The General’s mechanical fist tore into his back, pulverizing his skin like paper before grabbing his heart and tearing it out of his chest!

"Ahhh...!" Leon gasped and staggered.

For a brief moment, the pain made his eyes glaze over again, and then he looked down at the hole in his chest where his beating heart should have been.

His heart was gone!

Leon staggered again, but he didn’t pay attention to his missing heart. Instead, he paid attention to something else, someone else... Lt. Colonel Umar Farouq.

Leon looked at the Lt. Colonel with a pained look on his face, a look that was filled with deep meaning and questions.

’Why...?’

Lt. Colonel Umar Farouq looked away.

Seeing it, Leon almost laughed. ’Wow...,’ he thought. ’Wow. After everything, after everything I did. After everything that we went through together’.

He laughed, coughing blood.

’Well, what did I expect?’

’It’s not like we’ve been some deep friends or comrades. In the end, he’s just someone I met just a few weeks ago’.

’Not everyone is going to be like Ren Nora’.

The thought brought his mind back to reality, sobering him up as he calmly accepted the betrayal.

But he was already compromised.

During the battle against the assassin in the dreamscape, he suffered so many injuries that now followed him back to reality, making him feel crippled. All of those injuries and now, he just suffered fatal damage from the General’s attack.

That single attack from the General wiped out almost 20,000 from his current total HP!

For such lethal attacks, HP didn’t matter much though. HP or no HP, once you lose your heart, unless you’re a Gene Augur, if your regeneration is not fast enough, you’ll continually bleed HP till you die a painful and gruesome death.

But not Leon.

He was not a Gene Augur, but he was not a regular Mechanist either. He was a Mechanist with an Undying Roach Racial trait, and it was still active.

BZZZZ!

Leon’s grayish white ADE flared around his body like a thick cocoon and instantly, from within the hole in his chest blood and new blood vessels and tissues started pumping.

Standing just behind the Mechanist after grabbing his heart and tearing it out, seeing this sudden progression, General Sylvari’s eyes widened.

’What...?!’

’How is he still alive???’

Since meeting this Mechanist, common sense seemed to have simply developed wings and flew out of the world.

How on earth is a Mechanist regenerating so fast?

How on earth did a Mechanist survive losing his heart?

It didn’t matter though because with common sense or no common sense, General Sylvari Charr was still determined to end the Mechanist’s life today.

The Mechanist’s defiance only filled him with even more motivation.

Time was moving extremely slowly as...

BZZZZZZ!

Leon barely started healing when the General’s neon green ADE erupted like a tsunami behind him, and then...

Psionic Assault!

Mind Distortion!

Neural Burn!

The General stacked 3 of his strongest skills together instantly! The failure of Neural Tyrant did not deter him from attacking.

Against any other D Rank Ascended in the world, those 3 skills from a C Rank Ascended would have crippled any of them, but not Leon.

All Leon felt was a tickle as the General’s abilities brushed against his mind.

His mind was not normal anymore, not today.

Today, his mind was protected by- [Stalwart].

General Sylvari’s eyes widened like saucers as despite just unleashing 3 powerful abilities with the full density of his ADE, he saw the Mechanist still standing like nothing happened.

This was what gave Leon the confidence to execute Plan B.

The moment he shed his muddle-headedness and could think again, even as he was mourning the loss of the ChronoSystem, Leon didn’t forget the sacrifice and boon that it left behind for him before shutting down.

His entire plan from there revolved around [Stalwart].

Head-on against any C Rank Ascended in the world, Leon was 100% sure that he would not last more than a few dozen seconds even with the help of his allies.

But with [Stalwart], everything changed.

With the sudden immunity to all forms of mind manipulation and mental damage that the trait brought, he literally became the boogeyman of all high-ranking NetRunners of the Mindbreaker Specialization.

All their core powers became useless against him.

This did not make General Sylvari Charr toothless though. Afterall, mind manipulation and mental damage abilities were not their only abilities.

But still, unlike the previous scenario where he literally had 0 percent chances of surviving, with immunity to mental damage now, Leon at least had a chance to make his last stand.

Even with Lt. Colonel Umar Farouq’s betrayal.

It was do or die, it was life and death!

In that moment, abstraction took place in Leon’s head as every distraction evaporated from his mind, replaced by absolute battle clarity.

Survival became the only frequency in his mind, and this was why he was able to react faster than the General.

The moment he used his 3 abilities and realized that nothing happened to the Mechanist, once again, General Sylvari’s world view was shattered completely, but he was not a man to give up easily.

Not for this, not for an enemy that he’d hated and waited for across a period of over a century.

Not against HIM.

"Brat, I’ll KILL YOU!" He snarled and pounced, pulling his sword out of a hidden compartment of his military uniform.

But just before he pounced, Leon moved.

BZZZZ!

Grayish white ADE flared around him like a tsunami as he dodged.

For a brief moment, it seemed like he was just focused on dodging but Leon was not. Afterall, he knew that he could never match the sheer physicality and speed gulf separating D Rank from C Rank.

He simply dodged to buy himself a chance for...

KABOOM!

The ground shook as the sound of a powerful cannon tore through the surface of the ground with obliterating power from underground!

The ground was torn open just a few meters away from where the General and Leon stood opposite each other, and then from the sudden hole on the ground emerged Leon’s war machines having escaped from their crates already in response to his call for battle.

Unlike when he fought the assassin, he was no longer in a dream where he had to adapt to crazy and unrealistic rules.

He was back in reality meaning he had access to all his constructs again.

He could fight to survive at full power.

The ground trembled as one after another, the Bulwark MK.II Titan Frame emerged, followed by the Sentry IV Autocannon Drone, a swarm of drones- C-5 drones, Vita7 Magnesium Nanites, Mosquito pac 3060s, and an army of mechanical soldiers!

Leon went all out without hesitation. Unlike Geneforms, his army of machines would not betray him.

The squad pulled out for war!

...

[Congratulations to us on 400 Chapters! 5 Chapters Mass Release incoming tomorrow to celebrate!]

[Special Appreciation to ImperialJadeDragon, DaoistVTW6S6, Yametekudastop, Ka4kada, and burdseede for the Golden Tickets! ImperialJadeDragon, special thanks for the consistent support this month, I appreciate it man.]