Chapter 6021 Breakthrough Ambitions 6021 Breakthrough Ambitions Venerable Brutus Wodin wordlessly shook his head in disapproval. Commander Melkor's damaged mech failed to move for several long seconds. Eventually, the Avatar Commander wised up and moved his Fey Fianna to the rear. It was not as if Brutus was unsympathetic towards Melkor Larkinson. Every mech pilot yearned to become a hero one day. Even male Hexers dreamed of becoming strong enough to serve as the shields of the female Hexers. However, greatness could not be attained by being recklessly suicidal in combat. Theories about breakthrough triggers varied, but Brutus personally believed that mech pilots needed to be sincere in their approach towards combat. They needed to fight with the intent to survive and overcome any challenges in their way! Sometimes, that meant making the sensible decision to perform a tactical retreat. There was nothing shameful about backing away from a disadvantageous situation if doing so would lead to better results down the line. Commander Melkor wouldn't do anyone on his side any favors if he foolishly overextended himself before getting himself killed. Morale among the Avatars of Myth would plunge, and many Larkinsons would probably go crazy as they attempted to make up for the shame of losing their commander! This was exactly why Commander Casella Ingvar had approached Venerable Brutus before the battle with a request to keep an eye on the Avatar Commander. "I am always happy to fulfill a request from a charming lady such as yourself, but why do you seek my assistance in particular? Venerable Davia Stark and Venerable Isobel Kotin can already provide support from a distance. You are also in a position to lend him aid from your Minerva." Casella crossed her arms. "The Amaranto and the Promethea are some of our best anti-ship assets. More importantly than that, I do not want to insult Commander Melkor by exposing the fact that our ranged expert pilots have been ordered to babysit him. It would shatter his self-esteem and put him in the wrong state of mind. You are much better placed to save him in the upcoming battle. Your expert mech's firepower is not strong enough to put you on ship elimination duty. If the Torment Fleet deploys a large number of phasefighters, then you are much better suited to whittle down their numbers. You can do this while at the same time position yourself to prevent Melkor's demise." "He will not appreciate it, especially if he finds out." Brutus frowned. "I will do as you ask, but if I am compelled to intervene to save his life over that of other mech pilots, then I will disclose the reason for doing so. His honor and my honor insist on it. After that, I will extend any special favors to him. There are many other soldiers on the battlefield that are equally deserving of my help. I would much rather intervene to save the life of a woman rather than Melkor." "He is family, you know. You are married to a Larkinson, and so is your sister." "That is true, but I will not let family affection override Melkor's desire to risk his life for a chance of ascension. Coddling him may keep him alive, but it will kill his fighting spirit." A tense pause ensued as Casella recognized the truth of that statement. She was an expert pilot as well. The female commander eventually let out a sigh. "Not every Larkinson is equal. Melkor is an important contributor to the Larkinson Clan's early development and rise to power. Let us do this, then. You only need to pay special attention to him and save his life once. Hopefully, Melkor will have learned a lesson from his near-death experience and adjust his mentality so that he will no longer behave so recklessly." "Reckless mech pilots tend to be the most willful pilots of all. If you deprive them of their willingness to confront enemies that they cannot overcome under normal circumstances…" There was no need for Brutus to finish that sentence. "Once is enough." Casella said. "If he continues to take disproportionate risks, then he must bear the consequences of his actions. Perhaps only by coming closer to death will he have a chance to succeed." Although Venerable Brutus did not believe that Melkor possessed the qualities to break through, he had already fulfilled Casella's request. While Melkor's shabby Fey Fianna beat a hasty retreat, the Star Dancer Mark II continued to advance forward! Unlike other rifleman mechs, the Hexer expert rifleman mech boldly flew in the middle of enemy formations and rapidly fired one resonance-empowered transphasic energy beam after another at many different targets. Brutus had deliberately reduced the power of the Hexacris rifle in order to increase its firing rate, but it still managed to unleash enough power to overwhelm the transphasic energy shields and sear a hole into each and every alien phasefighter. This was because his resonance strength had grown just as rapidly as the Larkinson expert pilots as of late! With the help of the general cultivation elixirs provided by the Larkinsons, Brutus felt much stronger than a couple of years prior. Now that he had just managed to become an ace pilot candidate, he was already thinking about forcing his next breakthrough! Although his chances of breaking through were low due to his irregular growth and the limitations of his outdated expert mech, Venerable Brutus was at least able to work on his courage and momentum in advance. Even though his bold behavior had caused hundreds of alien phasefighters to direct their firepower towards his Star Dancer Mark II, their retaliatory fire was completely ineffective! Just as the machine's suggested, The Star Dancer was highly maneuverable and easily evaded many incoming attacks no matter which direction they came from. The aliens had yet to learn how to coordinate their fire so that they could envelop their targets into unavoidable grids, so Brutus found it remarkably easier to dance around the firepower of the inflexible enemy small craft. Even if the sheer volume of fire still caused his expert rifleman mech to get struck by