The Mech Touch

6067 Purple Wood

What did he do to deserve this?

Why had Taon incurred this punishment?

He did not mean to hurt Lanie!

Yet how could he possibly explain himself to a maddened pilot who just broke through and becconsumed by madness?

As the unbridled rage of his fellow Larkinson swept over the Zeal like an unstoppable firestorm, Taon reflexively tried to keep his precious masterwork mech alive by any means possible!

Even as the razor-sharp Heartsword sunk deep into the transphasic alloys of the massive quasi-first-class mech and severed entire subsystems, all 5 guns of the Zeal fired at once!

The shells detonated even faster than before, thereby instantly engulfing the unshielded heavy artillery mechs with explosions!

At the stime, the Zeal also endured a lot of recoil just after firing his Devora Cannon!

Even if the recoil of a gauss cannon was not as severe as other kinetic weapons, its immense size and power still produced a lot of consequences.

Normally, the heavy lifter platform tried to compensate for the recoil, but after receiving Taon's desperate command, the device did the reverse!

The Zeal successfully managed to wrench himself out of the reach of the empowered Elegant Rage!

"<nulli>TAAAAAAOOON!" Lanie's distorted voice roared over the damaged and imperfectly repaired speakers of the Elegant Rage! "<nulli>YOUR TREACHERY IS THE LAST MISTAKE THAT YOU WILL EVER MAKE!"

It becabundantly clear to everyone that Lanie had completely lost her rationality!

Losing one's mind was a big taboo on the battlefield. Years of piloting a personalized version of the Lucid Rage model had taught Lanie how to achieve a perfect balance between rage and rationality. Even if Zeiga and Lufa were temporarily blocked from lending their glows to her living mech, the female mech pilot should have been able to keep her growing rage contained behind a wall of logic and purpose.

Now, that wall had been completely breached by the super- heavy gauss shell that punched straight through the Elegant Rage's abdomen section.

The melee mech no longer displayed any of the elegance that characterized her past performance.

Instead, the overflowing forced resonance empowering the spontaneously repaired machine caused the mech frto not only fuse with the wood produced by the Emperor Tree, but also mutate further according to Lanie and her companion spirit's most deepest thoughts and desires!

Right now, Lanie had becoverwhelmed with rage and a desire to enact revenge!

This had far-reaching consequences as her unstable extraordinary willpower shaped the forced resonance acting on her machine and caused her Elegant Rage to mutate increasingly further over time!

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The partially wooden mech began to grow dark and spiky branches around her exterior. The previously normal pieces of armor plating steadily deformed until they acquired sharper and more aggressive angles.

Spikes extended from the shoulder plates, knee plates and even the head of the Lucid Rage!

"MA-AOW!"

Kelly yowled in pain and rage as she directly helped to fuel this transformation by absorbing the abundant wood and life energies originally attracted by the Emperor Tree!

As the Elegant Rage continued to morph further and further away from the original intentions of the designers of the original Lucid Rage model, the Zeal quickly managed to stabilize himself further away at a lower altitude.

By this time, Taon hardly cared about the threat of getting attacked by the Emperor Tree's root spikes.

"Stop it, Lanie! I did not mean to attack you! It was an accident! The Emperor Tree is the true culprit!"

"<nulli>TTTAAAAAAAOOOOOOONNNNN!"

There was no way Taon could reason with Lanie anymore!

The Zeal had already oriented all of his guns towards the Elegant Rage, yet Taon had little confidence that the attacks would be able to stop the melee mech from tearing his machine apart.

A state of forced resonance resulting from a breakthrough was one of the most mysterious and magical phenomena in the mech community!

The duration always varied depending on factors such as the accumulation of the mech pilot, but the power boost was always significant!

It always seemed to elevate the performance of a standard mech to the parameters of an expert mech, if only barely.

Yet even if the restored and mutated Elegant Rage only reached the strength of a shabby low-tier expert mech, that was still an entire level higher than a custom mech like the Zeal!

Taon's heart beat faster. His face began to redden as he could feel the unambiguous hostility of Lanie radiating from her killing machine.

He did not exactly know why Lanie temporarily stopped to accumulate more energy, but the reprieve granted him a faint amount of hope that he might be able to avoid getting killed by a fellow Larkinson!

"Joshua! Dise! I need your help! Please keep her away from my mech!"

"I can't! The Emperor Tree is hindering our escape!"

The Zeal's accidental sneak attack onto the Elegant Rage had completely caught Venerable Joshua and Venerable Dise off- guard!

Even though their intuitions had been honed over many battles, their unnaturally high sensitivity towards threats were still primarily centered around themselves. The two expert pilots needed to allocate much of their focus towards dealing with the difficulties introduced by the calamity plant.

It was also a lot more difficult to anticipate impending threats towards other people and mechs, especially if they were located further away.

Then there was all of the Solus Gas. Since the Emperor Tree rested right on top of a major deposit of this mysterious gas, neither expert pilots operated at their best conditions anymore.

The all-round dampening of the sensor systems of their mechs and the perception that they depended on so much caused them to fight as if they had becnear-sighted!

