5369 The Third Armada
The Second Armada encountered greater numbers and stiffer opposition.
The alien defenders held their ground with greater fervor.
With three of their most impressive native gods watching over them, the morale of the elite soldiers of the Red Cabal remained high.
Not even the Indignation of Righteousness and the Dominion of Man could shake their confidence all that much!
Fortunately, the Red Two made sure to add enough fault tolerance in their planning. The mechers and fleeters had already estimated that the strength of a typical ancient phase whale could not match that of a god pilot.
The only advantage that the native aliens could count on in a fight was superior numbers.
The more ancient phase whales cooperated with each other, the greater the extent they were able to wrestle back control over space from the God Kingdoms of their difficult human opponents.
This was why the Fist of Defiance and the First Flame still had a hard fight ahead of them even if they still managed to hold their own against three enormous alien gods.
Once these clever alien leaders realized that they were actually at a disadvantage when they entered into a contest of strength with the unreasonably strong Fist of Defiance, they began to rely a lot more on maneuvers and remote spatial attacks to frustrate the two god mechs.
Even if these rule-breaking machines managed to resist every attack, they could be slowed and stalled under the combined efforts of all three powerful phase whales!
As the Second Armada and their alien adversaries attempted to outlast each other and grind their enemies down, the Third Armada's situation proceeded in a much more different fashion!
The Ancient phase whales presiding over the Seventeenth Tide Station had made the heartless decision to stay in the rear and let their defenders consume the resources of the mechs and warships of the Third Armada.
Much of this had to do with the top-level units that the Red Two assigned to this assault.
The two dreadnoughts that led the Third Armada possessed their own distinctive traits that largely dictated how their forces approached the battle.
The Reign of Frost cast an oppressive presence on the battlefield.
What was special about this 18-kilometer long dreadnought was that she traded direct damage capabilities in favor of becoming much more effective at debilitating her targets. Mounted with a generous quantity of newly developed and installed ice hyper cannons, the Reign of Frost fired powerful shells that exploded in a much different way when they struck a target.
The hyper shells were filled with the power of ice. Upon detonation, they not only caused anything they came into contact with to abruptly lose a lot of heat, causing them to drop to absolute zero or near zero temperatures!
Many tough and resilient materials suddenly became as fragile as eggshells when they became frozen to this extent!
The only reason why the Reign of Frost hadn't been able to eliminate her targets so quickly was because her attacks were less effective against transphasic energy shields.
However, they were still threatening to an extent!
The ice hyper cannons did not just freeze anything they hit in a physical manner. They also affected their targets in a metaphysical way!
Transphasic energy shields that were struck by the ice hyper shells were getting drained of energy.
Warp bubbles found it harder to maintain their strength as the areas of space that got struck by the ice shells became more stable and inflexible.
The Reign of Frost was able to suppress the transphasic technologies that the aliens relied upon!
Wherever the Reign of Frost made her presence felt, the alien warships and defensive installations inevitably slowed down as they became affected by her chilling attacks.
The phasefighters deployed by the aliens were having an especially miserable time!
One ice shell detonating in the vicinity could freeze entire wings of phasefighters!
Hundreds of expensive small craft that were originally designed to compete against first-class mechs all turned into metal popsicles. Their defenses were too weak to resist the freezing waves!
Still, the Reign of Frost's damage output was not that shocking to the aliens. The ship that truly concerned the defenders was her sister dreadnought!
The Doom of Xenos had been christened with an ominous name for a clear reason. Her weapon configuration was much more extreme compared to other dreadnoughts.
The Doom of Xenos did not mount any primary gun batteries on her hull! Her regular damage output relied entirely on her complement of smaller secondary and tertiary cannon turrets.
The main armament of the offensive dreadnought was much more massive than that. The fleeters had made the extreme decision to base the huge warship around one of the largest spinal cannons that the fleeters had ever designed and built!
A clear cylindrical muzzle ran along her entire 18-kilometer hull and ended in a huge opening that was large and spacious enough to fit an entire battleship under certain circumstances!
This extreme spinal cannon was entirely energy-based. It took a huge amount of time just to charge this recently upgraded hyper weapon system with the Spark Reactor.
Yet once the Doom of Xenos had charged her ominous spinal cannon, the damage output was absolutely incredible!
A thick and powerful transphasic graser beam shot out of the gigantic muzzle and quickly overwhelmed all of the targets in her line of fire with a spike of heat and radiation!
Not a single starship or defensive installation could resist a full-powered blow from this ridiculously excessive energy cannon!
Even the ancient phase whales that were hanging back felt reluctant to endure this powerful energy attack with their own bodies.
The damage potential of the Doom of Xenos was so high that she actually wasted a lot of energy in vain if she continually waited until her spinal cannon became fully charged.
This was why her crew only charged her up to 15 to 40 percent of the weapon system's total capacity before pressing the button.
Even at reduced power, no single alien defensive asset was able to last more than a single hit from this spinal cannon!
The crew and analysts of the Red Fleet were fully capable of studying the enemy and calculating how much energy was required to overwhelm their transphasic shields and destroy their structures with a single hit.
