As soon as the Fridaymen properly recognized the threat posed by the Promethea, numerous expert ranged mechs began to fire at its position along the hull of the Wild Torch! The fleet carrier that the Wild Fighter Association had once awarded to the Larkinson Clan began to suffer a lot of strain and damage as a torrent of powerful attacks bombarded her directional shields and damaged her exterior fixtures! The Promethea even suffered a close shave as the Star of Liberation briefly turned its attention away from suppressing the Amaranto and fired a casual but destructive shot in the other Larkinson expert mech's direction! The experienced Venerable Rezkin quickly saw through Venerable Isobel's power. "Your fire trick is surprisingly useful, but how much concentration does it take to burn what isn't supposed to be burned?" The more suppression directed towards the Promethea, the harder it became for Venerable Isobel to maintain the fires she had sparked on all of the defensive platforms struck by the Ignitron! The purple flames that seemed to be unstoppable earlier had become a lot feebler now that Venerable Isobel needed to direct a lot more attention towards evasion. While the Star of Liberation couldn't direct much attention away from the Amaranto, other Sundered Phalanx expert mechs took over the duty of suppressing the Promethea whenever possible. The biggest threats that Venerable Isobel faced after the Star of Liberation were the Tensars! As one of the recent mid-tier expert mechs designed by Master Toqueman Huron and Master Johnny Bates, the twin expert rifleman mechs synchronized their actions to a flawless degree and always struck at their targets from different angles at the exact same time! With the help of their Slipdream rifles, the Arma Tensar and Fila Tensar easily inflicted a lot of energy damage with every discharge! If only one of the mechs attacked at a time, then Venerable Isobel was still confident she could block the attacks with the resonance shields of her Promethea. However, she had seen how the simultaneous strikes of the Tensar frequently inflicted damage that equaled or in some cases surpassed the normal attacks of the Star of Liberation! "Those identical expert rifleman mechs truly have the capital to challenge high-tier expert mechs!" Considering that the Promethea was just a mid-tier expert mech and one that did not even excel at defense, there was no way that Venerable Isobel dared to make any aggressive moves when she was locked down by both Venerable Anastasia Choi and Venerable Geraldino Fameuse. "We're keeping our eyes on you, Promothea! We're not going to allow you to burn down the Kosic Ring any further!" The Promethea was a poor matchup against the Tensars. One of the biggest weaknesses of luminar crystal weapons was that Ves had yet to figure out how to integrate phasewater into them without causing catastrophic disasters. Due to this, the Promethea could only overcome defenses such as titan shields and resonance shields the hard way. There was no way the expert mech could overcome either of them in its current state! The Carnare was at least able to partially bypass titan shields with its transphasic dual-type rifle. As for trying to take down the Tensars once they became exposed, Venerable Isobel did not even attempt to accomplish this on her own. Not only did they perfectly cover for each other's weaknesses, their resonance strengths were significantly more powerful than her own, allowing them to easily snuff out the flames she set before they even had a chance to burn! Despite all of the suppression directed towards the Promethea, Venerable Isobel did not feel too bad about her current state. "Being able to hold down both Tensars is a huge profit!" If the Tensars tried their best to hinder the Promethea from setting more fires, then these potent expert mechs weren't directing much of their firepower towards other targets! The only downside was that the Wild Torch came under increasing fire from not only the Tensars but many other Fridayman mechs as well. "Our ship is taking way too much damage! We can't endure so much firepower!" Before the Larkinson Clan moved any other ships in the way, the Hexers already moved their combat carriers in the way. "Keep attracting the attention of the enemy's champions." General Alisky Victrix communicated to the Larkinson Clan's expert pilots. "The more they are threatened by you, the more they will leave our regular mech forces alone. We shall assist you in any way possible." The Hexers did not expose their own combat carriers to danger merely because they valued the Larkinson Clan and felt the need to be charitable all of a sudden. This was all part of a greater strategy that aimed to direct as much attention of the enemy elites to the Golden Skull Alliance as possible. The Hexers hadn't brought that much mid and high-tier expert mechs to the fight, so they couldn't fight against the most powerful enemy champions on an equal basis. Therefore, the amount of heat that the Amaranto and the Promethea generated through their actions was highly beneficial to the overall attack plan! The trajectory of the battle played out exactly how the planners envisioned. Even though the Gaugers figured out the enemy's strategy, they had no choice but to direct their more powerful ranged expert mechs to suppress the Amaranto and the Promethea. The Sundered Phalanx had already tried and failed to achieve effective suppression. Weaker expert mechs did not pose a sufficient threat to the two thorny Larkinson expert mechs. Their power levels were not sufficient and their firepower couldn't threaten the defenses of their targets. As important mechs, the Larkinson Clan invested a lot in bolstering their defenses! Ves had especially directed a lot of attention towards this issue when he upgraded the design of the Amaranto. Previously, the Amaranto functioned as a glass cannon. Its firepower was fearsome but its defenses were abysmal. Though Ves did not wish to make his first proper expert rifleman mech stray from its original design concept of pursuing extreme firepower, he still found plenty of ways to strengthen