Chapter 2284: Stopgap Solutions The Marrakath System had fallen! Ever since the Komodo War began, several star systems had already begun to change hands. None of them were very important. Even if the enemy took them over, they could always be taken back. There were too many planets and star systems in space. Even powerful states such as the Friday Coalition and Hexadric Hegemony knew that it was futile to turn every one of them into impenetrable fortresses. Also, due to the properties of FTL drives and the extreme distances they were capable of traversing, no wall was impenetrable. What truly mattered in the long run was holding key star systems. These star systems possessed several strategically important endowments, ranging from rich exotic deposits, a large existing infrastructure, a large productive workforce or close proximity to a lot of other valuable star systems. The Carnegie Group happened to turn the Crestfallen Stars into their first line of defense! Though the Fridaymen never bet all of their chips on holding these fortified star systems, they at least wanted to bleed the Hex Army of hundreds of thousands or even millions of mech pilots! In this final struggle for supremacy in this remote star sector, both sides knew they needed to deplete each other's war-making potential! Considering the abundant material resources that both states stockpiled during centuries of peace, it would take far too long to deplete each other's resources. Conquering territory and taking over the enemy's resources, industrial capacity, trade and population was possible, but only up to an extent. While the Hexers believed they possessed the might to overrun their archenemy, the Fridaymen were at lot more realistic about their chances! In a war like this, the critical resource that both sides needed to preserve the most was their mech pilots. It couldn't be helped. Unlike resources such as Kavenit, mech pilots couldn't be stockpiled over a long period of time. Neither state was capable of increasing the amount of mech pilots in a short amount of time after the outbreak of the Komodo War. While the Fridaymen and Hexers hastily put their negleced low aptitude potentates through a crash course training in piloting mechs, it still took at least a couple of years to yield some results. Until then, the war revolved around diminishing each other's pool of mech pilots as much as possible! From the perspective of the Fridaymen, this plan was bound to work as long as they lured their hated enemies in unfavorable battles. Aware of the arrogance and conceit of the Hexers, the Carnegie Group and the Vermeer Group had long given up on launching any offenses. Launching an attack was always costlier than defending a stronghold. Therefore, the two coalition partners expressly invested in fortifying a lot of star systems, each of which they considered expendable despite the ludricrous sums of cols pumped into their defenses! Up until a point, the plan appeared to work. The entry of the infamous Blessed Squire changed everything! The Hex Army's Wrathful Doves may have lost a lot of mechs and mech pilots, but the Fortune Legion's Opal Tridents failed to meet their quota! The bedraggled survivors evacuated Marrakath III and the rest of the star system in haste, prioritizing the retrieval of people over war materiel. The Opal Tridents suffered a shameful defeat! Though they preserved enough manpower to fight again another day, the sudden abandonment of so much mechs, production equipment, supplies and lots of other gear would set them back for months, preventing them from playing any role in the next couple of months. It was different for the Wrathful Doves! Though the Hexers bled heavily in order to topple the Marrakath System, their morale was skyhigh and their eagerness to battle again had reached a peak! "We will go down in history as the first Hexers to conquer a Fridayman fortress system! Let us thank the Superior Mother for giving us strength!" "For the Hegemony! For the Superior Mother!" The fall of the Marrakath System triggered a chain reaction. First, the Wrathful Doves earned an immense amount of glory and honor for their great service. Conquering Marrakath ahead of schedule in such an overwhelming fashion while preserving most of their mech pilots made the next steps of the Hex Army so much easier! While the Wrathful Doves needed to secure their new prize and weren't quite ready to transfer to another battlefield, most of the reinforcements no longer headed to Marrakath. Aside from sending second line garrison troops to take over Marrakath's defense, the other reinforcements changed their route to the other remaining Crestfallen Stars! The pressure against the Fortune Legion units stationed there intensified as the Hexers built up a greater and greater numerical advantage. On top of that, after weeks of deliberation, procrastination, arguing, dealmaking and persuasion, the council of matriarchs in charge of approving mech designs finally made the decision that more and more combat troops were waiting for. The Hexer leaders finally permitted the Hex Army to deploy the Blessed Squire model in every battlefield! "We can finally use our new mechs!" "We could have used them weeks ago! While I respect the matriarchs, they have no idea how many sisters we've lost since then! Why couldn't they approve the Blessed Squire faster?" "Don't complain. At least we can see what the fuss is about!" Hours after the Blessed Squire received official sanction, many frontline mech army groups and mech divisions began to deploy the supportive knight mech in great quantities! Each of these Hexers units had already diverted their production capacity to build up a stockpile of Blessed Squires. The fact that a significant portion of the Hex Army already built hundreds of thousands of Blessed Squires had already forced the hand of the council of matriarchs. Rather than permitting that something could be done, the matriarchs essentially acknowledged reality. The rest of the Hex Army had learned from the example set by DIVA and the Wrathful Doves. Instead of introducing the Blessed Squire mechs onto the battlefield one by one, the individual Hex Army units smashed thousands of them across the frontlines all at once! "Don't let the Fridaymen get used to the Blessed Squire's glow or whatever it's called. We need to ride our momentum all the way to victory!" 𝚏𝕣𝐞𝗲𝐰𝕖𝐛𝐧𝕠𝕧𝚎𝚕.