The Mech Touch

Ves and many other people seated in Block L watched with increasing horror as the entire situation in the Government District deteriorated in a short amount of time.

They barely had any time to react to the abrupt arrival of a group of large and dangerous beasts in the middle of the central plaza.

The beasts barely took time to get their bearings before they immediately sought to attack the humans in the vicinity.

No one could figure out why the brutish monsters unanimously chose to go on the attack instead of trying to run away, but the fact of the matter was that every seating block turned into an eligible target at this point!

Ves scarcely managed to jump to his feet and unpack his Unending Regalia before three bright and hot energy beams exploded from the maws of the three largest and more remarkable beasts!

"AHHH! THEY'RE GONE! THEY'RE ALL GONE!"

In the places of the U-shaped formation where two seating blocks were previously hovering, nothing was left except for half-molten pieces of slag!

"What happened to their energy shields?! Attacks of this magnitude shouldn't be able to break the shields of our blocks so easily. It's impossible for them to be so weak!"

Ves hurriedly equipped his Unending Regalia while providing clarification based on what he managed to observe.

As a transcendent who evolved into something of a phase lord himself, he and Veronica could clearly sense that many of the organisms down below possessed extremely special properties that significantly elevated their threat level!

"These beasts are not normal creatures. They are phasewater beasts! Each of their attacks can bypass or overwhelm transphasic energy shields with greater ease!"

"I recognize some of these beasts." A hospital director working for Freewell Medical Services uttered. "If I am not mistaken, these are the captured exobeasts and experimental warbeasts that should have been locked away inside the holding pens underneath the campus of the Davute Biotech University. The former are already dangerous on their own, but the latter are even worse as they are specifically made to crush mechs!"

"Who brought them here?! Shouldn't they be locked in their cages?!"

Panic and incomprehension rapidly spread among the audience. If two of the seating blocks could be felled by the alien beasts, then so could all of the other ones!

All of their previous poise and confidence was nowhere to be seen as they fell under the sway of their own fears!

"GET US OUT OF HERE!"

"Where are our mech armies?!"

Many children began to cry and sought shelter from their parents, which didn't help all of that much because a lot of adults were barely able to maintain their wits in the face of all of this death and destruction!

Only the Larkinsons exhibited a lot more discipline and control. Though the children and the non-combatants among them did not react well to the outbreak of violence, almost all of them had been riding aboard the same starships that took part in multiple dangerous expeditions. Their tolerance towards life-threatening situations was remarkably better than normal!

Ves was most proud with the reactions of his soldiers.

The officers of the Larkinson Army did not possess any advance warning of what might happen today.

That did not stop them from rising to the occasion. They pressed their more vulnerable clansmen back and tried their best to meet any incoming threat, though there was not much they could do without access to arms.

Everyone implicitly knew that there was no way they could protect themselves against the scale of attacks launched by these mech-sized beasts.

Only mechs or heavier war platforms could adequately handle these cruel but surprisingly strong warbeasts!

Fortunately, the Government District was not short of mechs.

Compared to the streets and avenues that had descended into chaos, the central plaza area was much better protected and organized.

The first mechs to respond there were ace mechs as their pilots were much more powerful and much faster to respond.

Of the three ace mechs that were stationed in this crucial area, the Shotgun Shogun was the first to bear the brunt of alien firepower!

Even as Block E and Block Y vaporized and melted into unrecognizable ruins, Block M still managed to hold on for the time being despite the unexpected weakening of its energy shield!

"HAAAAAAA!"

As soon as one of the strange multi-colored dragon-like creatures spat out a transphasic heat beam of unsurpassed might and penetration power, the ace striker mech did its best to block and weaken the destructive energies that sought to kill off everyone sitting in Block M!

As soon as the incoming energy beam struck in the direction of this seating block, Master Benedict Cortez had already been prepared to activate his emergency single-use personal teleporter and disappear from the heart of this calamity zone.

It was only his great reluctance to use up a precious life-saving device that he had exchanged from the Association for a hefty amount of MTA merits that had stayed his hands.

Seeing that the Shotgun Shogun was holding on for now, Master Benedict held back from squandering one of his most valuable assets in vain and hovered in solidarity with his fellow Crossers.

The incredible output of the multi-colored warbeast completely washed the area directly in front of the Shotgun Shogun with heat and energy!

Even as the Davutan ace mech's Saint Kingdom constantly sapped the strength of the heat beam the further it proceeded, a small portion of the heat still bypassed the solid frame of the machine and passed through the other side!

The energy shield covering Block M slightly strained to resist the incoming remnant heat and energy.

It was a pity that the Shotgun Shogun was not a true defensive mech like the Indormeon!

Its relatively thick transphasic armor system more than satisfied its own defensive needs, but aside from its Saint Kingdom, the ace mech lacked any ability to mitigate damage across a wider area!

"We... we are saved!"

