The Mech Touch (Web Novel)

5678 Unintended Power

When the strange cat 'dove' into Yuri and came into contact with his most fundamental self, the avatar of the god pilot did not act gently.

Now that the god pilot had made up her mind, she acted decisively.

Though she was only able to channel a tiny aspect of her power through Emma's faint connection to the Ultimatum, she was able to leverage more than enough power to induce far-reaching changes into Yuri's spirit!

The Ultimatum suddenly triggered multiple alarms as Yuri began to scream and thrash while he was strapped against his cockpit seat!

The Hooligan Barke became notified of the concerning development as well.

Commander Andrea Pellicky had been wondering what was wrong with one of her subordinates. To see him in pain and distress made her feel concerned. If she wasn't in the middle of commanding her mercenaries through an incredibly difficult battle, she would have stepped in and taken charge of this matter.

As it was, hundreds of good men had already died from the alien onslaught. With the native alien warships destroying human mechs and starships left and right, Commander Pellicky simply couldn't afford to spend too much time on the breakdown of a single pilot.

She just felt it was a pity that it had to happen to a mech pilot assigned to one of her precious Ultimatums.

"Commander! The Ardent Highlander has just suffered a hull breach that has crippled half of her mobility. She is drifting out of formation!"

The mercenary commander quickly set Yuri's abnormal condition aside and turned her attention back to more pressing matters.

Despite the fact that the mech pilot was suffering from a lot of pain and distress, the Ultimatum still remained active.

Its safety programming should have forcibly shut down the man-machine connection once it became clear that the mech had become a source of harm to the mech pilot, but the living mech forcibly blocked this directive and continued to maintain this connection!

This gave Emma the time she needed to complete an unprecedented transformation that sought to reinvent the mech pilot currently known as Yuri Enfame.

This was the first time that the Destroyer of Worlds did anything like this. Usually, she applied her powers on a wider scale. She embodied the concept of unbridled destruction.

She was not accustomed to applying her power in a much more subtle manner. God pilots usually weren't known for finesse because most of their problems could be solved by relying on brute force.

The willpower of a god pilot was also far too powerful to withstand for ordinary people. It was doubtful whether any of her peers could perform this delicate operation without utterly crushing the fragile soul of the recipient!

Irene herself would have never dared to go to this far if not for the fact she had Emma!

Her companion spirit represented a side of herself that still contained many vestiges of her past. Irene deliberately kept her feline alter ego free of her overbearing willpower to maintain her original character.

Emma was able to undertake actions that no other god pilot could do. The companion spirit was able to apply a lot more finesse and control her power to a much greater extent.

This was just enough to selectively alter Yuri's soul without exceeding a limit and killing the mech pilot in the process!

That said, this was the first time that Irene did anything like this, and she had no particular expertise in figuring out how to empower a mech pilot beyond his natural limits.

This was why she decided to take a few risks and try out a new and untested approach.

Irene relied on her powerful intuition to settle on an approach. She instinctively felt that she could remake Yuri into a stronger pilot by destroying the parts of him that held him back.

All Irene was really good at was wrecking stuff, so that was what she did. Emma carefully applied her power through her faint connection with the Ultimatum mech and surgically erased whole parts from Yuri's spirit.

Most of his fears, doubts and other parts got wiped out as Emma thought they held the pilot back.

However, destroying all of these parts was not only incredibly painful to the pilot, but also literally made him less than the person he used to be before.

The consequences to his psyche and his identity were extremely serious!

It would be a surprise if Yuri could still maintain his awareness and rationality after receiving so many crippling debilities.

His body may be physically fine, but his spirituality turned into swiss cheese after Emma had cut away so many parts that made up the mech pilot.

No matter how detrimental his fears and doubts may have been in his line of work, they were still parts that made up a complete life.

But wiping away these aspects, Yuri had literally lost essential parts of his humanity!

There was clearly no way for Emma to succeed in making Yuri stronger if she left at this instance.

Fortunately, Irene already had a follow-up plan in mind.

She became inspired by what a certain time-traveling mech designer once did to her own soul a very long time ago. Even if she was unable to recall that process, she could still figure out what he had done to a large extent.

The god pilot knew that there would be gaps in Yuri's soul, so she simply decided to fill up the gaps with other stuff.

The only viable source she could draw upon was Emma.

As a True God-level companion spirit, Emma's power was beyond doubt.

The problem was that she was far too powerful relative to Yuri's current state! His soul would definitely disintegrate if it came in touch with just a tiny fraction of Emma's potent energy!

However, Emma's power was more gentle and malleable than Irene's tyrannical willpower.

Even though Irene was not accustomed to doing this, she instinctively found ways to take a tiny mote of Emma's energy and selectively use her own destruction authority to weaken its power.

By destroying the parts that made it so destructive and harmful to other people, she gradually turned the mote of power into a weaker but much more digestible seed of power!

The Destroyer of Worlds actually derived a powerful sense of satisfaction when she created this delicate seed.

