The Mech Touch

Everyone held their breaths as the Monster Slayer piloted by Captain Gheri astonishingly landed on the back of the Giant Stone Eater and plunged its greatsword straight through the center of the spine!

The massive creature had stilled.

All active forms of earth energy manipulation froze.

Did the Larkinsons manage to fell the beast?

"Its legs are giving in. The beast is starting to collapse!"

"Be careful and don't get affected by the crash!"

The crater rumbled as the considerable weight of the heavily injured Giant Stone Eater collapsed onto its belly!

All of its remaining limbs no longer moved anymore as the damage inflicted by Captain Gheri's final move proved to be too devastating!

Though the volume of her final resonance-empowered attack was not great, the concentration of energies had become so high that her energy attack successfully managed to sever the hardy bones that made up the spine!

A huge amount of critical nerves had been cut apart in a way that ruled out any way for the beast to regenerate the damage.

The Monster Slayer that stood triumphantly on the monster's uneven back still managed to stay upright under this situation.

The damaged and beaten mech looked especially heroic in this unique moment. Though its physical condition had deteriorated by a considerable degree, its spirit shone like a sharpened blade that reflected glittering stars!

This hard-fought victory clearly pushed Captain Gheri and her Monster Slayer beyond their previous limits!

They had never been able to pull off a move as strong as the one that landed the fatal blow onto the Giant Stone Eater in the past.

It was only now when they challenged a mutated beast that was stronger and less easy to deal with than before that they had successfully figured out a better way to combine their strengths.

The burden of fulfilling a mission issued by the patriarch who observed this hunt from the start made Captain Gheri even more unwilling to back off during this fight.

She had made numerous dangerous gambles during this fight, and she had somehow managed to prevail.

If anything went wrong during the final minute, then there was a large chance that the Giant Stone Eater would have wrecked her mech with her inside of it as well.

There were too many uncertain moments where she could have failed.

The other mechs might have gotten caught by the devastating attacks of the Giant Stone Eater.

The empowered leap of the Monster Slayer may have fallen short of reaching the monster's back.

She could have botched her adapted extraordinary sword technique, causing her Monster Slayer's greatsword to fail in severing the spine of the powerful mutated beast!

Yet by concentrating her willpower further and combining it with the strength and sharpness of her partner mech, their intimate pairing managed to produce a result that was far greater than anything they had managed to unleash in their past hunts!

Everyone grew impressed by what the Swordmaiden captain had accomplished. Her feat was bound to become immortalized in the record of the Ocanon VI Branch of the Larkinson Clan.

Captain Gheri soon snapped out of her inexcusable moment of enlightenment.

Though she reveled in her substantial boost in combat power, she had hunted down enough mutated beasts to know that defeating them was anything but simple.

The annoying part about mutated beasts was that killing blows that worked for ordinary exobeasts might not have the same effect for their stronger counterparts.

Shattering the heart of a mutated beast would not kill it outright when it had evolved a redundant heart.

"Pay attention!" She barked over the communication channel. "Stay sharp and get ready to finish this beast off if it makes any move. Cut off its remaining legs just to be sure. I would rather ruin its corpse entirely than to risk an accident in a misguided attempt to preserve its value."

A less heavily damaged mutated beast carcass offered a lot more value to researchers and hunters who sought to absorb its power, but far too many hunters suffered accidents by misjudging the conditions of their supposed prey.

Her hunting team all consisted of highly experienced mech pilots, so none of them let down their guard. They all positioned their machines so that they could quickly inflict crippling damage if anything set off their triggers.

In the meantime, the mechs directed as much power to their sensor and scanning systems as possible.

They needed to ascertain the physical state of the paralyzed and heavily injured Giant Stone Eater in order to confirm that it had truly lost its ability to resist.

More importantly than that, the mechs also needed to be on the lookout for other powerful beasts that sought to ambush the hunting team just when it had completed an exhausting fight.

Even though extremely powerful mutated beasts generally worked hard to deter other powerful beasts from invading their territories, who knew whether there were other monsters lurking in the shadows.

A proper hunting team had to account for many what-ifs in order to survive on this planet in the long run.

Fortunately, the sensors and scanners did not pick any concerning readings.

The Sorara #390 Hunting Ground was sparse to begin with, and the Giant Stone Eater offered no attraction to the few power beasts in the vicinity.

As for the earth monster itself, the creature was constantly losing more and more strength. Its wounds were no longer regenerating as effectively as before. Liters of liters of precious lifeblood spilled out of its many sword and puncture wounds and spilled onto the jagged and uneven ground.

Even so, the vitality of this giant beast was so great that it was still far from dying.

There was a considerable risk that it might develop a mutation that enabled it to regain control over its crippled body.

This was why they needed to move quickly. The longer the delay, the greater the risk that the hunting team would get overturned!

The remaining Monster Slayers performed the heavy and terious work of amputating the remaining legs of the beast.

