The Mech Touch - Chapter 7304: The Divine Dilemma
Chapter 7304: The Divine Dilemma
A major accident occurred!
Three giants got caught by the battle moon’s tentacles!
One of them was an Ur-Titan that possessed a fairly large body.
The other two consisted of Faceless Giants who possessed much smaller bodies.
Despite his size, the Ur-Titan inspired greater confidence. His expression showed that he was still full of defiance. His superior strength and phasewater concentration meant that he was tougher to take down. He was able to exert more force and his spatial barrier was also a lot more resistant.
The condition of the latter happened to be a lot more pessimistic.
The Faceless Giants were much smaller relative to the tentacles. Although that also made it harder for multiple tentacles to latch onto them, that was not that big of a problem as they simply stacked on top of each other.
The smaller giants already started to disappear from sight!
“Get off!”
“Save them!”
Both Ur-Titans and Faceless Giants briefly converged on their trapped comrades. They relied on a combination of physical force, spatial abilities and companion spirit abilities to dislodge the tentacles.
They achieved a lot of initial successes. While the tentacles appeared thick and strong, the reality was that they were made out of low-quality flesh and materials.
In the face of the power of many phase lords, the tentacles broke and spilled blood in every direction!
Multiple tentacles tore apart as they sought to free their trapped comrades.
However, the battle moon’s greatest strength was not its resilience, but its abundant resources!
Even as tentacle after tentacle got torn away, more of them spawned into existence and replaced the existing ones.
The Divine Harpoon scowled as he relied upon his bare strength to tear a tentacle apart by himself.
Unlike his subordinates, his size and strength was much greater on account of being a strategies. This made it much easier for him to destroy the alien entanglement, but he was just a single combatant.
When matched up against a battle moon that could dynamically spawn more tentacles by relying on its vast flesh reserves, his strength was ultimately feeble, especially when he was not specialized in close-ranged combat!
In fact, most of the giants were proficient in melee combat, but that did not matter all that much when they were lacking in gear.
Without the right weapons and armor, their combat effectiveness was just a fraction as powerful!
The Divine Harpoon clearly saw that there was no end to this threat. Even as he and his subordinates kept tearing apart the tentacles by relying on their collective strength, the battle moon’s rate of replenishment proved to be too great!
Without inflicting serious damage to the VOBM, the alien megaconstruct could easily spawn new tentacles at will.
In fact, the amount of tentacles that entangled the three human phase lords had not decreased, but increased!
The situation was growing worse over time!
Not only was the quantity of tentacles increasing, but the biological plasma cannons had never ceased firing.
The mutated voribugs no longer swarmed the giants directly, but showed a bit of tactical acumen by circling around so that they could form a blockade around the escape routes.
In short, the longer this situation persisted, the greater the probability that more giants would end up getting stuck!
The Divine Harpoon clearly fell into a dilemma. It was too hard for his men to put up a serious fight without adequate wargear. The difference it made was far too great. Many giants already resembled the decision to deploy without their arms and armor.
The giants now faced an agonizing choice. They could either choose to abandon their trapped comrades and flee with their remaining lives and bounty intact, or they could persist and risk losing the lives of more giants in the process!
This dilemma paralyzed them for a time.
While the Rubarthans kept transmitting instructions for the Ascended Giants to cut their losses and abandon their trapped colleagues, the human phase lords felt unwilling to abandon their comrades!
Regardless of whether they were Ur-Titans or Faceless Giants, they all considered each other kin. They were like a huge extended family. Abandoning their brothers and sisters in the face of this alien peril would be an agonizing decision!
Though most of them used to be professional soldiers who knew that they needed to be cold-blooded at times, their new lives as Ascended Giants had given them the illusion that they had become powerful enough to ignore these tradeoffs.
They never expected their first mission under their new leader to put them back in such a dire situation!
At this time, the giants failed to form a single consensus on the problem, and that turned into a problem.
With more and more tentacles converging on the giants, the rescuers may end up needing saving in short order!
It was at this time that they needed clarity and decisiveness the most!
Just before the tentacles enveloping the trapped Ur-Titan grew strong enough to reel him into the fleshy embrace of the battle moon, sharp and powerful shards of ice suddenly appeared from the distance and cut into the fleshy appendages!
The sharp ice shards cut and wounded the tentacles with unusual effectiveness!
Even if the ice elemental attacks failed to sever the large and thick tentacles straight away, the damage they suffered was already enough to weaken them by 10 to 50 percent, which was more than enough for the surrounding giants to tear them apart in short order!
“I HAVE ARRIVED!”
Reinforcements had arrived. Against the strong recommendations of the Rubarthans, Ves had chosen to step onto the battlefield in person.
He chose to let out the Dark Apostle.
While his alter ego lacked the high-quality wargear that had been prepared back in the Bluejay Fleet, he was better off than the rest of his giants.
That was because he could still resort to other solutions.
At this time, the value of a size-changing artifact had skyrocketed.
Previously, Ves had begun to favor the Oceancaller less and less.
He no longer held much interest in deepening his understanding of the water element now that he had roughly formed his foundation in this field.
