The battle of Screed Tanner VI-F unfolded in a completely unexpected manner. The human attackers may be relatively small in number, but their quality was so high that they were able to put up a good fight and minimize their losses despite being heavily outnumbered. Just the fact that Saint Commander Casella Ingvar was able to Commandeer over 1400 first-class multipurpose mechs was already impressive enough. Although the mass empowerment did not entirely make up for the huge disparity in numbers and absolute firepower, it at least ensured that the mechs became strong and tenacious enough to hold back the enemy forces for a lengthy period. To be more precise, the Knights could not only defeat several phasefighters with their resonance-empowered weapons, but the strength of their azure energy shields also became much stronger! If a warship happened to strike one of the Knights with one of their powerful secondary gun batteries and managed to collapse the azure energy shield quickly enough to prevent the shield links from reinforcing it, the mech in question still had a good chance of making it away alive! Although mechs that had lost their energy shields were not as fragile as alien phasefighters, their armor systems could only resist so many attacks. The native aliens always tried to concentrate their firepower on the human mechs that had lost their energy defenses! This was an old habit of theirs, and it happened to remain useful when fighting against the humans. Everyone knew that once an enemy unit lost energy shield coverage, the exposed enemy needed to be taken down with haste before it could retreat to the rear or buy enough time to restore its energy defenses! This made it very dangerous for the small number of mechs that attracted too much enemy firepower. Their shield link transceivers worked as hard as possible to siphon shield energy from other friendly assets, but they were not omnipotent. There were enough native aliens that had fought against the forces of the Red Two in the past to learn how to counter this powerful life-saving tech. The easiest solution was to knock the energy shield out with a single overwhelming blow, as mentioned before. The hardest solution was to attack the shielded enemies as often as possible. By putting a higher priority on inflicting damage than securing kills, the shield-linked units would exhaust their collective reserve of shield energy sooner or later. This was clearly the most wasteful and time-consuming solution, but there were many times when there was no better solution at hand. A more clever solution was to block the shield links. Much like tight-beam laser communications, the shield links could be blocked so long as an obstacle got in the way. The elite and veteran alien phasefighter pilots understood how shield link tech worked and developed special tactics to limit the effectiveness of this measure. The best way to deal with a mech protected by shield link technology was to surround it with several phasefighters and make sure to circle around and interrupt the shield links as often as possible! Even if it was not possible to maintain a 100 percent block rate, interrupting the connections on a repeated basis was already enough to severely degrade its performance. The alien phasefighters had already relied on these tactics to eliminate dozens of powerful mechs. However, even if they managed to erase the energy shield advantage of a mech, it was still difficult to secure the kills! The subtle willpower reinforcement enhanced the defensive performance of the already decently well armored mechs. So long as other machines had enough time to reinforce the unshielded mechs, the latter usually managed to get away, if a bit battered and bruised. The differences in performance between Knights and unempowered mechs were therefore too comprehensive! Every Dracoloid and Omega Thresher mech effectively fought like mechs that were several times more expensive to build and difficult to obtain. The mechs fielded by the Bluejay Fleet also derived many advantages from Casella's Command Field. Therefore, a magical and completely lopsided result unfolded on the battlefield. The human attackers had gone into this fight while being heavily outnumbered in terms of strike craft, warships and champions. Yet due to the excellent advantages of just two of the Premier Fleet's ace pilots, the native aliens stationed in the Screed Tanner System suffered so many setbacks that their surviving soldiers practically became traumatized! After all, they not only lost over 4000 phasefighters, but also lost 47 warships! The Viscounts empowered by the Minerva Mark II possessed ample enough power and numbers to cripple a warship's most essential functions. It was a bit difficult for the mechs to quickly destroy or damage the warships beyond recovery. Viscounts or not, their weapon systems were too small and lacked the scale to inflict widespread destruction. However, that was not a big problem. The primary gun batteries of the Tortuous Scream and the somewhat smaller but still potent primary armaments of the Babylon Excavator and the Tarrasque easily finished off the crippled and practically defenseless hulls. Alien warships that had lost both their azure energy shields and propulsion may as well be asteroids given how easy it was to calculate a firing solution and pummel the target with slow but devastating shots. Plasma bolts, laser beams, positron beams and kinetic rounds easily penetrated through the hull and disintegrated large parts of the citadel of a crippled vessel. If the design and interior of the alien warship in question happened to be known, then it became even easier to destroy the vessel. The human warships just had to aim their weapons at the main power generators, the munition storage compartments or other unstable elements and fire away! Even if the human warships had to divert their firepower away from more functional enemy warships, they still prioritized the destruction of the crippled hulls because the enemy still had a chance to recover them during the engagement or after the fighting had ended. While these attacks merely served to finish off the disabled warships for good, the sight of their collapse actually disheartened the alien soldiers even further! The spectacle of witnessing ships explode or break apart carried much more visual weight than seeing a mostly intact