The Battle of Bentheim stretched on for hours, then days. The sandman monoliths kept advancing to the critical planet which the aliens seed hellbent on reaching!
Over the course of the battle, the ch Corps, the Starfighter Corps and the myriad of dostic and foreign outfights learned one brutal lesson.
They were wholly outmatched.
The sandn previously posed a considerable challenge to these forces. The general consensus that humans settled on was that the sandn were individually weak, but extrely nurous and very willing to go all out to achieve their objectives!
Against weak and nurous enemies, the Bright Republic thought it was enough to bring numbers of their own in order to reduce the quantity disparity. For this reason, the governnt didn't hesitate to station over half of the entire ch Corps and Starfighter Corps in the Bentheim System!
The military should have brought more ch divisions and starfighter divisions.
"Where did these hellspawn obtain such good shielding technology?! Where are they getting all of the power needed to sustain these shields? It's as if we are attacking CFA warships instead of weak sandman monoliths!"
Before the Battle of Bentheim, no one thought too highly of sandman monoliths. While they were big and formidable damage sponges, their lack of mobility and huge size ant that it was trivially easy to bombard it with a multitude of rounds and missiles!
The conventional strategy to defeat them was to deploy a large number of chs and starfighters and shower the approaching threat with ordnance while flying backwards. This was where all of the footage and images of the so-called 'Stripes of Humanity' ca about.
No such heroic sights occurred today. Part of it was because the many clashes had grown too chaotic and hectic to allow chs to fight the upgraded sandman monoliths in orderly formations.
Another reason was that the Bright Republic had mostly phased out the Soldier product line!
This decision was mostly motivated by politics. Now that the Bright Republic aligned itself more closely to the Friday Coalition, the LMC's products had suddenly beco poisonous.
Despite their incredible value, the governnt simply couldn't justify the continued use of chs such as the Desolate Soldier, Prideful Soldier and Peaceful Soldier when their patron hated the designer to the core!
"It's as egregious as piloting a ch designed by a Hexer!"
Through various excuses, the governnt forced the military, the Planetary Guard organizations and the private sector to trade in their LMC chs for recycling and reprocessing.
In exchange, the Bright Republic offered these forces replacent chs that perford mildly to substantially better.
This trade sche wasn't just a way to get rid of all of the LMC chs circulating in the Bright Republic. It was also a way of upgrading the comprehensive strength of the defenders of Bentheim!
Initially, protests were fairly muted. Though the ch pilots of the LMC chs had beco very attached to their machines, the ch commanders and owners of the various outfits ca around faster due to the easy profit they gained.
Yet now that chs were falling left and right due to the multitude of positron beams raining down in their direction, morale throughout the entire system quickly dropped like a rock!
"Ahhhh! Jimmy! Why did they take you?!"
"Help! Help! My escape pod is leaking air! Please rescue ! I can still pilot a spare ch!"
"Our ship! It's gone! Our ho is gone!"
An incredible amount of debris started to fling into space as ch after ch got wrecked in an instant after being struck by a powerful positron beam!
Positron beams weren't as fast as laser beams, but in these circumstances, the differences might as well be negligible!
Unlike ordinary laser beams which most chs and starfighters could resist a couple of tis as long as they didn't land on the spot, positron beams were completely different in terms of lethality!
Considered the evil goatee-wearing counterparts of electrons, these tiny antiparticles were incredibly light and possessed no other remarkable properties aside from their positive charge.
It was only after they collided with electrons that they started to reveal their amazing destructive potential!
In a material realm where negatively-charged electrons were predominant, antiparticles such as positrons were extrely deadly!
This was because of the phenonon known as annihilation. Electrons and positrons both canceled each other out when they bumped into each other. The particles and antiparticles disappeared from the material realm, but due to the law of conservation of mass and energy, a lot of energy took their place!
In truth, a single electron and positron didn't release that much energy. Just soone lifting an arm in the air took more energy than the output of a single electron-positron annihilation reaction!
Yet the positron beams didn't just contain a single positron. It was packed with an uncountable amount of antiparticles, all accelerated towards their targets at relativistic or near-relativistic speeds!
No third-class ch could withstand a blow. Hardly any second-class ch escaped unscatched. Even first-class chs encountered significant difficulties when subjected to sustained attacks!
The sandman monoliths recklessly discharged a humongous amount of energy at their targets! By now, the energies they unleashed was more than enough to destroy the planet of Bentheim dozens of tis over!
Though the targeting systems of the monoliths hadn't been upgraded as well as their weapon systems, the alien dreadnoughts still managed to kill scores of chs and starfighters before each of them could be overwheld!
"We're bleeding assets at a rapid rate!"
"Hardly any ch or starfighter pilot is able to eject after being hit! The sandman positron beams are too lethal!"
"It's as if we are being attacked by the Fridayn or Hexers!"
In the first couple of hours, the forces that t the sandman monoliths in combat lost over half of their numbers!
This was a devastating loss! The savaged ch regints and outfits were forced to keep their distance and attack the sandman monoliths at a far greater distance to reduce the effectiveness of their targeting sowhat. Through heavy jamming and several other thods, the positron beams failed to harvest as much lives as before.
However, the increased range also reduced the effectiveness and intensity of the attacks directed towards the monoliths, allowing the aliens greater room to advance!
"What is the MTA doing?!"
"They're busy hunkering down while they attract the bulk of the sandman monoliths!"
The sandman seed to reserve most of their ire towards the stricken and heavily-outnumbered MTA task force! With their ships being raked by positron beam after positron beam, their chs were finding it a lot harder to achieve success!
