The final battle of Viola Magnifica unfolded like a grand tapestry.
As both sides confronted each other, countless instances of desperation and heroism unfolded.
Alien phasefighters weaved and danced into each other in order to place the mechs chasing from behind into their crosshairs.
Pairs and trios of melee mechs did their best to box in the fast and agile phasefighters on a busy battlefield where attacks could come from many directions.
A large number of alien warships of many different shapes and sizes unloaded their firepower at the orbital defense network that protected the final human stronghold in the star system.
In turn, the defensive platforms and orbital fortresses opened fire with their weapons with no abandon, not caring that their excessively high firing rate was rapidly wearing down their electrical components.
"Shoot! Keep shooting! This fortress is going down anyway, so it doesn't matter if we are cutting down the lifespan of our positron beam cannons by 99 percent! Just make sure you don't exceed the limits too much or else the charging mechanism for our guns will blow up prematurely. The more alien ships we take down, the longer we hold our enemies back from storming our final line of defense!"
Everyone knew what they were fighting for. The Viola Magnifica System was destined to fall to the native aliens, but that did not mean that their resistance was futile.
Although the enemy benefited much more from attrition warfare than red humanity, the latter had no choice but to play this game if it wanted to prevent a rapid collapse.
Mechs fell when strafed by phasefighters or got shot to pieces by the storm of firepower unleashed by nearby escort warships.
Numerous warships succumbed under heavy fire as the orbital defense network constantly focused its collective firepower onto a small selection of warships for the purpose of eliminating them before they could retreat to safety.
For now, the orbital defense network was making good progress in eliminating most warships.
The larger vessels possessed a multitude of strong segmented as well as multi-layered energy shields, allowing them to withstand an amazing amount of punishment despite posing as lager targets.
However, their lack of mobility made it so that they were much slower to retreat to safety than other vessels.
The native alien commanders tried to adjust by sending other warships forward so that they could utilize their defenses to serve as temporary forms of cover, but it was difficult for them to cover every angle.
The warships could go down much faster if they were being assaulted by mechs. The fast and agile small craft could not only weaken the vessel's transphasic defenses with their space suppressors, but also attack the hulls through any open gaps in the energy shield layers.
It was unfortunate that the enemy phasefighters did everything they could to prevent that from happening.
The latest generation of phasefighters exhibited many improvements that enabled them to close the gap with human mechs. From the implementation of hyper technology to more generous use of expensive materials, the major alien races that deployed the strike craft showed little hesitation in squandering large amounts of high-quality resources to give them an edge on the battlefield!
Many mech designers who observed the ongoing battle from the safety of their offices or design labs frequently had to suppress their pangs of jealousy when they saw how even the most trashy cannon fodder units benefited from phasewater technology.
For red humanity, phasewater was a precious strategic resource that was increasingly becoming more and more difficult to obtain!
Even the linefighters that had earned a lot of war merits over the past months could hardly afford to redeem enough phasewater to construct a serviceable transphasic mech.
The demand had grown, but the supply had not kept up that much. Red humanity was only able to extract a fraction of the phasewater contained within alien salvage.
All of this meant that human mechs had to make do with less. The Larkinson Clan may be one of the few private organizations that was able to field transphasic mechs on a large scale, but that did not mean that other outfits could afford this luxury!
Right now, these mechs were struggling to survive when fighting against the enemy phasefighters. They could only rely on the superior skill and judgment of their professional mech pilots to stay alive on a dangerous battlefield.
With so many mechs and other assets struggling to hold their ground against the alien forces, there were not enough assets that could hold the native alien phase lords back. There were plenty of low to mid-rank expert mechs among the mech forces. Plenty of soldiers had broken through since the start of the Red War.
However, nobody dared to send them in the direction of the enemy phase lords as they were far too weak to survive an extended engagement against the alien
powerhouses.
Even high-tier expert mechs struggled to hold back the lesser phase lords.
The expeditionary fleet of the Golden Skull Alliance contributed most of them to the fight.
Famed living expert mechs such as the Riot, the Everchanger, the C-Man, the Greenaxe, the Bloodripper, the Blood Star Mark II, the Star Dancer, the Valkyrie Krista and the Valkyrie Ursa were doing their best to hold back the 3 remaining lesser phase lords.
Despite the multitude of powerful machines, they were struggling to inflict meaningful damage while evading attacks that could heavily sap their resonance shields!
The Fatedriver was a hardy jureg lesser phase lord who possessed an unusual sense of foresight. Whatever phasewater organs he was making use of allowed him to predict his opponent's moves in advance and allow him to counterattack at accelerated
speeds.
Venerable Vincent had to rely far more on his intuition than in any of his prior fights just to prevent his C-Man from getting bludgeoned by the Fatedriver's heavy metal
rod!
Zren-Divar was an orvan lesser phase lord that wielded a deadly plasma sword that was largely derived from human technology.
Although it was not transphasic in nature, the phase lord-scaled energy weapon generated so much heat that brief contact with it was enough to overload an expert mech's resonance shield within seconds!
This was extremely troubling for the Riot. As one of the expert mechs that had undertaken the unenviable task of trying to stall the lesser phase lord up close, the outdated expert mech was showing his age in many ways.
The most important shortcoming was that the mobility of the armored expert spearman mech was not as good as the other machines. The Riot was designed to take hits head-on and launch counterattacks that struck just as hard if not harder. That strategy did not work against a phase lord who wielded a weapon as powerful as
a large plasma sword, so the Riot was forced to imitate more agile and mobile mechs such as the First Sword just to be able to fulfill his purpose!
The Riot barely managed to hold on for the time being because other expert mechs such as the Valkyrie Krysta and the Valkyrie Ursa were doing their best to distract the phase lord with their attack runs and their glows.
Of course, Zren-Divar hardly took notice of the famed glows of the Valkyrie mechs. This trick may be enough to scare inexperienced alien phasefighter pilots into paralysis, but the gap in strength between the orven phase lord and the Daughter of Death was not large enough!
The Riot spun around in a messy manner as the living expert mech barely managed to
evade a fast and tricky swipe of the phase lord's plasma sword.
The heat emanating from the powered weapon was so great that the Riot's resonance shield had to expend a small portion of its power just to prevent the mech from
suffering thermal damage!
Before the orven phase lord could press his attack, the Valkyrie Krista and the Valkyrie
Ursa coordinated their actions and simultaneously charged and thrust their own
spears into the enemy's spatial barrier from below and behind!
Zren-Divar clearly wanted to keep chasing after the Riot, especially since the outdated