Yet now that Joshua and Dise noticed that something had gone horribly wrong, they both tried their very best to take away the samples they had been tasked to collect and reach the two damaged mechs.

However, the Emperor Tree hindered their advance!

Having just collected a piece of bark and a container of sap, the Everchanger frantically tried to move away from the massive trunk, but a forest of tree branches surrounded the expert mech in a thick and multi-layered cage!

Searing hot fire beams struck the branches and either managed to vaporize them in an instant or caused them to catch fire!

Unfortunately, the Emperor Tree's immense wood energy and other fire suppression measures quickly doused the flames before they could reach a greater scale.

Having thrown out the Heartsword, the Everchanger had already taken hold of the Scarlet Ember and activated its burning hot edge.

"BREAK FOR ME!" Joshua roared as his anger at letting the Zeal strike the Elegant Rage increased the potency of his strikes!

The powerful plasma sword vaporized through the branches with much greater ease!

Unless the branches were particularly thick and reinforced, the weapon that was originally designed for an ace mech was able to remove practically every obstacle within reach!

However, just as the Everchanger managed to make it halfway out of the cage of branches, half-a-dozen purple wooden mechs descended from above and began to assail the Everchanger up close and from afar!

"Damn!"

Different from the normal wooden mechs, the ones that cin purple were much stronger and more difficult to fight against!

This was because the Emperor Tree invested a lot of high- quality resources into replicating the expert mechs of Task Force Solus!

They were probably one of the trump cards that the Emperor Tree had been working on in the past few months. They were clearly still in development as their performance was still too far away from matching that of the authentic versions, but it was already frightening enough to see that a wild calamity plant managed to make so much progress in so little time!

The biggest flaw of the purple mechs was that they were not yet capable of independent operation. The Emperor Tree had to attach thin and flexible branches onto their backs in order to control them more directly and supply a vast amount of energy and vitality into their resilient frames.

Since the purple mechs acted more like direct extensions of the Emperor Tree, they also happened to share much of the calamity plant's strengths, which included its extremely powerful regeneration!

When the Everchanger struck the purple mechs with his Vitalus rifle, the energy beams only scorched or damaged a third of their wooden construction before a powerful infusion of sap and wood energy caused them to becas good as new!

The purple mechs did not allow themselves to get struck for free. The copies of the First Sword wielded their enormous wood energy-infused swords that were made out of the spurple organic material and slammed them against the Everchanger's resonance shield!

Even though the wooden swords carried such a poor edge that they functioned more like blunt objects, they still functioned similar to hyper weapons!

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When empowered by a calamity plant, the damage inflicted by these purple wooden sword strikes was not small!

"ANNIHILATE!"

The only effective way for the Everchanger to get rid of these purple wooden mechs was by striking them head-on with the powerful Scarlet Ember!

The Everchanger channeled the weapon at the highest sustainable setting and felt his energy reserves draining at a rapid rate.

Joshua and his battle partner couldn't care less about their consumption as they needed to speed up their evacuation as quickly as possible!

The plasma sword allowed them to cut down one purple mech after another, but once the copies of the First Sword collapsed, the ones that imitated the Everchanger continued to fire their purple seed rifles while closing in to strike at the original with their one-handed swords!

Thankfully, the Emperor Tree had not been able to imitate the Scarlet Ember, but that did not mean that the purple wooden bootleg versions of the Everchanger were easy to defeat.

If the imitation First Swords excelled in attack, the imitation Everchangers excelled in regeneration!

Anything but a heavy strike was unable to put down the purple wooden hero mechs down for good!

Joshua felt like he was fighting against mirrors of his own expert mech. He never really appreciated how frustrating it was to fight against opponents that just wouldn't stay down!

The Everchanger had fallen behind the times!

If he had been upgraded to the standards of the current Dark Zephyr, the expert hero mech would never allow himself to get stalled by a bunch of branches and purple mechs!

"Dise! I can't get out! Can you go ahead and separate Lanie from Taon?!"

"I am in no better position than you. The Emperor Tree is attempting to cagewith its roots."

Close to the surface, the First Sword continually slashed away at the thick and resilient roots that attempted to slam into the expert swordsman mech.

While the Decapitator was sharp and powerful enough to cut through these thick black roots with relative ease, the First Sword lacked the power and momentum to create a gap large enough to leap out this trap!

The Emperor Tree did not bother to dispatch any purple mechs to hinder the First Sword further. The expert mech had already cut down multiple imitations of herself with contemptuous ease.

The only way the calamity plant could hinder the expert swordsman mech was to employ its own roots.

Since they were a core part of the calamity plant's main body, they were far thicker and more resilient than its branches or its purple mechs!

This effectively consumed the First Sword's high attack power. What was worse was that the roots seriously put the expert mech at risk of getting enveloped to the point where she could no longer exert any leverage to swing her greatsword!

In any case, the Emperor Tree's deliberate attempts to trap and potentially crush the two expert mechs prevented them from stopping the ongoing tragedy!

When Taon realized that help would not be forthcoming, his heart sank into a greater pit of despair!