The Mech Touch

6066 Broken

"No! I didn't hit her! It's not true! I struck the Emperor Tree! I swear it, Joshua!"

It shouldn't be possible. Taon was sure he had aimed his weapon correctly. A short tago, his focus had reached a new level of intensity. Ylvaine had returned to him at a critical moment and helped him overcthe Emperor Tree's attempts to distort his cognition.

At least, that was supposed to be the case.

Taon still could not accept that he had accidentally struck the Elegant Rage from behind.

While it was true that the Elegant Rage occasionally flew in front of the Zeal in order to intercept the wooden mechs approaching from this direction, the melee mech never crossed directly in front of the Devora Cannon.

Even if Lanie had overlooked the potential for friendly fire, Taon always kept himself from pulling the trigger whenever the Elegant Rage or any other friendly mech strayed into risky territory.

As a well-trained and battle-hardened mech pilot, Taon had encountered similar situations many times in the past. He and his fellow Ylvainan mech pilots also put themselves through mandatory simulation training in order to train themselves into withholding fire whenever friendly mechs accidentally moved in front of a heavy artillery mech's sights.

Venerable Joshua's accusation should be false. The expert pilot misjudged the situation!

Even though an increasingly more desperate Taon could figure out that this was an absurd conclusion, he still held out a faint amount of hope that the Emperor Tree managed to subvert Joshua instead of himself!

"You… you are wrong, Joshua! I never laid a hand on Lanie's mech! She shouldn't be dead!"

"THEN WHAT JUST DROPPED TO THE GROUND?!"

The Zeal's sensors had difficulty trying to perceive stuff further away, but the concentration of Solus Gas was not enough to hide all of the details of the crumpled pieces of a very metallic mech.

There was no way for Taon to mistake the wrecked and scattered pieces for anything else than the remnants of a proper machine!

Unlike the wooden mechs that the Emperor Tree had produced by the thousands, the Elegant Rage was a proper human-developed mech that was predominately made out of many different alloys!

Any non-metallic components in the design of the custom mech were made out of composites with specialized properties. None of them should ever resemble wood.

As Taon unwillingly spotted numerous distinct shapes that he was able to recognize from the intact form of the Elegant Rage, his heart sank to the bottom.

"Did… did I do this? Did I… kill a fellow sister?"

There was no way for the Elegant Rage to survive such a catastrophic blow. Even if Lanie spent a lot of Larkinson merits on requesting lots of incremental upgrades to the custom version of the Lucid Rage, the better alloys and stronger tech could only do so much in elevating the performance of a standard mech.

The earlier fighting had already drained the Elegant Rage's small and outdated transphasic energy shield by a large extent. It was unable to withstand a single powerful blow.

In fact, if the Elegant Rage was struck by any other serious attack, her armor system should have been able to withstand the remaining energy of the strike at least once.

Unfortunately, the slimmed-down mech that wielded the Heartsword was not only struck from behind where her armor was the weakest, but was completely outmatched by the firepower of the Devora Cannon!

Larger and more powerful than the Ultimatum's famous Onyx Cannon, the Zeal's powerful masterwork super-heavy high- velocity transphasic hyper gauss cannon was able to shatter any standard mech, including the Elegant Rage!

Perhaps one mercy of getting struck by the Devora Cannon was that the super-heavy gauss round overpenetrated the Elegant Rage.

This was why the broken machine hadn't been shattered into billions of tiny metal shards.

However, the kinetic energy transferred by the powerful round was more than enough to break the Elegant Rage!

As the mech dropped onto the ground, it had broken up into multiple pieces. Its legs and lower waist had separated from the upper half. Every single component from both halves of the broken machine was either shattered or deformed.

This included the cockpit, which most certainly suffered from the blow as well!

Just as Taon thought that he had killed a fellow Larkinson, soldier and expert candidate, a sudden change occurred.

One of the heavily damaged and deformed arms of the upper half of the Elegant Rage began to switch and reach towards the Heartsword that had fallen a short distance away!

"Lanie… she…"

"No. It can't be. It's the living mech… Lanie should be dead…"

No matter who was in control, the feeble movements showed that the Elegant Rage was not completely dead!

Just as the Larkinsons tried to figure out whether Lanie was still alive in the cockpit that had most certainly been breeched, an explosion of power erupted from the upper half of the Elegant Rage!

The eruption of power emanating from the fallen machine was so great that it had even pushed away a lot of Solus Gas!

"Apotheosis!"

"It's Lanie! She… she's still alive!"

The resonance meters had difficulty trying to measure the resonance phenomenon acting on the broken but reviving mech, but the fact that the numbers were constantly going up suggested that Lanie was finally making a breakthrough!

Hope began to well up in Taon's heart.

The breakthrough meant that Lanie had not died, at least not yet!

As long as the damage to her body was not too severe, she could still be saved!

As the breakthrough phenomenon continued, it soon becclear that the process began to go off-script!

Whether it was due to Lanie's heavily injured state, the backstab from Taon, the Elegant Rage's awful condition, the influence of the Emperor Tree, the heavy presence of Solus Gas or other extraordinary factors, the forced resonance acting upon the custom mech began to go out of control!

The Elegant Rage's mech frstarted to break even further as the violent forces acting upon the living mech exceeded her tolerance!

