5129 Attack of the Alien Zombies
While the Eden Institute of Business & Technology was preparing to hold an event that was utterly unique in the academic community, the ongoing contact between the Spirit of Bentheim and the yurzen raiding fleet had taken a new turn!
Powerful and entrancing mechs such as the Macharia Excelsia, the Amaranto, the Promethea, the Minerva and the Transcendent Punishers all exerted an increasing amount of pressure towards the yurzens.
Of the unusual and unconventional living mechs of the Larkinson Clan, the Promethea's presence in this clash had become so great that its contributions exceeded that of the Macharia Excelsia!
The principal reason why a mid-tier expert mech was able to outshine an ace mech was due to how much better the former adapted to the Age of Dawn!
With so many fire energies converging on the Promethea and Kiroshi, the Golden Skull Alliance obtained a strong visual example of the limitless potential of prime mechs and prime resonance in this new era!
Ves already started to receive a lot of private inquiries from within the clan and outside of it about applying similar adaptations to many other mechs.
He couldn't be bothered to offer a more detailed reply than explaining that he was too busy to bother with additional mech design projects.
"Our performance in this operation exceeds our expectations." General Verle informed the patriarch. "The Promethea is already on her way to burn a third large yurzen battleship. I am actually thinking about ordering Venerable Isobel to shift to a lower priority alien warship once she and her expert mech are done with their current prey. If we keep letting this pair of pyromaniacs have their way, nothing will be left of the most valuable derelicts aside from burned and ruined alloy funeral pyres."
The general of the Larkinson Army raised a good point. This battle was not just about breaking the alien raiding fleet and preventing it from raiding the colony built on Corellix III.
This was also about getting their hands on a lot of valuable intact tech and materials!
The Promethea's conflagrations were too powerful for their own good in this regard. They could burn almost anything. Nothing remained untouched in their wake. The warped and blacked metal structures that remained after a warship became completely engulfed in purple flames had become distorted beyond recognition!
What was especially painful for the Golden Skull Alliance was that the flames not only burned and evaporated any available stores of phasewater, but also caused transphasic alloys to lose their most valuable properties!
"To be frank, the Promethea's capacity for destruction has reached the level of a weapon of mass destruction." General Verle noted. "The Red Association generally doesn't step in because all of that destructive potential is under the control of a disciplined expert pilot, but if a day ever arises where we abuse this power to inflict untold harm onto our fellow human beings, the mechers may see fit to confiscate our expert mech."
That was indeed a rule enforced by the Mech Trade Association and presumably the Red Association.
This was why the Destroyer of Worlds never destroyed entire cities or planets occupied by lots of humans.
Mechs were supposed to provide humans with more targeted and less destructive means to beat each other up. Although it was always possible for these new small machines to pack so much power that they could replicate the dark days of the Age of Conquest, few if any serious incidents occurred due to the strong suppression of the Big Two.
Aside from that, the mech pilots who tended to wield the greatest power also tended to be the least willing to open fire on innocent civilians!
This was why Ves did not worry too much that Venerable Isobel would allow her flames to go out of control and threaten the lives of millions of humans.
Fire had a reputation for going out of control, but Kiroshi's authority over it was so strong that it was highly unlikely for the Promethea to inadvertently commit war crimes.
Besides, so long as Venerable Isobel Kotin and the Promethea reserved their most threatening attacks to the aliens, the Red Two should have nothing to complain about.
Aliens did not possess human rights by definition.
Just as Ves wanted to study the telemetry of the Promethea in greater detail, he suddenly noticed that the Everchanger had started to make his move in the fight!
"What?"
When Ves took a closer look at the projection that displayed the exterior and the interior of the living expert mech, his spiritual perception immediately noticed a lot more activity than usual!
"What the hell is doing on over there?" He questioned.
His quick observation told him that the Everchanger was channeling the combined influences of Joshua, himself, Helena, Ylvaine, the Golden Cat, the Illustrious One and Titania!
Even though not all of the aforementioned design spirits were all that present, Ves never imagined that his Everchanger could become so messy at this time!
That was not all. This odd and crowded combination of participants empowered the Everchanger to such a degree that the death beams fired by the Gray Lotus not only became a lot more powerful and accurate than usual, but also carried additional influences and properties!
From the way that Stingray 1's movements became considerably more erratic than before, the Everchanger clearly disturbed the puelmers a lot more than all of the other mechs.
This was quite impressive considering that the Promethea had already deprived the aliens of a couple of powerful armed capital ships!
Ves couldn't hold in his curiosity. He concentrated his mind and forged a connection to the Everchanger.
Though his old masterwork mech became a little more crowded as a consequence, Ves tried his best not to mess up the delicate balance.
Once he was able to 'get inside' the Everchanger and study what everyone was actually doing, Ves grew even more surprised than before!
He never anticipated that the Everchanger could be used to mess with the enemy in this fashion!
