The Mech Touch

As the winning side of the Battle of Pima Prime cleaned up the battlefield in orbit, the operations on the ground began to pick up steam.

The main objectives of Operation Saturday Market had always been to plunder or raze the heart of the port system!

As such, hundreds of intact combat carriers steadily descended from orbit and pierced through the upper layers of the atmosphere so that they could bring their combat-ready mechs to the surface.

The local defenders of the Gauge Dynasty did not make it easy for all of these vessels to reach their destination unscathed.

A large number of turrets and ranged mechs opened fire without hesitation and attempted to strike at the distant targets as best as possible!

The rather intense anti-air barrages forced the descending combat carriers to keep their distance from the enemy strongholds and touch down further away than they wished.

None of this hindered the massive amount of incoming raiding forces for long, but every second counted.

The garrison stationed on the surface along with the remnants of the Sundered Phalanx that lost the battle in orbit did not set out to repel the invading enemy troops.

The defenders no longer had the numbers to defeat the Hexers and the Golden Skullers in open combat.

Instead, the Gaugers had clearly shifted to a strategy that amounted to delaying the progress of their opposition as much as possible!

By forcing the raiding Hexers and Golden Skullers to waste lots of time on cracking powerful titan shields and dislodging entrenched mechs, the Gauge Dynasty hoped to limit the damage that the invaders could inflict on the planet.

"The first wave of reinforcements are already on their way! It's impossible for the Hexers to hold on to our planet when they have traveled so deep into our territory. They will have to leave eventually, so let's make sure that our old enemies won't be able to create too much of a mess to our planet. Time is on our side!"

General Alisky Victrix and the other leaders of the invading forces understood this truth as well. They had already given up on assaulting smaller and less important settlements and city districts. It simply wasn't worth the time and effort to destroy a bunch of bungalows, shopping malls or office buildings when there were much more profitable and strategic targets for them to strike.

It was at this junction that the different forces of the invading fleet split up and attacked Pima Prime V according to their own ideas.

It was not necessary anymore for the different allied forces to combine their efforts anymore. Operating together in sieging and raiding operations across dense urban environments would inevitably lead to greater confusion, friction and delays.

The Hexers had their own methodology of conducting raids and adding in other forces like the Larkinson Army would add a lot of coordination problems.

"The defenders are but a shadow of their former selves. Now that we have broken their backs and drove their expert mechs away, the threat of facing an overwhelming counterattack should be minimal!"

The movements of the surviving Fridayman mech forces were not secret to the attackers. It would be incredibly obvious if tens of thousands of mechs converged on one location in order to fight another standing battle."

"The Gaugers won't dare to concentrate their mech units anymore. No matter how many they can rally under these circumstances, we can definitely muster up more! Combined with the fact that we still have the Mars as well as plenty of expert mechs at our disposal, the Sundered Phalanx would only invite greater humiliation on the battlefield."

Reputation mattered!

The Gauge Dynasty had already become the laughingstock of the Magair Middle Zone!

Back in the Friday Coalition, its prestige and air of invincibility had also taken a lot of hits.

The smart and clear-minded leaders of the Gauge Dynasty were confident that they could rebuild their tattered reputation, but that required them to stop the bleeding.

This was why even if the Sundered Phalanx was still able to field the numbers required to contest the invaders once again, the Gaugers didn't dare to roll the dice again!

As such, the Sundered Phalanx no longer concentrated all of their available forces on a single battlefield, but dispersed whatever it had left across multiple different settlements and city districts.

While the more important strategic locations were much better defended than the less important ones, that did not change the reality that none of these sites were particularly difficult to siege.

The different invading forces had already divided their responsibilities and picked their own targets to focus upon.

The Hex Federation's ultimate goal was to destroy Pima Prime's capability to act as a strong and well-developed commercial and industrial hub.

The Hexers therefore targeted a lot of heavy industries, logistical centers but also more administrative or symbolic structures such as government offices and the Palace of New Beginnings.

Though General Alisky Victrix marked out a lot of different targets for destruction, Task Force Fury managed to deploy at least 80,000 mechs on the surface!

Even if many of them weren't optimized for atmospheric environments and siege operations, the abundance of mechs could overwhelm any well-defended fortification!

While it was nice if the detachments of Task Force Fury could plunder large quantities of lucrative goods, resources and data along the way, this was not as important as destroying as much infrastructure as possible.

"Don't spare your ammunition. Just shoot everything that looks expensive! I want to see this entire city flattened by the end of the day."

"Hahahaha! Those Fridayman mechs have all transformed into turtles. They are doing nothing aside from huddling inside their bunkers and underground tunnels. Where is their courage?!"

Flames and explosions engulfed many different cities and city districts in a short amount of time.

The Hexers didn't even wait to land all of their combat carriers before the earliest arrivals had already begun to march towards their nearest targets.

All the while, the mechs of the Hex Army hardly exhibited any restraint.

