Orbital bombardment! If there was anything that brought landbound mechs despair, then having giant objects thrown at you from the sky topped the list. No one on the surface possessed the power to withstand bombardment from orbit! While plenty of advanced ground weapons existed that could give ships orbiting leisurely above a planet’s atmosphere a nasty surprise, none of the forces and outfits in the Aeon Corona System could afford such extravagant toys. Neither the Vandals nor the Swordmaidens possessed any means to withstand hundreds of tons of metals and minerals fused together into a single, resilient package. Perhaps if they threw everything at a single artificial meteorite, they might be able to fracture it and cause it to crumble into smaller pieces. Yet those pieces would still descend along the same course! Besides, with dozens of artificial meteorites already being flung from orbit and at least a hundred more prepared to be thrown down as well, there was nothing anyone could do to stop this calamity that approximated a force of nature! "The Sixteenth Reconnaissance Squad has been hit directly by a meteorite! All of the mechs and mech pilots of the squad has been wiped out!" "Twenty swordsman mechs of Lydia’s Swordmaidens have been flung aside from the shockwave of a nearby impact! All of their mechs have sustained heavy damage!" "The south side of the camp has been swept by a shockwave! Hundreds of Vandals and Swordmaidens out in the open are affected! Over twenty of their suits report no life signs anymore!" The entire headquarters continued to report disaster after disaster. While most meteorites diverged by as much as a thousand kilometers from the camp, at least ten percent of the meteorites landed within a hundred kilometer radius. Sooner or later, the meteorites would hit close enough to wipe out the entire camp! This was all a function of probability! The chance of a single direct hit might be low, but the Caged and the Red Tongs compensated for that by preparing an abundant amount of artificial meteorites. The Roppongan gangers and the Ravienne Alliance pirates were determined to wipe out the formidable ground forces of the Vandals and the Swordmaidens by the most direct, violent and overbearing fashion as possible! Ordinarily, the Flagrant Swordmaidens in orbit should have covered the forces on the ground, but their preoccupation with their mining activities on one of the five moons had diverted them from their guard duties too much. The pirates and the Vesians that managed to enter the Aeon Corona System all competed for the moons, and the fleet under the leadership of Major Verle had directly monopolized the most mineral-rich moon! This caused the Flagrant Swordmaidens to divert too much of their spaceborn assets to the moon, leaving their orbital presence a little too bare. Now they paid for it as the pirates somehow managed to discover the trail of the Flagrant Swordmaiden ground forces! During times like these, Ves felt very small. No matter if he wore his customized C22 Earth Ant. No matter if he was armed with the Cadisis and the Amastendira. No matter if he possessed a pair of high-powered gadgets that lent itself well to spycraft. He suddenly realized that none of that mattered in the face of this disaster that approached an extinction event! This disaster actually didn’t affect the Flagrant Swordmaidens so much as the natives and the wildlife in this entire region. Hundreds of thousands of animal herds got wiped out entirely by the impact or by the shockwaves that followed after. Even a wild god that got hit directly by an artificial meteorite got pounded out of existence, with barely a scrap of its meat and bone left intact to tell the creature once existed! The wildling tribes all screeched towards the sky and either panicked or bent down in worship at the unprecedented sight. As for the blessed people, two sides of the wall around Samar crumbled entirely! Those walls were up to fifteen meters thick and consisted of solid alloy! However, in the face of death from the vault of the gods, no one was exempt from suffering! Of course, none of the Vandals cared about the blessed and cursed people now. All they cared about was tiding over this crisis. As long as they survived, they could recover! Ves hunkered down next to a couple of other experts in an out-of-the-way compartment inside the bunker. He held very little confidence that the fragile prefab bunker would be able to hold out if an artificial meteorite landed within five to ten kilometers of the camp. Each artificial meteorite landed with enough force to wipe out an entire city! They were even more destructive than tactical nuclear weapons in that regard, especially when the planet’s gravity pulled them down with greater force! "What is our fleet doing?!" Someone hissed. "We’re dying out here!" The ground continually rumbled as meteorites landed close or far away. Even an impact hundreds of kilometers away found a way to shake their location. This only highlighted the threat of any single meteorite. The Caged and the Tongs invested a lot of time and effort into fashioning these artificial meteorites together! They probably wanted to wipe out the ground forces of the Flagrant Swordmaidens in one fell swoop! Just as Ves didn’t think it could get any worse, a huge earthquake suddenly shook the bunker. A flash of heat and energy ran through his body, and for a moment he thought that a meteorite slammed directly in the camp. "What happened?!" "We’ve detected an antimatter explosion in orbit! The estimated yield of the explosion has reached approximately 300 to 900 megatons!" Antimatter explosion! None of the Vandals could stay calm when they heard that. Anti-matter bombs was one of the superweapons of the past, able to crack a continent at their weakest or blow up an entire planet at their worst! The fury of the explosion in orbit surpassed the dreadful impacts of the artificial meteorites cratering the surface of the planet. Every Vandal had grown numb. Nobody knew where the antimatter explosion came from, but if another somehow landed in their camp, the entire region would cease