Many of the pescans fighting at this entrance became disheartened by the fall of their native mech. Combined with the mental torture inflicted by Ves channeling a disorientating glow with the help of his handy ancient skull, the alien defensive line started to crumble despite the disparity in numbers! The pescans outnumbered the humans by over 5 to 1, but the differences in momentum, technology, tactics, combat acumen and more could not be bridged so easily! It had been a mistake for the pescans to rely on a first-generation mech to begin with. Their engineering wasn't that bad, but rashly starting to develop a mech under extremely barren conditions was a fool's errand! Ves no longer bothered to fire his Amastendira. He had been counting his shots and knew that it could only fire a limited amount of high-powered shots before it was forced to enter a lengthy cooldown cycle. Everything had a price and a weapon as compact as the Amastendira simply wasn't able to fire so many extremely powerful shots without needing to worry about its rapid heat accumulation. Ves resolved to mitigate this problem and expand its capacity as he had always found that the ability to fire a lot of high-powered shots in a short interval of time was extremely valuable under the right circumstances. It could even allow him to disable an actual second-class mech as long as its defenses weren't too good! However, it appeared that the fall of the pescan mech triggered the fury of the commander of this force. Even as the honor guards had made it to the next floor and began to clear a lot of space around them, the pescans were finally beginning to adjust to the latest circumstances. A lot of soldiers and civilians who were still able to maintain enough awareness received urgent instructions to back away and escape the range where they became susceptible to the disorientation glow! Even though only a minority of the alien combatants retreated from the risk zone, these pescan fighters undoubtedly consisted of the most skilled and elite of their group! Backing off did not affect their ability to land their shots at the human targets. Although more and more human soldiers took advantage of the hard work of the Larkinson honor guards and made it to the top as well, their arrival also provided more targets for the pescans to kill. The firefight became a lot more brutal, especially when the aliens were surrounding the incoming humans from every angle! A circle had formed of sorts that made it difficult for the human soldiers to defend against. No amount of cover could help them escape enemy fire because there would inevitably be a pescan soldier that could land a clear shot at their exposed backs. The encirclement made it a lot more difficult for Ves to affect them with his glow. He could only disorient aliens in a sphere around his position, which meant that he could only engulf a part of the alien encirclement at best. In addition to that, Ves would have to expose himself to a lot of enemy fire if he dared to move too far forward in any direction. "Sir!" General Verle yelled over a communication channel. "More pescan troops are converging on your position! The aliens are urgently trying to push back our forces and make us fail in our attempt to take over their main floor. Our scouting drones have already spotted the appearance of multiple heavy vehicles! There are two tanks and one self-propelled missile artillery launcher. All three vehicles are about to open fire!" "Wait, what?!" Ves responded before realizing the danger. He immediately issued a warning to the soldiers around him. "SPREAD OUT AND GET TO COVER!" They didn't need his warning as General Verle and Major Durant had already warned them in advance. It was at this time that the tanks fired at the same time. Their large guns fired powerful transphasic laser beams that punched through all of the obstacles in their way before striking several clusters of human soldiers at once! What was worse was that the tanks had been aiming at his honor guards. Though they had managed to split up in time, Ves couldn't do much but watch how one of the laser beams speared through one of his elite guards while another barely managed to jump away, only for his leg to get burned! First-class armor plating or not, the application of armor was so thin that getting hit by a transphasic tank-grade weapon could not avail the guards! "Nitaa!" Ves became alarmed when he saw that his favorite guard pretty much lost her leg and received a major shock to her body! The heat blast alone had cooked much of her body and organs, causing her to lose her combat effectiveness in an instant! Fortunately, her advanced combat armor immediately injected her body with a cocktail of chemicals. Her suit also began to release a lot of steam as the cooling systems worked hard to vent all of the excess heat that had entered her severely damaged body. An automatic recovery system went online. After testing whether the antigrav modules of her damaged combat armor was still operational, it automatically began to float in the air and steadily retreated back to a friendly rallying point unless it received an overriding order. Ves had personally programmed this system in her suit, so he knew that he could rely on it to bring the wounded guard back to safety. Hopefully, those medical directors employed by Freewell Medical Services could keep her alive long enough to save her life. The fight had become a lot more personal now that someone he knew and trusted well had fallen in battle. Nitaa had been with him for so long that Ves could not imagine trusting his back to a more reliable guard. "Damn these aliens… I am going to finish the job that the Davutans have started. The pescan race must not be allowed to survive