The mechs generally stayed low on the ground as opposed to flying in the air in order to avoid getting picked off by anti-air fire.

Melee mechs went in first and casually struck their weapons at the structures in the way.

Artillery mechs unleashed their cannons and missiles at distant targets with little concern whether their attacks ended up in the right places.

Other ranged mechs deliberately fired their laser or gauss rifles straight through the urban landscape in front of them as their pilots just wanted to wreck as much Fridayman possessions as possible!

The officers of the Hex Army did not rein in their soldiers. In fact, it was the opposite! These senior Hexer leaders were even more eager to demolish as much of Pima Prime V as they could manage during their short visit to this star system.

Of course, the Hexers didn't forget to do what they set out to accomplish in the first place.

A lot of expensive and important strongholds and complexes got broken in as thousands of mechs systematically overwhelmed the obstacles in their way.

Though mechs such as the Valkyrie Redeemer Mark II's were not that great at siege battles, their rifles possessed enough firepower to wear down titan shields as long as enough of them attacked at the same time!

Civilian casualties remained surprisingly low as these operations took place. The Fridaymen still possessed a strong memory of the cruelty of the Hexers and knew better than to ignore the orders to evacuate and head to safety.

Every settlement built by the Gaugers was designed to offer an abundance of underground shelters. Millions of colonists had already entered them before they all closed up in an effort to keep them out of harm's way as long as possible.

However, the Hexers weren't willing to let them all go. While the Hexers originally sought to sniff out these large shelters and collapse them so that none of the Fridaymen would be able to stay alive and contribute to the development of the Friday Colonies, the invaders recently changed their minds on how to best exploit these civilians.

Spies and saboteurs that had previously blended in with the locals silently took control of the operation centers of these facilities and unlocked the heavily reinforced entrances that should have kept the shelters closed.

The Hexer mechs that arrived soon afterward easily took control over the shelters and forced the bewildered Fridayman colonists to follow their own arrangements!

This wasn't the extent of what the Hexer spies accomplished now that time was of the essence.

Thousands of DIVA agents and other Hexer operatives emerged out of nowhere and struck critical objectives such as titan shield generators, ammunition depots, senior officers and more.

Many groups of defenders fell into disarray as their titan shields disappeared in an instant or when explosions began to engulf their own strongholds!

"These Hexers are everywhere!"

"How did they find out about our secret entrance?"

"Our intelligence agencies are too incompetent!"

As all of this was taking place, the Golden Skull Alliance preoccupied itself with chasing after its own objectives.

To the partners of the alliance, the planetary assault offered them a rare chance to plunder as much as they could out of what was left on Pima Prime V!

Most of them put their focus on attacking the wealthiest and most advanced districts of Ardam, the capital city of the main planet of the port system.

Ardam was roughly comparable to Kotor City of Davute VII. Both had developed into urban metropolises that were divided into many planned city districts.

The Golden Skull Alliance were mainly interested in attacking two sorts of districts.

The most obvious ones were the industrial districts. This was where all of the manufacturing complexes and most of the warehouses were located.

Thousands of Larkinson, Glory Seeker and Crosser mechs all split up in three different directions and sieged the areas that featured the largest and most extensive factories.

No matter whether these industrial facilities were tasked with producing mechs, starship components or colonial infrastructure, they were bound to store a lot of valuable materials and other goodies!

However, when a combined force of Swordmaidens and Penitent Sisters easily overran the defenses of a manufacturing complex belonging to a large mech company, they found precious little worth taking inside the production halls.

"Damn."

The Gaugers took away all of the superfabs while blowing up all of the other production equipment that weren't worth as much.

When the Larkinson mechs intruded into the warehouses, they saw that a lot of material stockpiles still remained intact, but that the most valuable exotics were nowhere to be soon.

It was a dream for the Larkinsons to think that they could plunder any phasewater from the surface of Pima Prime V!

Fortunately, not every manufacturing complex they targeted had been emptied of most of their valuables.

There were still numerous other factories where the locals failed to destroy or take away as much as they wished.

In one facility, a team of Black Cats patiently waited for the arrival of the Avatars of Myth.

"Are those superfabs? How could they still be intact?!"

"Mistakes tend to happen when everyone is running around like headless chickens." An intelligence operative replied with a smirk. "The locals didn't have enough manpower and transportation capacity to empty out each and every factory. This one happens to be a bit lower on the priority list, so it was not that difficult for us to delay the efforts of the Fridaymen and prevent them from destroying these machines."

Though the Larkinson Clan had no intentions of making use of these Fridayman superfabs, they could easily be sold for tens of thousands of MTA credits in any market!

Though these situations were fairly rare, the efforts of the Black Cats easily tripled the profits that the Larkinsons expected to gain from these raids!

Aside from plundering a lot of valuable production machines, the Larkinson raiding units also managed to pick up all kinds of new and strange exotics.

While their value was unclear, Ves eagerly wanted to take them away in the hopes of finding a new material that worked well with his specialty.