Chapter 6069 Irreconcilable Enemies 6069 Irreconcilable Enemies Two distorted mechs faced each other. Though both of their forced resonance states had diminished by a large extent, the two machines still looked vigorous enough to support at least one more exchange of blows! Their clash was inevitable. The original causes that had led them to stand opposite to each other no longer mattered anymore. Both recently ascended demigods had their own reasons to turn hostile against each other! At the very least, if they wanted to live, they instinctively felt they needed to see this battle through the end! It was strange for them to become utterly fixated on each other as the Emperor Tree was not a negligible threat. Even if it had redirected much of its attention and resources towards capturing or destroying the First Sword and the Everchanger, the calamity plant still directed a bit of effort towards crushing the other two mechs! However, its ability to distort the perceptions of the two mech pilots no longer worked now that their willpower had undergone a qualitative evolution. The surviving wooden mechs that kept their distance and launched hardened seeds at the two mechs accomplished nothing as the temporary resonance shields resisted all of the sporadic damage. The root spikes that Taon and his living mech previously feared not too long ago literally did nothing to shake the mutated Zeal. In their worlds, Lanie and Taon only registered each other as their ultimate foes. The two expert pilots appeared like polar opposites in many ways. Lanie burned hot with rage. Her willpower flared with unrelenting fury towards the perpetrator that had almost caused her to lose her life! Her extraordinary rage literally remolded the Elegant Rage into a mech of thorns. The fused metals and wood clad the broken and spontaneously repaired with armor that seemed to be expressly designed to hurt anyone who dared to lay a hand on Lanie again! In fact, the resonance-empowered Devora Cannon strike that almost managed to overpower the Elegant Rage's defenses had caused the latter's spikes to grow even sharper and deadlier! The Elegant Rage's thorns looked as if they could pierce the Zeal full of devastating holes just by rolling around! "Ma-aow!" Kelly had become irrevocably changed by her principal's desperate breakthrough. Her appearance changed from a normal Burmese cat coloring to a dark green form that resembled the color of the Emperor Tree's leaves. The reason for this visual mutation was quite obvious. The spiritual cat had become filled with life that originally belonged to others. By stealing a minute proportion of Joshua and the Emperor Tree's energies, Kelly had embarked on a path of predation where the most effective way to promote her strength was to leech it away from others! The cat had currently forced her way into one of the thorns that covered the Elegant Rage, giving it a hungry green glow. The companion spirit looked forward to draining all of the life out of Taon and Sirca's miserable forms! In contrast to his adversary's unbridled rage, Taon had descended into an exceptionally negative mood at the moment. An extraordinarily powerful air of gloom surrounded his mutated heavy artillery mech. The root spikes and everything else surrounding the Zeal seemed to age and crumble into ruin one way or another. Even the dirt where the Zeal was resting upon was drying out and growing feebler than before! The only substance that remained untouched by the Zeal's aura of ruin was the particles of Solus Gas that engulfed the surroundings. The Zeal actually seemed comfortable in the midst of all of this exotic gas. It had even absorbed portions of Solus Gas as the mech frame mutated into a rusted form. The malaise produced by Taon's willpower rejected everything else aside from his own companion spirit. "Hoot hoot." The evolved owl looked a lot different than before. The owl grew more mysterious and less defined. It was as if any attempts to observe it through multiple different senses would only result in a dark fog that vaguely resembled the previous form of Sirca! Not only did Sirca become more difficult to perceive, but when he blended into the Zeal, the mech became a bit more difficult to probe and track! The companion spirit's influence caused the Zeal to exude a profound rejection towards reality. It was as if the heavy artillery mech rejected any form of attention or friendship from others and wanted to disappear from their sights. Of course, that did not affect Lanie's tracking. She was too close and her hatred towards Taon was too strong for her to lose such a large and obvious target! There was one more obvious discrepancy that set the two crazed expert pilots apart from each other. Lanie stuck by the Elegant Rage. She never lost her trust and camaraderie towards her battle partner. Kelly even put a lot of effort into piecing the mech back together. For her part, the living mech unconditionally supported her battle partner. The Elegant Rage had suffered not one, but two catastrophic blows, each of which possessed the power to shatter her frame and cause her pilot to lose her life. Threatening her own existence was one thing. Threatening to take away Lanie's life was another thing! There was no way the Elegant Rage could tolerate Taon's outrageous attempts of murdering her battle partner! Together, the mech and pilot became of one mind. Only by joining forces would they be able to exact retribution! "Taon must die!" "TAON MUST PERISH!" In contrast to Lanie, Taon had evidently decided to go alone. Only Sirca