Venerable Kismet Hawkes and her Filamon had just burst out with great power and needed to cool down before they could pull off another intensive move.
Ordinarily, that would have made the Filamon vulnerable to a counterattack, but this was the moment where Quadknife took action again!
"Dukes!"
"On it, Hawkes!"
As a tag team that had cooperated on the battlefield for years, Venerable Dukes had already prepared to put pressure on the Dark Zephyr the instant his partner had moved past her peak.
This was a familiar routine to them that had worked out many times against many different opponents.
The theory was simple. They both alternated their offenses so that they could apply constant pressure onto their opponents.
Because their expert mechs burst out with maximum power or close to it during the short time they took the lead, their opponent would never be able to do anything but defend and react!
Though the expert pilots and expert mechs applying this tactic would rapidly drain themselves, Dukes and Hawkes preferred not to resort to this measure during large battles.
After all, there were a lot more opponents for them to defeat, so it was an ingrained habit for them to conserve their energy and resources.
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It was a pity that they already encountered a tough opponent at the start of their participation in this major battle. The Dark Zephyr posed such a threat to them and everyone else that Dukes and Hawkes felt obliged to commit everything to taking it down!
If an expert mech with this much raw power and piloting proficiency got loose, then a lot of other friendlies would get demolished!
With this thought, Venerable Dukes did not hesitate to draw out everything he could out of his Quadknife.
Its three knives were already glowing and thrumming with both true resonance and transphasic power.
The blending of these two high-level energies generated so much penetration potential that Hawkes was convinced that they could slice through the Dark Zephyr's unusually resilient armor plating!
"Whatever expensive crap your expert mech is made of is no match to the power of Fridayman tech!"
The timing of the Quadknife's approach did not give Venerable Tusa much time to react. His Dark Zephyr quickly activated its strained high-impulse boosters once again to not only dodge to the side, but also spin it around in order to parry the attacks that it could not evade!
Fortunately, Tusa had chosen for his expert mech to spin and evade in the right direction so that only the damaged side of the Quadknife was able to land an effective attack.
The Dark Zephyr ultimately managed to block the Quadknife's strike with its dagger at a clever angle.
Though the daggers that Ketis had personally handmade for Tusa received another chip, the integrity of the weapon did not drop as much this time.
However, just as Tusa thought that everything was safe, he suddenly detected a serious threat coming from below!
There was almost nothing that the Dark Zephyr could do under these circumstances except to trigger all forward-facing boosters, with the lower ones burning harder than the ones above!
This allowed the Dark Zephyr to distance itself from its current opponent while at the same time angling itself in a way that made it harder for it to get struck from below.
Even so, the Quadknife's surprise attack had come so suddenly that part of the attack still grazed a piece of the Dark Zephyr's ankle, causing the foot below to become unresponsive!
"You've got another set of blades?!"
"Legs can hold blades as well, you idiot!"
For the first time since the start of this battle, Venerable Tusa encountered a phenomenon that did not match the intelligence.
The intelligence leaks and other sources collected fairly detailed information about the Quadknife's design, but none of them ever suggested that its legs not only possessed the same range of motion as a pair of arms, but also contained integrated knives!
When Tusa directed his expert mech's optical sensors towards his opponent's legs, he saw that a knife-like spike had extended from each foot!
Tusa cursed at the sight. "This is cheating!"
It turned out that the Multi-Limbed Designer wasn't even honest when she named it the Quadknife.
A name like that would always make people assume that the Quadknife could only ever possess four weapons.
In most cases, the legs of a mech played a negligible role on battlefields. It was too easy for people to dismiss their existence. Aside from kicking, absorbing damage and maintaining the balance of a mech in flight, they seemed to serve no other meaningful purpose!
This was the brilliance of Master Veldam's design.
On the surface, the pair of legs of the Quadknife looked like they were normal. Many classified records that the Fridayman had on file showed that the legs were also of normal design according to its design schematics.
In truth, their internal design looked a lot different! Only the exclusive maintenance crew of the Quadknife as well as a select few other other people knew about this extra feature.
As a result, whereas everyone thought that Venerable Dukes piloted the Quadknife, he had secretly gained a Sextaknife!
Though the Dark Zephyr had turned the Sextaknife had turned into a Quintaknife, this still gave the Fridayman expert light skirmisher a lot of limbs to work with. The positioning of the legs granted Venerable Dukes a lot of tricky attack angles that were difficult to block for humanoid mechs.
Dukes felt incredibly irked that he had been forced to expose this crucial trump card at the start of his first real battle in the Red Ocean.
Instead of getting angry at his failure to stop the Dark Zephyr through normal means, he vented all of his fury and hatred towards the source of his misfortune.
"I won't forgive myself if I don't chop you up like sushi!"
"Have you ever thought about switching to a nutrient pack diet?!"
Venerable Dukes was far from done with his latest offensive. His Quadknife might not possess the instantaneous displacement and spinning capabilities of the Dark Zephyr, but it came equipped with a stutter flight system that allowed it to rapidly reposition itself so that it was able to charge at the Larkinson expert mech again.
When Venerable Tusa saw that the Quadknife had transformed its legs to the point where it looked like it had become a deformed horror monstrosity, he felt extremely depressed.
Just like Dukes and Hawkes, Tusa attempted to defeat his opponents while conserving his resources as much as possible.
However, the deep combat potential as well as the strongest abilities of their expert mechs had caused Tusa to misjudge the situation too much.
