The Mech Touch

The battle between the Terran defenders and the jureg invaders was a precious moment for Saint Tusa Billingsley-Larkinson.

He received the privilege of how some of the best forces on both sides waged war at their highest level.

What struck Tusa first was that neither side sustained much damage at first.

In the battles involving second-class forces, it was rather typical for warships, defensive installations and in certain cases small craft to blow up or limp away with heavy battle damage.

The existence of azure energy shields and other forms of energy shielding mitigated this problem somewhat, but they were not excessively strong, especially for human mech forces that struggled to source more phasewater.

This meant that it generally took less attacks to overcome energy barriers and inflict material damage.

Battles taking place in the Middle Zones tended to be quite destructive. The weapons were fairly powerful and both sides fielded a lot of assets. The constant pressure exerted by the alien invaders tested red humanity's strength in salvage, recovery and reconstruction operations.

Battles in the Upper Zones tended to progress significantly slower when neither side had managed to close in on each other.

The weapons wielded by both sides were certainly much more powerful. The primary armaments of the premier jureg warships were brutal. Many of their guns began to assail the defensive installations of the temporary defensive ring built around New Cartagena II, as they were the most static and easy-to-hit targets.

Yet it was exactly because of their stationary nature that the defensive ring possessed stronger and more formidable azure energy shields!

Tusa was amazed by the awesome damage inflicted by the enemy warships. The juregs were no strangers to energy weapons, but they overwhelmingly preferred to make use of kinetic and missile armaments.

The enemy vessels had yet to resort to their devastating missile armaments, but the alien equivalent to gauss cannons were already doing a lot of damage!

The primary guns on those jureg warships were particularly impressive!

The modern transphasic water hyper gauss cannons shot large and powerful transphasic rounds that did more than impact the azure energy shields protecting the human defensive installations.

They actually managed to partially 'sink' into the azure energy shields before finally stopping!

Repeated hits on the same azure energy shield not only caused the barrier to weaken at an accelerated rate, but also allowed the enemy transphasic rounds to sink deeper and deeper into the shields!

The effect was incredibly strange to see as Tusa had never witnessed such an effect before!

"I see." Lieutenant Daria Dostoevskaya noted with a grim voice. "We have received 95 percent confirmation that the juregs intend to fully commit their troops to this assault. Normally, they do not make use of their Aquapen Rounds due to their cost and scarcity. For the juregs to bring them out this time shows they intend to break our defense of New Cartagena II by the end of this day. The aliens are prepared to suffer significant losses in the process, but their gambit will pay off as long as they can take control of this planet and the surrounding orbit. The rich salvage they can harvest from this area will more than make up for their losses."

That was another aspect that became a lot more important in first-class warfare. The tech and materials used by both sides in the Upper Zones were leagues more valuable than in the Middle and Lower Zones!

The proportion of phasewater used in the construction of all of the hardware was considerably higher on average. A first-class weapon and a second-class weapon could both possess transphasic properties, but this description alone did not make any distinction on how much phasewater had been used to augment the penetration power of both armaments.

On average, both sides liked to employ as much as ten times more phasewater for a craft of the same size. One of the main reasons why phasewater was so scarce in the open market was because the big players spent too much of it on amplifying the combat power of their main forces.

They had no choice!

If the humans did not invest so much phasewater in their mechs, starships and orbital defenses, their assets would crumble far too quickly, causing them to suffer too much attrition and ceding too many star systems to their foes.

Yet no matter how much phasewater the humans pumped into their military assets, the aliens always managed to beat them on this front!

What was worse was that the native aliens worked with phasewater for so long that they developed a myriad of unique proprietary technologies.

Tusa had recently been briefed on one of the jureg's signature technologies.

"Aquapen technology is the development of special kinetic rounds that integrate phasewater in a weird way that helps them get past transphasic energy shields much easier, correct?"

"Yes, saint. The juregs have also recently updated their signature tech with hyper technology, so they are also capable of penetrating azure energy shields with relative ease. The notable effectiveness of Aquapen Rounds is one of the other reasons why the juregs have developed a love for kinetic armaments."

"Since this Aquapen Technology is so absurdly effective, why haven't we figured out the secret to making them? We could make good use of these Aquapen Rounds!"

"Not necessarily." Lieutenant Daria disagreed. "The juregs have managed to protect the working principles of this technology as well as their special production method for many years. The puelmers are especially greedy for this alien tech, yet they never succeeded in stealing it. Our human agents are also unable to achieve better results. The main reason for these results is that the juregs place their most important research labs and production facilities deep underwater. Their aquatic detection methods are unparalleled, so they always catch infiltrators before they can reach their target destinations."

That sounded interesting, but it was not too relevant to Tusa. All he needed to know was that the juregs possessed hard-hitting kinetic rounds that could penetrate azure energy shields with much greater ease.

He was already witnessing this as the various defensive platforms and orbital space fortresses started to incur real damage to their exteriors!

The Aquapen Rounds fired by the distant enemy warships sank all the way through the weakened azure energy shields, not caring that the barriers were still active for the most part!

This was game changing technology that made every form of energy protection a lot less effective than before.

Fortunately, the physical defenses of the artificial satellites under siege were also fairly impressive. High-grade alloys managed to hold together and dampen and disperse the transference of excessive kinetic energies. Only parts of the defensive installations crumbled to pieces with every hit.

