The Mech Touch

Chapter 6118 Reaching their Peaks

Under the influence of the transcendence glow, three different expert pilots opened themselves up to Lufa's mind-altering influence.

Through numerous twists and turns, each of these powerful and ambitious expert pilots sought to break their limits and attain the strength they needed to defeat an enemy as terrible as the Emperor Tree.

As the First Sword, the Everchanger and the Promethea continued to hover high above the massive layer of Solus Gas that obscured the lands beneath, the true resonances that affected their mech frame grew stronger than ever.

As each of their pilots pushed against their limits and faintly began to surpass their old peaks, it seemed as if the three machines were on the verge of exploding like volcanos!

Inside the cockpit of the Everchanger, Venerable Joshua had become obsessed with the assumption that in order to appreciate the fullness of life, he needed to master the opposite as well!

Death was the final destination of every life!

Death made life so much shorter but also so much more fulfilling!

Death was the condition that Joshua intended to inflict on all of his enemies!

Before Joshua became qualified to wield the power of death alongside life, he became convinced that he needed to experience it for himself!

As he decisively unholstered his high-quality service pistol and pushed the end of its barrel straight into his mouth, Joshua truly experienced the intense thrill that could only come from being a single step away from death!

This was it! This was the feeling of death that Joshua craved so much at the moment! The weight and fullness of death was so intoxicating to the expert pilot in his overactive state that his eyes almost rolled over in ultimate ecstasy.

"Pull the trigger."

"Pull the trigger."

"Pull the trigger."

Constant whispers bombarded his mind. He may have come close to embracing death, but he fell short of experiencing it in truth!

Only by taking that final crucial step would he be able to master the richness of death in all of its terrible glory!

"Pull the trigger." A voice encouragingly whispered in his ear yet again.

Though his arm was bent at an awkward angle in order to hold his laser pistol in its current position, he was still able to squeeze the trigger with his gloved finger.

As the tension in the cockpit rapidly rose, the energies emanating from Joshua actually changed!

His willpower no longer exuded the power of life in all of its overflowing bounty anymore.

Instead, a touch of death began to infect his willpower. It started out as a seed, but quickly began to bloom as it fed off Joshua's abundant power of life!

Just as the power of death threatened to engulf all of the life that made up the core of Joshua' willpower, Venerable Joshua excitement reached an absolute peak as he fully pulled the trigger!

Click.

Only a very faint and underwhelming trigger sound spread across the cockpit.

"What…?"

The spread of death halted as Joshua somehow failed to make the final and most crucial step that was supposed to lead to his ascension.

Click. Click. Click.

The dazed expert pilot pulled the trigger again and again, but his powerful and high-quality laser pistol failed to discharge an energy beam as it was supposed to. It remained completely silent even though Joshua was sure it was still in working condition.

Before Joshua could do anything else, his body suddenly dropped onto the floor as the antigrav modules built into the cockpit suddenly generated a downward force that surpassed 5 g!

Although Joshua was an expert pilot that kept his body fit, he was unaccustomed to bearing five times his own body weight under standard gravity conditions, especially when the transition was too abrupt!

"Reset artificial gravity!" Joshua commanded as he desperately tried to use his connection with his expert mech to repeatedly transmit the same command through his mind.

"IDIOT." The Everchanger's judgmental voice sounded.

"You! You did this! Stop this! I am in charge here!" Joshua rabidly shouted.

"IDIOT." The living mech repeated. "YOU ARE NEVER SOLELY IN CHARGE. I HAVE A SAY IN THIS MATTER AS WELL. BEFORE YOU TELL ME THAT I SHOULD LET YOU TAKE THE LEAD, YOU SHOULD KNOW THAT YOUR WIFE KETIS SECRETLY ORDERED ME TO KEEP AN EYE ON YOU AFTER YOU ENGAGED THIS PLAN. SHE SPECIFICALLY TOLD ME TO PREVENT YOU FROM DOING SOMETHING YOU WILL REGRET."

"Regret?! You stopped me! You stopped me from breaking through! I was so close, Everchanger!"

The abrupt interruption had pulled Venerable Joshua back from his peak condition and totally destroyed his previous mood. The Everchanger had ruined his only chance of breaking through during this period!

His battle partner remained unrepentant, though.

"WHATEVER YOU HAVE IN MIND, KILLING YOURSELF IS NOT THE ANSWER. DO YOU STILL NOT REALIZE HOW MUCH YOU HAVE BEEN MISLED? NEWSFLASH, JOSHUA. THE TRANSCENDENCE GLOW WAS NOT ALONE IN AFFECTING YOUR MIND. THE EMPEROR TREE ALSO REACHED OUT TO YOU FROM THE MOMENT YOU LOWERED YOUR MENTAL DEFENSES. YOU MAY HAVE OVERLOOKED THIS DETAIL, BUT KETIS DID NOT. SHE DELIBERATELY WITHHELD THIS INFORMATION FROM YOU IN ORDER TO PUT YOU TO THE TEST. FROM WHAT I HAVE OBSERVED… YOU FAILED."

Venerable Joshua may be an idiot at times, but he was not as stubborn and mule headed as many other expert pilots.

Faced with the logic of his own battle partner, Joshua eventually regained enough clarity to realize that he could not rule out the possibility that the Emperor Tree had corrupted his thoughts!

His eyes shook as his mind went into turmoil. How much did the Emperor Tree learn from him? What did the nefarious calamity plant do to turn his breakthrough into a suicide attempt?

All of these questions and more threw his thoughts into confusion. His willpower began to sputter. His fighting spirit began to deflate. He was no longer in a condition to return to battle!

"What have I done to myself…"

While Joshua began to doubt himself, another life-threatening situation unfolded inside the cockpit of the First Sword.

