The Mech Touch

Chapter 7333: The Unstoppable Voribug

The Rubarthan ace mechs raced ahead.

Their mobility was stronger than that of the Ascended Giants. Their compact mech frames hid a lot of power. Their advanced technologies granted them strength and functionality far beyond the standards of other machines of their size.

Eclipsed only by more advanced ace mechs and god mechs, these machines possessed the capital to serve as an object of admiration by the soldiers stationed in this star system.

Even so, the ace mechs did not charge directly towards the massive Level 8 Goliath.

The ace pilots were not stupid. They may be more courageous than other mech pilots, but they still retained enough rationality to know that they were outmatched.

The mutated voribugs did not play by the rules of red humanity.

The so-called Ixith Goliath stole the power that should have been reserved to their own kind and stretched it beyond any known limits!

So far, observers had managed to ascertain that the effective range of the Ixith Goliath’s stolen resonance was comparable to that of a senior ace mech’s domain field.

No human mech pilot was able to replicate such a bizarre phenomenon.

The only phenomenon that was remotely comparable to this was the Command Field of a Saint Commander.

However, the latter possessed additional traits that were very much lacking in the Ixith Goliath’s extraordinary power manifestation.

What else people found odd about the Ixith Goliath was that its stolen resonance was unusually abundant.

Due to its enormous mass and volume, the Ixith Goliath expended its resources at a much higher rate than a typical expert pilot or ace pilot.

To resonate with such a massive body and also empower a large amount of warship-grade attacks consumed so much willpower that a typical expert pilot would have been wrung dry by this time!

Yet the Ixith Goliath seemed to possess an infinite wellspring of willpower.

Nobody knew where all of its willpower was coming from. Was it able to resonate so much without breaking a sweat because it was leveraging its Mentalist Crystal in a new and unfamiliar fashion?

A growing number of mech designers and biotech experts suspected that this may very well be the case.

So what would happen if a human expert pilot or ace pilot leveraged a Mentalist Crystal in a similar fashion?

Perhaps this may lead to an epochal breakthrough that would enable any high-ranking mech pilot to stretch their willpower beyond their limits!

Expert pilots might be able to pilot expert juggernauts en masse!

Ace pilots could gain the ability to empower battleship-sized machines with true resonance!

When people beheld the performance of the Ixith Goliath, they did not necessarily see an unprecedented new enemy that had stolen the power of the human race.

They saw a brand-new application of willpower that could easily be applied to their own inventions!

This was the magic of racial diversity.

For too long, humans held a monopoly on mechs and willpower cultivation.

Now that a random alien race surprisingly managed to break this monopoly, its original take on age-old concepts inspired many mech designers!

Of course, while many people had begun to see the mutated voribug race as a novel source of inspiration, the soldiers on the battlefield did not have the luxury to fantasize about these distant prospects.

They still needed to overcome this final adversary!

The Ascended Giants cautiously advanced. The Divine Harpoon commanded them to control their pace.

There was no need for them to dive in blindly when the Rubarthan ace mechs had already taken the initiative to test the Ixith Goliath’s combat capabilities up close.

The Rubarthan ace mechs possessed a diverse array of ranged armaments.

This made sense as their pilots mostly achieved success with more ordinary first-class multipurpose mechs.

While there were expert pilots and ace pilots who gradually chose to eschew diversity in favor of specialization, maintaining a rich set of armaments remained the norm.

The disadvantage was that every miniaturized weapon system was limited in terms of absolute firepower.

The advantage was that such mechs possessed enough versatility to be able to inflict effective damage to any conceivable enemy.

This philosophy played out once again as the ace mechs intensified their ranged harassment.

Unlike other combat assets, ace pilots possessed superior resonance strength. The quality of their willpower was much stronger than the 30 or so laveres that the Ixith Goliath could produce at this time.

This granted them a potent advantage in their attacks.

While the caliber of their guns were smaller than that of warships and orbital facilities, when their attacks struck the dark brown shells of the Ixith Goliaths, they mostly punched through!

Just as with the case in fights between two high-ranking mechs, the combatant with drastically stronger willpower was easily able to neutralize weaker willpower manifestations.

The weakest Rubarthan ace pilot was able to generate true resonance measuring at least 175 laveres.

This easily crushed any form of stolen resonance based on just 30 laveres!

Though the collisions between different sources of willpower made it seem as if a bunch of adults were beating up a child, other factors made the confrontation a lot less lopsided.

“The Ixith Goliath’s willpower is weak, but it is endless! There is no sign that the megavoribug is experiencing any strain or exhaustion!”

“Despite our superior willpower, it is taking more effort than necessary to push our attacks past this persistent layer of resistance.”

“The Level 8 Goliath is too big! Our attacks are leaving marks, but their scale is too limited. It is as if we are launching needles at a human!”

The stolen resonance was ubiquitous. The Ixith Goliath generously empowered his entire body with it, causing not only the outer shell but also the internal flesh to become significantly tougher to damage than normal.

Many humans grew indignant at this display of power!

