Chapter 7465  Unfortunate Counter

Currently, the native aliens sacrificed the lives of multiple lesser phase lords, yet inflicted no effective damage up to this point.

Under ordinary circumstances, this attack run should have been declared an abject failure.

Yet still the two remaining lesser phase lords desperately attempted to close the remaining distance so they could fulfill their ostensive mission of wrecking the Tortuous Scream before they inevitably got butchered.

Why?

The smoother the sequence progressed for the humans, the more vigilant they became.

Whatever scheme the native aliens had set up would definitely become exposed soon!

In any case, during the time the First Sword Mark III boxed in the lesser orven phase lord and punctured his true body with 33 sword fey, the Amaranto Mark III and the Riot Mark III took care of the remaining two native gods.

Their game plan was quite simple. The Riot Mark III charged straight towards one of the enemy gods like a raging bull. Saint Rosa Orfan demonstrated no finesse at all, which made her attack run all the more frightening and intimidating!

The unsettling Saint Kingdom around the striped orange-and-black ace mech alone evoked a lot of concerns among the surviving enemy phase lords.

They did not think they could blink away successfully once they fell under its highly disruptive influence!

As such, the phase lord targeted by the Riot Mark III blinked away a little sooner than usual.

This was still sufficient enough to make the ace spearman mech miss its initial target!

With the formidable momentum behind the Riot Mark III, it would take precious seconds for the machine to turn around and charge after her prey.

Yet because the Riot Mark III had to chase from behind, it would take even more time for the two to finally meet!

Instead of doing so, Saint Orfan took a different course.

Her Riot Mark III followed a much gentler curve through space and began to charge at the final remaining lesser phase lord!

This meant that the spear-wielding machine could no longer threaten her previous target, but that did not matter because another machine had already taken care of her old problem!

Less than a second after the enemy in question had blinked to his new coordinates, a bright but ruthless energy beam abruptly shattered through the azure energy shield and spatial barrier before burning a deep hole through the native god's armored helmet and heat!

This time, no insane tech or miracle solution succeeded in saving the enemy's life at the last moment.

Even if the enemy somehow possessed the ability to blink a second time in a row, it still required an impossibly tight reaction window to make that happen.

Clearly, Saint Davia Stark never intended to give her foe enough time!

The third and final lesser phase lord perished just short of reaching his goal. The ace marksman mech and the ace spearman mech simply repeated their earlier tactics and managed to achieve an identical result.

This was good news for the Larkinsons, because they did not have to expose any other cards to deal with the imminent threat.

A brief lull ensued as multiple officers and leaders wondered whether this was truly the extent of the enemy plan.

"This can't be it… right?"

"Stay vigilant, but do not let up the pressure on the remaining enemy assets. Their numbers are still formidable."

While nearly everyone directed their attention to the enemies in the open, the ones who had been moving around in the dark finally delivered what was supposed to be their coup-de-grace!

Hundreds of large and formidable-looking missiles and torpedoes lost their stealth as they sought to close the remaining distance in full burn!

Before they unveiled themselves, they had quietly drifted fairly close to the perimeter of the human armada. Their minimal emissions and their ballistic trajectories ensured that even the best human-developed sensor systems would have been able to detect their traces from a distance!

There was hardly any time for the point defenses of the Tortuous Scream and other warships to respond to the latest threat in time.

Even if they managed to shoot down the majority of enemy munitions, the remaining ones would definitely strike the human warships with their new and massively enhanced warheads!

Multiple sensor systems already started to sound the alarm when they detected highly volatile activity from the incoming missiles!

They were all laced with a small amount of mid-grade superdimensional matter!

Though some may have found this expenditure to be wasteful, their presence easily elevated their threat level to the point that they could even pose a serious threat against superdimensional mechs upon direct impact!

"The aliens responsible for launching them had timed their attack nearly perfectly. It would have been even better if they struck their targets while the alien phase lords at the front kept the ace mechs busy, but the latter had still been drawn too far away to return and fend off the incoming payloads!

Yet before these missiles could even come close enough to threaten the human starships with proximity explosions, hundreds of Commandeered bunker mechs stationed on the Torturous Scream and other Larkinson vessels instantly cut down the threatening missiles with accurate intercepting fire.

All of the threatening missiles and torpedoes faltered well short of their target without exception. The Omega Threshers had managed to shoot them into slag without giving their failsafes any chance to detonate prematurely!

As such, this surprise attack ended with a whimper, much to the disappointment of the native aliens who had been hoping to deliver a crippling blow to the human invaders!

Ves sighed in relief. "The Saint Commander is as reliable as ever. It would have been much more difficult to deal with this particular threat without her participation. It is bad luck on the part of the aliens that they attempted to conduct a covert strike on our fleet. Nothing can remain completely hidden within the generous radius of Casella's Command Field."

Even though the Saint Commander had yet to gain the ability to usurp control of enemy soldiers and machines, it was still easy enough for her to detect any unwelcome intruders within her sphere of awareness.

The lower the distance, the more effectively she could gain the measure of her opponents!

It did not take much thinking that Casella detected the stealthed missiles well in advance and secretly prepared her Knights to intercept them all with the most optimal amount of firepower.

That was not the extent of her countermeasure.

Her Barons suddenly shifted from bombarding the native alien capital ships at the front to turning their powerful ship-mounted luminar crystal cannons and Omega Laser Cannons on the other side of the battlefield!

Moments later, a vast array of energy beams and plasma bolts struck seemingly random coordinates of space.

Yet instead of hitting nothing but vacuum, over a dozen strangely-shaped crystalline hulls appeared into view!

