“Nyeow…”
“I know, Minxie. I worry about Vincent as well.” Raella Larkinson said as she sat in her stateroom in a penthouse in Twilight City.
In previous battles, Raella always found herself in the cockpit. The Larkinsons needed every skilled mech pilot they could get in order to defend their clan. She still missed those days sometimes but thought it was better that she sat this battle out this time.
“Our clan has grown so much.” She sighed.
The Larkinson Clan had grown so explosively in the past couple of years that it was no longer short on mech pilots anymore. In fact, the clan actually had a surplus of thousands of mech pilots. Each of them were just like her and were sitting in their homes or shelters aboard the capital ships.
Though they were all capable of piloting a mech in battle, the mech legions already assigned all of their available mechs to the best mech pilots.
Though Raella made sure to keep up her skills every chance she got, she was not a part of any of the mech legions. Even if she thought she could outfight the average Avatar recruit, she wasn’t versed in any of the tactics and battle methods that the Avatars trained in. Her presence in the ranks would merely disrupt the unit she was attached to and threaten their internal cohesion.
“I chose this life for myself.”
She was a director now. She put herself in charge of the growing competitive scene of the Larkinson Clan. Ever since the Vivacious Wal with its built-in mech arena joined the fleet, she had come into her element.
Under her vigorous leadership, she quickly managed to erect exciting leagues where many clansmen could have their fill for battle in the form of thrilling duels and group matches.
Yet now, the mech arena was empty and silent. The clansmen who ordinarily sat in the stands to witness mech-on-mech violence with their own eyes were absent.
There was a bigger battle taking place outside, and it was not just a game to the clan.
It would have been one thing if Raella was able to put her champion skills to the test once again, but that part of her life was firmly over by now. She was no longer a Blood Claw who risked her life to win in underground duels.
That made her feel melancholic, but only for a short amount of time.
“Nyeow~”
Minxie comforted her by rubbing her furry face against her hand. She reached out and scratched her ears in return.
The more Raella observed this battle, the more she got reminded why she didn’t want to follow her family heritage. There was just something about being in the middle of that chaos and fighting for her very life that sat wrong with her. After so many years, she still couldn’t explain it. All she knew was that she wasn’t cut out for the battlefield.
“Jannzi and the others are much more suitable.”
She sighed once again when she thought of how the Larkinsons of her generation had diverged so much.
Ves became an incredibly successful mech designer and started his own clan.
Jannzi broke through to expert pilot and was becoming more and more difficult to approach.
Ghanso also became an expert pilot, only to go bonkers and die trying to kill his own relatives.
Melkor managed to become a somewhat successful legion commander and was able to command thousands of mechs in battle.
Certainly, there were far more trueblood Larkinsons than this. Some had gone on to become the chief ministers of the clan. Others advanced to expert candidate and were now on the battlefield in order to find their own opportunities to undergo apotheosis.
Of course, there were also many truebloods who hadn’t accomplished anything of note. They originally came from a third-rate state and not all of them managed to adapt to the rising standards and expectations of the Larkinson Clan. Even Raella herself found herself inferior to all of the talented second-raters that had joined up as of late.
She did not begrudge their entry, though. Even now, many adopted Larkinsons were fighting and dying to defend a clan and people that were strangers to them just a year ago. It was incredible how little time it took for foreigners from many different states to gather together and embrace a single identity.
Just as she was thinking about deep and profound matters, she suddenly saw that Vincent’s Bright Warrior had just been hit by a volley of gauss rounds. The mech’s rifle flung away into space as the machine lost both its arm and a considerable chunk on its life side!
“Vincent!”
Fortunately for Raella, her boyfriend managed to eject from his crippled mech in time. Just seconds after his cockpit soared back to the fleet, another volley of attacks slammed into the damaged Bright Warrior and broke it in half!
Now that she was able to confirm that Vincent made it out alive, she began to feel annoyed at his results. She had tracked his performance from the beginning of the engagement.
Nothing she saw made her feel proud of his performance.
“What a complete shame! You’re disgracing every expert candidate with your performance!”
Her words weren’t entirely fair. Vincent wasn’t a dedicated rifleman mech pilot and he had lost his only custom mech. He was also taking part in a huge battle where his excellent piloting skills didn’t seem to matter. Aside from crippling or destroying a dozen more dwarven mechs than average, his contribution was completely unremarkable.
“You’re never going to become an expert pilot at this rate!”
As Raella was trying to figure out a way to give her boyfriend a good kick in the butt in order to motivate him into working earnestly to become an expert pilot, elsewhere a certain guest pilot was feeling quite lost.
Jessica Quentin was one of the twenty MTA mech pilots that had been sent to the Larkinson Clan in order to gain their help in breaking through.
