The Mech Touch

Chapter 6059  Wooden Contact

The Emperor Tree reacted to the blatant intrusion of the Larkinson mechs by resorting to its most convenient ʼorganic weapon systemʼ.

Hundreds of wooden cannon muzzles extended from the immense juggernaut-sized trunk of the Emperor Tree. Not all of them faced the same direction, but there were still plenty of wooden cannons that could easily target the mechs flying in the air!

From the moment the seed barrage began, the defenses of every mech started to do their jobs.

The Everchanger and the First Sword effortlessly resisted the tide. The exotic launching method and the strange properties of the seeds did not hide the fact that they were hardly optimized for ranged combat.

Modern cannons developed by humans had gone through millennia of technological evolution and refinement. Even the cheapest of cannons had reached a remarkably high state of performance due to all of the incremental improvements that had been made over the ages.

The Emperor Tree may be an insanely talented exoplant that managed to reach his current level of strength just two years after the start of the Age of Dawn, but that did not change the fact that it was still a wild existence!

Unlike humans and many other civilized races in the cosmos, the Emperor Tree went through life without the benefit of systematic inheritance and education.

Its cannon designs were crude and its seed projectiles were only hard enough to damage mechs because the tree had obviously put effort into making them harder. The muzzle velocities of the wooden cannons were not particularly high due to relying on primitive means.

The projectiles were hardly any better. While the seeds could technically be categorized as hyper projectiles due to the fact that they were all imbued with wood energy, they did not undergo systematic development either.

However, while the expert mechs had little to fear from these relatively mundane massed attacks, the two custom mechs were experiencing greater pressure.

The Zeal had no hope of evading the attacks, so he had to rely entirely on his defenses to withstand the storm.

Fortunately, the quasi-first-class heavy artillery mech was equipped with a powerful azure shield generator. The transphasic properties of this energy shield was especially effective at withstanding attacks that did not possess the same qualities.

The Reticula Corein V was a star system that was almost devoid of phasewater. If the opposite was the case, then it would have been colonized by aliens or humans a long time ago!

The Emperor Tree likely never encountered phasewater directly throughout its existence, so it probably had no idea that the Zeal was able to resist far more seed attacks than usual!

However, the relentless tide of seeds crashing into the heavy mechʼs azure energy shield still caused it to drain at a gradual but concerning rate.

This was just the start of the fight. If the Zeal kept getting hit like this, he would soon lose his energy protection and become a lot more exposed to the Emperor Treeʼs attacks.

The Elegant Rage fared the worst out of the four machines. Lanie regretted the decision to pilot a mech with slimmed down armor. While she may have been able to arrange an upgrade to the custom mechʼs energy shield to modern standards, her battle partnerʼs power reactor had not been able to keep up. The melee mech was not able to withstand too many seed strikes!

The only way for the relatively fragile mech to withstand the seeds was to block the seeds with its much harder tonfas or to evade them with clever maneuvering.

Lanie and the Elegant Rage struggled to evade the projectiles. The tonfa-wielding mech lost the elegance that usually characterized her movement patterns. Compared to past performances, the living mech always started to move or change her course a bit too late!

The lack of intuition due to the strong concentration of Solus Gas deprived Lanie of a tool that she often relied upon to evade danger!

Though she quickly adjusted and learned to respond by relying on her perception and her own judgment, the Elegant Rage clearly struggled to preserve the integrity of her energy shields.

”Get behind me!” Taon suggested. ”This is no time to be stubborn, Lanie.”

He was right. It was not time yet for the Elegant Rage to shine. Lanie did not stubbornly stick around in order to resist the seed bombardment. She instead guided her beleaguered mech behind the Zealʼs massive mech frame.

The azure energy shield projected by the larger machine easily provided full directional coverage from the Emperor Treeʼs seed attacks!

”How many seeds can this damn tree launch!?” Lanie asked in a frustrated tone. ”It has already fired thousands if not tens of thousands of them already!”

There was no way for her Elegant Rage to do anything if she continually needed to brave a rain of seed projectiles.

”It wonʼt run out anytime soon, I think.” Taon responded. ”The tree is so huge that it should have more than enough wood and other stuff to turn into projectiles. These seeds are tiny compared to the size of its trunk.”

”THESE SEEDS ARE NOTHING TO US.” The Everchanger boasted that the machineʼs resonance shield resisted every attack with little strain. ”THE ONLY ANNOYING PART IS THAT THE RAIN OF FIREPOWER IS SO DENSE THAT IT IS TOO DIFFICULT TO EVADE THE SEEDS ENTIRELY.”

Venerable Joshua took charge again. ”Then let us do something about that. Those wooden cannons shouldnʼt be too tough. We should trim them down! Zeal, use your heavy artillery cannons! Everyone else, keep your distance.”

The threat posed by the Emperor Tree should be low so long as they remained at the edge of the red zone. That might change once they got closer, so Joshua did not want to rush forward right away.

Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!

Of the 8 semi-modular weapon hardpoints of the Zeal, half of them were taken up by conventional heavy artillery cannons.

Each of them began to launch explosive hyper shells at the massive tree in the distance.