Directional boosters also came online and began to spin the cumbersome defensive stations. This allowed them to make their damaged sections untargetable while presenting their undamaged exteriors to the enemy guns.

Even so, the defensive ring still started to take a toll from all of the kinetic bombardment.

Aquapen Rounds were difficult and expensive to produce, but the juregs showed no hesitation when it came to expending their limited stock of their special ammunition.

Saint Tusa could feel the ebb and flow of the battle shifting as a response to this development.

The juregs became even more motivated than before. Not only were they fighting directly under the command of two of their most senior gods, but they were also crumbling the formidable enemy defensive ring with 'blessed' ammunition!

The Terran defenders on the other hand settled in for a bloodier and more gruesome fight than usual. They understood the significance of Aquapen Rounds quite well, and knew that the juregs would not back off so easily this time!

Nonetheless, the proud and professional Terran soldiers did not grow discouraged from this. They were accustomed to dealing with pressure since their academy days and fought many prior battles in the short but intensive Red War.

The thought that hung in the back of everyone's minds was that heroes were usually born in battles like these!

The stakes were high, the enemies were formidable and the agency of standard mech pilots was very small. Only by stepping up and breaking through would they gain the power to tilt the balance in their favor!

There were circumstances where the presence of powerful expert pilots and ace pilots depressed this feeling of urgency, but Tusa did not observe this situation from the Terrans.

As powerful as the Messenger of Silence may be, not even he could single-handedly fight off a powerful first-class jureg armada, especially when it was led by two tricky greater phase lords!

"Our vanguard mech units are beginning to clash against the first wave of jureg gunships."

A deathly dance ensued in the center and the flanks as thousands of first-class multipurpose mechs and jureg transphasic gunships began to dance and fight against each other!

Both sides suffered much greater material losses as the craft did not hold back in their attempts to take each other down.

The melee mechs generally held an advantage when they got close and utilized their transphasic space suppressors to weaken the performance of the transphasic gunships.

It did not help that the gunships were quite slow and less maneuverable, so they could not play any cat-and-mouse games with the human mechs.

What they did have were superior defenses and powerful armaments. Their guns struck at the Terran melee mechs and pummeled their defenses in turn!

The more powerful azure energy shields protecting the jureg gunships may hae lost much of their phasewater amplification, but their base performance was still good enough to buy valuable seconds, enabling them to pummel more mechs and keeping them occupied a little longer before they inevitably fell!

While the Terran mechs also possessed a large variety of integrated ranged weapons that enabled them to harass their enemies from a distance, the gunships carried larger and more powerful guns that gave them a distinct advantage in ranged combat.

Their transphasic hyper kinetic guns might not be loaded with Aquapen Rounds, but the penetrating ammunition still succeeded in rapidly weakening the energy defenses of the attacking mechs!

More and more first-class multipurpose mechs and powerful transphasic gunships fell. Their wreckage formed an increasingly more expansive debris field that promised the winner of this battle the right to salvage materials worth trillions of MTA credits or more!

"When… do I get to move?" Tusa asked as he grew increasingly more excited due to all of the fighting. "My battle partner and I are itching to move forward and do something useful. We are not made to remain on standby all of this time."

The guest pilot expected to be told that he needed to stay put and wait for the right moment, as if this was a grand game of chess.

Instead, he received a more palatable instruction.

"You have permission to enter the battlefield in earnest, saint. The Messenger of Silence hopes that you can circle around and approach the Diffraction Lord and the Biopod Mother as much as possible without attracting attention. The strange alloy used to construct your Dark Zephyr is noticeably more difficult to detect and track than usual. If you adopt a stealtheir approach, you may just be able to sneak in. Our mech forces will coordinate with your movements as best as possible by directing more firepower along your approximate route. This will generate more local interference that will make it harder to distinguish your ace mech's energy signature from all of the noise."

That was quite an inventive if somewhat risky plan. Saint Tusa grinned. "I like it, but I do not think I can get too close without eventually getting spotted. My Dark Zephyr is still an ace mech at the end of the day. It is impossible for the native aliens to completely overlook my machine."

"We have a solution for that. To be more precise, our great champion can increase your infiltration chances. You need to retract your Saint Kingdom and lower your resistance to his willpower first."

Venerable Tusa already had an inkling of what would happen next. He tried his best to withdraw his Saint Kingdom and offer as little resistance as possible.

It wouldn't have mattered too much because he suddenly felt the Messenger of Silence's domain imposing itself onto his ace mech!

Mirage.

The Terran hero's willpower was so much stronger and more ominous that Tusa immediately felt as if he had entered into a zone of absolute silence and stillness!

Then, the pressure had suddenly disappeared.

What did not go away was the stillness effect. Tusa instinctively understood that the Messenger of Silence had somehow imbued a part of his power onto the Dark Zephyr, causing its emissions to become a lot more dampened than before!

It was as if the ace light skirmisher received a free cloaking effect!

It was not perfect, especially when the Dark Zephyr started to put up more distance from the Whispering Willow, but the temporary beneficial effect stacked nicely with the effect produced by Solus Gas and other measures!

Saint Tusa suddenly became a lot more confident about his ability to sneak up on the two greater phase lords!

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