5370 The Fourth Armada
The Army of One and the Huntsman synergized even better with each other than their current adversaries.
One of them spread his strength across many different autonomous units while the other concentrated all of his power into his devastating spear attacks!
Both of them were highly admirable in their own right.
The Army of One was the idol of every serious mech commander.
The way in which Divine Jean Talos was able to grant the power of a god to a huge quantity of friendly units enabled him to sweep through almost every opposing army!
The Huntsman was even more impressive. Divine Alessandro Conti had an unending obsession with hunting.
The 280-year old god pilot even became the leader and the figurehead of the Galactic Hunting Club due to his strong involvement in the quirky hunting community!
With every throw of his spear, his prey grew weaker.
None of his spears were average. Each of them were treasures and artifacts in their own right.
As long as they struck the bodies of a target that did not instantly die, the wounds began to bleed without end.
Not only that, but as long as the spears remained lodged inside the bodies of their target, they continued to exert a weakening effect onto any nearby organs, especially ones that got damaged by the weapon!
The targeted ancient phase whales discovered the tricky aspects of the spears fairly quickly, but removing them was anything but easy!
They were planted so strongly into their flesh that none of their spatial abilities could meaningly affect the willpower-infused spears.
They had to resort to physical means to remove these nasty spears, but that took so much time and effort that the Huntsman could easily strike them with another empowered spear throw!
It soon became clear to most people that as long as there were no ancient phase whales in hiding, the Third Armada was bound to defeat the sister whales and win the battle!
The Fourth Armada wished their own battle progressed in such a smooth fashion.
The assault on the Sixth Tide Station started off relatively comfortably, just like with the other attacks that happened at the same time.
Just like several of the other dreadnoughts that had debuted in the other battles, the ones leading the Fourth Armada possessed special traits that caused them to stand out from other warships.
The Grail of Eternity was the more conventional of the two. She was designed to serve as a support vessel from the ground up, which meant that her weapon arsenal was not too comprehensive.
What she lacked in offensive power, she more than made up for it with her strong and versatile support functions!
The Grail of Eternity functioned as an excellent command vessel. Her powerful sensor systems could see through a lot of interference and accurately direct the attacks of a lot of different friendly units so that they could remain highly productive on the battlefield.
The mechs and warships of the Fourth Armada ran like well-oiled machines under the guidance of this support dreadnought!
That was not the true power of this 16 kilometer-long vessel, though.
What truly made the Grail of Eternity special was the wide array of strong linking technology at her disposal.
While the Red Two already made widespread use of support link technology, the experimental hyper modules installed on the Grail of Eternity were not only a lot more powerful, but could support a much greater quantity of units at a time!
One of the limitations of support link technology was that it became progressively more difficult to keep everything in sync. The constant transfers of data and energy became more complex with every addition to the support link network.
The Grail of Eternity stood out in this aspect by her capacity to simultaneously link 125 warships at the same time!
This was an astounding record, especially when battleships were also among the eligible vessels.
What this meant was that the Grail of Eternity had formed an unstoppable fleet by linking together 125 RF battleships that had already been prepared for this purpose.
The battleships advanced as one and resisted every attack thrown in their direction!
When the aliens struck one of the ships in this vast shield link network, they did not drain the energy shields of a single human capital ship, but only caused a miniscule reduction in the collective energy shield pool of all of the linked battleships!
If that was the only gimmick employed by the Fourth Armada, then the aliens still had a chance of draining this enormous pool.
The problem was that the second dreadnought did everything she could to disrupt the coordination of the alien defenders!
The Heart of Darkness was just as vile and devious as her name suggested. The dreadnought was a lot more experimental than most, and should have never left obscurity due to the controversial tech installed on her hull.
On the surface, the Heart of Darkness functioned similarly to the Throne of Lies in that she sought to debilitate the enemy.
Instead of relying on electronic warfare, the Heart of Darkness instead attempted to wage psychological warfare.
The dreadnought did so by relying on so-called psychic weapons that had recently been enhanced by hyper technology!
Few if any people knew about the existence of these dreadful weapons, but once this battle was over, practically every human would learn what the Heart of Darkness had been hiding all this time!
Unlike the flashy and visible web of links produced by the Grail of Eternity and her many accompanying battleships, the other dreadnought was content to avoid attention.
While it looked as if the Heart of Darkness remained on standby, her psychic weapon arsenal were already running at full power! Her Spark Reactor directed the majority of its extraordinary energy generation to meet the demands of the ship's exotic weapons.
The effects of these psychic weapons were subtle and invisible. They fired nearly undetectable psychic waves that penetrated through hulls as if they did not exist.
While the transphasic energy shields of enemy warships were able to block these hidden waves to an extent, the Heart of Darkness relied on her massive power to overcome the transphasic energy shields and reach the minds of the vulnerable alien minds!
The fleeters had thoroughly researched the brain and mental activity of every major race of the Red Ocean. They had developed special energy wave patterns for each of those races.
It just so happened that the majority of the alien defenders hailed from the nunser race!
As the transphasic energy shields of phasefighters and smaller warships were relatively weaker, they started to behave erratically first.
The ships reacted slower to commands. The weapons occasionally fired at the wrong targets. They started to drift from their assigned positions.
It slowly became clear that the nunsers that crewed the affected vessels were slowly losing their minds.
They initially started to lose their concentration. Then they started to reject orders. Soon, any source of irritation could trigger an extremely violent response from these quadruped aliens!
