5101 Evolving Fiend
Alarms rang throughout the interior of the puelmer heavy cruiser!
The entire crew of puelmers became frenzied as reports of sudden deaths continued to be transmitted on the vessel's internal network.
Every once in a while, most of the puelmers stationed in a compartment lost their lives no matter what sort of means they utilized to repel the intruder.
If that wasn't bad enough, the visual captures of the dark and shadowy ghost became increasingly thicker and more substantial.
This ghost that had no doubt been unleashed by the evil humans was feeding off their lives!
The more puelmers that perished at Nosferatu's hands, the more he began to resemble the puelmer form, only in a nightmarish version that was ghoulish enough to frighten both aliens and humans!
His belly grew thicker and thicker as he continually absorbed the tortured and fractured souls of his alien victims.
The hands that extended from all sides of his body grew longer to the point where Nosferatu looked as if he was a hair demon from hell.
At a certain point, his arms had grown so abnormally long and strong that the evil fiend no longer needed to dive into the bodies of his puelmer victims.
It was already enough for him to extend one of his many creepy hands and use it to directly grasp the souls of his helpless victims!
Weapons fire continually assaulted Nosferatu as he moved and phased around.
The puelmers no longer put any thought on trying to restrict their firepower in order to minimize the collateral damage to the valuable internal ship components.
They made full use of their heavier transphasic armaments as that appeared to be the only effective means to damage and disrupt Nosferatu's form!
Though transphasic attacks did inflict a certain degree of harm against Nosferatu, he had become far too healthy to be significantly affected by these attacks anymore.
It was impossible for the puelmers to bring their starfighter and warship-grade weapons to bear against an internal intruder. The small and cramped compartments worked against them this time as the lack of space not only prevented the aliens from bringing in more serious firepower, but also gave the fiend plenty of physical cover to haunt his victims!
After Nosferatu grew increasingly more annoyed at all of the attacks striking his increasingly fatter and rounder body, he phased down into the deck and never showed his full body in the open again.
From then on, the puelmer nightmare truly began!
Random groups of crew members either rolled around or gathered together in order to guard a critical section of their homeship.
None of these puelmers were frail or soft-hearted, yet the information they received caused so much dread that they couldn't help but experience the rare emotion of fear this time.
Just as these armored puelmers succeeded in suppressing their apprehension, dozens of long and spindly arms poked out of the deck beneath and grappled their spirits in an instant!
"Uuehaah!"
"Kiiikiiaah!"
"Uuuahaa!"
The mouths of the ball-like aliens all uttered different cries as they all felt as if the ghostly arms were sapping their lives in an excruciatingly torturous sequence!
Nosferatu's killing speed dropped to a considerable extent when he adopted this approach. He had to split his strength more and more in order to drain multiple puelmers at the same time, and that gave the aliens more time to resist the pull and make a desperate last stand.
Fortunately, he was able to exert enough suppression on his alien victims to prevent them from rolling out of the reach of his many arms!
In desperation, the puelmers all shot their weapons in a desperate attempt to shake off the evil human devil.
It was a pity that the high technological standards set by their own race held them back. Their weapons weren't powerful enough to damage the transphasic deck quickly enough.
By the time their weapons dug deep enough, Nosferatu had already managed to drain all of their souls at once!
As the fat fiend savored the taste of the latest batch of alien spirits, he felt sated in a way that he had never experienced before in his short existence.
Yet despite how much vitality he absorbed in this deployment, Nosferatu did not have any thoughts about quitting!
His yearning for life had turned into an extremely strong obsession!
He wanted to continue to harvest the lives of the puelmers until the entire homeship had turned into a giant metal shell that was devoid of life!
"Hishaaaaaa!"
However, the puelmers weren't about to let the evil ghost continue to harvest their lives as if they were rations for the taking.
As over fifty puelmers lost their lives and turned into motionless sacks of meat, the captain of the homeship took in the analysis of his staff and issued several specific orders.
Hundreds of puelmer crew members started to move at once. Many of them rolled out of the center and moved towards the outer section of the ship.
Although their intentions were obvious to those with an outsider's perspective, Nosferatu couldn't think so much anymore!
He did not have any time to properly digest all of the scattered and messy puelmer thoughts and emotions that he absorbed during this time.
This caused his entire spirit and mentality to become extremely distorted. The exotic radiation in the air did not help matters either.
As the fiend continued to grow stronger, he was able to draw more strength from the environment, but the problem was that the only energies that responded to him at this time amplified his evil and chaotic tendencies!
From the moment Nosferatu sensed a large group of delectable puelmer souls within his range, he completely ignored all other considerations and phased through the decks in order to catch up to all of the juicy alien prey!
His greedy actions did not escape the perception of the Phobos and his occupants.
