Chapter 7322: Limited Defense A large battlefield encompassing the orbit of a planet was a large tapestry of violence. Chaos reigned more than order. The mutated voribugs primarily attacked from one direction. While the Goliath Hive diverted a large amount of Goliaths as well as swarms of smaller bugs to the flanks, the main thrust of their offense closely aligned with the trajectory of the Incubator. At this range, the VOBM no longer served as a purely psychological weapon. It had come close enough to intervene in the surrounding fights. The planet did not only serve as a womb for a scarily powerful Goliath. It also functioned as a massive moon-sized battle fortress! The Incubator took advantage of its organic nature and rapidly grew thousands of cannons on its surface. Each of these cannons began to besiege anything that crossed their sights! Plasma cannons launched large and formidable plasma bolts at distant orbital fortresses. Their accuracy was so terrible that more than half of the attacks missed the large and stationary targets. It was clear that the mutated voribugs had yet to make much progress in advancing their proficiency in fire control systems. However, with hundreds of cannons firing at a brisk frequency, the Incubator could afford to miss so many shots! Many attacks struck the titan shields of the orbital fortresses and exerted a lot more strain onto the defenses. Their situation rapidly deteriorated as most of the structures were already half-damaged or largely depleted from having to fend off prior attacks. One massive structure that had born the brunt of the Incubator attacks outright lost its titan shield. This instantly caused the surrounding swarms to descend onto the exposed structure and begin to eat into its metallic exterior! The Incubator and other ranged voribug units did not cease in their attacks. They launched plasma bolts, laser beams, physical projectiles and acid bombs without any form of rhythm or coordination. The chaotic attacks often struck many cannon fodder bugs that just so happened to be in the way before finally striking the vulnerable orbital fortress. Yet the Goliath Hive clearly did not care about the friendly fire. The swarms massively hindered evacuation efforts while lowering any chance for the defenders to save the key defensive asset. The enemy bombardment methodically chipped away at the structure of the orbital fortress. To the credit of the Rubarthans, they had not skimped on the physical construction of the fortress in any way. The prideful first-raters had long progressed the designs of their orbital defenses to a very high standard. Even if the Rubarthans largely guarded against the Terrans and the Big Two, the incredible hardiness of much of the orbital fortification meant that just breaching its exterior was not enough to knock it out of commission! Many anti-swarm defenses went active. Bombs, firestorms and lethal radiation continually cleared the approaching swarms and bought time for the crew to do their jobs and take more bugs with them as they went down with the crumbling fortification. Such an event was not unique on the battlefield. While the defenders had been able to hold out for multiple hours, now that the Goliath Hive had made its most serious push to date, many units and structures had been pushed past their breaking point! As brave men and women continued to fight and die across the orbital battlefield, the champions on both sides struggled in their own ways. Of the four quadrants of the orbital battlefield, only one of the teams of Ascended Giants was doing fairly well. Those stationed in the remaining quadrants were having a much more difficult time! For example, Ur-Titan in charge of defending one of the flanks roared in frustration as he fended off an avalanche of attacks from two Level 7 Goliaths! While a proper Ur-Titan should handedly defeat a Level 7 Goliath without suffering any harm, facing two of these massive creatures at the same time was a different story! The Ur-Titan wielded his Rubarthan plasma halberd like a furious wildcat, choosing to stay as mobile as possible in order to avoid getting caught. The most acute threat was a Level 7 Goliath of the Sudhar strain. This was a monstrous beast of claws and acid. Not only did it possess the disgusting habit of spitting acid into the face of its enemies at random moments, its claws struck quickly and relentlessly. What was worse was that the Sudhar Goliath were also capable of grappling! The Ur-Titan in question constantly had to remain on guard to avoid getting caught by the enemy. He needed to utilize the reach of his plasma halberd very carefully to avoid giving the clawed Goliath an opening. The second Level 7 Goliath made this a lot more difficult! The Korcho Goliath was normally known as a ranged specialist. It was unusual for such a creature to move closer to a formidable human champion and make itself vulnerable to reprisals. However, the Goliath Hive had apparently cooked a variant of the usual Korcho Goliath. Instead of growing a long-ranged artillery specialist, the latest variant bore with multiple kinetic cannons. Their calibers were not big, but they possessed an impressive firing rate while simultaneously possessing enough power to knock the Ur-Titan aside! Though the penetration power of the projectiles was not good enough to punch through the Ascended Giant’s mid-grade superdimensional raiment, the concussive force was still strong enough to break the phase lord’s rhythm! If this was the sole contribution of the Korcho Goliath, then the Ascended Giant did not necessarily have to take this second alien champion seriously. What truly scared and infuriated the Ur-Titan was that the Korcho Goliath was constantly trying to strike the plasma halberd in his arms! Though the weapon was designed with very hard transphasic alloys, the high-tech weapon was ultimately not as durable as a superdimensional weapon. Worse than getting damaged, a powerful enough hit could actually dislodge the weapon from his hands! This was why the Ur-Titan constantly had to be on guard. He had to maneuver in more complex ways to prevent the Korcho Goliath from striking his hands or his precious weapon. Fortunately, his superior