Chapter 3266: Sacrifices The successive blows to the Gauss Baron's layered defenses were so abrupt that Venerable Leiva hardly paid any attention to what had happened to the Dark Zephyr. That was a mistake. Much to her surprise, the intact and still combat-capable Dark Zephyr had reached the upper surface of the bunker and swiped its knives to tear through the gap in order to widen its opening. It looked as if it had evaded the explosive trap that had engulfed many of its illusionary copies! Venerable Tusa smirked. In fact, that was indeed the case. When he leveraged the prime mech properties of his expert mech and channeled the power of Arnold, he sent out every single iteration of the Dark Zephyr around the enemy mech blockade in different directions. What no one noticed was that there was one Dark Zephyr copy that had slowed down and reversed course! Instead of going forward, it had stalled and even flew backwards to an extent. This turned out to be a prudent decision as the Slug Rangers didn't hesitate to detonate a powerful explosive buried in the hull of the Lemogo Distat that destroyed or incapacitated over sixty dwarven escort mechs! Apparently, the Slug Rangers thought it was worth it to sacrifice that many regular mechs just to take down a single enemy expert light skirmisher that threatened their greatest hero and expert mech. It was a pity that Venerable Tusa's caution had caused this devious trap to fail, leading to a lot of friendly fire with no substantial results. "VULCAN DAMN YOU!" Leiva roared as she commanded the Gauss Baron to fire its cannons through the opening in a continuous alternating pattern. There was no way for the Dark Zephyr to go except through the narrow hole in the front. Even if it took the time to carve out another hole, it would still be easy for the Gauss Baron to hit the enemy light mech when it was this close and approached from such a limited angle! "Hahaha! I'm never letting you get in! Come inside if you dare!" 𝒇𝒓𝙚𝒆𝔀𝓮𝓫𝒏𝓸𝙫𝓮𝓵.𝓬𝙤𝙢 Though heavy artillery mechs were known to be extremely vulnerable to melee mechs that had managed to close the distance, expert mechs did not play by the same rules. The Gauss Baron still had several countermeasures in reserve. This was the advantage of piloting a big and fat mech. There was so much space and capacity that Venerable Leiva still had at least three emergency measures at her disposal that could repel any enemy mech that thought that her machine was vulnerable at close range. Perhaps her opponent thought the same way because the enemy expert mech stopped cutting through the bunker and retreated from the immediate area. "Gone?" She frowned. This was highly unusual. The Dark Zephyr had worked so hard to cross the battlefield and run through a gauntlet of withering artillery fire, expending plenty of resources in the process. Now that it had reached the finish line, how could it abandon its greatest goal? "Venerable Leiva! The hostile expert mech hasn't retreated. It is carving its way into the deck below you! Pull back immediately!" "What?!" The explosive trap that had devastated a lot of escort mechs also dealt a significant amount of damage to the hull of the Lemogo Distat. The rough rectangular grooves exposed enough openings for the Dark Zephyr to carve through the hull with quick, repeated attacks with its extremely sharp knives. Though they didn't look like it, the Dark Zephyr's main weapons were quite good at carving through thick but not too resilient metal. Starship hull plating was typically characterized by these properties. The only problem was that there was too much material to carve through that it would take any mech a long time to create an opening. Another problem was that many blades wore down rapidly if used in such a crude fashion. It was fortunate that Venerable Tusa didn't have to worry about this problem. Not only were the knives of the Dark Zephyr made out of high-quality exotics, but they were also laced with Bissonat, the same resonance material that had been used to make the Decapitator, the masterwork mech sword forged by Ketis! By resonating with his knives, he activated a resonance ability that massively increased their durability as well as their sharpness. The enormous hull plating became as easy to carve into as a freshly roasted turkey to the Dark Zephyr. The only cost was that it took a lot out of Venerable Tusa. His earlier exertions had already taxed his will and now he was depleting the remainder of his mental strength at an alarmingly high rate! "I have to end this quickly!" Once the expert mech had dug a compact hole through the compartment below the bunker, Venerable Tusa drove his expert mech in without any concern. He then began to press his mech upwards and carve its glowing knives right across the ceiling! Though he encountered plenty of resistance, most of it turned out to be highly intricate and complicated mechanical systems. One of them happened to be the moving platform that was supposed to retract the Gauss Baron back into the interior of the Lemogo Distat! Once the Dark Zephyr sabotaged this mechanism, the Gauss Baron had become stuck! Its thick, short but massive dwarven legs were slotted into the deck, both to increase stability and enhance heat transference. Even though expert mechs were faster and more powerful by nature, the Gauss Baron wasn't designed to be an acrobat. It took a lot of time and effort for it to extricate itself from the malfunctioning platform, especially since its design didn't even include arms that would have enabled it to leverage its mechanical strength a lot better! What happened next only took a few seconds. After literally carving its way through the deck where the Gauss Baron stood on, the Dark Zephyr had reached the rear of the expert mech that possessed the greatest firepower out of any single machine! "YOU DON'T BELONG HERE, HUMAN!" Venerable Leiva boomed as she tried to reverse the orientation of every gauss cannon on her frame