The people who had originally been marked for death managed to obtain a stay of execution when they saw that the Shotgun Shogun's early arrival had allowed them to escape the same fate that had befallen the victims assigned to Block E and Block Y!

The two ruined seating blocks had long lost all of their power and antigrav modules. With nothing able to keep them aloft, they rapidly lost altitude until the large and ruined constructs of metal crashed against the plaza surface as if they were pieces of discarded ship debris!

"NO BEAST IS ALLOWED TO RUN WILD UNDER MY WATCH!" Saint Antai Shogi roared as his fury amplified his true resonance and caused his ace striker mech's shotgun to charge up an attack of great power!

As the colorful wormdragon creature looked as if it had overdrawn half of its life to unleash such a ridiculously powerful heat beam attack, the creature hastily activated one of its phasewater organs to produce a wobbly spatial shield.

The other wormdragons that had succeeded in their initial strike noticed that threat posed by the Shotgun Shogun was considerable.

They simultaneously generated their own spatial shields, thereby causing three of them in total to cover their group!

Saint Antai Shogi didn't care. The beasts that had managed to kill off hundreds of important VIPs and almost managed to reap more lives with their powerful biological attacks had completely enraged him! The creatures needed to be dealt with before they could inflict any more damage!

"WIPE THE BOARD."

With a single pull of the trigger, the oversized transphasic shotgun held by the ace striker mech opened fire, producing a discharge that outputted both physical projectiles and lots of energy!

This time, not even Master Benedict Cortez could observe what happened! His augmented eyes strained with the excess of resonance-empowered energies that burst out of the powerful shotgun!

The effect was immediate.

The special ammunition utilized by the shotgun tore through the spatial shields as if they did not exist and slammed straight into the fleshy bodies of the three wormdragons!

The monstrous beasts did not die immediately, but they sustained serious injuries as their bioengineered bodies sustained massive injuries as the resonance-empowered projectiles tore through their flesh and bones.

The Shotgun Shogun charged up for another attack and opened fire again, unleashing an incendiary attack that made it seem as if the ace striker mech had breathed out a concentrated pulse of fire!

This time, the bodies of the wormdragons screamed to their deaths as their weakened and heavily injured bodies could not resist the resonance-empowered flames.

Their horrible flesh burned into ash while their bones crumbled as well.

All three warbeasts ultimately didn't stand a chance against a single ace mech!

It was unfortunate that the seating blocks were placed too far apart from each other and that the Shotgun Shogun could not save all of the seating blocks.

In fact, if an explosive assassination attack hadn't taken out the CEO of the Pennylane Planetary Shipping Company, Saint Antai would have never brought his ace mech to such a convenient position in advance.

Saint Antai wasn't stupid. He figured out that the two events were not only perpetrated by different actors, but that they also worked against each other!

However, this was not the time for him to conduct an investigation. The three wormdragons had been taken care of, but there were still plenty of other dangerous beasts that had managed to spread out since their appearance!

Fortunately, most of the seating blocks floated high enough in the air to prevent most of the hostile creatures from threatening the other VIPs.

Not all of the beasts were able to attack at a distance. Though a number of them could output weaker energy beams or spit out globs of corrosive acids, most creatures could only savage their prey with their limbs or their teeth.

Still, after finding out that they could not reach their desired targets, the bloodthirsty warbeasts were already starting to run towards the sides where dense crowds of people were hastily trying to fly away or evacuate to the nearest emergency shelters!

"STOP THEM ALL!"

Seeing that the threat targeted against Block M had passed, the Shotgun Shogun quickly flew away so that it could intercept the other beasts and blast them all to bits at more effective angles of fire.

The VIPs sheltering inside the fragile energy shield of Block M felt awfully exposed again.

"Get us out of here!"

"Let us leave this place at once!"

"Where are our mechs?!"

There was no justification to allow the seating blocks to hover conspicuously in the air. No matter how much the colonial government wanted to portray an image of absolute control, it was not acceptable to put the surviving VIPs at risk.

After a short delay, Block M along with all of the other surviving seating blocks began to split apart and followed several different evacuation routes that should eventually bring them to highly secure underground hangars.

A large number of military mechs belatedly arrived and escorted the vulnerable blocks to ensure that no beast could target them unopposed.

After the departure of the Shotgun Shogun, Master Benedict Cortez finally dared to think about the sequence of events that ultimately led to this situation.

He put his considerable analytical mind to use by processing Ves' cryptic warning, the assassination of Arthur Pennylane, the arrival of an ace striker mech and the sudden appearance and surprise attack from a cultivated warbeast.

The possible conclusions he drew from all of these clues did not sit well with him. Though his expression remained carefully neutral, internally he was seething with fury.

He only clenched his fist for a single second before he shifted his attention elsewhere.

He first needed to take care of his own survival before he could pursue other priorities.

"Where are our guards! Recall them to our positions and prepare to move out as soon as our mechs arrive. We will remain targets if we continue to stay on this faulty block!"