The Mech Touch (Web Novel)

5887 Reshape Reality

The Fire Elemental could rightfully be regarded as one of the most dangerous threats in the Red Ocean.

Few people had the right to know the secret behind the power of a dreadnought. There were good reasons why these gigantic vessels displayed a level of combat effectiveness that was far above other battleships, and it was not just due to their greater size!

Energy was the most fundamental parameter that determined the combat power of a soldier or a war weapon. It was the main factor that separated mechs between third-class, second-class and first-class.

It had been an inspired idea to utilize mindless Fire Elementals as the primary power source of dreadnoughts. They not only seemed to output a huge amount of heat just by existing, but also generated a large amount of fire-attributed E-energy.

Back during the Age of Mechs, the Fire Elementals already presented a huge risk to the security and the continuation of modern human civilization.

Now that red humanity had entered the Age of Dawn, that risk became magnified due to the amplifying influence of E energy radiation.

Every Fire Elemental not only fed off E energy radiation, but also possessed the ability to spread their domain through it with much greater ease, allowing them to borrow the power of heaven to empower each of their actions.

The Red Fleet had become a lot more ambivalent towards the Fire Elementals for that reason.

Their considerable boost in effectiveness came paired with vastly greater danger should the entities in question ever wake up and pose a threat to human society.

These fears were not overblown. Back when the CFA initially experimented with Fire Elementals, they found out the hard way that each of these True God-level entities had been hardwired into spawning a fraction of the consciousness of the creator of the Fire Scroll.

This mysterious creator posed such an existential threat towards the CFA and everything that modern human civilization stood for that every 'awakened' Fire Elemental had turned into a terror!

The continued use of dreadnoughts and their associated Spark Reactors had been subject to a huge amount of debate behind closed doors.

While the fleeters had reluctantly decided that they had no luxury to refuse the power of dreadnoughts during times of turmoil, one of the rules that they had set for themselves was that they would absolutely not do anything to risk the revival of any of the so-called immortal gods!

In fact, one of the most important rules adopted by the Red Fleet was that any experimentation on the Fire Elementals had become taboo!

Perhaps the fleeters used to have the luxury to do so under more secure and controlled circumstances in the old galaxy, but those conditions no longer applied in the Red Ocean!

It was not an exaggeration to say that a single wrong experiment could very well lead to the total erasure of all red humans!

It would be beyond ironic for the humans in the Red Ocean to be responsible for their own extinction as opposed to getting defeated by their alien foes.

None of these fleeters had any clue that Ves had been crazy enough to risk the destruction of all humanity in the dwarf galaxy on this day.

It helped that Ves hadn't been aware of the existence of this new taboo, but that was no excuse for him to even think about chasing a fantastical outcome at the cost of risking the entirety of red humanity!

Ves had no right to put everyone's lives and freedom at risk, but he did it anyway because he was utterly convinced that this extreme measure was necessary.

His earlier confrontation against the Subjugation King had only given him a hint of the immense power of this alien God King, but that was already enough for him to understand why the tier 1 galactic citizens were so spooked by this extragalactic threat!

It was exactly because of the existential threat posed by the Subjugation King that Ves went through with this insane plan!

As he desperately ran outside the Spark Reactor, alarms began to ring throughout the entire chamber that held the Spark Reactor.

The heat radiating from the center of the Spark Reactor had spiked! More fire energy than ever before blasted from the awakened Fire Elemental, causing the entire dreadnought to become hotter and more empowered than any previous point in her relatively short history!

Additional power was normally helpful.

The Dread Marines operating outside the hull of the Dominion of Man heavily relied on the output of the Spark Reactor to empower their hyper weapons and pose a slightly greater threat against god-like beings.

Yet few fleeters welcomed this change. No matter whether they were aware of what truly powered the Spark Reactor, each of them had become affected by the malice radiating from the Fire Elemental's expanding domain!

It was rather amazing at what Ves managed to do by injecting only a fraction of his life energy into the previously dormant entity.

The Fire Elemental only needed a single spark of life to kickstart the automated process that rapidly turned him into a vessel that accommodated a shard of the mythical creator of the Fire Scroll!

If everything unfolded without any other interfering factors, then Ves would have bet that the angry Fire Elemental engulfed the Dominion of Man in an unstoppable conflagration!

One of the reasons why Ves tried to run so quickly out of the Spark Reactor was because he wanted the Rubicon Spatial Transfer System to lock onto his body and teleport him far away.

However, the interference produced by the rapidly strengthening Fire Elemental made it impossible for the Rubicon to establish a stable lock on Ves or any of the personnel that was stationed close to the Spark Reactor.

There had been a moment of time where Ves briefly felt the spector of death catching up to him. His intuition screamed that he was about to get blasted by such a strong flame that not even his true body would be able to hold out for long!

