Red humanity’s final defensive band was under attack! The Red Tide Offensive had entered the next phase. News of assaults on hundreds of star systems spread across the fifth defensive band flooded the galactic net. One live feed after another depicted violent skirmishes and direct assaults against fortified strongholds. While the battles unfolding in the Upper Zones progressed in a methodical fashion similar to a chess game, the battles that erupted in the Middle and Lower Zones were much more intensive! The Lower Zones collapsed the fastest. The native aliens had spent the last month on accumulating a greater quantity of mass-produced phasefighters and warships from the lesser races. What they lacked in coordination, efficiency and fighting spirit, they more than made up with quantity alone! No matter how ramshackle their warships may be or how poorly made their phasefighters turned out, the third-class defenders of the Lower Zones were most prone to getting overwhelmed by numbers. There was no need for the native aliens to send too many phase lords to overrun the defenses. They merely had to disregard the enormous amount of losses suffered by their side and continue to ram assault fleet after assault fleet down the throats of the third-raters! The Middle Zones played host to the most intense battles. Every important strategic location was protected by millions of mechs and varying amounts of ’auxiliary warships’. Their orbital defense networks were also a lot more built up and difficult to take down. The native aliens deployed a mixture of assault fleets hailing from both the major and lesser alien races. Their coordination was still as superficial as ever. While they had decided to send out larger quantities of strike craft and warships than usual, the second-class defenders should still be able to hold on due to their formidable defensive works. It turned out that Human High Command had always treated the first to fourth defensive band as disposable. Their purpose from the beginning was never to stop the alien advance entirely. They were primarily designed to slow down and bleed the alien invaders as best possible. It would have been great if the first four defensive bands managed to stop the aliens entirely, but the brightest human military strategists and planners never held their hopes up. Not that they shared their opinions with the rank and file who died on the battlefronts. The fifth defensive band was different. The number of soldiers stationed over there were at least twice as great on average. The buildup of infrastructure and defensive fortifications was at least three times greater! Despite these advanced preparations, the native aliens answered with greater numbers, but not as much as they could have sent. Instead, the aliens in charge of taking over the Middle Zones made a different choice than the leaders of the Lower Zones. The alien bigshots made the atypical choice to rely more on quality rather than quantity! It was public knowledge that all of the Middle Zones had sent off the vast majority of their ace pilots to the Upper Zones. This created a critical gap in the defensive strategies previously employed by the humans stationed in these vulnerable territories. The final battles over the control of the fourth defensive band conclusively verified that the humans had not engaged in any subterfuge. They truly ’abandoned’ the Middle Zones and chose to transfer their strongest champions to the Upper Zones. This made the phase lords assigned to the Middle Zones ecstatic! Not only did more of them volunteer to take over these underprotected territories in the name of their alien dominions, they also brought in their personal forces, which were considerably more elite and well-equipped than the usual forces assigned to attack the Middle Zones. The increased numbers of elite phasefighters and capital warships assaulting the strongholds of the Middle Zones clearly took a huge toll on the latter. Even if the defenders of the fifth defensive band were able to withstand the onslaught for the most part, the destruction of so many mechs and defensive fortifications could not be made up in a short amount of time! Wave after wave of alien attacks continued to take place over the span of days and quickly started to wear down the strategic depth of the defending forces. In a few cases, the greater phase lords fighting in the Middle Zones boldly risked substantial injuries to their massive true bodies and advanced close enough to wreck the most powerful and well-equipped space fortresses with their physical and spatial might! The lack of ace mechs that were capable of holding them back meant that the defenders could do almost nothing against them. Their only solution was to allocate lots of firepower to exhaust their ridiculously strong spatial barriers. The efficiency of this method was so low that the greater phase lords were able to laugh with impunity as they were able to dismantle important nodes of an orbital defense network while absorbing blows that were powerful enough to obliterate an entire assault fleet! This was the power of extraordinary superdimensional beings! Much of what they were capable of went beyond the scope of conventional science. The phasewater flowing inside their veins fundamentally transformed their true bodies into organic miracles that were still difficult for humans to decipher. Whatever the case, the gap between superdimensional and non-superdimensional combatants was so big that the latter needed a lot of advantages just to overcome their enormous handicap! As the final defensive strongholds of the Middle Zones began to falter in time due to the relentless efforts of highly motivated phase lords, more and more people placed their hopes in the Upper Zones. Every soldier involved in the war effort had learned that Human High Command had placed all of their hopes on the Upper Zones. So long as the defenders of this zone were able to not only hold back the invading alien forces, but also beat them back while culling much of their numbers, red humanity would finally be able to launch a serious counterattack! Saint Davia Stark was able to witness through her own eyes what the