The Mech Touch

The field outside Diandi Base had become a spectacle that attracted countless eyes!

Although the local authorities did not announce or broadcast the anomalous weather event to the public, certain members of high society with excellent connections received word of what was happening and secretly paid a lot of attention to the unfolding tribulation.

Many of them became impressed by what they saw. This seemingly weak standard mech began to display increasingly more strength. It wielded the power of all five classical elements in stronger and more skillful ways.

The more the unnaturally powerful thunderstorm tried to destroy the mech, the more the latter sought to defy its fate!

The observers who possessed the deepest understanding of mechs could clearly sense the will and desire emanating from the living mech!

The mech had received the blessing of life, and it wanted to do its utmost to defend this precious gift and prevent the unknowable power from above from cutting off its story before it had properly begun!

The Elemental Lord was partially a misnomer.

The five elements mech encompassed five distinct living entities, each of which had taken on a masculine bent for various reasons.

The living mech and the living fey all regarded each other as fellow brothers who were destined to live and die as a single entity.

In this regard, they were connected enough to each other that they could be treated as a single package.

None of them were allowed to die alone!

The only acceptable way for them to survive this massive was to band together and fight against the storm that sought to disintegrate their entire being!

Chirp! Chirp! Chirp! Chirp! Chirp! Chirp!

At this moment, a torrent of lightning birds closed in on the fleeing drone mech and tried to envelop their prey from multiple angles.

"Fourth brother, burn as much as you can! We cannot let so many birds get through."

"I am trying, but my phoenix is not large enough! I need more fuel to feed its flames."

"I have already reached my limit." The fifth brother helplessly spoke. "I am trying as hard as I can to extract more wood energy from the surrounding terrain, but there is only so much that can be done."

The fiery purple phoenix circling around the Elemental Lord uttered a silent cry before diving forward with blazing momentum.

A trail of purple flames briefly lingered after its passage, enabling the phoenix to form narrow walls of flames that burned dozens if not hundreds of lightning birds in quick succession!

However, no matter how many lightning birds got caught by the hot and deadly fires, their flexibility and numbers were too much to handle!

Hundreds more birds easily managed to flank around the purple phoenix and the trails of fire that it left behind.

Handfuls of lightning birds still disappeared from existence when they got shot by the weapons discharge of the luminar crystal rifle along with the smaller weapon systems built into the fire fey and the earth fey.

Nonetheless, way too many lightning birds successfully managed to close the distance, thereby putting the Elemental Lord in serious danger!

Major Jankowski did his utmost to mitigate the bird bombardment. He not only landed his mech on the ground, but also instructed the four fey to use their modest bulk to shield the more vulnerable parts such as the flight system and the luminar crystal rifle.

Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack!

Even so, the drone mech still endured hundreds of continuous hits, causing them to scorch and weaken the transphasic hyper armor plating while doing greater damage to the exterior and internal modules!

The cockpit not only blared with alarms as several minor components had begun to fail due to the excess quantity of currents introduced to by the rapid discharges, but also lit up due to the golden shocks inflicted on the body of the mech designer who refused to let his living creations suffer this punishment alone!

Ves had already grown a bit numb to the continuous pain roaring from his overloaded nerves.

This wave of lightning impacts was worse than anything the Elemental Lord suffered before, which meant that Ves' body suffered significantly greater abuse!

His body began to release an acrid form of smoke as small parts of his body had carbonized.

However, his body had gained a huge amount of resilience that was far in excess of any human. Only the most abnormal designer babies could compare to him in his ability to resist damage, and he was already starting to outpace those abnormal freaks!

His hair looked like a complete mess at this time. His skin had darkened and looked like they had turned into a desert landscape.

Nonetheless, there was an inner vitality in his body that was constantly growing stronger in order to replenish the physical damage to his physique.

Though Ves deeply understood that he was growing stronger in many ways, his mind was deeply concerned about the state of the Elemental Lord.

The 25th wave that his latest creation had just managed to endure inflicted notable damage to the internals!

Though the Elemental Lord was constructed well enough to retain most of its combat capabilities, Ves knew that the mech's performance would drop a lot more seriously if it endured an identical wave of attacks!

The 26th wave of tribulation attacks was bound to become more difficult to overcome.

They needed to do better in order to preserve their chance of making it to the end!

They could not allow the Elemental Lord to falter when they weren't even half-way to making it through this event!

As soon as Ves managed to regain control, he immediately studied the internal condition of the Elemental Lord and rapidly formulated a damage control plan.

Ves transmitted a short set of instructions to his gem cat.

"Lucky, I need you to dive back in and remove or alter these components."

"Meow!"

"If you don't do as I say, this mech will fall apart in the next few waves of attacks!"

"Meow..."