Yet before that critical moment came to pass, Caramond had launched an attack on the awakening Fire Elemental.

Though the recent fighting had caused Caramond's transition into a True God to be set back, that did not diminish the faith he had access to at all. It had only increased due to the machinations of the Red Two and the first-rate superstates!

As red humanity spontaneously began to celebrate a brand new holiday that celebrated the legacy and the accomplishments of Supreme Marshal Caramond Perle, a huge amount of faith poured into the ancestral spirit.

Normally, it should never have been possible to redirect all of that faith to a completely different True God that arguably possessed principles that were almost completely opposite to that of the Supreme Marshal!

Yet because the Bloodfire Pact merged Caramond together with the Dominion of Man, a vulnerability opened up where faith in one also translated into faith in the other!

It helped that the Dominion of Man was one of the strongest and most iconic symbols of human supremacy. The fleeters had always been strong believers of the power of 'ordinary' humans, and there was nothing that represented their power better than a dreadnought that fielded the strongest infantry force in the Red Ocean!

What was a bit more puzzling was how the Fire Elemental tied into this relationship. His association with the Dominion of Man was not that strong since he existed as a separate entity.

However, the Fire Elemental had served as a core part of the Dominion of Man since her inception. From a symbolic standpoint, the entity was undeniably related to the dreadnought in question.

So long as this symbolic relationship still existed, the Fire Elemental was still tied to the massive warship, which meant his fate remained tied with that of the vessel that he had been a part of shortly after his creation!

The result of all of this was that the Fire Elemental had no chance of evading the huge influx of faith that had been channeled in his direction!

As Ves continued to pass through numerous gates in order to build up more distance between himself and the volatile Spark Reactor, his spiritual senses had practically gone crazy as reality itself seemed to distort behind his back!

The clash of domains, wills and faith had resulted in a lot of freaky phenomena that Ves did not want to explore too closely!

All he could perceive was that the Fire Elemental tried to do his best to defend his fragile personality that had only just been born or revived.

Unfortunately, Caramond never intended for the extremely dangerous shard of the creator of the Fire Scroll to mature his personality and develop the strength to fend off this attack.

The 'faith attack' was not impossible to defend against. The people of the Red Ocean might be relatively united in their heartfelt belief in the supremacy of modern humanity, but their population was only a fraction of their brothers and sisters back in the Milky Way.

The vast majority of red humans were not that strong either. Practically none of them had engaged in any sort of active cultivation, which meant that their faith was so weak that it could easily be missed, especially when none of them engaged in any proper prayer or religious ceremonies.

Even so, the faith of all of the humans in the Red Ocean was nothing to scoff at either. If there was one strength that humanity had acquired, it was the pride and confidence that their scrappy race could overcome all alien adversaries!

As all of these beliefs hammered the Fire Elemental like a trillion projectiles, the weak and debilitated True God ultimately had no chance of standing his ground!

The Fire Elemental suffered one of the worst nightmares that a deity could suffer. He had become vulnerable to the diverging beliefs of his own 'worshipers'!

The severe discordance between his own principles and the beliefs of so many red humans ultimately forced the personality of the Fire Elemental to break and rewrite itself into a more compatible form!

The essential values, principles and the memories that shaped the creator of the Fire Scroll practically got overridden by a new set of traits that were much more characteristic of Caramond Perle!

Naturally, the Fire Elemental did not go down without a fight. An invisible struggle had already broken out between him and Caramond. They fought on an unseen battlefield where faith and power collided against each other, causing the fabric of reality to ripple in unpredictable ways.

A few components surrounding the Spark Reactor broke and malfunctioned due to the shockwaves of this invisible clash!

If not for the fact that the Dominion of Man was insanely robust and well-designed, the Spark Reactor and the surrounding systems would have exhibited a lot more malfunctions!

Fortunately, this clash lasted relatively briefly. Scarcely a minute had gone by when reality settled into calm again.

The Fire Elemental's chances of gaining upper hand had steadily diminished as the faith attack sapped his resistance.

Once all of the beliefs from ordinary humans started to rewrite aspects of himself, more and more of himself became aligned with red humanity!

Though there were still a few deep-rooted parts of the Fire Elemental that resisted the faith attack a lot better, a majority of the entity's very personality and essence ultimately surrendered to the will of the people!

This had many far-reaching consequences!

The Fire Elemental had lost much of his aggression and began to alter in shape.

Though there was still a bitter core of the Fire Elemental that refused to give up the struggle to restore the consciousness of an immortal god, the constant influx of faith energy continued to suppress these destructive impulses.

This subsequently created enough room for the Fire Elemental to change into a form that was more reflective of beliefs of so many humans.