𝐜𝚘𝗺 The idea was sound, and the plan largely worked. The Fridaymen mech units put up considerably more resistance this time. Now that they became aware of the horrifying influence this foreign mech design could make, the Fortune Legion and other mech militaries had already drawn up some responses! While the Coalition's Master Mech Designers were rapidly trying to develop effective counters against this heinous mech design, the Fridaymen settled for several stopgap solutions. "Bombard the enemy positions! Snipe those Blessed Squires! Don't let the Hexers get close!" Hundreds of Hexer mechs attempted to assault a Fridayman stronghold in a burning city. The Hexer assault unit adopted an unusual formation where a large number of male and female Hexer mechs protected the latest addition to their mech roster! In ordinary circumstances, the female supremacists never showed this much care for expendable male mechs! Yet before the Hexer mechs could make much progress, explosions began to rain down from the sky! Massed artillery peppered their ranks with shells and other ordnance without any regard for cost. Crack! Sharp laser beams, powerful positron beams and thunderous gauss rounds flooded the escorts of the Blessed Squires. The knight mechs and other defensive mechs strained to withstand the focused firepower, and the less well-protected mechs did not last long if they didn't move out of the way! "The blasted Fridaymen want to take out our Blessed Squires from a distance!" "Don't let them! We need to protect our sons at all costs!" "We can't! Their firepower is too much." "Despicable cowards! Fight us up close if you dare!" Even without a specific counter against the Blessed Squire, the mech designers and analysts of the Friday Coalition had aready developed an effective tactic against this devilish Hexer mech. Just take them out from range! There were three properties of the Blessed Squire that made them so powerful. First, their energy siphoning and energy transferring capabilities significantly extended the deployment time of other Hexer mechs. Second, their glows invigorated every Hexer mech pilots in a radius that was able to encompass an entire mech company under ideal conditions. Third, the same glows also damaged the morale and concentration of enemy mech pilots in the same radius! All of these points shared a common element. They were only effective in close range! "The Blessed Squires are one of the most effective force multipliers the Hex Army has fielded to date, but they are not omnipotent!" A Fridayman staff officer briefed hundreds of attentive mech commanders by remote. "Of the three points that I have just listed, only the second one is valid as long as the Hexer units haven't collided against our own units. Keeping this new Hexer mech model at bay will minimize its advantages." The logic sounded simple, but it was undeniably true. In the other six Crestfallen Stars, the initial introduction of the Blessed Squire immediately encountered the response that the Fridaymen had long prepared. "Don't let it get close!" "Shoot it from a distance!" "Empty our entire ammunition reserves if necessary!" In order to slow down the collapse of the Crestfallen Stars and buy time for critical star systems to evacuate their critical infrastructure and personnel, the Fortune Legion invested heavily in their response. Just like how the Sand War drove many states to revive the use of Starfighters, the Fortune Legion units all began to employ old-fashioned artillery pieces! These hastily-fabricated and disposable cannons were installed in almost every major fortification. The Fridaymen readily emptied their huge stockpiles of explosive shells and allocated a lot more industrial capacity into fabricating more. "Turn the battlefield in a sea of flame and explosions!" "Bomb them until they can't take a step forward!" "No knight mech can withstand our firepower!" For a time, these tactics worked. The Hexers possessed a bias for melee combat, and much of the Hex Army's mech doctrine revolved around relying on the might of melee mechs to achieve quick, decisive victories. Even so, the Hexers weren't weak at range! While the Hex Army honestly did not expect the Fridaymen to rely so heavily on bombardment, the response came quick. Boom! Boom! Boom! A rain of shells attempted to destroy a stationary artillery battery deployed by the Fortune Legion. The norms crewing the artillery cannons cowered and flinched from the shells exploding against the energy shield that had been erected over their position. "The firepower is too much! Our shield is rapidly losing its charge! At this rate, it will break in forty seconds!" In another artillery position, a squad of Hexer aerial mechs fired their plasma rifles at their targets. Unfortunately, due to scarcity, no shield generator protected this site, thereby causing the auxiliaries and their artillery cannons to succumb in a sea of immense heat and plasma! At a different location, A Hexer mech company supported by a Blessed Squire had attacked an artillery battery from the flank! The defending Fridaymen mechs put up a good fight, but their defense lines started to buckle as its mech pilots weren't accustomed to the Blessed Squire's disturbing glow. A trio of light skirmishers evaded the defenders and stormed over to the artillery pieces. Crack! A shield blocked their path! However, the female Hexer mech pilots only grinned at the sight. "Let's exhaust this shield!" The mechs did not employ their daggers. Instead, they simply bashed their frames against the energy-based hindrance. The immense kinetic energy transferred by the Hexer mechs rapidly consumed the shield until it finally popped out of existence! "Kill!" Though the slaughter was immense, the deployment of so many artillery batteries helped mitigate the impact of the Blessed Squire's entry into the frontlines, at least for a time. In addition, the Friday Coalition's existing ranged mechs all prioritized the Blessed Squires above any other strategically important target. To the Hexers who often relied on riling themselves up to fight without fear, the Blessed Squire had become one of their best tools to generate momentum! Naturally, the ranged mechs of the Hex Army did not allow their foes to do as they wished! With the Hexer mech units concentrating their knight mechs and other defensive mechs around their Blessed Squires, it took an immense amount of firepower to chew through all of that resistance. The same could not be said for the Fridayman's ranged mechs! Even though they often took advantage of walls and fixed defenses, the fact that they numbered so much meant that they were vulnerable to being defeated in detail, especially when the Fridaymen ranged mechs did not suppress their Hexer counterparts! Under these evolving dynamics, the frontlines of the Komodo War became more turbulent.