The Mech Touch

Commander Melkor watched on with satisfaction as the start of the plan proceeded smoothly.

Even though the current wave of attacks only affected a small proportion of Pima Defenders, being able to disrupt and tear a hole in their formation, however small, produced a lot of ripple effects!

For one, the enemy mech pilots were no longer in their comfort zone.

The pilots of the machines targeted by the Inferno Company, the Akimbo Company and the Catcher Squads had it worse than other Fridaymen.

They became so lost, isolated and confused that the vast majority of them could not resist from beginning to end.

Many of them ejected as soon as the Redaxes showed up and lifted their iconic weapons!

Though the Redaxe was a rather simple design compared to many of the other models adopted by the Larkinson Army, it definitely had a place in the mech roster of the Avatars of Myth.

Their heavy, sharp axes along with their prodigious physical might were ideal for breaking physical shields and armor!

One of the Redaxes fully showcased its ability to tear through the unshielded heavy mechs of the Pima Defenders by breaching half of the rear armor plating of a Modal Firmament!

Without the protection of the famed HiCap energy shield, the Modal Firmament’s rear could not hold up against the Redaxes.

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Normally, heavy space knights were supposed to be more resilient than that, but the Bubble Man had deliberately thinned the armor of the Modal Firmament in order to equip a larger and heavier HiCap shield generator.

The Avatars eagerly took advantage of this inherent design weakness!

The powerful medium axeman mech only needed to chop one more time to breach the rear armor of the enemy machine entirely!

The powerful strike not only chopped open a hole through the armor, but also destroyed and disabled several important components, causing the trapped defensive mech to lose a bit of power.

After that, it took only one final strike to tear through the internals and breach the cockpit, thereby killing the Fridayman mech pilot inside!

Although this was just a tiny incident in a much larger sequence of events, the decisive killing of the mech pilot of the Modal Firmament mech sent a chill through some of the spines of the Pima Defender mech pilots.

The rank-and-file members of the mech division did not lose heart at the display. The vast majority of them were war veterans who served with distinction during the Komodo War.

Back then, it seemed like they lost friends after every deployment! Even the pilots themselves weren’t certain whether they could make it back alive!

The younger and more tender mech officers were different. At least Captain Arbid Hovan-Gauge had been old enough to take part in real actions in the past.

There were plenty of other mech officers who hadn’t even graduated from the mech academies by the time the war had ended!

Though each of them received impeccable training, they were still rookies when it came to actual battle.

Their reaction to the sight of deaths among their own mech division was much greater than their subordinates!

Though these highborn mech officers did not do anything that deviated from their roles, their heart and courage had diminished.

One of the main selling points for serving in the Pima Defenders was that it fielded the toughest mechs in the colonies!

Master Zenie Bonakane’s work was not for show! His HiCap shield generators were considerably more expensive than the usual offerings on the market, but their ability to resist incoming attacks were legendary!

As long as the Pima Defenders remained stable and steady enough to conduct its rotation tactic, the mech division should have been able to weather almost any storm!

Yet now that the Avatars had not only broken a small but significant hole in the formation, but also proved their ability to kill the mech pilots of the highly resilient mechs of the Pima Defenders, the myth had been broken!

This dealt a severe blow to the confidence and belief of the Pima Defender mech pilots. Their fighting spirit wasn’t as strong as before and plenty of highborn officers started to think about their escape plans in advance!

“Heh, these pampered sons and daughters don’t know anything about hardship.” Commander Melkorr contemptuously remarked.

Though he couldn’t sense the expressions or reactions of the enemy mech pilots and mech officers, he believed in his analysis and plans.

The Larkinson Clan paid a lot more attention to tempering its mech pilots and mech officers in actual combat.

Having good skills or performing well in the MSTS was not enough as far as many clansmen were concerned.

The only way to definitely prove that a comrade could be relied upon was to evaluate his or her performance in an actual crisis situation!

Ordinarily, the Sundered Phalanx should have been cognizant of this as well. It would have been better if the military branch could spread out all of its less experienced mech officers across all of its mech units stationed in the Friday Colonies, but even the military was not immune to outside pressure.

Too many resume builders wanted to become a part of the Pima Defenders. Whether it was because of its resilient mechs, its permanent station in a prosperous and well-developed port system, the ease of commanding heavy mechs or the networking opportunities gained by joining a large and expanding circle of well-knit scions, too many dubious figures had joined this special mech division!

Now, despite not losing a lot of mechs as of yet, Commander Melkor practically knew for certain that the officers of the Pima Defenders were not in a good state of mind anymore.

“We’ve created a weak point in their formation, sir.” Colonel Cardano reported to Melkor. “According to our analysis of their reactions or lack thereof, the Pima Defenders have yet to formulate an effective response. We should proceed with launching a general assault on their lines!”

Commander Melkor nodded. “Then give the orders. Focus on exploiting the hole in the center as much as possible!”

The Avatars of Myth finally moved in force!

The switch happened so suddenly that the Pima Defenders were caught off-guard.

