Chapter 6673 Larkinsons Outmatched Alien phasefighters used to be considered a joke. At the start, the aliens trotted them out in order to stop mechs from surrounding and whacking their homeships with impunity. The alien craft performed badly because the humans were not used to fighting with strike craft to such a refined degree. The primitive alien strike craft doctrines were adequate for the low-level conflicts that they fought between themselves, but proved completely inadequate when fighting against a race that spent four centuries perfecting the use of mechs in multiple levels of warfare! No one considered alien phasefighters to be a joke now. While they still possessed similar characteristics as before, their designs had improved considerably. Their transphasic energy shields turned into more superior azure energy shields. The native aliens finally began to put more emphasis into training their fighter pilots. The many hard lessons they learned on the frontlines caused them to evolve their strike craft doctrines at a rapid pace. The relatively small battle taking place in a specific section of an asteroid belt in the Viola Magnifica System taught red humanity that alien phasefighters had moved on from being a joke to becoming a real threat! Even though only 21 elite phasefighters demonstrated traits that were powerful enough to overwhelm ordinary mechs, that was already more than what this contingent of the Larkinson Army could handle! Melkor cursed under his breath. If he had been careful enough to bring an expert pilot. along, then the puelmer combination gunships wouldn't have been able to down so many mechs and end the lives of so many clansmen. However, the expert pilots had their own responsibilities to deal with. There was no good reason to divert them to the asteroid belt where only skirmishes were supposed to take place. The planners did not anticipate that both sides would consolidate their scattered units in order to conduct a proper fight! Melkor partially regretted his decision to take this action. He was able to accept the destruction of living mechs. As precious as they were, the machines were generally okay with dying so long as they fulfilled their functions to the end. What he could not accept was that his greed to strengthen his cultivation and gain the Larkinson mech pilots. 11 Around a thousand Avatar, Vandal, Swordmaiden and Penitent Sister mech pilots entrusted their lives and futures to Melkor, but he had failed to lead them properly. He underestimated the threat posed by the puelmer elite phasefighters. Their state-of-the-art hybrid human and alien tech was far beyond what a good second-class mech force could handle! Melkor did not remain idle. He continued to issue orders and attempted to reposition the forces in an attempt to open up a chink in the alien armor, but to no avail. The aliens not only had plenty of well-shielded cannon fodder to throw at the mechs, but the puelmer combination gunships always seemed to know which mech units posed the greatest and most acute threat. Their scarily accurate and powerful cannon barrages regularly shattered quasi-first-class mechs or at least managed to drive them away. The difference in firepower between the two sides was so great that it may end up deciding the outcome of this battle by itself! This was an amazing prediction given the strength of the Larkinson mechs. The Larkinson mechs attempted to make use of their trump cards. The Avatars invoked numerous design spirits to give them an edge against their opponents. While their mechs did become stronger as a result, the boost was not enough to make them last longer in the face of the absolute firepower advantage by the puelmer combination gunships! Dozens of Swordmaiden mechs came together in order to perform a battle formation, yet they had to scatter in advance as the prepared puelmer craft launch extremely potent transphasic missiles at the rigid formation of swordsman mechs! The puelmers had proven with their tech and responses that they were not only familiar with the Larkinson Army's battle tactics, but also prepared counters to neutralize them as effectively as possible! The Energy Weaver Mech Ecosystem that Ves frequently touted as a trump card of the Larkinson Clan was having an effect. Mech units that had cooperated and fought alongside each other for months tried to coordinate their maneuvers so that they were able to combine their forces and assert control over a large amount of E energy radiation around their formations. They were generating pseudo-domains around themselves! With the conscious efforts of the living mechs as well as their mech pilots, they began to produce metaphysical phenomena that no other machines could generate at this time! most authoritative mech officers in a unit took charge of the formation and tried to leverage all of the E energy into amplifying the attacks or the defenses of mechs so that they could put up a better fight. Mechs that previously struggled to overwhelm the defenses of phasefighters began to produce results a bit faster as their attacks destabilized the enemy azure energy shields significantly better than before. The more creative among the mech officers tried to shape E energy into other forms, such as decoys that could attract firepower or create a translucent cat construct that was able to frighten the less experienced alien fighter pilots! While these measures made a difference, the use of the Energy Weaver Mech Ecosystem only allowed the Larkinsons to narrow the gap instead of closing it entirely! "This isn't working! As long as those puelmer combination gunships keep making use of their advanced tech and guns, our measures aren't enough to take them down!" The feeling of getting countered at every turn made the Larkinson mech pilots lose their confidence even faster than before. If they weren't able to properly leverage their strengths, then how