So far, their training methods and other forms of help did not particularly impress her so much. Not even the guidance of the Larkinson expert pilots had made much of a difference. No matter what theories she bought into, none of them made her feel as if she was making any progress!
She already regretted her decision to let the Larkinsons plan her training program. Their methods were primitive, unscientific and outright illogical in many ways. She shouldn’t have expected better from these space yokels. Their patriarch hadn’t even bothered to spend any time on her and her cohort even though he was the one who was supposedly able to help them the most!
“What’s even worse is that they’ve dragged us all into this meaningless battle!”
The Larkinsons could have avoided this battle. To the dwarves, the Smiling Samuel Star Sector was their paradise. To mechers like Jessica, it was the equivalent of a ghetto and an experimental chamber. She didn’t know what the higher-ups were up to when they allowed the dwarves to build their own state while retaining their anti-human ideology, but she knew that her superiors didn’t take the Vulcanites seriously.
No matter how much the dwarves wanted to tear down the MTA and other human-centric organizations, they were too weak to be considered qualified opponents!
She had always looked down on the dwarves for that reason. The Vulcanites were clowns who thought that they were the masters of the cosmos, only to forget that the MTA could easily wipe dwarvenkind across the galaxy in just a couple of days!
Aside from vermin that had crawled into difficult regions of space such as the Nyxian Gap, Jessica was confident that the MTA could wipe the rest out. Not that it ever would. The Association was better than that. Dwarves were still humans, so they enjoyed the same basic human rights.
She directed her attention back to the battle. She was currently attached to the Speed Demons and piloted a Ferocious Piranha like the rest of her ‘comrades’.
As some of the best light mech pilots in the Larkinson Clan, the Speed Demons that were personally trained by Venerable Tusa played an important role in disrupting the hardiest enemy units.
Though bypassing the enemy lines and approaching the dwarven fleet from an angle was beyond their capabilities, they were doing a good job at gnawing at the Molten Hammers from the right wing.
“Break up this formation!” A Larkinson mech officer commanded over the communication channel. “We need to squeeze the dwarven mechs closer together and that won’t happen if they don’t feel enough pressure. You don’t need to destroy them all but you must do everything in your power to push them towards the center.”
They were doing just that. Through skill and coordination, the small squad of elites swept alongside the Molten Hammer mechs, taunting them and threatening to attack their openings.
They rarely did so, though. Even though their skill allowed them to find opportunities to overwhelm any vulnerable mechs, the Molten Hammers were far too solid and coordinated to reveal any major openings.
The Magmatars fielded by the Volcano’s Wrath mech regiment were especially difficult to deal with! Anytime the Speed Demons or other light mechs attempted to swoop in, a Magmatar or two would be ready to spray huge spurts of flames in their direction!
Even though Jessica could outduel pretty much every mech pilot aside from the expert pilots on this battlefield, the mech she was stuck with was far too limiting for her liking.
She still hadn’t been able to get accustomed to piloting inferior mechs after many months of getting accustomed to them. She lacked the multitude of weapon systems that she enjoyed back when she piloted her standard-issue MTA mechs. Under no circumstance would she ever be rendered as ineffective in battle as this moment!
“Good job, Jessica! Keep swooping close to them. The more they experience our glows, the more they are pulling back. These dwarven mech pilots like to act tough but they don’t like our glows any more than other humans!”
The woman understood what the Larkinson Clan was attempting to do. She felt quite ambivalent about it. Sure, she heard all of the stories about how the Larkinsons reversed defeat into victory by performing outright magic. She also watched the footage of the battle.
Yet no matter how well they could pull off their area attacks, there were limits. There were too many enemy mechs on the battlefield.
“These Larkinsons will be the death of me!” She whispered to herself.
Just like any other human, she feared death, but did not let that affect her thinking. She already knew when she received this assignment that no one from the Assocation would come to rescue her and her fellow MTA mech pilots.
For better or worse, she had to fight for her life and trust that the Larkinsons knew what they were doing as they laid the groundwork for their ‘battle formations’!
“Let’s see whether the hype is justified.”
After several minutes of dodging flames and annoying dwarves, the Larkinsons were finally ready.
“It’s almost time! The Penitent Sisters and the Swordmaidens are about to make their final approaches. They’ll try and time their attacks so that they’ll unleash their power at the same time to put the dwarves on the backfoot as much as possible. Get ready to advance into them and break open any holes in their battle lines!”
Though Jessica still maintained her skepticism, she nonetheless became excited for what she might be witnessing. The Larkinsons had talked so much about these maneuvers that she was bound to grow curious about the actual effects.
Were these Larkinsons really capable of coming up with a new attack method that completely surpassed the power level of a second-class mech force? What was their secret? Why did they possess so much power despite fielding weak mechs?
“Hopefully, I can get a glimpse of the answer today.”