His expert mech already suffered considerably more damage than it was supposed to incur if Tusa fought all-out at the beginning!
"Maybe too much of Ves has rubbed off on me." Tusa grumbled. "Serves me right for acting like a cheapskate."
As soon as Venerable Tusa threw away every instruction and directive that he had received from Ves out of his mind, he suddenly felt a lot lighter and more liberated.
"I'm just going to do what I want!"
This decision did not come too soon, as the Quadknife had almost reached the Dark Zephyr at this point!
As the five knives of the former were about to plunge into the frame of the latter, Venerable Tusa resonated with his expert mech in a substantially different manner!
Venerable Dukes could clearly sense the fluctuations of true resonance from his opponent, but his confidence never receded.
There was nothing that the Dark Zephyr could do to avoid getting stabbed by at least one of the Quadknife's weapons!
"I'VE GOT YOU NOW!"
Though the Dark Zephyr attempted to evade the incoming strikes in a similar way as before, Venerable Dukes had already grown a lot more familiar with his opponent's evasion moves.
The Quadknife squeezed a bit of extra push out of its overstrained stutter flight system.
This allowed the Fridayman expert mech to stutter ahead and drive its knives into the frame of the Dark Zephyr when the latter was just beginning to move aside!
All five transphasic knives sunk through the Unending alloy armor plating like a hot knife through butter!
The angles of attack and the momentum behind the stabs were so great that Venerable Dukes should have been assured that he had fatally skewered the Dark Zephyr this time!
However, the feedback from his Quadknife indicated that the knives encountered so little resistance that it was unnatural!
Only a tiny amount of time had passed, but Venerable Dukes was able to think so quickly during this high-pressure fight that he quickly figured out a lot of crucial details at once.
First, the Dark Zephyr in front of him possessed no mass or resistance, though the sensors of his expert mech said otherwise.
Second, the Dark Zephyr was known to possess a few illusionary resonance abilities.
Third, his intuition suddenly went wild as he instinctively detected a fatal threat from the grenade holster mounted on the front right of the apparently false Larkinson expert mech!
"...Oh crap."
It turned out that while the Dark Zephyr was fake, one of the grenades that it stored in this particular holster happened to be real!
Not only did it happen to be real, it had already been primed and triggered!
At the last possible instant, the Quadknife instantly hunched over and retracted all five of its remaining limbs in front of its torso, thereby forming an extra layer of protection in front of its chest!
It was then that the entire surrounding volume space became engulfed in a massive explosion that became so violent that it cracked the fabric of space!
"Are you Larkinsons crazy!? How many grams of phasewater did you throw away with this grenade?!"
"It's worth it, though! I would gladly pay a transphasic grenade to get rid of an enemy expert mech."
As the explosion ran its course, the Dark Zephyr barely managed to escape from the blast zone in time!
,m Aside from suffering a few surface cracks to its armor plating, it had come out of its risky move unscathed.
"I'm glad I got out in time." Tusa sighed in relief.
He knew first-hand how powerful transphasic grenades could be! Their blast radii were quite wide since they were designed for sieging purposes.
"The Quadknife shouldn't have survived since it got pretty close to my package."
It turned out that just before the Quadknife struck, Tusa had resonated with his expert mech and activated its Endless Paths prime ability derived from Arnold.
After several years of practice, Tusa's control and application of this prime ability had grown more exquisite.
This not only allowed the Dark Zephyr to 'retreat' while leaving behind a false version of itself in place, but also make it so that one of its grenades was mysteriously left behind!
Such selective control was extremely difficult to accomplish, but Tusa had put a lot of hard work into practicing it exactly for situations like these!
After all, no one expected that the pilot of a grenade-carrying mech would be crazy enough to perform such a suicidal move!
When the powerful grenade finally ran its course and the immediate space corrected itself again, Venerable Tusa and many others looked carefully at the results of this powerful attack.
"The Quadknife… is still intact!"
"Wait, where are its limbs? Where are its knives?"
A transphasic grenade could deal incredible damage to targets, but since they were mainly designed to cripple massive warships, their explosive potential was mostly geared towards blasting a huge volume of space rather than unleashing it in a more focused manner.
Even so, the distance between the detonated grenade and the Quadknife was so close that the hapless expert mech still received a lot of the damage potential of the grenade!
If not for the fact that the designers of the Quadknife actually laced a minor amount of phasewater into the armor plating of the expert mech to soften the blows of transphasic weapons, Tusa's surprise would have torn apart its insides beyond recognition!
As it was, the Quadknife gained enough holes on its exterior and interior that its core systems were already failing.
Not that it would have helped that much. The five intact limbs that the Quadknife had folded in front of it at the last possible moment had all been torn apart by the explosion, which meant that the attack had literally disarmed the Fridayman expert mech!
Venerable Tusa chuckled as he gazed appreciatively at the results of his handiwork.
Though he had been forced to use up an expensive transphasic grenade that he had reserved for other purposes, he became so amused at the damage that he had inflicted that he felt it was worth the sacrifice!
"I told you I would turn you into a Noknife."
Venerable Dukes did not waste any time on replying. Perhaps the communication system of whatever was left of his expert mech had already been crushed.
Surprisingly enough, the cockpit was still intact enough to eject from the damaged rear of the Quadknife.
The developers of the multi-limbed expert mech had actually reinforced the cockpit and laced it with a higher concentration of phasewater to increase its resistance against decapitation strikes.
This design choice pretty much saved Venerable Dukes' life!