The Larkinsons obtained another ace pilot! This time the individual in question was unquestionably a member of the Larkinson Clan, making this event even more significant! Though General, now ’Saint General’ Ark Larkinson had generated a considerable amount of controversy and even opposition within the ranks of the clan, much of the criticism had paled now that he had entered an entirely new division of strength. Ace pilots were much further removed from mortals that comprised the vast majority of the Larkinson Clan. Even if a number of enterprising individuals had begun to make attainments in qi cultivation, there was no way they could think of challenging an ace pilot with one of the most powerful mechs developed by the Design Department. In his debut as an ace pilot, the newly arisen Saint General unquestionably proved to all of his doubters and critics that he was more than a blowhard. Slaying a lesser phase lord in battle was a massive contribution to the war effort. As the Lionheart valiantly floated before the massive corpse of Zren-Divar, the shining machine attracted a crazy amount of admiration and appreciation! The more knowledgeable mech insiders recognized that Saint General Ark Larkinson’s success had not been solely due to his own strengths and qualities. Without the support of a sufficiently powerful masterwork mech, he wouldn’t have been able to eliminate a lesser phase lord in a relatively short interval! Read new chapters at freewebnovel Both the Amaranto Mark III and the Lionheart proved that the increasingly more famous combination of Ves Larkinson and Gloriana Wodin definitely possessed a magic touch! Their high-ranking mechs were easily able to match and in a few cases exceed the power of excellent machines designed by much older and more knowledgeable Master Mech Designers. 𝓯𝙧𝓮𝓮𝒘𝓮𝙗𝙣𝒐𝒗𝒆𝓵.𝓬𝓸𝒎 Of course, that did not mean that the expert mechs and ace mechs designed by third parties were useless. For example, while the Lionheart played the hero and saved Venerable Rosa Orfan and Venerable Jannzi from imminent doom, the Amphis Extremis had gone above and beyond to hold back Herald of the Void by itself! Saint Linda Cross pulled out all of the stops and decisively activated the Volcanic Outburst Mode of the latest version of the Magma Vein System. It was as if the same unlocking of limiters that made the Cleansing Light so strong applied to the entire mech frame of the Amphis Extremis! While the principles were remarkably similar, the complexity of achieving the latter was far greater! It was extremely difficult to overcharge almost every electrical component of an entire mech, especially a high-end one that incorporated numerous cutting-edge and experimental technologies. However, this was exactly the area where Master Benedict Cortez excelled at. He knew precisely how far he could push certain components and how overloading several interconnected systems may affect each other in a way that caused their instability to explode. The Magma Vein System had to be improved and expanded upon in order to cope with all of these potential disaster scenarios. Even so, the Amphis Extremis would have exploded a long time ago if it wasn’t being reinforced by Saint Linda’s powerful true resonance! For several minutes on end, the Amphis Extremis had been fighting much harder than the Lionheart just to be able to stand its ground against a greater phase lord. The Herald of the Void was not as easy to stop as Zren-Divar. The former was larger, stronger, more massive and far more adept at manipulating the surrounding space with his spatial abilities. The Amphis Extremis forcefully charged through gravity wells and warped space and slammed its mace against the greater phase lord’s spatial barrier with greater force and mass than a weapon of this size should carry! Unlike Saint Stark and Saint General Ark, Saint Linda Cross had enough time to develop more effectively ways to leverage her domain field. Whenever her Amphis Extremis swung her Wrecker Skull, the chain extended by several times while its Saint Kingdom generated an energy manifestation that caused the destructive skull-shaped ball to appear a lot larger than before! The impact damage generated from the collision was so strong that even the Herald of the Void was taken aback! Before the greater phase lord could even attempt a counterattack, the overheating Amphis Extremis had already circled around before charging directly forward, allowing its tower shield with the iconic emblem of the Cross Clan to collide against the massive alien’s spatial barrier like a battering ram! On and on the Amphis Extremis attacked. The Ace offensive space knight had raised its tempo to the highest level. Its momentum rose higher, causing the Herald of the Void to feel increasingly more suffocated by the repeated heavy impacts that were taking a toll on his strong but ultimately finite spatial barrier. What Saint Linda Cross and the Amphis Extremis were able to do was just as impressive as what Saint General Ark Larkinson and the Lionheart had accomplished. Unfortunately, the performance of the Amphis Extremis was not as flashy, so it failed to attract as much attention as the bright and shining Lionheart. "The Amphis Extremis won’t be able to hold out like this for long. The Volcanic Outburst Mode imposes a huge amount of strain on many of its internal components. Once the ace mech exits this mode, it will fall into a period of prolonged weakness." The good news was that the Amphis Extremis would not have to exit the battlefield right away. The bad news was that the ace offensive space knight would become a lot less effective at holding back the Herald of the Void! This was a ticking time bomb that weighed heavily in the minds of Saint Commander Casella Ingvar and other senior commanding officers. None of this mattered all that much to Saint General Ark Larkinson. He had secured the most important objective in his mind, which was to finally trigger his breakthrough. As his forced resonance state began to subside, the latest ace pilot of the Larkinson Clan already began to feel tired. His accumulation was considerably greater than that of the other Larkinson ace pilots, but any breakthrough event was inherently