Chapter 7341: About Time The Dark Apostle was losing. He was losing badly. He had already overestimated his capabilities when he challenged the Ixith Goliath head-on, but the fact that the latter improved at a rapid rate made the disparity even worse! The more he fought, the more he had to go on the defensive. The nimbler and meaner Ixith Goliath learned too quickly. It not only optimized its attacks and maneuvers, but also grew more familiar with its enemies, which happened to include the largest and most conspicuous Ascended Giant on the battlefield! The Dark Apostle could do nothing to stop his adversary from figuring him out. He lacked the depth and foundation to catch the Level 8 Goliath by surprise and confound its calculations. Despite his defensive posture, more and more resonance-empowered attacks struck his Superdimensional Giant Regalia. The stolen superdimensional halberds made a huge difference in this regard. Without the use of these unnaturally sharp weapons, it would have taken at least an order of magnitude more blows to inflict so much damage onto the raiment! Everyone else realized this as well. Currently, the Dark Apostle was the only combatant left on the battlefield that could somewhat hold back the Ixith Goliath. The Rubarthan junior ace mechs that had been trying to run interference all of this time had lost this qualification as soon as the powerful Goliath acquired its latest set of weapons. Their transphasic hyper armor systems may have been quite respectable in the previous years, but the rise of superdimensional arms had completely altered the dynamics. The ace pilots knew that no matter how much they reinforced their machines with their Saint Kingdoms, their ace mechs wouldn’t be able to withstand a fraction of the amount of attacks that the Dark Apostle endured up to this point! The sudden and rapid advancements in technologies and materials had already left them behind. Due to this disparity, the ace mechs did not dare to get too close anymore. They shifted to attacking with their ranged armaments, using them to target specific organs and joints. They focused much of their attacks on the joints that connected to the limbs that integrated the stolen superdimensional halberds! However, the enemy Goliath had evolved. Despite its reduction in size, its new form significantly reinforced the joints and limbs. Their exoskeleton had become much thicker. Their overall design sacrificed a bit of flexibility in exchange for a major boost in protection! This also bought more time for the Goliath’s rapid regeneration to do its work and restore the integrity of the shells. Combined with the Ixith Goliath’s faster and more responsive maneuvers, it became impossible for the ace mechs to sever the limbs in a short amount of time! The Dark Apostle could not count on them for assistance. This increased his sense of urgency and desperation. The dire circumstances stimulated his combat sense and forced him to improve his skills even further than before. While he felt grateful to experience such improvements, his raiment became increasingly more battered by the minute! The Ixith Goliath continually slammed the blade of the stolen halberds against the front torso of the Ascended Giant’s raiment. With every impactful resonance-empowered strike, the superdimensional armor plating accumulated another mark. Every collision reduced the Dark Apostle’s buffer by another extent. He and Ves tried their best to figure out a way to break this deadlock, but their options wore thin. The nature of their current opponent made it far too difficult to find effective counters! "I cannot keep this up! C’mon, Ves! I know you have a few more tricks up your sleeve. This big bug will surely impale us with our own superdimensional weapons if you continue to fool around!" "I am not fooling around! I am continuing to channel the withering curse as well as analyze the transformed Ixith Goliath for any weaknesses that we may have overlooked. Before you ask, I haven’t found any glaring holes that we can exploit. This fellow is a much more capable duelist in its latest form. Nothing about this is random or instinctive. Its entire organic form betrays clear signs of intelligent design. The leader or leaders of the mutated voribug race are absolutely not stupid. They may be savage, but their rationality cannot be in doubt anymore." "What the hell does that mean, Ves?!" "We are dealing with an enemy race that can and will develop counters against our units in real-time! When you think about it, the properties of the mutated voribug race are intrinsically set up to fight in this manner. There is no silver bullet. A single solution is unlikely to work as well in the future because the enemy can always implement a targeted change or mutation across all of its forces in a short amount of time. The organic nature of all of its units makes it very easy to modify their forms! This is an advantage that races that rely on conventional technology cannot match!" This was an important insight and one that had massive implications for the Voribug War. The Rubarhthan Pact had definitely encountered a nightmare opponent. While the mutated voribugs definitely had their shortcomings, red humanity did not have the means to take advantage of them during these difficult times. The Dark Apostle gritted his teeth. "I know you have Worclaw energy saved up. I think we might need it to break this alien’s limbs or distract it long enough to disengage." "Ah, don’t be in a hurry. Worclaw energy is too valuable to be squandered. If we use it all up now, we don’t have any of it left when we truly need the extra power." "The superdimensional raiment you made for me is already breached half-way! We need to do something quickly or else there will be a big hole in our chest!" Blinky smirked. "Don’t worry. You have done your job. We have bought enough time for the true bane of the Ixith Goliath to appear. Our job is pretty much done at this point. Against my latest work, this Level 8 Goliath does not stand a chance." It took a few seconds for the Dark Apostle to connect the dots. His eyes widened behind his helmet. "Do you mean...!" "FALL BACK, GIANT. I CANNOT STAND THE SIGHT OF YOUR FORMULAIC SPEARMANSHIP ANY LONGER. I WILL SHOW YOU HOW TO TRULY DUEL WITH A LONG ARM." A power presence approached from the side and charged straight towards the Ixith Goliath while it was