to exist! As the numbness faded, so did the meteorite impacts. However, smaller impacts continued to rain down from the sky in a much higher frequency. Half an hour passed as the Vandals quietly discovered that no more meteorites rained down. So far, only about fifty of them fell from the skies, of which only a small proportion landed close enough to damage the Flagrant Swordmaidens. Had they survived? "Why did it stop?" Ves left the bunker along with a couple of other people. When they moved outside, they looked above their heads and saw nothing at all except for the astral winds encompassing the entire sky like clouds. What had happened beyond those winds? It took some time for a shuttle from the fleet to descend from orbit and reach the camp. It brought news from the fleet! The first revelation it brought was that the spaceborn mechs and ships of the Caged and the Red Tongs were wiped out to the last mech before they could drop all of their artificial meteorities! The second revelation was that the reason why they were wiped out was because an antimatter torpedo homed in on their fleet and blasted them all to bits in a huge, all-encompassing explosion! Nothing survived! Due to their activities, the pirates had kept their fleet and mechs in a tight formation, and this because their downfall as the antimatter explosion affected them all without exception! The smaller impacts the Vandals felt came from the larger pieces of debris that survived reentry. The damage they dealt upon impact was considerable, with some of the larger hull fragments even surpassing the damage dealt by the artificial meteorites. The only consolation was that the debris hadn’t been aimed at the camp, so instead they dispersed over many different areas. "Where did the antimatter torpedo come from?" This became the most critical question of all. As a taboo weapon, the use of antimatter weapons was a huge violation. The CFA and MTA hunted down any force that made use of weapons of mass destruction without any exception! Not even the first-rate superstates dared to cross the line on this matter! However, only a handful of organizations received an exemption from the restrictions against the use of weapons of mass destruction. "According to the fleet, they traced the trajectory of the antimatter torpedo back to the presumed location of the Starlight Megalodon!" The Vandals became numb yet again. So many inconceivable things happened today that they could hardly process the revelations. As a battleship of the CFA, the Starlight Megalodon almost certainly carried her own arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Antimatter torpedoes used to be employed as a way to annihilate an enemy fleet in a single blow! As one of the two guardian organizations of humanity, the CFA strictly prohibited other human forces from employing weapons of mass destruction. However, they themselves didn’t adhere to their own rules. As much as these weapons had scarred the human race, they still had their uses, particularly against the hostile alien civilizations that didn’t play by any rules. The use of weapons of mass destruction could only ever be deployed against the common enemies of humanity! Never again would they turn these dreadful extinction weapons against themselves. So the fact that the Starlight Megalodon was capable of launching an antimatter torpedo hadn’t fazed the Vandals at all. The astonishing matter was that the battleship had moved into action in the first place! Over three-hundred years had passed since the battleship went missing. On the surface of Aeon Corona VII, at least three-thousand years have passed due to the spacetime distortion effecting the entire planet. Due to the enormous passage of time as well as the other weirdness surrounding the Starlight Megalodon, none of the Flagrant Swordmaidens believed the battleship was still operational. Yet now, they needed to revise that assumption! Even if the Starlight Megalodon experienced several millenia, she somehow managed to retain enough functionality to detect the activities of the Caged and the Red Tongs and launch an antimatter torpedo towards their fleet to put a stop to their destructive activities. "She’s still alive! How is that possible!?" "Who is crewing that battleship? It’s impossible to run a capital ship without tens of thousands of personnel!" Perhaps the original crew still clung to life somehow and maintained the operations of the Starlight Megalodon. Perhaps they raised a proper strain of descendants and insured these people would be able to inherit their functions over generations. What mattered was that if the Starlight Megalodon could launch a single antimatter torpedo, she could easily launch another! Battleships never carried only one torpedo. Ves had no time to think about that, though. Now that the rain from the skies had stopped, the Vandals and the Swordmaidens each needed to recover. During the orbital bombardment, most mechs had been stationed at some distance outside the camp. They went on patrol or scouted the terrain ahead. Once the crisis hit, the mechs all split up and tried to disperse as much as possible. There was no point in concentrating their mechs! The more the mechs dispersed, the lower the chance of losing a bunch of them at once if an artificial meteorite happened to land on top of them. Only the camp remained vulnerable, but they couldn’t do anything about that. Dismantling the camp and moving out their heavy transports required at least several hours of preparation time. When the damage figures finally poured in, Ves found out that at least nine Vandal mechs and mech pilots were lost without any hope of recovery. About forty mechs received severe damage that required a significant amount of time to fix. The camp also received significant shockwave damage, injuring and killing numerous Vandals who hadn’t made it to a shelter in time. The Swordmaidens suffered an equivalent amount of damage. All in all, the orbital bombardment significantly impacted overall strength of the ground forces! If not for the Starlight Megalodon’s retaliation, the damage could have been much more worse!