Chapter 2660: Rising Casualties Ves and many other observers couldn't help but admire the performance of the Garlener expert mechs. He had to admit that Vicious Mountain had turned expert mech combat into an artform. While he looked down on their warrior culture, only such a circumstance was capable of pushing the development of expert mechs to a higher level! The expert mechs fielded by the rest of the enemy strike force looked like toys in comparison to the Vicious Mountain expert mechs! Of course, Ves knew that much of that had to do with the relative strength and treatment of the individual expert pilots. Venerable Brutus Wodin was not only a boy, but also a relatively young expert pilot who had only come into power for a few years. Venerable Ghanso Larkinson and the other 7 expert pilots deployed by his side weren't truly Fridaymen. As foreigners who were half-conscripted to fight on behalf of the Coalition, they didn't receive the best treatment. They weren't as skilled as true second-class expert pilots so they wouldn't be able to make good use of more powerful expert mechs anyway. All of this resulted in an obvious disparity between the two enemy forces. The Fridaymen brought powerful elite mech troops but only paired them up with a bunch of mediocre expert mechs. The Praetor and Planat Clan were led by a small number of powerful expert pilots but only managed to bring several thousand ordinary military mechs. The expeditionary fleet did not have to worry too much about the weaker components of the two enemy forces. While that didn't mean that they could be ignored at will, they obviously weren't expected to achieve victory on their own merits as long as they were contained. Right now, thousands of mechs on both sides have become locked in battle! Due to the fact the enemy dispatched its forces in two pincers, the Larkinsons, Glory Seekers and Crossers had to split up their forces as well. As previously agreed upon, the defending mechs on the right side of the expeditionary fleet largely consisted of units that were more suited to slower-paced battles of attrition. While that didn't necessarily mean that the individual officers couldn't employ unexpected stratagems or pull off clever maneuvers, the overall tone of the battle was relatively subdued compared to what took place on the opposite side. The exchange of blows was a lot more intensive at the left side of the battlefield! A flood of laser and positron beams lit up the surrounding space as rifleman mechs from both sides had become locked in battle! The initial weight of fire clearly favored the elite Fridaymen due to their stronger mechs. The Larkinsons only managed to compensate for the weakness of their Vima Suns by relying on their greater numbers and allowing the Transcendent Punishers to provide some much-needed assistance. The artillery mechs played a crucial role in suppressing the enemy! The Ylvainan mech pilots had all received orders to concentrate their firepower on the grenade-carrying mechs of the Holvein Grenadiers. It couldn't be helped! The elite mech regiment founded by the Gauge Dynasty was just too difficult to fight against at close range! A series of powerful grenades could easily tear apart a formation or blow upon a hole in a battle line. The grenades also induced a lot of fear in any mech pilot that attempted to take down a Holvein Grenadier mech. The elite mech pilots had a habit of holding back at least one grenade until their mech was about to be defeated. The damaged mech would whip out and throw the grenade at its opponent at the final moment before taking advantage of the moment to disengage. If the nearly-defeated Holvein Grenadier mech was unable to withdraw, then its mech pilot would not hesitate to blow up the grenade at point blank range! Therefore, the 300 or so Transcendent Punishers that still remained operational all unleashed death and destruction on all 6 mech companies of the Holvein Grenadiers! While the Grenadiers brought forth plenty of space knights to withstand the barrage, their defenses weren't as perverse as that of the Corundian Giants. With up to 1200 heavy positron and gauss cannons trained onto the brave space knights of the Holvein Grenadiers, their thick shields melted and fractured into pieces as soon as they were subject to focused fire. The energy shields that formed along the way quickly popped within seconds after blocking over twenty successive beams and rounds at once! Once the space knights became exposed, not even their thick frontal armor availed them for long. Positron beams vaporized the upper layers while softening up what remained with an excess of heat. Solid gauss rounds fired by the Transcendent Punisher's potent Xcordon cannons slammed into the already-weakened plates and shattered several of them at the same time! While a single Transcendent Punisher likely needed a fair amount of time to chew through the defensive layers of a Holvein Grenadier space knight, what about an entire squad? What about an entire mech company? No single mech could withstand so much firepower at once, especially when they advanced closer! Dozens of space knights shattered into pieces. Others turned into empty husks as their mech pilots hastily ejected from their machines. Without any significant counter battery fire to worry about, the Transcendent Punishers were performing their jobs in splendid fashion as their heavy firepower literally forced the Holvein Grenadiers to a standstill! Other defensive mechs hastily reinforced the Holvein Grenadiers, allowing their more fragile mechs to escape the brunt of the bombardment for a while longer. Of course, the fact that the Transcendent Punishers employed all of their firepower on just one single enemy mech unit meant that the others were able to advance under much less pressure! The Larkinson rifleman mechs only inflicted light damage onto the enemy mechs. The modified laser rifles of the Vima Suns might be a tad more powerful than the norm, but the powerful armor of their opposition were more than capable of resisting the beams. It couldn't be helped! The commercial second-class rifleman mechs piloted by the Avatars, Battle Criers, Vandals and so on were only optimized for laser weapons in order to lower costs. While laser