"Archeships!"

"I knew those sneaky turtles had to be skulking around somewhere. They are the secret defenders of native alien space. Many of our scouts and stealth vessels end up getting hunted down by these alien stealth masters."

Though the arche race did not maintain large populations or vast territories, it still managed to keep up with the other major alien races by virtue of their elusiveness.

Just a dozen-or-so archeships could inflict as much damage as a fleet ten times the size by making the most out of the advantage of surprise.

Yet the combined fleet did not cross the border between human and alien space without making adequate preparations.

Even without the benefit of Casella's Command Field, multiple recently upgraded warships such as the Tarrasque and the Babylon Excavator possessed sophisticated sensor arrays that could detect all manner of stealthed objects. They had been specifically tuned to detect the approach of archeships in particular due to the potential damage they could inflict on an unsuspecting fleet.

However, their effectiveness at an extended range could not match that of the domain field of a genuine ace commander.

In order to make her counterattack foolproof, Casella took direct control of all of the bunker mechs assigned to attack the archeships.

Both Knights and Barons combined their firepower to accurately cripple or destroy the archeships that had clearly been caught off-guard by the human response!

The arche soldiers never expected their 'unwitting' prey to detect them in advance and strike their ships directly!

Due to the need to maintain active stealth, the archeships kept their azure shield generators inactive.

Even if they had been designed to go online in a hurry, it still took precious seconds for the bewildered aliens to complete the process.

This was way too late to prevent the resonance-empowered energy beams from burning holes through the hulls and damaging a considerable amount of archemetal!

Unfortunately, archeships possessed a lot more redundancy than conventional warships. It was extremely difficult to completely knock out an archeship's subsystems.

Aside from a few exceptions such as the power reactor and other systems, many other functions such as sensors, propulsion and life support could still persist despite half of the alien hull getting scrapped!

This was why half of the archeships still managed to activate some energy shields, though their power levels were so low that they only bought a few seconds of time before they shattered apart.

The impressive resilience of archetech could have saved the saved arche stealth flotilla if not for one inconvenient fact.

The archeships were not all that big.

The arche consistently lacked resources and population.

Their extreme specialization in sneak attacks did not help them with holding resource-rich territories.

Nobody had ever witnessed a capital archeship before. By far most of the ones encountered by red humanity consisted of frigate-sized alien vessels.

The ambush force this time was a bit more luxurious than that. Half of them still consisted of archefrigates, but a handful of them also consisted of the much-rarer archedestroyers.

Yet what truly attracted people's attention was an archeship that was significantly larger than the rest!

Its volume roughly matched that of a more substantial human cruiser!

The moment a certain Senior Mech Designer caught sight of this extremely rare construction, she instantly grew crazy!

"CASELLA!" Gloriana forcefully shouted into the command channel! "DO NOT DESTROY THE FLAGSHIP OF THE ARCHES! I NEED HER! COMPARED TO THEIR TINY FRIGATES, THE LARGER HULLS MOST DEFINITELY CONTAIN MORE ADVANCED AND DIVERSE APPLICATIONS OF ARCHETECH. OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THIS UNIQUE BRAND OF ALIEN ENGINEERING WILL DEFINITELY PROGRESS BY LEAPS AND BOUNDS IF WE CAN CAPTURE HER MOSTLY INTACT! ABSOLUTELY DO NOT INFLICT HEAVY DAMAGE ON HER. THE CRUISER ANALOGUE NEEDS TO BE AS INTACT AS POSSIBLE IF WE WANT TO UNLOCK ALL OF HER SECRETS!"

Though the Saint Commander did not issue a verbal reply, her Knights and Barons moderated their firepower straight away.

They still attacked the archefrigates and archedestroyers at full power but deliberately lowered their power settings when striking at the archecruiser.

The energy beams also became a lot more discriminating in their targeting. They no longer tried to burn holes straight into the interior of the hull and instead focused on knocking out surface components.

Though it was difficult to fully understand how the archecruiser worked, the Saint Commander relied on her judgment and the analysis of Sovvie to neutralize anything related to weapons and propulsion.

Soon enough, the archecruiser had lost much of her ability to affect the battlefield. Her archemetal exterior gained a lot of scorch marks, yet still retained much of her core integrity.

This did not mean she was harmless or even crippled.

Even now, the archecruiser still attempted to back away from the frighteningly competent human fleet by relying on some sort of reactionless drive that couldn't be knocked out without damaging the core of the priceless alien flagship.

However, if the agonizingly slow alien vessel thought that it could get away from the Larkinsons, then she had another thing coming!

The Babylon Excavator along with a small squadron of RF escort warships quickly swooped in and began to surround the mostly impotent vessel from multiple directions.

They soon launched physical harpoons that pierced through the archemetal with just the right amount of force and locked the archecruiser in place.

They also activated their high-powered scanners at close range in order to gather as much data on their interior as possible.

Once they collected a satisfactory amount of raw data, they activated specialized directional jamming systems and other forms of ECM to debilitate the captive hull as much as they could manage.

Their effectiveness was questionable as anything made out of archetech was naturally a lot more resistant towards most forms of electronic interference.

Still, it was better than nothing.

Once the Saint Commander became satisfied that the RF warships could keep the archecruiser in their grasp, she finally issued the order to the boarding parties.

It was time for the infantry soldiers to earn their keep.

Multiple boarding shuttles under the escort of first-class multipurpose mechs launched from various hangar bays and furiously burned their way to the archeship.

None of the armored soldiers knew what was in store for them, but that did not sway them from their duty.

"Let's butcher some turtles."