The battle of Screed Tanner VI-F unfolded in a completely unexpected manner.
The human attackers may be relatively small in number, but their quality was so high that they were able to put up a good fight and minimize their losses despite being heavily outnumbered.
Just the fact that Saint Commander Casella Ingvar was able to Commandeer over 1400 first-class multipurpose chs was already impressive enough.
Although the mass empowernt did not entirely make up for the huge disparity in numbers and absolute firepower, it at least ensured that the chs beca strong and tenacious enough to hold back the enemy forces for a lengthy period.
To be more precise, the Knights could not only defeat several phasefighters with their resonance-empowered weapons, but the strength of their azure energy shields also beca much stronger!
If a warship happened to strike one of the Knights with one of their powerful secondary gun batteries and managed to collapse the azure energy shield quickly enough to prevent the shield links from reinforcing it, the ch in question still had a good chance of making it away alive!
Although chs that had lost their energy shields were not as fragile as alien phasefighters, their armor systems could only resist so many attacks.
The native aliens always tried to concentrate their firepower on the human chs that had lost their energy defenses!
This was an old habit of theirs, and it happened to remain useful when fighting against the humans.
Everyone knew that once an enemy unit lost energy shield coverage, the exposed enemy needed to be taken down with haste before it could retreat to the rear or buy enough ti to restore its energy defenses!
This made it very dangerous for the small number of chs that attracted too much enemy firepower.
Their shield link transceivers worked as hard as possible to siphon shield energy from other friendly assets, but they were not omnipotent.
There were enough native aliens that had fought against the forces of the Red Two in the past to learn how to counter this powerful life-saving tech.
The easiest solution was to knock the energy shield out with a single overwhelming blow, as ntioned before.
The hardest solution was to attack the shielded enemies as often as possible. By putting a higher priority on inflicting damage than securing kills, the shield-linked units would exhaust their collective reserve of shield energy sooner or later.
This was clearly the most wasteful and ti-consuming solution, but there were many tis when there was no better solution at hand.
A more clever solution was to block the shield links.
Much like tight-beam laser communications, the shield links could be blocked so long as an obstacle got in the way.
The elite and veteran alien phasefighter pilots understood how shield link tech worked and developed special tactics to limit the effectiveness of this asure.
The best way to deal with a ch protected by shield link technology was to surround it with several phasefighters and make sure to circle around and interrupt the shield links as often as possible!
Even if it was not possible to maintain a 100 percent block rate, interrupting the connections on a repeated basis was already enough to severely degrade its performance.
The alien phasefighters had already relied on these tactics to eliminate dozens of powerful chs.
However, even if they managed to erase the energy shield advantage of a ch, it was still difficult to secure the kills!
The subtle willpower reinforcent enhanced the defensive performance of the already decently well armored chs.
So long as other machines had enough ti to reinforce the unshielded chs, the latter usually managed to get away, if a bit battered and bruised.
The differences in performance between Knights and unempowered chs were therefore too comprehensive!
Every Dracoloid and Oga Thresher ch effectively fought like chs that were several tis more expensive to build and difficult to obtain.
The chs fielded by the Bluejay Fleet also derived many advantages from Casella's Command Field.
Therefore, a magical and completely lopsided result unfolded on the battlefield.
The human attackers had gone into this fight while being heavily outnumbered in terms of strike craft, warships and champions.
Yet due to the excellent advantages of just two of the Premier Fleet's ace pilots, the native aliens stationed in the Screed Tanner System suffered so many setbacks that their surviving soldiers practically beca traumatized!
After all, they not only lost over 4000 phasefighters, but also lost 47 warships!
The Viscounts empowered by the Minerva Mark II possessed ample enough power and numbers to cripple a warship's most essential functions.
It was a bit difficult for the chs to quickly destroy or damage the warships beyond recovery.
Viscounts or not, their weapon systems were too small and lacked the scale to inflict widespread destruction.
However, that was not a big problem. The primary gun batteries of the Tortuous Scream and the sowhat smaller but still potent primary armants of the Babylon Excavator and the Tarrasque easily finished off the crippled and practically defenseless hulls.
Alien warships that had lost both their azure energy shields and propulsion may as well be asteroids given how easy it was to calculate a firing solution and puml the target with slow but devastating shots.
Plasma bolts, laser beams, positron beams and kinetic rounds easily penetrated through the hull and disintegrated large parts of the citadel of a crippled vessel.
If the design and interior of the alien warship in question happened to be known, then it beca even easier to destroy the vessel.
The human warships just had to aim their weapons at the main power generators, the munition storage compartnts or other unstable elents and fire away!
Even if the human warships had to divert their firepower away from more functional enemy warships, they still prioritized the destruction of the crippled hulls because the enemy still had a chance to recover them during the engagent or after the fighting had ended.
While these attacks rely served to finish off the disabled warships for good, the sight of their collapse actually disheartened the alien soldiers even further!
The spectacle of witnessing ships explode or break apart carried much more visual weight than seeing a mostly intact vessel drift out of formation.
