The Mech Touch

Chapter 6707 The Hungry Blade

When Venerable Joshua initially deployed on the battlefield, he had high hopes about his performance.

The Bitter Scimitar had already proven to be an incredibly formidable weapon.

While it was also plagued by a spirit that was incredibly difficult to pacify, Venerable Joshua thought that the excitement of battle would focus its hostility towards the enemy instead of its wielder.

His assumptions turned out to be considerably off the mark!

The biggest problem was that the artifact spirit did not appear to understand how warfare in the Red Ocean was different from warfare in the Milky Way!

Everyone made much more extensive use of energy shields due to its obvious synergies with phasewater.

This happened to be a downer for the Bitter Swordsman as the demon-turned-artifact spirit still could not shed his hunger and desire to spill blood!

Joshua had promised the Bitter Scimitar that it would be used to sink into the delectable flesh of alien victims, yet so far none of that had occurred!

The D-arm even started to veer sideways as if it wanted to drag the Everchanger to another part of the battlefield where lots of warships filled with vulnerable alien bodies were ripe for the slaughter!

"No! We can't switch our targets! We should leave the job of attacking those warships to others. There are only a few expert pilots and ace pilots who are capable of holding back these phase lords. The Greenaxe and the Bloodripper will have a much harder time if my Everchanger disappears."

Venerable Joshua wasn't sure whether his words even managed to get through the Bitter Swordsman's mind.

He was like an overactive child who craved instant gratification above anything else!

Perhaps the Bitter Scimitar had spent too much time without being utilized for its intended purpose that when it finally took part in a real battle, its already feeble patience had crumbled in its entirely!

The Bitter Scimitar practically grew feral in how it wanted to do anything other than whack its sharp and potent blade against one spatial barrier after another.

The experience of attacking energy barriers was so devoid of gratification that it was no different from cutting a mountain or an asteroid from the perspective of the Bitter Swordsman!

In hindsight, Joshua picked a fight against the wrong phase lord. He assumed that since the Bitter Scimitar was primarily designed to kill nphase lords that targeting the

Eight Lord of Takansha was a good bet!

Unfortunately, the Bitter Scimitar hated being used against energy defenses so much that it had actively reduced its own power!

The D-arm behaved no differently from a spoiled brat that deliberately sabotaged its own performance just so that it could persuade its wielder to turn away from the Eight Lord of Takansha and attack much more vulnerable prey!

Venerable Joshua briefly thought about giving in to the demands of the D-arm.

The Greenaxe and the Bloodripper were doing pretty decently by themselves.

While the orven warships had begun to be more proactive in supporting their only remaining phase lord on the battlefield, the two expert mechs were able to hang on for quite a while.

The Bloodripper was the expert mech version of the Stingripper. That meant that he excelled at evasion and misdirection. The expert harasser mech gleefully weaved through numerous warship-grade cannon fire.

Even if Kalo's glow was not able to distort the perception of alien gunnery crew at extreme distances, the light mech's inherently high mobility made it very difficult for long-ranged gunnery to hit the machine.

Venerable Pedro Rodrigo was also highly skilled at evasion as well. He was almost just as good as Tusa back when he was still an expert pilot!

The Greenaxe was a lot more vulnerable to attacks, but the expert axeman mech was also able to endure a lot more hits.

Although it was not the most modern high-end mech of the 77th Warborn mech Division, its excellent transphasic defenses allowed it to focus more on attacking for a

time.

Venerable Kolak Glendale may not be as good at evasion as his college, but he had his own way of coping with the situation.

His solution?

Just stick close to the Eight Lord of Takansha and make sure to put the lesser phase lord's body between the Greenaxe and most of the orven warships that were trying wear down his resonance shield!

This was a very viable strategy as the Eight Lord's true body was large enough to provide plenty of cover for the expert axeman mech.

The only weapons that were effectively able to get around this obstacle were transphasic missiles, but the Bloodripper made sure to intercept them well before they could explode against the Greenaxe's resonance shield.

Venerable Glendale would never take the risk of bringing his expert mech close to a phase lord that knew how to fight such as the Herald of the Void. the Lower

Herdmaster or the late Zren-Divar.

Each of them were powerful, experienced and possessed the capacity to inflict a lot of damage.

However, the Greenaxe was able to largely remain safe because the Eight Lord of Takansha was a defensive specialist who only knew how to play with spatial barriers.

Though the expert mech struggled to destroy the spatial barriers that were both numerous and powerful enough to require a lot of effort to tear down, the Greenaxe was definitely making decent progress.

It was too bad that the combined efforts of the Greenaxe, the Bloodripper and the Everchanger failed to satisfy the Bitter Scimitar!

"Be patient!" Venerable Joshua growled at his own weapon! "If you just wait for a few more minutes, our enemy will run out of barriers. That will be the time where you will truly get to taste alien blood. I will only kill who I want to eliminate, and do so at a time of my choosing! You do not get to decide my actions! Either cooperate and help me tear down these spatial barriers faster, or continue to act like an immature child and make this ordeal last longer than necessary"

The Bitter Swordsman stupidly chose the latter course of action. The Bitter Scimitar seemed to grow weaker, causing it to inflict even less damage against the Eight Lord's spatial barrier than before.

