The battle at the Emperor Tree had reached a new level of intensity.
In the distance, hundreds of ordinary Larkinson mechs either remained on guard or fired their armaments at the distant Emperor Tree.
The Fey Fiannas, Bright Warriors and Stingrippers all fired their weapons in a steady and monotonous fashion in the direction of the Emperor Tree.
The concentration of Solus Gas was very thick, and the outbreak of fighting had made everything a lot more chaotic.
It was only due to the help of scout mechs acting as data relays that the ranged mechs knew where they needed to aim their weapons.
The steady release of hyper laser beams that were aspected towards fire constantly bombarded the upper half of the Emperor Tree.
Many shots either ended up striking the thick trunk or one of the many branches and leaves.
Unfortunately, the massed firepower had a fairly limited effect. Not all of the weapons were transphasic, and the overall lethality of every individual shot was fairly modest at best in the face of a calamity plant that excelled at vitality.
None of the attacks inflicted a lot of damage against the resilient wood of the Emperor Tree.
The lack of true resonance empowering energy attacks also made it easy for the calamity plant to utilize its vast amount of wood energy to reduce or negate their impact.
Any fire that emerged as a result of the massed energy beam attacks quickly got suppressed!
The Emperor Tree easily mobilized an abundance of wood energy or tree sap to snuff out the relatively ordinary fires before they could ever spread any further.
Even the leaves proved to be difficult to eliminate on a large scale due to these measures!
Ketis scowled as she witnessed all of this happening from the cockpit of the Storm Sword.
Perhaps the only consolation was that the Emperor Tree's attempts to stop the ranged mechs were feeble at best.
Certainly, the rear element of the strike force initially grew apprehensive when thousands of wooden mechs assaulted their position.
However, the wooden constructs were too weak. While it may have been impressive for the Emperor Tree to figure out a way to mass produce wooden minions as strong as second-class mechs, that was not even close enough to confront a modern and highly developed mech force.
The tactics, fighting skills, coordination and many other parameters of the wooden mechs fell far behind!
Combined with the fact that the wooden mechs stood no chance in a direct confrontation against quasi-first-class mechs such as the Storm Sword and the Larkinson Edition of the Fey Fianna, dozens of wooden machines fell in droves from the moment the fighting began in earnest.
The fight lasted so short that the melee mech pilots hardly broke out a sweat before they ran out of wooden cannon fodder that they could chop with their blades!
While Ketis was glad that the wooden mechs posed no threat, she felt dissatisfied at how little the ranged mechs were able to contribute to the fight.
The Emperor Tree's greatest strength was its massive size and resources. It was impossible for Task Force Solus to beat it in a contest of consumption.
A part of her even felt that the ranged mechs did not even need to bother with their efforts to attack the Emperor Tree from a distance. They were like ants trying to kill an elephant.
Was it possible for ants to kill a much larger organism? Most definitely.
Were the Larkinsons equipped to do so? That was very much in question.
Ketis and the others gained a renewed appreciation of how terrible it was to fight against an enemy with so much vitality.
The best way to overcome such an opponent was to resort to overwhelming firepower, but that was not a preferred option at the moment.
It was best to rely on the three expert mechs to defeat the Emperor Tree in a contest between champions.
The Larkinsons placed a lot of expectations onto Venerable Isobel Kotin's shoulders as a result.
For the recently arrived expert pilot to struggle to burn the Emperor Tree to this extent was a disappointment.
The current outcome shouldn't have come as a surprise. The absolute power gap between the Promethea and the Emperor Tree was very evident.
Still, Ketis refused to accept that this assault was doomed to fail. There had to be a way to help Venerable Isobel and the Promethea burn down the tree one way or another.
The issue was whether she and the other Larkinson mech pilots could do anything to help.
Aside from maintaining position and continuing to fire energy beams at the Emperor Tree from a distance, what else could they do to make life a little easier for the expert pilots?
As Ketis pondered over this difficult question, she suddenly looked up in surprise when she observed the latest development.
The Promethea got struck by an invisible enemy!
"No. It is not invisible. It is another wooden mech variant!"
The Promethea had been busy with trying to burn a section of the Emperor Tree's massive trunk, only for her to get attacked twice from different directions.
The problem was that neither Isobel nor her battle partner had been able to detect the threat in advance!
Isobel's intuition provided no warning at all. The sensor systems of the Promethea was only able to detect the sudden approach of what appeared to be an ebony wooden mech when it had already come very close!
"Isobel!"
"Don't worry about me, Joshua. Keep the remaining purple mechs at bay. My Promethea can't shoot as freely as now if she is getting mobbed by too many of those machines."
The First Sword and Everchanger continued to repel all of the purple wooden mechs that sought to attack the Promethea.
Occasionally, all three expert mechs hastily moved away before a mass of tree branches attempted to slap them all down.
Heavy seed cannons embedded along the trunk kept pelting the expert mechs with seed projectiles. They fired in a relatively haphazard pattern, but that also made them more difficult to anticipate.
The seed cannons fired at the expert mechs regardless of whether there were any purple wooden mechs in the way!
Far more wooden constructs got struck in the back or sides as a consequence. The heavy seeds struck so hard that many of the purple wooden mechs cracked their torsos or lost their limbs.
The Emperor Tree didn't seem to care!
It simply shone down its radiant light from above and forcibly restored the damaged purple wooden mechs back to mint condition.
The three expert mechs were not able to keep up with this level of consumption. Their energy cells continued to drain while their resonance shields began to lose their integrity.