The Mech Touch

6025 Organic Salvage

"We defeated the Torment Fleet!"

"It was a bloody battle, but we won!"

"The overseer in charge of leading the raids on the Torald Middle Zone is ours! We have finally taken revenge for all of the colonists who died from the raids orchestrated by this alien."

"We managed to capture him alive, did we? He's obviously been crippled, but phase lords are much tougher than ordinary aliens. What will we do with him? How will we be able to transport him back to human space?"

"The Black Cats dropped the ball yet again. How many times did they get fooled by enemy counterintelligence? Aren't we supposed to be the best at spycraft? We need to reform our entire intelligence agency from top to bottom!"

The Golden Skull Alliance vanquished the Torment Fleet.

The news exploded onto the galactic net, causing major ripples throughout the nearby zones!

Every soldier that had either been assigned to defend the border regions or aspired to beca linefighter becshocked when they heard about this development.

The Eminence of Torment may have been an elusive phase lord who never dared to show up on the battlefield, but his leadership over the alien raiding fleets had earned him a lot of infamy.

The supposedly cowardly but shrewd alien often resorted to despicable means in order to attain more results.

He exhorted the alien raiding fleets to target the weakest defended colonies and penetrate deeper into human space in an attempt to sow terror among the residents of the Torald Middle Zone.

He utilized his connections within the orven race to occasionally transfer much more powerful warfleets to smash apart the mech forces that had made consistent achievements in recent months.

The Eminence of Torment had already proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that he had no shred of honor in his enormous bones.

The fact that the Eminence of Torment deliberately misled both humans and aliens about his true strength as a phase lord cemented his reputation as an honorless alien who deserved to get captured!

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Many Golden Skullers looked pleased when they gazed at the crippled and immobilized phase lord.

It had been glorious to see the three ace pilots of the expeditionary fleet systematically dismantle the large but relatively clumsy orven space lord!

The Dark Zephyr had played a key role in this confrontation by bypassing the Eminence of Torment's vaunted energy defenses. Once inside the defensive envelope, there was little the phase lord could do to prevent the expert light skirmisher from wrecking many of the graser cannons, transphasic shield generators and power generators of his so-called 'ship raiment'.

Once Saint Tusa single-handedly managed to neutralize the enormous technological enhancements of the enemy phase lord, the other two ace pilots quickly joined in to finish off the enemy!

The Eminence of Torment might have been able to repel just one of the ace pilots, but even he could not withstand the combined attention of three of them at the stime!

The Dark Zephyr and the Jedda Sandivar mainly served as distractions while the Royal Jeem skillfully utilized its transphasic spear to cripple the phase lord's limbs and sap the alien's strength by draining his phasewater-infused blood!

Unfortunately, the Eminence of Torment was so afraid of falling into the hands of his enemies that he put up a desperate resistance, not hesitating to overdraw his phasewater organs in order to buy his way to freedom!

"This is why the Eminence of Torment is in fairly bad shape at the moment." Commander Casella Ingvar reported.

The physical projection of Ves stood alongside her as he stared outside one of the observation windows of the Spirit of Bentheim.

As a leader who was stationed in the rear, Ves no longer kept up with the day-to-day affairs of the expeditionary fleet. He did not have the tto babysit it, and he trusted the judgment of the leaders who held all of the authority.

Ves had not even been informed about the specifics of this planned battle. He always maintained an attitude that it was better to save his tand wait for the expeditionary fleet to present their results every once in a while.

He never expected the debut of the first ace pilot of the Larkinson Clan to unfold in such a bombastic fashion!

Pulling off an ambush against the Torment Fleet was a feat that had drawn the admiration of many linefighters!

By defeating the Torment Fleet in such a decisive fashion, the participating soldiers of the Golden Skull Alliance earned a lot of war merits for this accomplishment!

Ves had many reasons to feel happy about this. Not only did his clan burnish its military credentials even further, but it also managed to secure a huge amount of gains, of which many of them happened to be of unprecedented value!

Naturally, his first priority was the condition of the enemy phase lord.

Commander Casella gestured at another projection that showed a live feed of the captured alien. "The Eminence of Torment has implanted 11 phasewater organs in his body. His reckless efforts have ruptured or drained 6 of them. It is difficult for our biotech experts to restore them to an operational state. They have all frozen the organs in case there is still a chance they can be salvaged, but their prognosis is not good."

The projection changed to display a fairly thorough scan of the Eminence of Torment's biological condition.

The giant humanoid alien had been reduced to an awful state. All of his limbs had almost been severed from his torso. His head was brushed and concussed to the point of suffering brain damage. His abdomen had been torn and cut open, exposing large gaps where the alien's valuable phasewater organs were supposed to reside.

Compared to the state of the Eminence of Torment when he was healthy, the current picture looked a lot emptier than before!

