5036 Stormblade Debut The wheednar warships were taking more and more of a beating as the human mechs flew closer. Their proud cannons that could repel or destroy a lot of opposing warships had taken down far too few mechs. Sure, a couple of hundred of them had been wiped out during the lengthy approach, but that still left many thousands more! The ranged mechs had already begun to pressure the mechs with their firepower. Meanwhile, the melee mechs were just about to close in and exhaust the defenses of the starships a lot faster at close range! The only way for the wheednars to delay the human mechs from completely terrorizing their warships was to make use of their own small craft! Formations of starfighters flew under the cover of the alien warships and began to strafe and harass the human mechs! The wheednars had already encountered mechs in their past raids, so they knew better than to confront the humanoid machines at closer ranges. The eight-limbed aliens showed none of the complacency and foolishness of before as they all realized that this would be the most difficult fight of their lives! While the wheednar starfighters did not boast excellent performance, their high acceleration along with their respectable ranged firepower meant that they could still fight effectively against human mechs! At first, the swift wheednar starfighters put a lot of mechs under pressure by making cautious attack runs that kept them well away from any threatening melee mechs. However, the Golden Skull Alliance soon dispatched their own fast mechs to counter these fast and annoying alien small craft. The Valkyrie mechs fielded by the Penitent Sisters and the Glory Seekers might not have the mobility to catch up to the alien starfighters, but they were still fast enough to give their submachine guns a good chance of damaging the relatively fragile enemy craft! "The Daughter of Death is watching over us! I can feel her gaze!" "Bless us, Helena! Let the souls of the aliens nourish your divinity!" "Hah! Look at them running! The aliens are afraid of our lady!" The glows of the Valkyrie mechs had become more effective at disturbing the mood of enemies as of late. They became stronger and were able to remain effective at longer distances. Combined with the ferocity and the determination of the highly trained Hexer pilots, the alien starfighter pilots hated to fight against this mech line the most! Of course, the aliens did not fare much better when fighting against other human mechs. The Larkinson Clan primarily relied on the Ferocious Piranhas and the Stingrippers of the Flagrant Vandals to chase the enemy starfighters down to the end! While the Ferocious Piranhas rarely managed to catch up to the faster alien starfighters, the light skirmishers could still direct the movements of the enemy craft with the help of their disorientation glows. The aliens had already discovered that as long as any of them came close enough to the deceptively weak light mechs, the starfighter pilots would quickly lose concentration! The wheednar pilots soon tried to avoid the Larkinson mechs entirely, but that did not help them much when the fast and light Stingrippers flew behind their tails and persistently peppered their targets with their luminar crystal submachine guns! Of course, the mechs fielded by the other groups did not fall too far behind either. Though the wheednar starfighters had the capital to pose a more serious threat against most second-class mechs, the alien raiding fleet ultimately brought too few of them to this fight! After all, the wheednars primarily fielded warships. Starfighters had always been treated as a secondary concern to the indigenous aliens. The only small craft that gave the Golden Skull Alliance a greater challenge were the ones deployed by the orven battleship. Even though the orvens only deployed thirty of them, each of them were much more powerful than a typical second-class mech. Their defenses particularly stood out as their transphasic energy shields shrugged off a lot of attacks! It was a pity that there were too few of them. The Golden Skull Alliance did not even bother to allocate any expert mechs or elite mech units to wipe out these excellent machines. The ranged Bright Warriors that were still Commandeered by the Minerva only briefly shifted their weapons away from the enemy warships and accurately struck all thirty orven starfighters with accurate resonance-empowered disruptor beams! The proud but relatively weak transphasic energy shields folded in seconds. Dozens more disruptor beams continued to pelt each alien starfighter until their electronic systems completely failed! No further intervention was needed as the powerless starfighters coasted off in the distance. The Larkinsons deliberately tried to keep the alien starfighters as intact as possible this time as they contained a lot of valuable salvage. Their highly compact transphasic energy shield generators were already valuable enough by themselves as they could easily be transplanted into human mechs after a bit of reconstruction! The alien starfighters no longer became a problem. They had either been eliminated or controlled to the point where they could no longer make any contributions. The real fight was about to start! "Come on, sisters! Let us hack into these energy shields and show these aliens that our mechs are still to be feared!" A Swordmaiden captain roared! "For Lydia!" "For Ketis!" "For the Swordmaidens!" Hundreds of Second Swords flew forward and began to envelop a wheednar heavy cruiser! 𝗳𝗿𝐞𝕖𝘄𝗲𝕓𝗻𝚘𝚟𝕖𝐥.