preoccupied with outfighting the Dark Apostle! Of course, the enemy megavoribug managed to detect the mighty mech’s approach well in advance. It abruptly withdrew its superdimensional halberds and instead utilized its body to slam into the Ascended Giant and shove his body backwards! The Dark Apostle did not expect this move. His armored form helplessly flew away from the Goliath. By the time the giant managed to arrest his involuntary flight, a new machine had already attracted the attention of the only significant Goliath left on the battlefield. The Riot Mark III had returned in triumph, and it had struck its first blow against the current incarnation of the Ixith Goliath with its charge attack! Saint Orfan had successfully driven back the demon that threatened to take her over! Now that she had regained her rationality, she immediately channeled her fury and frustration at her own failures at the only significant punching bag left on the battlefield. The results of her opening strike satisfied her a lot! A devastating hole appeared on the torso of the massive insect. This hole was not only surprisingly large in diameter, but the surrounding shell and tissue already started to get eroded by destructive energies. The tier 3 Destroyer spear inflicted much more devastating damage to the Goliath than expected! The resonance strength of the Ixith Goliath dipped by 0.3 laveres just because of this initial attack. This was huge progress! The abrupt drop in resonance strength implied that the Riot Mark III’s singular attack had neutralized the willpower contribution of a significant amount of biomass! So long as Saint Orfan could replicate this effect with her ace mech’s subsequent attacks, she could successively weaken the Ixith Goliath, thereby making it even more vulnerable to the Riot Mark III’s subsequent strikes! The tier Destroyer spear practically glowed with bloodthirsty anticipation. The Riot Mark III also became surrounded by a field of pseudo-Destroyer particles. Just flying close to the Ixith Goliath was already enough to inhibit the latter’s sentient organic components! When Ves and everyone else observed the Riot Mark III remain in close proximity to the enemy Goliath, they noticed a familiar reaction. "The Ixith Goliath has slowed down!" "Its movements have become less coordinated!" "Parts of its body that have fallen into the new ace mech’s Saint Kingdom have fallen into disarray!" The vastly superior Saint Kingdom easily overrode the stolen resonance empowerment that endowed extraordinary protection to all of the biomass. That was not all. Any ace mech could accomplish this feat. Unlike the domain fields of other ace mechs, the one belonging to the Riot Mark III was filled with the power of chaos and destruction. When these two forces acted on the body of the deadly Goliath, their effects proved devastating! The pseudo-Destruction particles generated by resonating with Terran Destroyer Amplification Material inflicted constant low-level damage across the entire Saint Kingdom, even when it penetrated deeper into the body of the Level 8 Goliath! The magnitude of the damage might not be too high compared to the Riot’s more direct attacks, but what made this devastating to the enemy was that it covered an extremely large volume! This exerted a large burden on the Goliath that could not be blocked or avoided so long as the ace mech remained in close proximity. The constant erosion from the power of destruction tied up a disproportionate amount of resources. The Ixith Goliath had little choice but to expend energy and biomass to constantly regenerate and prop up its body. It even had to engage in triage and abandon the less important parts of its body to preserve its more important muscles and organs! Yet that was not the extent of the misery that the Riot Mark III inflicted on the insectile monster. Its Chaos Armor exuded a subtle but undeniable sense of madness and disorder. Though it was much more subdued now that Saint Rosa Orfan successfully managed to rein in her demonic inclinations, the aura generated by this special armor system proved especially disturbing to the Ixith Goliath! The biomass affected by this aura immediately showed signs of delays, reduced coordination and even internal conflict! 𝘧𝑟𝑒𝑒𝘸𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝓁.𝘤𝘰𝓂 The greatest strength of the Ixith Goliath was its distributed intelligence. However, such a control scheme demanded much greater order and precision than what a normal organism of this scope had at its disposal. The disorder spread by the Saint Kingdom was not particularly strong, but it just so happened to overpower any attempt made by the Ixith Goliath to keep its vast body under total control. The Mentalist Crystal proved completely unable to block or mitigate this chaotic field effect! The Goliath’s stolen willpower proved far too brittle against a force of a higher order. Saint Orfan’s will pressed down upon the Goliath like steel did not relent for a single second. As such, her Riot Mark III already gained the upper hand from the beginning! The ace pilot did not waste this advantage. Her ace mech boldly faced the limbs that integrated the superdimensional halberds and fearlessly faced them without any intention of evading their unnaturally sharp blades. The other ace mechs had to avoid them because their energy and physical defenses could not withstand a single blow against these arms, but the Riot Mark III was different! In fact, even if the machine did not benefit from the cutting-edge Chaos Armor, Saint Orfan would still choose to confront the enemy up close! "AMATEUR. THERE IS NO HEART IN YOUR MOVES." The Ixith Goliath tried its best to contain its disorder and strike at the Riot Mark III with its borrowed weapons. Yet in the face of the two fast attacks, the ace spearman mech skillfully evaded one of the superdimensional halberds before slicing off the limb that held the other halberd! Too easy! Before the Ixith Goliath could withdraw, the Riot Mark III swung its Destroyer spear a second time and easily cut off the second limb! "What?!" "Too fast!" "The skill gap is too big!" A single Rubarthan ace mech diverted its flight and quickly moved in to retrieve the oversized weapons before rapidly pulling away. No matter what, the enemy could not be allowed to retrieve these strategic assets and use them against the human race ever again!