5367 Ill-Prepared
Neither the Geneforger nor the Radiant utilized any heavy armaments that could inflict massive damage onto the even more massive bodies of their alien adversaries.
Their pilots did not mind this at all. In this battle between the gods, the comparatively tiny mechs maintained the upper hand from beginning to end!
None of the attacks or maneuvers of the ancient phase whales worked out the way they wanted.
No matter how many strange and diverse spatial manipulation abilities the two alien leaders had mastered, when the powerful God Kingdoms combined with strong space suppression fields worked against their efforts, their vaunted mastery of space turned into a joke!
Could a phase whale still be called this way if they had lost their ability to manipulate space?
The only variable that the ancient phase whales could rely upon to resist the god mechs was their strong and resilient physical bodies, but even that wasn't enough for them to gain any advantages!
The Space Tearer's body was absolutely massive and was only outmatched by that of his older whale, but all of that worked against him as his response speed was terrible!
Let alone biting the Radiant, the Space Tearer couldn't even land a single hit by generating a fast spatial tear onto the flighty god mech!
This left the ancient phase whale in an awkward position. Regardless of the strength of his attacks, none of them were fast enough to outpace one of the fastest mechs ever built by humanity!
The fastest move he could make was to create a rapid space tear in the vicinity of his massive body.
Yet no matter how quickly the Space Tearer tried to rip space apart, he always produced fluctuations that the Light of Sol could easily detect at the start.
In fact, even if the Light of Sol was not able to detect these fluctuations, his intuition that was honed through centuries of combat was already capable enough to warn him of any impending danger well in advance!
The Space Tearer even suspected that if he managed to catch the Radiant in a spatial tear, the god mech would find a way to resist the attack with its God Kingdom and come away without suffering a visible scratch!
While it was true that light mechs couldn't take hits as well as their larger brethren, the rules didn't entirely apply at the god mech level anymore!
Another bright and powerful flash of light impacted the Space Tearer's head!
This time, the Radiant deliberately struck one of the ancient phase whale's eyes, causing it to pop and splatter enough phasewater to drench an entire city!
The ancient phase whale jerked in pain even as his conventional vision became compromised!
Even though a highly evolved and modified being like him possessed many other sensory organs besides his massive eyes, this loss was a significant psychological and symbolic blow!
The Space Tearer's flesh squirmed and slowly began to grow an entirely new eyeball in a different position, but another powerful flash of light arrived and demolished it before it could come into effect again!
"MY LIGHT SHALL NEVER GRACE YOUR UNWORTHY SIGHT."
In order to emphasize his arrogant declaration, the Radiant continually circled around and crashed into the other eyeballs of the Space Tearer!
No matter how many of them the ancient phase whale regrew, his regeneration speed could not outpace the frequency of the Radiant's charging attacks!
Soon enough, the alien leader had lost all of his eyeballs!
The Space Tearer eventually gave up on forming them and decided to stick to other sensory organs that weren't as obvious.
This was yet another admission of defeat, but the alien leader couldn't care about this anymore.
He already understood that the Light of Sol was too powerful for him to solve with his current means.
If the Space Tearer had known how this tiny mech was this strong and difficult to deal with, he could have altered his massive body and developed specific countermeasures against this infuriating opponent!
Unfortunately, none of the leaders of the Red Cabal thought that these tiny machines could actually put up such a good fight.
The phase whales had become so complacent and comfortable in their own positions of superiority that they had lost their vigilance a long time ago!
This was a fatal misstep to the Singularity Lord and the Space Tearer.
If they had a year to prepare for this bout, they would have definitely been able to reduce the vulnerabilities that caused them to become so helpless.
The ancient phase whales were also confident in their ability to come up with more effective attack methods that were fast and concentrated enough to pose a serious threat against these god mechs!
Alas, it was not to be. The clever Space Tearer knew that since he had entered this battle without all of this necessary preparation, defeat was already certain!
His thoughts no longer obsessed over winning, but instead shifted towards mitigating the losses on their side.
If he could, the Space Tearer would have turned around and fled this cursed star system with great haste.
"DO NOT THINK ABOUT GETTING AWAY, ALIEN. NO MATTER HOW FAST YOU MOVE, MY SPEED SHALL ALWAYS OVERTAKE YOURS."
The Space Tearer suffered another bout of pain as the Radiant crashed into a crater that had yet to heal from an earlier impact!
As much as the alien leader hated it, the god pilot was right.
There was no way that the Space Tearer could get rid of the pursuit of the Radiant!
The only way for the Space Tearer to live was to follow his initial plan and to reunite with the Singularity Lord.
So long as they converged on each other, they should be able to break through every space suppression effect!
This resulted in the continuation of a painful journey where the Space Tearer slowly moved closer to the older and larger phase whale.
Each time the alien made a little more progress, the Radiant charged into his body at a significant fraction of the speed of light and damaged another large chunk of flesh!
The impacts created by the Terran god mech should have been able to wipe out an entire metropolis off the map at the very least!
