The Mech Touch

The Eight Lord of Takansha had disappeared from sight!

Melkor’s modified Fey Fianna had deployed 25 recently constructed formation anchor fey. They successfully reached the coordinates calculated by the newly established qi cultivator and formed a spell array that was large enough to trap the orven lesser phase lord in place!

At this time, the white mists that contained and obscured the active spell array were roiling violently from time to time.

While most of the other alien races hardly noticed the disappearance of a lesser phase lord, the orvens most definitely saw what happened!

Their warship gun batteries trained their muzzles towards the coordinates of the formation anchors and opened fire, only to see their attacks passing through the mists as if they hit nothing.

They had no understanding of how qi formations worked, and they couldn’t afford to divert too much firepower away from their human opponents, so they only attacked the spell array half-heartedly.

What they did notice was a single mech that was seemingly responsible for deploying this mysterious anomaly!

Commander Melkor’s machine soon came under heavy attack!

Saint Commander Casella Ingvar already anticipated this response. She ceased to Enfeoff the Karma Cutters as they had already done their jobs and shifted her most powerful form of empowerment to a company of Rigid Wall mechs from the Living Sentinels!

The defensive space knights excelled in defense, and these ones had been especially modified and upgraded to resist even more transphasic attacks than usual!

"Our defenses are impervious!"

"We are the walls that stand in the way of destruction!"

"The blessing of the Saint Commander shall make us impervious!"

The Rigid Walls formed a half-sphere formation that covered the Fey Fianna with multiple thick and overlapping tower shields and armored mech frames.

As temporarily empowered Barons, the Rigid Walls proved far more effective at withstanding enemy firepower than ordinary small craft!

Even so, there were limits to how much firepower they could resist with the help of the Saint Commander’s true resonance.

Melkor was not skilled enough to be able to sustain and control the active spell array while on the move. His Fey Fianna needed to remain stationary in order to keep the confinement array as strong and stable as possible.

This instantly negated the best defense that small craft possessed against warship-grade gun batteries.

All of the mechs were stuck in place, making it trivially easy for the powerful primary and secondary gun batteries of enemy cruisers and battleships to bombard their coordinates!

Rigid Wall after Rigid Wall endured crushing amounts of damage that could have easily flattened a city district.

The mechs honestly shouldn’t have been capable of tanking direct attacks from the most powerful guns of orven warships.

They were actually quite lucky that the native aliens had not developed the habit of mounting enormous spinal cannons onto their largest hulls.

Perhaps this might change in time with the help of cosmopolitan intervention, but for now the Rigid Walls were performing admirably well with the help of the Minerva’s empowerment.

However, the Living Sentinels were only able to deploy so many Rigid Walls for this onerous task.

While the Saint Commander frequently rotated the spent and worn out Rigid Walls with fresh ones that were previously hovering on standby, the rate of depletion was too high. The Larkinsons would soon run out of defensive mechs to shield Melkor’s mech against bombardment!

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"Jannzi, is your Bastion ready to give me a hand?!" Commander Melkor urgently requested.

"I am sorry, Melkor, but Zren-Divar’s plasma sword has overloaded most of my defenses. I can barely maintain a resonance shield at this time. Don’t worry. There is another defensive mech on the way. His machine is more modern than mine, and has yet to sustain as much damage, so he should serve you well."

Melkor soon understood what Jannzi meant as an expert mech that possessed a similar configuration to the Amphis Extremis flew to his Fey Fianna’s side!

The Blood Star Mark II had arrived!

"Benjamin!"

The father of Ark Larkinson and the grandfather of Ves Larkinson had been faring decently well during the battle.

Though his expert offensive space knight did not engage in any flashy theatrics, the machine instead fulfilled the role of a troubleshooter.

The Blood Star Mark II had flown across the battlefield and helped out the soldiers by breaking formations of elite phasefighters, assaulting and disabling sub-capital warships with hulls bristling with anti-mech armaments and more.

Now, Venerable Benjamin Larkinson arrived where he and his expert mech were needed the most. The Blood Star Mark II quickly took over much of the burden from the Enfeoffed Rigid Walls and did a much better job of resisting the incoming attacks!

The resonance shield generated by a high-tier expert pilot and a high-tier expert mech was much more effective at withstanding punishing blows that were powerful enough to demolish city districts!

"How long can your Blood Star last?!"

"A minute or maybe a minute-and-a-half, but not much longer." Venerable Benjamin spoke. "I have sustained relatively little damage so far, so my resonance shield is in good condition. The firepower that the enemy warships are bringing to bear is still difficult to resist even for expert mechs like my Blood Star Mark II. My battle partner’s defenses are not as exaggerated as that of the Bastion!"

Both of them fell under the space knight classification, but they were designed with completely different purposes in mind.

The Bastion exemplified the concept of extreme defense and sacrificed nearly every other advantage in favor of raising her ability to resist attacks to the limit. Her most recent performance clearly proved the value of such a machine, and everyone gained a newfound appreciation for an expert mech that they previously looked down on for being slow, clumsy and lacking in agency.

The Blood Star Mark II possessed respectable defensive attributes, but did not compromise too much in terms of mobility. The living expert mech was meant to be a relatively mobile assault unit that could fulfill flexible roles on the battlefield.

The expert offensive space knight was able to switch from a defensive assignment to an offensive assignment with ease.

