Chapter 6319 Free Flight All of the waiting, preparation and setup had given way to action! From the moment the Dark Zephyr detected and confirmed the coordinates of the actual greater phase lords, the ace light skirmisher along with the much more powerful ace marksman mech stationed in the rear exploded into action and managed to land the first true blow against the Diffraction Lord. Among the jureg phase lords, the Diffraction Lord had long built up a reputation for being nearly impossible to injure. As his translated title suggested, he excelled at making himself appear elsewhere than his true location. Many enemies who attempted to attack him from a distance or tried to approach him for a brawl found themselves frustrated as they never managed to touch the real phase lord! This was quite peculiar as most jureg phase lords tended to develop their bodies a bit more than their spatial abilities. Each of them tended to develop increasingly stronger, tougher and more massive transphasic exoskeletons as they grew in size. This lent them a powerful organic defensive barrier that enabled them to endure more attacks than usual. However, the Diffraction Lord did not spend as much effort developing his physical gifts, opting to acquire a large amount of phasewater organs that strengthened and amplified his spatial manipulation abilities. Much of his phasewater organs also amplified and synergized with his primary specialization, which was crafting large-scale, remote illusions that affected both armies and powerful individuals alike! Combined with a small collection of strong spatial attack abilities, the Diffraction Lord clearly preferred to act like a wizard that liked to torment his opponents with illusions from a comfortable distance! This came with a big disadvantage. He was not comfortable with fighting at close range. His racial endowments might allow him to take a greater beating than normal, but the lack of practice and phasewater organs that further enhanced the combat prowess of his true body limited his options. He was not a good brawler, and this showed when the Diffraction Lord continually tried and failed to swat the circling ace light skirmisher buzzing around his unfolding true body! That did not make Tusa complacent though. He focused fully on evasion and made sure to put his ace mech out of line of sight from the threatening Biopod Mother at all times. Tusa had no thoughts about launching any attacks. He very much doubted that the Dark Zephyr's small knives, underdeveloped Banish resonating ability and a very risky Ultimate Ability could inflict a killing or crippling blow against the Diffraction Lord. At this time, the greater phase lord had unfolded his true body to the fullest, turning him from a giant crustacean into a behemoth that was larger than most cities! When a creature had reached such a stupendous size, most mechs simply lost the ability to inflict any significant damage to such a monstrosity. The Dark Zephyr suffered from this problem right now. It was not the fault of the living ace mech. The Erlemin integrated into his mech frame was especially designed to cope with exaggeratingly large phase lords and phase whales one day. The problem was Tusa. His resonance strength was still too weak, and his lack of practice with Erlemin left him unable to bite even a small chunk from the Diffraction Lord's transphasic shell. The story would have been different if Saint Tusa had become a senior ace pilot and had a lot more practice under his belt, but for now, his offensive contributions remained virtually zero! And he was fine with that this time! "Hahaha! What is the use of flinging all of those spatial attacks when none of them can land on my machine?!" The Dark Zephyr did what he had always done best, and that was buzzing around like an annoying fly that could not be struck! Even though the Diffraction Lord already figured out that the Dark Zephyr did not pose a direct risk to his life, the resonance-empowered space suppression field generated by this annoying machine was not only weakening all of his spatial abilities, but also prevented him from teleporting away! The greater phase lord could have powered through an emergency displacement if not for the fact that the Dark Zephyr stuck so close to his true body. Saint Tusa understood that the effectiveness of the space suppression module was highly dependent on range, so he courageously kept his machine close to a greater phase lord that might very well inflict a crippling blow if he ever managed to land a heavy blow. Yet that did not happen because Tusa and his battle partner continually succeeded in evading the spatial blades, spatial storms and other spatial attacks! The greatest hindrance that the Dark Zephyr encountered so far were the occasional area attacks and illusionary tricks. The Diffraction Lord tried to squeeze space apart, create tunnels that unexpectedly turned the Dark Zephyr in a different direction and so on. He also created smaller but more focused illusions that occasionally tripped Saint Tusa up and caused him to almost crash into the body of the greater phase lord a few times. Even that was not enough to stop Tusa from fulfilling his most important responsibility. His Saint Kingdom was working hard to resist all of these spatial effects. Blackwing was working harder than ever to amplify the output of the space suppressor as much as possible. Combined with the Dark Zephyr's much higher phasewater content, the ace mech was just able to crush or mitigate the effects of most of these harmful effects. The balance between risk and danger was so precarious that Saint Tusa felt more excited and alive than he had since his breakthrough. This was what a real ace pilot should do! His previous battles no longer impressed him in the slightest as he was unable to unleash his true power as an ace pilot. Being able to pilot a much more powerful first-class ace mech