The Mech Touch

In a distant location, an alien stealth vessel had just encountered tragedy!

The modestly-sized observation vessel that had been assigned to keep watch on one of the more vulnerable and less well-defended human settlements.

The secret puelmer spy vessel quietly hovered in the Davute System for many months without issue. The puelmer race had already grown familiar with the division of human organizations and knew that it only really had to watch out for the 'Big Two' and the 'first-rate superstates'.

As for other human forces? They all belonged to the underclass of human society! It was not without reason why they were called space peasants. They didn't even receive the right to operate their own warships!

Since these space peasants posed so little threat to puelmer starships, it should be trivially easy to keep an eye on what went on in their key star systems!

That was what the crew of the puelmer stealth vessel thought. They quietly recorded the traffic and the flow of goods flowing in and out of Davute's main economic hub without encountering any sign of getting exposed until their ship suddenly suffered a calamity!

A powerful energy beam had shot through the hull of the stealth vessel without warning!

Though the strange beam did not disrupt her active stealth systems nor interrupt any of her functioning, its effect on the lives aboard the vessel was much more devastating!

Before the fateful strike, the ball-like aliens were working quietly behind their workstations.

Half of them suddenly experienced palpitations as if a massive threat to their lives was about to strike!

They barely had time to roll away before a gray blast of energy shot straight through their positions, reaping their lives and wiping out any measure of vitality in their small and compact bodies!

By the time the other half of the crew realized what had happened, they screamed while rolling around their bodies in panic!

Eventually, the puelmer survivors got a hold of themselves and quickly decided to evacuate from the star system now that they realized their vessel was exposed.

If the unknown human adversary could strike their hidden vessel once, the enemy could do so again!

"We must warn our brethren of this new threat!" The puelmer second-in-command exclaimed in his squeaky alien language as he spoke to his fellow survivors. "Send an emergency transmission back to headquarters! Inform our superiors that the 'space peasants' in this star system have made an astonishing technological breakthrough! Not only have the humans developed another means to detect our stealth vessels from a distance we thought was safe, but they have also invented a powerful new directed energy weapon that can pass through both energy and physical barriers and take our lives directly!"

As the surviving puelmers continued to reassess the threat posed by the lesser elements of humanity, they desperately moved their vessel away as far away from the inner system as possible.

If not for the fact that entering into warp travel would produce spatial fluctuations that could easily be detected by the many sensors in the star system, the puelmers would have activated the stealth vessel's warp drive in an instant!

While the hidden aliens were scrambling, the source of their distress grew more pleased with her present.

"This is the best birthday present ever! I already love it to death!" Helena happily cheered as she rubbed her cheek against the surface of her new pistol.

Though she initially believed that she was powerful enough to defeat her opponents by relying on her own strength and abilities, the Death Lotus provided her with too much convenience for her to ignore!

Not only did it allow her to project her deathly energy in a much more concentrated attack, the range of the Death Lotus was the real killer!

Her eyes glinted as she thought of the alien lives she reaped. She wanted to do her brother a favor and clean up those funny aliens who were snooping in his direction from afar.

The Death Lotus did not disappoint! Though its beam eventually weakened and dispersed over a long distance, her new weapon still managed to hit her intended target!

It didn't matter too much if the new spiritual firearm did not come in the form of a long rifle. Spiritual constructs operated in a different environment and abided by different rules.

The Death Lotus was also alive, which meant it was able to correct its own flaws and perform more effectively to a degree.

All of this and more convinced Helena that her brother's present was not only awesome, but would only become even more powerful in the future, especially when it remained in her hands!

Once she was satisfied with the serious output of her new gun, she switched the Death Lotus from its dangerous Pistol Mode to its more pretty and innocuous-looking Flower Form.

She put the glowing black lotus flower in her hair and conjured up a mirror out of her own energy.

"I'm so cute!"

"Yes you are." Ves hollowly said as he prayed that the last attack did not provoke any trouble for his clan. "I would appreciate it if you don't fire your weapon willy-nilly again. You can shoot wherever you want in the Nyxian Gap, but please show a bit more restraint in a civilized location!"

Helena rolled her eyes. "I'm the Daughter of Death, brother. I end lives wherever I go. It comes with the job."

"Gods are artificial concepts that do not exist in nature!" Ves insisted! "You're just a powerful life form who happens to be untouchable by ordinary people. You shouldn't grow a big head all of a sudden and assume you can reign over puny mortal humans like myself as if you can treat us all like toys. I think that even you will be forced to retreat if you are ever confronted by the strongest CFA battleships or the most formidable MTA god mechs. Oh, and don't assume that the Compact is a pushover either based on the agents they have sent to the Nyxian Gap so far. Even if the cultists are only a shadow of their former selves, they are still far more numerous and knowledgeable than you can imagine!"

