Chapter 6019 Alien Adaptations 6019 Alien Adaptations "We've found them, commander! We've found the aliens!" "The Torment Fleet fell right into our trap, ma'am! Our new warp interdictors are working better than expected, ma'am." "Don't let the enemy warships advance on our starships! The more vessels we lose, the weaker our suppression of space. We cannot allow them to reactivate their warp drives!" "Commander, the Gorgoneion has just gotten hit by a massive strike! A large breach has emerged across her starboard side. The capital ship is falling out of formation! Half of her thrusters are gone and she has lost contact with hundreds of crew members." "Identify the cause!" Commander Casella Ingvar barked as she interfaced with her trusty Minerva expert command mech. "It's bad! The Eminence of Torment has just emerged, and the strength he has displayed is much higher than we predicted! The intelligence is wrong!" That caused the battlefield commander of the Larkinson Army to feel bad. "Has he been rewarded with a PPS and promoted to a greater phase lord recently?!" "No, but he is not a defective phase lord who failed to ascend into a phase lord. His body is tall and vigorous, and he does not appear to be in pain. His true body is as tall as a juggernaut, and he is able to launch spatial ripple attacks that can breach through any transphasic energy or transphasic hull plating with ease. According to our observation and analysis, the Eminence of Torment's phasewater concentration is likely within the range of a mid-tier lesser phase lord." A mid-tier lesser phase lord! The Trampler of Stars that the expeditionary fleet fought against a long time ago used to hover around that strength. However, just because the Larkinsons managed to handle such an opponent did not mean that all mid-tier lesser phase lords could be treated in the same fashion. Just like there was a huge degree of variance between ace pilots, so did phase lords! Some excelled at creating powerful spatial storms from a distance. Others excelled at brawling other powerful foes up close. Phase whales and phase lords had a long tradition in the Red Ocean, and they had managed to explore many different ways of leveraging the power of phasewater. As the Minerva launched from the hangar bay of the Spirit of Bentheim, the expert command mech immediately trained her sensors onto the Eminence of Torment in the distance. Casella's eyes widened as she understood why the lesser phase lord managed to land such a powerful blow onto the Gorgoneion. "Is that… a warship wrapped around his body?!" 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚 "Yes, ma'am! When we managed to interdict the Torment Fleet, the Eminence of Torment appeared from his flagship, reached his true size and flew right towards one of the sub- capital ships of the Torment Fleet. That ship subsequently split into several large pieces before molding onto the Eminence's humanoid body similar to a suit of combat armor. The ship raiment is most certainly designed for his use. It fits too well to his dimensions, and the fact that the Eminence can synergize many of his inherent abilities with the transphasic parts of his gigantic armor has multiplied his combat effectiveness by several times! Just his defenses alone are much harder to overcome!" That became evident when the completely armored form of the giant juggernaut-sized phase lord was surrounded by both a spatial barrier and multiple layers of segmented transphasic energy shields! Even though these were old-style transphasic energy shields, their combined defensive properties could not be underestimated! It was through this protection that the Eminence of Torment managed to resist the piercing blows from the Royal Jeem! "I decree that your power generators have become exhausted." Saint Kalasandra Boojay's powerful Saint Kingdom attempted to weaken the power supply of the Eminence's massive suit. This was a clever decision as the enormous ship raiment immediately started to weaken in every aspect. Not only did its transphasic energy shields lose a bit of strength, but the very odd cannons mounted on the orven phase lord's arms took longer to charge up and launch terrifying space ripple attacks. However, the Boojay Saint was unable to eliminate the threat posed by the Eminence of Torment! Unlike warships, the Eminence of Torment was a lot more flexible and capable of repelling enemies at closer ranges. Even though the Royal Jeem was protected by its own Saint Kingdom, the Eminence constantly utilized his massive limbs to smash aside the ace mech and reduce its maneuvering space. The Eminence also possessed a range of phasewater organs that granted him the ability to disturb the local space, create localized spatial storms and even tear space apart. The orven phase lord was a far cry from the weak and almost disabled alien leader as described by all of the rumors! The intelligence was completely wrong! Many aliens didn't know any better and had been completely fooled by the false rumors spread by the Eminence and his direct subordinates! Although the Royal Jeem's powerful space suppressor and Saint Kingdom were able to work together to weaken the effects of all of these spatial attacks, they weren't able to make the ace mech immune. Furthermore, the Eminence of Torment's embrace of technology went beyond using the hull of a homeship as his armor. Some of the relatively compact but powerful gun batteries had been especially designed to maintain their operation even after they had been shifted to the phase lord's shoulders and other parts of his body! Dozens of warship-grade cannons attempted to strike the Royal Jeem as the ace spearman mech constantly sought to wear down the armored phase lord's defenses. "Graser cannons!" The power and potency of graser weapons was much higher than ordinary laser cannons! Both of them relied on concentrated electromagnetic radiation to inflict damage, but the former relied on very energetic and lethal gamma rays, while the latter mostly relied on a lot of visible light or infrared rays. It was very clear which of the two was deadlier than the others! The humans of the modern era had very little exposure to graser cannons as they were