The Mech Touch

From the moment the Unrelenting's sensors detected the emergence of an alien battleship that stretched for 1.7 kilometers, Saint Neville Magrin understood that he and his father had been utterly fooled.

All of the events that took place so far made a lot more sense all of a sudden. The inexplicable actions of the Golden Skull Alliance also became a lot more logical.

"The Golden Skullers led us into a trap!"

For some reason or another, the Golden Skullers knew that a powerful alien warship had been hiding in the gasses of the brown dwarf star.

Like blind and ignorant fools, his father had unknowingly brought his fleet close to the location of the alien battleship.

This meant that when the latter emerged from the top layer of gasses of the brown dwarf star, they were positioned almost right on top of each other!

It was impossible for this to be a coincidence. The second alien ship wreckage had been a piece of bait all along. Its main purpose had been to lure Cenatus Prospecting into the perfect killzone of the newly emerged alien battleship!

As Saint Neville Magrin made all of these realizations in an instant, his battle-oriented mindset understood how exposed his father's fleet had become.

The distance between the fleet and the newly emerged alien battleship was far enough that it would take melee mechs a lot of time to close the distance.

Ranged mechs would also find it difficult to hit a starship at such a large distance, especially if this alien vessel was capable of activating warp travel on an active battlefield.

The chance that this advanced alien battleship could dictate the range of the engagement was high!

In short, the thousands of mechs fielded by the Cenatus Prospecting fleet could hardly play a role in this fight. Their offensive power was practically irrelevant in the face of such a powerful enemy. The most they could do was force the warship to expend more shots to eliminate the opposition.

Not even the expert mechs could make a meaningful difference!

The disparity in combat power was simply too great. Although the analysts working for Cenatus Prospecting only had time to discern the basic details of the alien bogey, the preliminary data already showed that the specs of this warship had reached first-class standards.

A single first-class multipurpose mech could already inflict a serious blow against the fleet!

A battleship could inflict much more damage!

"The enemy ship is about to open fire again!"

"Disperse and take evasive maneuvers! Make sure to cover the Seeker of Wealth and buy time for her to evacuate this killzone!"

After taking the time to charge up and lock onto its targets, a single gun battery installed on the hull of the alien warship unleashed its might.

The triple-barreled puelmer kinetic cannon battery fired three different kinetic rounds at slightly different angles.

Even though the range was rather long for kinetic weapons, the modern transphasic armaments of the alien battleship were able to speed up their projectiles to an impressive degree, causing them to close in much faster than normal.

Each of these projectiles happened to strike three different combat carriers with amazing power!

If space could transmit sound, the surrounding area would have been bombarded with simultaneous thunderous impact noises!

The heavy kinetic rounds that were roughly the size of mechs or larger possessed incredible mass and power.

The guns of the alien battleship fired them out with such great power that the energy shields and the hull plating of the affected vessels played no role at all. They easily folded as if they were made of paper. Hull plating and structural parts deformed and disintegrated at such great speeds that the vessels peeled open like flowers!

Though the kinetic projectiles transferred a massive amount of destructive forces onto the combat carriers, they pushed forth with such great momentum that they actually drilled right through the hulls and continued to plunge deeper into space on ballistic courses!

"The battleship's main guns have overpenetrated!" A weapons officer spoke with horror in his voice.

Overpenetration!

This was the clearest sign that the pioneering fleet had bitten off more than it could chew after encountering this powerful foe.

If the main guns of the alien battleship possessed enough power to not only demolish entire combat carriers with a single round, but also have plenty of power to spare, then that meant that their effectiveness against capital ships was definitely just as threatening!

As the wreckage and debris of the fallen combat carriers continued to spread across space, pain and loss affected the only ace pilot of the fleet.

He could see and feel the thousands of bodies that had become utterly mangled and crushed after getting affected by the prodigious firepower of the alien vessel.

"This is too much…"

Neville had never witnessed brutality at this scale. The alien battleship was by far the most powerful alien warship that he had encountered in battle, and she was definitely showing that she was built to defeat other warships!

Against this level of firepower, his father's fleet possessed no effective means to mitigate the incoming attacks.

No matter whether it was a combat carrier or a fleet carrier, neither type of vessels had ever been designed with resisting battleship-grade attacks in mind!

"This… this is about to turn into a massacre."

Saint Neville Magrin could do little to prevent any of the three combat carriers from suffering a direct hit each, and that hurt him a lot.

Even if he wasn't particularly close to the men and family members who served aboard these proud vessels, they were still comrades who he vowed to protect!

"The alien battleship is reorienting her guns. As far as we can tell, her secondary gun batteries are beginning to target our sub-capital ships."

"What about her main guns?!" Otrus Magrin personally asked.

"They are slower to move. Wait. It appears that her primary kinetic cannon batteries are turning to aim their muzzles at our capital ships!"

The Unrelenting had to take action. Even though the disparity between an ace mech and a first-class alien battleship was still too large, it was impossible for Saint Neville Magrin to cut and run even though this was the most rational course of action to take!

