The gravitic catapult of the Vulcan’s Glory proved effective! Sure, it behaved a little clunky, but it was nonetheless effective at inserting individual mechs deep into the heart of the enemy! The native aliens never imagined that a lone ace mech would descend into the heart of their moonbase like an unstoppable spear. The massive energy shield that was supposed to protect Karnak Base from battleship-grade armaments utterly failed to repel the superdimensional mech. The thick roof of one of the main structures that was rated to resist limited warship bombardment functioned no different than a mild speed bump. It actually helped the First Sword Mark III arrest her speed and prevent her mech frame from completely crashing through the ground floor and deep into the underground tunnels! Now, the metal monster had entered the midst of one of the alien strongholds in the star system. The native aliens still did not understand what was going on at that point. Nobody expected for a mech to arrive in such a sudden fashion. Shouldn’t the humans approach from afar with their mechs and warships and steadily advance forward while firing their guns? Melee mechs usually came into action much later. They could also be tracked from afar, making it so that the aliens wouldn’t be caught by surprise once they finally came close enough to swing their blades or other weapons. Nothing of the sort happened this time. Even now, every single alien soldier that was stationed in and around Screed Tanner VI-F still remained ignorant that one of the most dangerous mechs ever made in the Red Ocean had just arrived in their midst. Even the sensor systems of the heavily damaged structure failed to make heads or tails of the new arrival. They continually tried and failed to obtain any responses. Only a few more unusual sensors managed to obtain a few weak and abnormal returns, but none of them made any sense. The optical sensors could vaguely detect a solid metallic form surrounded by dozens of smaller metal blades. Those floating blades surrounded the larger mass like a protective swarm and also happened to break up its silhouette, which combined with all of the dust made it even harder to complete visual verification. Unlike the lifeless alien computer systems, the nearby surviving alien troopers had a better idea of what they faced. Many of their comrades had gotten crushed by the crashing ceiling or the shockwave produced by the sudden landing. However, the armored soldiers who stood further apart still managed to get saved by the buffer provided by their personal energy shields. Though many of them felt grateful that they managed to survive a strangely effective kinetic siege attack, their minds and souls soon became frozen as they sensed an entirely different threat, one that felt much more frightening than getting struck in a physical manner. This was because they had fallen into the Saint Kingdom of a human ace pilot. To humans and those that evoked no hostility from an ace pilot, entering a domain field was simply a mildly disturbing experience. It was as if a law enforcement officer had entered your mind and watched your every thought, word and move. No matter how much you tried to hide your intentions, an ace pilot could always find out the truth. This was what it meant to be in the domain of a saint. Even if ace pilots still had a long way to go before they attained genuine godhood, they already acquired a fraction of the power of one. This small preview may be trivial in comparison to a true human deity, but it was already enough to override the feeble mental defenses of most mortal beings! The near-absolute exposure associated with Saint Kingdoms was why most people preferred not to be around an ace mech that was actively being piloted. Almost no one could bear the scrutiny of a saint. Ordinary people were frail, mortal and weighed down by sins. Even if they knew it, they liked to keep their weaknesses private. Having an ace pilot strip all of their veils of secrecy and judge them in totality was a traumatic event to typical folk. What these aliens were being subjected to was way worse than that. Each of them were aliens. As footsoldiers in the service of the Protector of Karnak, who in turn answered to the Red Cabal, their racial makeups and backgrounds were extremely diverse. Although the Protector of Karnak clearly favored the recruitment of juregs, there were plenty of orvens, nunsers and other assorted races under his command. The only notable absence were puelmers, who universally rejected the divinity of phase leaders. The fact that those ball aliens remained staunch about this belief and managed to survive in the Red Ocean all of this time was suspicious. There had to be more behind this mystery, but few if any humans knew anything more. In any case, these alien soldiers all felt as if they had entered an imaginary field of swords. Even though such a thing clearly did not exist in reality, they felt as if making a single move would cause them to cut their bodies to pieces. Their combat armor gave them no reassurance that they could withstand these cuts! More than that, they felt as if they were being judged by an entity that they could only equate to a god. This was not the god they worshiped or served for so many years. The Protector of Karnak amazed them whenever he revealed his true body and became large enough to alter the orbit of the moon they were standing on at the moment. The sight of such a divine body was enough for these mortals to completely surrender to the obvious divinity of their lord and god. Yet now that they became subjected to a Saint Kingdom, they felt that their previous surrender was absurd. Although they had yet to glimpse the human god, they all instinctively felt that they had entered the presence of true divinity for the first time. They were lucky that ace pilots could not literally read their minds. Yet what this human god could sense from their emotions and intentions was already enough to make him, no her, mad! Many of the soldiers under the command of the Protector of Karnak had human blood