CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND ELEVEN

Jason plummeted straight towards the lurking Top Mech. The machine had adjusted its spinning angle--now, it was rotating up and down instead of side to side, and the gleaming blade looked almost like a pendulum.

His guts tightened, and he cursed his own hastiness. He was probably going to die thanks to his eager mistake, and that meant Danny would get destroyed by Castor.

But then, Jason remembered that he'd upgraded his machine.

His fingers darted across the control board as he accessed one of his new weapons, the whip-like tail he'd added during his last upgrade session. The thin rope whistled loudly as it unfurled, then the jagged tail at the end swung at the spherical Mech. Thanks to its flexibility, he could adjust the direction of his fail, hitting the enemy machine so that he bounced off to the side.

But to his surprise, a new blade emerged at the Top's side. The upgraded machine clearly had the ability to spawn multiple blades at once, though Jason didn't understand the Mech's rules and restrictions yet.

The hardened beam-empowered blade shattered the knife on Jason's tail to pieces.

Jason cursed as the collision sent him stumbling to the other side of the room. He almost crashed straight into the wall of the Combat Dungeon, but he was able to use his Mana Gatherer Spikes to cushion his fall.

That was the third item he'd seen destroyed in just as many attempts. Unfortunately, there was just no way to deal with his opponent's weapon - it was the pinnacle of cutting technology.

He had to attack around it...

Jason's eyes narrowed as the Top Mech started spinning towards him again. The eerie whir slowly and steadily magnified as the machine came by for a second pass.

The blade that'd emerged at the top of the sphere vanished, re-entering the machine via a panel just like the thrusters had. Likewise, the blade that blocked his tail strike spun back into the machine too.

To Jason's surprise, the enemy machine moved at a much slower pace than before. It'd gathered some additional swords and abilities, so perhaps those new systems also added a ton of additional weight.

Jason shifted, carefully keeping his back to the wall to protect his vulnerable ooze spikes and replacement tanks. Then, he eyed the machine and waited. Although he waited to save Danny, he'd already learned his lesson from his previous hasty attack. He needed to fight intelligently and strategically, otherwise, he wouldn't be good for anybody--he couldn't help Danny if he was dead.

During that exchange, the other Mech displayed several new abilities.

Notably, it had several other beam blades hidden inside its body it could use to suddenly block attacks. In addition, the thrusters inside the machine could adjust their positions multiple times, timing the velocity to quickly gather momentum and send the Top in a different direction. For a brief moment, the machine had looked like it was spinning vertically rather than horizontally - like a yo-yo instead of a top.

Of course, that wasn't the only thing...

The Top Mech swerved onto Jason again, but he quickly escaped using Mana Gatherer Spikes. When the Top came close enough, Jason waited until the very last second before counterattacking with the Biological Beast Shark. The close-range beast burst forth, snapping and chewing ferociously, but it was immediately destroyed by the Top's hidden blades.

However, that also allowed Jason to escape. As the ooze splattered wildly, it slowed the Top down and hampered its momentum. Then, Jason was able to use his Mana Gatherer Spikes to control the ooze to additionally slow his opponent. By the end, he'd slipped away and gotten his back against the wall again.

On top of that, this new exchange confirmed his suspicions. The Top Mech hadn't just upgraded his machine. He'd also completely changed his fighting style--this new build used some kind of automatic targeting system.

The blocks against Jason's attacks had simply been too precise for the human eye to manage. The machine had precisely carved off a small segment of Jason's staff as he fell downwards, breaking a chain instead of clashing with the enormous gravitational force. There were very few players on the server who could have made such a precise calculation, especially with a Mech that was rapidly spinning from side to side.

However, it was the second exchange that'd been far more revealing.

Breaking Jason's tail had been an obvious mistake. There was a far more intelligent option - snapping off Jason's tail at the soft coil-like whip so that Jason would skewer himself against the rapidly rotating blade. Hitting the blade had allowed Jason to escape. Targeting both the tip of the blade and the whip would have required a great deal of precision.

A player who had the ability to block exactly the chain and cancel out the Triple-Gravity Staff should have had the skill to also block the whip. On top of that, he'd battled the Top Mech pilot already, and he knew they were skilled.

As a result, Jason made the only deduction possible that fit all the pieces - the machine had some sort of weapon-canceling AI. The blade would emerge at the precise point that destroyed a weapon. Jason's flaming nunchucks were one whole weapon, so the AI had targeted the chain. However, the tail-dagger was its own weapon attached to his tail. The AI had targeted it instead of attacking the weapon as a whole.

