What did he do to deserve this?
Why had Taon incurred this punishnt?
He did not an to hurt Lanie!
Yet how could he possibly explain himself to a maddened pilot who just broke through and beca consud by madness?
As the unbridled rage of his fellow Larkinson swept over the Zeal like an unstoppable firestorm, Taon reflexively tried to keep his precious masterwork ch alive by any ans possible!
Even as the razor-sharp Heartsword sunk deep into the transphasic alloys of the massive quasi-first-class ch and severed entire subsystems, all 5 guns of the Zeal fired at once!
The shells detonated even faster than before, thereby instantly engulfing the unshielded heavy artillery chs with explosions!
At the sa ti, the Zeal also endured a lot of recoil just after firing his Devora Cannon!
Even if the recoil of a gauss cannon was not as severe as other kinetic weapons, its imnse size and power still produced a lot of consequences.
Normally, the heavy lifter platform tried to compensate for the recoil, but after receiving Taon's desperate command, the device did the reverse!
The Zeal successfully managed to wrench himself out of the reach of the empowered Elegant Rage!
"TAAAAAAOOON!" Lanie's distorted voice roared over the damaged and imperfectly repaired speakers of the Elegant Rage! "YOUR TREACHERY IS THE LAST MISTAKE THAT YOU WILL EVER MAKE!"
It beca abundantly clear to everyone that Lanie had completely lost her rationality!
Losing one's mind was a big taboo on the battlefield. Years of piloting a personalized version of the Lucid Rage model had taught Lanie how to achieve a perfect balance between rage and rationality. Even if Zeiga and Lufa were temporarily blocked from lending their glows to her living ch, the female ch pilot should have been able to keep her growing rage contained behind a wall of logic and purpose.
Now, that wall had been completely breached by the super-heavy gauss shell that punched straight through the Elegant Rage's abdon section.
The lee ch no longer displayed any of the elegance that characterized her past performance.
Instead, the overflowing forced resonance empowering the spontaneously repaired machine caused the ch fra to not only fuse with the wood produced by the Emperor Tree, but also mutate further according to Lanie and her companion spirit's most deepest thoughts and desires!
Right now, Lanie had beco overwheld with rage and a desire to enact revenge!
This had far-reaching consequences as her unstable extraordinary willpower shaped the forced resonance acting on her machine and caused her Elegant Rage to mutate increasingly further over ti!
The partially wooden ch began to grow dark and spiky branches around her exterior. The previously normal pieces of armor plating steadily deford until they acquired sharper and more aggressive angles.
Spikes extended from the shoulder plates, knee plates and even the head of the Lucid Rage!
"MA-AOW!"
Kelly yowled in pain and rage as she directly helped to fuel this transformation by absorbing the abundant wood and life energies originally attracted by the Emperor Tree!
As the Elegant Rage continued to morph further and further away from the original intentions of the designers of the original Lucid Rage model, the Zeal quickly managed to stabilize himself further away at a lower altitude.
By this ti, Taon hardly cared about the threat of getting attacked by the Emperor Tree's root spikes.
"Stop it, Lanie! I did not an to attack you! It was an accident! The Emperor Tree is the true culprit!"
"TTTAAAAAAAOOOOOOONNNNN!"
There was no way Taon could reason with Lanie anymore!
The Zeal had already oriented all of his guns towards the Elegant Rage, yet Taon had little confidence that the attacks would be able to stop the lee ch from tearing his machine apart.
A state of forced resonance resulting from a breakthrough was one of the most mysterious and magical phenona in the ch community!
The duration always varied depending on factors such as the accumulation of the ch pilot, but the power boost was always significant!
It always seed to elevate the performance of a standard ch to the paraters of an expert ch, if only barely.
Yet even if the restored and mutated Elegant Rage only reached the strength of a shabby low-tier expert ch, that was still an entire level higher than a custom ch like the Zeal!
Taon's heart beat faster. His face began to redden as he could feel the unambiguous hostility of Lanie radiating from her killing machine.
He did not exactly know why Lanie temporarily stopped to accumulate more energy, but the reprieve granted him a faint amount of hope that he might be able to avoid getting killed by a fellow Larkinson!
"Joshua! Dise! I need your help! Please keep her away from my ch!"
"I can't! The Emperor Tree is hindering our escape!"
The Zeal's accidental sneak attack onto the Elegant Rage had completely caught Venerable Joshua and Venerable Dise off-guard!
Then there was all of the Solus Gas. Since the Emperor Tree rested right on top of a major deposit of this mysterious gas, neither expert pilots operated at their best conditions anymore.
Even though their intuitions had been honed over many battles, their unnaturally high sensitivity towards threats were still primarily centered around themselves. The two expert pilots needed to allocate much of their focus towards dealing with the difficulties introduced by the calamity plant.
It was also a lot more difficult to anticipate impending threats towards other people and chs, especially if they were located further away.
Then there was all of the Solus Gas. Since the Emperor Tree rested right on top of a major deposit of this mysterious gas, neither expert pilots operated at their best conditions anymore.
