Chapter 7337: The Compromised Limb As the Level 8 Goliath continued to rampage across the orbital network, the giants began to suffer their first setbacks. It couldn’t be helped. The Ur-Titans repeatedly threw themselves into battle, hoping that their mid-grade superdimensional raiments would see them through. While their armor indeed kept them safe after getting struck half-a-dozen times by large and powerful claws, every strike weakened their structure by a variable degree. Some Ur-Titans were luckier than others. They turned their bodies around in time and managed to spread the blows across the front and sides of their raiments. This dispersed the damage sufficiently to the point where they could still reliably tank a few more blows before they needed to worry about any breaches. Others did not have such luck. One Ur-Titan had been struck three times in the chest. Even if the armor layers were thickest in the chest region, the powerful transphasic claws still managed to inflict a lot of kinetic damage to this section. Even if the cuts did not go too deep, much of the structure became compromised anyway. The Ascended Giant was not ignorant of the condition of his raiment. The operating system of his suit beeped a warning and informed him of the issue. He appropriately reined in his aggression and fought a lot more carefully than before. This should have kept him safe when fighting against a relatively consistent opponent. However, the people who were fighting against the Ixith Goliath had made one big mistake. They assumed that the Level 8 Goliath fought in a fixed pattern. Everyone was caught off-guard when it suddenly turned away from its preoccupation with orbital fortresses. After demolishing the fourth large fortified space station in a row, the massive alien insect abruptly turned its attention to the enemies assailing it from every direction! Its resonance-empowered claws began to strike at the nearby ace mechs and Ascended Giants with greater speed and determination! "Be careful!" The ace mechs still managed to evade the attacks. The ace pilots had long been on guard and backed off as soon as their intuition warned them of the possible change. The Ur-Titans failed to respond as quickly. Their intuition was nowhere near as good as that of a high-ranking mech pilot. Their combat experience also lacked relevance in scenarios like these. All of this meant that almost every nearby Ascended Giant got savaged by at least several claws in quick succession! Even the Dark Apostle received 4 continuous claw strikes, causing his body to get flung away due to the collisions! While the Dark Apostle’s raiment suffered very little material due to its material superiority, the same could not be said for the other giants. Their inferior raiments suffered such serious blows that several of them began to show gaps! Meanwhile, the worst among them broke entirely from the front, causing his nanosuited body to become exposed! The Level 8 Goliath did not hesitate. It exhibited an uncanny degree of combat literacy when it briefly ignored its other enemies and pounced on the vulnerable Ur-Titan! "Stop it! Attack the creature at all costs!" The Ascended Giants knew that one of their own was in trouble. They cast aside their usual caution and closed in on the Ixith Goliath in order to hinder its current actions. However, the Ixith Goliath willingly withstood all of the attacks in order to take out the vulnerable Ascended Giant. A powerful claw struck the giant on the chest! Though the intact portions of the raiment prevented the limb from dissecting the Ascended Giant, the damage to his true body was much more serious this time! Phasewater-enriched blood spilled from his chest and abdomen. His phasewater organs got injured as well! The pain and damage vastly exceeded his tolerance this time, causing him to lose control! This caused him to turn into a sitting duck as far as the Ixith Goliath was concerned! Even as the remaining Ascended Giants finally managed to sever one of the clawed limbs from the main body, the powerful insectile monster lunged forward with the intent to devour the injured giant! Yet just as its wounded and partially decayed mandibles managed to bite the Ur-Titan in half, a sacrificial javelin plunged into its open maw and exploded inside, causing the Level 8 Goliath to suffer a substantial injury! What was more important was that the powerful explosion just happened to stall its momentum! "Good job, sir!" This was all the Dark Apostle could do on short notice. Unfortunately, the power of the sacrificial javelin only briefly interrupted the Ixith Goliath. The massive city-sized creature possessed way too much mass and momentum to stop for this reason. Even if it lost a claw and got dinged in the head, the Ixith Goliath still had many other claws at its disposal! Just as it came close enough to completely shred the vulnerable Ur-Titan with its bloodthirsty limbs, a short harpoon flung towards the giant and changed direction, causing it to loop several times around the injured phase lord’s body. Once the line grew taut, the Divine Harpoon along with several Faceless Giants worked together to pull it back, allowing them to reel in their wounded comrade! They clearly intended to bring him to safety! "Hurry up! The Ixith Goliath is still trying to kill him off! Do your best to hinder its mobility!" "How is this insect able to move so fast?! It doesn’t have any wings or anything!" "Voribugs are able to traverse through space by relying on organic versions of inertialess drives. These organs generate special forcefields that essentially push their bodies in one direction or another. It will be difficult for us to damage them as they are always located in the center." This meant that hindering their mobility was difficult if not impossible. Even the best ace mechs were only able to inflict surface damage to the Level 8 Goliath for the most part. Still, the defenders tried their best to hinder their opponent in other ways, from attacking the other limbs to damaging the body at large. The deterioration of the orbital network significantly reduced the amount of fire support from the remaining defensive installations, but their contributions still