Though the Everchanger was not able to gain a visual feed of what was actually taking place inside the hull of Stingray 1, he could feel most of the parties weaving together their respective powers to produce an astonishing result.
They were killing the puelmer crew members struck by the death beams, only to 'revive1 them in order to animate their corpses!
Ves could feel how Helena snuffed the spirits of the puelmers with her death energy, only to prevent them from passing on in their entirety.
Venerable Joshua and his Willy subsequently injected a little life into the puelmer corpses to support the next operation.
The Titania stepped forward to facilitate the act of taking deliberate control over the 'undead' puelmers!
All of this and more ensured that every puelmer that fell after getting struck by the resonance-empowered death beam not only lost their ability to contribute to the enemy, but also turned against their own compatriots!
This was a brilliantly effective move!
Even though every individual death beam strike could not affect too many puelmers at once, the sheer amount of chaos and confusion that ensued whenever a batch of puelmer crew members lost their minds and turned against their fellow aliens was delightful!
For example, the surviving puelmer engineers who were working hard to repair the warp drives all became mobbed by violent and jerky undead bodies that rolled up to them and acted as if they hated all forms of life!
In another section of the ship, a third of the puelmers responsible for managing a pair of secondary laser cannon batteries, causing them to roll away from their stations and disturb their former colleagues. The disruption caused by this disturbance forced the affected laser cannons into silence before an automated system kicked in and temporarily took over control!
The physical damage that the undead puelmers were able to inflict was rather limited. It would have been a different story if the undead had been physically imposing nunsers, but the round bodies of the puelmer race were exceptionally unsuited to hand-to-hand combat!
Even so, the continuous conversion of healthy puelmers into maddened undead caused a lot of mental damage to the aliens that were normally accustomed to having everything under control!
Even now, Joshua, Everchanger and the design spirits were trying to figure out how to make the undead puelmers do more than basic physical actions.
They could do a lot more damage inside the ship if the animated alien bodies were able to act on their original memories and issue highly damaging commands to the systems that kept Stingray 1 running like clockwork!
If that was not possible, they at least wanted to make the undead puelmers activate the weapons at their disposal so that they could pose a more serious threat against their fellow living crew members!
Ves could see that they were still too far away from making this happen.
Everyone involved was too accustomed to this. Without developing more sophisticated methods to retain the memories of the deceased and have the undead aliens purposefully act on that information, it was impossible to turn these bodies into corporeal fiends.
Perhaps it might be different in the future once the Everchanger progressed further in the Path of the Ghost King and Titania developed her strength even further.
Venerable Joshua began to experience increasingly greater strain.
Even with his companion spirit sharing the burden, it became increasingly more challenging for him to support this expansive joint operation with each passing minute.
The distance between the Spirit of Bentheim and the alien raiding fleet was still considerable, so Joshua and the Everchanger had to struggle even more to maintain active connections to what was happening inside Stingray!
"Ah! I can't do this any longer! I need to take a breather!" He said as he steadily pulled back from the current effort.
"Mraaaaaw..." Willy echoed as the green cat let go of Ylvaine and returned.
As Venerable Joshua kept breathing hard as if he had just completed a strenuous exercise session, the manifestation of Ves appeared openly in the cockpit.
"Sir." The pilot said as he had already picked up the presence of his patriarch. "What do you think?"
"It's... not what I expected from you." Ves steadily replied. "It looks like your cooperation with Helena has enabled you to pull off a few new tricks. I have already witnessed how the Phobos is able to produce a lot of advantages through the interplay of life and death. Perhaps the Everchanger can grow and develop even faster if it gains a greater familiarity with an opposing element."
Joshua did not think so far ahead. He just wanted to produce immediate results in order to make more significant contributions to the clan.
"I've been trying to figure out a way to make the lives of our enemies miserable. These puelmers and other aliens are so accustomed to basking under the strong protection of their transphasic energy shields that they can't conceive of any attacks that can bypass these barriers entirely. I bet those puelmers are truly pissed at us now for having the temerity of turning their own colleagues against them. Look, Stingray 2 and a bunch of yurzen warships are no longer trying to maintain a protective envelope around Stingray 1. They're beginning to close in on our ship!"
"Wait, what?"
When Ves paid attention to the latest movements of his enemies, he saw that Joshua was not exaggerating.
The aliens could no longer endure the harassment from the Spirit of Bentheim and her eclectic contingent of mechs!
Two dozen yurzen warships under the lead of Stingray 2 moved to break away and surround the Spirit of Bentheim from multiple sides!
"The aliens have finally taken the bait! We need to get out of here right away!"
The crew of the factory ship had been paying close attention to the alien warships for a response just like this. The Spirit of Bentheim had already turned around as fast as possible and increased the warp factor of the superdrive so that she would not get overtaken by her angry pursuers.
"The chase is on! The alien vessels have split! Let us make sure to keep it that way!"
