The Mech Touch

The great enemy that was on the cusp of swinging down the Sword of Damocles had sustained a powerful injury that forced him to drop his weapon to the floor!

From the moment an unknown but exceedingly powerful projectile had punched through the spatial barrier and struck the unclean whale, the massive beast's concentration had shattered!

The alien creature could no longer pay any attention to completing his great displacement technique when a much more immediate threat was coursing through his massive body!

Unseen by all except for Ves who maintained an active and unbreakable connection to his divine artifact, a cyborg cat found that it had punched deep inside the body of its target!

Its passage had created a tunnel of wounded and torn flesh that only stopped when the cyborg cat had collided against an enormous whale bone.

Already, the unclean whale attempted to remedy his serious injuries by accelerating the regeneration of his injured body.

Dark and sickly flesh squirmed and expanded as the massive beast urgently tapped his prodigious fat reserves to provide the biomass to undo all of the damage.

At the same time, humongous flesh walls were about to press against the invading cyborg cat from all sides.

Already, the walls were beginning to grow tougher and more impenetrable in an attempt to stop the cat from escaping this organic cage!

The living divine artifact did not exhibit any concern.

This was strange as the cyborg cat was much smaller and much weaker than the unclean whale.

Regardless of their phasewater concentration, the stupendous volume and mass of the latter meant that the corrupted phase whale had a lot more power at his disposal!

Once the alien beast regained his wits, he gathered as much concentration as possible and began to launch a powerful spatial attack before his hard flesh walls pressed the intruder flat!

The spatial attack failed to land on its intended target!

The unclean whale grew confused. Where was the intruder? Why couldn't he sense the tiny metallic creature anymore?

A spike of pain soon altered the unclean whale to a hole in its bone membrane.

It turned out that the cyborg cat had dove to the side and somehow managed to drill through the hardening bone layer!

That was not necessarily a disaster.

Even though the unclean whale possessed much less control over his own body than a more proper phase whale, the powerful aquatic beast could still command the surrounding flesh to squeeze and crush any foreign elements that were hiding in their midst!

The gigantic flesh contracted several times, yet nothing had been crushed.

The unclean whale grew confused as he lost track of the intruder. How could the cyborg cat hide its presence when it should have been drilling through his body?

Did the intruder employ a phasing ability?

The giant creature grew suspicious enough to apply a wide area spatial technique in his body that inhibited phasing.

Nothing changed. The intruder did not reappear.

It wasn't until a few more seconds had passed that the unclean whale experienced another spike of pain.

One of its internal organs was sustaining damage!

When the unclean whale utilized his senses to detect the intruder, he still wasn't able to find anything that didn't belong inside his body.

This was clearly impossible because his organ was getting eaten by what appeared to be itself!

The unclean whale experienced more shock than it had in centuries!

The earlier attack that punched through his defenses was already strange enough. This follow-up attack that somehow caused his own flesh to rebel against itself was even more confounding.

What strange and unusual alien race had entered this region of space? How come their small and tiny war machines could perform so many strange and unusual feats?

Though the scale of the damage inflicted by the invisible threat was small, the fact that it was harming one of his many important phasewater organs was greatly distressing!

The unclean whale squeezed his flesh until they crushed half of the phasewater organ!

Though the damage was grievous, it was worth it as long as he managed to destroy the internal threat.

Yet moments later, the intact half of the phasewater organ was getting torn as if nothing changed!

The unclean whale grew mad! The intruder was like a virus that managed to avoid his internal detection methods.

None of his means of detecting the tiny threat was working. No matter how many times the unclean whale attacked his own body, the undetectable intruder always managed to slip away before resuming its attacks a short distance away!

Though it was impossible for the intruder to inflict massive damage to the unclean whale in a short amount of time, the most distressing fact about the ongoing intrusion was that the foreign element was moving closer to the brain cavity!

This was why the unclean whale doubled his efforts into trying to crush or drive out the tiny attacker!

Back on the Spirit of Bentheim, Ves smirked as he used his connection to his living divine artifact to supervise and direct the ongoing sabotage.

Compared to himself, his cyborg cat received much greater enhancements. His theory that the transformation process would upgrade the existing capabilities of his divine artifact was true!

This happened to be extremely relevant to what was happening inside the body of the unclean whale.

One of the greatest strengths of the cyborg cat was not its ability to harness Worclaw energy.

It was its camouflage and other anti-detection measures.

Despite the fact that the unclean whale should have easily been able to detect such a foreign element tunneling throughout his body, the cyborg cat's upgraded camouflage abilities were too much for the giant creature!

What the old and powerful corrupted whale didn't entirely realize was that the cyborg cat had actually transformed the exterior part of its body into a copy of the surrounding biomass!

This was one of the reasons why Ves had been eager to apply Permanent Mimic Arcutuleum Platinum to the cyborg cat's outer layer!

Its ability to mimic any matter it came in touch with was already impressive in its base form.

After the cyborg cat not only absorbed a lot of galactic energies, but lived through a lengthy lightning baptism that thoroughly transformed and elevated its camouflage abilities!