As a pure melee weapon, Ves could easily make use of other armaments that were much more effective at close range.
He could rely on a plasma weapon if he wanted to burn lots of voribugs.
He could also wield a superdimensional spear if he wanted to penetrate the spatial barriers of enemy phase leaders.
Whacking them apart with the physical bulk of the Oceancaller seemed much less effective and more primitive by comparison.
At the same time, the boost in water manipulation may be considerable, but Ves never regarded himself as a qi cultivator who specialized in the water element.
His ability to leverage the water element to attack, defend or other tasks was not impressive.
Even if he was actively making use of Blinky’s talent in energy control, he and the Dark Apostle’s lack of comprehension and affinity in water hindered their applications.
However, it just so happened that their mediocre water manipulation capabilities proved helpful during this crucial stage!
Due to the positioning of the ship that Ves previously boarded, the Dark Apostle was only able to lend a hand to the trapped Ur-Titan.
Although he also wanted to rescue the pair of trapped Faceless Giants, they were positioned on the other sides of the large battle moon!
Even if the Dark Apostle could circle around and launch ice shards at the tentacles that trapped his other subordinates, the time expended on this plan was too great!
The spatial barriers of many Faceless Giants had already reached their limits at this time.
In fact, the Dark Apostle already observed a couple of them that had backed away because their spatial barriers had already broken apart!
Their bodies became vulnerable and a few of them even started to suffer serious plasma burns!
“Rescue the Reed King!” The Dark Apostle roared over the communication channel!
Now that he had stepped in, he did not want his efforts to go to waste. This was no time for the giants to waver. They needed to rescue the precious Ur-Titan at all cost!
“Sir! What about the Divine Wheel and the Divine Aporia?” The strategies of the Faceless Giant Phalanx asked.
“I have called for Rubarthan reinforcements to assist in their rescue. They have 20 seconds.”
The Rubarthans had not just sent out their upgraded scout missions to the VOBM.
At this time, dozens of hidden assets turned off their cloaking technology and began to open fire with whatever weapon systems they possessed!
Stealth mechs and stealth shuttles launched precision attacks that did not possess a lot of power, but helped with severing one tentacle after another.
However, the Divine Wheel and the Divine Aporia still remained trapped!
The stealth assets were divided among the two due to their positioning. It was far too difficult for them to concentrate their fire. They had no choice but to keep up their current efforts, yet that failed to change the status
quo.
The battle moon kept regrowing the damaging tentacles in less than a minute!
Its rate of replenishment was too fast, especially when the composition of the tentacles was not that complicated
in the first place.
The simpler the flesh structure of the mutated voribugs, the easier it was for the insects to regenerate the damage.
While the gesture of the Rubarthans briefly boosted the morale of the giants, the trapped giants still remained under the entanglement of too numerous tentacles.
In fact, the pressure they endured became so great that their spatial barriers eventually collapsed!
“Ahhhhh!”
“My bones are getting crushed!”
Just as the Dark Apostle’s assistance proved timely and helpful enough to free the trapped Ur-Titan, he simultaneously made a painful decision.
“WITHDRAW! THEY CAN’T BE SAVED ANYMORE. DO NOT LET THEIR SACRIFICE GO TO WASTE. YOU CAN AVENGE THEM LATER, BUT DON’T LET THE BATTLE MOON TRAP YOU AS WELL.
As unwilling as they felt, the Ascended Giants hadn’t lost their sanity. They still retained enough good sense to understand the meaning of sacrifice.
As their expressions betrayed their inner turmoil, the remaining giants nonetheless abandoned the Divine Wheel and the Divine Aporia to their fates.
Even as the pair of the Faceless Giants screamed and broadcasted their final tortuous words, the giants Armed up their massive hearts and focused on withdrawal.
While many of them had lost their spatial barriers at this time, the strength of the Ur-Titans proved decisive
enough.
Not only did they lead the vanguard and smash through the obstruction of hundreds of thousands of mutated voribugs, they also relied on their larger bodies to swat and push away lots of enemies!
Though bug after bug landed on their unarmored bodies and tried to gnaw on their skin and flesh, their progress was too slow due to their horrible efficiency of burrowing into the flesh of a phase lord.
With the help of the Dark Apostle’s water manipulation and the precision attacks of the Rubarthan stealth assets, the remaining giants eventually managed to escape the reach of the VOBM’s plasma cannons and tentacles.
The giants hastily returned to the waiting scout vessels and eagerly shrunk in size until they reached the scale of
ordinary humans.
At this time, their reluctance to return to their human-sized statures no longer mattered.
Their greatest priority was to get away with their lives intact!
They could worry about the decision to abandon two of their comrades later. Right now, they needed to retreat to
space that red humanity still controlled!
The further they moved away from the scary battle moon, the better!
Many of the giants closed their eyes and ignored the haunting screams of the Divine Wheel and the Divine Aporia.
By this time, their communications with the entangled Faceless Giants had cut off. Whether this was due to signal blockage or worse, they could not tell. (More chapters t.me/+z7ieNjQSLFMzMmY6)
