The Swordmaidens struck the Allidus mechs at a devastating moment.
Though it was a bit unfortunate that the pirates eliminated over a dozen Avatar mechs and mech pilots, the attack of the former daughters of the frontier fully showcased the cunning of Commander Dise!
Instead of moving to reinforce the Avatars of Myth right away, she instead took the long way around. Without moving to attack any pirates, her single mech company managed to fly under everyone's attention.
It was only when the swordsman mechs slowly started to turn around, building up momentum along the way, that their purpose became gradually clear.
By the time they bared their fangs at the ranged mechs of the Allidus Alliance, they had already built up a considerable amount of delta-v that would make any lancer mech proud!
The Swordmaidens succeeded in overwhelming the gamma laser rifleman mechs in a single devastating attack run.
This not only removed a major pirate threat from the board in a decisive fashion, but also struck a considerable amount of fear in the hearts of the remaining pirates!
The swordsman mech piloted by Commander Dise raised its greatsword!
"Sisters, enemies still remain! Let us show both sides that while our numbers are small, our ferocity is endless! Advance!"
The Swordsman mechs flew out of the debris field that consisted of the broken, chopped up parts of pirate ranged mechs in unison!
The elite Archon mechs as well as the regular Allidus mechs both noted to their alarm that the black-coated melee mechs approached the rear of their formation!
The pirates hastily reorganized their ranks in order to muster up a hasty line of melee mechs to meet the Swordmaiden charge.
Though it seemed as if another collision was imminent, the Swordmaiden mech company veered aside a few seconds from impact, thereby avoiding the prepared pirate defenders.
Instead, the swordsman mechs raked the edge of the pirate formation. Their greatswords opportunistically chopped through the frames of the Allidus mechs.
By borrowing the momentum of their movements, the Swordmaidens often succeeded in landing devastating attacks!
Even the sturdier Archon mechs with their superior Kavenit alloy formulas did not manage to escape unscathed! Considerable rents and deep tears marred their exteriors, thereby exposing those portions to follow-up attacks!
Commander Melkor's visor seemingly lit up at the assistance provided by the Swordmaidens. They had cooperated often enough in training sessions and simulated drills for him to know what Commander Dise asked of the Avatars.
"If you want us to be the anvil to the hammer, then so be it. We will gladly accept this role!"
The orders he issued intensified the stubborn, sticky approach of the Avatar mechs. Whether they were Bright Warriors or not, the Avatar mechs put their training to good use by adopting a cooperative fighting method that sought to rob as much initiative from the Allidus mechs as possible.
This prevented the increasingly more distressed pirates to encounter great difficulties whenever they attempted to allocate some mechs to blunt the flanking attacks of the Swordmaidens!
The swordsman mechs piloted by Commander Dise and her fellow sisters weren't particularly exceptional. Their defense and mobility was on par against other premium mechs.
What stood out was their offense and supreme skill in wielding greatswords. Ves had specially prepared these Breyer alloy greatswords to show his appreciation to the Swordmaidens and assuage the guilt he felt for their losses.
Though the Swordmaidens currently numbered very few mech pilots, each battle-hardened sister had survived the punishing gauntlet of the Aeon Corona Mission and turned into elite veterans that embodied the best of their outfit!
With their sharp and practically indestructible greatswords, the Swordmaidens ferociously circled around the rear and sides of the pirate formation as it remained entangled with the Avatar formation.
Chop!
Chop!
Chop!
Through successive attack runs, the Swordmaidens harvested at least a couple of pirate mechs and severely damaged a dozen more!
The Avatar mechs stopped attacking for the purpose of taking out the Allidus mechs. There was no particular need for them to risk themselves when they could just close ranks and keep sticking to their opponents like stubborn leeches!
Ves and Major Verle no longer paid attention to this particular clash. The main Allidus mech force was finished as far as they were concerned!
The other parts of the battlefield raged on as well. The Penitent Sisters, devoid of the numbers and support of much of the Larkinson Clan, still managed to instill despair in the hearts of the Crona Lords.
With much of their formidable fixed defenses rendered ineffective from the beginning, the lack of secret weapons being deployed made many Crona Lords suspicious whether the extensive sabotage had struck them as well.
If this was the case, the Crona Lords had very little power to contend against the superior Hexer mechs!
While Supreme Lord Roda did his best to motivate and stiffen his fighting forces, there was only so much a good leader could make a difference.
With the Living Sentinels running interference on the medium carriers armed with so-called Judgement Lasers, the exiled Hexers were completely unburdened by the threat of this superweapon.
Unless the Crona Lords managed to fix their monstrously powerful Omega Laser, they completely lacked the punch to inflict serious damage to the superior mechs!
Initially, the Crona Lords believed that the combination of solid cover and super numbers might allow them to stall their defeats and buy time for Lord Drogen's troops to come to their aid or their secret weapons to come online.
Yet as the less than 200 Penitent Sister mechs continued to advance while enduring a storm of ranged attacks, Supreme Lord Roda and his fellow pirates continued to feel as if doom approached.
The melee mechs of the Crona Lords readied themselves for a punishing confrontation. While none of the Crona Lords possessed the confidence to defeat or even last more than dozen seconds against a second-class mech, at least they had more mechs at their disposal.