considered taboo by the Big Two and the Red Two. However, the native aliens never agreed to adopt the same taboos, so they clearly had no qualms about mounting graser cannons onto their warships. The only reasons why the aliens rarely made use of them was because they were much more demanding and expensive to build and mount onto their warships. Only high-end alien warships tended to mount them in place of cheaper and less demanding laser cannons! Although the Eminence of Torment never built up a good reputation in the alien galactic community, he had obviously hidden his strength much deeper than anyone realized! Not only that, but he likely received enough support from the Red Cabal to be able to commission a powerful ship raiment equipped with graser cannons! The mech designers and engineers serving on the expeditionary fleet could quickly determine that the tech and materials used to make the graser cannons originated from the puelmer race. The ball-like aliens mastered the most advanced tech in the Red Ocean! Not only that, but the puelmers were also good at miniaturizing their technologies. They were quite adept at mounting more compact weapon systems onto their relatively small homeships that could still pack a sizable punch! Although the graser cannons mounted across the surface of the Eminence's armored suit were not particularly accurate, each hit or near-hit constantly consumed the Royal Jeem's energies and made it more difficult for the ace mech to wear down the segmented transphasic energy shields. Even though the ace mech's blessed weapon was able to tear one of more segmented transphasic energy shields with every serious blow, the Eminence of Torment always adapted quickly and allowed his spatial barrier to tank follow-up attacks, thereby giving time for his transphasic energy shield generators to recover. "The Eminence of Torment and the Royal Jeem are locked into a duel. Neither of them are able to breach each other's defenses, so they have fallen into a stalemate. However, the Eminence of Torment is still able to divert enough attention to launch space ripple attacks at our starships from time to time. We have already lost two combat carriers to the Eminence while one of our other fleet carriers has lost an entire hangar bay from his most powerful strikes." "Can the Jedda Sandivar reinforce the Royal Jeem?" "Saint Marissa Lewandowski is the only ace mech that is suppressing the most powerful alien hulls of the Torment Fleet. It has unexpectedly been reinforced by a squadron of modern battleships equipped with stolen human technologies! They even have hyper technology!" Hyper technology! As time went by, more and more alien warships came equipped with different versions of hyper technology. Even though the aliens were not as good at technological innovation as the humans, the former possesses a lot of scientists. They were bound to be geniuses and innovators among them puelmers, orvens, nunsers and even the arche. On top of that, multiple cells of the Cosmopolitan Movement continued to transfer many human technologies to the Red Cabal in a misguided attempt to force red humanity to abandon its human supremacy ideals. Although the cosmopolitans had not managed to come close to attaining their goals so far, their acts of treason caused a lot of pain and misery to the soldiers responsible for fighting against the aliens. This time, the expeditionary fleet had suffered major blows from these alien hyper battleships! They absorbed E energy radiation from the environment and used that to empower their azure energy shields and fire considerably more lethal hyper transphasic attacks. Their sensor systems, fire control systems, ECM systems and targeting systems had also been modernized to near-human standards. All of these technological improvements made the gun batteries of the alien hyper battleships considerably more accurate than was typical of orven vessels! The consequence of all of this was that none of the starships of the expeditionary fleet could fend off their powerful attack salvos! In order to prevent these powerful alien hyper battleships from crippling the expeditionary fleet from afar, the Jedda Sandivar had little choice but to spread its Saint Kingdom as far and wide as possible to engulf one of multiple threatening hulls in a highly disorienting mist. While Saint Marissa Lewandowski was steadily able to grind down the defenses of the suppressed hyper battleships by joining forces with other friendly mech units, the expeditionary fleet would suffer a lot more damage as soon as the Jedda Sandivar left to reinforce the Royal Jeem! The mech forces of the expeditionary fleet tried their best to assist the pilots, but most of them had little choice but to hold back the remainder of the fairly powerful Torment Fleet. Many of the homeships of the Torment Fleet originally hailed from the orven race, so the vessels were much better constructed than the typical junk ships fielded by the more disposable alien raiding fleets. As Legion Commander Casella Ingvar had already spread her Command Field and began to Commandeer thousands of Bright Warriors, Fey Fiannas and other ranged Larkinson mechs, her Commandeered mech troops urgently fired their resonance-empowered attacks at the hyper battleships. Despite amplifying thousands of attacks with her true resonance, the Living Sentinels under her command were unable to produce immediate results. The other mech units were working hard as well. The Transcendent Punisher Mark III's and the Zeal were making good progress in wearing down the mid-sized alien homeships. The Avatars of Myth under the leadership of Legion Commander Melkor had advanced on the smaller and more mobile alien sub-capital ships. The space suppressors tacked onto the melee mechs of the Avatars made it much easier to overcome the defenses of the enemy ships than before, but they could not attack with impunity due to enemy interference. "Phasefighters! Those unarmed alien cargo ships turned out to be makeshift carrier vessels. They are in the process of launching thousands of phasefighters!" "How many?!" "They have already launched 6000 of them, and we estimate that they have at least 1200 more in their cargo holds!"