The Mech Touch

Chapter 7519 Playing Our Own Game

The time had come for the human intruders to break down the current impasse.

Yet how they should go about solving the problem was a delicate matter.

They had managed to make a lot of scattered observations, but the bigger picture still remained woefully incomplete.

The data that they had gathered up to this point only clarified a few points, but brought up a lot of new ones as well.

It was very easy for commanders to get lost in this mixed sea of clarity and ignorance.

Every incomplete pattern hinted at a greater conclusion, yet these hints never represented the absolute truth.

Too many variables remained obscured behind the fog of war for any of them to figure out the true strategy employed by their adversaries.

If they had more time, then the combined fleet could have spent more time on conducting reconnaissance and performing detailed analysis on all of the gathered data.

Unfortunately, time was very much against their side.

They were stranded in a miasma-filed star system that had fallen under the control of the mysterious deathborn.

This not only meant that they were burning through scarce resources at a much higher rate than usual, but with each day that passed, enemy reinforcements might arrive from afar.

The red humans needed to cut through the fog and put an end to the schemes of the hostile aliens.

Whatever the deathborn were up to, many people doubted that the results would benefit human civilization!

This placed Saint Commander Casella Ingvar in a very difficult position.

She had never been put into a situation as pivotal as now.

Depending on the scope and investment of the enemy's plans, her judgment may very well shake the course of history of the Red Ocean and all of the races that inhabited it in the present and future!

To be put in such a focal node of galactic historical progression could break any lesser human individual.

Of course, an ace commander would never fail to discharge her responsibilities in such a situation.

Her willpower, though different from a regular ace pilot, was still strong in its own right.

In fact, Casella believed that out of every mortal or saint in the combined fleet, only she had the greatest chance to make the right decision at this historical junction.

Because she was confident in her ability to strategize better than anyone else.

Time was not their side.

She could not waste too many minutes on tedious analysis and reflection. She had to absorb all of the data and conclusions currently on hand and formulate a response right away.

"We are caught in a trap." She quickly summarized her thoughts. "Yet the true pitfalls are not obvious. The deployment of the energy vortices has not only caused us to become stuck in place, but also threatens to engulf our fleet in an incremental fashion through creating and exploiting faults in our energy fields. We must break them if we want to stabilize our fleet and resume our movement. Remaining static is a dead end."

By this time, the First Sword Mark III had already swept the miasma-filled space created by the initial breach.

None of the ships that fell out of sight made it out intact.

The ace swordsman mech only encountered several more ships that had undergone such rapid erosion that it looked as if their hulls had been rusting for thousands if not tens of thousands of years without receiving any maintenance!

No forms of life had been detected either. The bodies of all human crew members had simply disappeared.

What everyone found even more ominous was that the First Sword Mark III failed to find the outermost ships.

Though they only consisted of relatively small and ordinary vessels, the fact that they did not even leave behind a heavily-aged hull was highly disconcerting!

It became clear to everyone that they could not allow their fleet to become exposed to the erosion-enhanced dark miasma again.

No matter what was responsible for neutralizing those vessels, the red humans needed to break the enemy's death energy formation at all cost!

"What are we waiting for, then?" Gloriana impatiently asked. "Since the Dark Zephyr and the Victrix managed to get in and out without encountering serious opposition, then it should be safe enough to dispatch several of our ace mechs to destroy or retrieve the enemy formation anchors. They are right there for the taking!"

Ves smacked his gauntleted palm on his face. He wanted to call his wife an idiot, though he wisely chose to reconsider that impulsive decision.

"Honey, have you ever considered that this may be exactly what the enemy wants? It is too obvious of an invitation! Perhaps the deathborn have shown far greater forbearance than you thought. Normal spell arrays do a good job of hiding their formation anchors. That is not the case with the deathborn. Even if you can blame this on skipping the necessary adaptation process, who knows whether the enemy deliberately repurposed this shortcoming into bait. No weaknesses are absolute. A good commander can often transform traditional vulnerabilities into clever stratagems."

"I strongly agree, Ves." Casella backed him up. "There is no certainty that the most obvious course of action will cause us to fall to the enemy's ruse, but the consequences are too great. My intuition cannot detect any powerful threats in the vicinity, but my judgment tells me that the deathborn would never commit to an ambush if their goal was merely to delay our approach. Even without any solid proof, I believe we are absolutely at risk of losing our ace mechs or even our flagship if we recklessly choose to split our forces. It is times like these when it is all the more important to keep our assets together."

Gloriana frowned after she heard this. "Your words make sense, but how does that solve the problem? If we do not dispatch our ace mechs, we will not be able to eliminate the enemy's formation anchors. That leaves us stuck in a situation that is continually deteriorating. Stagnation does not equate to progress. We need to be proactive."

The Saint Commander actually nodded in agreement. "We will indeed take action, but not in the way you expect. The enemy commander thinks itself clever by forcing us to send out one of our ace mechs or a force of Knights and Barons escorted by my Victrix. I dare say that if we choose to do so, these isolated units will suffer severe damage or complete annihilation. If we send out too much core assets, then the enemy's core forces will strike at our underdefended fleet instead. If neither of these options are acceptable, then we can simply choose to stay put, which is not actually a solution at all because it will only cause us to deplete our resources in vain."

"Since that is the case, why not dispatch a strong strike force while simultaneously reinforcing our fleet's perimeter defenses by deploying all of our Ascended Giants? I understand that not showing your hand is important, but now that the enemy has backed us in a corner, we no longer have the luxury to keep our trump cards hidden."

The Saint Commander finally grinned for the first time in a while. "We do not have to go that far, madame. Exposing all of our giants will only grant the enemy an intelligence victory. It might not be as obviously damaging as losing our core units, but it will definitely come to haunt us in the decisive battle to come. No. I refuse to play the enemy commander's game. The proper way to address this matter is to make use of our own advantages, especially the ones that our opposition does not fully understand."

"What… have you decided to do, Casella?" Ves curiously asked.

"Saint Davia Stark has already received her orders. The Amaranto Mark III is preparing to open fire directly onto one of the three enemy formation anchors that we have scouted."

Ves and several other leaders switched to a live feed that displayed the Amaranto Mark III.

It turned out that while they had been talking, the ace marksman mech had been quietly redeploying before slowly accumulating more energy with her Instrument of Vengeance!

"Is that… even possible?" Ves asked with serious doubt in his voice. "Although the formation anchors should not be placed too far from our current coordinates, all of the empowered dark miasma in the way still generates a lot of interference. It also goes beyond blocking our sensors. The dark miasma has always possessed a weak spatial interference effect, but now that it has been enhanced by the active spell array, the strengthened erosion trait also acts on the local space, causing it to bend and oscillate in strange and unpredictable ways. Trying to draw a straight trajectory from the Amaranto Mark III and the targeted formation anchor will result in a squiggly line when observed from the side!"

In other words, the fabric of spacetime had long become disordered with the activation of the death energy formation!

It was a pipedream to expect that a single straight-line energy beam could accurately hit a target in the distance, even if it maintained a relatively static position!