5038 Expert Mechs Showing Their Might The famous Death Phase Formation that the Penitent Sisters and the Glory Seekers often relied upon to wipe out large swathes of mechs and starship crews instantly shifted the direction of the battle! Although the strong faith of the wheednar crew members firmed up their spiritualities under the influence of exotic radiation, not enough time had passed for this strengthening effect to save too many of them from Helena's might! Besides, the female mech pilots held an even more fanatical faith towards the Daughter of Death. Their focused and uniform beliefs towards Helena enabled them to channel her powerful and deathly strength at significantly greater efficiencies! All in all, only a small proportion of alien crew members had any hope of surviving the devastating death waves, and even then they did not manage to survive unscathed. Each affected vessel easily folded in the following minutes. Even if the ships managed to resist the onslaught of hundreds of mechs, their automated systems were unable to keep up with the rapidly changing circumstances. The lack of manual direction and operations quickly caused their transphasic energy shields to break and their hulls to become completely exposed! The mechs of the Golden Skull Alliance did not demolish the vulnerable ships entirely, but instead chose to limit the damage by disabling the gun batteries and destroying a few other important systems such as the thrusters and any easily accessible power generators. It was a lot more lucrative to salvage the starships when they were still close to intact! It may even be possible to convert them to human use if the Golden Skull Alliance happened to possess suitable Warship Tokens! In any case, the remaining wheednars stationed on the unaffected vessels became more desperate when they learned what happened. "The gods have already foretold our doom. We must die in order for our home planet to live!" "Do not lament your demise! As long as you can drag down at least one evil human with you, our race shall persist!" Although the wheednar race possessed many common flaws, the soldiers assigned to this raiding mission knew what was at stake. They did not falter or despair when they realized that there was no way for them to win or escale from this battle. Instead, they threw themselves into their duties with even greater fervor than before! Their belief in the native gods that had brought the entire Red Ocean out of the clutches of the Great Hive peaked yet again! Their common desire to protect their homeland and prevent the humans from ever posing a threat against race pushed them to fight to the bitterend! The resistance from the remaining alien warships only intensified as their transphasic energy shields came under greater stress. More and more mechs smashed into pieces or vaporized into nothing as the vengeful alien warships directly managed to strike them with their enormous gun batteries, but there were simply too many humanoid machines to wipe them all out in this manner! As the standard mech units of the Golden Skull Alliance continued to wear down the defenses of the remaining dozens or so warships, the high-ranking mechs demonstrated their might in various different ways! For example, the Amaranto that had remained behind in the expeditionary fleet was one of the few machines that was able to offer effective support at extreme range. The powerful masterwork expert mech occupied a newly added bunker on the refitted Spirit of Bentheim. At this time, the gigantic Golden Cat head mounted on the prow of the factory slightly opened its maw in order to open up a small gun port. This gun port was just large enough to fit the muzzle of the Instrument of Doom! As Venerable Davia Stark resonated with her living mech as well as the powerful transphasic luminar cannon, she spent an entire minute on adjusting her aim as it was extremely difficult to land an accurate shot at such an exaggerated range. At the same time, she resonated with the Phase King and requested for the design spirit to bless her Instrument of Doom and boost its penetration power! Once the expert pilot felt she was close to completing her firing solution, she barked out a single instruction over the command net. "Open up a window and get out of the way!" Hundreds of mechs that were swarming around a particularly resilient wheednar heavy cruiser suddenly withdrew and put more space between themselves and the target vessel. Other mechs that happened to be positioned in the Amaranto's firing line received urgent instructions to make their way out as well! Only after all of these mechs had cleared out did Venerable Stark finally pull the trigger. "FIRE!" A blindingly bright and thick laser beam escaped from the mouth of the Golden Cat head! If other people did not know any better, then they would have thought that the Larkinson Clan had violated the taboo against warships! The might and penetration power of the blessed and resonance-empowered transphasic laser beam far surpassed that of any ordinary mech or even expert mech for that matter! Some of its properties even managed to catch up with the power of a serious attack of an ace mech! Venerable Stark's aim held true. The laser beam crossed thousands of kilometers at the speed of light and struck so close to the center of the heavy cruiser's silhouette that practically no one else in the fleet could have done any better! The weakened segmented transphasic energy shield could not withstand an attack of this magnitude. The true resonance and phasewater empowering the thick laser beam were so substantial that the alien warship's main defensive barrier folded in an instant! Though the laser beam had lost most of its power after overcoming this obstacle, the vulnerable hull fared poorly against the energies that remained! The still-potent attack burned and phased through dozens of compartments as the relatively weaker hull structure proved much less adequate at withstanding a strike of this magnitude! The heavy cruiser started to malfunction shortly after the attack had passed. The crew received too much of a shock and the laser beam had destroyed enough systems to disrupt the operation of the rest of the vessel. As multiple transphasic energy shields started to falter, the