vessel drift out of formation. The aliens felt a greater sense of loss and tragedy as they witnessed so many impressive homeships succumb to violence. Many of the hulls had only been constructed in the past few years! They had been designed and built to fight the top powers of the human race, and therefore incorporated plenty of excellent human technological solutions. Yet when the two sides entered into battle, the humans thoroughly managed to destroy almost 50 alien warships at this point! In contrast, not a single human carrier or warship suffered the same fate! The superior tech, maneuverability and defense offered by shield link technology kept them all safe. What was more ridiculous was that the effective firepower of just one captured and partially converted alien warship easily exceeded that of a dozen warships, if not more! Even if the Tortuous Scream relied on an ace command mech and her bunker mechs as opposed to normal gun batteries, the fact of the matter was that this combination alone was directly responsible for much of the losses suffered by the native aliens! Their attempt to pincer the flagship of the Premier Fleet failed. One of them had become completely savaged by the Dracoloids-turned-Viscounts. It was as if the dragon mechs had turned from technological limitations of dragons into the real deal! Each Viscount moved faster, struck harder and resisted far more damage than their tech ought to be able to resist! Even without relying on shield link technology, the Dracoloids were already agile and resistant enough to survive long enough to shred the azure energy shields of an alien warship before crippling the vessel! "The aliens… are breaking." Although the native aliens still 'outnumbered' the humans, the continuous setbacks completely snuffed out their fighting spirit. It had been dim for a while. If not for their pride, training and instructions from above, they would have preferred to cut their losses and retreat. They had banked all of their hopes on the last gambit, yet the Enfeoffment of 57 Dracoloids completely crushed their last viable attempt to destroy the Tortuous Scream. The alien soldiers saw no hope of achieving their win conditions anymore. Sure, many of the human mechs and warships had suffered so much attrition that their azure shield generators were on the verge of failing. Every few seconds, a mech had to withdraw from the battle line and return to its mothership in order to replenish its reserves and give its azure shield generator time to recover. The shield link transceiver also incurred a certain degree of stress due to bearing a heavy burden. The mech technicians needed to perform a quick inspection and make sure to replace worn components before they had a chance to fail at the worst possible moment. Fortunately, not many mechs needed to rotate at the same time. The Larkinsons actually began to rotate their mechs many minutes earlier. This set up a healthy pattern where recently topped off mechs were able to return and fight with much greater gusto than before. There should never be a situation where an entire mech company was at risk of collapsing in a single instant because all of the machines had simultaneously reached their limits! Through this clever and prudent management, the human mech units kept fighting without deteriorating in any significant fashion. The Knights demonstrated a level of persistence and resilience that far exceeded that of other first-class multipurpose mechs. As long as they remained within the impressive range of the Minerva Mark II's Command Field, fighting against them was like fighting against lesser versions of the human false gods! This had been an unfair confrontation from the beginning. It slowly dawned upon the alien soldiers and particularly the phasefighter pilots that they had not been fighting against their mortal equals all this time. Instead, they had been fighting against humans that harnessed the power of gods! The distinction between false gods and real gods did not matter to them at the moment. After all, at their level, anything related to divinity was unreachable by their standards! The only way to cope with such power was to seek salvation from their own native gods. Yet what were the alien phase lords doing? They had fled from the battlefield! After the First Sword Mark III demonstrated her capacity to butcher a greater phase lord like a pig, she had turned into an absolute terror to the lesser phase lords! Perhaps the Protector of Karnak and the Endless Stomach possessed the means to cope against the superdimensional mechs, but the rest would only lose their heads if they attempted to intervene. Now that the First Sword Mark III had temporarily given up on killing the two troublesome greater phase lords, she had been circling around the battlefield. Not all of the lesser phase lords had abandoned all of their responsibilities and fled from the Screed Tanner System without remorse. There were still plenty of them that still wanted to wait until the First Sword Mark III ceased her pursuit of the lesser prey and became preoccupied with the two greater phase lords again. Unfortunately, the First Sword Mark III did not give up. Anytime a lesser phase lord turned back and tried to get close to their fleets, the ace swordsman mech ruthlessly homed in on the alien champion and charged forward with her Decapitator poised to butcher another giant alien pig! How could a lesser phase lord possibly think about rescuing his fleet and subordinates under those circumstances? It was not worth it to risk their lives to save a bunch of mortals and mundane possessions. The Red Ocean was big enough for a lesser phase lord to be able to replenish those losses easily as long as he returned to his home territory. This was also a good excuse to stay away from the battlefield and avoid scary opponents like this superdimensional ace mech! If one such machine had appeared, others would soon emerge as well. Lesser phase lords may be at the bottom of the alien god totem pole, but few of them were truly stupid. They could easily deduce that the human-alien battlefield was about to become a lot deadlier for their kind! These thoughts and more caused the lesser phase lords to grow even more timid. So long as the First Sword Mark III remained active on the battlefield, the native gods had no intentions of reinforcing their mortal alien forces!