The Mech Touch

The source of the disaster had succ.u.mbed!

In the middle of the nutrient processing plant, a shrine of the Hallowed Abyss Temple rested on a large platform.

The dark fog that burst out of the shrine receded bit by bit. Soon enough, the shrine produced no more darkness, giving everyone the hope that the anomaly that had engulfed Ulimo Citadel and its surroundings no longer threatened the Larkinsons, pirates and everyone trapped inside its dark embrace.

Ketis, who had managed to defeat a mutated monstrosity that was powerful enough to rampage through several infantry companies, had become absolutely drained.

Wary of the large hole in the floor that led straight down into one of the dangerous vats of the plant, she summoned up the last of her strength to drag her body a healthy distance away.

Eventually, her overstrained muscles could no longer keep her upright. She fell onto her butt and became dazed.

The successive battles took everything she had to achieve victory. She fought her way to the core section of the marketplace, barely managed to turn the insane leader of the Dry Snakes himself and fought on a knife's edge when she confronted the transformed Grey Watcher!

The last battle especially pushed her to her limits!

Even though she was a mech designer, and a pretty good one for her age at that, she was also a Swordmaiden.

It didn't matter that she was supposed to dedicate herself to an intellectual pursuit. She lived her life around swordsmanship, and it made no sense for her to specialize in designing sword-wielding mechs if she didn't possess the proficiency to handle them with as much skill as the mech pilots who were supposed to depend on her products!

Her greatest desire was to design the best and most suited swordsman mechs for her fellow Swordmaidens. This was why she diligently tried to pursue greater swordsmanship and mech design at the same time.

The burden on her shoulders was huge. The two disciplines demanded two completely different skill sets. Having learned the value of time from Ves, Ketis knew that she had to make many sacrifices in order to pursue her chosen path to the fullest.

This was why she decided to specialize in designing mechs that primarily fought by wielding swords. Other mechs simply didn't interest her. She felt no passion at the prospect of designing a rifleman mech or even a lancer mech.

Though there were many kinds of mechs that each possessed their own charm, she didn't love every mech equally like Ves.

While her current mentor possessed a broader love and curiosity for mechs that constantly urged him to design different mechs, Ketis lacked this common impulse.

What she loved wasn't mechs. What she truly loved was making the Swordmaidens stronger.

In fact, her desires and ambitions centered so much around the Swordmaidens that she wouldn't know what to do if they no longer existed! It was very likely that she would suffer a complete mental collapse if every Swordmaiden died.

Her survival wasn't important compared to the survival of her fellow sisters! As long as one qualified Swordmaiden remained alive to carry the torch, Ketis would gladly sacrifice her life to further this cause!

This was why she unreservedly chose to confront the source of the anomaly. Mech designer or not, the dark ritual of the Hallowed Abyss Temple threatened the entirety of the Swordmaidens! How could she stand by and watch her sisters get swallowed by this artificial abyss?

Fortunately, she succeeded.

Her extreme desire to save the Swordmaidens helped her draw out all of her fighting potential. Though the mutated Grey Watcher clearly lacked hand-to-hand combat training, his clumsy moves possessed so much lethality that a single glancing blow from his claws would have shredded her unarmored body!

Armed with just a single cutlass, it took every bit of training and pushing her body to the extreme to evade the monster's powerful attacks while retaliating everytime she spotted a good opening. If not for taking advantage of the maddened monster's lack of situational awareness, who knew how the battle might have ended.

Ketis knew very well how frail her scheme truly was! While she could have lasted longer and lower her chances of getting hit if she focused purely on evasion, that was not how a Swordmaiden fought!

Swords were made to be used!

Besides, the constant attacks and the wounds she dealt were very crucial despite the fact that the mutated monster regenerated himself almost instantly.

She noticed that the Grey Watcher wasn't used to the rigors of combat. A real warrior would have endured the pain and kept his cool, but Grey Watcher Xarnus kept growing angrier and angrier with every painful wound he suffered!

Whether the Grey Watcher was too inexperienced to manage his pain response or whether his altered physiology decreased his capacity for rational thought, the monster had turned almost rabid at the very end. The monstrosity became so fixated at the thought of killing the source of his pain that he had almost completely tunnel visioned on her, which was a deadly mistake in combat!

To Ketis, the transformed monster's defeat served as a very poignant lesson to her. "Power without control is wasted power."

As she ran her mind back through the battle, she began to feel unprecedentedly inspired.

The lopsided battle between her and the transformed cultist melded with her desire to design mechs to produce a preliminary mech concept that came straight from her heart!

Immense satisfaction suffused her entire mind as she imagined a mech that embodied all of the principles she used to defeat her opponent.

She wanted to design a supreme swordsman mech that excelled at dueling stronger or better opponents.

She wanted to enact her philosophy of combining power with precise control in a swordsman mech that possessed great potential as long as its mech pilot was skilled enough to make use of its strengths.