Although it was difficult to target anything with pinpoint accuracy due to all of the Solus Gas, Taon and the Zeal were still able to land their explosive projectiles near the base of the trunk.

Continuous explosions began to engulf the surface of the tree. Huge pieces of bark splintered from the surface while dozens of wooden cannons shattered or deformed.

”The wooden cannons are much more fragile than the main trunk!” Venerable Joshua grinned. ”Keep bombarding them! Even if the tree can regrow them, it will surely take time for them to return!”

The Everchanger did not sit still during this period. He lifted his Vitalus rifle and began to spit out a continuous barrage of resonance-empowered fire beams at the trunk.

The souped-up laser beams struck the trunk and the surrounding wooden cannons with a blaze of thermal energy. The fire E-energy attached to the beams domineeringly engulfed the nearby wood energy and created an even greater conflagration!

It seemed as if the wooden cannons could be cleaned up fairly quickly so long as the two ranged mechs kept up the fire.

However, the Emperor Tree was not weak or passive. It began to channel a large amount of wood energy and forcefully suppressed the fire energy that was raging on its surface!

A completely alien and inhuman presence began to exert more power. Though the thick concentration of Solus Gas made it difficult for the mech pilots to notice it, the Emperor Tree domineeringly forced the fires to subside!

While the Emperor Tree was able to put out the fires through this method, it could do little to prevent its wooden cannons from getting shattered by all of the explosions and energy beams!

The volume of seed attacks gradually lessened. It was amazing how just two mechs could cause the Emperor Tree to lose so many wooden cannons.

However, none of the attacks came close to damaging the main trunk itself. It was simply too huge to become seriously affected by these relatively small-scale attacks.

As the Zeal and the Everchanger continued to remove wooden cannon after wooden cannon, the Emperor Tree did not appear to be in a hurry to regenerate them. New cannons started to grow from the bottom where the first ones had been removed, but it would take many more minutes before they became functional again.

”The Zeal cannot keep this up forever, sir.” Taon reported to Venerable Joshua. ”As large as my heavy mechʼs ammunition capacity may be, these explosive shells all take up space. Once they run out, I wonʼt be able to contribute as much firepower.”

”I know, but we cannot go forward yet. This tree is capable of doing so much more. We need to tease out its tricks instead of blindly blundering into them. Just wait. Now that the tree understands that it canʼt get rid of us with its seed cannons alone, it will resort to other measures. Pay attention to the ground in case it is able to grow much longer roots than previously reported.”

The next threat did not come from below.

Instead, it came from the front, left, right and even their rear!

Dozens of smaller and less potent seed projectiles assaulted the four Larkinson mechs from many different directions!

Even though their power was clearly worse, the fact that the Emperor Tree was able to attack the mechs from completely different directions caught the mech pilots by surprise!

”Where did those attacks come from!? Did the Emperor Tree plant some of its seeds and have them germinate into miniature versions of itself?!”

”No. The trajectories are not quite right for that. The smaller seeds are launched from the same altitude or higher.”

Before the four mech pilots could guess even further, they were all taken by surprise as more than a dozen large wooden monsters of uneven sizes and shapes emerged from the surrounding gas clouds and assailed the mechs with a variety of wooden armaments!

”What?!”

Even though the high-strung mech pilots completely failed to anticipate their approach in advance, they responded quickly enough.

The First Sword made a quick and deceptively simple horizontal sweep with her Decapitator that easily parted the wooden monsters in half.

The Everchanger intercepted half-a-dozen of them with rapid-fire shots of his Vitalus before slashing apart the remainder with his Heartsword.

The Elegant Rage suddenly came into her element again. Under the direction of an eager Lanie, the melee mech actively surged forward to bash and burn the roughly mech-sized monstrosities with a pair of plasma tonfas!

The three mechs dealt with the wooden monsters so efficiently that none of them came close to the Zeal.

The three mech pilots clearly intended for this to happen. They did not forget that the Zeal was the only machine that was unable to adequately defend himself against enemies up close.

”What… did we just fight against? How can these wooden monsters fly?” Lanie wondered.

”Donʼt you think these wooden monsters look familiar?” Taon said the obvious.

Though the sudden ambush strike started and ended quickly, the mech pilots and their living mechs still managed to get a good impression of all of the attackers sent by the Emperor Tree.

In truth, the living mechs felt much more shocked than their mech pilots at this time!

”THESE ARE NOT WOODEN MONSTERS. THEY ARE WOODEN MECHS.” The Everchanger declared as his three eyes glowed brighter. ”CAN YOU NOT SEE WHAT IS HAPPENING? THE EMPEROR TREE HAS BEEN LEARNING FROM US. IT HAS NOT ONLY IMITATED OUR RANGED WEAONS, BUT IT HAS ALSO MADE STRIDES TO REPLICATE OUR MECHS!”

This statement unquestionably rung true in everyone elseʼs minds!

This was because the shapes and contours of those ʼwooden monstersʼ roughly matched the designs of the mech models fielded by Task Force Solus!

From the light and swift Ferocious Piranha to the fierce dual-wielding Stormblade Samurai, the Emperor Tree had somehow managed to set up a wooden mech factory and began to produce blatantly pirated versions of the famous mechs of the Larkinson Clan!