So far, the Avatars showed clear reluctance in trying to attack the Pima Defenders head-on. This was not a surprise as the latter would clearly gain an advantage if anyone tried to attack them from the front.

Now, over a thousand Avatar mechs attacked the very center of the Pima Defenders which had been hard just a moment earlier!

All kinds of Bright Warriors showed up as a result.

There were Lancer Warriors that charged towards the Modal Firmaments and inflicted so much impact damage with their blunt lances that the heavy space knights either lost a lot of energy shield capacity or suffered brand-new holes in their tower shields.

There were Knight Warriors that boldly flew forward and resisted the incidental attacks from the Favored Sons and Space Piercers as best as possible.

These Knight Warriors did not deploy in their default configurations but carried additional modules in order to prolong the time they could resist the punishing attacks from the polearms wielded by the enemy heavy mechs.

For one, the Knight Warriors carried extra thick shields that were made out of extra dense alloys!

Transphasic spear tips or not, the penetration capacity of the main weapons of the Space Piercers could not punch through so much thick and dense material at once!

While some of the extended spears of the Space Piercers still managed to punch through the ultra-thick shields with great effort, this was where the Avatars launched their real counterattack.

The Knight Warrior would angle their shields as much as possible in order to prevent the Space Piercer from pulling out the spear through the hole it had just made!

During this brief interval of time where the spear remained stuck, a nearby Sword Warrior or Redaxe would come and chop the long and exposed shaft at the front of the Knight Warrior’s tower shield!

Even though the spear shafts of the Space Piercer were made of extremely tough alloys in order to ensure it wouldn’t break when utilized in combat, none of them could resist repeated heavy chopping attacks for long!

Cutting off the most valuable transphasic spear tips from the rest of the weapon turned out to be as easy as chopping a tree branch.

Once the Space Piercers lost their signature weapons, their threat level instantly plummeted to the bottom.

Even if they still had access to a backup spear or a backup sword, their slow attack speed meant that it was far more difficult for them to land a hit.

Even if the heavy spearman mechs managed to strike a Larkinson mech, without transphasic weapons it was unlikely for them to pierce through multiple armor layers in an instant.

The only mechs that gave the Avatars a serious challenge was the Favored Son model.

While these mechs performed best when they fought in an organized line and formation, they could also hold their own in duels and chaotic battlefields.

All of the mech pilots assigned to these heavy halberdier mechs were the elites among elites!

The various Bright Warriors immediately experienced difficulties when fighting against the Favored Sons.

First, they needed to get through the HiCap energy shields that protected these halberd-wielding monstrosities.

The Avatar melee mechs simply weren’t able to accomplish this in a short amount of time.

They all needed the help of Rifle Warriors armed with luminar crystal rifles in order to efficiently drain their energy shields.

Once these HiCap shields were down, the Avatar melee mechs needed to outfight or outduel the Favored Sons head-on. While the assistance of ranged mechs could take them down a lot faster, all of the Rifle Warriors were already preoccupied with overcoming the HiCap shields of many other Pima Defender mechs!

“These mech pilots are too good!”

“Damn, half of our squad has been forced to retreat from those Favored Sons!”

“We can’t defeat these halberdier mechs from the front. We need to break open their formation further and attack them from the flanks in order to overwhelm these difficult enemies.”

“Just hold the Favored Son mechs in place and don’t let them rotate or reinforce their comrades. The Modal Firmaments and the Space Piercers are a lot easier for us to defeat.”

The Avatars of Myth experienced real challenges and difficulties when fighting the Pima Defenders in frontal combat, but they already expected that this would be a tough fight.

More and more Bright Warriors and other Avatar mechs frequently incurred so much damage that they either got destroyed or were forced to retreat from the battle line.

In contrast, the strong defenses of most Pima Defender mechs meant that their rate of attrition was significantly lower!

If not for the fact that the Avatars made targeted preparations to counter the various means of the Pima Defenders, the Larkinson soldiers would have suffered considerably more losses!

Commander Melkor noticed a clear difference in progress between the Avatar units fighting at the center as opposed to those who were confronting the Pima Defender mechs at the periphery.

The Avatar mechs fighting against the freshest and least disarrayed enemy units clearly did not gain any advantages.

Melkor did not hold out much hope for them from the beginning. It was enough for the Avatars at the periphery along with the units dispatched by the Glory Seekers, the Cross Clan as well as the Hex Army to pin down as many Pima Defender mechs as possible.

The more enemy mechs got stuck in place, the easier it was to expand and widen the breach at the center!

The Avatars responsible for expanding this breach happened to be the best of their mech legion.

Numerous elite squads and mech companies bravely surged forward and did their utmost to overwhelm the tough Pima Defender mechs as much as possible.

In this kind of hard confrontation, the individual combat skills of the mech pilots were less important than the raw performance of the mechs involved in this fight.

The power of the Bright Warrior Mark II’s and other Avatar mechs increasingly stood out against their opponents!