The Mech Touch

The greater phase lords could not be stopped anymore.

No matter whether it was the Herald of the Void or the Lower Herdmaster, their hard power was too great for ordinary measures to work anymore.

The Amphis Extremis had reached a state of fatigue. While Saint Linda Cross still possessed a decent amount of fighting spirit and had yet to exhaust her willpower, she had overburdened her machine in an attempt to hold back the Herald of the Void mainly herself.

A similar dynamic applied to the First Sword. Saint Dise Larkinson was the best swordsman mech specialist on the battlefield, but even if she was able to reinforce the parts of her expert mech with her Saint Kingdom, there was only so much she could do to maintain an exceptionally high level of performance!

The extreme maneuvers and excessive exertions of force that she thought was necessary to stay one step ahead of the Saint Piercer-wielding phase lord all took a toll on her machine.

The First Sword Mark II was only a mid-tier expert mech. It was never supposed to perform at a level that was close to an ace mech, and forcing it to do so drastically shortened its service life!

Therefore, the Lower Herdmaster also couldn’t be stopped anymore.

While their spatial barriers continually got pummeled by the firepower that Saint Casella Ingvar and many other friendly assets brought to bear, the defenses were way more effective than ordinary azure energy shield generators.

They also became harder to target as they gained more room for maneuver. Without any effective opposition left, it became harder for the guns of the orbital defense ring to maintain a high hit rate against the large but also faster-moving phase lords.

The fact that there weren’t as many defensive fortifications left as before also contributed to humanity’s increasing inability to prevent the greater phase lords from rampaging.

The aliens had brought too many warships. Many of them got felled. Their larger and more valuable hulls especially got targeted due to how much harder it was to produce them en masse, but that still left a lot of smaller destroyer and cruiser-sized vessels that were all armed with their own collection of guns.

As for the phasefighters, they had suffered enormous losses, but they did not make it easy for the opposing mechs.

The aliens were able to tolerate casualties much easier than their human foes.

The loss of a single mech was a comparatively greater loss to red humanity than to the native aliens.

Losing the pilots made this comparison even more lopsided!

Mech pilots were far more skilled and experienced than alien phasefighter pilots, but that also made their deaths extra painful to red humanity.

While the amount of experienced and professional mech pilots was still fairly abundant for now, that might not remain true anymore after several more years of hard fighting.

This was why mech academies throughout human-occupied space had already begun to trim their curriculums.

It was no longer realistic for mech pilots to waste their time on further studies and attend an advanced mech academy for 4 or 5 additional years!

In any case, the introduction of systematic cultivation massively eased the difficulty of compressing mech piloting education.

As long as a mech cadet made enough attainments in an auxiliary qi cultivation method, he or she may only need 4 years to gain 10 years worth of proficiency in the skills that needed to be mastered! Explore more at empire

Even so, the fact that it still took a couple of years to transform this year’s mech cadets into half-way decent mech pilots could not be avoided!

This was especially inconvenient considering that mech academies had already begun to offer shortened training programs for a rapidly growing amount of norms that aspired to become Carmine mech pilots. РÄ𐌽οᛒĘș

While the amount of volunteers who wanted to contribute to the war effort by fighting in the trenches was gratifying, there was no immediate way to turn them into readily available mech pilots in the short term.

A large influx of retired and disabled veterans had already been reactivated, but there weren’t as many of them in the Red Ocean as the higher ups hoped.

After all, the Red Ocean was a place of opportunity for the young and healthy. The proportion of elderly and retired mech pilots that decided to emigrate to this dwarf galaxy was very low back when the greater beyonder gates were still operational.

The only significantly large group that could still be reactivated were disabled veterans who had suffered brain damage over the course of their service in the Red Ocean.

Even this group became sparse when the newly converted Carmine mech pilots got dispersed across the frontlines.

In any case, the ultimate point was that trained, educated and experienced manpower was a precious strategic asset to red humanity.

It was truly not worth it to kill 10 alien soldiers at the cost of 1 human mech pilot!

Yet the reason why the people stationed in Viola Magnifica did not evacuate unless they put up a mean fight was because they had no other choice.

Territory was just as valuable as manpower, if not more.

Giving up a star system without a fight might allow red humanity to preserve a lot of manpower, but it would lose a portion of its living space and industrial capacity for free!

It was stupid to give up ground for free. Doing it enough times would just cause red humanity to put itself at an even greater disadvantage than before.

This was why there was a consensus among the human leaders that every star system should be fought over.

People needed to fight not just because they needed to make the aliens bleed for every piece of territory they took, but also to keep up humanity’s fighting spirit.

If red humanity conceded a star system without a fight a few times due to strategic considerations, then that was fine.

If red humanity started to give up star systems left and right just because its leaders were afraid of suffering too many losses, then this could easily spark a chain reaction where many officers and soldiers simply lost faith in their ability to resist the enemy!