This was one of the disadvantages of wielding a living weapon!

It was great if the mech pilot and the living weapon were aligned in thought and motivation.

However, the Bitter Scimitar was highly volatile and had never completely gotten along with Venerable Joshua and the Everchanger.

The worst part about it was that Joshua thought that he had made progress. The D-arm had been growing more accustomed to him and his expert mech. He thought that the powerful new weapon would remain this way when they entered the

battlefield.

What went wrong?

Did Joshua make a mistake?

Why was the Bitter Swordsman so insistent on turning away from the Eight Lord of

Takansha?

"What is it that you want?!" He shouted at his own weapon! "Tell me! I need to understand! Why are you refusing to cooperate with me?! Don't you know how important it is for us to kill or drive away this phase lord?!"

The Bitter Scimitar took offense at Joshua's confrontational tone!

It retaliated by lengthening and curling the spikes that were located close to the hilt.

The sharp metal spikes stabbed straight into the hand that held the D-arm!

"THAT HURTS!" The Everchanger complained.

The expert hero mech did not experience any physical pain as he was strictly speaking

a machine. However, the Bitter Scimitar was also capable of inflicting harm on the mech's spiritual foundation. Though its retaliation was not strong enough to be fatal, the Everchanger did not appreciate this gesture in the slightest!

While the Bitter Swordsman was being childish and irrational as usual, he at least conveyed the reason why he wanted to kill other aliens so badly.

Joshua widened his eyes as he realized the source of the Bitter Scimitar's bloodlust.

"Souls."

The Bitter Scimitar was able to detect the mass slaughter that took place in the

distance.

It detected the deaths of humans stationed inside crumbling orbital fortresses that failed to evacuate in time.

It was able to sense the large number of humans and alien pilots that got killed as their mechs and phasefighters fought for supremacy.

It was also able to perceive the demise of massive amounts of alien crew members that served within the alien warships that got felled by sustained human bombardment! The Bitter Swordsman did not crave for bloodshed or bloodshed's sake.

As irrational as he may be, he was also a slave to his own desires. For whatever reason,

he hungered for souls, and what better way to harvest thousands of them by ripping into the hulls of huge alien warships and destroying them so that the aliens inside would perish en masse?

This was the best way to sate the Bitter Scimitar's appetite as far as the D-arm was

concerned!

Venerable Joshua glowered. He began to doubt whether Ketis had any involvement in making this weapon. There was no way she would ever agree to forge such an evil

blade!

"Why are you drooling over those worthless souls when there is a much bigger one in

front of us? I don't know about you, but I think that the soul of a phase lord is much more nutritious than the alternatives."

The Bigger Scimitar clearly did not agree. Its spikes increased in length and burrowed even further into the Everchanger's hand!

"I refuse! I will not participate in the effort to destroy those warships because holding

back the phase lords is more important. I will not compromise with you on this matter! If you want to harvest any souls during this fight, then you better cooperate with me, or else you will get nothing!"

Venerable Joshua found himself in a dilemma. When Ketis gifted him the Bitter

Scimitar and taught him about her Heaven Earth Man Trifecta, he had devised a

promising plan to form a relationship with the powerful D-arm and use it to facilitate his breakthrough as an expert pilot.

He recognized that trying to achieve symbiosis with a resistant artifact may be

enough of a challenge to break through on the basis of this concept.

Yet now that he was attempting to put his plan into practice, he found that he had no choice but to put his foot down and tell the Bitter Scimitar who was in charge! This was not the kind of relationship that he wanted to forge with the D-arm, but Joshua increasingly felt it was hopeless to befriend the weapon.

The Bitter Swordsman lacked too much self-control to exhibit any workable form of

reason!

This caused Joshua to change his attitude towards the D-arm. Instead of treating the Bitter Scimitar as an equal partner like he did with the Everchanger, he was more inclined to treat it as a stupid and feral pet!

As Joshua continued to grapple with his unwilling and resistant weapon, a crucial development occurred not too far away.

The Amphis Extremis had exited the Volcanic Outburst Mode!

The Herald of the Void immediately noticed the changes and quickly switched from

defense to offense!

The powerful jureg phase lord immediately launched a counterattack with his

unarmored claws.

They were not covered by his raiment because it was not necessary. The claws of a jureg phase lord might not be as sharp as a Saint Piercer, but the enormous muscles that powered them could apply so much force that they had been known to snap

expert mechs and ace mechs in half!

The Amphis Extremis tried its best to persevere in the face of this threat, but the

damage and fatigue caused by the Volcanic Outburst Mode caused the ace mech to slow down a bit more than was ideal.

At one point, the ace offensive space knight lost half of its tower shield as the Herald

of the Void managed to snap his claw forward at a prodigious speed and almost managed to clasp the torso of the Amphis Extremis!

Saint Linda reacted quickly and just managed to move Amphis Extremis away fast

enough that only half of its tower shield got snapped.

The Herald of the Void gained greater confidence on this and began to advance with

greater determination than before!

Nothing was allowed to stop him from destroying the orbital defense ring!