4247 Wildfire The opening shots of the Amaranto and the Star of Liberation triggered other expert mechs into action. Those that were solely equipped with melee weapons still had to sit tight, but those with ranged weapons had no excuse anymore. The ranged expert mechs of the Hex Army and the Golden Skull Alliance began to fire at different targets and achieved immediate results! For example, the recently completed Carnare fielded by the Cross Clan already exhibited a faint shadow of the Mars. The Carnare was the personal machine of Venerable Emland Cross, one of the mech pilots that had been lucky enough to break through during the climax of the Purgatory Campaign. Even though Venerable Emland was just a low-tier expert pilot, the treatment he received from the Cross Clan was extravagant! It couldn't be helped. The Cross Clan suffered from a shortage of expert pilots and had a lot of money to spare. Benedict Cortez, who was still a Senior Mech Designer at the time, expressly set out to emulate the firepower of the Mars but in a much more manageable package. Though the renowned Larkinson mech designers did not take part in its development, the Carnare still turned into a powerful work. The expert mech possessed two standout features. First, Benedict integrated a weaker and more modest version of the original Magma Vein System into its design. This allowed the expert mech to channel and wield a lot more energy in a much more efficient manner. Second, the Carnare came equipped with a transphasic dual-type energy rifle! As Venerable Emland Cross targeted a space station that fell under the protection of a titan shield, he resonated with his expert mech and pulled the trigger without hesitation. Despite the fact that the space station in question still boasted a healthy titan shield, the Carnare's resonance-empowered positron beam only partially collided against the powerful energy barrier. More than a quarter of the deadly particles of the original beam seemed to behave as if the thick titan shield did not exist and passed right through without any issue! This took some of the crew manning the stations of the orbital fortress by surprise. Before they could do anything else, the weakened but still-potent energy beam struck an armored turret. The same behavior happened again! While a significant proportion of the positron beam damaged the outer layers of the turret, a part of the stream of positrons continued to pass right through solid alloys before they eventually unleashed their potent destructive potential onto the critical internals of the defensive fixture. The powerful turret that had put a decent amount of pressure on the starships of the Hex Army lost all of its functions even though its frontal armor was not entirely breached! "Watch out! That expert mech has a transphasic weapon, and not a weak one at that!" The Cross Clan invested over 350 grams of phasewater to provide transphasic capabilities to the Carnare, and this was a pretty luxurious treatment for a machine assigned to a low-tier expert pilot! If not for the fact that the Cross Clan still had more phasewater than they knew what to do with it, the Crossers would have never been so willing to allocate so much of this strategic substance to a single machine! The Carnare's transphasic energy rifle that Benedict had developed in cooperation with Melmen Advanced Systems possessed enough phasewater to allow its potent beams to move past the titan shields deployed by the defenders and several meters of thick alloys depending on their defensive properties. Many conventional defensive measures lost a lot of their power when struck by potent transphasic attacks. While armor and energy shields still played a major role in mitigating the damage potential of attacks like the ones launched by the Carnare, it became clear that the mere existence of this new attack method had the potential to change human warfare forever! "The only defenses that can completely block transphasic attacks are true resonance and transphasic defense systems! Everything else is just waiting for death!" This was a bit of an exaggeration. The orbital fortresses that made up the strongest parts of the Kosic Ring would not go down just because it was targeted by a few mechs armed with transphasic weapon systems. Their massive titan shield generators were buried deep within the interior of the enormous constructs. A huge amount of walls and other obstacles stood in the way between these critical defensive systems and attacks launched from afar. The Carnare's effectiveness on this massive battlefield was therefore limited at this stage. The most that Venerable Emland Cross could do was knock out the turrets and occasionally the mechs that were hiding behind the cover of intact titan shields. Other ranged expert mechs exhibited greater effectiveness. "So much hardware. So much to burn. It's been a long time since I have entered a target-rich environment." Venerable Isobel Kotin had been waiting for this moment a long time. Ever since she broke through during the Purgatory Campaign and received her own expert mech a year later, she had been looking forward to making a huge impact in the next major battle involving the Larkinson Clan. It was a pity that the Larkinsons spent 5 long years in Davute! Aside from sending out modest batches of mech units to fulfill mercenary missions, the Larkinson Clan did not encounter any hostilities. Venerable Isobel therefore became a lot happier when the clan initially announced its participation in Operation Saturday Market. Though her personal resentment towards the Fridaymen was not that strong to be honest, she valued this confrontation because it could serve as an excellent opportunity for her to explore her power and search the limits of her current strength! "I've never been able to fulfill my duty to the fullest since I received you, Promethea. You can cheer up now, because these Fridaymen have been generous enough to give us plenty of targets to burn." Though the Promethea was not a masterwork mech and still had a lot to grow until it became a third order living mech, it had already reached a state of development that made it as responsive as a pet. The expert mech liked what Venerable Isobel was conveying. The Promethea became so excited at the thought of fulfilling the