The nunsers took pride in their strong bodies, so the damage they could do when they went wild was quite considerable!
As more and more alien warships and defensive installations got affected, the efficiency of the defenders continued to drop at a steady rate!
The enhancement of friendly units combined with the sabotage of enemy units proved to be a deadly combination!
The gap in performance widened to such an extent that the weakened and less coordinated aliens gradually crumbled in the face of a concentrated push by the Fourth Armada.
Just like on the other battlefields, the phase leaders presiding over the local Tide Station had to step out and prevent their defensive lines from collapsing.
The lesser phase lords emerged first. The Trampler of Stars was one of many ascended aliens that sought to destroy the dreadnoughts, only to get blocked by the enemy ace mechs.
This time, the nunser phase lord was among the weakest of his group. He only managed to hold his own against a single ace mech, and it was not even a strong one among its own kind.
The alien leader felt sickened and angry at his inability to redeem himself by defeating any of the human champions.
When it became clear that the aliens needed to do more in order to defend the crucial Sixth Tide Station, the ancient phase whales directly appeared onto the battlefield!
The Tide Caller and the Deep Swimmer both appeared in the mist of the huge linked battleship formation centered around the Grail of Eternity!
This happened so suddenly and unexpectedly that the Fourth Armada issued its advance warning far too late to save all of the battleships at risk.
As the two ancient phase whales both unfolded their true bodies, their rapid expansion overloaded or broke all of the shield links in an instant!
Over 60 percent of the battleships that failed to get away in time got crushed by the titanic forces produced by the bodies of the two massive whales!
Before either ancient phase whale could proceed to crush the Grail of Eternity, a single god mech appeared to block the massive aliens.
"HALT. YOU SHALL GO NO FURTHER."
The two ancient phase whales initially did not pay much attention to the Spacelock's words. His god mech was so physically tiny that they could not imagine that it could inflict any meaningful damage.
The Rubarthan god pilot did not try to convince the aliens with his words, but took direct action.
The god mech known as the Ultimate Controller steadily glowed brighter before it unfolded a God Kingdom as well as a space suppression field that was much stronger than anything else the Red Two had produced to this date!
The spatial abilities that the Tide Caller and the Deep Swimmer were about to unleash suddenly failed as the fabric of space suddenly decided to stop cooperating with the powerful aliens!
Both aliens reacted with considerable surprise. They quickly ceased to underestimate the Spacelock as anything that could stop them from employing their spatial abilities posed a huge threat!
The two ancient phase whales were right to be worried. Space suppression technology actually originated from the Ultimate Controller.
All of the other space suppressors utilized by the other units of the Red Two were merely derivatives of the original space suppressor!
As such, the space suppression field generated by the Rubarthan god mech was not only a lot stronger, but also synergized fantastically with the Spacelock's inherent God Kingdom. The results were incredible and unmatched. Just a single god mech managed to suppress the spatial manipulation abilities of two ancient phase whales at the same time! "BLASPHEMY!" The Deep Swimmer uttered in her alien language.
She prided in her ability to dive into other dimensions and navigate in them. This allowed her to get exposed to exotic energies and reach destinations that were unreachable through other means.
Now that the Spacelock had solidified the surrounding space, it became far too difficult for her to dive into another dimension and launch an ambush attack on the god mech!
The Tide Caller had become awfully suppressed as well, but he was so strong that he still managed to form ripples in this highly adverse environment!
These ripples started out small, but so long as they occurred, the Tide Caller still had a way of making them stronger with each subsequent wave.
As the spatial tides slowly grew stronger under the strenuous efforts of the powerful phase whale, the Spacelock found to his surprise that his targets would be able to break his locks if this continued!
Fortunately, the Spacelock was not alone.
As the two powerful aliens focused on escaping, a god mech that was situated further in the rear started to glow in bright orange as it began to accumulate a lot of energy!
The Tide Caller and the Deep Swimmer perceived so much threat from the second god mech that they intensified their efforts to break from the Spacelock's restrictions!
The Tide Caller's escalating spatial tides slowly destabilized the surrounding space more and more.
It would not take much time before the Deep Swimmer could break free from this hostile environment and dive into another dimension!
Yet before she could escape from the grip of the Ultimate Controller, the god mech known as the Ragnarok had finally charged its primary weapon in full.
The large rust-red mech only extended a single, massive artillery cannon from the top of her mech frame.
This oversized cannon glowed in such bright orange that it looked as if it was trying to contain a star!
As the Destroyer of Worlds had powered her main cannon to the limit, she grinned as she finally pulled the trigger.
"THE TWILIGHT OF THE NATIVE GODS STARTS TODAY."
An incredibly bright and powerful flash erupted from the Ragnarok as it launched an enormous glowing projectile!
Those who were ascended enough to track the incredibly fast shell could see that it was surrounded by a much larger god cat!
The possessed artillery shell crossed the distance in an instant and punched through the spatial barrier that the Spacelock had helpfully weakened.
The shell along with Emma plunged into the thick flesh of the Deep Swimmer like a hot knife through butter.
Nothing happened in the next second.
The one after that turned into complete pandemonium as the entire right side of the Deep Swimmer ruptured and blew apart into several bloody continent-sized chunks of flesh! "MIIIIEEEEWWW!"
As the god cat unleashed her fury inside the body of the ancient phase whale, the Deep Swimmer became overwhelmed by pain!
The singular artillery strike had damaged, separated or destroyed a third of her moon-sized body in an instant!