The fact that they only produced relatively modest craters was a testament to the highly resilient phasewater-reinforced flesh of an ancient phase whale!
Yet with no way to hinder or slow down the Radiant in any fashion, the god mech gleefully repeated its attack runs, focusing on maintaining a random pattern while also compounding the damage onto specific spots!
As the injuries penetrated deeper and deeper inside the massive ancient phase whale's body, the debilitations slowly accumulated.
Even though most of his body mass still remained intact, the successive injuries slowly degraded his strength, causing the ancient phase whale's chances of escaping from this battlefield to dwindle even more!
What the Space Tearer was most afraid of was that the Radiant managed to pierce all the way into one of the cavities that contained his important phasewater organs.
Damaging or destroying any of them would significantly affect his combat potential!
Normally, the Space Tearer had many different ways of preventing them from getting harmed or even touched, but none of them could hinder the Terran god mech in any way!
Not even the ancient phase whale's vaunted spatial barrier could slow down the machine all that much. Somehow, the god mech pierced through it as if it was just an ordinary pane of glass.
It did not escape the Space Tearer's notice than neither of the god mechs had displayed a lot of abilities during this battle.
So far, the Geneforger had not transformed into a lot of different forms. It continued to launch relatively basic stinging attacks that were not that impressive.
The only major capability it had shown so far was its ability to subvert stolen body cells and put them back so that they could spread an unstoppable infection.
As for the Radiant, the smaller god mech revealed even less powers!
It had only showcased its incredibly high mobility and its relativistic charging attack capability.
There was no way a god pilot as powerful as the Light of Sol only possessed such a singular attack method.
The native aliens had entered into a war against a foreign race that possessed a much larger and deeper heritage.
If the Space Tearer was fated to suffer defeat at the hands of the Light of Sol, then he at least wanted to expose as many abilities of his powerful human adversaries as possible!
Of course, the Light of Sol was aware of this as well. He gave the native aliens no chance to deduce his other capabilities and continued to stick to a single basic attack pattern.
It didn't matter if these charging attacks took a long time to whittle down a moon-sized organism.
There was no reason for him to give away valuable information by resorting to a more effective attack measure!
As the battle continued to unfold, the Terrans watching the live broadcast did not get bored or tired at all at seeing their greatest hero make one repetitive attack after another.
Each relativistic charge attack against one of the gods of the native aliens was yet another hammer blow that exemplified Terran strength and superiority!
The footage of the Light of Sol completely reducing the Space Tearer into a gigantic fleshy punching bag was a sequence that was bound to be replayed on repeat all over the Terran Alliance in the following months!
All journeys had to come to an end. After a progressively more injured Space Tearer finally came close enough to his fellow ancient phase whales for their gravitational pulls to significantly affect each other, the state of the Singularity Lord turned out to be even worse!
Enough time had passed for the infection to expand at such an exponential rate that over 50 percent of the stronger phase whale's body came under the control of the Evolution Witch!
Pain, unwillingness and helplessness radiated from the Singularity Lord as the exterior of his massive body turned into a diseased moon.
The surface became riddled with green and veiny flesh.
The infection was not as great deeper inside the Singularity Lord's body, but even then the traitor cells were making steady progress into capturing all of the organic mass that still remained relatively untouched.
By this time, the Evolution Witch's efforts already resulted in the complete capture of a quarter of the Singularity Lord's phasewater organs!
This was a devastating result to both native gods.
The Singularity Lord could no longer activate a part of his abilities. His remaining ones also became a lot weaker as he could no longer leverage the strength of all of his diseased flesh and organs!
The Space Tearer looked devastated. The two could no longer join forces and exert enough power over space to escape the battlefield!
At this point, the Singularity Lord wanted to die, but his body was just too tough and resilient to make that happen!
Was he fated to become the first god to be taken prisoner by these alien invaders?
This was a shame that would dishonor his name and legacy forever!
The alien tried to resist harder, he had so little pure flesh left intact that he could manage to do little more than squirm!
As the infected ancient phase whale effectively lost most of his agency over his own body, the Geneforger triumphantly flew in front of his head.
"EITHER YOU DIE, OR I DIE. YOUR LIFE IS FORFEIT NOW THAT YOU HAVE LOST. SINCE THAT IS THE CASE, I SHALL CLAIM YOUR FLESH TO ADVANCE MY EVOLUTION."
What was the Evolution Witch talking about?
Before the defeated Singularity Lord could offer any response, the Geneforger steadily flew forward and began to dive into his head!
Unlike his normal flesh, the compromised body tissue easily parted before their new master.
All of the infected flesh had effectively become extensions of the god biomech's frame!
Now, it became apparent that the Evolution Witch intended to take advantage of this property by completely merging the Geneforger with the titanic body of the defeated native god!
"What?!" Ves gasped as he almost jumped off his couch. "What is she doing?! Is the Evolution Witch actually attempting to snatch the Singularity Lord's body?!"
Nobody knew whether she could pull it off, but if she was able to take over the ancient phase whale's body in its entirety, then this would probably be regarded as the most outrageous feat that took place during this massive joint operation!
