Joshua lost most of his coherence as the pain truly started to set in! Somehow, the powerful energies drilled into his mind and began to erode his will without encountering any meaningful resistance!
There was nothing Joshua could do to repel this invasion! His willpower turned into a complete joke in front of this powerful source!
What was odd was that even his companion spirit Willy also experienced a similar kind of overwhelming pain!
As the active effects induced by the elixir started to affect him in a crude and agonizing manner, Joshua's perception soon started to grow woozy.
His eyes remained wide open, but he was 110 longer in the medical chamber.
Somehow, he found himself in a shaky and misshapen version of his cockpit. There were so many familiar shapes and colors that Joshua knew that he had entered the belly of his battle partner again.
"E-Evcrchangcr." His voice shakily said in an oddly distorted manner. "I need you, buddy."
Silence greeted him. Though Joshua's active interface with his expert mech granted him control over its systems, he found it odd that the living mech remained unresponsive.
As his weary and buzzing head tried to investigate the state of his Everchanger further, he found to his horror that his expert mech was dead!
"No! Everchanger! Where are you?! Why have you died!?"
His expert mech had become as responsive as a lifeless rock! All of the years that Joshua spent growing alongside the Everchanger had given him a strong attachment lo his battle partner, so discovering that his machine had become diminished was an alarming discovery!
It was at this point that the resonance shield of his expert mech received a powerful kinetic blow!
"Ahhl"
Getting distracted was one of the greatest taboos of a pilot!
Joshua quickly tried to regain his situational awareness. He soon discovered what took place during his moment of absence.
"The fleet! No!"
An indescribably enormous mass of tangible shadows had enveloped all of the ships of the expeditionary fleet!
From the Spirit of Bentheim to the Indigo Tremor, this amorphous mass of space that had somehow gained substance engulfed the vulnerable ships as well as the mechs that tried to fight off this scary threat, to no avail!
No weapon could do anything to hall the advance of this inky shadow. As soon as a mech got caught by the tentacles of darkness, they got crushed, destroying them utterly while taking their pilots down as well!
"NOOOOOO!"
Venerable Joshua found it difficult to maintain his full concentration, but he tried his best to command his dead expert mech to fly forward while drawing out the Gray Lotus!
Beams of ominous death did nothing but disappear inside the dark mass. Il was as if there wasn't anything actually alive to kill.
Joshua registered this futile result, yet he pulled the trigger over and over again as if that would help.
Once his glowing green expert hero mech got close enough, the machine struck at the mass head-on with a powerful plasma sword!
Unfortunately, the destructive energy weapon did nothing to harm this shadow!
It took less a second later for the nearest inky black masses to shoot forward and capture the Everchanger in a dark embrace, completely bypassing the resonance shield which should have offered actual protection.
"I'm caught!"
Joshua did everything possible to escape this hold. As the dark tentacles squeezed rhe frame of rhe expert mech, the Everchanger silently groaned and creaked as the sturdy armor plating started to deform remarkably quickly.
The forces acting on the mech frame were overwhelmingly powerful!
As the squeeze became tighter and tighter, more and more components got damaged, causing Venerable Joshua to experience painful feedback that became increasingly more distressing and debilitating!
"Aaaah!" He screamed inside rhe wobbling cockpit as his vision and his senses started to go haywire.
At a certain point, Joshua could no longer properly maintain the connection to his distressed expert mech.
Instead, he became surrounded by the powerful black inky masses that conveyed an overwhelming sense of power.
Joshua fell downwards into a pit that did not end.
There was no mech or comrade to stop his descent.
The threatening inky masses crept closer and closer, causing Joshua to experience their overwhelming danger increasingly better.
Once the dark tentacles wrapped around his body, they squeezed with forces that were strong enough to shatter an entire expert mech!
His body didn't stand a chance.
Flesh and bone shattered in an instant, causing Joshua to experience death in its truest sense!
He didn't even experience enough pain to let out one last cry!