The aliens felt a greater sense of loss and tragedy as they witnessed so many impressive hoships succumb to violence.
Many of the hulls had only been constructed in the past few years!
They had been designed and built to fight the top powers of the human race, and therefore incorporated plenty of excellent human technological solutions.
Yet when the two sides entered into battle, the humans thoroughly managed to destroy almost 50 alien warships at this point!
In contrast, not a single human carrier or warship suffered the sa fate!
The superior tech, maneuverability and defense offered by shield link technology kept them all safe.
What was more ridiculous was that the effective firepower of just one captured and partially converted alien warship easily exceeded that of a dozen warships, if not more!
Even if the Tortuous Scream relied on an ace command ch and her bunker chs as opposed to normal gun batteries, the fact of the matter was that this combination alone was directly responsible for much of the losses suffered by the native aliens!
Their attempt to pincer the flagship of the Premier Fleet failed.
One of them had beco completely savaged by the Dracoloids-turned-Viscounts.
It was as if the dragon chs had turned from technological limitations of dragons into the real deal!
Each Viscount moved faster, struck harder and resisted far more damage than their tech ought to be able to resist!
Even without relying on shield link technology, the Dracoloids were already agile and resistant enough to survive long enough to shred the azure energy shields of an alien warship before crippling the vessel!
"The aliens… are breaking."
Although the native aliens still 'outnumbered' the humans, the continuous setbacks completely snuffed out their fighting spirit.
It had been dim for a while. If not for their pride, training and instructions from above, they would have preferred to cut their losses and retreat.
They had banked all of their hopes on the last gambit, yet the Enfeoffnt of 57 Dracoloids completely crushed their last viable attempt to destroy the Tortuous Scream.
The alien soldiers saw no hope of achieving their win conditions anymore.
Sure, many of the human chs and warships had suffered so much attrition that their azure shield generators were on the verge of failing.
Every few seconds, a ch had to withdraw from the battle line and return to its mothership in order to replenish its reserves and give its azure shield generator ti to recover.
The shield link transceiver also incurred a certain degree of stress due to bearing a heavy burden.
The ch technicians needed to perform a quick inspection and make sure to replace worn components before they had a chance to fail at the worst possible mont.
Fortunately, not many chs needed to rotate at the sa ti.
The Larkinsons actually began to rotate their chs many minutes earlier. This set up a healthy pattern where recently topped off chs were able to return and fight with much greater gusto than before.
There should never be a situation where an entire ch company was at risk of collapsing in a single instant because all of the machines had simultaneously reached their limits!
Through this clever and prudent managent, the human ch units kept fighting without deteriorating in any significant fashion.
The Knights demonstrated a level of persistence and resilience that far exceeded that of other first-class multipurpose chs.
As long as they remained within the impressive range of the Minerva Mark II's Command Field, fighting against them was like fighting against lesser versions of the human false gods!
This had been an unfair confrontation from the beginning.
It slowly dawned upon the alien soldiers and particularly the phasefighter pilots that they had not been fighting against their mortal equals all this ti.
Instead, they had been fighting against humans that harnessed the power of gods!
The distinction between false gods and real gods did not matter to them at the mont. After all, at their level, anything related to divinity was unreachable by their standards!
The only way to cope with such power was to seek salvation from their own native gods.
Yet what were the alien phase lords doing?
They had fled from the battlefield!
After the First Sword Mark III demonstrated her capacity to butcher a greater phase lord like a pig, she had turned into an absolute terror to the lesser phase lords!
Perhaps the Protector of Karnak and the Endless Stomach possessed the ans to cope against the superdinsional chs, but the rest would only lose their heads if they attempted to intervene.
Now that the First Sword Mark III had temporarily given up on killing the two troubleso greater phase lords, she had been circling around the battlefield.
Not all of the lesser phase lords had abandoned all of their responsibilities and fled from the Screed Tanner System without remorse.
There were still plenty of them that still wanted to wait until the First Sword Mark III ceased her pursuit of the lesser prey and beca preoccupied with the two greater phase lords again.
Unfortunately, the First Sword Mark III did not give up.
Anyti a lesser phase lord turned back and tried to get close to their fleets, the ace swordsman ch ruthlessly hod in on the alien champion and charged forward with her Decapitator poised to butcher another giant alien pig!
How could a lesser phase lord possibly think about rescuing his fleet and subordinates under those circumstances?
It was not worth it to risk their lives to save a bunch of mortals and mundane possessions.
The Red Ocean was big enough for a lesser phase lord to be able to replenish those losses easily as long as he returned to his ho territory.
This was also a good excuse to stay away from the battlefield and avoid scary opponents like this superdinsional ace ch!
If one such machine had appeared, others would soon erge as well.
Lesser phase lords may be at the bottom of the alien god totem pole, but few of them were truly stupid. They could easily deduce that the human-alien battlefield was about to beco a lot deadlier for their kind!
These thoughts and more caused the lesser phase lords to grow even more timid.
So long as the First Sword Mark III remained active on the battlefield, the native gods had no intentions of reinforcing their mortal alien forces!
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