The Mech Touch

During the Red War, ace pilots quickly stood out as one of the most strategic assets of red humanity.

This was not too different from how they were treated in the previous age, but the Red War raised their importance up a notch.

The native aliens had a lot of phase leaders under their sway.

Sure, many of them were lesser phase lords who managed to luck out and not die when they transcended the limitations of their mortal bodies, but that still left a lot of aliens who gained the power to fight against mechs barehanded.

Many major alien races managed to spawn a lot of phase lords over a long time. Certainly, phase lords were not immortal and some of them eventually died from old age, but there were still lots of them available that were in the prime of their transcendent lives.

Many of those phase lords had begun to accompany the fleets assaulting human space.

Not all of them participated in the thick of the fighting on a willing basis, but what could they do? The Red Cabal and the leadership of all of the aligned alien races collectively made the determination that it was better to go all-out in the early stage of the war and eliminate the latent threat posed by red humanity straight away!

This inevitably required a bloody sacrifice, and it was the phase lords at the bottom of the totem pole that needed to pay this heavy price.

No matter how unwilling they were, the expectations of their race and the orders from above forced them out of their cushy temples and drove them all the way to the frontlines, knowing that they could die for many reasons!

None of them were easy to deal with. Their high mobility, high defense and mind blowing variety of powers made each of them a nightmare to fight against.

Even if their ace mechs could not match up against the phase lords in the field, they could still engage in endless harassment where they could still inflict enough damage to delay any offensive pushes.

Fortunately, not all ace pilots possessed the raw talent required to land a killing blow against phase lords, especially the larger and more physically imposing ones.

What truly frightened the phase lords in the field were the god mechs roaming across the frontlines!

Dreadful enemies such as the Light of Sol, the Evolution Witch and the Destroyer of Worlds terrorized entire armadas as their mere entry in a star system foretold the doom of every single alien that happened to have the misfortune of being close to these human death gods!

There was no way for lesser phase lords to resist against the might of the most powerful god pilots of red humanity.

At least the dreadnoughts of the Red Fleet were a bit less imposing. Their power was still vast, but they were so much slower and less flexible that phase lords could easily get away from them if they split up right away.

That was not possible with god mechs.

These absurdly tiny specters of doom utilized their own God Kingdoms to mask their approach and only unleashed their unstoppable attacks when they got close enough to make any escape attempt futile!

The Red Tide Offensive had already raged for over a month.

During that time, god pilots alone accounted for a huge amount of death and destruction.

No one had any precise figures at their disposal, but many phase lords heard that hundreds of their fellow 'gods' had already been slain by the much more powerful human deities!

Yet despite the bloody toll exacted by the human god pilots, the Red Cabal still conscripted more phase lords and pushed them to the frontlines.

Not just lesser phase lords, but even greater phase lords found themselves reduced to cannon fodder in this unimaginably cruel conflict!

At least the greater phase lords received better treatment. They were necessary to stall and potentially kill the known senior ace pilots of red humanity.

Even so, greater phase lords were no different from their lesser counterparts when it came to their chances to survive an encounter against a god pilot!

So many native 'gods' had fallen that deicide had become an established fact in many alien societies.

The sudden and shameful downfall of so many alien deities not only caused a lot of power blocs to lose their only form of support, but also permanently damaged the prestige of these high-and-mighty figures among the masses.

More and more phase lords were getting shoved straight into the human defensive lines in the hopes of collapsing them quickly.

Many of them continued to get butchered by pigs by the god pilots circulating throughout the front.

Yet this pattern repeated itself many times.

The reason for that was because the native alien community could afford the consumption!

The Red Cabal practically embraced attrition warfare and readily used their immense numbers and stupendous resource accumulation to batter the outnumbered and resource-deprived humans in the stupidest way possible.

Yet even if it was stupid to throw the lives of so many phase lords away, the measures were still producing a lot of results!

Though the pace of alien conquests had dropped by a huge extent after quickly overrunning the 1st and 2nd defensive bands, the 3rd was still on its way of crumbling to pieces, only in slow motion this time.

As long as the Red Cabal continually mobilized the phase lords of the major alien races and threw them onto the 3rd defensive bands in controlled waves, there would eventually come a time when the humans could no longer maintain their front anymore.

Already, more and more star systems under siege had crumbled under the relentless weight of costly alien advances.

The god pilots roaming around to lift the sieges in the most violent way possible only strengthened the urgency of the native aliens!

The sooner the Red Tide Offensive succeeded in breaching all of the defensive lines, the sooner all of the phase lords and native alien soldiers could pull their necks out of the chopping blocks of those scarily powerful human death gods!