so that they pointed towards the rear. It was too bad that out of eight of its formidable cannons, only two that were mounted on the top were capable of angling to the rear. After all, the Gauss Baron was designed to function exclusively as a bunker mech. One of the crucial reasons why the artillery mech's frame was able to mount so many powerful gauss cannons was because it made a lot of tradeoffs in its flexibility. Now, these design choices had come back to bite the Gauss Baron from behind, literally in this case! The Dark Zephyr quickly rushed to the back of the Gauss Baron and cut the powerful but slow-turning cannons into trash before digging its knives through the vulnerable rear armor of the heavy artillery mech with only slightly greater resistance! Venerable Leiva's manic eyes glinted as the dwarven expert pilot made a ruthless decision. Ejecting from the mech was out of the question because the enemy mech stood in the way. Many of the countermeasures that she had ready were invalidated because they were primarily designed to repel enemies from the front. Venerable Leiva and the Slug Rangers had already failed by allowing the Dark Zephyr get this close. It was not a surprise that she didn't have any adequate solutions at her disposal. Without the ability to move or turn around her heavy mech, she made the only decision that could still allow her to contribute to the battle. "THE VULCAN EMPIRE BELONGS TO DWARVENKIND!" Venerable Tusa instinctively sensed an acute threat from the thick and heavy mech he was carving up. It was taking too much time for him to disable it due to its enormous bulk. "Oh, hell…" He mustered up as much of his remaining resonance strength as possible! At the same time, he urgently resonated with his Dark Zephyr, causing it to appear increasingly more fuzzy just as the Gauss Baron exploded! From an outside perspective, a huge explosion engulfed the side of the Lemogo Distat where the Gauss Baron's bunker was situated! The power and force of the detonation was so mighty that the capital ship jerked and lost control of her flight trajectory for a short instant. A lot of dwarven mechs, particularly those belonging to the Slug Rangers, momentarily faltered. "The Lemogo Distat is hurt!" "Venerable Leiva…" The explosion that tore out of the Lemogo Distat's hull was so visually impactful that a lot of dwarven mech pilots felt chilled. The capital ship looked like a wounded whale. The violent detonation had demolished dozens of compartments around the bunker and widened a huge and ugly cavity that represented an enormous vulnerability! "Rotate our vessel by 180 degrees!" Though wounded on her side, the damage to her functionality was relatively limited. With all of her major systems and ship components still in working condition, the bruised but still unbroken dwarven fleet carrier spun around her length until her gaping wound was no longer exposed to the human enemies at the front. Regardless of this quick response, a lot of dwarves were still devastated. The Gauss Baron was one of the three most powerful guardians of the soldiers in the dwarven military fleet. Her powerful gauss cannons and her extremely helpful fire support had been key to suppressing powerful elements like the Amaranto, sieging hardy defensive ships like the Graveyard and wrecking a lot of key enemy mechs such as the Transcendent Punishers and the Eternal Redemptions. Aside from that, the morale boost that Venerable Leiva Hinder and her Gauss Baron bestowed to the dwarven troops was also gone. What was worse was that her tragic loss inflicted a negative impact on their morale. The Slug Rangers were especially hard hit! In the same way, the expeditionary forces had become a lot more buoyed. Many Larkinsons, Glory Seekers and Crossers felt suffocated sometimes due to the prospect of fighting under the specter of getting blasted by powerful artillery at any moment. The Gauss Baron had destroyed or crippled hundreds of mechs before it finally went down. The Dark Zephyr's daring intervention freed the human soldiers from a huge weight on their shoulders, allowing them to fight and serve with less reservations! Yet a number of attentive people weren't entirely happy at this dramatic outcome. The Gauss Baron had unquestionably self-destructed, but what happened to the Dark Zephyr that had been a stone's throw from its target? "Venerable Tusa, please respond! What is the Dark Zephyr's condition?! We have lost connection to your expert mech's data feeds and cannot ascertain its current state. Please respond!" Ves grew increasingly more worried as nothing came back. The Spirit of Bentheim should have at least been able to receive some signals. Even from this distance and even with all of the heavy interference in the surrounding space, the Dark Zephyr should have been able to show signs of life… but only if it was functional enough. He suddenly remembered that he had a good way of finding out whether a member of the Larkinson Clan was still alive. "Book, please." Nitaa stepped forward and passed over the Larkinson Mandate to him. He let his armored gauntlet keep hold of the relic and tried to immerse himself in the Larkinson Network. As soon as he did so, he immediately noticed that there were less connections and distant presences than before. The Larkinson Clan had already suffered thousands of casualties. Not just mech pilots but also many ship personnel had sacrificed their lives in order to resist the Vulcanites. Nya… The Golden Cat who sat in the center of this remarkable network took each and every loss personally. As the embodiment of kinship, the ancestral spirit was not able to disregard the death of even the most inconsequential Larkinson. "It's okay." Ves mentally soothed Goldie. "I know you don't like it but these soldiers died for a good cause. We can't get distracted by grieving for their losses right now. We need to continue the fight and make sure that their sacrifices were not in vain." Nyaaa…