The all-round dampening of the sensor systems of their chs and the perception that they depended on so much caused them to fight as if they had beco near-sighted!
Yet now that Joshua and Dise noticed that sothing had gone horribly wrong, they both tried their very best to take away the samples they had been tasked to collect and reach the two damaged chs.
However, the Emperor Tree hindered their advance!
Having just collected a piece of bark and a container of sap, the Everchanger frantically tried to move away from the massive trunk, but a forest of tree branches surrounded the expert ch in a thick and multi-layered cage!
Searing hot fire beams struck the branches and either managed to vaporize them in an instant or caused them to catch fire!
Unfortunately, the Emperor Tree's imnse wood energy and other fire suppression asures quickly doused the flas before they could reach a greater scale.
Having thrown out the Heartsword, the Everchanger had already taken hold of the Scarlet Ember and activated its burning hot edge.
"BREAK FOR !" Joshua roared as his anger at letting the Zeal strike the Elegant Rage increased the potency of his strikes!
The powerful plasma sword vaporized through the branches with much greater ease!
Unless the branches were particularly thick and reinforced, the weapon that was originally designed for an ace ch was able to remove practically every obstacle within reach!
However, just as the Everchanger managed to make it halfway out of the cage of branches, half-a-dozen purple wooden chs descended from above and began to assail the Everchanger up close and from afar!
"Damn!"
Different from the normal wooden chs, the ones that ca in purple were much stronger and more difficult to fight against!
This was because the Emperor Tree invested a lot of high-quality resources into replicating the expert chs of Task Force Solus!
They were probably one of the trump cards that the Emperor Tree had been working on in the past few months. They were clearly still in developnt as their performance was still too far away from matching that of the authentic versions, but it was already frightening enough to see that a wild calamity plant managed to make so much progress in so little ti!
The biggest flaw of the purple chs was that they were not yet capable of independent operation. The Emperor Tree had to attach thin and flexible branches onto their backs in order to control them more directly and supply a vast amount of energy and vitality into their resilient fras.
Since the purple chs acted more like direct extensions of the Emperor Tree, they also happened to share much of the calamity plant's strengths, which included its extrely powerful regeneration!
When the Everchanger struck the purple chs with his Vitalus rifle, the energy beams only scorched or damaged a third of their wooden construction before a powerful infusion of sap and wood energy caused them to beco as good as new!
The purple chs did not allow themselves to get struck for free. The copies of the First Sword wielded their enormous wood energy-infused swords that were made out of the sa purple organic material and slamd them against the Everchanger's resonance shield!
Even though the wooden swords carried such a poor edge that they functioned more like blunt objects, they still functioned similar to hyper weapons!
When empowered by a calamity plant, the damage inflicted by these purple wooden sword strikes was not small!
"ANNIHILATE!"
The only effective way for the Everchanger to get rid of these purple wooden chs was by striking them head-on with the powerful Scarlet Ember!
The Everchanger channeled the weapon at the highest sustainable setting and felt his energy reserves draining at a rapid rate.
Joshua and his battle partner couldn't care less about their consumption as they needed to speed up their evacuation as quickly as possible!
The plasma sword allowed them to cut down one purple ch after another, but once the copies of the First Sword collapsed, the ones that imitated the Everchanger continued to fire their purple seed rifles while closing in to strike at the original with their one-handed swords!
Thankfully, the Emperor Tree had not been able to imitate the Scarlet Ember, but that did not an that the purple wooden bootleg versions of the Everchanger were easy to defeat.
If the imitation First Swords excelled in attack, the imitation Everchangers excelled in regeneration!
Anything but a heavy strike was unable to put down the purple wooden hero chs down for good!
Joshua felt like he was fighting against mirrors of his own expert ch. He never really appreciated how frustrating it was to fight against opponents that just wouldn't stay down!
The Everchanger had fallen behind the tis!
If he had been upgraded to the standards of the current Dark Zephyr, the expert hero ch would never allow himself to get stalled by a bunch of branches and purple chs!
"Dise! I can't get out! Can you go ahead and separate Lanie from Taon?!"
"I am in no better position than you. The Emperor Tree is attempting to cage with its roots."
Close to the surface, the First Sword continually slashed away at the thick and resilient roots that attempted to slam into the expert swordsman ch.
While the Decapitator was sharp and powerful enough to cut through these thick black roots with relative ease, the First Sword lacked the power and montum to create a gap large enough to leap out this trap!
The Emperor Tree did not bother to dispatch any purple chs to hinder the First Sword further. The expert ch had already cut down multiple imitations of herself with contemptuous ease.
The only way the calamity plant could hinder the expert swordsman ch was to employ its own roots.
Since they were a core part of the calamity plant's main body, they were far thicker and more resilient than its branches or its purple chs!
This effectively consud the First Sword's high attack power. What was worse was that the roots seriously put the expert ch at risk of getting enveloped to the point where she could no longer exert any leverage to swing her greatsword!
In any case, the Emperor Tree's deliberate attempts to trap and potentially crush the two expert chs prevented them from stopping the ongoing tragedy!
When Taon realized that help would not be forthcoming, his heart sank into a greater pit of despair!
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