weapons boasted stellar accuracy, their damage potential was disappointing compared to positron weapons. Even when squads of Vima Suns focused their fire onto a single target, it took a lot of effort just to dig into the internals of a tough military mech. The enemy rifleman mechs did not suffer from the same problem. Many relatively fragile Larkinson mechs lost limbs or suffered severe damage after getting hit a couple times by power positron beams. The enemy rifleman mechs had no equals on this side of the battlefield! Only the rifleman mechs fielded by the Glory Seekers and the Cross Clan were able to match their Fridayman counterparts blow for blow, but the latter had numbers by their side. This was because the Glory Seekers and the Crossers had tasked the majority of their ranged mechs with the vital mission of suppressing the Fridayman expert mechs! Colonel Ariadne Wodin chose to rely heavily on ranged firepower to suppress and constrain the Fridaymen expert mechs. Thousands of rifleman mechs all concentrated their energy beams at the powerful machines. Most of the beams actually went wide because their targets accelerated in unexpected directions, allowing them to evade most incoming fire. What scattered beams managed to hit the expert mechs were actually scattered by their resonance shields. The combined firepower of a mech regiment's worth of rifleman mechs weren't even capable of getting past the resonance shields of the enemy mechs! While the expert mechs did not sustain any significant damage at the moment, it was quite exhausting to maintain their resonance shields. The expert pilots had to invest so much attention to avoiding so much damage that they weren't able to close in on their opponents! Whenever an expert mech shot forward, the rifleman mechs flew backwards while at the same time directing much more firepower at the closing enemy. The Glory Seekers and the Crossers also dispatched many melee mechs because ranged suppression was not enough to hold back the enemy expert mechs. These mechs formed into squads and advanced whenever the rifleman mechs halted their fire on a target. These brief clashes did not end well. In one instance, the Glory Seeker and Crosser mechs that approached an enemy melee mech abruptly lost half their number as a blade extended by resonance slashed across a wide area, thereby slicing the attacking melee mechs without encountering any significant resistance! This wasn't even the worst that the Fridayman expert mechs could unleash. The Charlemagne and its Scarra calmly took aim before firing 40 resonance-empowered beams at the same time. 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞 40 Glory Seeker rifleman mechs exploded at the same time as they were fatally struck by Venerable Ghanso Larkinson's amazing feat of marksmanship! Just as the Unit L was about to fire a second time, two different enemy mechs sniped three Scarra mechs at once! The Star Dancer piloted by Venerable Brutus Wodin managed to fire a powerful beam that instantly tore through a quasi-expert mech. As the rifleman mech flew forward, its multi-rifle fired a steady staccato of gauss rounds that heavily damaged another Scarra mech. Approaching from the other side was the Leskin piloted by Venerable Banner Cross. The experienced Crosser expert pilot quickly deemed Venerable Ghanso's abnormal entourage to be the most threatening presence on the battlefield. If Unit L was about to repeat its earlier feat a few times, then the losses to the Glory Seeker and the Crosser mechs would quickly render them unable to hold back the other expert mechs! Under this desperate circumstance, the thousands of standard mechs were basically trading their own frames in order to consume the energy levels of the enemy expert mechs. The chances of taking down expert mechs were too low under normal circumstances. They became a lot more vulnerable once they exhausted their reserves, and one of the ways to do that was to force them to expend their energy to fight back against a flood of regular mechs! Naturally, the Fridayman expert mech pilots weren't blind. As soon as their opponents brought so many mechs to bear against them, they tried their best to link up with each other and combine their powers together. When an expert melee mech paired up with an expert ranged mech, the combination proved a lot deadlier than if they were separate! The former perfectly took care of the advancing waves of melee mechs while the latter steadily shot down ranged mech after ranged mech without worrying about interference! Unit L already established this combination by pairing up the Charlemagne with the Jaenne D'Arc. As soon as Scarra mechs started blowing up one after another, the Jeanne D'Arc instantly propelled forward and chased after the Leskin, which Venerable Foster regarded as the more threatening of the two opposing expert rifleman mechs! "You take care of that Hexer expert mech yourself!" She told her teammate. "Who do you think I am?" Venerable Ghanso growled as the Charlemagne along with all of his Scarra aimed at the swift and elusive Star Dancer. "I've demolished a lot more Hexer expert mechs than you!" Venerable Brutus Wodin felt a fatal threat as soon as over 35 rifles simultaneously aimed in the direction of his mech. No matter where the Star Dancer attempted to dodge, it could not avoid getting hit! This was because Venerable Ghanso always fired the guns under his control in a box pattern around his target. Perhaps getting hit a few times was no big deal, but as long as the Star Dancer received damage that impaired its mobility, then the expert rifleman mech was definitely doomed! Fortunately for him, the Glory Seekers already anticipated this situation. A dozen or so regular mechs darted forth and put themselves in between the two expert mechs just in time! "For the Superior Mother!" "Glory to the Seekers of Truth! Every mech that had moved to help the Star Dancer blew up or turned into wrecks without fail! In some cases, the cockpits of the damaged mechs managed to eject without a problem, but over half of the Glory Seeker mech pilots sacrificed their lives for a momentary advantage! Venerable Brutus regretted his inability to prevent the Hexer mech pilots from dying. "Your slaughter ends here!"