native aliens relied upon to topple the most difficult and well-defended human strongholds. They were relying on both quantity and quality. The most obvious manifestation of this was the abundance of full-blown warfleets comprised of many warships. None of them appeared to be in outdated configurations that originated well before the Red War. While the native alien races weren’t extravagant enough to build entire armadas of modern warships that incorporated a lot of stolen human technologies, they were still able to spend a lot of resources on refurbishing their best warships. The orvens, nunsers, puelmers, arche, zzamayels, juregs and so on had taken advantage of their vast industrial capacities and extensively refit and modernized a lot of hulls to the standards of the Hyper Generation. Their smaller warships had eschewed their anti-ship weapons entirely. Their hulls were entirely covered by as many point defenses and anti-strike craft gun batteries as the aliens could get away with. The vast majority of them consisted of simple transphasic energy weapon cannons of a caliber that was small enough to support constant rapid fire barrages. The alien frigate, destroyer and light cruiser equivalents also mounted sizable amounts of small missile launchers. Each of them were able to fire large volleys of short-ranged transphasic missiles that were small and humble enough to home in on hostile melee mechs at close range, but explode with enough power to wreck multiple mechs within a modest radius! The smaller hulls also possessed enhanced mobility, enabling them to provide fire support to nearby strike craft and allowing them to outflank or outmaneuver their human foes. While the sub-capital warships weren’t particularly tough enough to last long when confronted by accurate and concentrated firepower, the native aliens had constructed or modernized enough of them that the human defenders had to waste a lot of time to whittle down their numbers! The capital ships were more concerning. They mainly boasted a mix of tertiary gun batteries and primary gun batteries. Most of the alien races had evidently abandoned the use of secondary gun battery batteries for their largest and most expensive warships. This was because the humans did not make heavy use of warships, particularly sub-capital ones that secondary armaments were most suited to attack. The tertiary gun batteries were essential to making the lives of swarming melee mechs miserable. The primary gun batteries solely consisted of slow but immensely powerful siege cannons that were able to exhaust the defenses of static fortifications in quick order. With the new and optimized naval configurations, the modernized warships assigned to punch through the Upper Zones were clearly well-prepared to assault the strongest and most formidable human defenders in the Red Ocean. Alongside them were the elite phasefighters. While their overall strength and sophistication still fell short of first-class multipurpose mechs, the native aliens had built up enough carriers to deploy millions or in some cases tens of millions of them in every contested star system! Not only were these phasefighters more difficult to defeat due to their ubiquitous azure shield generators, they were also substantially better piloted than Saint Stark was accustomed to in the Middle Zones. "The aliens assigned to pilot these phasefighters are always professional soldiers that understand the value of discipline and coordination." Saint Alo Chevor explained to Stark. "The races that trained them also held them back long enough to train them properly while incorporating the lessons learned over the course of the Red War. The pilots have all learned many tactics on how to deal with mechs." Their tech was also better and more uniform. A single phasefighter was not strong enough to wear down the defenses of a first-class multipurpose mech by itself. What if a dozen phasefighters attacked the same mech? As long as the disparity in numbers grew great enough, even the most elite and storied mech forces of the first-raters would succumb! "How many first-class multipurpose mechs and other first-class mechs do we have at our disposal in this star system?" Saint Stark asked. "That information is classified." Jerivern Chevor answered. "In truth, we am not fully informed of the numbers ourselves. We are still trying to scrape as many reinforcements as we can. Officially, the Kayana System hosts at least 8 full Rubarthan mech corps, each of which can field around 50,000 first-class multipurpose mechs. We also host at least one full Rubarthan Carmine mech corps. The upgraded Yellow Jackets that have arrived in recent days and weeks are all piloted by wounded veterans and retirees, so they can be relied upon even if their numbers are not particularly great." "What about other mechs?" "There are at least 6 irregular mech corps comprised of first-class mechs of multiple different archetypes. Their pilots mostly come from the private sector or second-rate states, so do not expect them to perform up to our best standard." Jeri warned. "That said, every soldier can be of use. The irregular mech corps are best suited for defense and scouting." 𝗳𝚛𝚎𝚎𝘄𝕖𝕓𝕟𝕠𝚟𝚎𝕝.𝗰𝕠𝐦 "The numbers are not high enough to inspire confidence in our ability to hold this star system." Stark frowned. "Especially considering that we are short on warships." "There are still more forces arriving with each passing day. We will have to remain passive and rely extensively on our orbital defenses to hold our ground, but we are relying on other measures to repel the invading aliens." Enjoy new tales from freewebnovel "You mean that strange black space fortress that somehow teleported in orbit of Kayana VIII-E?" Saint Alo nodded. "One of our primary responsibilities for the upcoming battle is to defend the Obsidian Orb. The priority of this directive exceeds all of our other orders because it is almost irreplaceable. It is one of the limited number of superweapons that our Rubarthan Pact has imported from the old galaxy." The Obsidian Orb was not a normal space fortress. It was designed and built by the Plasma Shaper herself, and it was a masterwork-level superweapon!