After struggling for decades to defy his original fate, break past his seemingly impenetrable bottleneck and forge a new future for himself, he finally succeeded! General Ark Larkinson managed to break through! The unmistakable signs of a second apotheosis had gripped the Lionheart. The expert command mech never looked brighter, dazzling and more magnificent than today. As a light-attributed hyper masterwork mech, the lion-headed machine had always had a morale-boosting effect on nearby soldiers. Now, that effect was amplified by at least an order of magnitude! Those who stared closely at the Lionheart instinctively felt that it was the right decision for them to admire and worship the expert command mech or more precisely the brand new ace pilot that used it as his vessel. It was hard for both humans and aliens to ignore the presence of the Lionheart. Despite its limitations as an expert mech, the valiant machine was explicitly designed to attract attention. General Ark’s breakthrough clearly played into this trait and amplified it with his surging willpower! Though the Lionheart currently shone almost just as brightly as the Amaranto Mark III at the beginning of this battle, the way the two treated the light element were completely different. Saint Davia Stark never wanted to produce a spectacle. The light radiating from her unconventional archemech was a byproduct of her incredible ability to absorb and concentrate an extreme amount of light energies into her mech frame and Instrument of Vengeance. Light was a resource and a weapon to the Amaranto Mark III. Neither the pilot and machine held any special thoughts or beliefs about the property of light. They mostly saw it as a form of energy that they could shape into a lethal energy beam that could travel at a blazingly fast speed and penetrate through any target in their sights! In contrast, General Ark and the Lionheart treated light as a complimentary tool. Light drew attention. Light was able to direct where people looked at stuff. Light made everything that shone under its rays look good. It was for these reasons and more that General Ark had taken a liking of the light element. Heroes fought under the light, while villains crawled in the darkness. Previously, General Ark always struggled to attract the most attention while he was fighting in large battles. It was difficult for him to remain at the center of attention when there were hundreds of thousands of small craft whipping around, of which dozens comprised of expert mechs and even ace mechs! The latter were especially effective at stealing his thunder. Prior to his breakthrough, the Amaranto Mark III, the Amphis Extremis, the Minerva Mark I and the First Sword Mark II hogged most of the attention. The worst part about it was that General Ark couldn’t blame the masses for keeping their eyes on all of those machines. The Amaranto Mark III only remained active for a short amount of time, but had contributed the most to this battle so far by eliminating an orven lesser phase lord! The latter three machines stepped up from there by directly confronting the two greater phase lords! Saint Linda Cross was the only ace pilot with a proper ace mech in the star system. She had taken on the most burdensome task of holding back the Herald of the Void by any means necessary. As an envoy of the Red Cabal, the Herald of the Void was a considerably better developed jureg greater phase lord than usual. He had access to more powerful and specialized phasewater organs. He not only developed his physical body to withstand a lot of damage and inflict a lot of it in return, but also developed a few powerful spatial abilities that complimented his fighting style. The Herald of the Void fought like a crustacean-shaped battering ram. His fanatical loyalty to the phase whales compelled him to push through all of the attacks that battered his spatial barrier and head straight towards the orbital defense ring that served as the bulwark of human resistance in the star system. So long as he personally battered much of the orbital defenses into pieces, it became untenable for red humanity to continue the fight! Against an opponent that appeared to be nearly unstoppable, only the Amphis Extremis had a chance of holding back his advance, and only on a temporary basis. The Amphis Extremis was not a proper match against the Herald of the Void, but Saint Linda Cross somehow did a decent job with the help of fire support from the Knights and Barons empowered by the Saint Commander. That still left another greater phase lord. The Lower Herdmaster did not possess the same degree of resilience and momentum as the Herald of the Void, but his threat level was arguably just as high! This was because the Lower Herdmaster had been awarded with a Saint Piercer arm. The greater phase lord wielded his superdimensional weapon with considerable skill and power. Even the formidable defenses of the Amphis Extremis could not block the incredible penetration power of this confounding weapon! Amazingly enough, Saint Dise Larkinson and her outdated First Sword Mark II somehow managed to distract and slow down the advance of the Lower Herdmaster. Similar to Venerable Rosa Orfan, Saint Dise squeezed out all of the performance she could out of her First Sword and her masterwork Decapitator. The difference between the two Larkinson pilots was that Saint Dise was simply much better at it. Her resonance strength alone was stronger by at least an order of magnitude, and that made a huge difference! Together with her Saint Kingdom, she was not only able to defy reality to a much greater extent, but also leverage a lot more metal E energy from the environment! As a Domain Shaper who developed a strong affinity for the metal element, the recently emerged ace pilot was already capable of reinforcing her expert mech to a certain extent even if the machine was not explicitly designed for this purpose. The First Sword moved faster and was able to endure far greater stresses than usual. It was not just her armor system that had become a lot tougher and more damage resistant than usual. One of the tricks that Saint Dise applied to her old battle partner was to reinforce the internals with lots of metal energy! Combined with her powerful true resonance, this effectively allowed Dise to get away with pushing the First Sword way past her safe levels! These extreme measures were not enough to allow the First Sword to close the distance to a real ace mech such as the Amphis Extremis, but they were barely enough to allow the expert swordsman mech to dance around the Lower Herdmaster! It was good