The inspections revealed no abnormalities or rule violations. The chers cleared all four chs for action.
As the two teams split up and positioned themselves at opposite ends of the ch arena, everyone looked forward to witnessing a different kind of fight from before.
The second challenge match only involved 2 chs on each side.
Most observers had beco a lot more familiar with the Fey Fianna by now. They had watched Ves' presentation the day before and also witnessed the drone chs winning a tough and exciting match just before.
The drone chs already proved its capacity to fight and win when the odds were against their favor. The Standard Fey Fiannas might be a bit on the expensive side, but they made up for it by offering a compelling combination between flexibility and hard combat power.
Even a single fey was powerful in itself!
It was only a fraction of the size of a ch, but could fully reproduce one of the functions of the latter!
Whether it was offense, defense, mobility or utility, the Fey Fianna could excel in any of these areas depending on what sort of fey accompanied the main body.
The only major shortcoming aside from its relatively high upfront price of 3 MTA credits per copy was the lack of fey models.
Ves had not spent much ti on designing enough varieties of fey to satisfy the needs of every potential custor.
This was why the LMC launched the Fey Shaper Contest a short ti ago. The incentives of this little competition should hopefully persuade enough people to earn a living by designing and selling more creative and diverse fey types.
It would have been handy if Ves had more fey models at his disposal. His Fey Fiannas could have won the last match a lot easier if they had access to an offensive fey that was aligned with the wood elent.
It didn't matter too much, though. The previous challenge match had proven that elental disadvantages were not decisive. chs had won and lost more battles than anyone could count despite the fact that they should have lost in theory.
What people were much more interested in were the two lancer chs.
They looked fairly normal at first glance. Ves had designed his fair share of lancer chs, so he possessed a good grasp of this ch type.
The oddly-nad Montebra carried a lot of armor at its front side, which enabled it to resist a lot of damage when it comnced its attack runs.
The quantity of armor was not excessive, though. Part of that had to do with the flight system of the ch.
The flight system of a normal lancer ch was mostly designed to maximize their straight-line acceleration paraters.
This made lancer chs great at speeding up in straight trajectories, yet also caused them to exhibit poor maneuverability, especially at high speeds.
In any case, the Montebra's flight system clearly betrayed the fact that it was not a pure lancer ch, but rather a compromise between a lancer ch and a spearman ch.
This was not uncommon in the ch industry. Lancer chs possessed devastating charges but were pretty much useless outside of them. Spearman chs were good in static battles but lacked the punch to break through enemy lines.
A ch ard with long weapons that could perform both roles decently well was an attractive product to many ch forces!
So what if the Montebra was not able to outperform a pure lancer ch at the sa design budget? So long as its brawling capabilities were not too poor, its applicability would definitely be a lot higher!
While all of these factors seed obvious enough when Ves studied the appearance of the Montebras, he failed to ascertain its more hidden traits.
This was rather annoying. Ves could clearly sense that there was a depth to the Montebras that currently remained dormant beneath its steel gray exterior.
The only signs of 'exotic energy' that he could sense from the Montebras was its strong affinity to the tal elent.
A considerable reason why the Montebra was more expensive than a typical second-class ch was because Master Ginevra Hubert-Colmain chose to impart it with higher grades of tal hyper materials.
While she clearly did not go overboard and made the ch completely unaffordable, she had definitely made a lot of compromises in the design in order to turn the Montebras into a tal-attributed machine.
This was a deliberate design choice. It told Ves that tal E energy was bound to play a key role in its upcoming performance.
Ves actually found it a bit strange that Master Ginevra dared to deploy a tal-aligned ch against the predominantly water-aligned Fey Fiannas.
tal fed water, so the Montebra's attacks were bound to weaken when they struck the Fey Fiannas.
Of course, if the Montebras successfully struck the Fey Fiannas with their lances during a charge attack, the sheer kinetic montum of the impacts alone was enough to overpower any elental disadvantage!
Ves did not have the capital to say that these elental relationships could decide the outco of battles. The previous match had already disproven this assumption.
Master Ginevra most certainly knew what she was getting into when she issued her challenge yesterday.
The more the Montebras looked like they were at a disadvantage, the more Ves suspected that they had access to a powerful trump card that could change the entire equation!
"The challenge match shall comnce in 1 minute."
The countdown started. The ch pilots from both sides made their final preparations as they beheld their opponents on the opposite side of the expansive arena.
"Do you think my Montebras will successfully drive their lances into your Fey Fiannas?" Master Ginevra asked.
"Nah." Ves shook his head. "Lancer chs excel at breaking slow and unwieldy targets. Everyone knows that. My Fey Fiannas aren't as maneuverable as light chs, but they are pretty mobile compared to other dium chs."
This was a clear and obvious fact, yet Master Ginevra did not seem to treat it as an insurmountable obstacle.
