The city had become devastated. This was the result of having a combat carrier crash into it from above! Large impact craters and toppled office buildings had made the landscape unrecognizable. Dust particles and strange gasses filled the air and obscured everyone's vision. Deep rents had been dug into the ground as the hardiest pieces of metal somehow remained intact enough to be recognizable. No bodies had been left intact. The supremely powerful collisions had pulverized all of their bodies to the point where not even their organic cells had been left intact! Fires burned. Structures in the periphery that had managed to survive the initial crash event finally couldn't take it any longer and crumbled apart. Hell had arrived in the city! The downtown areas were completely wiped off the map. It took an unknown amount of time before movement stirred the landscape. Several pieces of rock and metal materials rippled until they were cast aside. A battered but somewhat intact mech had managed to push itself out of the pile of wreckage that had piled on top of its large and heavy frame. The qualities of an expert mech helped the Iron Hedgehog a lot during the destructive crash. Even though it hadn't been fast enough to flee the impact site, its resonance shield along with its resilient exterior enabled it to survive the worst! As Venerable Irene Mox groggily tried to push back the headache in her mind and regain her situational awareness, she quickly called up the status of her expert mech in order to inspect the damage. The Iron Hedgehog was in the worst state it had ever been since she first received it from the Quillim Mech Army! She called up a projection that displayed a wireframe diagram of her expert mech. Many parts had turned from green into yellow. A number of exterior components had even turned red! "3 gauss cannons and 4 howitzers were destroyed. Frontal armor has received heavy damage and cannot offer substantial protection. Mobility is reduced by at least 30 percent. Sensor systems are degraded." These deficiencies were the most obvious deficiencies of her expert heavy artillery mech, but the machine suffered from so many other ailments. A standard mech exposed to the same conditions would have been flattened or torn apart a long time ago! Even weaker and lighter expert mechs might not be able to withstand the destructive power unleashed by the violent impacts. Fortunately, the expert heavy artillery mech that was designed to take a beating by enemy ranged mechs possessed enough defenses to safeguard its most critical parts and systems. The power reactor worked fine and the mech engine had only suffered light damage. The Iron Hedgehog was most definitely not in a healthy condition. Irene had developed a deep familiarity with her machine and could readily tell that it was deteriorating by the minute. While the expert mech was designed and built to high standards, that only enabled it to slow down the inevitable breakdown of parts that had suffered badly not too long ago. The Iron Hedgehog's automated damage control systems could only do so much to keep its powerful frame together. Once Venerable Irene Mox understood how badly her expert mech had suffered, she immediately shut down numerous systems in order to reduce the strain on her machine and preserve its integrity as much as possible. She then tried to connect to her comrades. The communication systems of her Iron Hedgehog had received a bit of damage as well. Her expert mech had lost connection to her mech battalion's command net, so she was unsure whether the others had made it through. Her Iron Hedgehog slowly navigated through the messy and uneven landscape while trying to hail anyone who could still pick up her signals. "Mox here. Anyone alive?" "Please respond to my hails." Her expert mech only picked up static and nonsensical signals. The post-apocalyptic landscape gave Irene the illusion that she had been the only Quillim to survive this calamity. Despair overtook her mind for a moment before her strong willpower surged and forced her to maintain hope! "I am not alone! There are bound to be survivors!" Her expert mech steadily crawled over to the entrances to the underground fortifications. All of them had collapsed. Not only that, but the entire ground had sunk down. The crashing combat carrier had done more than wipe out every structure on the surface. The debris from the starship had also damaged the tunnels and halls underneath the ground! The closer they were to the surface, the less likely they remained intact! As the Iron Hedgehog continued to move around in a desperate attempt to reconnect with any surviving units, Venerable Mox continued in her effort to cling to hope. It was a pity that her strong will and desire could not alter reality to this extent. The Iron Hedgehog began to gather an increasing amount of evidence that any mech or individual that had taken shelter underneath the ground had suffered just as badly if not more than those that had remained on the surface! It wasn't just the Quillim troops that had fallen victim to this extinction attack. Many Bontue civilians who originally lived and worked in this city had perished as well! There were so many of them who hadn't been able to evacuate from the city after the invasion had begun. The underground shelters they took refuge in had collapsed as well. Only the ones that were buried deeper underground or were located far enough away from the center of the city had made it through. As Venerable Irene Mox vainly tried to hail her unit again and again, her voice turned feebler and feebler. She eventually instructed her expert mech to hail friendly units within communications range on repeat and fell silent. Her expert mech could hear nothing from the city except for the desolate winds, the scattered fires and the regular building collapses. Other than that, the damaged city had turned into a lifeless and unwelcoming ruin. Though Irene Mox was an expert pilot who could endure a lot of shocks, what happened to her and her comrades