Venerable Joshua and the Everchanger had broken new ground. No longer were they relegated to channeling the power of other design spirits to gain an edge in combat. They had taken a step forward and had begun to experiment with combining and transforming multiple different E energy attributes! None of this should be possible, but the true resonance generated by the two forcefully combined the different energies together into a ’fusion spirit’ that took on the form of a dark crow! Nobody had a clear understanding or explanation of where this crow came from and how it became so powerful. That did not stop them from appreciating how much faster the Everchanger was tearing down his adversary’s defensive layers! Though the Eight Lord of Takansha had made strides to reach the side of one of the greater phase lords, the interference from the Greenaxe and Bloodripper slowed him down just enough! As soon as the combined efforts of the Everchanger and assisting units broke the last spatial barrier, the Eight Lord of Takansha became vulnerable to attacks! The azure energy shield generator mounted on his raiment was able to delay the aggressive human mechs for a moment, but it didn’t last very long against the onslaught. His raiment immediately began to incur a lot of damage. The lesser phase lord quickly whipped out a giant scepter that could function as a mace. The scepter was infused with a lot of phasewater which he used to bend the fabric of space around him. He managed to divert some of the ranged attacks that struck and dented his raiment, but he was not able to block all of them, especially if they came from different directions! Find your next read on freewebnovel.com The Eight Lord of Takansha had grown a lot more desperate at this time. He flailed his scepter back and forth, which not only disturbed the surrounding space and diverted a bunch of attacks, but also forced the Greenaxe and the Bloodripper to evade. Their pilots did not reduce their aggression. After spending so much time and effort to break down the phase lord’s spatial barriers, they finally managed to get past! The Bloodripper’s luminar crystal submachine gun began to fire a rapid sequence of copper-colored energy beams. The transphasic hyper positron beams inflicted significantly greater damage against solid armor! The expert harasser mech did not utilize his firepower to get past the armor and damage the lesser phase lord’s flesh. His attacks weren’t strong enough to make this a worthwhile endeavor against this kind of opponent. Venerable Pedro Rodrigo instead focused on crippling and debilitating the lesser phase lord. The luminar crystal submachine gun targeted all of the functional components of the enemy’s raiment. Different from a mech, a battle bot or a starship, a raiment functioned much more as a suit of armor, so it was not able to place any important parts and systems deep inside its structure. That meant that crucial parts such as the power reactor, the azure shield generator, the sensor modules and so much more were all mounted close or on the exterior surface of the raiment. The Bloodripper took it upon himself to target and destroy all of these modules so that he could quickly render the raiment useless! Meanwhile, the Greenaxe did his best to coordinate with the Everchanger by facing the vulnerable phase lord on the opposite side at all times! This added to the Eight Lord’s stress. If the native god tried to fend off the Everchanger, the Greenaxe would just approach his rear and hack into his raiment’s rear armor with his giant weapon! If the Eight Lord turned around to force the Greenaxe to back off, then the Everchanger would repeatedly slash his Bitter Scimitar onto the phase lord’s rear. This was especially devastating to the beleaguered phase lord as the dark crow echoed every scimitar strike that landed onto the phase lord. Meanwhile, the Barons under the control of Saint Commander Casella Ingvar were also providing an indispensable contribution! Although the firepower of 39 brand-new Karma Cutters weren’t dealing particularly effective damage against the armored lesser phase lord, the torrent of resonance-empowered Null Rounds striking the increasingly more damaged raiment actually produced a more useful effect. The new rifleman mechs were gradually cutting off the Eight Lord of Takansha’s bonds of karma with others! While their progress was fairly slow as the lesser phase lord possessed so many more bonds of karma than any mortal, the fact that the Karma Cutters were able to attain this much progress was already fairly amazing! It was impossible for the Null Rounds to have any significant effect on a lesser phase lord under normal circumstances. The difference in power was just too big. However, once these new machines became affected by Saint Commander Casella’s true resonance, their effectiveness drastically rose! The stronger bonds of karma that the Eight Lord of Takansha maintained with his orven subjects and worshippers were surprisingly difficult to sever. The same did not apply to the weaker bonds of karma! The more the Eight Lord got struck by a multitude of Null Rounds, the more difficult it became for others to remember his existence and spot him on the battlefield. The nunsers, the puelmers, the jureg and members of other minor races unconsciously began to overlook the plight of the lesser orven phase lord. It was as if he literally did not exist to these aliens anymore! What particularly worked in the favor of the Karma Cutters was that the bonds of karma that the Eight Lord of Takansha shared with the other surviving phase lords also happened to be shallow! If they wanted to, the Herald of the Void, the Lower Herdmaster or the Fatedriver could have noticed the Eight Lord’s plight and alter their course in order to save his life. Yet because the three phase lords weren’t familiar with their orven counterparts and only met each other a short time ago, there was no way for them to possess any deep friendship or camaraderie with their fellow native god! If Khaso Leiyen or Zren-Divar were still alive, then they would most certainly be able to remember that the Eight Lord existed, but it was too bad that they had already died! "What is funny is that the Eight Lord probably doesn’t realize that the Karma Cutters are making him less noticeable among the other aliens." Ves grinned as he observed his latest mechs at work. How could the orven phase lord possibly know any better? Karma was an extremely nebulous concept. The native aliens probably did not know about its existence