the spiritual flashes pass through as if they were just harmless rays of light.
This was a pretty confounding interaction. Ves couldn’t help but rub his smooth-shaven chin as he tried to figure out how resonance shields worked.
Who or what determined the defensive paraters of a resonance shield? Were all of them the sa, or did they only block attacks the expert pilot deed harmful?
For now, it seed that the latter was true. Ves never programd anything related to resonance shields when he developed his pri chs. They only erged when expert pilots interfaced with his prir chs.
This indirectly suggested that a lot of spiritual manifestations were rooted in the ch pilot rather than the ch. The forr had to be strong, but the latter didn’t necessarily have to be the best.
This was an interesting little insight, but not one that changed the overall outco of this test.
Catherine issued a single request over a private command channel.
"Venerable Tusa, please describe your experiences during the brief event."
"I... dunno really. I feel like soone flashes in the eyes, but my ch automatically filtered out the excess luminosity captured by its optical sensors. I still felt a bit strange though. Maybe so of the sensors got damaged during the Battle of Reckoning. Please tell soone to inspect my pri ch after this is over."
"Ahem." Catherine slightly coughed. "Did you experience any discomfort or debilitating effects at all during the brief interval when the Blinding chs were flashing their shields?"
"No." Tusa replied in an impatient tone. "I felt a little weird, but not enough to affect in any way. It takes way more than a strange twinkle to distract from my goal."
After asking a few more questions which yielded several more disappointing answers, Catherine eventually turned to her superior.
"As you can see, sir, a full ch company of Blinding chs failed to debilitate Venerable Tusa Billingsley-Larkinson in any way."
"Have you perford this test on any other expert pilot?"
"We did." She nodded. "Venerable Joshua exhibited an even milder reaction towards the Blinding chs."
All in all, Ves figured the fundantal problem behind the lack of effectiveness.
The triggered ability was just too weak.
In its current state, the Blinding ch would never be able to disturb any expert pilot no matter how many of them were deployed at once.
Ves didn’t think the addition of a couple of hundred Blinding chs would change the fundantal result. As he had just observed, the intensity of the Blinding Pulse did not scale linearly when multiple of them were stacked together.
Instead, just like glows, the combined effect was only mildly stronger than just a single spiritual emission. The only major advantage was that it beca a lot harder to disrupt all of them, which was only useful if the damned ability did anything in the first place.
"You can resu the regular schedule." Ves sighed and turned away from the observation window. "I have seen enough for now. I’ll be down at the hangar bay to take a look at the prototypes up close."
Half an hour later, the Blinding chs all moved to their assigned places in the hangar bay and powered down. The Living Sentinel ch pilots all exited the c.o.c.kpits and moved to a debriefing room in order to doc.u.nt their individual experiences.
Ves approached a random prototype and looked up at the tall and heavy machine. Its thick fra and hefty shield exuded a subtle atmosphere that was completely different from that of his other Hexer chs.
The Ill.u.s.trious One possessed a very understated glow despite the light shows he frequently generated. Ves didn’t even pretend how this worked. He just wanted to focus on the Blinding ch’s spiritual foundation and spiritual construct he shaped to enable its primary purpose.
"Blinding an expert pilot is harder than I thought." He muttered.
"ow." Lucky echoed as he floated around the Blinding ch in question.
According to his nose, the Blinding ch was the equivalent of a nutrient pack! Other than filling up his stomach, the ch possessed no other value!
Ves sneered at his pet. "I rember a ti where you wouldn’t hesitate to eat junk exotics that are primarily used to make third-class chs. Even if the Blinding ch is a budget model, it’s still a second-class machine!"
"ow!" Lucky arrogantly huffed while distancing himself from what he considered to be a disgusting al.
Not even a gem cat valued the Blinding ch. Ves was quite depressed by all of the bad news surrounding this project. The ch design was an ambitious experint, but right now Ves didn’t see any way of getting it to work.
As Ves experienced many tis throughout his ch design career, the simplest problems were also the hardest ones to solve.
"There’s a lack of power."
It was impossible to affect change without supplying energy. If there wasn’t energy to fuel a reaction, then the effect would always disappoint no matter what it was supposed to achieve.
It was like pitting his Unending Regalia suit against a ch. Even though his combat armor largely consisted of near-indestructible Unending alloy that was worth as much as entire starsh.i.p.s, any ordinary ch could easily defeat it by stepping onto the suit!
In this example, the difference in scale resulted in a massive difference in power that simply couldn’t be surmounted by the weaker side.
The Blinding ch was not as small as a personal suit, but from a spiritual perspective it might as well be. It was just an ordinary ch paired with an ordinary ch pilot. This combination didn’t even co close enough to matching the spiritual strength of an expert pilot!
"We might need a thousand Blinding chs to achieve an effective result against a single expert pilot, and only against a weaker one!"
This was too unreasonable. While the Blinding ch was designed to be deployed en masse, it took too much resources, manpower and transportation capacity to put the model to use in this case.
When he traveled down to this testing facility, he thought the problem was more technical.
Yet when he examined the spiritual construct and the Ill.u.s.trious One’s interaction with it in detail, he concluded that it was working exactly as intended.
The spiritual parts were all doing what they were supposed to do. The input was just too feeble to achieve a strong enough output.
"This isn’t the first ti I’m dealing with a lack of energy." Ves grumbled.
Right now, he didn’t see any way for him to supply the Blinding ch with additional spiritual energy. The ch was already straining to draw as much as it could accomplish from the Ill.u.s.trious One.
It wasn’t enough.
"At least my pri chs have another source of energy."
Those were different circ.u.mstances. What Ves needed to do was to achieve a comparable result but without the benefit of pri materials, manual preparations and expert pilots.
"This is impossible!"
Free energy did not just show up out of nowhere! Even the Ill.u.s.trious One had to divert the harvest he received from the modestly-growing number of ch pilots of the recently-released Crystal Lord Mark II.
While the third-class rifleman ch model had achieved a decent degree of popularity, it was more of a hidden gem at the mont. The original Ferocious Piranha sales hadn’t abated yet, so it was still attracting the most attention out of all of the LMC’s ch catalog!
For these reasons and more, the Ill.u.s.trious One could only do so much. Even if he was as strong as the Superior Mother, he wouldn’t be able to sustain the effective functioning of the Blinding ch for long.
"I need another source of energy." Ves concluded.
Yet where could he possibly obtain one? Due to all of the aforentioned limitations, he did not possess anything that could address this vital need.
"Wait a minute." He suddenly paused. "At least one of my battle prizes may be capable of generating energy!"
His thoughts went back on one of his most significant harvests from the Battle against the Abyss. For all this ti, he barely paid any attention to it because he was imrsed in his imdiate priorities.
It wasn’t until now that he possessed an actual need for it. For the first ti in months, Ves finally thought about the nasake of Unending alloy.
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