The Mech Touch

The Golden Skull Alliance increasingly managed to get a grip on the alien small craft.

Though the enemy combat drones and starfighters doggedly threw themselves at the mechs in front of them with hardly any regard for self-preservation, the powerful mechs easily held the line.

Even if it was a bit difficult for many mechs to take down the faster and more mobile starfighters, there were always other mechs that would complete the job sooner or later.

Between all of the differences between human mechs and alien starfighters, the former possessed too many advantages over the latter!

However, the real clash between the human coalition and the alien pirate groups had never truly centered around their smallest and weaker combat units.

The regular mech forces of the Golden Skull Alliance lacked the firepower to effectively breach the defenses of the alien warships.

As for the aliens, their starfighters might have a decent chance of shooting down ordinary mechs, but as soon as they fought against anything stronger, they instantly faced defeat!

From the beginning of the battle, the expert mechs and ace mechs showed why they both deserved to be treated as threats that were just as powerful if not more so than warships!

The Dark Zephyr was like a shark that had just entered a pool occupied by little fishes.

The expert light skirmisher might not be any bigger than a typical mech, but its fantastic speed along with its potent melee attacks left no recourse for any small craft in its sights!

Venerable Tusa Billingsley-Larkinson grinned as he precisely controlled his fast and powerful expert mech to chop up one starfighter after another.

The elite starfighters with their transphasic energy shields were almost just as vulnerable. At most, the protective barriers forced the Dark Zephyr to waste a little more time and launch an extra attack to finish the job!

"Tusa!" General Verle barked over a communication channel. "Stop wasting your time on the enemy small craft and proceed to attack their fleet! Our mech legions can already handle the starfighters by themselves."

The light mech specialist grimaced inside his cockpit. "I'm not wasting time here. Can't you see what my presence is doing here? All of the surrounding starfighter wings have fallen into disarray! They can't do anything to me and they know it. None of the terrified alien pilots can concentrate on attacking our other units anymore."

"That may be true, but it is redundant. Our mechs can defeat the starfighters with or without your help. The same does not necessarily apply to the enemy warships."

Venerable Tusa grimaced. "Have you seen what kind of mech I am piloting? A light skirmisher is one of the worst kinds of mech to pit against a warship. The only way I can deliver a powerful blow is if I make use of my transphasic grenades, but I don't have nearly enough of them in my possession."

"You can still be useful even if it takes a while for you to breach the enemy energy shields. Just look at how much disruption you are causing by fighting in the midst of enemy starfighters. You can prevent many more casualties if you do the same to enemy warships. Their firepower is much greater, so the more you can redirect their gun batteries in your expert mech's direction, the better."

"Fine."

Tusa did not enjoy the prospect of hammering away at the powerful segmented energy shields of the alien warships, but he acknowledged that it would be better for the other comrades if he was able to draw the attention of the larger gun batteries to his expert mech.

The Dark Zephyr ignored the starfighters around it and zipped through the enemy formations and accelerated straight towards the warships in the distance!

The expert light skirmisher even engaged warp travel in order to reach its destination faster!

Though the distant enemy warships immediately tried to intercept the human mech that was much more powerful than other machines of its size, none of the powerful gun batteries came close to landing a hit!

Venerable Tusa smirked. The Dark Zephyr's evasion ability was one of its strongest traits. Its characteristic Untouchable resonance ability seemingly produced an optical illusion that successfully diverted a lot of enemy attacks!

No matter whether they were gamma laser beams, super-heavy kinetic slugs or plasma bolts, Tusa laughed as all of the enemy attack salvos failed to get close enough to touch his expert mech's resonance shield.

"These aliens are so easy to fool! Wait, I get it now. Their gun batteries are highly automated! There is no manual aim!"

Although there were many advantages to automating the aiming systems and fire control of large and complicated warship armaments, humans were generally reluctant to pass on too many responsibilities to AIs and software algorithms.

Even the CFA recognized the power of human ingenuity and human intuition. There may be factions within the Common Fleet Alliance that pushed for all-out automation, but there were still a lot of old school fleeters who resolutely opposed this transition.

If the Dark Zephyr was charging towards a CFA warship, then the expert mech would never be able to approach so leisurely!

Unfortunately for the indigenous aliens of the Red Ocean, they rarely encountered any urgent situations where their automated gun batteries failed to this extent, so the crews of the warships didn't know how to deal with this situation.

Once the Dark Zephyr reached the enemy fleet, the expert mech quickly went to work. It approached several nearby warships and struck their segmented energy shields with a flurry of attacks.

"Tch. They're too tough!"

The fast but relatively weak attacks of the Dark Zephyr could not breach the energy shields in a short amount of time.

Though Tusa originally wanted to overwhelm an energy shield and pass through the resulting gap, the alien warship in question quickly shifted the orientations of all of its energy shields, thereby preventing the Dark Zephyr from finishing the job!

Whenever the Dark Zephyr tried to stick around a single warship for too long in an attempt to tire out the vessel's defenses, it would come under siege by the surrounding enemy vessels.