The biotech experts had quickly moved in to remove all of the phasewater organs no matter whether they were in a working condition or not. The value of the 5 remaining intact phasewater organs were much more precious and had to be taken away as soon as possible in order to avoid any further tampering.

Who knew whether the Eminence of Torment would wake up and grow spiteful enough to destroy his healthy phasewater organs!

Ves waved his hand, causing the projection to turn into a slideshow that showed the actual physical state of every frozen or preserved phasewater organ.

The damaged ones had all been frozen in order to prevent decay.

The healthier ones had been placed in special cultivation tanks that were already preconfigured to preserve the vitality of giant orven phasewater organs.

Ves relaxed a bit when he glanced at the data that showed that the healthy phasewater organs remained stable for the most part.

"Let's leave the destroyed phasewater organs aside for the tbeing. What can you tellabout the healthy phasewater organs?"

"They are clearly not developed by the Eminence of Torment himself. Instead, he has bought or acquired the organs developed from the orven civilization or the Red Cabal as far as we can ascertain. There is a distinct difference in quality and performance between the two 'developers'. The orvens are much more adept at adapting phasewater organs for the phase lords of their own race. There is no rejection to speak of. The organs developed for their own race are highly stable and fault tolerant, but they are also relatively unsophisticated and limited in performance. The ones procured from the Red Cabal are much newer and considerably more powerful at the cost of stability. They are more universal, so they are only lightly adapted for use by orven phase lords."

That was an interesting set of details. It indicated that phase lords functioned similar to custom biomechs that could steadily be upgraded with new phasewater organs every once in a while.

The phasewater organs acted like modular plugins that could easily be installed in the body of a phase lord. The staggered and modular nature of this 'business model' gave Ves a few ideas about commercializing his future modular products.

The LMC was already doing this in part with the Fey Fianna. While the base mech itself was not modular, a thriving industry had emerged where many different third-party manufacturers developed a lot of useful and powerful living fey for every living drone mech.

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The Larkinson Army's own contingent of Fey Fianna also happened to make heavy use of third-party fey models during the recent battle!

"Tellabout the state of each intact organ."

"The Locos, Maracos and Kelsis organs are all intact." Casella replied to the physical projection. "The Kelsis organ has endured a lot of strain in an attempt to sustain a powerful spatial barrier, but it is in relatively good condition. The Locos organ is in a decent state. The Eminence of Torment had overstrained it in an attempt to defeat the Jedda Sandivar's disorienting Saint Kingdom. The Maracos organ is damaged and torn as the phase lord becomes very desperate at the end. He has tried to fend off our ace mechs by generating many spatial attacks, each of which had proven to be ineffective under the circumstances."

That was not a surprise. Ves felt it was a bit of a pity that the Maracos organ got damaged. That made it harder to study it and decipher its working principles. It also made it a lot riskier if he wanted to implant this organ in his body.

In fact, ever since he heard that the Eminence of Torment got captured relatively intact, Ves could not resist the urge to change his previous policy and upgrade his phase lord cultivation by taking over the captured phasewater organs!

Ves inwardly shook his head.

This was a bad idea!

The rejection and incompatibility issues were too annoying to deal with. There was also the possibility that the organs could fail at crucial moments due to alien tampering. Who knew how many backdoors the orvans and the Red Cabal had installed in those organs!

"It is not too big of a deal if the phasewater organs got scuffed in the process of capturing the Eminence of Torment, commander. I do not intend to implant them in my body as is. We can make much more optimal use out of them if we transfer them to the Larkinson Biotech Institute and have our research teams derive their own versions of the sphasewater organs."

"I see. Then the state of the intact organs should satisfy your researchers, then. Perhaps the expired organs may also give them enough research data."

With all of these specimens, it may take a few years for the research teams to generate results, but at least it was much faster than starting from scratch!

Ves especially looked forward to upgrading his Locos organ. He would not only strengthen all of his spatial senses, but also fulfill a lucrative Mission in the process!

"What about the other intact organs? Did you manage to save the organ responsible for launching those powerful spatial ripple attacks?"

"Unfortunately, we failed, sir. Before the Royal Jeem managed to knock the alien unconscious, the Eminence of Torment may have already guessed our intentions, so he deliberately self-destructed the large and powerful organ responsible for granting him this capability. The destruction was especially thorough, so there is little left to salvage."

That was a huge pity. The data indicated that it was a high-

quality product from the Red Cabal.

If the expeditionary fleet truly managed to retrieve an intact version of this organ, then Ves would feel a lot more tempted to implant it inside his body, backdoors be damned!

If nothing else, he would find other ways to neutralize hidden dangers embedded into the alien organ. It was not as if this was the first the ended up in this kind of situation.

Since the greatest prize had been denied to him, Ves focused his attention on the remaining organs that could still be used.