Humanity's Greatest Mecha Warrior System

The chance to show off was precisely what Nico had been waiting for. She had been modifying her artificial body lately, using the energy that they had captured from the Greater Energy beings, and some that she had sneakily borrowed from Max while he was sleeping after they had run out of the wild version.

That proved to be much more effective. It was stabilized, and compatible with her mind and body, so she only had to do a little to it to tweak her power system.

At the moment, she was not even on the level of a Lesser Demon, but if her analysis of Max's gathering process was correct, then she should be able to continue to build it up as she fought.

So naturally, her first target was going to be the collection of Lesser Demons that had made their way through the new portals over the last few minutes. There was no time like the present to see if her modifications were working, and if she really could store wild energy and modify her body even further.

No way was she going to lose to Max in an evolution contest when she was already a living metal cyborg.

The first large gathering that she found were the fast moving purple ones. Not her favourite target, since they were a pain to hit, but there were a lot of them, and even if her power system needed a minor tweak, she should still be able to gain something out of this battle.

With that in mind, Nico launched herself into combat, tearing the Demons apart with the Disintegrator, as it was the most efficient way to cause free energy to enter the atmosphere, instead of being contained within the flow that the dead Demons turned into.

The first blast of her Disintegrator freed enough energy that she could activate her new gathering array, a mechanical device designed to attract loose energy and feed it to the experimental refiner in her Mecha.

If those both worked, then she could either use the energy herself, or keep it for study later.

The versatility that the energy had shown was incredibly high, and with the sentience removed from it, the effect was a lot like having a lab grown portion of biomatter to work with. She could shape it and grow it how she wanted, guide it to where she needed it to be, and hopefully impose her will upon it naturally so that she could begin the process of truly integrating it the way that Max had, and not just using it to enhance her physical body parts.

[Energy Assimilated. Beginning analysis.] The device informed her, before sending the data to Felicity and Sylvie for processing.

The research teams were going to be overjoyed with this news. They had tried and failed multiple times before to get the energy to stabilize and stay with them, and this device was their newest collective effort, separate from Nico's body modification work that was more based on Max's energy.

Nico smiled as her Disintegrator ripped more energy free from the pathetic creatures, and then frowned as the device brought up a warning.

[Capacity at eighty percent.]

That shouldn't be right. They had calculated the amount of energy that they would get, and the conversion rate for the creatures when they were attacked. There should be lots of storage room left.

But when she looked, the canister really was showing itself to be near maximum density. The question was whether the gathering was more efficient than expected, or if they had miscalculated the conversion rates.

But if the canister was full, and the battle had just started, there was no harm in taking just a little bit for herself, right?

Nico hooked her secondary power system to the storage tank, prepared with a failsafe in case the energy wouldn't integrate into the battery she had prepared. She had already done this successfully with Max's energy, and the sensors said that this was modified to be the same, but if there was a variable that she didn't understand or couldn't measure, she would find out very quickly, and the battery could be jettisoned in milliseconds if it showed signs of instability.

The energy flowed smoothly from the container into her battery, which filled at the expected rate. That meant either the conversion rate was much higher than expected, or they had miscalculated how much could be gathered from each lesser energy being as it was being killed.

The AI and the researchers would be working on that for a while now, but Nico had sent them the data, and the confirmation that the energy density and quantity was as indicated on the storage compartment.

The lesser energy beings had scattered when they saw Nico coming, and she had already killed as many of them as were still in range, so Nico paused to finish the process of assimilating the energy before she moved on to hunt down the rest.

The battery was full and the storage of the converter was back down to one third of its capacity when she changed from drawing the energy to attempting to use it in her circuitry. If it conflicted with Max's energy, it could be rejected and lost into the atmosphere, leaving her to start her accumulation all over again, or it could simply fail to be processed, and remain in a charged state, like it did when creating the bodies for the lesser energy beings.

That wasn't what she needed. It would be akin to another energy shield, or an outstanding disguise ability. She wanted it to fully integrate with the metals of her body and bring them to life, in a sense.

She cautiously opened the circuit to see if the energy would clash, and watched in confusion as the energy was forcibly ripped from the battery, bypassing the circuits entirely, and assimilated by the energy borrowed from Max before integrating with the metal of her body.

Unexpected, but successful. It looked like the energy retained some sort of sentience when she pulled it directly from Max, and it was set on absorbing everything that it could get from the Energy Beings.

Now all that was left was to completely saturate her body with it, and adapt it to herself so that it was her own, and not a borrowed power. Nothing much, just the seemingly impossible part that defied scientific analysis and had absolutely zero supporting documentation.