ranged attacks, the powerful resonance shield easily withstood the damage without much consumption. Now that Brutus had reached the strength of a high-tier expert pilot, he was much better able to utilize his willpower to forcibly negate the damage inflicted by enemy attacks! "If Saint Tusa can do it, then so can I!" Brutus exclaimed as his Star Dancer's rifle began to overheat due to his insistence on raising its firing rate. "I need to kill faster. I can still exceed my limits!" Venerable Brutus was not the only expert pilot who became inspired by Tusa's breakthrough. Every high-tier expert pilot of the expeditionary fleet tried their own ways of taking on greater challenges and tapping into their hidden potential. Further away, one of the modern alien battleships of the Torment Fleet had begun to perform more erratically over time. Even though her excellent coverage of segmented multi- layered azure energy shields easily resisted the ranged attack salvos from the distant human mechs, the alien vessel began to suffer more and more malfunctions and inexplicable deaths. It was not until the orven command crew got slaughtered in a single fell swoop that the remaining alien crew discovered that they were being haunted by demons! None of the aliens were aware that a very hidden expert stealth mech had been shadowing their homeship for several minutes. Despite all of the havoc wreaked by the expert mech's Geist System, the aliens failed to connect the dots, thereby allowing the Phobos to lurk in the vicinity. What was even more remarkable was that Venerable Zimro Belson and his living expert mech were able to escalate the damage they inflicted onto the alien battleship over time! In fact, the Phobos ordinarily shouldn't be able to compromise the enemy vessel when she had erected all of her energy defenses. However, Venerable Zimro and his Phobos were both living beings. This meant that they possessed the capacity to grow and adapt! Zimro and his battle partner had long become frustrated by the inability for his Geist System to infiltrate enemy vessels when they had erected their transphasic energy shields. This was why they both conducted focused training and learning on how to allow them to sneak the fiends anchored to the Geist System to quietly slip through energy shields no matter whether they were transphasic! Their efforts paid off. What was supposed to be impossible no longer applied to the pair. With great effort, Zimro and the Phobos carefully wrapped a fiend with their true resonance and essentially tried to smuggle the dangerous ghost past the multiple layers of azure energy shields. The concentration and effort required to sneak a fiend past such formidable barriers was great, but as long as the Phobos remained undetected and undisturbed, Zimro was confident that he would be able to succeed! "....Haaahahahaaaaaa…" The fiend uttered a haunting laugh once the intangible monster finally found himself inside one of the vessel's compartments. After receiving his instructions from the Geist System, the spiritual fiend grinned, revealing disturbingly sharp and long fangs. "....Killllllll….!" Orven crew members began to drop dead for inexplicable reasons while delicate components got torn into pieces! One of the older fiends that was coincidentally named Nosferatu the Tormented proved to be especially fearsome! As the first fiend to infiltrate the enemy vessel, the fiend already slayed more enemy aliens than the other fiends! After sapping the life out of every officer in what passed for the alien vessel's bridge, Nosferatu utilized the strength granted by Zimro's true resonance to unscrupulously drain the lives of the reinforcing orven crew members as well as hundreds of staff that were stationed in the surrounding compartments. The disruptions caused by his death directly caused the hyper battleship to fall into a state of paralysis, thereby making it less likely for the Phobos to become exposed! Meanwhile, two powerful expert rifleman mechs were doing their jobs by besieging enemy warships in the rear. The Amaranto had set aside her Instrument of Vengeance and relied on the superior firepower of the much larger Instrument of Doom to shatter and overwhelm the transphasic energy shields of numerous orven sub-capital warships all by herself! Once the expert rifleman mech managed to create a hole in an enemy vessel's energy shield coverage, Venerable Davia Stark had already done her job even if the gap only lasted for a few seconds! This was because the Promethea was able to exploit these momentary gap to fire a strong resonance-empowered purple fire beam that started a fire on the enemy vessel's exposed hull! As long as the Promethea managed to land a single shot with her Ignitron luminar crystal rifle, Venerable Isobel Kotin was able to feed the flames and caused them to engulf more and more parts of the hull until it was too late for the enemy vessel! "Ya ya ya!" The reason why just a single attack from the Promethea was already able to spell the doom of any exposed enemy warship was because Isobel's companion spirit had become particularly good at raising the heat! As long as Kiroshi piggybacked on the resonance-empowered fire beam, the flaming purple cat was able to blend into the other King Killer Flames while quietly working to spread them towards anything nearby that looked vulnerable and important enough! Although Isobel felt satisfied for being able to relieve the expeditionary fleet by single-handedly burning down several enemy vessels, she did not feel this was enough to trigger her second apotheosis. She needed to conquer a greater challenge or perform a more impossible feat in order to transcend for a second time! "Transphasic energy shields." She uttered. "It is frustrating that they continually prevent me from burning down these alien ships. How can I make them catch fire?" If she could evolve her fire to the point where she could burn energy shields despite how it should be impossible according to science, then Isobel became certain she would be able to turn into a Saint!