𝚌𝕠𝕞 While the relatively powerful alien warship tried her best to sweep away the greatsword-wielding mechs with her tertiary gun batteries, the Swordmaiden mechs fearlessly struck their blades against the vessel's segmented energy shields while continuing to stay on the move. The Second Swords were famed for being able to cut through armor with their sharp and heavy greatswords. Their weapons had become even sharper due to the influence exerted by Messier 87! Unfortunately for the Swordmaidens, most energy shields did not care about the sharpness of enemy attacks. They simply absorbed all kinetics at the same level of efficiency no matter whether the weapon was sharp or blunt! When Ketis observed the results in the main design lab where most of the other mech designers had gathered, she crossed her arms but otherwise maintained her cool. She already expected for her Second Swords to struggle with overcoming transphasic energy shields. What she really wanted to see this time was whether her latest completed mech model could make a difference! Soon enough, a single squad of Swordmaiden mechs joined the fray! Different from the familiar Second Swords, the new swordsman mechs not only looked a bit more expensive and high-end, but also held two smaller swords that currently crackled with electric potency. The Stormblade Samurai model had made its first proper debut on the battlefield! Ketis would have preferred to wait for a few more weeks so that the Spirit of Bentheim could have produced more copies of this new dual-wielding swordsman mech. It was already impressive that the Swordmaidens managed to field a single full squad so quickly after she completed her latest design! Though the quantity of Stormblade Samurais was not enough to make a significant difference in this battle, it was enough to test its performance and make direct comparisons with other melee mechs! "Come on sisters." A veteran Swordmaiden told her fellow Stormblade Samurai pilots. "Our blades are made to drain energy shields, so don't stop attacking until we can get through!" As the dual-wielding swordsman mechs flew within range, they began to pound the segmented energy shields with swift and unrelenting attacks while continuing to circle around the wheednar heavy cruiser. The barrage of lasers and machine gun fire erupting from the heavy cruiser occasionally dinged against their armor, but the modern mechs benefited heavily from the stronger and more resilient armor system designed by Sara Voiken! This gave the Samurai pilots enough confidence to continue their attacks. Even if they weren't able to stay motionless long enough to concentrate all of their attacks on a single segmented energy shield, the sensors still measured the approximate effects of every attack. Ketis' eyes gleamed as the initial sensor readings suggested that her Stormblade Samurais were sapping the enemy warship's energy shields at a much more impressive rate! "Every light Stormblade attack can inflict more than three times the damage of a single conventional greatsword attack!" This was much bigger of a deal than it looked on the surface! A greatsword was a larger and more hard-hitting weapon that took quite a bit of time and effort to swing against an opponent. They relied on a combination of force and sharpness to deal damage. A single-handed stormblade on the other hand could swing a lot faster with less exertion, which meant it could strike at greater frequencies at the cost of less power behind every attack. While there was a physical component to the attack of a stormblade weapon, their electrical components meant that they could inflict a lot more damage against energy defenses through disruption! Since every Stormblade Samurai wielded two swords at the same time, this meant that they could effectively maximize the disruptive attacks that they could inflict on a transphasic energy shield! "The heavy cruiser is losing her energy shields at a faster rate!" If the Swordmaidens deployed a hundred or so Stormblade Samurais, the wheednar warship would have lost her primary form of defense at this time! Still, Ketis was more than satisfied with the results. "You can go ahead, Dise." She transmitted to the Swordmaiden expert pilot. "I have been waiting for this!" Dise responded as her expert mech glowed brighter on approach! Many Second Swords flew out of the way as the First Sword descended upon the beleaguered wheednar heavy cruiser like a comet! andasnovel.com As the living expert mech came closer, her Decapitator greatsword started to get surrounded by a shimmering field of stars. Ketis had been unable to pass on her fairly recent Ultimate Cut technique to Venerable Dise as it was too specific to her own sword style. That did not mean that Venerable Dise had done nothing to improve her own ability to cut through transphasic defenses. She had spent months practicing and refining her Phase Cutter technique. Compared to the previous she employed this extraordinary sword technique, she succeeded in shaping the field of stars into a sharper and more condensed energy blade form! The First Sword momentarily looked as if she was wielding a sword that was over three times as long as the Decapitator! The alien heavy cruiser detected the huge threat posed by the expert mech and directed numerous secondary and tertiary gun batteries towards the approaching machine. However, the First Sword easily resisted the tertiary weapons fire with her resonance shield and easily evaded the more powerful attacks launched by the secondary warship weapons. The expert swordsman mech soon came close enough to launch her charged attack! Both the expert pilot and the expert mech roared at the same time! "CUT!" [CUT!] The enormous blade made out of thousands of miniature stars made contact with a half-depleted transphasic energy shield and tore right through as if the barrier was made out of paper! The First Sword charged straight through the gap she had just made before the wheednar vessel had any chance of plugging the gap. Now that the expert mech managed to get inside the main defensive envelope of the alien heavy cruiser, she had free reign to cut down all of the gun batteries that had suddenly become vulnerable! Ketis already shifted her attention away from the live feed. She had absolute trust in Venerable Dise and her fellow Swordmaidens. She instead chose to complete her calculations based on the data gathered just a little bit earlier. The Stormblade Samurais depleted their energy reserves a lot faster, but the gains were more than worth it. Their offensive threat against warships were simply too great to pass up, especially in an age where battles against shielded warships would only become more common! While the Stormblade Samurai had yet to test its mettle against opposing mechs and other types of enemies, the new model's effectiveness against the transphasic energy shields of warships had already been confirmed! "We need to equip our Swordmaidens with more stormblade weapons!"