"No! Save the Wolf Mother! Don't let her die!"
"It's too late, captain! Her engineering is gone! Colonel Lowenfield has ordered the crew to abandon ship!"
The great factory ship had no place on the battlefield. Expecting a much lower-intensity conflict, the Flagrant Vandals and many other ch regints had made a huge mistake in bringing their logistical vessels along!
Now, the giant, venerable ship that had produced or repaired much of the chs of the Vandals was rolling chaotically along her axis. Her entire propulsion system and engineering section had disappeared when a sandman monolith targeted the slow-moving ship and kept attacking her. Even though a swarm of angry Vandal chs finally overwheld its energy shield and destroyed it shortly afterwards, the damage was done!
Without her main ans of sublight propulsion, the Wolf Mother turned into a sitting duck! Floating along a very predictable ballistic trajectory in space, anyone could hit the ship with ease!
The sandn may not always be the brightest lifeforms around, but they were still smart enough to pounce on the opportunity!
The Wolf Mother had never been designed to withstand attacks. Though her huge structure and bulk offered her a form of protection in itself, in the end it only gave the sandn more stuff to destroy!
"Ahhh! Stop it you darned aliens!"
Plenty of Vandals lost their emotions at the loss of so many comrades. Now that their biggest pillar of support was bleeding oxygen, energy and escape pods, many of them had started to snap!
Captain Orfan had briefly joined them in her grief, but she quickly sobered up when soone told her sothing important!
"Major Verle said Colonel Lowenfield is out of contact! We can't find her escape pod among the ones that escaped the derelict Wolf Mother!" A communications officer hollered in the channel.
"Who's in command and what are my orders?!"
"For now, Major Verle has assud command of the Vandals, ma'am! Your orders are to rally the remnants of the ch companies and led them back to our surviving combat carriers!"
"We can't retreat! There are too many monoliths we need to kill! Tell Verle we need reinforcents!"
"There are no reinforcents, captain! Our starfighter screen has almost disappeared and most of the other reserve forces are already confronting the sandn elsewhere! According to the tactical situation, we don't have the numbers to stop the dozens of monoliths barreling their way forward!"
"But Bentheim!"
"Our sacrifice won't an anything! We need to retract our lines and regroup!"
Her fist slamd against the armrest of her piloting seat!
"Damnit!"
Though she tried her best to block it out, she couldn't forget about the nas and faces of the fallen. Too many of her fellow Vandals had succumbed against the sandn!
No matter how tough their Novabreaker or other chs were designed to resist laser beams, none of them fared well when positron beams struck them head-on! In many cases, all of those layers of armor turned out to be completely useless!
Ironically, the light chs with the thinnest armor fared best against the sandman monoliths! Their exceptional mobility allowed them to dodge and weave through most positron beam attacks! Their lack of armor didn't matter since getting hit even once already spelled the doom of a ch unless it belonged to a higher class!
Over the course of the running battle, high command eventually ordered a general retreat. The human forces needed to concentrate their surviving forces!
However, many saw these actions as futile because shrinking the defensive circle also allowed the sandman monoliths to tighten their envelopnt!
Not everyone was willing to fight on behalf of Bentheim and the Bright Republic.
"Where are you going?! We paid you to fight!"
"You cowards! I'll make sure to sha you to death by posting your flight on the galactic net!"
"Hahaha! The Comm Consortium already blocked us out! There's no way you can stop us from leaving! Sorry Brighters, but we have done enough! We're outta here!"
Without the glows of the Desolate Soldiers, the private outfits crumbled exceptionally quickly.
None of them signed up to fight a pitched battle, let alone an overwhelming struggle against an imnsely powerful doomsday armada!
The soldiers of the ch Corps and the Starfighter Corps watched with despair as the various private outfits reneged on their contracts and fled the battlefield by heading upwards or downwards from the ecliptic plane!
The sandman monoliths mostly arrived in the Bentheim System in a flat circle. While this made it unwise to go through them, there was nothing blocking the way of the rcenaries as long as they flew straight up or straight downwards!
The longer the slaughter proceeded, the greater the attraction of these obvious escape routes!
Even the soldiers in the service of the Bright Republic started to lose heart in the battle.
Why were they fighting so hard?
Had the sacrifices of their comrades accomplished anything?
Was there a point to continuing to resist the alien advance?
Their morale, which hadn't been the steadiest before the start of the battle, started to beco more turbulent as the general retreat struck a huge blow to their confidence.
With the MTA task force in dire straits, the doom throughout the star system spread like wildfire!
Was this the end of Bentheim? Would the Bright Republic beco a crippled state after this day?
"Watch out! There's a huge portal erging next to the planet!"
"It's the MTA! They finally ca to reinforce us! We're saved!"
An MTA destroyer in high orbit slowly began to form a portal. Its circumference much larger than anything the Brighters had ever seen before!
The portal stretched across many kiloters, providing more than enough space for a battleship to fly through!
Yet before the portal had just finished stabilizing, the sandman monoliths instantly reacted. A considerable amount of gravitic energy emanated from their giant forms, forming a cage of gravitic waves that enveloped the entire star system!
"The portal!"
The portal ford by the destroyer suddenly shook and started to destabilize! Many Brighters stifled their hopes when the portal quickly warped beyond recognition before exploding in a shower of light!
"No!"
"Our reinforcents!"
Without the ability to generate a portal, the most convenient ans the MTA possessed to rapidly reinforce Bentheim had beco invalid!
The sandn succeeded in forming a blockade around the star system!
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