High-ranking mech pilots usually took advantage of this trick. To see an alien abusing it on a much larger scale drove them mad!

“Thief!”

“The Goliath Hive must die!”

“Pay for the lives that you have deprived!”

Yet as their plasma bolts and high-density kinetic rounds struck the massive Goliath from multiple different angles, the enemy did not seem to care.

The power of stolen resonance alone was not enough to make it resistant against the attacks of the ace mechs, but when combined with its battleship-scaled body, it was able to endure every attack with ease!

What was even worse was that the Level 8 Goliath inherited the rapid regeneration capabilities of other Goliaths!

Before the first attacks managed to punch through the shell and damage the flesh underneath with difficulty, the Ixith Goliath’s biomass surged and quickly filled up the gaps within seconds!

Even though the new enemy definitely had to expend a bit of energy and biomass to heal its injuries, it definitely was not short on resources!

The rapid regeneration prevented the human forces from working together to inflict lasting damage.

The Rubarthans hoped that their ace mechs would be able to create gaps in the shells that other units could expand with their own massed firepower, but the resonance-empowered shells healed so quickly that it invalidated this tactic!

None of the ranged attacks launched by the ace mechs was effective.

Kinetic rounds inflicted a large amount of kinetic damage, but this was rather trivial to a Goliath of this scale.

Energy beams inflicted a large amount of thermal damage, but voribugs happened to resist it pretty well.

The resonance-empowered exoskeleton absorbed all of the incoming energies pretty well, and only a small amount of flesh got burned.

Plasma bolts happened to be a little more effective, but their awesome power faced the same constraints!

It was not until the ace mechs managed to get close enough to entangle the Level 8 Goliath in melee combat that the situation became a little more favorable.

The ace mechs all drew their plasma swords or other melee weapons and began to launch power moves at the massive target.

Since these attacks received the full amplification of an ace mech’s domain field, they were much more effective at overcoming the Ixith Goliath’s stolen resonance.

Not only that, but now that the ace mechs were able to envelop parts of the enemy’s body twitch their Saint Kingdom, they were actively able to hinder the enemy’s willpower manifestation.

Other units suddenly found it easier to inflict effective damage onto the Ixith Goliath all of a sudden.

“Stay close, Saints! The longer you subject the Ixith Goliath to your Saint Kingdoms, the more our warships and orbital fortifications can inflict lasting damage onto this enemy.”

However, the Ixith Goliath did not allow his opponents to chip away at its body with impunity.

It began to make use of its formidable strength and superior mobility to spin around while flaying its sharp limbs in multiple directions.

The giant insect’s claws almost struck the ace mechs with blazing speed!

Even if the ace mechs would have been able to block the blades, the overwhelming kinetic force behind the collision would have shook and jarred the mech frames to hell and back.

The ace pilots had to squeeze the most out of their skills, intuition and combat experience to navigate through this storm of sharp limbs.

It became untenable for their machines to remain so close!

The Ixith Goliath managed to force the ace mechs to back off by a kilometer or 2. This was enough to draw away their Saint Kingdoms from its massive insectile form.

This was not the extent of the Level 8 Goliath’s response.

After trying and failing to strike the fast and agile ace mechs, the Ixith Goliath abruptly flew forward.

It built up a lot of momentum, only to crash into a nearby warship on support link duty!

The vessel was also one of many that had attempted to bombard the Ixith Goliath.

Her crew never expected to be targeted by the enemy Goliath, and the entire vessel paid for their mistake!

The Ixith Goliath utilized its massive strength and size to rip the hull to shreds. Most of the crew never had a chance to evacuate!

After finishing off the warship, the massive Goliath quickly moved on to the next target.

The attacking ace mechs desperately tried to keep up as the Ixith Goliath thundered its way to the orbital defense network.

“EVACUATE!”

The Ixith Goliath directly assaulted an orbital fortress this time!

Though the massive fortified space station was a lot larger than the prior target, the Ixith Goliath still possessed a notable scale advantage.

While the orbital fortress was firing its cannons at point-blank range, the damage was just as trivial as before.

The large defensive installation ultimately succumbed to the large and powerful claws. The Ixith Goliath continued to cut through the meters worth of thick armor plating as if it was opening a particularly thick can.

Other units tried their best to shake off the Goliath and force it to turn away, yet none of their attacks passed the threshold that could persuade the enemy to take the other threats more seriously.

It continued to savage the orbital fortress until it had finally torn apart the last power generator!

The massive creature’s pitiless eyes had already turned to the next orbital fortress.

It surged from its position and utilized all of its flight capabilities to close in on the next major facility!

“Stop it! Stop it now! If we let the Ixith Goliath tear apart the orbital fortresses, this star system will lose its backbone! Once it dismantles our orbital network, it will most certainly go after our starships!”

Once it began to tear apart the ships, there was no way out for the remaining soldiers in the star system.

Even if the evacuation fleet had left in advance, nobody wanted to bet whether the Goliath Hive could still catch up and intercept the escaping vessels.

Throughout this rapid sequence of events, the Ascended Giants struggled to catch up and figure out their place in this battle.

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