She already had a name in mind for this immature but promising mech design.

"Monster Slayer."

Minutes passed as Ketis became immersed in her ideas. Despite the blood, debris and body parts spread across the hall of the shrine, she calmly recovered from her exertion while fleshing out the Monster Slayer design in her mind.

The mech not only had to match her performance against the mutated Grey Watcher, it had to do even better!

Its sword had to be even better than the cutlass she wielded!

"I need to pair it with the best greatsword that I can design!"

This was the only way she could channel her frustration at resorting to trickery to defeat her formidable foe.

The manner in which she defeated the Grey Watcher left her without any way to obtain a trophy from his corpse.

"Maybe I should grab some freshly-produced nutrient packs on the way out. Ves will love them." She muttered.

After another minute of rest, she picked herself up from the ground and approached the decapitated corpse of Grand Protector Roshaw.

With the death of the pirate lord of Ulimo Citadel, the rest of the defenders were no longer much of a concern. The Larkinson Clan could easily defeat the remnants of the pirates as long as the anomaly receded.

Though the darkness still lingered, it already started to weaken. It wouldn't take long for the dark fog to dissipate.

In the meantime, Ketis harvested her trophies.

She filched the pirate lord's hand cannon for her own. Though its security system locked her out of using the weapon, she wasn't really interested in using it. She just wanted to display the formidable weapon in a trophy case.

After searching the deceased Grand Protector's corpse, she managed to obtain something even better. After removing the man's gauntlets, she pulled out an ornate ring from a finger.

The ring was shaped like a snake in the process of molting. Ketis appreciated its multi-layered design and took a fancy of using it to represented her contribution in the Battle of Ulimo Citadel.

Not quite satisfied with her gains, she looked around and approached the toppled statue of the so-called Unending One.

"Meow."

Lucky had climbed back up to the hole he fled into earlier. He still bore a lot of damage and needed a lot of time to recover. The cat padded over to Ketis and nuzzled his nose against her leg.

"Meoww…"

She gently brushed his back, taking care not to hit the damaged portions of his body.

"Well that was a big fight, wasn't it? I'm amazed you managed to chew through the underside of the statue!"

Lucky hadn't actually eaten through all of the material. He only swallowed a portion of what he managed to bite with his exceptional teeth. A large amount of bite-sized chunks of old metals were strewn across the base of the statue.

Even so, Lucky ingested more than enough metal to develop some indigestion! This was the other reason why he came across as tired. He ate way too many dense metals in a very short amount of time.

Though his stomach capacity was so abnormally large that it must be some dimensional pocket of sorts, even it had limits!

Ketis grabbed one of the chunks that Lucky had bitten off and discarded and decided to take it as another trophy.

Together with the damaged energised scimitar from Captain Wenter of the Hydra Battalion, she gained at least four new trophies to show off to her fellow sisters!

"It's too bad there's no one else left alive." She sighed.

Just as she thought that the outcome of the Battle of Ulimo Citadel, the floor suddenly shook! Immediately afterwards, the darkness that cloyed around her suddenly intensified!

"What!?" Ketis urgently lifted herself to her feet while holding her cutlass. "It's not over yet?!"

The darkness seemed to have come alive, and much of it started to flow out of the shrine. Just to be sure, Ketis turned around and studied the toppled statue and the ruined ritual circle underneath.

Both of them were inert! Neither of them should have any power left, so why did she feel more and more pressure from above?

"Something must be happening in space!" She quickly concluded.

"Meow!"

Both woman and cat looked at the ceiling, trying to imagine what kind of development had occurred that caused them to feel so much threat.

Ketis grew more and more nervous as she felt some primordial part of her brain shiver in terror at something many kilometers away.

The threat that had emerged must be particularly powerful for her to feel so terrified from a great distance!

Outside into space, the grey ghost mechs that continually assaulted the Larkinsons trapped inside the anomaly had only grown more and more threatening.

Ever since the ghosts merged together to form supermechs, the pressure onto the Larkinson mechs increased!

Their insane durability combined with their abnormally strong offensive power rendered them deathly against any regular third-class mech!

Not even the Bright Warrior mechs were able to last against the giant abomination mechs! Their Breyer alloy visibly crunched when struck by one of the many limbs of the giant grey mechs!

The only mech that could possibly inflict meaningful damage to it was Joshua's Quint. Every other Larkinson mech was forced to play a supporting role in order to give as much space as possible for the expert candidate to play to his strengths.

Slowly but surely, the Larkinsons managed to stem their losses and contain their great threat.

Yet just when they all thought that they had the situation under control, the darkness abruptly intensified all of a sudden!

An unexpected adverse development took place. The dark fog seemingly grew exponentially stronger while at the same time becoming less stable! Much of the order it previously exhibited was gone.

Ves winced and held his head as his heightened spiritual sensensitivy couldn't take the sheer influx of confusing stimuli.

"Something is happening! The darkness is trying to get inside!"