The Mech Touch

Chapter 6689 The Second Shot

Chapter 6689 The Second Shot

The shot launched from one of the cat eyes of the Spirit of Bentheim's iconic prow had missed the mark!

Granted, any rifleman mech that attempted to strike a target from so many kilometers away would have missed anyway. It was just too difficult to control so many variables and keep the rifle of a barrel at the perfect angle to secure a hit.

As the native aliens gloated at the incompetence shown by the powerful marksman mech, the human defenders grew dismayed.

How come the puelmer heavy cruisers were able to maintain consistent and accurate laser beam fire at such enormous distances while their best marksman failed to land her own shot?

In fact, it was a bit unfair to compare the two with each other. The puelmer warships exclusively hammered the largest orbital fortresses that all followed constant and predictable trajectories.

Any human mech would struggle a lot more to do the same!

Mechs by nature were originally designed to fight at much closer ranges than typical warships were capable of. For centuries, they had been designed to fight and defeat other mechs, so they naturally gravitated towards improving their close to mid-range combat capabilities.

In other words, they were handicapped in long-ranged shooting contests from the start. This made it so that fewer people held expectations that they would 'win' this competition.

Venerable Stark did not take notice of what other humans and aliens thought about her performance.

She and her battle partner were still fully focused on their primary goal and mission. The initial shot missed, but they were already preparing to launch their second shot! What few people noticed as they reacted to the dramatic miss was that the Spirit of Bentheim's eye socket still glowed bright!

Although the energy levels of the Amaranto Mark III and the new Instrument of Vengeance had dipped, they were already beginning to return to their prior peak levels.

It turned out that the powerful marksman mech had only discharged a portion of her accumulated power!

It was a testament to the excellent design and powerful specifications of the Amaranto Mark III that many people mistook her partially charged attack as a blow that the mech was only able to launch at full strength!

Venerable Stark had a better appreciation of the difference in firepower and lethality between the Amaranto Mark II and the Amaranto Mark III.

"I can do better. I can do much better."

At this moment, Venerable Stark and her machine were busy trying to use the data gathered from the calibrating shot to finetune the decisive execution shot.

This was a process that should normally happen within a few seconds at most, but Stark decided to break from this standard routine.

Her next shot had to strike true, so Davia Stark was more than willing to impose additional delays in order to further calculate the best firing solutions.

The Two-Step Execution Crystal had already run the numbers and proposed minute adjustments to get the angle just right.

This would only remain valid for a short time, and its accuracy steadily dropped as the enemy phase lords maintained their advance towards the final fortress.

The mech and rifle glowed brightly once again. It was amazing to see how much energy they were able to absorb after the big upgrade. The Amaranto was most definitely a peak performance mech that only needed to make a few moves to turn the tide of a battle!

Was she capable of repeating her miracles? Did she have what it took to deter enemy phase lords with her Instrument of Vengeance alone?

"Get ready!"

Venerable Stark's momentum rose to a new peak, Her fighting spirit blazed with excitement and expectation. Her focus narrowed to the point where she had consciously cast aside most of her calculations and became solely focused on making sure her next shot hit her target.

All of the previous factors that made her attacks so much more powerful than before fell into place once again.

The offensive hyper materials integrated in the archemetal frame.

The ace mech-grade resonating exotics.

The Endex System Version 3.0.

The high saturation of phasewater.

The massive increase in size of the Instrument of Vengeance.

The blessing from the Phase King.

The Two-Step Execution Crystal's protocols for the critical execution shot.

All of these separate factors combined into a total package where mech and rifle turned into one extraordinary superweapon.

The line between the two practically blurred as they sucked in the surrounding light. in an unscientific manner and glowed extremely bright as a response!

As Venerable Stark quickly dialed in her settings, she decided to go all out and bet everything on this single shot.

"Vail, it's your turn."

"Chip chip!"

A dark and shadowy companion spirit emerged from her head. Vails' aura was tinged with the curse of death. Its aura made a strong contrast with the light-filled mech, but Vail was still able to enter the Instrument of Vengeance without effort and add her own modest strength to the impending attack!

The companion spirit's ominous properties happened to resonate well with the Two-Step Execution Crystal.

This was what Venerable Stark relied upon to give the execution shot additional

meaning.

Just like her companion spirit, Stark herself was also able to imbue additional power into the already overloaded attack that was still in the making.

Even as her Instrument of Vengeance started to transmit a few warning signals due to holding back so much power, Venerable Stark still forced herself to squeeze out a bit

more strength.

Just like every other expert pilot, Davia Stark had been studying Ketis' new theory.

After consulting with Venerable Dise, Stark worked hard to discover and develop her own 'clement!

There were certain expert pilots who already knew what their element was supposed to be. Venerable Vincent Ricklin was a clear example of this. He knew exactly how he wanted to shape and express his power.

There were also other expert pilots who needed to do a lot more thinking and self-exploration in order to find out the best way to harmonize with the environment.

