The Mech Touch

The battle between the Swarmers and the Phasers turned into an immediate massacre!

Neither Ves nor Joshua were able to pull their attention away from the grand slaughter that they had purposefully engineered.

"All of that slaughter…" Venerable Joshua uttered as he eased the Everchanger into a gentle glide. "Did we do all of this, sir?"

"Yup." Ves grinned as he reveled at the unfolding slaughter. "It is impossible for two sides to stop this confrontation. Both sides believe that the other has targeted them. The Swarmers and the Phasers aren't friends to begin with so there is no chance for reconciliation at all. Both sides will fight until one of them has buckled!"

The two fish-whale subspecies fought according to the methods that best fit their conditions.

To the Phasers, that meant exercising their phasewater abilities without any restraint!

Thousands of light blue fish-whales converged upon the battle site and immediately stimulated the most important organs of their bodies.

What distinguished the Phaser fish-whales from the other fishes was that harnessing phasewater was baked into their genetic code!

Even the most ordinary Phaser fish-whale possessed considerable talent in utilizing phasewater for offensive and defensive purposes.

While that meant that they were incomparably weak if they failed to fill their bodies with enough phasewater, the upside was that the Phase Kingdom did not need to invest any effort into training or augmenting its soldiers.

This was different from the Evolvers whose bodies were more malleable than normal but did not possess any inherent abilities when they grew into maturity.

A single ordinary Phaser fish-whale was not that intimidating, actually. They were good at area attacks but fared poorly when bombarded from range or getting attacked up close.

However, when they began to group together, the Phasers became more and more formidable.

The reason for that was quite simple.

"Their spatial abilities are overlapping." Venerable Joshua observed. "The reason why they're so hard to deal with when there are so many of them is because they can combine their efforts!"

A typical spatial storm was nothing more than an attempt to shake the fabric of space.

A single Phaser fish-whale wasn't able to completely destabilize an area of space by itself. The phasewater and energy requirements were too great for a single creature.

Yet what if another comrade joined suit?

If the second Phaser performed the same technique as the first one, then the space that had grown slightly unstable became even more dangerous!

The first fish-whale lowered the threshold of destabilizing space, allowing the second one to push even further!

The best part of it was that this was a stackable phenomenon.

The damage that ten Phasers could inflict upon an area was qualitatively greater than what a single fish-whale could accomplish.

If the difference was already great with ten Phasers, what about a hundred Phasers? What about a thousand Phasers?

As the sole continent in the possession of the Phase Kingdom, a lot of phasewater-rich fish-whales were already in the area. The invasion of the Swarmers completely alarmed them to the point where they did not hesitate to bend and stretch the space above their heads until they formed a lethal blockade!

Even though the Phaser fish-whales had to spread out their attacks across a wider area in order to prevent the Swarmers from circling around, a huge stretch had literally become a fish grinder as Swarmer after Swarmer continued to dive headlong into the destabilized areas of space!

Shredded pieces of flesh and bone exploded from the forbidden space on a continuous basis as the Swarmers did not relent in their determination to brute force their way forward!

Ves and Joshua both turned queasy at the disturbing sight.

This was hardly their first contact with death and slaughter, but the scale and magnitude of the current collision was beyond proportion!

"I thought fighting against a meat mountain like the Titania was already bad enough. This… is worse." Venerable Joshua softly remarked as he witnessed the continuous decomposition of entire hordes of Swarmers. "Something like this would never be possible with humans. There's no way that mech pilots are willing to dive into certain death just to make their opponents tired."

Ves found the sight to be disturbing as well. Even if the white fish-whales were exclusively grown to serve as cannon fodder, the method the Swarmers used to break open the defenses of the Phase Kingdom was probably the stupidest one imaginable! The potential of so many bodies and so many lives were being squandered without ever having the chance to live for themselves.

The Hive King clearly did not show any empathy towards its footsoldiers. The elimination of thousands, tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of grunt fishes was not a serious loss in its eyes.

As long as the sacrifices of so many bodies allowed the Hive King to obtain an even greater advantage, then everything was worth it. Only the outcome mattered.

As for the happiness and wellbeing of the poor fish at the bottom? Their wants and needs were completely irrelevant in the Swarm Kingdom!

The lives of the grunt fishes could easily be replaced. The Swarm Kingdom only needed to invest a bit of resources and time to replace the losses that it had suffered today!

Since the white fish-whales weren't precious at all, the Hive King saw no need to take extra care into preserving their numbers.

To the aloof and powerful alien sovereign, its soldiers were literally resources that it could expend in order to achieve strategic goals!

Such a sight was a total nightmare to someone like Venerable Joshua.

Ves could already tell that the expert pilot had entered into a more contemplative if somber mood after seeing how an alien leader callously used up so many living individuals.

"Humans aren't so different from these Swarmer fish-whales as you think." He eventually said to Joshua. "Although our highest leaders aren't as obvious and direct about it as the Hive King, I can most certainly tell you that there are lots of humans that are willing to throw away the lives of their subordinates in order to get ahead. Why do you think the Vesia Kingdom was so eager to invade the Bright Republic over and over again? Why do you think the Hexadric Hegemony started a massive sector-wide war against the Friday Coalition despite the formidable strength of its opponent? Even the most optimistic warmongers could see that starting those wars will lead to the deaths of lots of good men and women, but that did not stop them from going forward."

