The Mech Touch

6022 Mutual Evolution

As the battle between the expeditionary fleet and the Torment Fleet raged on, it becclear that the Golden Skull Alliance had gotten caught in a tough battle!

This had becan increasingly rare occurrence because the mech forces of the expeditionary fleet had grown to a formidable level of strength.

Ever since the expeditionary fleet started the Trailblazer Expedition, the Larkinsons and their allies defeated one alien raiding fleet after another.

Each victory yielded a huge amount of spoils, as the Golden Skull Alliance always managed to claim possession of the rich debris field as well as any alien warship hulls that were still relatively intact.

The Larkinsons had already replaced many old second-class mechs with modern and well-equipped quasi-first-class products. The other alliance partners made similar moves, if only so that they could keep up and ensure they contributed enough to the battle to claim a richer share of the spoils.

With powerful models such as the Fey Fianna, the Transcendent Punisher Mark III and most recently the Storm Sword, the Larkinson Army's comprehensive strength and ability to counter alien warships had increased remarkably.

However, the Torment Fleet was not as easy to defeat as other alien fleets!

Different from the old and outdated warships that the Red Cabal drove into human space to create attrition, most of the vessels fielded by the Torment Fleet were more modern, more powerful and more well-supplied orven homeships.

The Eminence of Torment had lived for over 800 standard years, and managed to amass a sizable amount of wealth and influence in orven civilization during much of that time.

Even if he strangely portrayed himself as a weak and defective phase lord that was constantly suffering from unending pain, that did not stop the Eminence of Torment from building his own power base and earning more rewards from the Red War.

The smaller vessels of the Torment Fleet were easy enough to defeat. Their defenses were better and their gun batteries may be remarkably more effective at eliminating large numbers of mechs, but they still succumbed when a large number of mechs overwhelmed their transphasic energy shields.

It was the bigger warships that posed a bigger problem! The aliens had not only incorporated a lot of stolen human technologies, but also adapted the designs of their homeships in order to better cope with human fighting methods.

"The newer hyper battleships are too lethal to our mech forces! They don't mount as many primary gun batteries, but their hulls have at least 50 percent more secondary gun batteries and thrice as many tertiary gun batteries! These alien ships carry so many rapid-fire transphasichyper laser gun batteries that they can shred entire mech companies in seconds! Even our much better protected quasi-first-class mechs can hardly last more than a few seconds when subjected to focused fire!"

While the Torment Fleet had yet to receive too many state-

of-the-art hyper battleships from the Red Cabal, their designs deliberately placed less emphasis on anti-ship armaments in order to free up capacity that could be used to accommodate a much greater amount of anti-small craft armaments!

Small but fast-tracking and fast-firing transphasic hyper laser cannons had been specifically designed and optimized to lock onto mechs and shred them with continuous barrages of energy beams.

The design philosophy of these unassuming but extremely numerous gun batteries was to rely on quantity over quality.

Mechs were quite difficult to hit at different ranges, especially if they were fast and maneuverable. Even if they got hit once or twice, they were usually tough enough to shrug off the attacks without getting impaired.

Yet very few mechs could remain intact when they were focused on by at least a dozen rapid-fire transphasic hyper laser cannons!

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One by one, these clusters of laser cannons continually induced despair onto mech pilots as their machines almost had no recourse against these kinds of attacks.

Only shield link technology could allow these mechs to defend against attacks that vastly exceeded their native defensive capabilities, but it was a pity that the expeditionary fleet did not enjoy this extravagant luxury.

As such, with each minute that passed, every force suffered an escalating number of casualties from these giant anti-mech platforms.

The only positive news for the mech forces was that the threat posed by these hyper battleships becso acute that numerous mech pilots managed to break through after getting targeted!

The immense terror of getting bombarded by dozens of transphasic laser beams in quick succession was enough for many desperate mech pilots to unlock their hidden potential!

Numerous mech pilots took their first step on the path to godhood by advancing to the rank of expert candidate!

More notable were the existing expert candidates who broke through to the rank of expert pilot and temporarily wielded the power of an expert mech!

Yet for every hero that got born on this bloody battlefield, many more mech pilots perished in an instant.

The successive transphasic laser beams were too rushless. The gun batteries may be small in relation to warships, but they were a lot more powerful than the weapons employed by small craft, hence their tendency to leave very few survivors behind!

The threat posed by the new alien vessels to the mech forces happened to be so great that the Jedda Sandivar had becfully preoccupied with interfering with their operations.

The ace light skirmisher rapidly flew from one hyper battleship after another. The Jedda Sandivar's Saint Kingdom produced a strange mist that lingered even after the machine moved away.

The persistent mist did not block the perception of the sensors and the aliens stationed inside the hyper battleship.

Instead, it primarily sapped the energy out of the laser beams that attempted to pass through the hazy mist!

The anti-energy beam mist was empowered by enough true resonance to easily block or weaken thousands of laser beams fired by tertiary gun batteries.

It would have been much more difficult for this mist to neutralize the energy beams fired by much larger weapon emplacements, but the tertiary armaments were so much smaller and weaker that they failed to exceed the threshold of the anti-energy beam mist!

Although the mist gradually dispersed shortly after they left the Saint Kingdom, causing its effects to rapidly weaken over time, Saint Marissa was still able to limit the firepower of three or four hyper battleships!

Unfortunately, there was only so much the Jedda Sandivar could do to suppress the vessels.

There were other hyper battleships that had split away from the main formation and tried to put as much distance from the ace light skirmisher as possible.

This forced the remainder of the mech forces to confront the threat posed by all of these specialized anti-mech battleships by themselves!

The horror of these warships becincreasingly more clear even as they attracted a lot of attacks.