that the First Sword had been designed to function as a relatively agile, responsive and maneuverable expert mech, because Saint Dise needed everything she could use to evade the fatal stabs of the greater phase lord’s Saint Piercer! Saint Dise had fought many exobeasts and other enemies that were more powerful than herself. She showed no fear or hesitation as she repeatedly pushed the First Sword beyond her limits just so that she could evade the incoming Saint Piercer once more. In order to prevent the Lower Herdmaster from ignoring the First Sword entirely, Saint Dise did not dare to fight too passively and actively directed her machine to charge forward and deliver a couple of devastating strikes onto the greater phase lord’s spatial barrier! The power of the Decapitator when it was fully empowered by her true resonance and lots of metal energy had become formidable enough that the Lower Herdmaster could not ignore its threat! Another reason why the Lower Herdmaster was not able to ignore the First Sword was because the machine also carried a space suppressor that worked far more effectively than usual because its effects were amplified by ace pilot-grade true resonance! Even if the space element was not Saint Dise’s forte, she was still able to weaken and dampen a part of the greater phase lord’s comprehensive spatial capabilities with her space suppression field and Saint Kingdom. Once the Lower Herdmaster recognized the threat and inconvenience posed by the First Sword and tried to eliminate the expert mech in earnest, Saint Dise’s situation became a lot more precarious. The greater phase lord was too strong, and possessed just enough skill with polearms to be able to bring the tip of the Saint Piercer closer and closer towards the First Sword. She needed help in order to stay in the fight! The remote fire support from the Knights and Barons of the Saint Commander provided a bit of relief. The additional firepower provided by the orbital defense ring helped as well, but not enough as most of it was needed to pummel the advancing alien warships. This was where the Lionheart initially made itself useful. General Ark Larkinson bravely but foolishly tried to intervene in the fight against the Lower Herdmaster. Though the then-expert pilot had made the resolve to become the shining knight in armor that he had always envisioned himself as, when he finally began to help Saint Dise in holding back the Lower Herdmaster, he found that he had severely overestimated his capabilities! The integrated luminar crystal cannons spat out light beam after light beam, but but the effects were fairly minimal due to the greater phase lord’s formidable strength. The Lionheart’s space suppressor was having a bit of an effect, but it was miniscule compared to the effects of the First Sword’s own space suppressor due to the disparity in resonance strength! As for direct attacks, General Ark had made one attempt to attack the Lower Herdmaster with the Lionheart’s Cleansing Light, and almost got pierced through the cockpit for his troubles! The striking range of the hyper plasma sword in its regular active state was too short! If not for the fact that the Lower Herdmaster took the First Sword a lot more seriously than the Lionheart, it was doubtful whether General Ark would have survived at that time. After he learned his lesson, General Ark had withdrawn much of his arrogance and took on a more cautious approach. His Lionheart shut off and put away the Cleansing Light and wielded its transphasic hyper spear instead. The Lionheart subsequently tried to serve as another distraction by performing charge attacks whenever the Lower Herdmaster had overcommitted in his attempts to impale the First Sword! The charge attacks did not inflict that much damage on the greater phase lord’s spatial barrier, but they were enough to relieve a bit of pressure for Saint Dise. General Ark was not satisfied with this contribution, though. He was not fulfilling his objective by being the brightest star on the battlefield. The three ace pilots that were currently active on the battlefield rightfully earned most of the glory from this battle due to being the main reasons why the greater phase lords weren’t able to advance and kill everyone else! As for General Ark, his Lionheart was unable to outshine the mechs of the three. His contribution to the fight was so low that he felt he was being relegated to a side character! This was intolerable to an expert pilot that was determined to become the object of admiration and worship by his subordinates and other soldiers on the battlefield! Ark had already been thinking about suspending his attempts to steal the show by attacking the Lower Herdmaster. There had to be another way for him to find his calling and make a much more meaningful impact on the battlefield. It was only when he saw the Riot and subsequently the Bastion getting overwhelmed by the much larger plasma sword wielded by the orven lesser phase lord that General Ark suddenly made an important realization! "I am not just a mech pilot." He was a mech commander. He was responsible for the safety and wellbeing of all of the soldiers of the 77th Warborn Mech Division. This included Venerable Rosa Orfan, who had decided to transfer to his mech division along with a couple of other Larkinson expert pilots. Though General Ark never maintained a close relationship with Venerable Orfan, he still considered her to be one of his key assets and subordinates. As long as she was in trouble, Ark had an obligation to bail her out so long as doing so did not compromise his other objectives! After he made this critical realization, General Ark suddenly felt as if he had fit the final piece of the puzzle that prevented him from rising above his current limitations. As long as he remained the strongest combatant in the 77th Warborn Mech Division, he had an obligation to step up and bear the greatest burden! The main reason why he had always been so desperate to pursue greater strength was so that he could deal with the strongest enemies and prevent them from directing their lethality towards his subordinates! To allow an enemy champion to kill one of his subordinates in front of him was not only an affront, but also a failure to a responsible mech commander like himself! "I have already failed Imon Ingvar once. I will not fail Rosa Orfan if it is the last thing I do!" The Lionheart abandoned the effort to assist and reinforce the First Sword without warning and instantly flew towards Zren-Divar for the purpose of relieving the Riot and the Bastion! "Wait for me! Your savior is coming!"