were they supposed to win this battle? Loss of confidence was a fatal outcome in any battle! As Commander Melkor saw that his forces were becoming increasingly more disarrayed, he realized that his soldiers were not taking this situation well. They had rarely ended up in situations where they had lost so much initiative and control. They also weren't used to fighting without the cover of allied units or powerful champions. This should actually be a situation that could best stimulate the breakthrough of a desperate mech pilot, but unfortunately for the Larkinsons, no such event had occurred by this time. It was quite logical for their morale to drop. Melkor felt as if he was out of his league. He not only made mistakes before the start of this battle, but he also failed to make the right responses. He couldn't help but suspect that if a more competent and impressive mech commander such as Saint Commander Casella Ingvar was in charge, the Larkinsons would have been able to gain the upper hand by this time! Was Melkor even cut out for this job? He was just an ordinary Larkinson who rose up from his third-class roots, but never fully managed to keep up with the brightest talents of the clan. troops in battle more than ever he had done in the past. "I am letting my impostor syndrome fill my head with doubts again." He was aware that this was detrimental behavior, but he couldn't help it. Melkor was intimately familiar with this mental condition as he never felt he fully measured up compared to much more successful mech pilots and mech commanders. In a clan that was filled with a multitude of talents who had managed to realize their potential, it was hard for relatively ordinary and mediocre Larkinsons to feel strong and capable enough to matter. Right now, Melkor felt frozen by indecision. The only other way he could change the situation besides ordering a retreat was to activate the spell array that his mechs deployed in advance. The problem was that he felt a lot less confident about being able to contain the enemy and complete the ritual. The firepower of the enemy elite phasefighters exceeded his estimations. While Melkor did not understand spell arrays to a great degree, he roughly understood that the basic one that he procured from the Red Collective was not designed to resist so much firepower! With no good choices available to him, Melkor felt paralyzed and helpless to stop his forces from suffering a defeat at the hands of the aliens. Getting beaten by alien phasefighters was not that uncommon nowadays. There was not much shame in getting defeated by them. Many mech forces that were active in the frontlines had suffered losses in the past. The Larkinson Army was different. The premier armed forces of the Larkinson Clan boasted excellent talents, superior living mechs and equipment, excellent maintenance and abundant high-level support. The Larkinson mech pilots had rarely suffered any true defeats since the start of the Red War. Melkor did not want to contribute to the first truly catastrophic loss of the Larkinson Army. As the pressure of the deteriorating situation continued to weigh down on his shoulders, he suddenly froze as he made a realization. "What am I doing?" Instead of trying to figure out a proper response to the disadvantageous situation his troops had fallen into, he was procrastinating like an incompetent idiot. This was not what a proper mech commander should engage in at this time! Even if he harbored doubts about his qualifications to command a mech force, he needed to compartmentalize all of his distractions and deal with them after the battle He remembered that he was not an ordinary red human. He was a Larkinson. He was a member of the best clan in the Red Ocean! There was no way he and his fellow clansmen would allow the native aliens to drive them away like ragged beggars! An angry fire lit inside Melkor's heart. He immediately activated a communication channel and began to broadcast his words to every mech under his command! "LARKINSONS! Stand fast and do not give up! The native aliens have caught us by surprise with their amazing tech, but our mechs are not weak either! We are the vanquishers of gods! Our mech forces have managed to slay dark gods as well as native gods over the course of multiple battles in the past! Are we going to allow these ball-shaped alien losers to trample over our dignity and tear down our pride? Not a chance! Remember who you are! We are Larkinsons! We belong to the strongest and most successful clan in the Red Ocean! Our living mechs are the envy of red humanity! Trust in your battle partners and they shall reward you with their performance. Trust in my command and I shall lead you to victory! For the clan!" "FOR THE CLAN!" "For the Golden Cat!" "FOR THE GOLDEN CAT!" 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞 "For victory!" "FOR VICTORY!" Yelling a few slogans might sound trivial, but had a marvelous effect of reversing the decline in morale and boosting everyone's spirits. However, Melkor was well aware that the effects of his speech would only remain temporary if he did not capitalize on this momentary advantage. This was why he was ready to turn the tables on the native aliens! "Do not lose hope, men. There is still a pathway towards victory. Be prepared to follow my commands as best as possible. We need to position our forces and the enemy forces precisely according to my new plan if we want to make our Larkinson name proud!" Melkor did not bother to use his voice to issue verbal commands as it was too slow for his needs. He directly used his neural interface to upload a set of orders and movement commands to the different mech units that were still active on the battlefield. Soon, hundreds of mechs and phasefighters began to shift across the asteroid-filled battlefield like moving chess pieces. Almost every element was moving exactly as Melkor envisioned.