also pumped him up as he felt far more powerful and capable than just a few months prior! Tusa could practically feel his resonance strength growing by the second. The closer his Dark Zephyr managed to evade a nasty spatial blade, the more he felt as if he was proving his commitment to unrestricted freedom! As his ace mech continued to dance around the Diffraction Lord's flailing, the ace pilot already started to imitate his mentor by letting his imagination go wild. Saint Tusa was already applying the lessons he learned from his mentor! He visualized that he and his battle partner had turned into a flitty bird that playfully danced around a lumbering giant that continually tried and failed to swat the winged pest away. There was little hostile intent behind the bird's actions. The animal merely felt playful and delighted in the freedom of movement imparted by his wings, and only intended to fly around his enemies as opposed to landing any attacks. This purity of intent was important. Tusa instinctively felt he would fail if he tried to bite off more than he could chew. As Tusa began to feed this image with his willpower, he vaguely felt as if it became more substantial. He melded his willpower, his highly attuned combat intuition, his technical maneuvering skills, his faint feel for phasewater, Trisk's helpful glow, his sentiments about the freedom imparted by flight and fused them all together in a more focused ability that precisely matched his conditions! It was remarkably easy for him to construct his first proper 'artistic conception'. It was as if Tusa always had the ability to create it, yet somehow neglected it and postponed it far too many times. Even if he hadn't attempted to imitate his mentor's methodology, he probably would have created a similar ability eventually, but it would have been a lot slower and less precise! As Tusa delighted in the creation of a new ability that perfectly harmonized with his Saint Kingdom, his Dark Zephyr began to glow brighter as if the ace mech had received a blessing! A name came unbidden in his mind and automatically escaped from his throat as if it demanded to be announced! "Free Flight!" The declaration solidified the new effects on the Dark Zephyr and caused him to become even more elusive and untouchable than before! By this time, the Diffraction Lord was not alone anymore. The Biopod Mother that initially chose to back off had launched her signature biopods from the open cavities of her malleable shell. These biological monstrosities acted like organic strike craft and tried to converge upon the Dark Zephyr like a swarm. The biopods were not too strong, but they still posed a threat to the Dark Zephyr, especially if they were able to gang up on the ace mech. Many biopods also integrated various ranged cannons that fired a mixture of laser beams, bone projectiles and fleshy spores that tried to gnaw at anything they struck. With thousands of biopods spreading out to envelop the Dark Zephyr, it became much harder for the ace mech to evade the multitude of attacks! Yet now that Saint Tusa applied his newly developed Free Flight ability, his Dark Zephyr almost always managed to maneuver in the exact right position to evade the most attacks and incur the least amount of damage! Tusa did not even have to think over every single move anymore like he did before. Instead of using his evolved mind and the Dark Zephyr's formidable first-class processors to calculate trajectories and evasion routes, he simply put his faith into the image of the free-flying bird that he created for himself. This image was no longer a figment of his imagination anymore. It had turned into an artistic conception or whatever it was called, and gained definition and power on its own as a consequence! Though the Messenger of Silence's artistic conceptions were so powerful and substantial that they could already substitute a significant chunk of reality, Saint Tusa's first attempt was only enough to subtly affect the reality at the center of his Saint Kingdom. This was a portion of space that was entirely occupied by his ace mech and little else! Yet that was enough for Tusa's purposes! The junior ace pilot did not seek to impose his willpower on enemies such as the Diffraction Lord. He only sought to improve himself and his battle partner, and the results he managed to attain exceeded his imagination! "Hahahaha! You can't touch me anymore!" As Tusa delighted in his freedom, he constantly grew more familiar with his Free Flight ability. Not only did it automate and optimize the Dark Zephyr's evasion capabilities very close to their maximum theoretical limitations, it also overcame them during a few rare occasions! Though it only happened sparingly when the Diffraction Lord or the Biopod Mother was just about to strike the Dark Zephyr with a more substantial attack or debilitation, his ace mech seemingly phased through the harm as if he was elsewhere! Tusa's eyes glowed brighter when he noticed these occurrences. It reminded him a lot of his Leap of True Freedom ability, but this time the phasing effect was subtler, shorter and much less consuming. While it was a waste for the Dark Zephyr to phase through weak attacks, it could be a lifesaver if the Dark Zephyr was about to get struck by a more threatening blow! Of course, Tusa was not sure about how often and how reliable he could produce this phasing effect. He did not think he could pull it off continuously, as that would contradict the image of a free and worriless bird in flight. As the ace pilot continued to keep his Dark Zephyr free from harm while continuing to refine his newly developed ability, his mentor had taken full advantage of all of the openings and managed to land numerous powerful and debilitating shots at the Diffraction Lord! By now, his hard shell got punctured numerous times as their incredibly thickness failed to block the rounds launched from afar!