Chapter 404: Battle against General Sylvari Charr! [4]

Leon was playing a delicate game of chess.

He was heavily injured, his brain was aching, and yet he couldn’t afford to stop thinking and plotting because he couldn’t afford to let his enemy settle within a consistent battle rhythm.

This was why he choose chaos, and the only reason why he was able to execute it and last this long was because of his Class.

Leon already realized long ago that unlike what people thought, Cyber Gladiators were not the ultimate combat Class. In his eyes, Mechanists were the ultimate combat Class because of their infinite versatility and adaptability.

If he was an Ascended of any other Class, General Sylvari Charr would have murdered him within the first 10 seconds of this clash.

No matter how much power a D Rank Cyber Gladiator had, all that power meant nothing in the face of a vastly superior opponent like a C Rank Ascended. They would be overwhelmed with sheer quality and killed.

The same thing applied for D Rank Gene Augurs and NetRunners, with the exception of perhaps only D Rank Quantum Shapers.

Leon felt like only this insidious Class and its Class Specializations may have the ability to survive this long like him with the nature of their abilities.

He was playing a delicate game of chess, a game of life and death where any single mistake could result in his death.

He was fighting against a vastly superior enemy that was vastly stronger than him, vastly faster than him, could teleport, and who had the ability to tamper with his machines.

This was despite the core powers of the General already being negated.

From the beginning, Leon knew that the only way for him to survive long enough for help to come was by outsmarting and outthinking his enemy, making sure that he was always one step ahead.

This was why he went all out from the beginning. He could not afford to slack, because one single mistake would mean death against the General.

By using Drone Control Matrix on 25 invisible C-5 drones, Leon cut off the possibility of being cut off-guard by the sheer mobility advantage of his enemy.

Multiple times as the battle raged, General Sylvari Charr already tried to ambush him when he least expected it through Neural Projection on the Bulwark MK.II Titan Frame to rapidly close the distance but with his 25 fields of vision, Leon was always able to stay one step ahead and predict it to react.

But reacting did not mean that he had the power to repel the General if he came close to the mech suit, and this is where the other constructs came in.

At this moment, General Sylvari Charr was not just fighting against a human.

He was fighting against an embodiment of war with 25 fields of vision, 20 different bodies, a Gun Drone with harrowing firepower, a factory drone to repair damaged machines mid battle, and numerous attack drones.

With the Vita7 Magnesium Nanites and the Mosquito pac 3060s, Leon posed enough insidious threat to always keep the General on his toes.

The drones may look small, but one lapse in concentration were all they needed to deal the General significant damage.

With the aerial threat that they presented, they ensured that the General never stopped paying attention to the sky which reduced how much attention he was able to give to the ground forces, but that reduced attention still led to harrowing effects as the battle raged.

And they were just one part of Leon’s means of deterrence in this battle.

It was already more than 30 seconds since the clash started, and General Sylvari Charr already destroyed the Gun Drone and the Factory Drone 3 different times, but Leon always sacrificed his ADE to call the Factory Drone back.

And anytime he called the Factory Drone back meant a chance of the Gun Drone being resurrected, which kept the General focusing on them.

This gave Leon who was safely inside the Bulwark MK.II Titan Frame an opportunity to survive and keep on surviving as the battle raged on.

He could not defeat the General.

Heck, he was yet to even nick the General’s skin once despite the harrowing power of his attacks and the frequency of them.

But despite this, he was also able to keep the General from targeting his real body inside the mech suit and to him that was all that he needed.

But this was unsustainable. Afterall, the sheer amount of ADE needed to activate Warforge just once was so much that doing it multiple times was a drain to Leon’s ADE.

Besides, after the battle in the dreamscape, his ADE depletion in the dream reflected to reality meaning Leon’s ADE should have been desperately low now.

But luckily for him, having used Ramirez’s Symbiotic Character Summon Card before embarking on Operation Killing Joe, Leon already created large reserves of ADE in his blood.

And now, it was this ADE that became his lifeline, sustaining him but even this didn’t last as the battle raged till the 40th second.

By the 40th second, the epic battle already sucked so much of his ADE that again Leon was beginning to run on a deficit.

A battle against a C Rank Ascended was just unfair.

Within the Bulwark MK.II Titan Frame where he observed the harrowing intensity of the battle, controlling it’s cadence from a safe distance, Leon was sweating bullets despite the ventilation inside the mech suit.

There was a grim look on his pale face even as his eyes were now bloodshot.

He wasn’t just paying attention to this battle, he was still trying to endure the pain that came with his injuries in the dreamscape.

By now, General Sylvari already wrestled control of a few Doom Rover v0.2s with his Neural Hack abilities already.

The situation did not look good, but still...

Leon snarled. ’I won’t give up!’

’I CAN’T GIVE UP!’

’40 seconds,’ he thought. ’How long will General Ren Nora take to come?’

He had no idea which would have made any other man despair, but not Leon. For him, that only served as more motivation for him to persevere.

The battle raged.

The General moved like a Battle God with his great plasma Odachi, singlehandedly fighting against the army of war machines and dominating them!

...

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

General Sylvari obliterated the Factory Drone for the 8th time since this battle started, and for the first time Leon no longer used his Warforge ability again because it was finally time to ration his ADE.

His ADE was low!

The moment General Sylvari Charr realized that the Factory Drone didn’t come to life again, without a moment of hesitation he turned and pounced on the Gun Drone.

BAM!

One slash of the great plasma Odachi and the Gun Drone shuddered and collapsed to the ground.

But this time, the General didn’t stop there as with the great Odachi, he pounced on the machine again as he attacked and slashed again and again with the great plasma sword.

BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

This time, the Sentry-IV Autocannon Drone became unrecognizable as the General took his time to turn it into unusable scrap parts that could not be repaired anymore.

Only a minute have passed since the clash started.

And then, with a bestial snarl still on his mechanical face, the General stood on top the metallic corpse of the Gun Drone and turned to face the distant mech suit where his true enemy was.

Apart from the corpse of the Gun Drone, around him, scattered about were the metallic corpse of over a dozen Doom Rover v0.2s that he already obliterated and turned to scrap parts within the time frame of a single minute.

He stared at the mech suit and the Mechanist inside stared back at him.

And for the first time, Leon’s heart that was already regenerated by Undying Roach reacted as his heartbeat changed.

BA-DUMP!