made a difference, especially now that the Ixith Goliath’s trajectory became a lot more predictable. Eventually, the giants managed to ferry their injured comrade far enough that it became unfeasible for the Level 8 Goliath to maintain its pursuit. The enemy monstrosity would probably turn its attention to other prey, but before it did so, the creature made an effort to retrieve its severed limb. Although it did not necessarily need to reclaim it, the resources invested in its growth were still significant. All of that would turn into waste if the Ixith Goliath let it drift off into the vacuum of deep space. Given how much the voribug race paid so much attention to the effective utilization of resources, there was no reason for the Ixith Goliath to abandon its limb, especially when it did not take much time and effort to retrieve the severed claw! The Goliath did just that. Just as the Ixith Goliath was about to resume its offensive, it suddenly paused as it encountered an unexpected problem. The claw that it just reattached to its main body had been compromised! This shouldn’t have happened! It turned out that the Dark Apostle briefly hovered close to it a short time ago. He only poked the limb a few times with his Withering Sting, but did not linger around long enough to damage it any further. Of course, he was not responsible for corrupting the limb. Ves was the culprit. He utilized all of the power that he and Blinky had at their disposal to apply multiple techniques on the temporarily isolated sentient organic components. While they were previously strong and capable of generating stolen resonance, they had lost this capacity now that they were physically separated from the main body which contained the crucial Mentalist Crystal. The loss of stolen resonance meant that Ves could finally get away with a lot of stuff that wasn’t possible beforehand! He immediately launched two separate attacks. On the one hand, he utilized the inherent power of the Withering Sting to apply the withering curse to all of the sentient organic components. The directionless and uncoordinated organic units resisted the curse as best as possible, but still fell prey to its effects. Their vitality drained away at a measured pace. The insidious part of the withering curse was that it sustained itself from the power of life. This meant that poorly defended but abundant sources of vitality happened to be the most vulnerable targets to this particular curse! After the organic units grew feebler by the second, Ves applied a second debilitating effect onto the limb. He stimulated the Corrupting Orb embedded into the Withering Sting and channeled the power of darkness into the alien biomass. As the high-level voribug tissue became exposed to large amounts of darkness energy, the sentient organic components resisted as best they could. If they were still healthy, then they would have been able to resist even if they were unable to coordinate with each other. However, the withering curse just so happened to sap their vitality to the point where their ability to withstand the corruptive influence of darkness energy had weakened to a massive degree! If this was not enough, Ves secretly worked together with his sister Helena to dump dozens of Minor Demons into the limb! Even if Helena was only able to supply the weakest demonic entities, their hostility and insidious nature turned them into an immediate threat to the organic units! Due to their weakened vitality and disrupted coordination, the sentient organic components were unable to resist the erosion and subversion of all of those Minor Demons. The strong infusion of darkness energy only made it worse. The demons directly claimed this power and used it to accelerate their efforts to completely subvert the entire limb! By the time the Ixith Goliath returned and reattached the limb, its condition had drastically changed compared to a few moments prior! From the moment the compromised limb connected to the main body, an immediate confrontation took place! The Minor Demons went on the attack! While they encountered immediate resistance due to stolen resonance, they were still able to make limited progress, if at a much slower pace. The Ixith Goliath became alarmed by the new threat and sought to push back the tide of darkness. It almost managed to do so. Its lack of experience and its imperfect control over stolen resonance hindered the megavoribug’s ability to drive back the demons. In terms of mental strength and resilience, the Ixith Goliath clearly towered over these weak demonic entities. However, Minor Demons possessed far greater ferocity and cunning! They quickly set aside their mutual hostility towards each other and worked together to spread their influence into the Ixith Goliath’s enormous body. The Minor Demons joined forces to overcome the alien willpower’s blockade before spreading out to infect different parts of the Goliath’s body. Meanwhile, the withering curse slowly spread across new vectors in the background. While the Ixith Goliath was still able to slow down the invasion of foreign energies, its willpower was not as strong and abundant as before. The defilement of its claw had caused it to permanently lose the strength of the affected sentient organic components! This effectively caused its resonance strength to drop by a small but measurable degree. "It is working! The resonance meter tells me that its resonance strength has dropped by 0.4 laveres!" This might not sound much, but it was definite progress! 𝚏𝕣𝐞𝗲𝐰𝕖𝐛𝐧𝕠𝕧𝚎𝚕.𝐜𝚘𝗺 As long as the withering curse and the Minor Demons continued to expand their influence on the main body, then the drop in resonance strength would become a lot more significant! Many people grew encouraged. The plan devised by Ves showed promise! Yet it was precisely because his tactic produced results that the Ixith Goliath rapidly reevaluated his threat level. The Ixith Goliath abruptly shifted its focus towards the Dark Apostle. This Ascended GIant and accompanying companion spirit had inflicted actual harm against the Level 8 Goliath. This meant that Ves and the Dark Apostle needed to be taken out a lot sooner than other targets! "Be careful, sir! You have attracted its animosity!"