While the Ur-Titan immediately managed to gain the upper-hand through skill and superior equipment, time was not on his side.

The true challenge in fighting the Goliaths never lay in defeating them. So long as the voribugs did not pull off any fancy tricks, they were not that difficult to defeat.

What truly hindered people from eliminating Goliaths quickly were the incredible vitality of the megavoribugs in question and the constant interference of the surrounding cannon fodder bugs.

The Ur-Titan clearly gained the upper hand from the beginning and continued to press the advantage like there was no tomorrow.

However, now that it became clear that the Ekstrom Goliath was in trouble, the surrounding swarms immediately converged on their position and began to get in the way!

A quarter of the converging bugs flowed into the Ekstrom Goliath’s mouth so that they could be turned into biomass and energy to fuel the enormous creature’s regeneration.

The remainder of the swarm mobbed the Ur-Titan and turned into a massive ball of alien insects!

Even if the Ur-Titan was strong enough to overcome the resistance of all of those bugs, he had completely lost his vision!

" Filthy bugs! Your disgusting tactics are useless! The radiance of the sun shall cleanse you from my divine body! "

A burst of heat instantly burned and seared away the surrounding bugs!

The Rubarthan plasma halberd had already incorporated a number of quick and easy solutions in response to the novel challenges introduced by the mutated voribugs.

One of them happened to be a setting that allowed the wielder to briefly loosen the containment of the plasma energies concentrated at the blade.

Though it only generated a brief pulse of heat, the sheer magnitude of thermal energy released from this move directly burned or vaporized the bugs within a range of dozens of meters in each direction!

While the heat pulse did not clear out all of the bugs that crowded around the Ur-Titan, the insects that were positioned a little further away were not doing so well at the moment.

The burn damage suffered by these bugs impaired their effectiveness and caused them to turn into deadweight.

Only the bugs that previously hadn’t been able to press closely onto the Ur-Titan’s armored form managed to get away without suffering significant damage.

Despite what just happened to their alien siblings, these healthier bugs did not hesitate to fill the void and mob the Ur-Titan yet again.

The Ascended Giants sneered and activated the same setting again, causing the surrounding bugs to suffer the same fate as the ones from before!

This time he was not content to let the swarm continually converge on his armored form. He switched the setting to a lower intensity before starting to swing his polearm in every direction!

The soldier executed a sweeping technique that caused the leaking plasma blade to swing in every direction in the shortest amount of time.

Plasma and heat energies did not concentrate in place, but began to flow outwards and damage much greater portions of the bug swarm!

Over a million cannon fodder bugs failed to resist the dance of thermal energy and burned like candles in the cold void of space!

Of course, these powerful effects came with an equally severe price.

Ordinary plasma weapons were never designed to output so much energy in a sloppy manner.

The plasma halberd’s power consumption skyrocketed while its emitters and other components experienced much greater strain than before!

The weapon’s lifespan was deteriorating at a rapid rate!

Ordinarily, the plasma halberd should have been able to function normally without requiring any maintenance for at least several lengthy engagements.

However, if the Ur-Titan kept up this performance, it would be questionable whether the plasma halberd would last more than half an hour.

Yet what did it matter? So long as the weapon held up, it should easily last long enough for the giant to defeat the Ekstrom Goliath!

He already received instructions to pass the plasma halberd to a specialized support mech so that it could undergo field repair. While these hasty fixes could not address every problem, it should still be enough to restore the high-tech weapon to a more functional condition.

The Ascended Giants cared little about preserving the long-term health of the plasma halberd.

This was the decisive battle. Let alone sacrificing their new weapons, they were even willing to sacrifice their superdimensional raiments in order to earn glory and blood in battle!

After the Ur-Titan affirmed his current strength, his confidence and aura soared.

Amidst all of the dead and burned bugs, the giant stared straight at the Ekstrom Goliath that was struggling to heal all of the burn wounds on its exoskeleton.

" Your end has come! "

The Goliath Hive was taken aback by the elite Ascended Giant’s effective countermeasure.

While there were still many weak bugs in the vicinity, they temporarily lacked the numbers to pose any significant hindrance to the human phase lord!

Technology made all of the difference!

The advanced sensor systems integrated into the raiment were able to overcome the visual obstruction and keep track of powerful opponents at relatively close range.

The superdimensional raiment was sufficiently strong enough to resist the attacks of Level 7 Goliaths, which meant that ordinary cannon fodder bugs were completely unqualified to leave any mark!

Together with a plasma weapon adapted to the Voribug War, the Ascended Giants were much better equipped to fight against the mutated voribugs than before!

However, just as the Ur-Titan was burning his way past the Ekstrom Goliath’s thick shell, other Goliaths were moving in to reinforce their troubled insect brother!

These Goliaths may just be Level 4 or Level 5, but they were still large and strong enough to hinder an Ascended Giant.

Numbers had always been the greatest advantage of the voribug race!

The Goliath Hive prepared well enough to field 200 Goliaths. Even if many of them had split up to assault different quadrants, they still outnumbered their human counterparts!