"Keep calm and don't panic!" Supreme Lord Roda instructed his mech pilots. "Second-class mechs have met their end in the Nyxian Gap many times. Hexers are always overconfident. Use their arrogance against them. As long as at least one of you manages to circle around their mechs, you can hack away at their flight systems. As long as we break off their wings, it doesn't matter how tough they are or how powerful they land their blows. The immobilized mechs will just float away in random directions!"
His logic was sound. The weakest components of any spaceborn mech was always the flight systems.
Though the flight systems of the Penitent Sister mechs were not easy to break, compared to the frontal armor they were sturdy as twigs!
However, would the Penitent Sisters allow these filthy pirates to execute their naive and simplistic battle plan?
"Penitent Sisters, punish the damned!"
"Punish the damned!"
The moment the Penitent Sister mechs collided against the prepared ranks of the Crona Lord mechs, the disparity in strength became obvious!
The Penitent Sisters outright ignored defense and just swung their weapons as violently and with as much righteous fury as possible!
These detestable pirates deserved death!
The Penitent Sisters did not allow their inferior pirate opponents to attack their vulnerable rear. No matter how much Kavenit had been used to form their armor plating, the feeble pirate mechs lasted only seconds against the attacks of the Hexer melee mechs!
By mowing their opponents with an even greater degree of lethality than that of the Swordmaidens, the Penitent Sisters decisively demonstrated the might of Hexadric Hegemony!
Even if they were exiled from their state and paired with outdated, worn-out mechs, they still possessed the identity and corresponding battle prowess of the most feared women in the Komodo Star Sector.
"Life!"
A Hexer swung a longsword with a single hand in a horizontal slash. The sharp blade raked across the chests of three Crona Lord mechs in an instant, slaying not only the machines, but also their pilots! Traces of evaporated lifeblood leaked from the exposed cockpits as their mech pilots only had seconds to live before their broken bodies succumbed.
"Death!"
A Penitent Sister mech lieutenant commanded her squad to rain death from above. Now that the Penitent Sisters had reached the position of their opponents, they were able to attack the pirates from angles where their defensive cover hardly offered any shelter from the apocalyptic devastation unleashed by Hexer rifles.
"Godhood!"
A pair of Hexer lancer mechs crashed straight in the middle of a prepared Crona Lord formation! Their lances pierced straight through multiple mechs! After shaking off the impaled mechs, the lancer mechs continued to fly away before the pirates had any chance of swarming them in every direction.
"Damnation!"
A Hexer space knight interposed itself in the path of a squad of Crona Lord elites. Though the pirate mechs weren't as good as the ones deployed by the Allidus Archons, they were still one of the remaining hopes of the pirates.
Yet no matter how many times they pounded on the thick shield of the space knight, they only managed to scratch the coating!
After discovering that it was a waste of time to attack the defensive mech, the elite Crona Lord mechs attempted to divert to other prey, but the Hexer space knight would not have it! It instantly boosted forward and began to counterattack! Its swords lopped off the weapon of an enemy pirate mech while its shield slammed against the surface of another pirate mech, visibly causing it to deform!
"Dust!"
A modest number of Hexer cannoneer mechs fired their gauss cannons at a slow but devastating pace!
With each heavy kinetic slug they fired, a Crona Lord instantly shattered! A shower of broken parts and crumbled components spread out with every shot. As for the human remains of their mech pilots, hardly anything bigger than a nail or a drop of blood was distinguishable from the expanding debris field!
"Woman!"
Perhaps stimulated by the display of martial prowess exhibited by the Swordmaidens, the Penitent Sister swordsman mechs banded together and began to scythe through the main body of the Crona Lord formations without stop! Their blades hewed up and down, left to right, back to forth in rapid succession, causing any opposition in front of them to be hacked apart!
Not a single Penitent Sister mech fell! Their constant forward movement as well as their in-depth coordination between each other displayed complete contempt to the means of the Crona Lords.
No matter what tricks they attempted to pull off, the superiority of the Hexer mechs negated all forms of resistance!
The Battle Crier mechs following from behind anticipated that they needed to lend a hand in order to prevent some of the Penitent Sister mechs from being overwhelmed by desperation attacks.
However, the Hexers were so domineering that they didn't give any Crona Lord a chance!
The Kinner mech pilots were therefore left to police the battlefield and make sure that any downed mech no longer posed a threat.
Regardless of what happened elsewhere, the Crona Lords were finished as a pirate group. After losing all of their fighting forces, Surpeme Lord Roda had no capital to cling to Xiphard Base anymore!
With these local successes, Ves and Major Verle grew more at ease. The only opponents that still posed a threat was the Allidus trade convoy.
The three medium carriers armed with Judgement Lasers came under continuous attacks by the flanking and swarming attacks of the Living Sentinels.
Unfortunately, Lord Drogen had more surprises in store than the powerful anti-ship lasers. Some of the other ships in his fleet began to expose various weapon batteries and began to put the Living Sentinels under a lot of pressure.
Some of them even fired a large volume of devastating missiles! While they didn't carry any nuclear warheads, when they struck a target or exploded close to one, something worse took place.
Strange holes began to emerge at the coordinates which quickly caused the nearby Sentinel mechs to tear apart!
"Those missile explosions are generating localized anomalies! Stay away from them and intercept them at all costs!"