While the Blood Star Mark II’s was not as good at resisting a huge amount of attacks as the Bastion, his mobility allowed the machine to evade many devastating attacks.

Unfortunately, when assigned to a task of defending a static target against focused attacks, the Blood Star Mark II was clearly out of his element!

Fortunately, Melkor shared a piece of good news.

"You don’t have to weather the storm for long, old man. Joshua doesn’t need much time to finish off his enemy."

Inside the damaged but still functional resonance-empowered spell array, the Everchanger had finally tasted first blood!

The toxic and dangerous phasewater-infused blood from the orven lesser phase lord did not harm the Bitter Scimitar in the slightest.

In fact, the D-arm had developed an instant liking for phase lord blood!

The weapon was originally forged as a highly saturated transphasic hyper weapon, so getting exposed to phasewater posed no threat to its material structure.

The mysterious transformation induced by the Demoncasting process caused the D-arm to gain other properties.

One of them happened to be the ability to devour phasewater — as well as phasewater-infused blood — to fuel its phasewater-charged mechanism!

While Joshua imagined that this might happen, he did not dare to put too much hope in this possible interaction. He had already been prepared to launch repeated attack runs in order to finally land a killing blow on the lesser phase lord.

What happened instead was that the Bitter Scimitar exploded in power shortly after its blade sunk into the Eight Lord’s exposed chest!

The flesh, bone and other toughened organic tissue tried to resist the advancing blade by any means possible, but the phasewater that reinforced their structure and granted them transphasic capabilities had turned from a source of strength into a serious liability!

Any organic tissue that contained any scrap of blood got drained by the Bitter Scimitar!

Any pieces that did not contain blood could not withstand the sharpness of the resonance-empowered transphasic blade.

Even if the Everchanger did not press the D-arm any deeper, the Bitter Scimitar drove its blade deeper into the chest on its own accord!

Though the Bitter Scimitar clearly exhibited signs of going out of control again, Venerable Joshua did not try to interrupt what was happening.

If he wanted to develop a respectful relationship with the D-arm, he needed to extend his trust to it and give it space to take action on its own initiative.

Killing the Eight Lord of Takansha was their common goal. If the Bitter Scimitar thought that driving its blade straight through the chest, then that was a viable choice!

It became a lot more difficult for Joshua to maintain the fusion spirit that empowered the Everchanger so much. The dark crow briefly grew fuzzy as Joshua tried to sort of the explosion of euphoria and power from the D-arm.

He still managed to keep it together. This time, the dark crow no longer used its beak to peck into the lesser phase lord’s body. The Bitter Scimitar was already doing an excellent job in its phasewater-charged state!

What the dark crow did instead was serve as an additional defensive layer to the Everchanger.

While the Bitter Scimitar was still digging deeper into the chest of the Eight Lord of Takansha, the suffering phase lord frantically used his scepter and his knees to bash into the stationary Everchanger!

The expert hero mech’s resonance shield was still intact and able to resist a number of direct attacks, but the additional protection provided by the fusion spirit granted the machine an extra safety margin!

Soon enough, the phase lord started to lose his strength as the Bitter Scimitar cut too deeply into his large body. Phasewater-enriched blood continued to spill out of the open wounds. Anything that wasn’t devoured by the bloodthirsty blade freely seeped into vacuum and disappeared into the mists!

After the Everchanger made another concerted push, the D-arm finally cut into the enormous heart of the phase lord.

The Bitter Scimitar especially enjoyed the act of draining and devouring this key organ.

Orven hearts functioned similar to human hearts. Both of them were responsible for rhythmically pumping blood to every organ and piece of flesh in an organic body.

The catastrophic damage inflicted to the lesser phase lord’s heart caused his true body to quickly lose most forms of blood circulation!

Even if phase lord bodies were able to last considerably longer without a fresh supply of blood, there was no way for the Eight Lord of Takansha to save his life unless others immediately came to the rescue.

Alas, the confinement spell array still remained active. Nobody was able to come to the lesser phase lord’s rescue, let alone observe what was taking place.

The orven phase lord had lived for so long and amassed so much power. He had managed to scheme his way to the top of his society and successfully passed the life tests that resulted in his ascension to godhood.

He should have enjoyed a much more glorious life, but because he got drafted into the Red War, he instead lost his life at the hands of a human expert pilot!

The Eight Lord made one more expression of despair behind his closed helmet before losing consciousness.

"Is he dead?!"

"No. Not yet. He’s comatose."

"Should we capture him, Joshua?"

"That is not a good idea. We won’t be able to get away with hauling away this huge corpse without driving every orvan soldier crazy. We should end his life immediately and quickly harvest the most unique and valuable phasewater organs that we can carry away. It will be messy, but I have been told that it is fine if just half of the organic tissue is left."

The Everchanger withdrew the Bitter Scimitar from the ruined chest of the dying phase lord and flew up until he reached the same height as the top of the alien god’s head.

Joshua did not bother to conduct any ceremonies and straightforwardly chopped the Bitter Scimitar directly through the forehead that was covered in armor.

Armor and skull bone parted easily enough. Once the Bitter Scimitar finally cut apart and drained the vulnerable brain tissue, the Eight Lord of Takansha had finally perished!

A soundless scream briefly shuddered through space as the Bitter Swordsman instantly captured and devoured the orven lesser phase lord’s soul!

Just as Joshua had promised, his new life sword could freely devour the soul of the defeated champion!

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