"Good soldiers die while bad leaders get to live and enjoy all of the benefits." Joshua flatly stated.

Ves shrugged. "That's an oversimplification. In an ideal situation, both the grunts doing all of the fighting and the leaders who are in charge get to profit from their actions. Not every war is driven by greed or hatred."

"I think that still applies to most wars."

"Touché."

The two continued watching the ongoing battle. Although the Swarmers had already driven over 300,000 fish-whales to the spatial death zones erected over the Lake Continent, their efforts were not in vain!

The Phaser fish-whales that were frantically squeezing their bodies of whatever power they could muster were all beginning to flag.

There were simply too many Swarmers for them to kill! Even a killing machine could malfunction and break down if it had to operate far beyond its intended capacity!

The Phaser fish-whales might be incredibly strong at turning whole areas of space into danger zones, but the energy and other resources required to generate these attacks weren't light.

An abundance of phasewater just lowered the barrier to producing drastic effects. If the organs that tried to leverage phasewater to manipulate space were not supplied with enough energy, then how could they keep performing work?

Another factor that inhibited the Phasers from attacking without abandon was the fact that their active organs were not able to endure the heavy strain on a continuous basis!

Many of the Phasers became increasingly more tired over time as they ran their bodies and organs ragged.

At one point, the Phasers were forced to implement a rudimentary rotation system where roughly a quarter of their numbers stopped and rested their abused bodies.

However, they couldn't stay idle for long as the Swarmers made substantially more progress in forcing their way to the Lake Continent.

"The Phasers are reaching their limits." Ves observed. "If this goes on, maybe our mechs and our Evolver allies won't even need to fight against the remaining defenders. The Swarmers will just gobble them all up until there are none of them left!"

The situation of the Phase Kingdom wasn't completely hopeless, though. The fish-whales stationed at the more distant parts of the Lake Continent were constantly pouring in to contribute their fresh bodies to the defensive effort.

However, the influx of reinforcements only slowed the advance of the Swarmer hordes.

What was more frightening about the attackers was that the Hive King had yet to deploy all of the elites!

The sergeant fishes, the assassin fishes and the spitter fishes were all maintaining their distance from the devastating area attacks.

Though their eyes grew increasingly redder, the strong compulsion from their sovereign forced them into staying still while their frenzied lesser fish-whales continued to throw their lives away!

So far, it didn't look as if the elites were even needed. The storms above the Lake Continent grew less and less intense as Phaser fish-whales began to reach their limits!

Ves began to frown at the sight.

"Is the Phase Kingdom truly so weak? How was it able to survive up to this point?"

The answer soon became evident as a massive change occurred on the battlefield.

The various pools of water which presumably held phasewater deposits at the bottom all began to stir at the same time.

Hundreds of large shapes emerged from the water. Fish-whales that were larger and more formidable than the ones putting up a hard defense had made an appearance!

These 'elite' Phaser fish-whales were not only larger, but possessed a darker blue coloration.

Their large bodies were not only packed with greater amounts of phasewater, but also happened to be brimming with energy, which caused them to look like strong and noble knights surrounded by a tired mob of ragged peasants.

The space around their formidable bodies shook as they activated their powerful organs.

Soon, a much wider expanse of space became turbulent!

The bodies of grunt fishes endured all kinds of abuse!

Some were squeezed into invisible tubes.

Others charged right into invisible blades of solidified space, causing them to turn themselves into neatly-sliced sushi!

Yet despite this horrendous slaughter, the attackers still had a lot of cannon fodder at their disposal.

While the elite Phaser fish-whales managed to stem the tide for now, their appearance finally prompted the Hive King to employ its own reserves.

"The elite Swarmers are on the move!"

Throughout all of this slaughter, the number of sergeant fishes, assassin fishes and spitter fishes had reached the thousands. Combined with a couple of other variants that the expeditionary forces had never encountered, the elite Swarmer force had accumulated a lot of concentrated combat power!

Now, these fish-whales boldly charged forward as if they were confident that they could break through the reinvigorated space blockade!

"The crucial moment has arrived!" Ves leaned forward. "What happens next will determine whether we have a chance of attaining our goals today."

Ves grew tenser than ever as he saw the two groups of elites confronting each other.

At this time, he was rooting for the Swarmers to gain the upper hand. The defenders had shown great might and an awesome capacity for destruction. None of them must live in order to preserve the lives of his own troops as much as possible.

Just as the two sides began to get serious, the biggest pool of water on the Lake Continent began to stir as well.

A shadow that was larger and more menacing than the others slowly became visible.

A fish-whale head that was far larger than any of the heads of the previous elites popped out of the surface. A pair of cruel and domineering eyes beheld everything in the span of a couple of seconds.

Then, the titanic fish-whale body that was largely submerged below the water had abruptly disappeared. The sudden displacement of such a huge body caused the pool to collapse in on itself to a degree!

"Where did it go?!"

"Over there!"

It turned out that the fish-whale that could only be the Phase King had teleported himself in the middle of the formation of elites.

As soon as this creature made this bold move, its body glowed as the surrounding space began to wobble.

Then, a large globe of space around the Phase King exploded, tearing apart the bodies of hundreds of elites at an instant!

"What?! These aren't ordinary cannon fodder!"