at all. They had even less reason to develop senses that could specifically measure this phenomenon. While the panicking lesser phase lord clearly felt that something bad was happening to him, it was extremely difficult for him to focus on these subtle changes when he was getting assaulted by three different expert mechs, of which one of them possessed enough power to take his life! The Eight Lord swiped his transphasic scepter in a wide sweep in front of him that forced the Everchanger to back off for a moment. The phase lord took advantage of this small opening to advance straight in the direction of the Lower Herdmaster. Of the two greater phase lords, the Herald of the Void had already advanced far ahead. The Lower Herdmaster maintained a more controlled pace and was therefore closer to the Eight Lord. Since the orven phase lord was not able to ask the considerably more powerful nunser god to come to his rescue, the Eight Lord of Takansha simply decided to move directly in front of the greater phase lord! The Eight Lord refused to believe that the Lower Herdmaster would continue to ignore him and his plight! This posed a problem to the human attackers. The three mechs were making good progress in damaging the phase lord’s raiment and had already begun to cut into his flesh, but they were not able to slow him down too much! The Eight Lord even took the initiative to absorb serious blows in order to avoid slowing down his flight! "We need more time!" Venerable Joshua urged! "Ask, and you shall receive." A new voice sounded. After a long period of waiting, Avatar Commander Melkor finally moved into action! His custom Fey Fianna looked much different from before. Not only was his machine glowing with the power of the Saint Commander’s Enfeoffment, but the drone mech was also accompanied by 25 recently made formation anchor fey! Melkor had carefully put them out of harm’s way in order to avoid attracting any enemy fire. Now, the 25 fey closed in on the fleeing lesser phase lord and began to surround him at seemingly random distances and angles. The fey soon went active as Melkor held the formation artifact and immediately activated his bonded basic confinement spell array! The formation anchors drew in a huge amount of E energy from the environment. Enhanced by the power of Casella’s true resonance, the formation anchor fey worked a lot more effectively than they should. Not only did they attract E energy in a wider radius, but they also enhanced the strength and other performance parameters of the spell array that just came into existence! The Everchanger, the Greenaxe and the Bloodripper immediately disappeared inside the mysterious mist that had engulfed their area. Thankfully, the phenomenon did not really attract that much attention as the native aliens were not familiar with sealing spell arrays. Besides, they were already preoccupied with much more urgent concerns. The only aliens that worried about the lesser phase lord that had disappeared from their sights were the orvens, and they grew more confused than anything. What if this was a means for their phase lord to disappear from everyone’s sights and escape from the battlefield? Unfortunately for all of them, this was most definitely not the case. Inside the active spell array, the Eight Lord of Takansha initially became befuddled, but he hadn’t lived so many years for nothing. He only flew around for a short amount of time before he figured out that he had been trapped in a warped space region. The phase lord tried his best to channel whatever spatial abilities he had left and forcefully break open this invisible cage, but the spell array proved to be far too resilient for him to open up a breach with this method! The Eight Lord uttered a silent roar in frustration but still did not give up! His spatial senses were still developed enough for him to determine the direction where the spell array was the weakest. He flew forward and soon began to swing his scepter in front of him, hitting nothing but empty white mist. Although the Eight Lord did not appear to be striking anything, he was actually damaging the boundary that kept him trapped in this space! "Hurry up, guys!" Melkor gritted his teeth and communicated to the expert pilots inside his confinement spell array. "This phase lord is recklessly using his transphasic weapon to tear a hole in my spell array. My formation anchors were only partially repaired by the patriarch, so they are still quite fragile. Don’t let him destroy my fey!" The three expert mechs were racing against time. They could not afford to let the Eight Lord get loose, or else he would quickly rendezvous with the Lower Herdmaster! The Greenaxe attacked so aggressively that the expert axeman mech got smacked multiple times by the panicking phase lord’s scepter. The machine’s resonance shield drained significantly with every impact, but Venerable Glendale remained fearless! The Bloodripper no longer spread out his attacks and concentrated solely on burning a hole through the phase lord’s head! The Eight Lord responded to this assault by overexerting the phasewater organs that were still capable of producing spatial barriers and forcefully projected them around his head! This still left his chest vulnerable. The Everchanger eagerly took advantage of this vulnerability and continually maneuvered around the taller and clumsier phase lord to slash his Bitter Scimitar at the crumbling chest plating! Each successful hit was quickly followed up by an attack from the dark crow. The sealing spell array did not weaken the fusion spirit in the slightest. In fact, the changing environment seemed to make it more ominous and in its element! When the Everchanger finally managed to break open enough of the chest plating, the machine briefly paused and fed another 100 grams to the D-arm in order to renew its phasewater-charged condition! The curved blade of the scimitar glowed brighter and more menacing than ever as the dark crow flapped its wings at the right time, allowing the Everchanger to evade the incoming scepter strike and gain a clear shot at his target’s chest! When the Bitter Scimitar’s unnaturally sharp and empowered edge finally dug into the hide, bone and flesh of the orven phase lord’s chest, a runaway reaction occurred! Before the dark crow could peck into the Eight Lord’s vulnerable flesh, the Bitter Scimitar went into a frenzy as it greedily sucked all of the alien phasewater-infused blood from the open wound! The D-arm went crazy and automatically started to cut deeper on its own accord!