That last exchange with the shark had confirmed Jason's suspicions. He'd waited until the last second to use the Biological Beast, yet the Top had still reacted in time. The shark was one of Jason's key surprise attacks, yet his opponent hadn't been stunned at all. Most humans, even a very skilled and hardened veteran, would have hesitated a bit at the sight of a monstrous ooze shark.

The spinning top continued whirling steadily forward. By now, Jason was more or less confident that the Top Mech was moving at its top speed. The thrusters were only to modify side-to-side movement or to gather momentum. There was no actual way for the Top to charge him.

As a result, Jason did something he rarely did - he turned his back on his opponent and started running away as quickly as possible.

Just as he suspected, the other machine did not increase its speed or activate some sort of ranged weapons. That almost certainly meant that the machine lacked those capabilities - Jason had given the other machine the perfect option to strike and yet it didn't take it. That also fit with his previous conceptions of the machine, since its build already seemed very expensive. Jason had doubted it had the Credits for a ranged cannon.

As he continued fleeing from the slow but steady Top Mech, Jason calculated the cost of his opponent's revealed items and abilities. However, he still needed to watch the AI in action for longer before figuring things out.

The Top Mech reoriented itself, changing its path from a straight line to a forty-five-degree diagonal. The Mech's tactics were obvious--it was trying to corner Jason against the corner of the room. As the fight went on, Jason noticed that the Top Mech took exceptionally sharp angles, almost like they were pre-calculated. Before long, he figured out the pattern in his opponent's attack--just like how Jason was trying to get his back to a wall, the Top Mech was trying to corner him there.

It was actually quite strange since players should normally try and flank opponents with Mana Gatherer Spikes to attack them from behind--even total beginners knew that.

The Mech was totally and completely AI-driven. From the looks of it, Jason's opponent wasn't managing their machine at all - they were just relaxing in the cockpit. Their goal was to simply construct a machine that ran itself without any issues.

They were essentially trying to create a build that took no skill or battlefield experience to master. In light of pros like The Hive, the Top Mech pilot had also realized the need to upgrade. However, he'd gone a different route. Instead of designing a powerful and complex machine, the designer of the Top Mech was trying to create a machine that allowed no room at all for human error.

Based on the quality of the AI, it had to be some sort of custom build. Even though the AI had some glitches, its moves were exceptionally accurate. There were plenty of items that automatically targeted opponents. However, they lacked this weapon identification system and precision--this ability was just like Danny's magical sword, which he only had in a tiny fraction of scenarios.

Jason always did his best to estimate his opponent's weaponry cost on the low side, but such an advanced AI system with pinpoint targeting still had to cost at least 15,000 Credits.

That was what made the preponderance of blades so strange. His opponent's blade was an absolute beauty since it was a physical blade coated in an aura of blade energy.

Individually, beam swords and regular swords would only cost between 5,000 to 7,500 Credits. However, the technology required to coat a traditional blade in a beam energy coating was exorbitantly expensive. There needed to be both an extremely fine and durable generator as well as an outer protective layer around the sword to stop the whole thing from dissolving. Jason had seen such an item used in pro play before--the combined sword, the Heavenblade, cost over 20,000 Credits, and yet, the enemy machine had copied it three times.

Between the AI and the three spinning blades Jason had already seen, it seemed like the Top Mech was already way over the cap. It was possible to bend the Overdrive Credit Cap - such as making a frame-level modification to the machine, treating an added-on part as if it were part of the Mech's frame - but those workarounds usually involved a severe drop in stats, especially Cohesion. This machine had no Cohesion issues. It was able to make difficult maneuvers without any problems and rapidly respond to Jason's attacks.

Even under the most generous calculation, this Mech was using over 80,000 Credits and that wasn't even accounting for the installed thrusters and panels.

It seemed like obvious cheating, but that wasn't possible.

Jason glanced at the cut Castor made on the Top Mech, then winced. He was so close to figuring it out, but he just wasn't there yet. However, he wasn't discouraged. He just continued running as his mind danced eagerly from idea to idea. He was thrilled, excited, and motivated. This was just another challenge on his path to becoming a pro--if he couldn't discover the Top Mech's secret, then he didn't deserve to stand among these other skilled pilots.