Before the upper half of the Elegant Rage broke entirely, the machine suddenly utilized her half-disabled arms to push herself to the side.

Soon enough, a mech arm grasped the hilt of the Heartsword.

A shocking turn of events took place!

Instead of trying to resist the willpower contamination of the weapon of the Everchanger, the living mech embraced it, allowing Joshua's true resonance to intrude into the machine and distort Lanie's cognition, all the while she was still undergoing an unstable breakthrough process!

Another mutation occurred!

"MA-AOW!"

"It's Kelly! It's Lanie's companion spirit!"

The willpower and life energy belonging to a high-tier expert pilot blended into the upper half of the Elegant Rage and began to merge with a part of Lanie!

Whether the evolving pilot planned it or not, the energies originating from the Heartsword began to merge into Kelly. The feline companion spirit grew in size and began to undergo an incredibly profound transformation that caused her to becmore and more similar to Venerable Joshua in nature!

Just as Kelly painfully endured this transformation, the companion spirit already started to make her newfound power felt by affecting the upper half of the Elegant Rage with her power!

"The broken mech… is repairing!"

This was a power that the Everchanger only rarely showed off, mostly because the expert mech rarely lost the protection of both his resonance shield and transphasic energy shield.

However, few Larkinson mech pilots could forget the few instances where the Everchanger miraculously repaired the damage to his mech frdespite the fact that he had never been installed with any technological repair systems of such potency!

After Kelly absorbed the energies from the Heartsword, she had mysteriously inherited this particular ability from Venerable Joshua!

Not only that, but she was actively using the accumulated breakthrough energies from Lanie to fuel the mech regeneration process.

That was not all. The upper half of the Elegant Rage had lost a lot of components. The duplicated regeneration power may be able to restore a lot of broken metal components, but it was not as good as the real deal.

The Elegant Rage needed more components in order to fully restore into a complete mech!

The mech continuously began to absorb a lot of E energy from the environment. The Elegant Rage had no qualms about absorbing the abundant wood energy attracted and affected by the Emperor Tree!

This not only extended the breakthrough process, but also allowed Lanie, Kelly and the Elegant Rage to take additional measures to repair the damage!

Powerful resonance flares stretched from the upper half of the broken mech frand began to connect to the lower half of the body.

The latter, which consisted of multiple tons of damaged alloy parts, miraculously moved back to the upper half and messily snapped back into place!

"The Elegant Rage is putting herself back together again!"

That was not quite the case. Even though both halves of the machine had reunited with each other again, there was a massive hole where the mech engine and other critical components used to be located.

Aside from that, both halves had lost so many smaller components that it bectoo implausible for the Elegant Rage to becfunctional enough to move again.

Instead of letting this unfortunate truth hold back her recovery, the frantic living mech began to flare out her forced resonance and reach out to other materials!

It began to grab any other material that could take the place of the missing and unrecoverable metallic components.

It just happened that the Elegant Rage had fallen in the middle of a large wooden debris field.

The remains of many shattered and burned wooden mechs happened to be within reach, and the Elegant Rage mindlessly took hold of broken splinters and other wooden remnants!

Each of these broken pieces of wood got pulled back into the Elegant Rage and haphazardly took the place of many delicate and precise metallic instruments.

Normally, there was no way that such a crude and illogical substitution would work.

However, under the reality-defying effects of Lanie's extraordinary willpower and Kelly's newly acquired life domain, the Elegant Rage somehow drew strength from these newly merged wooden parts!

The state of forced resonance had originally caused the Elegant Rage to ccloser to breaking, but under these exceptional circumstances, the opposite was taking place!

Lanie's mech slowly grew whole and healthy again, but with an obvious twist as the forced integration of the wood originating from the Emperor Tree had caused the Elegant Rage to show increasingly more wooden components!

The entire living mech had turned into a macabre patchwork of modern alloys and mysterious wooden materials!

Once the Elegant Rage looked close to whole again, the miraculously resurrected machine actually began to stand up to her feet again!

"Lanie…" Taon hoarsely whispered. "I am sorry. Are you… are you okay?"

A crackle sounded from the noisy communication channel.

A hazy voice sounded in the Ylvainan mech pilot's ears.

"<nulli>A tooth for a tooth…"

"What?"

"<nulli>YOU BETRAYEDTAON! I WILL NOT REST UNTIL I HAVE BROKEN YOUR MECH AND BODY MYSELF!"

The mutated Elegant Rage blasted off the ground and aggressively charged towards the Zeal!

The speed of the mech in a state of forced resonance was so fast that neither the Everchanger nor the First Sword could respond in tto stop the machine that had so obviously gone out of control!

There was nothing in Lanie's sights except for the pilot that had broken one of the most sacred rules of the Larkinson Clan and almost becresponsible for her death!

Now, the only thing left in the mind of the newly ascended expert pilot was taking revenge for the near-death of herself and her living mech!

With the extraordinary potent power of forced resonance, the Elegant Rage advanced towards the Zeal with so much speed and momentum that her borrowed Heartsword broke through the Zeal's failing azure energy shield with ease and sank into the huge metal frof the heavy artillery mech at once!

First-class alloys or not, the unstable power of the Elegant Rage was enough to part through layers of armor plating and sever a lot of internal components!

"LANIE! HAVE YOU GONE MAD?!"

The entire mission had gone sideways!