Chapter 1600 Natural Counter Not a single Larkinson remained unaffected by Ves Larkinson's meteoric rise to prominence. Now that he designed an incredibly popular mech and earned an immense amount of money, the Larkinson Family no longer resembled the Larkinson Family of the past. While the changes provoked a lot of discussion among the Larkinsons, the sandman crisis occupied most of their time. Whatever Ghanso and his faction of like-minded Larkinsons thought, defending the Bright Republic came first. Many other fortified star systems came under threat. While the sandmen dispersed their forces along the entire length of the border, their numbers seemed inexhaustible. If not for the first and second line of defense slowing down the sandman offensive, the Bright Republic wouldn't have been able to bolster the defenses of the border system. Along with the plentiful amount of orbital defensive platforms, the gradual reinforcement of starfighters granted the overextended Mech Corps a great amount of relief. Casualties among mech pilots had plummeted! Even though their lives had only been preserved at the cost of the lives of hastily-trained starfighter pilots, the Bright Republic didn't care. The state could draw from an immense pool of manpower to replace the lost starfighter pilots! By simplifying the designs of their starfighters and automating many complicated functions, even an office worker could be turned into a suitable starfighter pilot! Though their training standard was barely better than a kid who casually played an immersive starfighter game, that was enough to resist basic sandman fleets. Yet.. what if the sandman fleets adopted a different configuration? What if the sandman admirals that followed their directive to sweep through human space became more inventive? In one star system defended by the Apocalypse Heralds, a humongous sandman monolith advanced indominably towards a planet populated by billions! With so many lives at stake, the Apocalypse Heralds were just one of many forces assigned to defend this critical border system. Yet the immense firepower unleashed by their numerous medium to heavy artillery mechs caused them to take on the leading role in this battle! "Unleash the apocalypse on the sandmen! Let them know that their extinction is at hand!" The Apocalypse Heralds modified their powerful heavy mechs to better cope against the aliens. All of their laser weapon mounts had been removed and replaced by kinetic or ballistic weaponry. Though it was very cumbersome to modify so many heavy mechs, the Apocalypse Heralds employed sufficient mech technicians to transform all of their mechs in time to defend against the main waves of sandman intruders! With the help of their immense ammunition capacity, their ranged mechs had become the worst nightmares of many of the sandman fleet that intruded in this star system! "We are the bane of the sandmen! We are the doom of every alien!" Ever since a detachment of Apocalypse Heralds arrived at this border system, the sandmen never managed to cross into the inner system. The heavy mechs unleashed such prodigious firepower that not even the biggest sandman mothership could last against weapons powerful enough to annihilate entire asteroids! Unfortunately, this time was different. The latest sandman fleet to barge into this border system adopted a very different configuration. Not only did the fleet combine the strengths of at least nine sandman admirals, they all adopted a different configuration. "The sandmen have adopted a swarm configuration!" "Damnit! There's too many of them! My sensors can't even track how many of them are buzzing around!" An immense swarm of small, shuttle-sized sandman drones advanced relentlessly towards the inner system. The first defenders already tangled against the swarm, but aside from swatting a large number of inconsequential sandman drones, they failed to affect the overall strength of the swarm. Only until the defenders consolidated their forces did their attacks begin to hurt the sandman swarm. Yet their preliminary success did not cheer up the mech and starfighter pilots. Instead, a feeling of creeping doom built up in their hearts as they waited for the inevitable. This was not the first time humanity encountered the swarm configuration. Different from basic sandman fleets, the swarm accelerated much faster than normal. One of the lessons that sandman admirals learned when fighting against human forces was that speed mattered! The faster they moved, the easier it was for them to engulf the mechs, starfighters and carriers that hindered their invasion. Another lesson they learned was that this was no time to conserve their energy! As a race that depended highly on energy, inexperienced sandman admirals tended to be very conservative in their energy expenditure. Even as their sandman motherships fell apart, they were highly unwilling to waste more than fifty percent of their energy reserves. The story was different once they faced how difficult it was to defeat their human opponents on the battlefield. If the sandmen didn't put in their full effort, then they could forget about winning the battle! The sandman swarm the Apocalypse Heralds and their allies faced today held nothing back. Even if the swarm depleted 90 percent of its energy reserves, it could easily recoup its losses by devouring the rich energy sources of the highly-developed planet orbiting the inner system! "Wait for it! Get ready, men! The real fight starts at any moment!" After an agonizing wait, the sandman admirals finally issued their latest command! The entire swarm unleashed a swathe of weak but incredibly numerous laser beams! Thousands of mechs and starfighters had been struck by these lasers! Fortunately, the power behind these laser beams were very weak compared to the massive strikes that could easily take out an entire mech. The sandman drones couldn't fire anything stronger. It was already admirable enough for them to match the power of a light laser rifle. The problem was that their firing rate was very prodigious! Every dozen or so seconds, the drones unleashed another salvo of laser beams, striking thousands of machines yet again! With their machine-like accuracy, only a portion of their laser beams missed! "We're taking too much damage!" "Fire at will! Whittle down the swarm as much as possible! The more drones we knock out, the more mechs and starfighters we'll save!" Facing