role it was made for that it began to resonate stronger with its expert pilot. A flame-like purple corona surrounded the black-and-purple mech. Both Venerable Isobel and the Promethea wanted to make their first proper debut in battle as memorable as possible, and the best way to do that was to disrupt the enemy as much as possible! Isobel scanned the battlefield and selected her first target. The Promethea's custom Ignitron luminar crystal assault rifle did not possess the greatest accuracy compared to the Amaranto's Instrument of Vengeance, but it should not be a challenge for it to strike a relatively stationary target from a distance. As she and her expert mech locked on to a defensive platform that was a bit larger than a corvette and boasted three powerful and accurate laser turrets, the Ignitron in the arms of the Promethea fired a relatively thin and modest positron beam at the target. The positron beam dealt a decent amount of damage on impact, but even if it was empowered by true resonance, the strike hardly managed to breach the cheap but abundant structural armor. This was the normal result of attacking one of the thousands of defensive platforms that orbited Pima Prime V. Each of them were relatively cheap and low-quality but much tougher than mechs because they traded mobility for a lot of mass! Even if expert mechs such as the Amaranto and the Carnare were able to knock them out with attacks that were strong enough, it was not worth it for their expert pilots to waste their willpower on destroying these ordinary targets. If not for the fact that all of the ranged mech units of Task Force Fury were preoccupied with breaking open orbital fortresses first, these defensive platforms would have long been torn apart in quick succession. Now, Venerable Isobel was making a head-start on their destruction by targeting them first. The strangest part about her approach was that she did not target the defensive platform any further after striking it once. The construct was still completely operational aside from suffering a bit of damage to its structure! Isobel just took a brief look at the damaged section before she became satisfied with what she and the Promethea managed to accomplish. "It begins." Isobel smirked and turned the Ignitron towards an adjacent defensive platform. The expert ranged mech fired another understated resonance-empowered positron beam. Isobel did not even deliberately aim her weapon at one of the turrets or any weak points of the defensive platform. Even if her attack ended up striking solid armor plating, Isobel still moved on to attacking another target!𝙛𝒓𝓮𝙚𝔀𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝒐𝒎 She continually sped up her attacks. It only took a few seconds at most to shift her aim to another target and accumulate enough energy and resonance to fire another attack at a defensive platform! Initially, the Fridaymen didn't pay much attention to the Promethea. Compared to the much more threatening Amaranto that was capable of firing immensely powerful and destructive energy beams, the attacks launched by the Larkinson Clan's latest expert rifleman mech did not even manage to cripple its targets! It was more than 30 seconds before numerous Fridaymen began to feel that something was wrong. The crew manning the defensive platforms and the officers who supervised them from remote began to receive increasingly alarming notifications. First, the heat levels of the defensive platforms started to rise at a drastic rate. Next, numerous systems and components closest to the impact site started to malfunction. Finally, the crew members discovered to their horror that the defensive platforms struck by the Promethea had actually started to burn! "This is impossible! Hardly anything here is flammable! We only got struck by a single positron beam attack that only blasted a chunk of the outer armor. Our sensors did not detect that our station had been doused with any propellant." There was no logical explanation why the defensive platforms slowly began to get engulfed in flames. It was only after ruling out every other possibility that the Fridaymen finally reached the right conclusion. "It's the Larkinson Clan's new expert mech! The Promethea is the chief culprit!" As far as Larkinson expert mechs went, the Promethea was one of the simpler ones. It was not loaded with many features and did not possess a complicated design. There were three major differences that set it apart from other ranged mechs. First, it was equipped with flamethrowers that possessed a lot of destructive potential at close range. Second, the Ignitron integrated a resonating alloy called ARB-34. This artificial alloy happened to be highly compatible with Venerable Isobel Kotin. Its main function was to amplify Isobel's flame domain and imbue each energy attack with burning properties! This meant that when an energy beam struck a target, a fire would start that could slowly burn through solid matter that should ordinarily not be flammable in a given environment. Thus, the third and principal reason why the defensive platforms burned was because Venerable Isobel willed them to become engulfed in flames! Perhaps Venerable Isobel would have a hard time setting flames on an expert mech due to the interference of an enemy expert pilot's force of will, but defensive platforms enjoyed no such luxury! "I haven't come close to reaching my limit." Venerable Isobel taunted as she continued to resonate with her expert mech and its special luminar crystal rifle. Resonating with ARB-34 did not strain her a lot, which meant that she could not only launch a lot of resonance-empowered attacks without tiring herself out, but also maintain a lot of different flames at the same time! Before anyone knew it, over 40 defensive platforms had already caught fire! The ones that the Promethea struck first had already been rendered useless as the flames had burned too many critical modules such as the power reactor or the turrets! The enemies that observed how the Promothea continued to burn through the defensive platform as if she was igniting a wildfire along the Kosic Ring began to experience a lot more fear towards this 'simple' expert rifleman mech! "Stop the Promethea! It can single-handedly gut the Kosic Ring if it continues to spread its flames!"