past this day!" "Take out their heavy vehicles! Don't give their missile vehicle a chance to open fire!" It was at this time that the heavy weapon specialists armed with missile launchers took action. They already spend precious time to program their final batch of missiles as well as wait for strong targeting assistance from nearby human soldiers in order to ensure they dealt effective damage. Once they fired their missiles, the guided munitions followed a winding path through the entrance and arced in the air before moving straight to the vulnerable sections of the armored vehicles! BOOOM! The missile launcher got struck down easily enough after getting hit by a single warhead. The tanks got hit by three missiles each. The transphasic warheads possessed enough penetration power that they managed to punch through a decent amount of armor before detonating! BOOOM! BOOOOOOM! One tank blew up completely as one of the explosives evidently triggered a volatile substance or warhead. The other tank amazingly managed to avoid outright destruction, although it suffered crippling damage to several systems! Its engine, a portion of its turret and a power generator had been knocked offline. Unfortunately for the humans, the remaining alien tank was not completely out of the fight! It soon barked out a second laser beam, one that was fuzzier and spread out in a cone due to a malfunction! Even though the uncontrolled blast killed numerous nearby pescans by mistake, it also burned a cluster of Davutan guard troops, causing them to suffer miserable burns! "Ahhh!" "It hurts!" Ves grew distressed at the survival of this vehicle. This was not a normal tank, but a protector that was specially designed to escort the great chief of the city state of Davute! "We need to finish off the remaining tank. Do we still have any missiles left?!" Ves questioned. "I'm sorry, sir, but we have just expended their last missiles. The only weapons we have left that can threaten the alien tank are our laser cannons and that high-quality pistol in your hands. Even then, it is doubtful whether you can inflict enough damage when attacking its front. Tanks are designed to resist much more damage from the targets, and I am sure you know better than I that this alien design follows the same idea." Ves knew this quite well. "Understood. It is just a matter of outflanking the tank, right? The big hunk of metal has been immobilized by the missile strike, so it should be easy enough to finish it off entirely." "Look at the enemy deployments!" General Verle retorted. "The pescans know they need to rely on their most powerful asset to repel our troops. Our men will never be able to get past the crowd of pescans that are positioned to strike them down!" When Ves accessed a map that showed a top-down view of all of the deployments, he could clearly see how the professional soldiers among the pescans did just that. They had positioned themselves in such a way that they would enfilade any enemy unit that sought to disable their only tank! His suit sounded an alarm as it detected another buildup of heat from the tank. Ves ducked as a broad and wavy laser blast burned the area in front! The damage to the tank's laser cannon system was more focused than before. It appeared the vehicle's crew made adjustments or its self-repair systems had fixed some of the issues that caused it to scatter its firepower to such an exaggerated extent. The effective range of the weapon had increased! If not for the fact that the human soldiers had responded by distancing themselves from the massive vehicle, more of them would have suffered massive burn damage! This was clearly unsustainable to the humans, though. The transphasic tank had swung the momentum of the fight back in favor of the pescans. The aliens were already beginning to regain their confidence after seeing that one of their only remaining super war machines put up a good fight! Now that they recovered from the various setbacks, the pescan combatants were beginning to lay down effective fire against the humans trying to take over their floor. "There are too many of these aliens!" "That alien tank has destroyed a lot of cover! We are sitting ducks out here! We need to take it down sooner or later!" "How are we supposed to do that without missiles or room to maneuver? Those pescans aren't stupid." "We should just head in the opposite direction of the tank. So long as its main gun remains damaged, its threat shouldn't be too great from a distance." "Are you crazy? That will give the aliens plenty of time to repair that gun. We will be screwed if this transphasic vehicle is able to fire its cannon just as well as before." The disparity in equipment and numbers became evident once more. Ves had hoped that his side would be able to overwhelm the pescans by exploiting a suppressive glow and building up enough momentum, but the aliens weren't that easy to defeat. The pescans may be incompetent in many areas, but they weren't complete fools! They knew how to wage war. They only lacked enough perspective due to the low development level of their civilization. All that mattered a lot in normal space, but in a confined place like this, Ves and many humans felt beyond frustrated that they couldn't leverage the great strength of their own mighty society! Ves wished so badly that he had one of his mechs at his side. It was beyond excruciating for a mech designer like him to be caught in a battle without a single friendly mech by his side! Let alone the Everchanger, just a Bright Warrior or even a humble Desolate Soldier would satisfy his need! In fact, even a weak and weaponless industrial mech like a Hymenoptera would do, because he at least knew how to modify it so that he could increase its lethality.