While the young apprentice was swept away by a flood of emotions and tossed from side to side, the engineer on the walls had no intention of waiting for him. Pushing the stick of the control device he put on the mass of stone in front of him forward, he attacked Michelangelo with the machine he invented.
"Field experiment 33, begins!"
Hearing these words, Michelangelo, whose limbs were replaced with black metallic parts, came to his senses and avoided the blow about to land on his torso. His opponent wanted to cleave him with its hand shaped like a spearhead.
If he hadn't jumped to the right at the last moment, it would have succeeded because the dimensions of the machine were sufficient to do this. Even orcs remained tiny next to it; this invention held physical power in its hands.
"Continue attacking!"
While the three assistants behind the engineer holding the control device took notes in their notebooks, the golden blond-haired man didn't give Michelangelo a breath of respite. The machine, leaping three human heights up from the ground, attacked using an axe kick; even trying to resist this was equivalent to committing suicide.
Michelangelo parried again; what happened was more like watching an adult bully a little child rather than a battle, and the orcs didn't like the situation at all.
"What is he doing? Why doesn't he respond?"
"We are being disgraced, one of the orc warriors should have challenged!"
The orcs who came all the way to the front of the walls as Volunteers were infuriated. Even though they had joined the army risking their own lives, they couldn't stand the human fighting on their behalf running away.
"Silence!"
While the complaints starting as whispers turned into a hum, the voice that would suppress them all was heard. The person who was the Commander-in-Chief of the Orc Empire Armies gave her order, and the whole area fell into a dead silence. Simultaneously, Michelangelo went into action too, and a yellow sphere appeared above the machine that was his enemy.
After the duration of a blink passed, the sphere exploded; the golden net overflowing from it pinned the machine it covered to where it was. One of the attacks, which was Michelangelo's invention and stored in spheres to be used whenever he wanted, was now in front of the eyes of the whole battlefield.
"Good trick!"
"An effective method!"
"You should order him to bring one of those spheres to the machine at the end of the battle!"
A fast conversation consisting of short sentences took place in the area where the engineers and scientists were. Even if the method Master Leonardo's apprentice developed didn't blow their minds, it was enough to attract their professional curiosity.
"Okay sir, let's get rid of those weird nets first!"
The engineer holding the control pulled the lever down and pressed the three buttons in the top row at the same time. The heat wave radiating from the surfaces of the cables on the limbs of the metal machine became visible to the eye. The golden yellow net carried the properties of the earth element, and the enemy thought to weaken it using fire energy.
The net seemed unaffected at first, but a few seconds later, its bright color began to fade, and before long, drying up, it began to shatter. Fire would harden earth, it wasn't hard to guess this, but very few people noticed that wind energy began to overflow outward replacing the heat radiating from the cables.
One of these was none other than Michelangelo. He threw another sphere; the new attack, causing the waters overflowing like a raging river to pour over the machine, was made against the heated metal. If wind energy wasn't involved, it couldn't show an effect, the attack would even strengthen the enemy, but the conditions completely determined the course of the battle.
"Sneaky brat!"
"Leonardo trained him well!"
"His judgment ability is at a considerable level!"
The high architects watching the battle from the platforms built a level above the other engineers uttered words full of praise after Michelangelo's move. These might not mean anything to ordinary people hearing them, but they were enough to make the engineer holding the control panel grimace.
According to the hierarchy and rules of etiquette within the Machine Empire, one must have done something extraordinary to receive praise from someone above them. Even the person who invented the machine harboring a human torso inside had to settle for superficial words because it remained dependent on the human.
Now, when that man saw his opponent received this grace with just one move, he went crazy; pressing the button at the left end of the bottom row and the one in the middle of the top row at the same time, he turned the lever in the shape of a crescent. The metal of his machine had cooled rapidly and was exposed to wind energy at that moment; it was impossible for it not to erode. The new move was created exactly for these moments; the scream coming from the human inside the machine announced the process had begun.
The blood-red energy was ripped from the man's body and used to repair the eroding parts of the machine via the cables. The engineer obviously hadn't mentioned this before; it was possible to understand this from the reactions of the high architects on the upper platform.
"Clever, very clever!"
"He balances the weakness created by the organic structure again only with the benefit provided by the organic structure."
"A living repair apparatus, ingenious!"
It was as if the person inside the machine wasn't someone who had a life, loved ones, memories, and a life of his own in their eyes. He perhaps had as much importance as the bolts connecting the metallic arms, perhaps he didn't.
"Father!"
"My husband!"
Unlike them, the man's family accompanied every scream. Michelangelo retreated; the traumas in his mind might be reviving the old days. Even if he didn't talk about his days on the Savage Swamp, this didn't mean he forgot what happened.
Turning inward was nice, it was a method accelerating a person's development, but the consequences of doing this on the battlefield were heavy. If he hadn't joined his two black metal arms in front of his body at the last moment, he could have been torn to pieces after the punch he took.
He was sent flying meters back; his arms were completely intact, but the shock of the blow caused damage to his torso holding all the weaknesses of the human body. The enemy was aware of this too; the target of the jumping machine was Michelangelo's head.
The footprint was exactly where Michelangelo's head was a few seconds ago; the mechanical foot plunging a hand-span deep couldn't reach its goal. Even if it wasn't on the first try, the engineer directing the machine didn't give up; he was determined to finish off his groggy opponent in these moments.
Michelangelo used his spheres to stop him; some could even deal considerable damage, but every time it could be repaired with the life energy drawn from the man in the machine's torso. If he wanted to kill this metal monster, he just had to continue in the same way; surely the man's life energy would come to an end.
The solution was obvious and the method simple, but Michelangelo wasn't a machine. The supplications accompanying the man's screams sabotaged his desire to fight every time, preventing the natural movement pattern of his body from working.
From the moment the engineer noticed this, he went after the weak point. Risking taking damage, he weakened the enemy, and now, holding Michelangelo from his fragile torso, turning him towards the Orc Empire army, he was swinging him practically like a rag.
"Bravo!"
"An engineer must know how to spot the weak points of the obstacles in front of him as much as the things he creates!"
"I guess we will have to reconvene regarding the appointment in the science board!"
The face of the engineer holding the control panel was as if he stole a small piece from the sun; his glitter was enough to illuminate the southern part condemned to gloom by his civilization. On the other side, the traces of the shadow created by the cloud consisting of anger, panic, and disappointment could be made out.
"Master, your apprentice is in a very difficult situation. Aren't you going to say anything?"
Holzmeister, the man who was the chief engineer of the Sand City, spoke turning to Master Leonardo right beside him. He wanted the Master, who was as calm and silent as a rock standing in the same place for thousands of years, to finally give a reaction.
"This is only a choice he will make! Michelangelo will either be reborn or die as he already has been for years!"