Chapter 3263: Elusive Zephyr Now that the Ferril punitive fleet put their expert mechs into play, the expeditionary fleet had sent out its response! Just as intended, Patriarch Reginald's Bolvos Rage rapidly intercepted the wolf that was feasting on the sheep. Now that the expert hybrid mech locked the hardy Gatecrasher into a duel, neither of the two high-tier expert mechs could assist any of their comrades or take care of their other comrades. Ves did not dare to hope that Patriarch Reginald could achieve a quick and decisive victory against Venerable Orthox. The latter piloted an expert space knight. Even if it leaned a bit more towards offense than defense, it did not change the fact that durability was its strongest property. It would take a long time for the Gatecrasher to fall into a disadvantage! Thus, the next-best outcome of this battle would be for both expert mechs to hammer at each other's defenses for a long amount of time. No matter who won or lost, as long as Patriarch Reginald managed to stall Venerable Orthox for at least fifteen minutes, the expeditionary fleet could do much to increase its advantage! "Don't do anything stupid, Reggie." Ves whispered as he sat on his observer's seat while lazily swinging his hammer in random directions. "I know you're desperate to break through, but please don't perform any insane stunts!" Other expert mechs had found their match as well. The Dark Zephyr had bypassed most of the battle lines and began to close in on the enemy fleet as fast as possible. However, the stretch of space it was attempting to bridge was completely empty and devoid of any mechs, ships or even pieces of debris. The environment offered absolutely no form of cover for the expert light skirmisher to block incoming fire. "Don't fire at the light skirmisher. It's a projection or something." A Slug Ranger analyst told the mech pilots. "The enemy expert mech has to be in the vicinity in order to project this image without any obvious traces. We need to sniff out the stealthed machine's coordinates." "Mech Crackers, saturate the wider area around the apparent mech with shards! Make sure to fill up a zone of at least 5 kilometers at all times!" The elite Steel Rain mech regiment may have received a lot of battering in the ongoing artillery duel, but most of the mechs that got knocked out consisted of Land Crackers and Ship Crackers. Their ultra-heavy and heavy gauss cannons posed enormous threats to the ships of the expeditionary fleet and had been the focus of the Eye of Ylvaine and other human ranged units from the start. As a result, there were too few Land Crackers left and the amount of active Ship Crackers had also diminished. Of course, the Eye of Ylvaine also lost a substantial amount of Transcendent Punishers in the process. It was painful for the Larkinson Clan to lose them before the Eye of Ylvaine employed its new battle network, but the time wasn't right for the youngest mech legion to employ its trump card. This left plenty of Mech Cracker mechs unscathed. While the 'lightest' artillery mech model of the Steel Rain did not boast an impressive caliber, it carried eight medium gauss cannons that were able to pump out a rain of projectiles. Every mech Cracker was capable of showering an area of a hundred meters and greater with deadly shards that could easily punch through a shuttle despite their smaller sizes! As the obvious target of this lone assault, the Gauss Baron couldn't sit still either. It also joined in on the party. The expert heavy artillery mech ceased its job of suppressing the Amaranto and exerting pressure on the other human expert mechs in order to address the immediate threat. "I'm not going to let you get close!" Venerable Leiva boomed as she began to switch the firing mode of her expert mech. Soon afterwards, all eight gauss cannons fired a salvo that propelled a different kind of round. Just like the projectiles of the Ship Crackers, the Gauss Baron's rounds splintered and fractured after reaching a predetermined distance. Different from the output of the regular heavy artillery mechs, the shards originating from the Gauss Baron possessed a lot more lethality. Venerable Leiva did not try to conserve her energy and expended a copious amount of effort to strengthen the damage potential of her cannons. With so many shards flooding the space around the fake Dark Zephyr, it was only a matter of time before the real mech got exposed. In actuality, a couple of shards did indeed hit the Dark Zephyr, but the odd thing was that the dwarven analysts failed to understand the distorted perception that frustrated their attempts to take the incoming expert mech down. Still, there were plenty of mech designers and other engineers that were researching the properties of the enemy light skirmisher. A dwarven Master Mech Designer who was providing support by remote finally deciphered the effect they were trying to overcome. "The human expert mech is employing the properties of Perfidious Steel. It's making this evasion-oriented light skirmisher far more difficult to target. What you're seeing is the actual mech but its actual position is shifted from our perspective due to a distortion of our perspective. The most troubling variable we need to deal with is that the expert pilot can vary the degree and direction of the distortion. The distance between the actual expert mech and its apparent coordinates can vary on the fly! The greater the range, the greater the maximum distortion!" All of this technical talk mostly flew over the heads of the dwarven mech pilots. However, they received enough instructions to know what they had to do to pressure the Dark Zephyr. The Mech Crackers concentrated on filling up a zone around the Dark Zephyr with deadly shards. They did not focus on penetration, knowing that the shards they propelled were simply too weak to penetrate the armor of an expert mech, even if it came in