"Rules are made to be broken." The woman spoke in a sagely voice. "This is especially the case in my field of specialty. In all my years of working with exotic energies, I have challenged many facts, broken many rules and rewrote the truths that many humans previously held sacred. I encountered plenty of opposition from more close-minded ch designers due to my controversial research activities. My theories ended up wrong in many of those cases, but that does not diminish my few crucial successes. I am more of a researcher than a ch designer, but whenever I set out to design a ch, my primary goal is to make a statent."
Those were strong words. Ves felt more emotion in her than in the previous minutes. Her conviction was strong. Her confidence in her chs was unusually high.
The Fey Fiannas were definitely in trouble this ti.
"3... 2... 1... START!"
From the mont the second challenge match comnced, the four chs took action right away!
The Fey Fiannas started to move and fly in order to make themselves as difficult to strike as possible.
The two drone chs had 6 luminar crystal cannon feys at their disposal. These fey had imdiately begun to bombard one of the Montebras with a succession of hot and searing fire laser beams.
The Fey Fiannas themselves also pitched in by firing their luminar crystal rifles.
The Montebras were both equipped with tal-attributed energy shields that appeared to be decently strong, but not quite capable of resisting so many incoming attacks for a long ti.
However, the lancer chs did not remain in place. Their flight systems boosted the Montebras forward, allowing the machines to build up speed and montum as quickly as possible.
Phoca Arena may be the largest ch arena on Bortele III, but the Montebras could only boost themselves forward for a relatively short ti before they already reached the other end!
During this short but intensive period, the Montebras did more than resisting the incoming attacks and trying to build up more and more montum.
If the lancer chs could only do this, then they did not have any chance of hitting the fast and agile Fey Fiannas!
In fact, a few seconds after the Montebras had comnced their charge, the Fey Fiannas already deployed another counterasure.
All of the luminar crystal cannon fey began to release obscuring smoke clouds.
The clouds were never ant to last too long, but they blocked enemy sensors long enough to reveal 8 identical-looking Fey Fiannas!
The offensive fey had activated their decoy functions which caused them to look like actual chs.
Their appearances as well as their emissions were so alike that the sensor systems integrated in the Montebras couldn't distinguish truth from falsehood at this ti!
Not even the weapon discharges could help them identify the real chs from all of the decoys.
This was because the weapon characteristics of the luminar crystal cannons suddenly resembled the luminar crystal rifles to an almost perfect degree!
As the designer of both weapon systems, it was easy for Ves to make one of them resemble the other. Luminar crystal technology happened to be highly scalable, so Ves did not even have to make too many alterations in order to add this functionality to his Fey Fianna design.
"I can see you have put a lot of effort into strengthening certain capabilities of your lancer ch, but I very much doubt that you have equipped your machine with high-quality sensor systems."
"You are correct." Master Ginevra admitted.
Offensive chs such as the Montebra were usually designed to go after obvious targets. They were not designed for scouting and reconnaissance, so there was little reason for them to waste valuable capacity to obtain better eyes.
It was much better to rely on other chs that specialized in this role!
The Montebra model was never designed to fight in isolation. It was ant to beco a part of a combined arms force where many different ch models combined their strengths and covered for their weaknesses.
The challenge match did not reflect these circumstances, so the Fey Fianna had an opportunity to make good use of its tricky decoy function!
Ves had no doubt that the Montebras would be able to distinguish the real Fey Fiannas from all of the false decoys in ti. So long as their sensor systems continued to gather a lot of data, small flaws and inconsistencies would eventually betray the actual states of the chs and the disguised fey.
However, there was no ti for the Montebras to play the long ga. At this mont, 8 luminar crystal weapons continually pumled the lancer chs, making it clear that the two lee chs were on a ti limit!
Ves glanced at Master Ginevra and found that the woman did not look concerned for her chs at all. Did her Montebra model possess a handy function that could successfully guide its lance to the correct target?
"Watch, Professor Larkinson."
A dramatic change suddenly occurred. The two Montebras began to absorb a lot of tal energy from the environnt! Two energy vortices appeared closely together as the lancer chs beca saturated with the power of tal!
Yet that did not last for long. Mysterious processes ca online that sohow absorbed all of this tal energy and proceeded to convert it into electrical E energy!
"No, not just that!"
The Montebra model not only had the capacity to convert tal E energy into electrical E energy, but also produced a lot of conventional electrical energy as well!
This was a massive surprise! The ability to produce electrical energy from E energy alone was enough to revolutionize a lot of existing human technologies!
However, this was not the extent of the changes.
All of that electrical power ant nothing if it wasn't put to good use.
Different streams of lightning bolts sparked from the two lancer chs and instantly closed the distance before striking all of the Fey Fiannas and fey at once!
Through this brief electrical contact, the Montebras instantly locked onto the only real chs among all of the false decoys!
The deception had failed!
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