The Mech Touch

The plasma sword wielded by one of the orven martial lesser phase lords was not an inferior weapon.

Although it was not as unnaturally sharp and penetrating as Saint Piercer arms, plasma swords were powerful enough in their own way.

They were also incredibly expensive to construct and operate. They consumed energy like nothing else, but it was usually worth it because their damage output was just as exaggerated!

The one wielded by Zren-Divar was more powerful than most, not just because of its much greater size in comparison to the Scarlet Ember.

Another reason why it was so powerful in the hands of the orven phase lord was because it was able to tap directly into the large power reactor integrated inside Zren-Divar’s raiment to fuel its extreme hunger for energy!

The weapon’s contact with the large raiment also allowed the latter to effectively serve as a heatsink, thereby draining a lot of excess heat that would have built up in the mechanical structure of the plasma weapon and cause its components to melt.

A third reason why the plasma sword was able to chop apart any other expert mech with relative ease was because it was based on modern and advanced human design principles.

The technological sophistication of the plasma sword was only slightly inferior to the ones wielded by expert mechs and ace mechs of the Red Association, the Terran Alliance and the Rubarthan pact.

All of these strengths drastically increased the danger that the Bastion was in. The expert heavy space knight amazingly managed to last far longer than the Riot after getting struck by the plasma sword, but her margin of safety was dwindling by the millisecond.

The discharge of thermal energy was incredibly high!

Her willpower which was supposed to be strong and robust enough to allow her to last for an entire battle was rapidly being consumed just to resist direct contact with a plasma sword!

The Bastion was struggling as well. Her systems were being forced to perform under circumstances far greater and more destructive than she was originally designed to cope against!

How could Ves and Gloriana know that Venerable Jannzi would willingly put her Bastion in the path of an extremely powerful energy weapon?

It was exactly because Venerable Jannzi possessed the courage to put her expert mech in the path of this devastating energy sword that she began to feel as if she was truly fulfilling her purpose!

"I must hold on… I must hold on…"

The strain on Jannzi and her expert mech increased as the azure energy shield rapidly destabilized. The plasma sword fueled by the lesser phase lord’s modern raiment was simply too powerful.

Even if the weapon was beginning to show greater signs of instability, it was so well-made that it would probably remain active longer than the Bastion could last!

"Save the Bastion!"

"We’re trying our best!"

Zren-Divar paid a great price for ignoring everything else so that he could drive his plasma sword through the Bastion and finally finish off what remained of the Riot.

The Karma Cutters that had been Enfeoffed by Saint Casella Ingvar launched a torrent of resonance-empowered Null Rounds that were rapidly wearing down the phase lord’s spatial barrier.

The Valkyrie Krista and the Valkyrie Ursa had abandoned their cautious fighting approach. The two expert marauder mechs continually stuck to the sides of the orven phase lord and not only made sure to weaken his transphasic capabilities with their powerful space suppressors, but also used their spears to break the spatial barrier even faster!

Even so, the martial phase lord had clearly invested significantly in his energy defenses. He had completely eschewed fancy spatial techniques in favor of fortifying his foundation.

This meant that his spatial barrier was not as easy to overcome as the spatial barriers of other phase lords!

The azure energy shield of the Bastion may be stronger and more sophisticated than that of other expert mechs, but it was impossible for it to match the strength of Zren-Divar’s spatial barrier.

Both of them operated on a completely different scale!

The Bastion, while large compared to other expert mech, was like a dwarven child in front of Zren-Divar.

The shield generator had done its best, but all of the true resonance that Jannzi leveraged to amplify its performance could not stop it from reaching its hard physical limits.

It overheated and broke down!

"Careful, Jannzi!"

The plasma sword had finally overcome another layer of defense and was currently trying to burn directly through the Bolton Armor that gave the Bastion her iconic appearance.

Venerable Jannzi and her battle partner were on a timer now. The Bolton Armor was able to remain remarkably solid and intact at first, but the machine was rapidly heating up. Soon enough, the powerful transphasic alloys would reach their melting point and succumb.

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The female expert pilot was determined to delay this catastrophic event as much as possible.

She could practically feel the interior of the cockpit heating up as she tried her best to resonate harder with her battle partner than ever before!

"I… WON’T… LET… YOU… DIE… BASTION. NOT… AGAIN…"

Jannzi had suffered a great amount of trauma after witnessing the death of the original Shield of Samar during a fateful clash against the Skorpion Kommando.

She was lucky that Ves managed to create a reborn version of her original machine. While the

Bastion was different in many ways, Jannzi still considered her to be a continuation of the expert mech that she had lost.

There was no point in ejecting her cockpit this time. Jannzi had formed the very first Blood Pact in existence with the Bastion. The two had become permanently tied together.

Losing the Bastion was like losing the other half of her soul.

Rather than live the remainder of her life as an incomplete half, she would rather end her misery straight away by dying with her battle partner!

The third order living mech knew that, so she did not try to persuade Jannzi to do anything else.

Both of them were of the same mind in this regard.

Given their strict circumstances, it was a stupid decision for Jannzi to send her expert mech forward and attempt to block the plasma sword head-on by putting both of their lives at risk.

Yet Jannzi did not make this decision out of logic, but out of duty and a sincere desire to fulfill her principles and ideals!

As one of the few Larkinsons who dared to question and criticize the legendary patriarch of the Larkinson Clan, Jannzi had always remained loyal to her beliefs and convictions!

How could she take Ves to account when she was unwilling to apply the rules to herself as well?

Seeing an important member of the Larkinson Clan in danger compelled her to act and stand in the way regardless of whether the calculus supported her decision!

While her Bastion was suffering progressively more due to her impulsive decision to come to the defense of Venerable Orfan and the Riot, Jannzi did not regret her decision in the slightest.