the lightest and slimmest package. Indeed, whenever the splintered shards fired by hundreds of Mech Crackers hit the surface of the Dark Zephyr, Venerable Tusa did not even deign to channel a resonance shield. He put his complete trust in the Unending alloy armor plating that covered his expert mech. The problem was that as the Dark Zephyr came closer, the degree of distortion grew less exaggerated. It became easier and easier for the Mech Crackers to achieve more frequent strikes. It was like tracking an invisible soldier in the rain. The soldier might remain out of view but the gap in the rain clearly exposed his position! Though the mechanics were slightly different in this case, the dwarves employed a lot of AIs and processing power to track, calculate and predict the Dark Zephyr's movements. The more data the Slug Rangers gathered, the more precise they were able to establish the Dark Zephyr's current position and where the mech was likely to be found a few seconds later. The Slug Rangers filtered and condensed all of this raw data and supplied the necessary details to the Gauss Baron. Venerable Leiva Hinder was an experienced expert pilot. Though she did not excel in precision or prediction, as a ranged mech specialist she was not a dummy in this aspect. She already gained a decent understanding of the Dark Zephyr and its expert pilot. Both of them were challenging to hit even if she received the most precise targeting data. 𝒇𝒓𝙚𝒆𝔀𝓮𝓫𝒏𝓸𝙫𝓮𝓵.𝓬𝙤𝙢 "So what?" The female dwarven expert pilot grinned. "I've got eight cannons to work with and my cluster rounds will tear your thin mech to shreds!" This was a huge advantage! Not only was the Gauss Baron able to flood a larger zone with simultaneous volleys, it could also alternate its fire in an attempt to track the Dark Zephyr and inflict continuous damage onto its frame. After doing the former for a minute, Venerable Leiva finally gained enough confidence to switch to the latter firing pattern! "Ah! Lay off me!" Venerable Tusa grunted as his expert mech continuously rumbled after getting hit by an unrelenting rain of resonance-empowered shards! Venerable Leiva grinned even as her breath grew heavier. Unlike her opponent, she had already expended a considerable amount of energy and resources in the earlier phases of the battle. "Maybe I shouldn't have put so much pressure on the enemy masterwork expert mech." She muttered. She did not regret her decision, though. Any other ranged mech would lose badly in a duel against the surprisingly powerful and accurate Amaranto. If not for her constant suppression effort, Venerable Stark would have massacred at least thrice as many Cracker mechs as now! The emergence of all of the other dwarven expert mechs freed her from this role. Though the Amaranto was quite powerful, the Slug Rangers still had expert rifleman mechs to spare. Two of Leiva's comrades were already working together to pin down the Amaranto and rob it of any opportunity to take its time to aim. With Venerable Zellie Abermas and Venerable Lloyd Kitserig on the job, the chances were extremely slim that the masterwork expert mech would be able to accomplish anything of notice. Venerable Leiva therefore felt free to concentrate fully on alternating her Gauss Baron's cannons so that they continually kept track of the Dark Zephyr's movements. It helped a lot that the distance between the incoming expert light skirmisher and the Lemogo Distat had shrunk by a considerable margin. The delay between pulling the trigger and seeing a shard hit the exterior of the Dark Zephyr grew smaller and smaller, giving Venerable Tusa a much harder time in trying to get rid of the tracking. He didn't bother to activate his resonance shield. Against the Steel Rain artillery mechs alone, it would have been able to block a fair deal of ordnance, but against the resonance-empowered attacks of the Gauss Baron it would shred like paper. "I really hope you can hold it together, Dark Zephyr. This dwarf isn't letting up on us!" He gritted his teeth as his mech began to rattle harder and harder. Though ordinary vibrations weren't a threat to a well-designed and well-built expert mech, he knew that could easily change once Venerable Leiva switched to heavier ordinance. "What is up with this expert mech?" Venerable Leiva had put the Dark Zephyr under continuous bombardment for over two minutes now. The shards she launched with the eight gauss cannons she had at her disposal wasn't shredding the enemy expert mech as they should. She did what many expert pilots did when they encountered something weird. She called in technical support. "What the hell is going on?! Why is this human expert mech so durable!?" "Ma'am, our analysis on the approaching expert light skirmisher indicates that it is clad with dense and abnormally resilient armor plating. We have never encountered this unknown alloy before, but our preliminary conclusion is that it is a pseudo first-class material!" "What?!" She reacted with alarm. "Are you saying that the Larkinson Clan built an expert mech that is covered with better armor than my Gauss Baron?!" "It's not just the light skirmisher we have identified as the Dark Zephyr that possesses this excellent armor system. Two more expert mechs along with two other abnormal machines fielded by the Larkinson Clan are also clad in this material. They are impenetrable by ordinary weapons and it is possible that even your heaviest shots can't penetrate the Larkinson Clan's expert mech." "Then how do we take down this target?!" Venerable Leiva demanded. "Please stand by. We are interpreting the sensor data and deliberating on the countermeasures you can take. In the worst-case scenario, we will recall an expert mech to block the enemy light skirmisher's approach or box it in with the help of additional melee mechs. A mech that cannot be destroyed can still be neutralized." "Then hurry up and figure out a response!"