:3 but of course, sir!

[hider=The Success]
As to your first point, his "incredible success against the demon armies", you refer to his "undeniable slaughtering of a battalion's worth of demons"? Then yes, he is incredibly successful. However, when that is the word from several enlisted members and officers in the royal armies, who would dare deny it? Also, his achievements are always overplayed by a Government fighting a desperate war, looking for any angle it could give the public to think humans are winning. And again, the books he helped write may well be a few textbooks that MCI employs, but with such a broad spectrum of topics on MECHs, he may be nothing more than anonymous examples or even part of averaging data.

So yes, he is successful for what time he spent in the army,and he did kill his fair share of demons, and I was present in a few early battles, but he was truly nothing more than some volunteer kid who was lucky enough to survive and have his own MECH. He chose to enroll at MCI so he could truly get a military career.
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[hider=Merging Mass]
CX-66 was a specially commissioned and produced by and for the Centuria family. The core itself was surrounded by a composite material that was specially designed to absorb mass for the sake of transport, yet, due to the nature of magic, will not get heavier. Before the war, the Stryd could take up to 1000lbs of any physical matter and add it to the material around its core without changing shape or weight of the suit.

Now, the Stryd merges its weapons and acessories into the composite and pulls them back through the pattern buffer, which is physically located below the core. The unintended effect of this design is that the composite becomes stronger  with the more mass it absorbs, meaning that the MECH becomes more survivable with the weapons stowed away, where the shortbow and blade of the sword are absorbed by the composite. 
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If worse comes to worse, I can always make another character for you. :)