Similar to Joshua, Venerable Dise became convinced that she could only gain greater strength if she initiated a radical transformation!

Dise was willing to throw aside all vestiges of civilization and turn into a beast in order to pursue greater strength and killing power!

The turning point was to literally perform brain surgery onto herself in order to change her mind and condition forever!

Yet as the powerful force of true resonance was about to rewire her relatively fragile and vulnerable brain on the spot, the entire expert mech suddenly became deprived of much of her extraordinary power!

Venerable Dise became shocked as she felt much weaker than a moment before!

According to her own perception, she had come so close to attaining the power of the beast that it felt agonizing to be ripped away from its promise!

"Partner!" The distraught expert pilot roared inside her cockpit! "Give me back my power!"

"NO." The firm and disapproving tone of the First Sword responded. "YOU ARE OUT OF YOUR MIND, DISE. LOOK AT YOURSELF. YOU WENT AGAINST THE MOST IMPORTANT TENET OF THE SWORDMAIDENS. YOU LOST CONTROL. YOU SWUNG YOUR BLADE WITH SUCH RECKLESS DISREGARD THAT YOU WERE ABOUT TO CHOP YOUR HEAD IN HALF."

"No… that is not true! I was about to break through! My bottleneck had already loosened!"

"YOU WERE ABOUT TO MAKE YOURSELF BRAINDEAD AT THE EMPEROR TREE'S BEHEST! THOSE THOUGHTS WERE NEVER YOUR OWN. YOU WERE UTTERLY FOOLED BY OUR ENEMY. IF KETIS DID NOT ANTICIPATE THIS POSSIBILITY IN ADVANCE AND TOLD ME TO STOP YOU FROM HARMING YOURSELF OR OTHERS, YOU WOULD HAVE ALREADY DIED. IN FACT, I WOULD HAVE INTERVENED WITHOUT ANY ORDERS, BECAUSE YOU ARE MY ONE AND ONLY BATTLE PARTNER."

"First Sword…" Dise looked incredibly lost and vulnerable now.

This was incredibly rare as she had always come across as strong and confident in the past!

"WE ARE A TEAM, DISE. YOU ARE NOT ALONE IN THIS. YOU ARE NEVER ALONE IN THIS. IN ALL YOUR EAGERNESS TO BREAK THROUGH, YOU COMPLETELY OVERLOOKED MY EXISTENCE. THAT WAS A MISTAKE. THE TWO OF US ARE MADE FOR EACH OTHER. IF WE ARE LUCKY ENOUGH TO SURVIVE THE CHALLENGES TO COME, WE WILL EVENTUALLY BECOME ONE AND THE SAME. BEFORE THAT HAPPENS, YOU STILL HAVE A LONG WAY TO GO BEFORE YOU HAVE EARNED YOUR ASCENSION."

Venerable Dise lowered her head in contrition. She knew she screwed up big time. She did not deny the possibility that the Emperor Tree had somehow twisted her mind as she became immersed by the influence of the transcendence glow.

Looking back at her radical thoughts and behavior, only the calamity plant could drive her to sabotage the foundation of her piloting career!

While Venerable Dise continued to process her abject failure, the temperature in the cockpit of the Promethea had reached a new height!

If not for the high-quality protective piloting suit issued by the Larkinson Army, Venerable Isobel would have already started to become afflicted by burn wounds!

As the flames started up by Kiroshi approached the piloting chair and threatened to engulf it entirely, the Promethea fell into a difficult dilemma.

She too received secret instructions from the commander of Task Force Solus.

The expert mech had been ordered to ignore the transcendence glow and maintain full vigilance towards their battle partners.

Due to the active man-machine connections, the Promethea was able to gain a very clear idea of the twisted logic and thinking that eventually drove Isobel to light herself on fire.

Although it was difficult for the Promethea to maintain a clear mind under the current circumstances, the third order living mech knew that her battle partner was most definitely deceived by the Emperor Tree.

The issue was that the Promethea was not quite certain whether Venerable Isobel's current thinking was necessarily wrong.

Just like Isobel, the Promethea had long become frustrated by the constant orders to show restraint and limit her firepower.

She was an expert mech that had been explicitly designed to spread flames onto her enemies.

Though the Promethea did not necessarily object to restraining her flames, she at least wanted to become better at burning the enemies that truly needed to be defeated.

Her inability to burn more than a large amount of completely disposable tree leaves rankled her just as much as her battle partner!

This was why the Promethea did not necessarily believe that her expert pilot was wrong in her thinking.

Only by letting go and allowing her King Killer Flames to burn without restraint would they be able to attain their true potential!

The Promethea tried her best to argue against this logic, but she found herself unable or unwilling to do so. She was quite sure that she was not being affected by the Emperor Tree, but still failed to turn away from this dangerous idea!

The Emperor Tree continually taunted Isobel and the Promethea by staying alive and well.

The mere sight of the tree in a completely healthy and undamaged condition seemed to mock the pair for their inability to burn down its wood!

This was why the Promethea thought about doing nothing and letting Isobel burn herself.

What if Isobel's idea had merit?

What if Isobel truly needed to expose herself to her own King Killer Flames in order to transform her willpower?

So long as she succeeded, she would become stronger than ever!

As the purple flames finally burned the underside of the cockpit chair and started to spread their way upwards, the Promethea continually struggled to choose between caution and recklessness.

Choosing caution guaranteed Isobel's survival, but ruled out any further benefits.

Choosing recklessness put Isobel's life in imminent danger, but it might just be enough to produce the second ace pilot of the Larkinson Clan!

The Promethea considered many possible arguments, though only a fraction of a second passed in real-time.

The expert rifleman mech eventually made a choice.

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