It had way too many limbs, and each of them were difficult to separate because the Monster Slayers had to cut through a lot of tough bones.

Still, the damaged mechs made steady progress as the Giant Stone Eater appeared helpless to intervene due to its complete immobilization.

The Crystal Lords assisted in this work by surgically cutting off the thick and heavy forearms with their focused slicer beams.

In the meantime, the lone Huntmaster remained on guard and held its spear in preparation to stab it straight through the eye of the beast.

It was unnerving for the Flagrant Vandal pilot to stare through one of the giant reptilian eyeballs of the creature. The creature still possessed enough clarity to direct an intense degree of hostility towards the mech that stood right in front of its sizable head!

"Ma'am, I suggest we finish it off sooner rather than later. This beast is giving me the creeps. Just give me the order and I will drive my spear as deep into this monster's head as I can. You can also behead this beast if you want to keep your hunting trophy as whole as possible."

"I understand your concerns, but it is not time yet to land the killing blow." Captain Gheri replied. "Our patriarch has demanded that he be close at hand before we finish off our prey. Stay on guard and do not let the mech he is riding on come to any harm."

After the hunting team completely severed the Giant Stone Eater's limbs, a single auxiliary mech climbed over the edge of the cratere and started to approach the collapsed beast.

The Hymenoptera strode with slow but steady steps befitting its mech type.

The closer it came to the beast, the more that Ves was able to feel the overflowing strength and savagery of this formidable beast.

It had come so close to reaching the threshold of a calamity beast, but the Giant Stone Eater ultimately fell short of transforming its very life essence.

Ves briefly felt a little guilty for cutting off its life trajectory, but quickly set his conflicting emotions aside.

Even if the Larkinson hunting team did not set out to hunt this beast, it would have perished eventually.

With the Hunting Association in control over the entire planet, there was no way a newly evolved calamity beast could ever pose a threat to red humanity!

At least Captain Gheri and her fellow mech pilots gave the Giant Stone Eater a worthy last stand.

As the Hymenoptera stopped a few steps away from the Huntmaster that stood poised to land the killing blow, Ves was able to ascertain the condition of the powerful beast much better than before.

Physically, the Giant Stone Eater was losing blood at a much more rapid rate than before. Its blood actually held a lot of value, but there was no easy way to preserve it unless a hunting team brought specialized containers to catch these precious fluids.

Spiritually, the mutated beast had become beset by pain, mindless fury and trauma. The Giant Stone Eater would like nothing more than to muster up its strength and lash out at the mechs that had brought its body down, but its crippled state inflicted so much pain that it had lost all of its control over the surrounding earth energies!

"The psychological state of this mutated beast is really poor." Ves frowned.

He sensed that the Giant Stone Eater harbored an overwhelming animosity towards the swordsman mechs and the Swordmaidens in particular.

The beast was just smart enough to discern that the giant metal machines were piloted by tiny humans.

If the Giant Stone Eater ever managed to recover, then it would never rest until it had completely crushed all of the Monster Slayers and mech pilots that had injured it to this extent!

This was not good news to Ves. An angry, vindictive and stubborn spirituality was much more difficult to tame. It was especially troublesome if the creature hated the Larkinson Clan in particular!

Ves knew better than to raise an obviously hostile spirituality.

At least Titania had been old, calm and rational enough to get over her own death and start a new life as a design spirit, though it helped a lot that its spirituality had lost a lot of components by the time that Ves salvaged it from the astral beast's corpse.

If Ves wanted to transform the Giant Stone Eater into a helpful design spirit, then he would have to damage it to the point of losing its original personality.

The only other way to make use of this valuable gain was to break it down into spiritual ingredients that could form the basis of an artificial design spirit.

Right now, Ves preferred the latter solution as he could exert a lot of control over the outcome.

"Prepare to kill the beast." He said as he remembered why he insisted on being here. "Make it as fast and clean as possible."

The mechs that retained their combat effectiveness all moved in the right positions.

In the meantime, Ves retrieved a special object that he had previously stashed in the corner of the cockpit.

Ves smiled as he patted the large and heavy alloy box. He opened it up and retrieve a rough piece of ore that would serve as the container of the Giant Stone Eater's spirituality.

"Let's see if you are up to the task."

This was one of the 'new' P-stones that he had managed to scrounge in one of the material markets of New Constantinople VIII.

It was not the same kind of hyper ore as the P-stones that he had originally gathered in the Milky Way, but its spiritual properties were similar enough to be used in the same way.

Once he confirmed that the new P-stone was up to the task, he issued the decisive order.

"Kill!"

Two of the Monster Slayers swung their glowing greatswords through the thick and heavy neck of the Giant Stone Eater. They needed to chop at the beast several times in order to get through all of the flesh and bones!

The Huntmaster struck faster and jabbed its spear straight through the eye, causing the organ to burst and release all kinds of disgusting liquids.

Ves grew sharper as he and Blinky got ready to harvest the powerful spirituality of this mutated beast.