The Mech Touch



The more Ketis utilized her newfound might, the harder it became to resist the allure of heaven.

She keenly fell in love with the versatility and pliability of heavenly energy.

Although its ability to hold an edge was decidedly mediocre, this powerful form of transcendent energy could do so much else that it was hard not to take advantage of such potential.

Her impression of the Heavensword also changed a lot as a result.

It became less of a sword and more of a magic wand in her eyes.

It could become as hot as plasma or as cold as a rogue planet.

It could strike a nearby foe with enormous power or assassinate a target on the other side of a planet.

It could speed up time or slow it down.

It could teleport vast distances or lock down an area to prevent anyone from employing the same ability.

It even claimed that it could resurrect the dead!

The list of what it could theoretically do exceeded the list of what it couldn't do! It was so damn omnipotent that Ketis could easily get lost in all of the possibilities.

It was a pity that Ketis was the wrong kind of sword practitioner to wield such an infinite blade.

She learned from the ancient relic that one of the requirements she had to meet was to imprint the image of heaven in her mind and infuse it with her willpower.

This act of visualization would steadily allow her to manifest a small piece of heaven in her deepest self!

By orienting her entire being towards heaven, she could artificially influence her development to the point where she might truly become a proper inheritor of the Heavensword!

The advantages this bestowed were too many to count. So long as Ketis developed the right 'artistic conception' or whatever that meant, she could not only understand what heaven was all about, but make proper use of the greater and more advanced possibilities of the Heavensword!

Ketis never gave in to the temptation. No matter how attractive it may be to take the Heavensword as her own, she was a mech designer as well as a swordmaster.

She much preferred to forge and utilize her own grand work weapon. If she had the power to do so, she would definitely rely on her own work as opposed to a sword created by a long-dead smith.

Besides, switching to become a successor of the Heavensword came with a lot of irreversible changes. Ketis gained a premonition that accepting transformation would cause her to lose Sharpie in its current form.

That was unacceptable to Ketis!

"Heaven sounds like a nice place, but… I am too attached to this reality to yearn for a different one."

As such, the Heavensword only had a limited ability to pull off all of those feats without her support, and even then it only gave her a small taste of how it could affect reality.

For example, when the pescans sneakily transported a large missile carrier from the upper floor and made it fire its full salvo of transphasic siege missiles, Ketis only swung her weapon a single time to capture all of the threatening warheads in a zone where time progressed a hundred times slower!

If Ketis had decided to intercept these heavy missiles by cutting them with a vibrating sword attack, then she could not guarantee that their exaggeratingly powerful warheads would explode prematurely.

That would have been devastating to both the humans and the pescans on this floor!

A lot more pescans would have died as a result, but Ketis could not accept the loss of any further human life!

She swung her sword yet again.

This time, the missiles that the aliens originally designed to break through the defenses of another city-state regained their normal speeds.

The difference was that they flew in the opposite direction!

The missiles flew so fast that the pescans barely had time to realize the danger heading in their direction.

"Reeeeiiaaa—"

BOOOOOMBOOOOOMBOOOOOMBOOOOOM!

Deafening sounds of explosions engulfed the already ruined floor as the missiles not only destroyed their carrier, but also everything else in a wide spread!

If not for the fact that the missiles were configured for penetrating walls and energy shields rather than destroying as many structures as possible, the entire floor would have turned into an explosive furnace by this time!

Even so, the shockwaves produced by the continuous explosions were so violent that they threatened to push all of the humans on this floor off their feet and slam them against the walls!

Ketis hastily swung the Heavensword once again. A large force field sprung to life that did not entirely negate the strong concussive forces, but managed to weaken them to the point where they only gave people a moderate push.

If her previous attacks had already slain over a thousand pescans and destroyed much of the cohesion and combat effectiveness of the defending side, then what had just taken place completely destroyed ability to resist!

The transphasic siege missiles had done their job and blown out large chunks of transphasic stone from the floor and walls.

Unfortunately, their indiscriminate power had done more harm to the pescans than the humans.

Every single alien combatant and structure on the side where the missiles originally came from had been devastated!

Nothing was left intact on the other side. The destruction was so utterly thorough and complete that it looked like the aftermath of a warzone.

The floor had been conquered at this point.

Though many hundreds of pescans still managed to survive the simultaneous explosions due to the size of this floor, they had all lost their confidence in this battle.

Their morale had hit rock bottom when they all witnessed the varied means of the 'human goddess'.

From their perspective, Ketis had been toying with them from the beginning!

Against an opponent that could power up to a massive degree and display many different abilities that had little to do with each other, these humble planet-bound aliens could not even muster the will to lift their arm cannons anymore.

