The Mars played a critical role in defeating the heavy hitters of the incoming alien armada. The ace hybrid mech had at least partially been designed with this purpose in mind. Any expert mech and ace mech designed in the new frontier had to offer a solution against alien opponents in order to keep up with the times. So far, the Mars relied on nothing but its ARCEUS System to continually pound an unlucky alien light cruiser with resonance-enhanced positron beams. The 1854210 pirates probably couldn't believe that such a tiny machine could hit as hard as a warship that was many times larger and heavier! It was already bad enough that the powerful humans managed to 'miniaturize' their most powerful combat assets to such an insane degree. For this miniaturized combat machine to also retain all of the size and mobility advantage of small craft was the truly ridiculous part! Only the most technologically alien races such as the puelmers were capable of producing such a miracle craft, and even then none of them bothered with such inventions due to the excessive costs associated with extreme miniaturization. The puelmers might as well upgrade their warship homes with a powerful new weapon system or build a completely new starfaring vessel. It seemed the mysterious humans didn't get the memo because the Mars continued to give the aliens a crash course on why ace mechs were so renowned and feared in human society! It only took a minute for the targeted light cruiser to look miserable. The penetrating positron beams launched by the ARCEUS System eventually punched through the exterior hull and ruined dozens of compartments. The 1854210 pirate fleet tried its best to adapt, of course. The alien commanders may be a bit ignorant about the power of human mechs, but they were not stupid. They wouldn't have been able to command one of the most powerful pirate fleets of the Palace of Shame if they were stupid. "The light cruisers are getting serious!" The warships no longer directed their firepower towards other targets. The aliens fully recognized the acute threat posed by the Mars and employed every measure at their disposal to eliminate this superfly! First, they tried to saturate the Mars with firepower. The primary and secondary gun batteries of all seven warships practically flooded the space surrounding the ace mech. Patriarch Reginald's Saint Kingdom experienced a much higher drain as the excessive attacks quickly drained a lot of energy! Second, the alien light cruisers also began to employ other solutions. Two of the warships launched a flurry of missiles that rapidly soared towards the Mars and exploded in a wide area around the ace mech! The missiles turned out to produce a powerful EMP effect upon detonation, and would have been able to disable or fry the circuitry of many starfighters! It was a pity that the Mars was so well-designed that an EMP attack of this magnitude hardly stressed out its protection against these kinds of attacks. Another warship launched a series of torpedoes that eventually unfolded into powerful alloy nets that could envelop any elusive starfighter! "Heh? Are you serious?" Patriarch Reginald Cross did not take the incoming nets seriously at all. His Mars easily evaded most of the nets and overcame the remaining ones by blasting holes in them that were wide enough for his mech to easily get through. It would have been fine even if his ace mech got caught. It had plenty of ways to shred the nets! The aliens didn't give up, though. Their light cruisers were large enough to accommodate a lot of different attack and debilitation methods. Since pirates primarily wanted to capture their prey intact, many of their warships were loaded with features that helped them fulfill this goal. From launching electrifying darts that would subject a target of all of the electrical power that the warships could channel through them to launching nuclear missiles that were ordinarily reserved for larger threats such as the V'gahnt-Zezne, nothing was working! The Mars made excellent use of its mobility and easily dodged the majority of the tricks that the aliens sent in its direction. The electrifying darts along with many other weird solutions had no chance of hitting anything in the first place! As for measures that had the potential to hit the Mars or inflict so much area damage that the ace mech would get affected, Patriarch Reginald proactively shot them down before they could get close. Despite their terrible might and reputation, none of the nuclear missiles managed to inflict any damage onto the Mars! At this time, the Mars had finally managed to land so many attacks on the increasingly damaged light cruiser that the alien vessel was already losing power! The crew of the pirate ship did their best to control the damage, but the positron beams launched by the ARCEUS System continually exhibited the damage! "The first light cruiser of the 1854210 pirate fleet has gone down! Over a third of her hull is destroyed or heavily damaged while the remainder has lost power!" The Mars could have continued to attack the crippled ship further, but there were other threats that needed to be taken care of. Patriarch Reginald already directed the ARCEUS System to switch to a second light cruiser. The pirate warships were all the same in his eyes. As long as his ace mech bombarded them with energy attacks long enough, they would eventually succumb to his might! "Too slow!" Reginald did not have the patience to grind down so many warships from a comfortable distance. The longer this battle dragged on, the more his Saint Kingdom wore out. This would eventually force him to fall back on the Abasis Armor to mitigate subsequent attacks. This was why Reginald directed his powerful ace mech to advance forward and close the distance to his enemies as soon as possible! The Mars had more weapons at its disposal aside from the ARCEUS System. Reginald had chosen to equip it with shoulder-mounted missile launchers this time. Though he usually preferred