Chapter 2260 - Ruination Witch The Marrakath System slowly succ.u.mbed to the Hexers! With the introduction of the amazing Blessed Squire model, the Wrathful Doves Mech Army Group embraced the new addition with remarkable speed. Initially, DIVA pushed the Blessed Squire onto the Wrathful Doves through backroom deals and secret agreements with the upper ranks. Later on, the positive reactions of the rank-and-file mech pilots who drew strength from the new model ensured that no one would be able to reverse the tide. No one within the Wrathful Doves wanted to deprive their fighting boys and women the incredible utility offered by this odd new supportive knight mech. Even if its design was not as optimized as regular Hex Army models, the Blessed Squire somehow possessed its own slightly foreign charm. Even when word started to spread that a boy of all people played an integral role in its design, the Wrathful Doves simply accepted the news without any controversy. This was because anyone who experienced the Blessed Squire’s simply couldn’t imagine getting rid of it! Many Hexers believed that the mech was literally blessed by the Superior Mother. With such a mythical Supreme revealing her presence through a mech model of all choices, how could the Wrathful Doves reject this sacred mech? No amount of external pressure would convince them to give up a mech that had helped them achieve victory after victory! Weeks after the Blessed Squire energized the ground forces of the Hex Army, the territories of Marrakath III quickly fell to their offensives in quick succession. Like falling domino stones, the rapid conquests rapidly caused the defenders to lose an enormous amount of supplies and war materiel. In too many cases, the Hexers advanced so rapidly that the Fridaymen were only just beginning to evacuate their exposed fortifications! The Fortune Legion and more specifically the Opal Trident Mech Army Group suffered calamity after calamity. The constant defeats and retreating actions depressed the morale of every Fridayman mech pilot. The dark cloud looming over them not only caused the Opal Tridents to lose their edge, but also made them more susceptible to the Blessed Squire’s glow! Only a fourth of the available land surface of Marrakath III remained in Fridayman hands. Ordinarily, any invasion would slow down at this point. If the Opal Tridents kept pulling off orderly retreats, then they would have been able to concentrate their remaining strengths across a much tighter defense line. This was not the case this time! Too many times, the Fridayman failed to retreat in order. They either sacrificed too many valuable supplies or failed to make it back to friendly lines. Without enough mechs, supplies and other equipment, the Fortune Legion simply couldn’t resist the Hex Army on even ground! With the rear of the Fridayman-occupied territory in disorder, the Hexers pushed themselves to the limit. They had to advance as fast as possible! The sooner Marrakath III fell, the sooner they breached the gates to the interior of Carnegie Group space! The momentum of the Wrathful Doves couldn’t be stopped at this point. High command decided that the cost of slowing down the enflamed Hexers was too much for them to bear, and began to issue orders to evacuate from the fortress planet! "Marrakath III will fall!" "We’ve given up on this planet!" "Those damn Hexers!" The Fortune Legion elements attempted to retreat as orderly as possible. Crucial production equipment and other heavy machines were shipped away first. After that, various mechs and high-value supplies were taken away next. The war-stricken orbit of Marrakath III became even more hazardous due to the non-stop struggle for orbital supremacy. The battle in orbit and in space unfolded more evenly as the spaceborn elements of the Hex Army lacked the support of the Blessed Squire. Yet even that started to change as the Wrathful Doves started experimenting on putting Blessed Squire in space! From attaching external flight system harnesses to its frame to simply placing it onto an armored flight platform, the Hexers tried many ways to deploy this remarkable mech in space. Some of these inelegant solutions actually worked! While it was very wasteful to employ Blessed Squires in this fashion, the amplification effect provided by their glows made the calculus worthwhile to the Wrathful Doves. The performance of every spaceborn mech increased remarkably! Under these circ.u.mstances, the Fridaymen became more desperate than ever to evacuate their ground troops and as much equipment as possible. Near a large, military spaceport, an entire city had almost become flattened and cratered due to the sheer amount of fighting that unfolded recently. Much of the structures had been built with large amounts of bulk exotics, making them as thick and tough as starship hull plating. Some key structures even boasted better protection than capital sh.i.p.s! Now, many of these structures had either collapsed or exhibited a lot of holes. Just a day of fighting had turned a key defensive bulwark into a broken mess. Mechs from both sides trampled over fallen debris, broken mech parts and other junk. The air constantly cracked and thundered with exchanges of energy beams, projectiles and missiles. Entire mech regiments advanced and retreated along a slowly-receding line. The Fortune Legion put up a stiff but increasingly hopeless resistance as the hotblooded Hexers relentlessly assaulted their lines without stop! Flying very low over the ruined streets was one of the few morale boosters left among the Fridaymen that had gained more prominence during the current campaign. The Charlemagne and the Scara had become famed in a matter of weeks! After its foreign expert slayed seven Hexer expert pilots in total, the Fridaymen no longer turned up their noses in front of Venerable Ghanso Larkinson. His heroism and valiant performance paved the way for the introduction of other foreign expert pilots. The Coalition Reserve Corps would have encountered a lot more resistance if Ghanso and his Charlemagne hadn’t killed so many enemy expert pilots. Unfortunately, the blood on his hands enraged the Hexers! After losing a string of valued expert pilots to the Charlemagne and his fifty quasi-expert mechs, the Wrathful Doves finally put down their