The ultimate dilemma that red humans faced at this time was that they could not afford to incur too many losses, but had to suffer them anyway because their enemies gave them no other choice!

Since the native aliens forced red humanity to engage in attrition warfare, the latter could only accept the rules as given and try to struggle to even the odds as much as possible.

This was why Saint Commander Casella Ingvar felt so unreconciled by the results of this battle.

The elimination of two lesser phase lords was a great result, but the amount of mech pilots and support personnel that died over the course of this battle were also considerable.

If the human defenders left without inflicting greater losses onto the enemy forces, then this battle would ultimately end up benefiting the native aliens the most!

"Do you understand what Casella is asking of you, Joshua?"

"I think I get it." He said. "You want us to kill the Eight Lord of Takansha so that the orven soldiers will collapse and lose any motivation to fight any further. This will introduce massive fault lines within the alien armada and make it much easier to inflict losses onto the enemy."

Ketis nodded. "The benefits go further than that. Think about how the greater orven community when an invasion force led by two jureg phase lords, one nunser phase lord and three orven phase lords end up losing the latter after a single battle."

"I see! You want to sow division between the orven race and the other major alien races! The orvens soldiers stationed elsewhere will begin to suspect that their gods are being conspired against. The remaining orven phase lords might not entirely believe that this is happening, but they will definitely fight more cautiously than before, causing them to become considerably less helpful on the battlefield."

"Exactly. Killing two orven phase lords is not enough as that could still be chalked up to a coincidence. It is only when we kill the third orven phase lord that a pattern will be set."

"That sounds great, but how do you expect me to be able to kill the Eight Lord of Takansha so quickly? He has so many spatial barriers at his disposal that he can stall us out long enough to flee to the rear or converge with the greater phase lords."

Joshua recognized that killing a lesser phase lord that excelled at defense was impossible unless he was able to kill him quickly.

"The Saint Commander will help." Ketis responded. "She is prepared to direct the firepower of all of her Enfeoffed Barons to the Eight Lord of Takansha at once."

"What about her Knights?"

"They are still necessary to suppress and destroy the enemy warships. Haven’t you noticed that the puelmer heavy cruisers are no longer causing any trouble? That is because Casella has thoroughly suppressed them to the point where they cannot breathe anymore."

That was good. What the puelmers lacked in phase lords, they made up for it with advanced technology. It was always better if there were less of them on the battlefield.

"I am going to need more help than that." Joshua said with a frown. "Venerable Glendale and Venerable Rodrigo are good, but our combined attacks aren’t enough for the task."

"The Saint Commander has also decided to put Commander Melkor into play."

Joshua did not look impressed. "Really? You expect us to kill the final remaining orven phase lord with the help of Melkor?"

"Don’t expect to receive any further help. The C-Man and the two expert Valkyrie mechs are doing their best to stall the Fatedriver. The Star Dancer Mark II is guarding our flanks to prevent the native aliens from encircling us. The Phobos has snuck behind enemy lines and is currently preoccupied with turning damaged warships into destroyed warships. Reassigning them to you won’t make much of a difference."

"Then how…"

"Melkor is being assigned to assist you because Casella believes in your strength." Ketis firmly said. "I believe in you as well. So what if you have suffered a setback? This is your first time using the Bitter Scimitar in actual combat. It is normal to encounter teething issues. What is important is that you resolve whatever differences you may have with your new D-arm and use it to tear down the defenses of the enemy phase lord at a much faster pace. I was involved in the development and forging of this sword artifact. I have a good idea of how powerful it can be. You just need to charge the weapon with phasewater in order to unleash its full potential."

"It’s not that simple, Ketis! First, my weapon has so much control over its functions that it has denied me from activating it on my own initiative. If I don’t get this stupid weapon’s agreement, I will never be able to burn phasewater to amplify the cutting power of my blade. Second, my expert mech is only carrying a limited reserve of phasewater. I am afraid that by the time I chop my way through all of the spatial barriers, my stash will run out. That will leave me with nothing to cut into the body of the Eight Lord of Takansha."

"That is not a problem."

"How so?"

"Think about it, Joshua. What is a substance that all phase lords have in their bodies?"

"I know that the true bodies of a phase lord contains phasewater. I am not stupid." The expert pilot responded with irritation. "It’s not that simple. As far as I know, the phasewater concentration of the blood of a phase lord is not that high. Feeding raw phase lord blood to the phasewater-charged mechanisms will cause them to gunk up or malfunction."

"That is true in most cases." Ketis admitted. "Your D-arm is different. It has long moved beyond the realm of a technological weapon. It is an artifact. It doesn’t have to play by the rules anymore. Besides, I believe that you should easily be able to overcome this problem if you empower of the Bitter Scimitar with your true resonance. This is your specialty, Joshua. It is time for you to move beyond the basics and develop your own unique powers and abilities. As long as you break through, killing the Eight Lord of Takansha should be a piece of cake."

Ketis had high expectations towards her husband, but would Joshua truly be able to live up to them this time?

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