to equip his ace mech with shoulder-mounted gauss cannons, their calibers weren't sufficient against his current opponents. He opted to go for a missile launcher because there was a much wider range of missile payloads. So far, Reginald had yet to fire any missiles. The alien warships possessed so much interception capabilities that his missiles would go down just as easily as the nuclear ones launched by his opponents. This was why he waited until his Mars rapidly closed the gap with the help of its Pulsvar V-1 transphasic flight system! The shorter the distance between the Mars and the alien warships, the harder it became for the latter to open fire without concerns. Warships were generally comfortable with exchanging fire across larger voids. The majority of them were never designed to excel in knife-fighting range. The reason why the indigenous aliens of the Red Ocean still made use of starfighters was because the small craft were highly effective once they managed to get extremely close to their targets! Now, the Mars had also managed to get close. The ace hybrid mech cheekily flew into the formation of the large but not very maneuverable alien vessels and prevented most of them from firing their guns for fear of causing friendly fire. "The elite starfighters are coming to the rescue." The aliens already anticipated the arrival of the Mars and had made sure to gather up several hundred elite starfighters to chase after the Mars. The formidable-looking starfighters were much stronger and of much higher quality than the cannon fodder that comprised the majority of the alien small craft. However, as soon as they came close to their target, the Mars merely lifted the arm that held its shotgun and opened fire. Thousands of resonance-empowered pellets blasted into space and engulfed a large chunk of the incoming alien starfighters in a rain of unstoppable projectiles! Many alien pilots screamed or simply shattered into bloody mists as their powerful and resilient starfighters instantly crumbled against the might of an ace mech! "Fools." Ves contemptuously snorted as he saw this result. "An ace mech can easily defeat entire mech divisions worth of mechs. It is beyond stupid for the aliens to think that a few hundred starfighters can do the job." Gloriana was a little more generous towards the enemy. "You cannot blame the aliens for their ignorance. Ace mechs are well outside the realm of possibility for most alien civilizations. They are oddities even to humans like ourselves. You were just like them when you were younger. It took a confrontation between your forces and the Olympus Mons to truly sink in how much ace mechs defied the standard conventions of reality." She was right. Ace mechs were so counterintuitively powerful that descriptions and archival footage were not enough to establish their power. Only direct demonstrations sufficed, and the aliens of the 1854210 pirate group were just beginning to find out what a masterwork ace mech could do when it was in its midst! One of the greatest advantages of a hybrid mech was that it possessed so many weapon systems that it could multi-task. Its ARCEUS System had not stopped firing at the second alien light cruiser. The defenses of the next warship on Reginald's list was faring just as poorly as the first one that had already fallen out of formation. At the same time, the Mars regularly aimed its shotgun in different directions to blast away another swarm of incoming starfighters. When the aliens finally adjusted their tactics and spread out their reinforcements, Reginald mostly ignored the small craft as their damage was far too low to threaten the Mars. In the meantime, Reginald finally put the shoulder-mounted missile launchers to good use. At a certain point, the Mars fired a full spread of resonance-empowered transphasic missiles at three other light cruisers! Though the warships in question automatically tried to intercept the powerful missiles, the distance was far too short for this measure to take effect! The first wave of missiles impacted against the segmented transphasic energy shields of the three vessels, causing them to overload to the point where they no longer provided any protection! The second wave of missiles that followed almost immediately afterwards slipped through the gaps before the alien light cruisers could close it up and proceeded to strike the exteriors of those vessels! Powerful explosions rent through the hull plating and damaged a decent amount of ship systems and compartments. The missile attacks managed to knock out several major gun batteries, which provided the Mars and the rest of the Golden Skull Alliance with a lot of relief! "Let me get up close and personal this time!" Reginald exclaimed. The Mars had damaged the second light cruiser to such an extent that the alien vessel was open and vulnerable. However, the ship was still large enough that it would take a while for the ARCEUS System to completely cripple her like last time. Patriarch Reginald decided to cut that short and boldly sent his Mars closer! The ace mech lifted its transphasic axe and leveraged its entire Saint Kingdom so that it began to mimic the weapon! With a single swing, the physical axe as well as the giant reddish axe that Reginald had formed with his Saint Kingdom inflicted a catastrophic strike to the hapless light cruiser's damaged hull! It was as if a giant cleaver had chopped into the poor alien pirate vessel. The damage was so exaggerated that the aliens simply couldn't process how a single physical strike could have such far-reaching effects. None of them understood the nature and the properties of a Saint Kingdom. It was the ultimate offensive, defensive and supportive tool. Only other ace mechs could resist the oppressive effects of a domain field! "Warships are screwed if they can't come up with an effective answer against ace mechs." Were the alien pirates capable of handling this threat, or would the Mars and every other ace mech ruin all of their warships?