At this time, 6 of them received an overriding instruction that caused them to drop their immediate goals and move directly towards the duel between the Ur-Titan and the Level 7 Ekstrom Goliath!

There was not much the Ur-Titan could do against half-a-dozen inferior Goliaths.

Even if they were not strong enough to last long against the giant, their quantity alone turned them into a much more effective hindrance than millions of cannon fodder bugs!

Fortunately, the Ur-Titan was not fighting by himself.

"Bombard the designated Goliaths! Delay their passage as much as possible!"

Warships, defensive platforms and orbital fortresses all diverted a portion of their firepower towards these reinforcing Goliaths.

While the cannon attacks were not strong enough to halt the Goliaths entirely, their traversal inevitably slowed down, and that was enough.

Numerous expert mechs chased after different Goliaths and immediately entangled them at close or medium range.

Their resonance-empowered attacks inflicted effective damage and granted them capabilities that the Goliaths found difficult to overcome.

The expert mechs came in many different shapes and sizes, but they were always faster and more agile.

Even if their offensive power was not strong enough to kill the Goliaths outright, the experienced expert pilots knew exactly how to exploit their advantages to guarantee a kill.

Their combat acumen was much better than Goliaths whose actual ages only amounted to a week or less!

This knowledge and experience gulf was so vast that it was impossible for any Goliath to outfight an expert pilot of the same level!

It was a pity that there were not many of them available at the moment.

So many expert mechs had already been tied down by other Goliaths that only 2 of them could render immediate assistance.

That left 4 more low-level Goliaths to close the remaining distance and reinforce the much more important horned Goliath!

It was at this time that all but 1 of them got stopped by the other giants of the team!

The Ur-Titan had already instructed the 3 Faceless Giants to intercept the remaining Goliaths by any means necessary.

Though the scale of the Faceless Giants was only 1.5x, they were facing much weaker opponents at this time!

The Level 4 and Level 5 Goliaths were only rated to fight against expert mechs.

Against the Faceless Giants that could already be compared with the weakest ace mechs, the gap in strength proved too much for these megavoribugs!

The plasma swords in the hands of the lesser giants might not be able to inflict much damage against a Level 7 Ekstrom Goliath, but they were more than enough to burn deeply into the more fragile bodies of the lower-level Goliaths!

Even if their tenacious vitality and the frequent interference of cannon fodder bugs delayed their demise to an extent, that did not change the fact that it would only take minutes for them to lose their lives!

In fact, one of the Faceless Giants did not wait to finish off the weakest Level 4 Goliath before disengaging in order to chase after the remaining Goliath that previously managed to fly away without hindrance!

This was how the giants assigned to this particular Ur-Titan fulfilled their purpose and made themselves useful.

The Ur-Titan received more than enough uninterrupted time to cripple the Ekstrom Goliath before finally sinking the strained plasma halberd’s blade deep into the head and thorax of the tough opponent!

The Level 7 Goliath’s redundant organs and remaining vitality tried their best to resist true death, but the Ur-Titan was in no mood to play this game.

He finally retrieved his original weapon from his back, which happened to be a mid-grade superdimensional halberd!

This was the weapon that was originally designed to earn him glory in the Red War.

Though it had yet to be christened with the phasewater-enriched blood of a phase lord, it cut through the heavily damaged exoskeleton of the Ekstrom Goliath without too much hindrance!

The mutated voribugs may have concentrated a lot of phasewater into the body of the Level 7 Goliath, but there was no way the alien insects invested any superdimensional matter.

Since this was the case, the superdimensional halberd efficiently dissected and cut apart the Goliath that was already on its way to the grave!

Now that the Ekstrom Goliath was crippled to the extent that it could no longer launch any effective attacks, the Ur-Titan completely let itself loose at this time!

" Face the power of blade and plasma! "

Though it was normally incredibly foolish to wield two halberds at the same time, the Ur-Titan did not care about this and recklessly swung his two high-tech polearms with no abandon!

A true opponent could easily exploit the Ascended Giant’s theatrical display, but the victimized Goliath was in such bad shape that it could only serve as a target for the two different weapons!

In the end, the Level 7 Goliath failed to last long enough to stall Ur-Titan much further.

The offensive of the twin halberds proved too much in the end.

Seeing as the powerful ace mech-grade opponent succumbed without any complications, the Ur-Titan uttered a heartfelt roar!

" Witness my power! "

Of course, how much of his victory could be attributed to his strength as a phase lord and his high technology equipment was a matter of debate.

Yet none could deny that a properly outfitted Ur-Titan could no longer be defeated by a Level 7 Goliath anymore!

Though the victorious giant managed to defeat his adversary fairly quickly, not all of his colleagues had it easy.

The other quadrants were under considerably greater pressure. Instances where the Ascended Giants fought against 1 Goliath at a time were still rare.

It was much more common for the Ur-Titans and Faceless Giants to fight against multiple Goliaths each!

On top of that, they also had to wrangle against millions of cannon fodder that continued to do their best to run interference!

" There are too many bugs! We are drowning in insects! "