After 200 hours of intensive worm punching, Rubicon Karate master melees Armored Core 6's Ice Worm to death without taking damage

While Armored Core 6 is a game packed with FromSoft spectacle, its most memorable mission might be the battle against the Ice Worm, which sees the player pilot and Rubicon's competing mercenary companies join forces to destroy a rampant, robotic behemoth. Typically players are expected to use a weapon specifically designed to pierce the Worm's nigh-unbreakable shields, but that instruction has driven true AC6 sickos to prove their mech piloting prowess by destroying the mechworm without the Stun Needle Launcher.

In November, X user @IBIS824101 put out a call for AC6 aces to go even further by toppling the Ice Worm without the Stun Needle Launcher and while taking no damage. Earlier today, user @2K_heso posted a late response with an additional escalation of his own: He destroyed the Ice Worm without taking damage, without the Stun Needle Launcher, using only melee combat.

No guns, no missiles; just mecha-scale fisticuffs.

"I managed to defeat the Ice Worm with bare-handed martial arts for a no-damage clear," @2k_heso said. "It took me about 150 to 200 hours."

In the accompanying video, you can see the proof of the time @2K_heso spent tempering himself in the furnace of high-stakes worm punching. His build for the feat is a heavy one, allowing him just enough mobility to dodge the Ice Worm's attacks—attacks he's able to read even when most of the Worm is off-screen.

You might wonder why he's using all those heavily-armored mech parts if he's not intending to take damage, as another user asked. The answer, @2K_heso explained, is weight. The core melee combat technique of what AC6 sickos call Rubicon Karate is the boost kick—the damage of which scales based on mech weight. The Ice Worm fight, he elaborated, is essentially a damage check; if his kicks didn't have enough heft, he wouldn't be able to deal enough damage when universal best friend V.IV Rusty knocks out the Worm's shields.

"After the shield is stripped away, there's a time limit until Worm-kun goes down and the shield redeploys (In the final stage, if you don't defeat it completely, Rusty can't shoot anymore and it's game over)," @2K_heso said. "So basically, you can't clear it at all unless you make it this heavy."

"You... are already mad... (said as a compliment)," replied a user awed by @2K_heso's melee mastery.

It's worth noting that @2k_heso's X video doesn't show his full fight, as he said "I ended up achieving it when I was messing up left and right, so I'm putting off posting the full version to YouTube for a bit."

Those of a conspiratorial persuasion might find that suspicious, even if the fight's final clip shows that he hadn't used any mech repairs by the time he dealt the last blow. Given his YouTube channel features dozens of videos of similarly impressive feats of Rubicon Karate, however, I'm inclined to believe him.

After all, I still haven't fully recovered from the Zimmerman nerf. I'm not exactly in a position to doubt.