"This fool." Venerable Zimro uttered with a frown. "Can't Nosferatu see that the aliens are leading him to a trap? His job still isn't done. There are many more powerful ship systems that he needs to sabotage. It is not enough to disable the alien warp drives, especially when the damage is rather superficial. Phobos, is there any way you can rein him in again?"
"No." The living mech's artificial voice softly replied. "The Geist System does not come with that feature. If you want to know more, you should ask its designer. The only action I can take is to forcefully call him back, but doing so will definitely inflict great damage so long as the puelmer homeship maintains her transphasic energy shield cover."
The energy manifestation of Ves did not look pleased either.
"The Geist System... is a first-generation product." He briefly explained. "It is not a surprise that it has a lot of shortcomings because I was pretty much groping in the dark when I developed it. I don't have any readily available solutions at hand."
It was at this time that the Phobos detected a lot of movements from the alien forces.
"The yurgens are sending over hundreds of starfighters." Zimro noted with notably greater concern. "It looks like the aliens are pretty certain that there is an active stealth mech or vessel hovering in the vicinity. Since this homeship isn't able to sniff us out on her own power, the puelmers have finally condescended to asking for assistance from their yurzen subjects."
This was not a positive development.
Venerable Zimro was already busy trying to maneuver his expert stealth mech around to prevent the puelmer heavy cruiser from detecting the source of her current troubles.
It would become exponentially more difficult for the Phobos to remain hidden around the puelmer vessel with hundreds of alien starfighters buzzing around!
The starfighters did not possess particularly powerful sensor systems, but just flying around was enough to exert a lot of pressure on the expert stealth mech.
This was because a single collision was already enough to expose the Phobos to the aliens!
"The range of the Geist System is too limited." Ves remarked with an annoyed tone. "If you are able to maintain a distance of at least 10 kilometers from the target ship, a trick like this wouldn't pose that much of a threat to you. There has to be a way to extend the range, but I haven't figured it out as of yet. So long as that is the case, risks like this will continue to exist."
He previously assumed that he would be able to use the Phobos to weaken and mess around with all of his adversaries.
That was still true so long as his targets did not expect to be infiltrated by hostile covert elements.
However, once the Larkinson Clan dispatched the Phobos multiple times against the same group of enemies, it was inevitable for the latter to grow suspicious and enact targeted countermeasures to prevent the expert stealth mech from exploiting their weaknesses again!
The only ways that Ves could mitigate this were to dispatch the Phobos against substantially different groups or to reduce the frequency of his deployments.
As long as the Phobos did not hit the same enemies multiple times in quick succession, it became a lot more difficult for the Red Cabal and its vassals to maintain their guard all of the time.
Still, Ves had no intentions of turning the Phobos into a rarely used trump card. His capabilities were far too useful and he could assist the Larkinson Clan in many different ways.
The expert stealth mech also needed to undergo many different experiences and battles in order to grow quickly and form more Ascension Runes.
Only when the Phobos grew up further would he be able to evolve and address his greatest shortcomings!
This was actually a pretty convenient way to solve a complicated technical problem.
Ordinary mechs that did not possess any growth and evolution capabilities could only rely on other mech designers to fix their shortcomings.
Living mechs had the option of taking care of at least a portion of their problems.
While it was impossible for them to transform into all-powerful first-class multipurpose mechs through this method alone, it shouldn't be too much of a problem for the Phobos to upgrade the functionality of a spiritual weapon system!
This not only saved Ves a lot of trouble and effort, but it also granted him the possibility of studying and reverse-engineering the solutions that his living mechs came up with over their lifespans.
Only when he was able to decipher the working principles of the extraordinary capabilities of his evolving works would he be able to systematically apply all of these powerful new features on his future mech designs!
In any case, concerns like these were a matter for the future. The Phobos was still far from forming his third Ascension Rune.
At this time, Nosferatu had been chasing after the groups of puelmers that continued to roll towards a small and compact hangar bay.
As a squad of puelmers boarded an oval-shaped shuttle, the greedy and uncontrollable fiend readily phased inside and began to grip all of the alien crew members with his many evil arms!
However, the activated shuttle immediately activated all of her thrusters and boosted out of the open hangar bay hatch at full power!
The shuttle suddenly ended up in open space!
A silent scream spread throughout the cramped vessel as Nosferatu experienced a huge amount of pain as his entire body squeezed through multiple layers of transphasic energy shields!
Much of the alien life energy that propped up his greedy existence scattered away from the fiend. He had lost almost all of the progress that he had made before and almost degenerated to his weakest point again!
That was not the extent of the alien scheme.
As soon as the shuttle had built up enough distance from the puelmer heavy cruiser, the powerful vessel opened fire with multiple batteries of highly precise and highly destructive transphasic laser cannons!
The shuttle and all of the puelmers inside became vaporized in an instant!