training and prior combat experience as a human soldier saw him through. He was not that easy to defeat. He boldly relied on his superdimensional raiment to endure attacks that he would normally have to guard against. This single piece of equipment massively improved the fault tolerance of the Ascended Giants and allowed them to get away with a lot of outrageous stunts. However, it was wrong to treat the raiment as an invincibility cheat. Even against a relatively ’poor’ opponent as the mutated voribug race, the Level 7 Goliaths still possessed enough attack power to degrade the protection of resonance-empowered transphasic armor systems. A mid-grade superdimensional raiment that lacked resonance empowerment may actually be tougher than the defenses of most ace mechs, but its durability ultimately had a limit, even if it was a lot higher than anyone had seen before. The continuous attacks gradually took a toll on the raiment. Superdimensional or not, any attack that left grooves could steadily dig through the layers. The two formidable Goliaths were not ignorant of this fact. After learning that the physical defenses of an Ascended Giant was not so easily breached, they relied on constant pressure along with focused attacks to consistently weaken a set number of weak points! With swarms of cannon fodder bugs regularly moving in to inconvenience the Ur-Titan, the latter found it difficult to extricate himself from his difficult situation! "Fight me fair and square, you bugs!" Sadly, the Goliaths saw no need to respond or acknowledge the request in any way. They were voribugs. Fighting fairly did not exist as far as they were concerned. Bullying individually superior foes with numbers was their primary, secondary and tertiary combat solution! Against this onslaught, the Ur-Titan truly found it difficult to gain any advantages. His plasma halberd was able to inflict serious damage to the Sudhar Goliath, but the need to defend from incoming attacks caused the giant to miss many opportunities to damage the enemy further. The Ur-Titan did not rely on his spatial barrier to fend off the attacks. He knew that it would just get drained at a record pace. His gear provided him with much more protection. He would only activate his spatial barrier if there was no other choice. "I need help!" "We can’t! These Goliaths are getting in our way!" The Ur-Titan was accompanied by 3 smaller Faceless Giants, but the latter were all being pressed away from their nominal leader. The Faceless Giants tried their best to stay close and avoid any further separation. Their familiarity with each other allowed them to weave into each other’s attacks and bail out any one of them that had landed in trouble. However, the Goliaths were not prohibited from grouping up either. A scattering of Level 4, Level 5 and Level 6 Goliaths surrounded the group of 3 giants and inflicted constant harassing attacks. Though none of the Goliaths were equals to any of the Faceless Giants, when 9 of the megavoribugs combined their forces, the human phase lords could only thank their raiments that they were able to last so long despite getting outnumbered! "We can’t last as long!" One of the Faceless Giants cried out in desperation. While the weaker Goliaths were not able to hit that hard, their frequent and varied blows still caused the raiments to suffer increasingly deeper and more numerous scratches. At a scale of just 1.5x, the raiments of the Faceless Giants not only possessed a much smaller surface area, but their thickness was also significantly lower. This meant that the smaller Ascended Giants truly couldn’t withstand as many blows as their larger counterparts! Seeing that the giant team had fallen into considerable trouble, the Rubarthans tried to assist the foreign helpers by bombarding their position with warship-grade gun batteries. While the attacks significantly distracted the Goliaths, their vitality allowed them to endure the blows. Their attacks only slowed down, but they did not cease! "We need more help than that! Fire support is not enough!" When the Dark Apostle noticed the team in trouble, he turned around and prepared to rescue his beleaguered subordinates before a large armored palm smacked into the chest plate of his Superdimensional Giant Regalia. "Divine Harpoon?" "There is no need for you to intervene. Have you forgotten about the ace mechs?" Ves and the Dark Apostle had become so fixated on observing the performance of their men that they had momentarily overlooked the other powerful assets on the battlefield! The ace mech that advanced towards the troubled team approached with incredible momentum. The machine did not possess any inherent stealth systems. Its emissions were hot as the ace mech spared little effort to speed up its flight. While the Goliath Hive registered the rapid advance of the ace mech, it had already made a move in response. Just as the humans learned to employ reserves in order to respond to new developments, the mutated voribugs had learned to do the same! A second Level 7 Sudhar Goliath abruptly flew forward and clearly sought to intercept the advancing ace mech. The alien megavoribug did not need to defeat the ace mech. Just stalling it was already enough. It just needed to buy enough time for the other Goliaths to crack open the superdimensional shells of the giants in trouble! The ace mech uncharacteristically did not rely on its superior mobility to circle around or evade this opponent. It maintained its straight trajectory and fearlessly charged forward until it collided straight against the Sudhar Goliath! A catastrophic collision occurred! Seconds afterwards, the ace mech emerged fully intact! Its exterior remained undamaged. While its momentum had been sapped, it continued to advance as its pilot had not forgotten her initial goal. As for the Sudhar Goliath in question, his insectile body was in awful shape! A massive puncture wound had dug straight into his exoskeleton. What exacerbated his injuries was not the giant hole, but the destructive energies that took root in its wounded flesh and continued to annihilate its organs. Pure destruction energy ravaged the Sudhar Goliath both inside and out! The Riot Mark III had struck its first blow!