exhausting. "I am falling back." He decisively transmitted. The Lionheart’s glow dimmed as the machine made a triumphant return to the Letven Archon, a fleet carrier that served as the flagship of the 77th Warborn Mech Division. Ark had already made arrangements to transfer his command authority to his deputies. The 77th Warborn Mech Division incorporated many talents from the Larkinson Clan and Cross Clan, so he had little concerns that they would drop the ball all of a sudden. The final battle that decided the ownership of the Viola Magnifica System had entered into a new phase. The native alien combatants had received successive shocks to their morale. The unexpectedly early demise of Khaso Leiyen was one thing. Saint Davia Stark and her recently upgraded Amaranto Mark III had proven to be unreasonably powerful at a distance, but they had already withdrawn from the battlefield. What the alien soldiers did not expect was for the infamous Larkinson Clan to spawn yet another ace pilot during the same battle! Another orven lesser phase lord got killed! This had a devastating impact on the mental state of the orven soldiers that piloted a large amount of alien phasefighters and crewed a sizable portion of the alien armada! Many of them were devout worshipers of their native gods. To see two of them fall in front of them in sequence caused them to suffer doubts and fears that they never entertained in the past. How come their gods were so weak? Were they truly divine in the first place? What if the humans were about to kill the last remaining orven phase god on this battlefield? The successive demise of Khaso Leiyen and Zren-Divar had put the Eight Lord of Takansha into a precarious position! The erudite lesser phase lord was the only leader left who represented the orven race in this engagement. Many orvens that previously looked up to the dead orven phase lords had all turned their desperate and fateful eyes towards the Eight Lord of Takansha. Though the remaining surviving orven god was able to rely on his strong control over spatial barriers to shield himself and his allies from damage, he had become a lot less enthusiastic about pressing the attack! The Eight Lord noticeably changed his approach. He had already been fighting fairly cautiously up to now, but now that he was the only orven god left in the fight, he did not dare to launch any serious counterattacks at the expert mechs that were battering at his defenses! The orven phase lord had studied enough about human expert pilots that there was always a small chance for them to break through during battle. The greater the pressure, the greater the likelihood of triggering a breakthrough! The solution devised by the Eight Lord was fairly simple. He purposefully restrained his aggression and switched to a full turtling strategy! This maximized his defenses and minimized the chance of suffering an ’accident’. Of course, this did not mean that the Eight Lord was willing to let the Everchanger, the Greenaxe and the Bloodripper pummel his spatial barriers with impunity. The three living expert mechs had teamed up to pressure the last remaining orven phase lord. So far, the Greenaxe had taken the lead in attacking the Eight Lord of Takansha’s spatial barriers up close. Its iconic green-tinted greataxe swung against the spatial barrier with great force and destructive momentum! Each resonance-empowered blow inflicted a considerable amount of damage to the integrity of a spatial barrier, thereby forcing the Eight Lord to reinforce the barrier or replace it with another one in order to shield his own body against this deadly axe! The Bloodripper meanwhile tried to act as a persistent nuisance by circling around and unleashing a torrent of phase disruptor beams from his Copperpill, a fairly light but potent fourth generation luminar crystal submachine gun. The persistent damage inflicted by the Bloodripper steadily wore down the Eight Lord’s energy reserves, especially when the expert harasser mech flew close enough for his space suppression module to take effect on the spatial barriers. The Everchanger looked a bit out of place among these two specialized expert mechs. His outdated Vitalus luminar crystal rifle inflicted less damage than the Copperpill and was virtually useless against a phase lord that excelled in defense. Fortunately, the new Bitter Scimitar was a much more powerful weapon! The D-arm that had been especially prepared by Ves and Ketis made its first formal debut on the battlefield. While the damage inflicted by a single slash from this extraordinary artifact came close to the damage inflicted by the Scarlet Ember that the Everchanger carried previously, the advantage was that it did not drain the Everchanger’s energy reserves dry within a handful of minutes! This should have given the Everchanger a massive advantage, allowing it to inflict as much damage if not more than a dedicated expert melee mech like the Greenaxe! However, as the Everchanger repeatedly struck one spatial barrier after another, the Bitter Scimitar started to grow unruly. The weapon resisted the expert hero mech’s grip and occasionally inflicted less damage than it was supposed to. It became very clear to Venerable Joshua and the Everchanger that the D-arm’s demonic artifact spirit had grown dissatisfied at the target of their attacks! "Be patient, scimitar!" Venerable Joshua exhapseratingly tried to placate the impatient D-arm. "These phase lords always hide behind their spatial barriers, and this one just happens to be really strong at them. If you cooperate with us and help us take down these spatial barriers faster, you will get your wish and spill alien blood, I promise!" The Bitter Swordsman reacted violently and caused the D-arm to shake even more violently than before. The powerful weapon actually looked as if it wanted to escape its wielder’s grip! "Why are you being so impatient! I told you that you will get to cut through real flesh in time, but first we need to tear them all down!" Joshua’s initial experience with wielding the Bitter Scimitar in actual battle was anything but positive up to this point. He was already expending a considerable amount of effort just to keep the impatient and unruly weapon under control!