arrogance and treated Unit L as a serious opponent. The Hex Army analyzed Venerable Ghanso and his assets and tried to figure out a way to counter him. With all of the protection that the Opal Tridents bestowed on him, it wasn’t easy to take out the Charlemagne. However, the Fortune Legion couldn’t protect all of the Scara! Above a ruined supply depot, the Charlemagne hastily flew back while firing a resonance-empowered positron beam! The quasi-expert mechs that accompanied the expert rifleman mech fired their rifles as well. Unlike before, their volley of beams looked ragged and not as nearly overwhelming as before. The Scara incurred many losses! With the Hexers focusing their fire on the cheaper and less well-protected rifleman mechs, Unit L gradually lost more and more of its teeth. By now, only twenty-three intact quasi-expert mechs accompanied Charlemagne in battle! Their beams, though still fairly potent, barely even scratched the armor of Venerable Ghanso’s current opponent! "Marrakath III shall fall, and so shall the Crestfallen Stars! The Carnegie Group will be the first to fall to ruin, and the rest of the Friday Coalition shall follow next!" Ghanso did not even bother to reply to his current adversary’s taunts. He was too busy with trying to keep the remainder of his Scara alive! The loss of a couple of dozen quasi-expert mechs was not regrettable. They were just mechs that could be produced at any time, though they weren’t cheap by any means. What truly pained Unit L and Master Huron was the loss of their ’mech pilots’! Not even a powerful Master was able to replace the dimwitted clones so easily. Something about them made it very difficult to cultivate them in greater numbers. The losses suffered by Unit L might take quite some time to replenish! Venerable Ghanso instinctively felt acute danger. He immediately responded by commanding his Charlemagne to dodge to the side as fast as possible no matter how disgraceful it seemed! His urgency also passed on through the neural network, causing the surviving Scara to split up as fast as possible. 𝐟𝚛𝕖𝚎𝕨𝗲𝐛𝚗𝐨𝐯𝐞𝕝.𝐜𝗼𝗺 "Too late!" A glowing shell rapidly reached the position that the Charlemagne occupied just half a second ago and exploded, unleashing a fiery blast that was large enough to engulf several quasi-expert mechs that hadn’t moved away fast enough! Venerable Ghanso felt a spike of pain and strange emotions. Three of the nodes within the neural network had disappeared, which meant that a single explosive shell had taken out three of his Scara at once! "Damnit, you witch!" He hastily reorganized his scattered Scara and began to unleash another empowered volley against his current attacker. Twenty-one positron beams empowered by rage struck one of the largest mechs on the battlefield. Though the concentrated attacks managed to pierce the resonance shield, the attacks had lost so much potency that they only managed to burn away some coating. The upper-most armor layer suffered negligible damage! Surrounding by numerous mech companies, a Doom Crawler that was half as taller and much more wider than the Charlemagne steadily advanced with the help of its six, spider-like legs. The armored limbs were thick and plated with broad slabs of armor. When linked together, they could even form an impromptu shield that could withstand nearly every form of attack! This huge expert mech was the infamous Death Blossom, an extremely powerful doom crawler that outputted a mindblowing amount of damage at various distances. It was one of the most renowned expert mechs of the Wrathful Doves! Piloted by Ginevra Costa, a high-tier expert pilot, the appearance of this infamous doom crawler spelled the end of the Fortune Legion’s stand in this city. This was because the so-called Ruination Witch was one of the most powerful artillery specialists in the Hex Army! Six different weapon mounts fired in an alternating pattern at various targets on the battlefield. Even as the Death Blossom put the Charlemagne under pressure, entire Fridayman mech companies and defensive fortifications succ.u.mbed under its prodigious firepower! Each and every attack unleashed by the huge doom crawler was powered by as much resonance as the Charlemagne’s fully-charged attacks. Whereas Ghanso had to exert himself in order to magnify his expert mech’s attacks, the Ruination Witch could easily empower all six weapons of her Death Blossom in quick succession! A ruinous positron beam bore straight through a thick and powerful bunker, penetrating through meters of armor plating and inflicting untold damage from within. Another weapon mount fired a split laser beam that lanced in over a hundred different directions, intercepting missiles, blasting through aerial mechs, taking out sensor arrays and more. A thick and heavy gauss cannon fired a powerful projectile that slammed straight through the shield of a heavy knight mech. Immediately afterwards, the round pierced straight through the mech itself before punching through eight more mechs further backwards until it finally slammed into an evacuated headquarters, causing the entire structure to be blasted into pieces! As the Charlemagne and the Scara continued to give ground, the Death Blossom’s gravitic cannon fired a strange orb that rapidly landed in the midst of some of the quasi-expert mechs. Soon, the orb expanded, causing four more rifleman mechs to be caught in a powerful localized gravity well! "No! Not again!" The plasma cannon mount of the Death Blossom ruthlessly fired, causing all of the trapped mechs to melt into pieces due to the incredible energy and heat impacting their frames! Throughout this entire rampage, the largest weapon mount of all thundered once again. The howitzer placed on top of the expert doom crawler had fired an empowered explosive shell that arced over everyone’s heads. Despite the various mechs and turrets that attempted to intercept the incredibly powerful shell, the glow surrounding the shell easily resisted the hasty attacks! Soon enough, the shell landed within the perimeter of the military spaceport many kilometers away. BOOM! A huge explosion engulfed several transports, hundreds of Fridaymen, and a large amount of critical equipment and strategic supplies! An exultant war cry erupted from the ranks of the Hexers! "Women shall reign supreme!"