It had lost most of the extraordinary power that intrinsically belonged to a True God, but it still contained just enough of a trace that preserved the power to defy reality.

After all, what Irene wanted to accomplish went against the natural order. She did not think she could successfully empower Yuri without breaking the rules.

Once she created her seed of power, she carefully tried to integrate it into Yuri's fragile soul.

The screams that escaped from the mech pilot's throat became a lot louder all of a sudden!

The pilot's weak and injured soul forcibly fused with the seed of power.

Even if Emma had weakened the seed to such a degree that she was able to send it all the way to the Ultimatum, it was still too powerful for a mortal soul to bear.

Yuri originally wasn't worthy to bear this kind of power. His forced operation had improved his qualifications, but also injured his spirit to such an extent that he was not able to bear this power!

At this time, the Ultimatum suddenly stepped in. It previously disdained its pilot, but after Emma had taken personal action to reform Yuri, the living mech understood that it was his duty to give his partner another chance.

There was not much the living mech could do. The Ultimatum could only use the man-machine connection to siphon away a part of the pain.

The bond between the two grew stronger through the sharing of pain!

As the fusion between Yuri and the seed of power continued to make progress, the Ultimatum became more and more involved.

At one point, the bond between the two had grown so close that the living mech accidentally touched the seed of power.

This incident immediately provoked a series of consequences that no one managed to foresee!

First, the Ultimatum unintentionally absorbed a small aspect of Emma's power!

Even though the power was miniscule, it did not change the fact that it originated from a True God!

The living mech experienced a form of pain as the seed was not prepared for the machine at all. Forcibly merging this power rapidly boosted the machine's affinity for destruction and caused it to absorb destruction energy at a much faster rate than before!

This triggered a runaway reaction where the Ultimatum grew stronger. This enabled it to absorb more destruction energy from the environment, which caused the living mech to become even stronger and more infused with destruction!

The current environment played a large part in promoting this accidental process. All of the death and destruction wrought by the native aliens as well as the treacherous Grimly Brothers caused the battlefield to become flooded with destruction E energy!

More and more of this newly generated destruction energy began to flow in the direction of the Hooligan Barke before getting absorbed by the Ultimatum!

Fed with so much raw destruction energy, the Ultimatum rapidly grew far beyond the limit that its spiritual foundation was able to bear!

However, because the Ultimatum forcibly absorbed a small part of the power of a True God, its upper limits had been raised to a huge extent, thereby preventing the mech from hitting a ceiling that could have stopped this cycle from running any further!

However, just because the Ultimatum was able to rapidly expand its power did not mean it was wise to do so! The second order living mech experienced such extreme growth and expansion that it was experiencing a lot of pain as its very essence was being hammered into a much larger shape!

What truly alarmed Irene was that the active man-machine connection caused the Ultimatum's transformation to spill over to Yuri!

Just when the poor mech pilot had survived the worst of this soul-tearing transformation, his own living mech flooded Yuri with destruction energy that not only caused his spirituality to expand yet again, but also strengthened the active man-machine connection far beyond its specifications!

Emma was completely taken aback by this accident. As powerful as she may be, what was happening fell completely outside of her area of expertise!

If Irene was physically present, then she could have utilized her God Kingdom to cut off the flow of destruction energy and suppress any unwanted reactions as much as possible.

However, there was little Emma could do under the current conditions. Even if she was able to apply a bit more force, trying to end whatever transformation was taking place would kill Yuri outright!

As the dangerous processes continued to power up the mech and mech pilot beyond any reasonable limits, the two had grown so united by their suffering that it triggered an entirely new reaction that completely alarmed Irene.

"AAAAAAAAAAHHH!"

As Yuri roared in pain, the saturated energies inside the cockpit somehow caused his piloting suit and his body to gradually melt and merge into the cockpit seat!

"What?!"

Irene became shocked when she observed what was happening!

If her suspicions were correct, then Yuri and his Ultimatum had just begun the process of corporeal union!

Their forms had physically merged with each other!

If Yuri's body had just melted, then he would have died without a doubt, his potent spirituality still remained alive and continued to power up with no end in sight!

This meant that Yuri and his living mech had not only commenced corporeal union, but likely already formed an operation union as well as a domain union!

In short, Irene's intervention somehow caused the beneficiaries of her power to complete three out of the four steps of the Mech Body Merger Process!

This was wrong!

This experiment had gone horribly wrong!

Yuri and his Ultimatum had mutated far beyond the scope of what Irene intended to do and permanently became fused together in an unholy union fueled by a large supply of raw destruction energy!

The unrestricted absorption of chaotic E energies created from the destruction of so many lives and assets was making everything worse!

The huge amount of random factors mixed into these energies induced all kinds of mutations into the transforming beings.

Even the crew of the Hooligan Barke became alarmed when they saw that the Ultimatum assigned to Yuri not only started to exude a lot of destructive power, but also started to change into a more irregular and ominous shape!