remained by his side, but that was because his companion spirit was just another part of himself. Different from before, the Zeal had lost signs of independent life. While it was still technically a living mech, it had lost the most essential spark of life that defined its former existence. The passing of the Zeal was an unmitigated tragedy! The third order living mech had lost its personality and turned into a spiritual shell that Taon and Sirca claimed as their own. Even though the expert pilot and his mutated companion spirit were able to fill the void adequately enough, they were ultimately very different from the existence that had previously been born upon the creation of the masterwork mech! Though the death of the Zeal's independent personality undoubtedly represented a massive loss to the Larkinson Clan, Taon remained completely unmoved by this development. He exhibited no remorse or guilt towards the brazen murder of his former battle partner. From Taon's perspective, nobody else could be trusted anymore. He had been misled and brought to ruin because of his propensity to depend on others. Taon was done with relying on them. He had completely lost faith in Ylvaine. The former object of his worship was no better than the Emperor Tree as far as he was concerned. Both of them were manipulative gods that brought nothing good to his life! Having seen the truth of their deceptive practices, Taon had taken upon himself to bring them all down to his level! He would never rest until each and every false god had been ruined at his hands! Neither the Great Prophet nor his living mech could be trusted to support him anymore! If they were not with him, then they were against him. There was no way his old friends and family would support his cause, particularly when he wanted to ruin some of their precious design spirits! "Lanie…" The two irreconcilable enemies seemed poised to attack each other. As their unstable willpower honed in on each other's machines, the two mechs simultaneously took action! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Four resonance-empowered heavy artillery shells launched from the Zeal's mutated cannons and blasted the entire air space above into explosions that corroded the very air! The Elegant Rage charged forward and had become partially affected by all of the explosions. Though the living mech's unstable resonance shield became even shakier, the melee mech at least managed to avoid getting too close to the powerful blasts. In fact, the explosions may have depleted the Elegant Rage's defenses, but they had also fed her thorns, causing them to grow longer and accumulate more counterattack energy! There was no way that Lanie would allow her target to live long enough to unleash another salvo of explosive attacks! There was only one chance left for the Zeal to repel the Elegant Rage, but there was so little time left that it seemed impossible for Taon to land a direct hit on the much faster and more maneuverable melee mech! The Elegant Rage in her transformed and temporarily empowered state had become a much more potent instrument in the hands of Lanie! Her breakthrough may have gone off-track, but she still gained all of the power and the skill expected of a newly ascended expert pilot! If Taon still had access to a handy prophet like Ylvaine, then perhaps he might have been able to accomplish the impossible and land a precision blow on the blazingly fast Elegant Rage. However, Taon had already forsaken Ylvaine and every other false god that was undeserving of his faith and piety. If he wanted to do a job right, then he could only rely on himself! BOOOOOOM! Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack! The mutated shape of the Zeal fundamentally altered the Devora Cannon to the point where it transformed into a completely different weapon system! Instead of launching a single solid super-heavy transphasic hyper gauss round, it launched a flechette of sharp and messy flechettes that possessed much of the same properties as the original projectile! Over a hundred different sharp and jagged metal shards sprayed from the muzzle and shot upwards in a wide spread! Many shards struck nothing and continued to soar through the Solus Gas until they disappeared from sight. However, several dozen still managed to strike the charging Elegant Rage! Her faltering resonance shield broke entirely, causing her thorn-covered mech frame to suffer multiple serious punctures! Some of the flechettes even managed to penetrate straight through the limbs, causing an arm and a leg to almost become severed from the rest of the frame! While the mutated Devora Cannon strike had definitely inflicted severe damage to the Elegant Rage, it failed to disable the aggressive living mech, let alone arrest her momentum! "TAAAAAAOOON!" CRASH! The two mechs collided against each other! The Elegant Rage most definitely incurred much more impact damage than the opposing heavy mech, but Lanie did not care as her enemy was finally in her grasp! Unfortunately, the melee mech had lost her grip on the Heartsword, but the long and energetic thorns that had grown out of the mech frame finally had a chance to serve their purpose! The Elegant Rage rabidly embraced the much larger Zeal and tried to roll and press in all of her thorns through the resonance shield and into the solid layers of first-class alloys. "Ahh! It hurts!" Taon strangely screamed in pain despite the fact that none of the thorns were long enough to affect his body! It appeared that the power of Lanie's revenge-fueled counterattacks