Lucky did not argue much further as he knew that the Elemental Lord was having a hard time.

Ves meanwhile utilized his cranial implant to directly tweak the settings of the drone mech. There was still much he could do to optimize the performance of the Elemental Lord.

However, Ves knew that this was far from enough to give his mech a chance to make it past the crucial 27th wave.

He had already made the determination to go all out in order to give his latest and arguably his most magnificent creation a chance to survive this powerful tribulation.

Ves briefly interrupted his work and reached out to the Unending Regalia that he had temporarily put aside.

At the same time, he urged his living mech to form a more effective solution for the next wave of lightning attacks.

"Major, you need to direct the Elemental Lord to produce a more effective means to wipe out the lightning bird."

"We are trying, but we have reached the limit of what the fire fey and the wood fey can do." The mech pilot helplessly said. "They have done their utmost to harness as much fire and wood energy as possible. Unless they attain some sort of breakthrough, it is not realistic for them to produce a stronger result in the short term."

Ves briefly withdrew a small item from his armor.

"This is not their limit. Their potential is far greater than this. If two elements are not enough, then make use of three elements. The second brother is doing little aside from putting up an energy shield at times. The water fey can do more. Water begets wood. Wood begets fire."

Major Jankowski's expression hardened. "It is already tough for the five brothers to blend two different elements at the same time. If they start to work in a third one, the difficulty of maintaining control will become much higher."

"We have no choice! The five brothers have to start with this sooner than later. If they want to make it all the way to the 81th lightning strike, then they cannot survive without harnessing all 5 elements at the same time! How can they grow so far if they do not have the courage and the will to tame three elements?!"

The RA mech officer did not reply any further, but the mech under his control and supervision already started to take action.

The water fey which had previously remained passive suddenly began to take a more active role.

Water energy began to surge from the surroundings. There was plenty of moisture and bodies of water in the artificial wilderness of New Constantinople VIII.

Water was the liquid of life. Water was the primary component of the blood that sustained living organisms. Water contained the atoms that enabled stars to burn so long that they could easily maintain their brightness for billions of years!

As the second brother attempted to work with his fourth and fifth sibling, their cooperation initially started off shaky.

The purple phoenix suddenly acted as if a large pool of water had almost doused its flames.

The water E energy was colliding directly against the fire E energy, producing many different conflicts that significantly reduced the combat effectiveness of the Elemental Lord!

Major Jankowski gritted his teeth yet again as he tried his best to help the three brothers combine their elements without producing too many undesirable collisions.

It was too difficult!

Combining two elements was manageable because there was only one relationship to worry about.

Putting three elements in closer proximity to each other produced a triangle of relationships, meaning that the Elemental Lord had to exert three times as much control to keep everything together!

Although the water fey was able to share the growing burden, it was not enough to manage all of the added volatility.

Just as the storm clouds from above began to spit out a massive quantity of angry lightning birds, Major Jankowski suddenly felt through the man-machine connection that the Elemental Lord had gained a sudden surge of strength!

Not only that, but the mech officer felt that the five brothers were all undergoing a strange transformation that caused them to grow more sharper and more dignified.

Their control over the elements improved by a significant margin as the drone mech and the living fey gained an inexplicable sense of pride and confidence that significantly increased their ability to tame the elements!

The water E energy had already begun to clash a lot less with the fire E energy, thereby allowing the fire phoenix to regain its initial stability!

Major Jankowksi could not explain what had happened. He instinctively felt that the mech designer riding along was responsible for this sudden change.

When the mech officer briefly turned his head, he saw that Professor Ves had actually unscrewed a few panels and conducted extensive modifications with the tools he had at hand!

"Professor, what have you done?!"

"It's too complicated for me to explain. Just know that I have given the Elemental Lord a boost that should hopefully make a difference."

"What you have done is working. The five brothers have all changed for the better. Their control over the elements has grown to the point where they are actually doing a good job at controlling three elements at the same time!"

Major Jankowski still did not know how a bit of tinkering could cause the Elemental Lord to gain such drastic improvement.

Only Ves understood exactly what he had done to improve his living mech's chances to survive the next few waves.

Did he make the right decision?

He was not sure about that. He chose to act on feelings, so he did not restrain himself when he secretly applied one of Lucky's gems to the Elemental Lord.

Ves briefly recalled the description of the gem that attracted him the most. Somehow, this one seemed more fitting than the rest.

[VIEAK FRAGMENT]

A semi-processed gem that contains the royal conceit of a second-born prince that has lost the struggle for the throne. Imparts an aggressive form of regality that will always be inadequate compared to authentic royal authority. Any discussion or behavior that hints or accuses the mech or its user of being a pretender, illegitimate, a spare or second-best will invoke violent retaliation.