The Mech Touch (Web Novel)
chapter-6107

6107 Purple Wildfire

The assault against the Emperor Tree started off a lot better than any of the Larkinsons expected.

They already figured that the Promethea would be a lot more effective when fighting against the Emperor Tree than any other high-end machine, but this was something else!

The Promethea dominated the battle right now. The expert rifleman mech easily outpaced the purple wooden mechs while relying on her Ignitron rifle to set one purple wooden mech aflame after another.

None of the elite constructs were able to offer any effective resistance!

No matter how much wood energy the Emperor Tree transferred to its constructs by remote, it all turned into additional fuel to feed hungry flames.

If the Promethea's shots only spread ordinary flames, then the Emperor Tree should have been able to prevent its elite constructs from burning down.

However, Isobel spent a lot of time and effort strengthening her ability to light up the toughest and most inflammable pieces of exotic alloys.

With the help of her growing willpower, her King Killer Flames was able to burn down virtually every alien warship if she went all-out!

How could the wood developed by the Emperor Tree possibly perform any better?

Even if it was reinforced by a lot of metallic ores that the calamity plant managed to extract from the ground as well as exobeast corpses, the wood was still a lot more flammable than anything made out of pure metal!

Combined with the inability for the Emperor Tree to overcome the attribute suppression in this instance, its purple wooden mechs turned into nothing but flammable decoys that were just waiting to get burned!

Venerable Isobel constantly sought to increase her burning efficiency. She precisely dialed the power settings of the Ignitron rifle so that it inflicted the right amount of damage to light the purple mechs aflame.

Under her masterful control, the Promethea's efficiency grew, allowing the living mech to accomplish more while expending less energy.

Throughout this sequence, the First Sword and the Everchanger had been relegated to bystanders.

They did not even receive any opportunities to act as the Promethea's bodyguards as the VIP straightforwardly burned down any wooden threat that attempted to get close!

The sight of so many difficult purple mechs catching flame was awe inspiring.

The purple machines did not go down without a fight. The ones armed with ranged weapons attempted to bombard the Promethea with hardened seeds.

The organic kinetic projectiles traveled faster and hit much harder than before. The Emperor Tree had clearly managed to refine this tech.

Yet the performance of the seed rifles was only good when compared to the weapons of other standard mechs.

Against an expert mech piloted by a high-tier expert pilot, the incoming seeds inflicted virtually no discernable damage!

The purple resonance shield covering the Promethea easily resisted the seeds that managed to hit their targets.

Many more seeds failed to accomplish anything useful. The intelligences responsible for controlling the purple wooden mechs did not possess the skills, experience or intuition of professional mech pilots.

It was incredibly trivial for Venerable Isobel to track all of the incoming shots and evade most of them. If not for the fact that the density of projectiles was a bit too much, the Promethea could have avoided taking any damage.

As the Promethea continued to show absolute dominance against the purple wooden mechs, the remaining constructs abruptly ceased their attempts to pursue the powerful expert mechs.

Even the stupidest exobeasts would realize that continuing this futile pursuit would only lead to further losses!

The purple wooden mechs turned around in an instant and all flew away before they could get burned by the Promethea's disturbingly effective flames.

The Promethea tried to shoot as many of them as possible before they ascended into the leaves and branches of the Emperor Tree. Dozens more purple wooden mechs turned into torches, but Venerable Isobel grew disappointed when she was unable to wipe out the entire elite force.

If her expert mech had been updated, she would definitely have the confidence to wipe out all of those constructs!

"Amazing…" Venerable Joshua spoke in an admiring tone. "I tried so hard to burn the purple wooden mechs myself, but my luminar crystal rifle and plasma blade never managed to do the job."

This was the difference between an expert pilot who dabbled with thermal weapons and an expert pilot who earnestly wielded the power of fire.

"Focus, Joshua! Don't get distracted by drooling over Isobel's ability to burn wood." Dise admonished. "The Emperor Tree is still alive and well. It definitely has a lot more tricks in store."

She was right. Joshua quickly regained his focus and studied the calamity plant carefully through all of the Solus Gas.

After a short delay, the Emperor Tree decided to attack the expert mechs in a different way.

"The bark is moving again. The tree is about to unveil its improved seed cannons!"

The Emperor Tree clearly spent a lot of effort into improving its ranged armaments after witnessing how much they managed to get done when employed by human mechs.

Similar to last time, the Emperor Tree embedded a lot of seed cannons underneath its bark. There were hundreds if not thousands of cannons buried across the length and surface of the main trunk.

However, when the calamity plant finally unveiled its formidable array of cannons, the three expert pilots all set aside their contempt towards their opponent's ranged solutions.

Just like the three enormous seed artillery cannons that were bombarding Chimera Base from afar even now, the Emperor Tree had clearly increased the size and power of its other cannons.

Their predecessors failed to accomplish anything useful last time. The response from the Emperor Tree was therefore understandable. It switched from prioritizing quantity to prioritizing quality.

The alien tree straightforwardly built larger and longer cannons even if it came at the cost of reducing the total quantity of armaments that it could accommodate onto its bark!