She would make the same decision even if she knew that she would put her Bastion in such a precarious situation!

"Even if the two of us die in the end, as long as Rosa and her battle partner are able to get away alive, it is worth it in the end!"

Already, Jannzi’s noble gesture was bearing fruit.

Her Bastion had bought enough time for a squad of mechs to retrieve the broken Riot and hastily bring the wreck back to the expeditionary fleet!

More mechs joined the escort force. They utilized their bulk and their azure energy shields to form an overlapping wall that shielded the crippled expert mech from any opportunistic attacks launched by other alien assets.

The Flagrant Vandal mechs even detonated a large amount of sensor-blocking particle grenades in order to frustrate any cheap attempts to flood the protective detail with massed attacks!

While the Riot was no longer in acute danger, Zren-Divar still set his sights on the broken expert spearman mech!

So long as he was able to melt the Bastion apart, he would definitely use his superior mobility to catch up and finish his original target once and for all! He was too prideful to let the Riot slip away!

The plasma sword had burned so long against multiple layers of defense that it was beginning to behave increasingly more erratic.

The weapon was slowly losing power as automated systems throttled the output of the plasma edge to prevent the contraption from blowing up in Zren-Divar’s face.

Even so, the continuous damage inflicted by the plasma sword was still strong enough to slowly part through the upper layers of the Bastion’s chest armor and slowly make its way through the deeper layers!

Even if the Bastion boasted more layers of armor plating than other expert mechs, it would not take long before the incredible heat generated by the plasma sword would pass through the exterior and begin to cook the internal components!

If the Bastion was an archemech, then her internal components would have been so tightly integrated with armored structural components that the expert mech would have retained many of her core functions for a long time!

Yet because the Bastion had been developed before Gloriana successfully got started in archetech, the internals remained her most serious vulnerability!

As Jannzi and the Bastion’s time were running out, both of them seemed to feel greater and greater fulfillment in their grand purpose.

The more the rescue force brought the Riot back to the rear, the more Jannzi and her battle partner felt that they had gone above and beyond to fulfill their noble ideals.

"This is our true calling." She whispered even as a gigantic plasma sword was getting closer and closer to breaching her cockpit and vaporizing her vulnerable human body.

"THIS IS OUR TRUE PURPOSE." Her battle partner affirmed.

"To be a knight is to commit your life to a vow of protection."

"TO BE A KNIGHT IS TO BE READY TO SACRIFICE YOURSELF SO THAT OTHERS MAY LIVE."

As Jannzi closed her eyes, she felt an unprecedented moment of peace.

She and her expert mech grew closer to each other like never before. During this moment, their thoughts, their goals and their emotions had almost become completely aligned with each other.

Though they were cognizant of the fatal crisis that they had put themselves under, they still showed no fear of dying because they were fulfilling their duty as knights.

Jannzi’s force of will grew more condensed.

The incredible pressure exerted by the plasma sword no longer exhausted her willpower, but instead refined it into a stronger and more firmer substance!

As Jannzi’s mood continued to rise, she could already feel her bottleneck loosening up. She only needed to make a final push before she could shatter this barrier and experience another rebirth that would bring her closer to fulfilling her duty and her purpose as a knight!

Just as she was about to utter the words that would cement her strengthened conviction, the enormous source of heat that was melting through her Bastion’s final layers of chest armor had abruptly disappeared!

"GET THE HELL AWAY FROM MY SUBORDINATE, YOU ALIEN BASTARD!"

"W-What?" Jannzi blinked in astonishment.

She quickly regained her bearings and tried to figure out what happened.

Much to her surprise, the orven phase lord that had almost brought her to a breakthrough had been physically slammed aside!

The Lionheart of all mechs had soared across space like a shining knight in armor and charged straight into the side of Zren-Divar when his spatial barrier had already been weakened a lot by repeated attacks from other powerful mechs!

The timing couldn’t be more perfect. The Lionheart braced a transphasic hyper spear designed by Dulo Voiken which was sharp and penetrating enough to punch through whatever was left of the spatial barrier and punch deep into the phase lord’s raiment!

What was even more amazing was that General Ark deliberately did not try to avoid a collision, but proactively sought it out, allowing his expert command mech to physically slam into the orven phase lord’s armored side!

This was the reason why Zren-Divar had been wrenched away before he could exert enough pressure to help Venerable Jannzi undergo her second apotheosis!

Right now, the heroic-looking Lionheart looked especially bright and dazzling as it had ’saved the day’.

With its flowing projected cape and a plasma sword of its own in its other hand, the Lionheart truly looked as if it was ready to save the ’damsels in distress’ from the murderous alien villain!

The pilot of the Bastion watched on with a mix of loss and confusion as she witnessed the Lionheart glowing like a lantern in the darkness.

That lantern seemed to break, only to unleash a blazing wildfire!

The Bastion’s resonance meter detected elevated activity!

"Is that… a domain…?"

The formation of a domain around the Lionheart was unquestionable proof that the greatest hero of the Larkinson Family before Ves had finally attained his long-cherished dream!

General Ark Larkinson had become the fifth ace pilot of the Larkinson Clan!

"NO DARKNESS SHALL STAIN MY LIGHT." General Ark Larkinson declared.

"I HAVE ALREADY FAILED ONCE BY LETTING IMON INGVAR DIE. I SHALL NOT ALLOW A SUBORDINATE TO FALL AGAIN DUE TO MY WEAKNESS. I AM THEIR COMMANDER. I AM RESPONSIBLE FOR THEIR LIVES. IF YOU WANT TO KILL VENERABLE ORFAN, YOU WILL HAVE TO GET PAST MY CLEANSING LIGHT FIRST!"

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