The Stormblade Samurais and the Storm Swords deployed by the Swordmaiden Legion assaulted one of these hyper battleships.

Despite employing a powerful combination of electrifying stormblade weapons and stackable space suppressors, the warship demolished over a hundred mechs, most of them Stormblade Samurais, and even put in the effort of striking any of the ejected cockpits that managed to abandon the doomed mechs in time!

"No! Sisters!"

"These orvens must die!"

With the help of the much more powerful transphasic stormblades of the powerful new Storm Swords, the Swordmaiden mechs eventually managed to exhaust much of the segmented azure energy shields, allowing them to slip through and tear apart the vulnerable battleship!

Further away, two large formations of Valkyrie mechs led by two expert mech versions of the smech line began to summon two different apparitions of the Superior Mother.

Yet before the Glory Seekers could launch their infamously lethal death energy wave attacks, multiple hyper battleships launched dozens of torpedoes at the approaching Valkyrie mechs!

Many mechs attempted to shoot down the torpedoes, but that was easier said than done. The large torpedoes were not only clad with thick layers of transphasic alloys, but they were also protected by their own transphasic energy shields!

Even though many of them eventually got shot down by many ranged mechs, one of them ultimately managed to survive long enough to detonate right in front of one of the large but highly inflexible battle formations!

"No! Sister!"

The affected battle formation immediately collapsed as a weapon of mass destruction engulfed hundreds of Valkyrie mechs, many of them piloted by highly experienced veterans!

"What is the status of Venerable Olivia Remus?! Did we lose an expert pilot!?"

Fortunately for the Glory Seekers, the heavily damaged form of the Valkyrie Krista quickly managed to hover away from the explosion. The mid-tier expert mech managed to withstand the fury of the powerful blast due to the fact that Venerable Olivia managed to reach the strength of a high-tier expert pilot with the help of general cultivation elixirs.

Even more fortunate for the Hexers was that numerous other surviving mech pilots becso desperate that they managed to break through to the rank of expert candidate!

Even so, the loss suffered by the Glory Seekers was great!

The fact that the other battle formation led by Venerable Eona Ballentine successfully managed to depopulate over half of the crew serving aboard the entire hyper battleship hardly lifted their moods.

In fact, the Larkinsons and the Glory Seekers becunpleasantly surprised that the hyper defenses of the modern orven battleship proved to be partially effective at neutralizing the power of one of their most reliable trump cards!

"Red humanity is adapting, but so are the aliens." Master Benedict Cortez muttered as he observed the battlefield from the safety of the Cross Clan's flagship.

The Hemmington Cross was in the process of moving further away from the ambush site. While this would make it harder for the fleet carrier to provide support to the Crosser mechs in the field, the ship was too large and vulnerable to stay so close to the action.

This was because the Eminence of Torment was particularly good at damaging starships!

Even though the Royal Jeem was steadily working to reduce the copious amount of energy barriers surrounding the juggernaut-sized alien, the alien relied on both his unblockable space ripple attacks as well as the graser cannons mounted on his giant suit of armor to inflict significant damage onto the expeditionary fleet every now and then.

When the giant Eminence of Torment successfully managed to swat aside the Royal Jeem, he also raised one of his arms and transmitted a deadly space ripple attack at the Spirit of Bentheim.

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Out of all of the starships of the expeditionary fleet, the vessel with the giant cat head prow had earned a lot more enmity from the enemy phase lord!

"The Eminence of Torment is trying to destroy the Spirit of Bentheim so that he can weaken our suppression of his spatial abilities!"

Although it was hard to believe, the orven phase lord was not fighting at his full strength at the moment.

He was originally even stronger!

It was just that the combined efforts of space interdictors and space suppressors weakened a lot of spatial abilities and prevented any warp bubbles from forming.

If not for these effects, the Eminence of Torment would have beca lot more mobile, allowing him to approach the starships of the expeditionary fleet and wreck them with impunity!

In order to free himself up, the powerful alien leader had set his sights on the flagship of the Larkinson Clan.

Yet before the spatial ripple attack could strike the factory ship, the Bastion quickly interposed herself in front of the ship and deployed a large and fairly powerful resonance shield!

"Primal Aegis!"

The ripple in space struck the enlarged resonance shield and quickly collapsed it due to the enormous difference in power!

Venerable Jannzi was not stupid enough to put her high-tier expert mech in the way. As impressive as the Bastion may be after her rebirth, the expert heavy space knight would probably get crippled at once if she withstood the full brunt of this spatial attack!

The weakened but still fairly powerful ripple attack therefore bypassed the Bastion and struck the azure energy shields of the Spirit of Bentheim.

The frontal shields held for a short while, but the Eminence of Torment's main attack turned out to be so effective against transphasic defenses that it managed to overcthis barrier and strike the hull!

The giant prow that was supposed to depict Goldie's splendid head suffered major tears!

Fortunately, the decorative prow successfully managed to prevent the ripple attack from drilling further into the hull.

The Spirit of Bentheim may appear to be a factory ship, but her last refit had boosted most of her defenses to the standards of a first-class capital ship!

Just the many layers of first-class alloys stacked onto the prow section had proven that they were worth all of the expense and effort to install onto the Spirit of Bentheim.

"Our flagship remains intact!"

"The new Zeta-65 Warp Interdictor has remained unaffected. The new module is still doing a good job of suppressing the Eminence of Torment's spatial abilities."

"The Spirit of Bentheim cannot withstand too many spatial ripple attacks. We need to neutralize the threat posed by the phase lord quickly before he inflicts more damage!"

"When is it tfor our new ace pilot to deploy?!"

"Where is Saint Tusa?!"