on their alien appendages. The native aliens had conquered many planets stolen by the humans who arrived from another galaxy. Only a few cycles passed since they carved a foothold in the Red Ocean, and already trillions of filthy pink-skinned bipedals had come to transform the worlds into imitations of their distant homeworld. The alien soldiers all became outraged at what had happened. They channeled that fury in their treatment of the humans that resided in the worlds that had been conquered by their gods and homeships. Although it was most convenient to cleanse a world from its human infection by bombarding it wholesale, that was an extraordinarily wasteful process. It was much cheaper and easier to convert the world if it was dealt with more finesse and precision. Hence the reason why their gods ordered soldiers like them to make landfall and wipe out the human filth through conventional warfare. The forces serving under the Protector of Karnak had already done this on three human-occupied worlds. Each time, the humans put up a fierce resistance, but once their precious mechs got wiped out, the rest of them died easily enough. Some aliens wiped out any humans they encountered — soldier, civilian or even infant chilrden — quickly and without hesitation. The alien troopers regarded the invaders as filthy bugs or heathens that did not acknowledge the divinity of their own gods. Other aliens possessed a cruel streak. Faced with a human population that lost the ability to escape or pose a serious threat, there had been plenty of aliens that sought to channel their fury as well as their sadistic desires upon the defenseless human colonists. Regardless of how they behaved, the amount of bloodshed on their hands was enormous! Each of them had taken part in operations that cleansed millions of humans in different settlements. Screed Tanner VI-F happened to be the latest that received this treatment. As the ace pilot that had just crashed into the base sensed from their hearts how many human lives they ended, she almost lost control over herself! It was only her extreme willpower and discipline that enabled her to maintain her rationality and stop herself from going berserk. Even so, her honor and dignity as a protector of humans did not find it acceptable to grant mercy to these cruel and murderous aliens. Saint Dise cared nothing about whether the native aliens acted righteously when they avenged the alien residents who died as humans swooped down on their worlds to colonize it for their own purposes. Even if humans bore ultimate responsibility for invading the Red Ocean in the first place and seeking to wipe out all of the intelligent alien species that occupied the dwarf galaxy, Dise was never a stickler for law or justice like Venerable Jannzi. Dise simply cared about her Swordmaidens and increasingly other red humans that sought and needed her protection. To know that millions of humans once made themselves home on Screed Tanner VI-F, only for all of their lives to get snuffed out enraged her beyond belief! "ALL OF YOU… DESERVE TO DIE!" Her original plan was to stir up a bit of trouble by taking out a few generators before moving up in orbit, but she changed her mind and unleashed her sword fey! Led by the Prime Sword Fey, the autonomous floating blades spun around the First Sword Mark III and proceeded to cut through everything in a slowly expanding radius like an all-consuming tornado! The whirlwind of superdimensional blades was so strong and unstoppable that everything got cut without exception! The pieces of rubble, the emergency energy shields that hastily came online and the armored soldiers that still remained frozen by the ace pilot’s Saint Kingdom all got cut or obliterated in just a short interval of time! The storm did not abate after that. Instead, its radius continued to grow, beginning to cut through walls, machines, storage containers and more with greater speed and violence! There was no elegance in the motion of the blades. Saint Dise did not direct any of their movements. The individual sword fey moved at her behest, but decided their trajectories by themselves. Of course, this haphazard arrangement also lacked the force of sword formations, but the sword fey did not require them at all as they continued to crumble through walls and objects alike! Even if they were made out of mid-grade superdimensional alloy, the sword fey were still way more than any of the defenses of Karnak Base could withstand! The focused rage of Saint Dise only fueled the true resonance that amplified the already impressive properties of the sword fey even further. The shining metal gleam of the blades further indicated that they had been strengthened by metal energy. All of these effects combined meant that there was nothing the mortal defenders could do to stop their base from getting shredded from the inside! The native aliens stationed further away were horrified, yet still sought to resist in any way they could. Stationary turrets opened fire at the storm of blades. Floating armed vehicles struck with transphasic energy beams, kinetic projectiles and missiles. Phasefighters scrambled in the air and sought to destroy the storm before it could expand any further. None of these measures worked. The sword fey did not linger in the limited range of the First Mark III’s Saint Kingdom. They instead shot out and impaled all of the heavier and more precious military hardware with unstoppable force and speed! The exceptional penetrative properties of these sword fey enabled them to pierce through any azure energy shield and transphasic hyper alloy armor with the same ease as cutting through sheets of paper! Explosions erupted all across Karnak Base as the sword fey reaped a horrific toll against phasefighters and other vehicles that most human mechs would have struggled to put down. This was the power of a full superdimensional ace mech! The base defenders had yet to confront the ace mech directly, and already they were proving to be as defenseless and vulnerable as the human civilians they had once butchered like pigs!