"Father!" He roared over their private communication channel. "What is the progress of your evacuation?!"

"We have made no progress, son." Otrus replied in a grave tone. "My flagship has tried to enter into warp travel numerous times with the help of her superdrive, but our engineers tell me that our proximity to the brown dwarf star along with the strong warp interdiction field produced by the alien battleship is making it impossible for us to speed away."

"What?!"

When Saint Neville attempted to activate the Unrelenting's powerful transphasic flight system, he could immediately feel a large amount of resistance from the surrounding space.

It was as if he was now trying to move his body around while submerged in a pool of water instead of walking around in open air.

Anything that wasn't strong enough to push back against the increased resistance would not be able to speed themselves up in realspace.

In other words, the various ships equipped with warp drives and superdrives were unable to jump out of the effective range of the enemy battleship fast enough!

This was a major disadvantage. If the ships of the vulnerable pioneering fleet could all enter into warp travel, then they could easily split up and move in rapidly different directions, thereby making it infeasible for a single warship to prevent at least some of them from escaping with their hulls intact.

However, the battleship's powerful warp interdiction capabilities prevented this from happening!

Otrus Magrin knew this but still wanted to make sure he did not lose his entire fleet and mech force.

"Keep dispersing and accelerating as hard as possible! The range of the warp interdiction field has to be limited. As long as some of our ships can lure this battleship away from the remainder, the latter will eventually be able to warp away. Right now, we must all fight to evacuate as many of our people as possible!"

The leader of the fleet did not speak anything about covering the flight of the Seeker of Wealth.

No ship was safe in the face of so much firepower. Otrus Magrin was afraid that if he commanded all of the ships at his disposal to block the line of sight to his flagship, the alien ship would just fire a missile or something that circled around and smashed the vessel he was on in a single titanic blow!

He judged that it was much better for every ship to disperse and look as indistinguishable to each other as possible.

The plan worked more or less. The alien battleship didn't seem to be able to distinguish which human starships were more important than others.

Her powerful kinetic gun batteries possessed a low firing rate, but each time they struck, they easily broke open the defenses of a fleet carrier and inflicted crippling internal damage to their hulls!

The much more numerous combat carriers on the other hand began to get peppered by highly accurate transphasic laser beams!

The puelmers developed the most advanced warship-grade weapons in the Red Ocean. Their reputation for possessing the greatest firepower out of any alien race was not undeserved!

While the primary armament of the alien battleship was purely designed to overcome the defenses of enemy battleships by relying on brute force and little else, the secondary armament possessed a lot more finesse.

The alien battleship actually possessed significantly less secondary laser cannon batteries than normal, but their calibers were also greater as a result.

This allowed the battleship's laser weapons to assist with taking down powerful battleships faster by employing their sustained precision to destroy critical surface modules or exploit narrow gaps in an opponent's defenses.

Their power almost made them overkill when employed against combat carriers!

Weapons designed to disable powerful battleship modules easily broke any energy shield in the way. Though the respectable hull plating of these smaller carriers were still respectable, they could hardly put up a serious resistance.

Many combat carriers that were lucky enough to retain enough functionality began to collect an increasingly greater quantity of massive half-melted holes in their hulls!

"Our entire hangar bay is melted into slag!"

"Our FTL drive has incurred too much heat damage. Repairing it will take at least fourteen days!"

"Half of the crew stationed aboard this ship have been vaporized or burned! There is nothing left of my immediate superior aside from leaving behind a pile of ashes!"

Death and suffering spread across the pioneering fleet at a rapid rate!

Even though thousands of mechs have already opened fire against the distant terror, the alien battleship deftly avoided most of the incoming fire by swimming through space like a playful fish with the help of her active warp drive!

"It's not fair! Why can the aliens activate their warp drives while we can't?!"

Superior technology. That was it. While the Big Two mastered even more powerful tech, the indigenous alien races possessed a much greater institutional understanding of phasewater technology. It would take far too long for humanity to close this crucial gap!

Before that happened, humanity had to had to deal with situations where they met alien opponents who were clever enough to maximize this disparity.

Neville gritted his teeth and tried his best to channel his fury at all of the losses into his machine.

He began to resonate much stronger with his ace mech. The boost in strength allowed him and the Unrelenting to resist the active warp interdiction field with greater effectiveness than before!

The ace pilot made an important decision.

"I'm going in, father!"

"Are you sure?"

"This is the only way I can buy your ship time to evacuate." Neville rapidly explained as his ace mech raced towards the distant enemy vessel. "I can't block the incoming attacks because they are just too powerful. The Unrelenting isn't suited for defense. The only way I can contribute is to divert most of the firepower of the enemy vessel. Don't worry, father. My chances of escaping are much higher."

Otrus Magrin sounded weary. "...Fine. Just be sure to suspend your mission as soon as my flagship gets away. I do not want to lose you so soon. You still have a mission to complete."

"I will make it back." Saint Neville promised to both himself and his father.