Fortunately, the immense size of the main trunk played in its favor. The Emperor Tree was still able to direct hundreds of large muzzles in the direction of the three mechs.

Venerable Isobel could already sense how much these up- scaled seed cannons could pose a threat to her expert mech.

There were so many cannons that it didn't matter if their hit rates were low. They just needed to weave a dense net of seed projectiles to ensure that at least some of the projectiles hit their intended target!

The consequences of getting hit were doubtlessly greater than before. A dozen or so heavy seed impacts might not be able to compromise the Promethea's resonance shield, but what about a hundred impacts? What about a thousand impacts?

Even expert mechs could fall when attacked by enough firepower to match that of an entire mech regiment!

"We need to back off and make it more difficult for those cannons to overwhelm the defenses of our mechs." Isobel quickly determined. "Joshua. Dise. The two of you must shield my Promethea against incoming attacks. My mech's defenses are not that good, and it is impossible to evade every heavy seed."

"Roger."

"Let's move."

The three expert mechs backed off as there was no reason for them to stick so cose to the Emperor Tree.

Visibility decreased rapidly due to the high concentration of Solus Gas, so the high-end machines did not retreat for long. They still needed to maintain an acceptable degree of visibility to allow for the sensor systems of their mechs to observe the detailed state of their target.

"Opening fire."

The Promethea aimed her large rifle straight in the direction of the enormous but faint tree silhouette in the distance.

The scorching hot purple fire beams cut straight through all of the Solus Gas and successfully struck the upper half of the tree!

Isobel ignored the roots and the lower half of the tree as she figured it would be a lot harder to light them all on fire.

She instead chose to spread her flames to the much more flammable leaves. The Emperor Tree possessed so many of them that it looked as if she needed to attack all day in order to manually light them all on fire.

However, it was not necessary for the Promethea to do all of that labor.

From the moment the first set of leaves caught fire, the surrounding ones began to burn as well!

The Promethea did not disperse her shots, but instead focused her attacks on lighting up all of the surrounding leaves and branches.

The small spark turned into a much larger blaze in a brief span of time!

The heat levels rose while the surrounding moisture quickly disappeared. The Emperor Tree shook and attempted to deal with the burning branches by forcibly severing them from the reist of its body, but it didn't help!

Many of the purple flames spread too fast for the Emperor Tree to cut them all off. Even if it managed to sever branches before they could spread the deadly fire any further, the elevated heat levels in the surroundings made it easier for the Promethea to catch other nearby branches on fire!

The Emperor Tree began to sway more violently as it tried to channel a huge amount of wood energy to suppress the flames.

It failed. Initially, it looked as if the abundance of wood energy may actually stifle the flames, but once the fires reached a large enough scale, it was no longer as easy as before to snuff them out with wood energy.

While the Emperor Tree was experiencing growing distress, the three expert mechs were not in a comfortable position either.

This was because the enlarged seed cannons had all begun to open fire!

Bang!

Bang!

Bang!

Bang!

The resonance shields of the First Sword and the Everchanger received numerous hard impacts as they tried their best to prevent the incoming attacks from interrupting the Promethea's rhythm.

"These seeds hit much harder!" Joshua exclaimed! "They're heavier, harder and are launched at much higher speeds than before. They're harder to avoid as well!"

The Emperor Tree comprehensively improved almost every parameter, ranging from muzzle speed to accuracy. With hundreds of these powerful cannons at its disposal, it was legitimately able to drown out the three expert mechs in a flood of heavy seeds!

The large seed cannons did not possess a high firing rate, but when hundreds of them were able to fire in a specific direction, the First Sword and the Everchanger immediately witnessed their resonance shields draining at a worrying rate.

"The Bastion should have come as well." Joshua said through gritted teeth.

Venerable Jannzi's expert mech excelled at this role. It would have been able to endure the incoming attacks a lot better than a pair of offensive melee mechs.

The Everchanger managed to endure the onslaught for the time being. The expert hero mech's malleable properties meant that he was able to reinforce his resonance shield and speed up its regeneration.

The First Sword was clearly worse off. Her defenses were never her highlight. The living mech primarily relied on evasion to keep herself alive, but now that she was on protective duty, she had little choice but to resist any heavy seed that sought to strike the Promethea!

Venerable Dise chose to utilize the Decapitator to deflect the incoming seeds!

Clang!

Clang!

Clang!

The masterwork mech greatsword managed to divert at least a few seeds this way. The projectiles came so fast that the First Sword was not able to move quickly enough to redirect every threatening seed.

The mech also had to endure a lot of shock with every hard impact. In addition to that, Venerable Dise constantly had to maintain maximum focus in order to anticipate, detect and deflect every incoming heavy seed.

It was much harder for her to do so when there was a lot of Solus Gas interfering with her sight and intuition!

Still, this was nothing if not a challenge. Venerable Dise gradually managed to improve her performance as she began to adapt to the abnormal circumstances.

"How many more shots will it take for your Promethea to light the entire tree on fire?!"

"Too many!"

"Then try to burn those seed cannons instead! Our expert mechs can't withstand the seed attacks for long. We need to get rid of as many of them as possible!"

"We shall try."