"Reeaiiiaee…"

"Lkoowwwwa…"

The aliens either wailed or said their goodbyes. Even the most elite soldiers had become broken after they realized how futile it was for them to resist.

Although Ketis wanted to wipe them all out with a few more strikes from her borrowed sword, she had already expended a lot of power.

Her time with the Heavensword was slowly coming to an end!

Rather than waste her time on defeating these dregs, Ketis wanted to eliminate the threats that could still threaten her family and clansmen after she had lost her power.

She gazed upwards. Her eyes seemed to penetrate through tens of meters of thick transphasic stone.

The next floor happened to be the highest one. It was smaller than the other ones and did not hold that many pescans.

The aliens stationed in the highest floor still possessed a decent amount of combat power, but their numbers were no longer as overwhelming as before.

She had much greater concerns to worry about.

The most lethal threat had never been the pescans.

Her gaze turned downwards.

She hadn't noticed it at the start, but the enhanced senses and perception granted by the Heavensword allowed her to detect a huge threat waking up from an awfully long slumber.

Ketis could sense that the central prison cell used to be the most secure one in the entire facility, but all of its security measures were steadily being retracted.

This granted the formerly dormant phase whale the opportunity to restore more and more of his power.

If the phase whale managed to get free from his restraints as well as his confining prison, then Ketis believed she stood no chance in defeating this creature.

This was after she had factored in the help provided by the Heavensword!

"It is a good thing that it hasn't fully woken up as of yet." Ketis grinned as she started to see the prisoner in the central cell as her latest prey. "I wouldn't think about touching you if you are in your prime, but now that you are still partially restrained, you are no different from a fish on the chopping block!"

Of course, a big fish on a chopping block was not so easily cut, but Ketis still possessed a lot of confidence in her Heavensword!

Besides, the Heavensword hungered to test its blade against this foreign alien powerhouse.

It happened before she could even formulate her thoughts.

In one moment, she was floating in the air like a heavenly goddess coming down to bring judgment to the aliens.

In another moment, she had teleported straight through all of the transphasic stone and appeared in the middle of a dark and enormous chamber!

The dim lighting of the jumbo-sized prison cell barely lit up the only occupant that had remained trapped in this place for so long.

The sudden appearance of Ketis and her glowing white blade inserted an explosion of light in this forgotten cell!

Just as the Larkinsons and many others suspected, the prison facility had never been completely emptied.

Its last occupants may have evacuated the entire facility, but they left behind the largest, strongest and most formidable native god for reasons no one could explain!

There was no question that the prisoner was a phase whale.

The aquatic creature was hundreds of meters long and possessed a pale gray hide that looked dry and leathery due to all of the moisture that it had lost over the ages.

One of the restraints that kept him in place all of this time were massive chains that had been shackled to his flesh and bones. They extended from reinforced enclosures built into the surrounding walls and maintained so much tension that the whale could not even move from the middle of the cell!

Made out of unknown transphasic alloys, their toughness and resistance against spatial effects were the highest that Ketis had ever seen!

Not all of the chains held the ancient prisoner anymore.

Ketis could see that while every chain remained attached to the whale, their connections to the walls of the prison had been severed only recently.

It turned out that whatever the pescans had done in the control room at the top allowed them to activate a gradual liberation process!

Ketis could sense that even now, a mechanism hidden behind the thick and reinforced transphasic walls was in the process of severing another thick chain!

After briefly studying the restrains, she studied the phase whale itself.

Compared to the ones the Larkinsons encountered before, this one looked a lot cleaner and less evil.

The ancient phase whale was not an unclean whale and did not transplant a lot of tentacles across his body to make it easier for him to grapple his enormous prey.

Despite not showing any signs that he has given in to cannibalism, the phase whale looked anything but gentle!

The creature's eyes were half-closed and only partially awake. It took an immeasurable amount of time and energy to rouse a phase whale from hibernation.

After all, it was incredible for a creature as large, massive and dense as this to be able to cling to life for thousands of years!

Only a part of the massive creature's brain had awoken by this time. The creature's massive eyes did not stare up at her, but she could feel the instincts of the phase whale's body responding to her intrusion.

Hostility immediately radiated from the massive whale!

The entire fabric of space in the chamber began to solidify as the whale's phasewater organs began to turn the immediate area into a spatial quagmire.

Normally, this should have immobilized anyone aside from powerful enough native gods.

Ketis would have become frozen in space as well if she was present in a normal capacity.

"Heaven shall never be denied!"

The powerful weapon easily shattered the solidification effect around it and completely negated half-dormant whale's efforts!