a sandman fleet in a swarm configuration was one of the worst nightmares of the soldiers and warriors at the frontlines. Their increased mobility not only allowed them to close the distance faster, but also made them very hard to hit with projectile weapons. Even though the drones were so fragile that one or two knocks could take it out, they were so darned agile that even light mechs had to admit defeat! Not only that, but their incredibly loose formation meant that the powerful cannons of the Apocalypse Heralds wasted the bulk of their firepower. Against a larger sandman vessel, their heavy mechs could easily damage ten or twenty drones worth of sandmen! Yet because the sandman admirals dispersed their strength into tiny, disposable drones, each and every round wasted the bulk of their damage potential! Due to all of these reasons, the swarm configuration was actually superior in firepower, mobility and defense! Against a large but cumbersome unit like the Apocalypse Heralds, its effectiveness skyrocketed! Unlike the Stripes of Humanity that gave the civilians hope, the swarm configuration's shower of laser beams impacted the defending forces like a rain of death! The worst-off in this engagement were the starfighters! Small, cheap and fragile, the starfighters lacked the mobility to confuse the sandman's targeting methods and the resilience to withstand too many attacks. Even though the sandman drones only fired very weak lasers, their volume and firing rate was incredibly powerful! Casualties mounted rapidly as the starfighter regiments faced their natural counter! Even though the mechs and starfighters hit back hard, too many lives and machines were being lost! The Starfighter Corps reaped what it sowed. By pursuing a strategy of fielding as much cannon fodder as possible, their pronounced weaknesses exacted an incredibly painful toll in this battle. Hundreds of starfighters succumbed after absorbing five or more hits! In fact, some starfighters even collapsed entirely if the sandman drones just happened to penetrate their poorly-armored cockpits! With the rapid rise in losses, the formation of defenders began to destabilize. The poorly-trained starfighter pilots especially broke down first! They were too green and barely better than a civilian! Against an ordinary sandman fleet where victory was almost assured, they easily remained confident even if a number of unlucky starfighter pilots got shot down. Yet now that a sea of laser beams pelted their fragile starfighters at a very worrisome frequency, their morale quickly dropped to rock bottom! Already, more than fifty starfighter pilots lost their nerves and turned around to flee the battlesite, leaving their comrades in the dust! Even though they couldn't flee very far due to their limited reserves and lack of FTL capability, humans who broke down a battle didn't pay attention to logic anymore. They only obeyed their primal instinct to flee! With the sudden and chaotic departure of so many starfighters, the formations they left began to destabilize even further! "This is bad! We have to bolster the starfighter regiments before their pilots crack!" Just as an entire wing of starfighters showed signs of succumbing to the fear of death by laser, an astounding heavy mech with glowing wings positioned right in front of them! Its massive polarized tower shield soundly resisted the weak lasers targeting the craft piloted by the wing commander! "Get your act together!" Jannzi Larkinson shouted as her scarred Shield of Samar continually resisted laser beam after laser beam. "There's nowhere you can run once the swarm sweeps over this entire star system! Our carriers won't evacuate any cowards who abandoned their comrades when they most needed your help! Hold the line and keep firing your weapons!" Her intervention managed to sober up the wing commander, who quickly rallied his men. Though the wing still appeared a little shaky, Jannzi could not afford to coddle them any further. Her Shield of Samar slowly flew elsewhere as she spotted another faltering starfighter wing that already lost half their numbers! Unfortunately, she was just a single mech pilot. Even if she was a promising expert candidate, in a large-scale battle against the swarm configuration, her ability to affect the outcome of the battle was too small! "Come on! We have to hold! Billions of innocent Brighters will die if we don't hold!" While the casualties among the starfighters reached the hundreds, the swarm configuration did not fare that much better. The number of drones visibly dropped with each passing second. Their rain of lasers grew lighter, thereby reducing the pressure on the defenders. Yet because so many starfighters had fallen and more were getting struck every moment, the intensity of the battle was still incredibly high! As long as the starfighter regiments held formation, the sandman swarm would inevitably run out of drones. "We have to endure! Don't give up too early! We've almost reached the light at the end of the tunnel!" Unfortunately, the shaky starfighter pilots, most of whom used to be laborers, shuttle pilots, customer service representatives and the like, had already reached the brink of their brittle courage. Just as the surviving starfighter units reached their tipping point, the Desolate Soldiers that used to fight in the center of the formation had finally dispersed to cover the bulk of the starfighters! A surge of duty and obligation filled every shaky starfighter pilot's heart. The glow affecting their moods banished some of the terror that threatened to overwhelm their minds. "Do your duty, pilots! The battle is not yet done!" Though the Desolate Soldiers couldn't prevent every starfighter pilot from breaking down, their intervention nonetheless prevented a complete route, at least for the moment! With the Desolate Soldiers propping up the shaky starfighter units, the defenders persisted long enough to strike a number of sandman admirals, thereby severely weakening the already-diminished sandman swarm. The battle had turned for the better! "We've won!" It was a costly victory. At the end of the day, the starfighter regiments lost over a thousand spacecraft. The Bright Republic hadn't lost so many machines and pilots in the Sand War until this battle! If not for the crucial intervention of the Desolate Soldiers deployed by the local Planetary Guard, the battle could have taken a much more awful turn!