The Emperor Tree reacted to the blatant intrusion of the Larkinson chs by resorting to its most convenient 'organic weapon system'.
Hundreds of wooden cannon muzzles extended from the imnse juggernaut-sized trunk of the Emperor Tree. Not all of them faced the sa direction, but there were still plenty of wooden cannons that could easily target the chs flying in the air!
From the mont the seed barrage began, the defenses of every ch started to do their jobs.
The Everchanger and the First Sword effortlessly resisted the tide. The exotic launching thod and the strange properties of the seeds did not hide the fact that they were hardly optimized for ranged combat.
Modern cannons developed by humans had gone through millennia of technological evolution and refinent. Even the cheapest of cannons had reached a remarkably high state of performance due to all of the incrental improvents that had been made over the ages.
The Emperor Tree may be an insanely talented exoplant that managed to reach his current level of strength just two years after the start of the Age of Dawn, but that did not change the fact that it was still a wild existence!
Unlike humans and many other civilized races in the cosmos, the Emperor Tree went through life without the benefit of systematic inheritance and education.
Its cannon designs were crude and its seed projectiles were only hard enough to damage chs because the tree had obviously put effort into making them harder. The muzzle velocities of the wooden cannons were not particularly high due to relying on primitive ans.
The projectiles were hardly any better. While the seeds could technically be categorized as hyper projectiles due to the fact that they were all imbued with wood energy, they did not undergo systematic developnt either.
However, while the expert chs had little to fear from these relatively mundane massed attacks, the two custom chs were experiencing greater pressure.
The Zeal had no hope of evading the attacks, so he had to rely entirely on his defenses to withstand the storm.
Fortunately, the quasi-first-class heavy artillery ch was equipped with a powerful azure shield generator. The transphasic properties of this energy shield was especially effective at withstanding attacks that did not possess the sa qualities.
The Reticula Corein V was a star system that was almost devoid of phasewater. If the opposite was the case, then it would have been colonized by aliens or humans a long ti ago!
The Emperor Tree likely never encountered phasewater directly throughout its existence, so it probably had no idea that the Zeal was able to resist far more seed attacks than usual!
However, the relentless tide of seeds crashing into the heavy ch's azure energy shield still caused it to drain at a gradual but concerning rate.
This was just the start of the fight. If the Zeal kept getting hit like this, he would soon lose his energy protection and beco a lot more exposed to the Emperor Tree's attacks.
The Elegant Rage fared the worst out of the four machines. Lanie regretted the decision to pilot a ch with slimd down armor. While she may have been able to arrange an upgrade to the custom ch's energy shield to modern standards, her battle partner's power reactor had not been able to keep up. The lee ch was not able to withstand too many seed strikes!
The only way for the relatively fragile ch to withstand the seeds was to block the seeds with its much harder tonfas or to evade them with clever maneuvering.
Lanie and the Elegant Rage struggled to evade the projectiles. The tonfa-wielding ch lost the elegance that usually characterized her movent patterns. Compared to past performances, the living ch always started to move or change her course a bit too late!
The lack of intuition due to the strong concentration of Solus Gas deprived Lanie of a tool that she often relied upon to evade danger!
Though she quickly adjusted and learned to respond by relying on her perception and her own judgnt, the Elegant Rage clearly struggled to preserve the integrity of her energy shields.
"Get behind !" Taon suggested. "This is no ti to be stubborn, Lanie."
He was right. It was not ti yet for the Elegant Rage to shine. Lanie did not stubbornly stick around in order to resist the seed bombardnt. She instead guided her beleaguered ch behind the Zeal's massive ch fra.
The azure energy shield projected by the larger machine easily provided full directional coverage from the Emperor Tree's seed attacks!
"How many seeds can this damn tree launch!?" Lanie asked in a frustrated tone. "It has already fired thousands if not tens of thousands of them already!"
There was no way for her Elegant Rage to do anything if she continually needed to brave a rain of seed projectiles.
"It won't run out anyti soon, I think." Taon responded. "The tree is so huge that it should have more than enough wood and other stuff to turn into projectiles. These seeds are tiny compared to the size of its trunk."
"THESE SEEDS ARE NOTHING TO US." The Everchanger boasted that the machine's resonance shield resisted every attack with little strain. "THE ONLY ANNOYING PART IS THAT THE RAIN OF FIREPOWER IS SO DENSE THAT IT IS TOO DIFFICULT TO EVADE THE SEEDS ENTIRELY."
Venerable Joshua took charge again. "Then let us do sothing about that. Those wooden cannons shouldn't be too tough. We should trim them down! Zeal, use your heavy artillery cannons! Everyone else, keep your distance."
The threat posed by the Emperor Tree should be low so long as they remained at the edge of the red zone. That might change once they got closer, so Joshua did not want to rush forward right away.
Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!
Of the 8 semi-modular weapon hardpoints of the Zeal, half of them were taken up by conventional heavy artillery cannons.
Each of them began to launch explosive hyper shells at the massive tree in the distance.
Although it was difficult to target anything with pinpoint accuracy due to all of the Solus Gas, Taon and the Zeal were still able to land their explosive projectiles near the base of the trunk.