A ship that expended so much energy and possessed an awfully slow firing rate had to be extremely deliberate in her actions!
Still, as soon as the Doom of Xenos entered into a comfortable rhythm, the aliens all became oppressed by her slow but heavy attacks.
The fact that every alien stationed on a warship or defensive installation died in an instant without even having a chance to escape was especially damaging to their morale!
The situation for the defenders of the Seventeenth Tide Station eventually became so unbearable that the ancient phase whales were forced to step forward!
The two alien leaders happened to be siblings and family with each other.
It was extremely difficult for a phase whale to reach their level of strength. There were many weaker and less capable whales who remained stuck at the adult stage for many ages.
The two sisters in blood were exceptional in that they both managed to become ancients among their own kind!
Part of their success was that they had resisted their racial instinct to separate from their family and live a mostly solitary life in the Red Ocean.
The sister whales instead stuck together and grew side by side on a near-constant basis.
They not only had no compulsions about sharing their own biotechnology research with each other, but also developed many cooperative techniques that enabled them to synergize with each other to a greater extent!
The two sister whales began to showcase their power by teleporting their massive bodies just a short distance away from the Doom of Xenos!
If not for the fact that the dreadnought still kept her own space suppression generators at full power, the ancient phase whales would have been able to crush the vessel with their bodies upon arrival!
As the ancient phase whales had managed to appear in the rear to the Doom of Xenus, they both moved forward with all of their speed.
Yet before they could come close enough to the dreadnought that had already begun to retreat in haste, two god mechs appeared to block their way!
Many people who watched the live feed tracking the progress of the Third Armada instantly recognized their identities.
"The Army of One!"
"The Huntsman!"
Both god pilots helmed the Expansionist Faction of the Red Association. They had been among the original proponents that advocated for the invasion of the Red Ocean.
While times had clearly changed since then, their strength had grown even stronger due to recent developments!
The Army of One took the initiative first.
"<nullb>THERE IS STRENGTH IN NUMBERS."
As a rare mech commander among his kind, the Army of One fought best when he was able to channel his power through many different units!
The Auto-Coordinator was carefully designed to give him the capacity to fight like an entire mech army by himself.
The god mech integrated a large pocket space that contained an entire automated manufacturing complex as well as other useful facilities.
As the machine confronted the two enemy phase whales, large quantities of battle bots constantly streamed out of the exit of the pocket space.
The battle bots shared a great resemblance to RA first-class multipurpose mechs, though they were completely autonomous and built according to slightly worse standards.
As powerful as they may be, the battle bots were essentially disposable.
That did not mean that they were easy to defeat.
The opposing ancient phase whales initially exhibited contempt at these weak machines.
The god mechs themselves might be difficult opponents, but their kind excelled at wiping out large swarms of weaker units!
Just as the two sister phase whales synchronized their spatial efforts and attempted to generate a wide-area spatial storm to shred these tiny bots to pieces, they became stumped when they only managed to produce a feeble destabilization at most.
It turned out that all of the newly deployed battle bots had all been equipped with their own space suppressors!
While the modules weren't as strong as the ones installed aboard starships, their sheer quantity combined with the Army of One's willpower empowerment made them ridiculously effective!
As the battle bots fearlessly spread out and surrounded the moon-sized ancient phase whales, they constantly constricted the fabric of space around them, preventing the alien leaders from utilizing their combination abilities!
Even if the sister whales managed to strike the battle bots with their weakened attacks, the automated units were far more resilient than any standard first-class multipurpose mech so long as they stayed within the protective envelope of Army of One's massive God Kingdom!
The only major fault of all of these empowered battle bots was that their offensive power was too inadequate against their current opponents.
The two ancient phase whales were so tough and massive that the low caliber weapons of the battle bots simply couldn't get past the spatial barriers!
This was what the other god pilot was for. Unlike the Army of One, the Huntsman excelled at inflicting high damage on single targets!
As the Auto-Coordinator attracted the attention of the sister whales, the Heartpiercer maneuvered around until it suddenly whipped out a hyper spear and charged it with a hefty amount of willpower.
"THE HUNT IS ON."
The energy silhouette of a much larger spear began to form around the physical projectile!
A huge amount of ambient E energy got pulled in to reinforce the power of this weapon even further!
Once the Huntsman locked onto his target, he flung the spear with so much power that the loosened projectile produced a massive trail of energy!
Space seemed to break as the highly amplified spear penetrated through a spatial barrier and sunk deep into the flesh of an ancient phase whale!
The alien leader instantly reared back in pain as the strike completely broke her concentration!
The successful spear throw not only dealt a considerable amount of damage to the whale in question, but also interrupted her efforts to coordinate her spatial attacks with her sister! "HUMANITY IS THE ULTIMATE HUNTER RACE. OVERGROWN BEASTS LIKE YOU CAN ONLY SERVE AS OUR PREY. ACCEPT YOUR DESTINY AND LET ME CLAIM YOUR HEADS AS MY TROPHIES!"