One of the broad warfronts where the fighting had become more intense was the 3rd defensive band within the sphere of the Terran Alliance.

The reason for that was simple: only a single god pilot presided over this section of human space.

Sure, the CF dispatched additional dreadnoughts to Terran space in order to compensate for this obvious shortcoming, but that did not change the fact that the enemy troops and phase lords were most eager to fight on this warfront!

Whereas the phase lords assigned to other fronts all felt as if their long lives may come to an end the next day, the much more motivated phase lords assailing Terran space had become much more confident in their chances to overrun the human lines and survive in the process!

Though the Light of Sol partially compensated for his solitary guardianship by being faster than any other god pilot, his speed was not enough to significantly relieve the crisis facing hundreds of star systems!

Not only did he have to cover for the critical star systems in the Upper Zones, he also had to rotate through the Middle and Lower Zones to prevent any of them from serving as the gap needed to collapse the 3rd defensive band.

The Terran soldiers and their allies put up a strong resistance as a response.

They cursed the Rubarthans for being lucky enough that the Destroyer of Worlds 'sneaked' into the Red Ocean just before the Great Severing, but they did not blame their own superstate for being short on god pilots.

They just fought harder in order to compensate for their disadvantageous circumstances.

As prideful, elitist, decadent, bound by tradition and all around unpleasant as Terrans could be, no one accused them of being weak.

A united nation state centered around Old Earth existed for millenia and survived the passing of multiple ages in one form or another because the Terrans were willing to fight to maintain their own heritage and identity.

The rise of the Terran Empire was the heyday of their people.

The rift caused by what eventually became known as the New Rubarth Empire may have caused the Terran Empire to collapse in the much more diminished Greater Terran United Confederation, but it had successfully survived an uprising that could have ended many other unwieldy star empires!

The catastrophe of the end of the Age of Conquest and the abrupt rise of the Mech Trade Association and the Common Fleet Alliance as the new human rulers still did not lead to the end of the Terrans.

Sure, the proud Terrans had been forced to give up a lot of rights and sovereignty, but somehow they managed to preserve the essence of their nation state, their heritage and identity.

Now that the Great Severing caused the Terrans to get stuck on the wrong side of the greater beyonder gate, they still did not break after losing access to the ancestral home planet their state centered around!

The proud Terrans remained unbowed and unbroken as they manned the 3rd defensive line and exchanged blows against the unending tides of alien assault fleets.

The native aliens were not unbeatable. They still had many flaws and weak points that the human mech forces could exploit.

However, the Terrans fought hard and made numerous sacrifices to defeat one tide of attackers, only for the next tide to deliver a fresh batch of alien assault fleets!

Although the Red Cabal did not dare to send too many alien assets at once for fear that the Light of Sol would swoop in at lightspeed and tear them all to shreds, the illusion that the major alien races could keep on sending tide after tide of attackers still made it hard for the Terrans to maintain their steadfastness.

The morale of the Terran defenders started to shake.

It would be devastating if this continued. This was why the Terrans enacted a lot of measures to prop up morale and give the soldiers a reason to be optimistic.

For example, the leaders drastically increased the rewards issued to the Terran linefighters.

They also put down their pride just enough to permit themselves to issue requests for assistance.

Most importantly, they put much more effort into publicizing the deeds of their greater heroes.

That last part was the most important one. The Terrans already realized long ago that the only way to solve their problem on a permanent basis was to produce more god pilots among their heroes.

This put a lot of renewed attention on the ace pilots of the Terran Alliance!

In particular, the peak ace pilots all endured a huge amount of expectations from the masses as everyone hoped that they would break through and join the side of the Light of Sol in driving away the native aliens wholesale.

It was on this day that Saint Tusa Billingsley-Larkinson met his mentor for the first time.

The fresh ace pilot of the Larkinson Clan read through the extensive briefing package that the clan prepared for him. It not only brought him up to speed with the current geopolitical difficulties of the Terran Alliance, but also provided the necessary context to understand the difficult position facing the ace pilots that shouldered everyone's expectations for a brighter and more prosperous future.

One of them happened to be his 'mentor'.

Ves had come through and managed to negotiate a deal with one of the Terran ancient clans to show Saint Tusa the ropes.

The Larkinson ace pilot in question just didn't expect that he would receive the tutelage of one of the god pilot candidates of the Terran Alliance!

Tusa stared at the long and distinguished record of Saint Isaiah Simovich Dostoevsky.

Otherwise known as the Messenger of Silence.

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