Fortunately, Venerable Stark managed to find her central concept rather easily after a bit of soul-searching.

Before she became an expert pilot, she was just an ordinary woman and a mech pilot.

Davia Stark still looked back on the days she spent in the Komodo Star Sector with

fondness.

Life was not easy for her at the time, but she had learned to enjoy the simple pleasures

in life.

Then the Sand War came and ruined everything,

Due to the Big Two's neglect of the border regions. the sandman race were allowed to

invade humanity's borders and raze planet after planet. So many star systems fell in such a short amount of time that no second-rate state was able to organize any

proper resistance against the tide of sandmen!

After breaking through in desperation and almost giving into despair, the Davia Stark that emerged from these traumas was a completely different woman from before.

The Venerable Stark of today was no longer able to appreciate the simpler pleasures in

life because she was no longer able to return to her previous state.

She had lost her humanity and made up for it by becoming an avenger. Vengeance was the overwhelming purpose that drove her to fight, to challenge herself

and to persist in her life.

If she was not so driven by the need to take revenge against those who harmed her and many other people, she would have taken away her life already, because there was

nothing else that could fill the void in her heart!

Davia Stark was broken woman. Her return to strength did not heal all of her wounds. It just made her functional enough to fight and nothing more.

As the flames of vengeance burned brighter and hotter inside her heart, she felt as if

she was forming a connection with the primal human desire for retribution.

She was fighting more people than just herself!

How many red humans had died to the native aliens since the start of the Red War?

How many parents had lost their children?

How many children had lost their parents?

How many families broke apart and how many friendships became severed when the native aliens ruthlessly slaughtered every human in their path?

The vast majority of people who died and those they left behind were too weak and powerless to take revenge against the murderous aliens.

They were ordinary civilians. Only a minority of them served in a military organization, and only a tiny fraction of them possessed enough agency due to

piloting a mech.

Other than that, the people who were locked in grief after learning about the depths of their families and loved ones resonated with Venerable Stark like nothing else!

As the unfulfilled desire to take revenge began to converge upon Venerable Stark, she took a deep breath as she felt herself swelling with violent and less controllable power! She did not dare to hold this power for long, especially when she was already struggling to contain the other potent and unstable element of her expert mech.

The expert pilot instead channeled much of the desire for vengeance into the

Instrument of Vengeance.

This caused the luminar crystal rifle to output even more energy emissions!

Its charge had not grown by much, but it began to take on strange properties. Negative E energy radiation channeled into the Instrument of Vengeance, causing it to harmonize with the collective human desire to exact retribution upon the native

aliens.

It was at this moment that Venerable Stark no longer felt alone anymore. There were millions if not billions of people who held the same desire for revenge as

her. Their reasons and motivations may vary, but they could all agree on the best way to satisfy their cries.

At this point in time, Venerable Stark was no longer just a high-tier expert pilot with a massive chip on her shoulder.

She had become the focal point of all of red humanity's imperative to punish the native

aliens for their many transgressions!

It did not matter to Venerable Stark whether the aliens were in the right and that they

were only defending their own native territories.

Stark hated the aliens with a vengeance. They were all the same, whether back in the Milky Way or here in the Red Ocean.

The only good alien was a dead alien!"

With that thought in mind, Venerable Stark tried her best to combine the power of

human retribution into her mech rifle, causing the bright weapon to grow hot with

surging anger.

Stark felt as if her rifle and mech had become a vessel that was solely designed to deliver the power of collective human retribution to one of the culprits who were chiefly responsible for all of the killing!

As her state rose to an unprecedentedly high peak, she felt powerful and omnipotent

like nothing else!

She had never wielded so much might in the past!

While the Amaranto Mark III was able to endure a lot of stresses due to her quality materials and exquisite archemech design, the machine had already exceeded the time limit on how long she was supposed to contain all of the combined energies!

Venerable Stark delayed no further. "Execution Strike."

The massive bright light beam that shot out of the Spirit of Bentheim was so much

thicker and more powerful than the previous strike that it temporarily overloaded many sensors!

Everyone's eyes became seared by the bright white line that crossed right across space and off into the distance!

The passage of this distorting and extremely penetration energy attack was so extraordinary that even the heavens bowed before its passage!

Though it happened far too quickly for people to observe this effect, the bright light

beam continually gathered more light as it passed through space. This caused everything around the beam to plunge into darkness, as if nothing on the battlefield existed aside from this overwhelmingly powerful attack! Though the bright light beam only lasted for an instant, the concentration of energy

was so immense that the phase lord that Venerable Stark set her sights upon was unable to react and defend against this surprisingly powerful follow-up attack. The Execution Strike shattered his spatial barrier in an instant, overwhelmed the azure energy shield that served as a second layer of protection and drilled through the armor plating of his raiment!

Even then, the energy beam still hadn't expended all of its power! The retributive light tunneled through the massive body of the phase lord like a hot knife through butter and even had enough energy left to exit from the other side!

The entire battlefield seemed to go still as both humans and aliens struggled to make sense of what had happened.