Continuous explosions began to engulf the surface of the tree. Huge pieces of bark splintered from the surface while dozens of wooden cannons shattered or deford.
"The wooden cannons are much more fragile than the main trunk!" Venerable Joshua grinned. "Keep bombarding them! Even if the tree can regrow them, it will surely take ti for them to return!"
The Everchanger did not sit still during this period. He lifted his Vitalus rifle and began to spit out a continuous barrage of resonance-empowered fire beams at the trunk.
The souped-up laser beams struck the trunk and the surrounding wooden cannons with a blaze of thermal energy. The fire E-energy attached to the beams domineeringly engulfed the nearby wood energy and created an even greater conflagration!
It seed as if the wooden cannons could be cleaned up fairly quickly so long as the two ranged chs kept up the fire.
However, the Emperor Tree was not weak or passive. It began to channel a large amount of wood energy and forcefully suppressed the fire energy that was raging on its surface!
A completely alien and inhuman presence began to exert more power. Though the thick concentration of Solus Gas made it difficult for the ch pilots to notice it, the Emperor Tree domineeringly forced the fires to subside!
While the Emperor Tree was able to put out the fires through this thod, it could do little to prevent its wooden cannons from getting shattered by all of the explosions and energy beams!
The volu of seed attacks gradually lessened. It was amazing how just two chs could cause the Emperor Tree to lose so many wooden cannons.
However, none of the attacks ca close to damaging the main trunk itself. It was simply too huge to beco seriously affected by these relatively small-scale attacks.
As the Zeal and the Everchanger continued to remove wooden cannon after wooden cannon, the Emperor Tree did not appear to be in a hurry to regenerate them. New cannons started to grow from the bottom where the first ones had been removed, but it would take many more minutes before they beca functional again.
"The Zeal cannot keep this up forever, sir." Taon reported to Venerable Joshua. "As large as my heavy ch's ammunition capacity may be, these explosive shells all take up space. Once they run out, I won't be able to contribute as much firepower."
"I know, but we cannot go forward yet. This tree is capable of doing so much more. We need to tease out its tricks instead of blindly blundering into them. Just wait. Now that the tree understands that it can't get rid of us with its seed cannons alone, it will resort to other asures. Pay attention to the ground in case it is able to grow much longer roots than previously reported."
The next threat did not co from below.
Instead, it ca from the front, left, right and even their rear!
Dozens of smaller and less potent seed projectiles assaulted the four Larkinson chs from many different directions!
Even though their power was clearly worse, the fact that the Emperor Tree was able to attack the chs from completely different directions caught the ch pilots by surprise!
"Where did those attacks co from!? Did the Emperor Tree plant so of its seeds and have them germinate into miniature versions of itself?!"
"No. The trajectories are not quite right for that. The smaller seeds are launched from the sa altitude or higher."
Before the four ch pilots could guess even further, they were all taken by surprise as more than a dozen large wooden monsters of uneven sizes and shapes erged from the surrounding gas clouds and assailed the chs with a variety of wooden armants!
"What?!"
Even though the high-strung ch pilots completely failed to anticipate their approach in advance, they responded quickly enough.
The First Sword made a quick and deceptively simple horizontal sweep with her Decapitator that easily parted the wooden monsters in half.
The Everchanger intercepted half-a-dozen of them with rapid-fire shots of his Vitalus before slashing apart the remainder with his Heartsword.
The Elegant Rage suddenly ca into her elent again. Under the direction of an eager Lanie, the lee ch actively surged forward to bash and burn the roughly ch-sized monstrosities with a pair of plasma tonfas!
The three chs dealt with the wooden monsters so efficiently that none of them ca close to the Zeal.
The three ch pilots clearly intended for this to happen. They did not forget that the Zeal was the only machine that was unable to adequately defend himself against enemies up close.
"What… did we just fight against? How can these wooden monsters fly?" Lanie wondered.
"Don't you think these wooden monsters look familiar?" Taon said the obvious.
Though the sudden ambush strike started and ended quickly, the ch pilots and their living chs still managed to get a good impression of all of the attackers sent by the Emperor Tree.
In truth, the living chs felt much more shocked than their ch pilots at this ti!
"THESE ARE NOT WOODEN MONSTERS. THEY ARE WOODEN CHS." The Everchanger declared as his three eyes glowed brighter. "CAN YOU NOT SEE WHAT IS HAPPENING? THE EMPEROR TREE HAS BEEN LEARNING FROM US. IT HAS NOT ONLY IMITATED OUR RANGED WEAONS, BUT IT HAS ALSO MADE STRIDES TO REPLICATE OUR CHS!"
This statent unquestionably rung true in everyone else's minds!
This was because the shapes and contours of those 'wooden monsters' roughly matched the designs of the ch models fielded by Task Force Solus!
From the light and swift Ferocious Piranha to the fierce dual-wielding Stormblade Samurai, the Emperor Tree had sohow managed to set up a wooden ch factory and began to produce blatantly pirated versions of the famous chs of the Larkinson Clan!
User Comments
0 comments from readers