From the way Helena rolled her eyes, it appeared that his warning fell on deaf ears. She completely embraced her guise as an all-powerful death goddess who could kill any opposing life that got in her way!

Ves feared that her initial victory against the dark gods had given her a distorted impression of all of the threats in the cosmos.

Fortunately, his gift should help her tide over her initial period as a newborn spiritual entity. Though she might develop a dangerous dependency on the Death Lotus, this was a better outcome to Ves than losing his only sister!

As Ves ordered his crew to take down the blocking screens and bring his shuttle back to the Spirit of Benheim, his sister was just about to retract her presence.

"I would love to spend more time with you, brother, but my mothers have sustained serious injuries after the last battle, so I will need to cover for their responsibilities."

Ves furrowed his brows. "I thought entities like yourself can manifest in multiple places at a time."

"It's not that simple, brother." Helena shook her head. "I am 'mainly' residing in the Yeina Star Cluster as that is where most of my anchors and my worshipers are residing. The enormous quantity of Hexer worshipers and Valkyrie mechs is making it a lot easier for me to do stuff over there. As for the Red Ocean, aside from the decent amount of Valkyrie mechs fielded by the Hexer colonists, there is only a fraction of that in your fleet."

"You mean that thousands of Valkyrie mechs and tens of thousands of devoted worshippers in the expeditionary fleet aren't enough for you already?"

Helena chuckled and stretched her arm to tousle his hair. "Deities work on a grander scale than that, silly brother. You can't be a decent god in any galaxy these days without having at least a million worshipers. That is also why that Ylvaine fellow is doing so poorly these days. You should do something about his lack of worship. As much as I am reluctant to admit it, gods in the current environment need the support of mortals to sustain their existence. Without anyone knowing about us, we will slowly lose our ability to affect the material realm while fading from existence. This is worse than death. This is true erasure from reality. I don't want to suffer this fate so soon when I have just become alive."

"Don't worry, sis. I might not fully understand what you're going through, but I will make sure that you receive the support you need to sustain your existence." Ves seriously pledged. "It will take a bit of time, but I will eventually release new mechs centered around you that will introduce you to millions if not billions of mech pilots in the Red Ocean. As long as I succeed, your growth will catch up to your mothers and you will also be able to manifest yourself more easily in this dwarf galaxy."

His answer pleased his sister. She leaned in and planted a quick kiss on his cheek. "I have the best brother I could ask for! I really enjoyed my first time with you, Ves, but I truly need to go and smash more Abyssals."

"Hey, aren't you forgetting about a certain promise?!"

"Oh. Yes. I just remembered I promised to give you a gift in return. Our mothers did say that sharing is caring."

Helena's manifestation went still as she brought out a formidable amount of energy and channeled it somewhere.

"There! That should give you more material to play with!" Helena smiled. "I will try and give you a more thoughtful present when I have developed my divine powers further."

"Hey, what did you just do?! Where is my present?!"

"You should check out the two most powerful Valkyrie mechs on your ship. I just gave both of them a substantial power-up. You can thank me later!"

"What?! You boosted the wrong mechs, Helena! Those Valkyrie Brunhilds belong to the Glory Seekers, not the Larkinson Clan! They're not my mechs!"

Helena disappeared before he could even finish his words.

"Damnit."

When his shuttle returned to the hangar bay of the Spirit of Bentheim, the people who had come to gawk at the changed Valkyrie mechs had all retreated from the center.

The reason?

The Valkyrie Brunhilds had all been dosed with a couple of hundred extra Ves worth of death energy!

The drastic change caused the mechs to become a lot closer to Helena, not that they needed a lot of help in that. His sister's glow became so thick and palpable around the machines that no mech technician would ever dare to get close to service the machines in person!

"Ugh, what am I going to do with these two machines?"

The Glory Seekers already intended to upgrade them into full expert mechs, which they surprisingly thought they could do with minimal intervention from himself.

Helena's move had made this a little harder, but as long as the Glory Seekers succeeded in their conversion attempt, the mechs of the new pair of female expert pilots would definitely turn into twin nightmares for any organic life!

"Hm, these mechs don't need all of that death energy. I should lighten the load."

Ves brought over a P-stone and siphoned away a small amount of death energy from both machines. While he hadn't decided what to do with it yet, he felt it was worth it to experiment with it later on when he developed his next big luminar crystal weapon.

He already had an interesting experimental concept in mind.

The Amastendira was arguably his main solution against expert mechs and other extraordinary threats. Its Instrument of Vengeance was still the single most powerful luminar crystal weapon of his clan.

What if it was possible for him to superimpose the Instrument of Vengeance with a spiritual version of the same weapon?

The overlap between a material firearm and a spiritual firearm might produce an unprecedentedly lethal combination, one that was especially deadly against all manner of biomonsters!

The phase whales would probably cry if they ever got struck by such a bizarre new weapon system!