The Mech Touch

While the initial attacks against the shielded mechs of the Pima Defenders yielded results, this was just the prelude to a greater assault.

The Larkinson mech pilot had already become familiar with the enemy mech models. They had tested the defenses of mechs such as the Modal Firmament many times with the help of the MSTS.

Surprisingly enough, the performance of the Modal Firmament based on leaked intelligence and educated guesses did not diverge that much from the actual performance of the defensive space knights fielded by the Pima Defenders!

The relatively slow and lumbering mechs did not possess the capability to execute any elaborate tactics, so their pilots could do relatively little to amplify the performance of their machines.

This meant that the Avatars only needed to take the technical capabilities of the Modal Firmament into account!

"Overcoming the Modal Firmaments at front is the first step to defeating the Pima Defenders." Commander Melkor stated. "We also have to beat the Favored Sons and the Space Piercers."

If the Modal Firmanents occupied the first row of a formation, then the latter two mech models occupied the second and third rows.

The Favored Son was a heavy halberdier mech model that wielded a relatively short but heavy halberd.

Though there wasn't anything special about the weapon itself, it was made of quality materials and its blade possessed enough mass to make any serious strike hurt!

It took a lot of skill and anticipation to pilot a slow and powerful mech like the Favored Son in battle. Only the most skilled or talented melee mech pilots of the Sundered Phalanx received an opportunity to pilot this powerful offensive melee mech!

The Space Piercer ordinarily occupied the third row of a formation. The defining feature of this heavy spearman mech was its weapon, which consisted of an extendable spear that could increase its length to an extreme degree!

The mech was mainly designed to stab enemies from afar, so its stabbing force was extremely powerful!

The reason why this model was called the Space Piercer was because their spears were transphasic!

To be more precise, the tips of their spears integrated a tiny drop of phasewater!

By concentrating the effect of that phasewater drop at the front-most part of the spear, the weapon's ability to breach through armor improved by at least 50 percent!

Of course, only an extravagant and well-connected mech division like the Pima Defenders could afford to produce so many Space Piercers.

All in all, the synergy between the mech models produced an incredibly stable and solid defensive formation.

The most important part was that while their offensive capabilities varied considerably, their defensive features were remarkably consistent!

Each of these signature models carried their own specific version of the HiCap shield generator!

They all sacrificed a considerable amount of armor in order to strengthen their HiCap shields as much as possible!

This meant that if an enemy launched a forceful assault and somehow managed to overcome the Modal Firmament at great cost, then the Favored Sons and the Space Piercers could easily take over and serve as the defensive bulwark.

They didn't need to carry any heavy shields because their HiCap energy shields were already enough for them to block a lot of attacks!

If the Avatars couldn't break through all of their defenses in quick succession, then the Pima Defenders would force everyone into a war of attrition where they inevitably held a huge advantage!

This was certainly one of the toughest walls that the Sundered Phalanx could muster in the field, but it just so happened that the Avatars had made targeted preparations to overcome this formation!

Commander Melkor studied the enemy battle line carefully once again before deciding to target the middle of their wall.

"Let's proceed with the standard breakthrough plan." He decided. "The most viable way for us to defeat the Pima Defenders is to breach their formation in the middle and continue to cut through ranks until our shock troops reach the rear. This way, we can not only attack the Pima Defender mechs with depleted shields, but also split their formation in half and attack it from multiple directions. The more chaotic and messed up the situation, the more the Pima Defenders will show faults!"

The Avatars of Myth weren't suited for drawn-out frontal engagements. That was the strength of the Living Sentinels.

What the Avatars did excel at was smashing open defensive lines with overwhelming force!

After a brief wait, all of the elements were in position.

"Inferno Company, you're up first! Light the center of their battle line up and drown them in heat!"

"Aye aye, commander!"

An entire mech company of Shield Warriors moved up first.

The rank-and-file members of the Larkinson Clan already called the space knight configuration of the Bright Warrior model by this convenient name, completely ignoring the official one that Ves had invented.

In order to make everything more convenient, Ves had taken over the colloquial names of all four configurations.

These Shield Warriors were a bit special though. All forty of them had swapped out their swords and shields in order to make way for a flamethrower loadout!

The Inferno Company mechs did not move quickly, and got hit by plenty of ranged attacks on approach.

However, the Shield Warriors easily endured the abuse with the help of their shield generators.

While their damage absorbing capacities and other parameters were not as good as the HiCap versions developed by the Bubble Man, they still provided the Shield Warriors with enough protection to get close and fire out 40 jets of hot propellant at the center of the Pima Defender formation!

Initially, Pima Defender mech pilots did not exhibit much concern towards the odd Bright Warriors that had turned themselves into striker mechs for some reason.

However, the Fridayman mech pilots quickly noticed that the flames not only spread incredibly deep into the formation, but that the burning propellant also began to get attracted by the HiCap energy shields as if metal got attracted to magnets!