surrounding mechs quickly turned around and descended onto the vulnerable alien warship like vultures! Elsewhere, the Everchanger had broken off from the Penitent Sisters. The Valkyrie mech pilots had exhausted most of their mental energies after executing their iconic battle formation. Venerable Joshua hardly consumed himself, and his Everchanger still hungered for battle. "TIMES HAVE CHANGED, JOSHUA. YOU CANNOT BE AS SOFT-HEARTED AS BEFORE. RED HUMANITY IS UNDER THREAT OF GOING EXTINCT, AND THESE ALIENS HAVE ALREADY TAKEN THE FIRST STEP OF MAKING THIS HAPPEN BY WIPING OUT THE NEARBY COLONY." "I know that, Everchanger. Don't worry. I won't hold back this time." Joshua responded. Although Joshua wished for a future where humans and aliens could forgo their hatreds and live in peace with each other, the current climate obviously did not allow for that to happen. Now that red humanity had been cut off from the Milky Way, every indigenous alien became eager to wipe out the outnumbered invaders! Even if Joshua had come to value all life, it was clear that he had no choice but to fight for red humanity's survival first before he could pursue any greater aspirations! As the sensors of his Everchanger clearly observed the cratered and ruined human settlement on the surface of the nearby planet, Joshua built up a greater animosity towards these wheednars. The aliens who slaughtered innocent human colonists en masse did not deserve his mercy! "Let us drive them crazy, Everchanger!" "I WAS WAITING FOR THAT." His living expert mech responded with great enthusiasm. The pilot and his expert mech had cooperated so much together that they instantly knew what to do next. The Everchanger flew towards the densest remaining concentration of alien warships. Though the recent battle formation attacks had spooked the wheednars so much that they drove their starships away from each other, the Everchanger still managed to find a good position between two struggling alien light cruisers. The Everchanger proceeded to rotate his design spirit over to Zeigra, Lufa and Qilanxo. This classic combination produced a selective disorientation glow that the Ferocious Piranhas and the Doom Guards were already using to excellent effect! However, their effectiveness against warships was rather limited as the range of their suppressive glows only reached the outer compartments of most of the alien vessels on the battlefield. The Everchanger was different though. As soon as Venerable Joshua resonated with the Iridescent Mercury integrated with his expert mech, the radius of the glow amplified by many times! An invisible globe expanded around the expert hero mech and enveloped the two nearby light cruisers! Though the vessels did not show any apparent changes, the wheednars stationed inside of them screamed and used their forelimbs to grasp at their alien heads! The alternating glows of Lufa and Zeigra drove each of them crazy as they continually became affected by the impressively powerful statures of two potent design spirits! Only the strongest, oldest or most faithful leaders among them were able to maintain their wits while affected by this glow, but that was hardly enough to run the light cruisers at maximum efficiency! As the thousands of wheednar crew members continued to remain suppressed by the Everchanger's amplified glow, the surrounding mechs eagerly took advantage of the new situation and easily wore down the defenses of the two light cruisers! The only other action that the Everchanger took was to raise his Vitalus rifle and fire disruptor beams at one of the vessels in order to wear down her defenses faster. Elsewhere, the Promethea flew alongside the Star Dancer Mark II. Venerable Isobel Kotin and Venerable Brutus Wodin had chosen to team up this time. The Promethea's Ignitron luminar crystal rifle continued to fire energy beams that produced powerful resonance-empowered explosions that severely strained the transphasic energy shield of an alien light cruiser. The Star Dancer's own Hexacris luminar crystal rifle fired a flurry of rapid energy beams that might not possess as much individual punch, but made up for it with a higher firing rate! The twin output of the two expert rifleman mechs quickly caused the alien warship to lose her defensive envelope! With the help of attacks launched by other mech units, the wheednar cruiser became fully exposed, enabling the two expert mechs to fully unleash their firepower! "Don't burn the ship, Isobel." Brutus gently reminded his fellow pilot as his expert mech precisely disabled the various gun batteries and other modules on the hull. "There won't be as much intact salvage left if you let your flames go wild." "You don't need to remind me, Hexer." The Promethea only blasted the largest and most resilient primary gun batteries of the exposed light cruiser with exploding positron beams before moving on to pressure another intact warship. As many different expert pilots worked to punch through the defenses of their prey and neutralize their threat towards the expeditionary fleet, one special individual belatedly entered the battlefield under a surprising amount of scrutiny. Nobody quite recognized the mech that had trailed the main wave mechs, but its appearance, design characteristics and IFF clearly identified it as another living mech from the Larkinson Clan. The mech looked like a standard mech at first glance, but it exuded a surprising amount of power for its construction. A small corona had formed around the exterior. Though it was faint, it showed that its pilot was anything but average! Inside the cockpit, an old but recently rejuvenated pilot closed his eyes. After over half a century of retirement, this old dog had finally returned to battle once again! "I missed this." The aged voice with a steel core spoke. "SO THIS IS WHAT COMBAT IS LIKE." The Blood Star responded to his aged battle partner. "IT IS... CHAOTIC. THESE WARSHIPS POSSESS FEARSOME ATTACKS." "That it is, but that is exactly why we need to participate. If we want to pursue greater strength, then we must be brave!" The Blood Star began to build up more momentum as Venerable Benjamin Larkinson began to refamiliarize himself with the excitement of combat! It was only now that he felt more alive than he had in decades!