The Mech Touch novel Chapter 933

Sigrund may be restricted by his circuits and his programming from killing humans directly and even indirectly, but that didn’t leave out every possibility!

There were always loopholes to a set of rules and restrictions. Even under such a long time under lockdown that vastly restricted his full capabilities, Sigrund nonetheless managed to arrange several methods to eliminate the pesky humans.

First, when a sandman mothership initially ambushed the Starlight Megalodon, it held the battleship in an inescapable stranglehold. The worst part about the sandman was that they almost always held the upper hand once their sand amalgamations managed to infiltrate and bore inside any ship!

The first lesson any person learned when they entered the frontier was to never let a sandman ship get close!

While Ves didn’t know the exact circumstances behind the sandman mothership’s successful attack on the Starlight Megalodon, the fact that it managed to grab the battleship was an incredible failure on the part of her officers and crew!

Whatever the reason for allowing the sandman mothership to get close, the engineers somehow managed to come up with a desperate solution and induced the FTL drives into an abnormal state that put the sandman mothership into a partial form of stasis and allowed them to tear out the sandman leader in control!

Ordinarily, a sandman mothership without a leader at the helm would have collapsed. But this was not an average mothership, and the sandman admiral was still alive in the form of Sigrund!

While the AI researchers of the Starlight Megalodon experimented on Sigrund’s old core and imposed several hardware and software restrictions that shackled it to this very day, the same couldn’t be said for the rest of the sandman mothership!

It still possessed an immense hostility to humans and human ships! Sigrund merely needed to let it finish the job it set out to do to destroy this hated ship and every human present.

However, as an added insurance, Sigrund also leveraged his control over Project Icarus’ enormous amounts of cloning vats. The unintelligent but very aggressive clones that stumbled out of them immediately acted upon their bioprogramming.

Sigrund may have been prevented into programming them to become hostile to humans. Yet that did not prevent him from applying a workaround that altered their brain chemistry in a way that made them naturally hostile to any form of life other than themselves!

"Goddammit!" Ketis cursed as she shot her standard-issue CFA laser pistol at the approaching horde of aggressive clones. "I thought zombies are supposed to go down in a single hit! Why are these clones so tough!"

Sigrund’s physical dwarf avatar cackled loudly. [I HAVE CULTIVATED THESE CLONES FOR CENTURIES. THEY HAVE BEEN PERCOLATING IN NUTRIENT SOLUTIONS FOR SUCH A LONG TIME THAT THEIR PHYSIQUE HAS HARDENED TO AN INCREDIBLE DEGREE!]

"Their vacsuits are also resistant to damage!" Miss Calabast observed as she fired a gout of green plasma at a clone which quickly caused it to melt down. The problem was that her weapon’s fire rate was too slow to stop the hundreds threatening to overrun them! "We don’t have enough firepower to defeat these clones!"

The war party she brought diminished substantially in numbers after fighting their way through several checkpoints in the Exotic Research Sub-Department. They lost all their bots, and what little exoskeleton soldiers remained alive tried their best to punch back the oncoming horde.

Even though their heavy kinetic cannons and artillery shells splattered dozens of clones at a time, hundreds more stumbled closer. There were far too many clones and far too little humans to fend them all back!

Ves and Ketis activated the aiming assist of their combat armor to fire their lasers at the heads. However, the abnormally durable vacsuits folded out their helmets to envelop the heads, removing this weakness from the table!

Even though the clones weren’t completely impervious to damage, Ves saw no way out with the anti-teleportation field blocking out his EPT from shunting him to safety!

He knew that while the CFA laser pistols were in an entirely different grade than the Vandal sidearms he handled before, they still fell short compared to a pinnacle mastercrafted pistol such as the Amastendira.

While the Amastendira that Ves obtained was only a copy, it nonetheless possessed a prodigious amount of firepower as long as he dialed up its power setting.

He felt rather hesitant about showing off his trump card in front of Ketis and Miss Calabast. He didn’t entirely know whether Calabast already knew he possessed this trump card, but he was loathe to reveal one of his strongest form of insurance to her. There were also his subordinates to consider who could leak out his possession of this wondrous wondrous weapon.

Nonetheless, the situation turned so dire that he couldn’t hold anything back at this point. Ketis gave up on lasering the resilient clones to death and holstered her overheated pistol and drew out her CFA greatsword.

If her end had come, she intended to fight and die like a Swordmaiden!

Calabast also drew out her secret weapons that she kept in store in case of emergencies. She launched a series of compact, miniature grenades at the horde. The crowd of clones pressed so closely against each other that every grenade affected at least a dozen or two of the clones at once!

Some of the grenades detonated in explosive fury. Others showered the surrounding area with plasma. Many more either warped the surrounding space, froze the clones in momentary stasis, corroded their bodies and vacsuit or weakened them due to the poisoned air they breathed.

Yet Calabast only carried a finite amount of grenades. Besides her plasma rifle, her sidearms and some knives and other minor trinkets, she possessed no more means of inflicting mass destruction!

Ves sighed and holstered his CFA laser pistol, just like Ketis. While she drew out the greatsword that she trusted the most, he began to materialize the weapon he came to depend upon to save his life time and time again.

Right now, Ves couldn’t tend to Calabast’s response. He instead tried to evaluate whether it was better for him to fire his Amastendira in a wide angle scatter mode to affect the entire horde at once or in a continuous cutting beam to slice apart scores of them in quick succession. _{freeωebnovēl.c૦m}