Not even Ves was able to figure out how much better his cyborg cat was able to hide its true nature!

While he expected his divine artifact to be able to delay the unclean whale's attempts to detect the intruder, what actually happened was that the stupid alien beast still hadn't found a way to distinguish the camouflaged cat from his own flesh!

It was an absurdity that Ves never expected to see! For all of his power, the unclean whale had always been a raider, not a scientist like the rest of his kind.

A proper phase whale would have never exhibited such poor control over his own body!

It couldn't be helped. An unclean whale only came into power by stealing and absorbing the organs developed by other phase whales.

Many of the organs that the cyborg cat targeted had never been developed by the unclean whale.

At most, the giant creature spent much of his years in captivity to make up for shortcoming, yet his scientific foundation was far too poor for him to understand more than 10 percent of the theory behind all of his foreign organs.

As a result, the cyborg cat found great success whenever it attempted to hide inside the many stolen internal organs of the giant phase whale!

"Hahaha! This unclean whale is not as strong as I thought. He's all brawn but no brain!"

Ves was the opposite as far as he was concerned!

Though there was a part of him that wished that he had opted for a larger and more powerful divine artifact, discretion was the better part of valor at his current stage.

Meanwhile, Ves still had to pay attention to his situation back inside the bridge of his flagship.

He tried his best to exert his leadership and reassure his fellow Larkinsons that the MTA hadn't secretly teleported him away and put a botched doppelganger in his place.

"Papa!"

"Hug me, papa!"

"Hahahahaha!"

His honor guards might still harbor doubts about his identity, but his children knew 100 percent that he was still their father!

Though the guards pulled the bodies of Aurelia and Andraste back for safety's sake, Nitaa still allowed their companion spirits to gather in midair.

The three cats looked especially cute as they curled around each other.

They rolled against each other until Blinky managed to wrap his front paws around both of his kittens at once.

Mrow mrow mrow~

The cute and furry Persian kitten wiggled her tiny limbs as her 'father' licked his face. Mana could clearly feel that Blinky had become a lot stronger than before!

Mew~ Mew~

The black-furred spiritual kitten pressed next to Mana squirmed and nagged Blinky for attention as well. It wasn't until Blinky started to lick her face that Yaika grew content.

Maaw~ Maaw~ Maawwww~

Though not everyone was familiar with the companion spirits, those that had the privilege to learn about them understood that Blinky was one of Ves' calling cards.

Of course, what truly convinced most Larkinsons that Ves was the real deal was Goldie's obvious affection.

The spiritual cat had become especially affectionate and joyous towards Ves since his return!

The Golden Cat knew more than any other member of the Larkinson Clan how Ves had played such a major role in lifting the immediate crisis.

She was also able to sense how extensively Ves had changed and evolved through his active connection to the Larkinson Network.

The spiritual feedback that Ves was able to supply to Goldie was so much greater that she almost became intoxicated by the potent energy!

Nyaaa~ Nyaaa~ Nyaaa~

Ves grinned as the cat nuzzled against his cheek.

"I'm happy to see you again as well. Thank you for vouching for me, Goldie. I really needed your help."

Nyaaaaa!

"Heh, you don't have to concern yourself much anymore. The most dangerous aspects about the unclean whale was his amazing defense and his threat to displace us all to a completely different region of space. Neither of these issues are hindering us anymore."

The interruption of the mass displacement technique bought a lot of time for the human coalition. They were no longer forced to scramble for a solution in a matter of minutes.

The breach in the all-powerful spatial barrier was even more significant!

Though the unclean whale tried his best to fill up the gap created in the cyborg cat's initial approach, six nearby ace mechs had pounced on the opportunity and managed to sneak inside the defensive envelope in time!

"Hahaha! We're in! There are no more spatial barriers in our way!"

All of the human ace mechs aside from the Thunderer Mark II

The Embodiment of Love and Sacrifice struck first. The merger between the two Gemini ace mechs resulted in the emergence of a super ace mech that produced exceptionally powerful resonance between four different participants!

This allowed the combination mech to power up its energy rifle and unleash a humongous transphasic resonance-empowered positron beam that finally struck and burned a serious portion of the unclean whale's outer layer!

Though the massive beast attempted to block or mitigate the powerful attack by projecting a small directional spatial shield, its defensive power was far from matching that of its main spatial barrier.

The truth was that the unclean whale derived all of his main abilities from stolen phase whale organs.

Perhaps the developers of all of these phasewater organs would have been able to exert more control over all of these abilities, but that was out of the question for the unclean whale!

This was why the unclean whale hadn't been able to close the breach in its defenses fast enough. It was also why most of his attempts to block all of the attacks launched by the ace mechs at close range weren't working!

Though the unclean whale was still distracted by his attempts to crush the invisible intruder that was drilling inside his body, he still recognized the need to neutralize the threats hovering outside his massive body.

Several more organs went into motion!

"Watch out! The phase whale is attempting to sweep us with his massive tentacles!"