mysteriously acquired the ability to induce pain on a conceptual level! In this sense, Taon's decision to kill the Zeal and take over its shell had backfired on him! There was no living personality anymore that could suffer the pain in his stead! However, Taon was not a little girl who was vulnerable to passing out after suffering a single scrape. He forcibly endured the pain, having already suffered much worse not too long ago. How could the pain of feeling betrayed by Ylvaine and his own senses compare to the stings of Lanie's thorns? While the Elegant Rage struggled to cause more serious harm to the Zeal and more importantly its pilot, Taon still retained enough sense to know that he was in deep trouble. If he was not able to dislodge the melee mech, Lanie would get to him sooner or later! Unfortunately, it was already too late to stop the Elegant Rage now that she was literally hugging a heavy artillery mech! The thorns had already punctured and disabled the four heavy artillery cannons. Lanie's mech was currently focusing on disabling the mutated Devora Cannon at this time! If not for the fact that the weapon barrel had become so much thicker at the base, the Elegant Rage would have been able cripple it sooner! There was nothing the Zeal could do to stop the enemy machine from rampaging. The mutated Zeal may be able to exert a corrosive effect on nearby objects, but the Elegant Rage's inherent resilience and constant regeneration prevented it from suffering damage through this method. This caused Taon to grow more desperate. His eyes grew more gloomy as he began to think about taking more desperate measures. His eyes suddenly flashed when he gained an idea. "If you won't let go… then I will take you down with me, Lanie!" Taon did not really think his idea through. He just wanted to get the Elegant Rage off him at all cost! With a single command, he forcibly deactivated the safeties of all of the remaining explosive shells that the Zeal retained. With another command, Taon forcibly armed all of the shells. He programmed them to detonate all at once after receiving a single signal. Just as the maddened expert pilot was about to issue a command that might very well cause his own mech and his body to explode into pieces, a sudden development occurred that shook the entire battlefield! "INCOMING!" BOOOOOOOOOOM! BOOOOOOOOOOM! BOOOOOOOOOOM! BOOOOOOOOOOM! BOOOOOOOOOOM! Five exceptionally powerful streaks rapidly descended from orbit and struck the trunk as well as the ground around the Emperor Tree! The sudden orbital bombardment and subsequent shockwaves completely interrupted every action and shook every mech and mech pilot! Even the tree shook as its massive trunk suffered significant damage that caused a part of its inner core to become exposed, if only briefly! The shockwaves of the orbital bombardment had forcibly flung the Elegant Rage away from her prey. The mutated metal and wooden mech tumbled away and rolled on the ground until her thorn-covered form finally came to a stop. The Zeal on the other hand had been pushed away to the point where it had tipped sideways! The damaged and crippled machine had lost all of its ability to move or do anything useful. Lanie did not miss this important fact. Her Elegant Rage may have gotten banged up from the strike from orbit, but the melee mech soon bounced back into the air. The mech's flight system suffered a lot of damage and had almost become inoperable. That did not stop her from boosting towards the Zeal. As the Elegant Rage moved closer in order to finish the job once and for all, a pair of searing light beams coming from afar punched through the mech's already damaged flight system and completely shut it down! "THAT IS ENOUGH, YOU TWO!" The Everchanger and the First Sword had finally returned! The two expert pilots took advantage of the orbital bombardment to escape their predicaments and return with whatever samples they managed to drag away! Right now, both Joshua and Dise felt profoundly disappointed by the former expert candidates. Neither Lanie nor Taon had behaved in a manner befitting a champion of the Larkinson Clan! This was not the time to sort out their guilt and mistakes. The Everchanger had managed to pick up his dented Heartsword and used it to chop away the damaged and redundant limbs of the Elegant Rage. The mutated mech was pretty much spent at this point, so she did not attempt to regenerate the damage. After neutralizing the mech and trimming away the excess mass, the Everchanger utilized both of his arms to lift up the downsized Elegant Rage and move out of the danger zone. Meanwhile, Venerable Dise dealt with the Zeal in a much more direct fashion. The Decapitator roughly cut through all of the alloys surrounding the cockpit and quickly severed it from the rest of the broken and crippled heavy artillery mech. It was too difficult to drag out this massive machine, and there was no particular reason to preserve it now that Taon had killed his own living mech. Once the First Sword dragged away the cockpit, a barrage of resonance-empowered fire beams struck the remains of the Zeal. Soon enough, the fiery laser beams managed to strike the ammunition reserves and caused the primed explosive shells to detonate at once! BOOOOOOOOM! Whatever remained intact of the mutated Zeal completely blew apart and turned into millions of useless shards! There was no sense in leaving anything intact behind for the Emperor Tree. The Larkinsons absolutely did not want the calamity plant to improve its imitation heavy artillery mechs any further!