the armor and the resonating shield of the Amaranto. Money solved many problems, and investing a huge amount of money in a high-quality lightweight armor system massively increased the survivability of the Amaranto. The instance in the past where the Amaranto was unable to snipe enemy expert mechs because of its fragile shell was in the past! The Amaranto Version 2.0 was not afraid of accruing a couple of dents! As more and more space stations started to lose their titan shields due to getting focused upon by tens of thousands of Hexer ranged mechs, the Sundered Phalanx mech units started to suffer real damage. Bunker mechs, cannoneer mechs, rifleman mechs and other mechs fell by the hundreds, and the rate was only increasing over time as the distance between the two sides continued to shrink. Though the expert mechs from both sides performed the flashiest, the role of ordinary expert mechs was not negligible. Many famed Sundered Phalanx mech divisions showed their excellence during this phase of the battle. For example, the 5642nd Blackened Reapers where Venerable Kasia Rezkin hailed from was a renowned long-range mech division that excelled in long-ranged precision warfare. The mech division fielded powerful cannoneer mechs that launched relatively slow but ultra-heavy gauss rounds that were best at breaking open starships! The Blackened Reapers also employed numerous rifleman mechs that were so precise that they could even knock out individual exterior parts from the hull of a moving starship as long as they became exposed! Then there was the artillery-oriented 5640th Witch Shatterers, which the Black Reapers viewed as a sister mech division. As their name suggested, the Witch Shatterers had been founded with the idea of crushing the Hexers on the battlefield. Their artillery mechs tended to be equipped with heavy gauss cannons, heavy ballistic cannons and missile launchers. While the Witch Shatterers did not excel at long-ranged precision bombardment like the Blackened Reapers, they did not need to be good at this aspect! Their main purpose in battle was to put a huge amount of pressure onto the larger and less maneuverable assets of their opponents. Each mech pilot possessed an abundant amount of experience in bombarding starships in space and shelling enemy strongholds and positions on land. At this stage of the battle, the thousands of artillery mechs of the Witch Shatterers put an enormous amount of pressure on the starships of the Hex Army's special task force for this operation! "Those Witch Shatterers are too foul! Many of them are holing up safely within the confines of the titan shields of their fortified space stations while we are losing our combat carriers at an alarming pace!" General Alisky Victrix and the other Hexer officers recognized the enormous threat posed by the Witch Shatterers, but they could do little but bear with the situation. As long as the forces under their command managed to get close enough to the enemy battle lines, then many of those heavy artillery mechs would turn into sitting ducks to the aggressive Hexer melee mechs. The attacking units just needed to cross the remaining distance! Fortunately, the Hexers brought their own artillery regiments and divisions. Though the Hex Army's mech doctrine did not put as much of an emphasis on ranged combat as the Fridaymen, that did not mean that the Hexers were bad in this aspect! The Hexers had already known what they faced in advance due to the intelligence leaks and the information retrieved by the spies planted in Pima Prime. Though the Hexer artillery mech models weren't as powerful as the Transcendent Punisher Mark II, the tens of thousands that the Hexers had brought to this battle was exacting a huge price on the titan shields that protected the orbital space stations. The Hexers even tuned their artillery mechs to deal the most optimal amount of damage against the Gauge Dynasty's titan shields! One of the most valuable secrets that the Fridaymen behind Tristan had leaked was the alleged properties of the titan shield models employed by the Gauge Dynasty in Pima Prime. Not every shield generator was the same. Some excelled in resisting energy attacks while others were more efficient in blocking physical attacks. The titan shield models utilized by the Gaugers were primarily attuned to resist massive burst attacks launched by warship-grade weapons. The idea was that friendly mechs could still put up a good fight against enemy mechs, but if alien warships dropped by one day, the Kosic Ring was meant to blunt their massive firepower as much as possible! While these titan shield generators also worked pretty well against smaller caliber weapons, they seemed to perform less efficiently against sustained or continuous attacks. The Hexer artillery mechs armed with energy weapons took advantage of this minor shortcoming by firing beams that lasted several more seconds at a time! The mechs accumulated heat a lot faster because of this, but the ranged mechs compensated for this by lowering the power settings in order to make this firing mode more bearable. As a result, a clear difference had formed between the ranged mechs from both sides. While the Fridaymen ranged mechs focused primarily on inflicting concentrated burst damage so that they could punch through the weak points of their targets, the Hexer ranged mechs primarily sought to overload the powerful titan shields by inflicting sustained area damage! In any case, the bubble generated by titan shields was so enormous that it was impossible for any of the Hexer mech pilots to miss their shots! "Our space stations are collapsing one by one! Our mechs are slowly becoming more exposed!" "Don't mind this. We can rebuild our orbital fortress after we have survived this battle. I will gladly sacrifice the entire Kosic Ring as long as we are able to beat off the Hexers in the end! Stand fast and keep focusing on reducing their mechs as much as possible!" As the invading forces proceeded to make progress, more and more mechs became involved in the fight. The time for the first melee mech units to clash against each other was drawing closer!