Its Untouchable ability was no longer effective now that it was on the attack!

"Damn these guns! There are so many of them and they all pack a punch."

Tusa had little choice but to abandon his current target and attack another warship in order to prevent his expert mech's resonance shield from getting exhausted.

He was tempted to pull out a transphasic grenade so that he could break the energy shields of an enemy vessel in an instant, but he slowly thought better of it. The frigates and destroyers that he was fighting against weren't worthwhile enough for him to waste a powerful explosive.

Just as General Verle had said, the alien pirates were highly uncomfortable with leaving an enemy expert mech in the middle of their fleet.

The Dark Zephyr's close proximity to the enemy warships and flagships spooked a lot of alien leaders. Hundreds of primary guns and secondary guns tried to shoot down the expert light skirmisher.

However, because Tusa purposefully flew his expert mech in the midst of the enemy formation, many warships fell silent as their guns could not open fire without hitting their own side.

With the Dark Zephyr unnerving the crews of dozens of warships, the mechs and expert mechs that were tasked with whittling down the defenses of the alien vessels from a distance had a much easier time.

Significantly less enemy gun batteries bombarded the positions of the mechs that could not withstand so much focused firepower.

One of the beneficiaries of Venerable Tusa's actions was the Promethea.

"Thanks, Tusa." Venerable Isobel Kotin softly said as her expert rifleman mech brought its Ignitron luminar crystal rifle to bear against an enemy frigate.

The Promethea charged its weapon and fired a powerful resonance-empowered disruptor beam at its target!

While neither Isobel nor her expert mech excelled at breaking energy shields, the enemy frigate's defenses were the least powerful among all of the alien warships.

The power of a single resonance-empowered disruptor beam was enough to overwhelm one of the segmented energy shields!

The techniques she learned from the mysterious Alfari Corps Detonation Code helped a lot in achieving this result. The true resonance that she had attached to the beam attack exploded upon impact, thereby inflicting a lot of damage in an instant.

Before the frigate could adjust its defensive coverage and move the gap out of the Promethea's line of sight, Isobel forced her expert mech to quickly squeeze out a quick resonance-empowered positron beam.

Since Isobel was in a hurry, she wasn't able to charge the Ignitron's next attack as much as she wished.

The positron beam that ended up striking the frigate's hull was at least several times less powerful than the previous attack.

The positron beam only ended up splashing against the frigate's fairly heat-resistant hull.

Energy weapons were quite common in the Red Ocean. Warships needed to defend against a large variety of attacks. Many of them were even designed to resist the destructive energies of plasma weapons!

Yet when this weak positron beam struck the hull of the frigate, it did not just fizzle out after vaporizing and melting a small hull section.

It left a lingering purple flame behind that slowly began to feed from the metal alloys it was attached to. Slowly but surely, the flames continued to burn in space despite lacking any obvious sources of propellants and oxidizing materials.

A fire like this should have long gone out, but the small amount of true resonance that Venerable Isobel had attached to the earlier attack artificially kept it alive!

The flame not only grew bigger, but began to burn more and more metal.

Even though the true resonance wasn't strong enough to expand the reach and potency of the purple flame by too much, its inextinguishable property caused it to become a persistent problem to the alien frigate!

Eventually, the crew noticed the danger and tried various measures to extinguish the flames.

Almost nothing worked!

The alien frigate only managed to get rid of this danger by ejecting the affected hull plating as well as any part of the ship that had been engulfed by the purple flames.

This unfortunately left the vessel with a gap in her experience.

Venerable Isobel Kotin had already moved on to repeating the same tactic onto other targets, but when she noticed that her initial target exposed a vulnerability, she quickly repeated the same sequence of attacks onto the ship that had just gotten rid of a disaster!

"Heh, try and see if you can get rid of this little flame!"

Her Promethea successfully landed a flaming shot in the gap of the frigate. Now that the purple flame had spread deeper into the hull of the warship, it was not so easy to get rid of it anymore!

Although it would take a long time for the purple flames to burn through the interior and destroy vital ship components such as power generators or propulsion systems, the vessel was already starting to weaken over time!

The frigate began to lose several segmented energy shields as the Promethea's flames slowly burned up a nearby energy shield generator while reducing the energy transmission to several more.

Seeing that an enemy warship was no longer as well-protected as before, Venerable Tusa's eyes lit up. His Dark Zephyr quickly turned around and quickly approached the side of the alien frigate before a pair of daggers began to tear through the metal hull!

"Hahaha! Thanks for cracking this ship open, Isobel! You have done great work!"

"Thanks."

This was just a solitary moment of cooperation between the Larkinson Clan's expert mechs.

Many more powerful machines were showing what they could do against the formidable alien vessels.

Chief among them was the C-Man, whose expert pilot was determined to prove his manliness by defeating the warships by himself!

"Pff." Vincent scoffed at Tusa's opportunistic behavior. "A true man doesn't need the help of a woman. I will use my fists to punch a hole into these ships!"