exceeded her tolerance! She was struggling to comprehend what happened, so much so that she wasn't spending any of her attention on what she should do next! Ves, who quietly witnessed everything that Venerable Mox experienced, grew distressed at what had befallen the future hero. He had no idea why the combat carriers descending from orbit had lost control and crashed. It became clear that the Bontues had somehow messed up the attempt of the Quillims to evacuate their assets from the surface of Korinna V. If this was the case, then this was just the beginning! "There is a lot of bad blood between the Bontues and the Quillims." Even though the Terrace War was 'just' a proxy conflict between the Terrans and the Rubarthans, it had become a vendetta to the soldiers doing the actual fighting! Crashing the combat carriers that were meant to pick up the Quillim forces deployed on the planet was a clear escalation in hostilities! "The Bontues are up to something." The move they pulled off was extremely costly. Not only did they expose the fact that they had managed to infiltrate and sabotage so many Quillim starships, the Bontues also allowed the combat carriers to crash onto their own population centers, thereby killing many millions of their own citizens! The infrastructure and population of Korinna V had evidently been sacrificed to fulfill a greater purpose, and Ves did not think the Bontues had anything trivial in mind. He soon gained another clue as the Iron Hedgehog's damaged but intact sensors finally managed to detect activity at the edge of their range. The alarms prompted Venerable Irene Mox to pull herself out of her daze and ignite her hope. Had her expert mech manage to regain contact with surviving Quillim units!? It wasn't until her expert mech informed her that the incoming mechs not only lacked the familiar IFFs, but also did not match the signatures of known Quillim mechs. Instead, the emission profiles and silhouettes of the mechs approaching from afar resembled the Bontue mechs that she and her comrades had driven out of the city a few days prior. The defenders had returned to confirm the elimination of the invaders and finish off any stragglers that had been lucky enough to survive the calamity! Since the Iron Hedgehog actively sought out to communicate with those distant mechs, it had stupidly revealed itself to the approaching Bontue forces! Just the thought of her enemies caused her anger to resurface. She could think about regaining contact with her comrades later. She first needed to wipe out the Bontue vultures that sought to finish the job! The expert pilot summoned up her professionalism and focused completely on her current priorities. She may have lost contact with the officers of her mech battalion, but she was still capable of taking the initiative if necessary. A quick survey of the surrounding terrain showed that the area had become messy and uneven and that it was difficult to obtain a clear line of sight of any opposing mechs. Her damaged expert mech moved to higher ground. At the same time, the 4 intact howitzers began to adjust their firing angles until they became fairly steep. Once Venerable Irene Mox became certain about her estimates, she pulled the trigger and caused the howitzers to launch their shells! They flew high in the messy and dust-filled air and quickly arced down until they landed and engulfed a small area with a spread of resonance-empowered explosions! Boom! Boom! Boom! Irene knew that this was not the time to hold back. The intact howitzers continued to fire as fast as her expert mech could load the new explosive shells. This continued onwards for several more salvos until she was sure that her expert mech's area attacks had destroyed much of the enemy units that had approached from a distance. She probably didn't manage to eliminate every Bontue mech, though. The expert pilot remained alert even as her Iron Hedgehog managed to reach a better vantage point. Several minutes passed in silence until her expert mech picked up movement behind a few mounds of debris! The howitzers of her expert mech fired a salvo of shells at minimum power. They launched almost straight into the air until they dropped down and engulfed the streets behind the debris mounds with explosions. Just before these shells struck the ground, a handful of swift and slender mechs zipped out of cover and rapidly advanced towards the Iron Hedgehog! "Light mechs!" These light skirmishers might not look impressive, but they could pose a substantial threat against a ranged mech. Irene had little reason to fear them if her Iron Hedgehog was still in its prime. However, her expert mech was hardly in a position to defend against an onslaught of melee mech. Its resonance shield was still down and many sections of armor had already been destroyed. Its internals had become exposed and vulnerable to attacks! Any mech could inflict heavy damage to the Iron Hedgehog. Even light skirmishers could take down the expert heavy artillery mech as it was never designed to operate in isolation! Fortunately, Venerable Irene Mox had been ready to defend against targets who managed to get closer. The intact gauss cannons of her expert mech had already been aiming in the right direction. As soon as the fast and agile light skirmishers approached the Iron Hedgehog while performing evasive maneuvers, Irene rapidly took in all of the data and quickly adjusted the aim of her gauss cannons. There was no time for her to second-guess her judgment or fine-tune her calculations. She even skipped over many steps and relied heavily on intuition to make up for what was missing! 𝐟𝐫𝕖𝗲𝘄𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝕧𝐞𝚕.𝕔𝕠𝐦 Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack! Five Bontue light skirmishers collapsed at once as each of them had been nailed by resonance-empowered gauss rounds at the same time! Their evasive maneuvers had not availed them at all as the Iron Hedgehog managed to strike them square in their torsos! No more mechs showed up for the time being.