"What is going on?! I can't see anymore!"

"I'm blinded! Too many of my sensors are overloaded by heat and light!"

"Why do these flames keep sticking to my energy shield?!"

The Inferno Company poured so much flames through a relatively small part of the Pima Defenders formation, not hesitating to concentrate their streams to achieve the greatest effect at the designated breakthrough point!

Not only that, but the Inferno Company mechs also emptied their propellant tanks as quickly as possible in order to saturate the affected Pima Defender mechs with as much heat damage as possible!

Commander Melkor and many other Avatars grinned when they saw that the HiCap energy shields had no way of wicking away the propellant that had been especially formulated to stick to it. The heat damage they dealt was so much that the Pima Defender mechs should definitely be suffering at the moment!

"It's a pity that the propellants won't last long."

The formula utilized for the flamethrower focused more on dealing as much damage in a short amount of time as possible. While the flames burned so hot that they blinded a lot of sensors, the propellant was destined to get used up in a short instant.

It was worth it, though!

Already the formation was becoming more disarrayed!

The mechs no longer covered each other as perfectly as before. Not even the best training could make these Fridayman mech pilots maintain their composure.

Although the flames did not burn the mechs or the pilots inside directly, it was extremely scary for humans to end up in a situation that literally resembled hell!

The Avatars needed to strike while the iron was hot.

"Akimbo Company, open fire!" Melkor ordered!

This time, another Avatar mech company arrived in front of the burning mechs.

The Inferno Company hadn't left after they expended their flamethrowers. They merely put away their weapon and picked up the heavy shields that they had brought over beforehand but entrusted to other friendly mechs while they started up the plan.

Now, the Shield Warriors took up their original occupation again and held out their shields in front of the mechs of the Akimbo Company!

This protection was sorely needed because the ranged mechs among the Sundered Phalanx already noticed the unusual movement at this part of the battlefield.

Different ranged mechs from various Sundered Phalanx mech divisions attempted to stop whatever the Avatars were trying to pull off and relieve the burning Pima Defender mechs, but the defenses of the Shield Warriors were too great to overcome in a short amount of time!

With the protection offered by the Inferno Company, the Rifle Warriors of the Akimbo Company comfortably set up their weapons and opened fire!

What was special about the Akimbo Company was that they actually carried two full-sized luminar crystal rifles at the same time!

Theoretically, any humanoid mech could wield two energy rifles in battle. They weren't particularly heavy and mechs possessed enough arm and limb strength to aim with them one-handed.

It was too troublesome in practice. Using two rifles at once made it a lot more difficult to maintain good and consistent precision and accuracy over longer ranges. 

Not only that, the mech's heat and energy management systems would endure an enormous amount of strain.

It was much more effective and efficient to equip mechs with a single larger energy weapon than two smaller ones under these circumstances.

This was different, though!

The Rifle Warriors wielded their two rifles with confidence because their targets were right in front of them. The distance was so small that it was impossible for their pilots to miss the huge energy-shielded heavy mechs!

Each rifle held in a single arm immediately began to fire disruptor beams at regular intervals!

Although only forty ranged mechs opened fire at a time, it looked as if eighty mechs were attacking the burning Pima Defender mechs at the moment!

"Hahaha! This is fun!"

The Rifle Warriors were able to sustain such an exaggerated rate of fire by mounting modular heatsinks and energy packs to the exterior of their frames!

Though the additional hardware turned them into larger and more lumbering targets, it was all worth it as long as their luminar crystal rifles kept firing as fast as possible!

"Don't let up the pressure! Those HiCap shields don't react to disruptor beams that well so keep firing!"

Since the Akimbo Company received orders to concentrate their fire on just a handful of individual Modal Firmaments, the degree of shield drain that the enemy mechs experienced was different!

Some Modal Firmament mechs were already reaching rock-bottom while many other heavy space knights could still keep going to an extent!

Under a calmer and more organized circumstance, the individual mech squads or mech companies could sort this out and rotate the mechs that had entered the danger zone as seamlessly as possible.

The current situation affecting this narrow slice of Pima Defender mechs was anything but normal!

The raging flames still cut off a lot of mechs from the chain of command and the untested highborn mech officers simply didn't know how to resolve this crisis in a short amount of time!

With so much disorganization and lack of communication, the mech pilots of Modal Firmaments that were losing their HiCap energy shields at a rapid rate due to enduring so many disruptor beam attacks faced a difficult choice!

They could either pull back their beleaguered mechs to the rear as they had trained so many times, or they could choose to obey their current instructions and stand their ground.

In the end, the mech pilots of the heavy space knights all chose to allow their HiCap shields to break and continue to withstand the incoming firepower with their physical shields and armor.

Even though the Modal Firmaments didn't stand out in terms of armor, they were still heavy mechs, so they could still take a lot of hits.

Unfortunately, the Avatars already prepared the next step of their plan!