The Eight Lord of Takansha had disappeared from sight!
Melkor's modified Fey Fianna had deployed 25 recently constructed formation anchor fey. They successfully reached the coordinates calculated by the newly established qi cultivator and formed a spell array that was large enough to trap the orven lesser phase lord in place!
At this time, the white mists that contained and obscured the active spell array were roiling violently from time to time.
While most of the other alien races hardly noticed the disappearance of a lesser phase lord, the orvens most definitely saw what happened!
Their warship gun batteries trained their muzzles towards the coordinates of the formation anchors and opened fire, only to see their attacks passing through the mists as if they hit nothing.
They had no understanding of how qi formations worked, and they couldn't afford to divert too much firepower away from their human opponents, so they only attacked the spell array half-heartedly.
What they did notice was a single mech that was seemingly responsible for deploying this mysterious anomaly!
Commander Melkor's machine soon came under heavy attack!
Saint Commander Casella Ingvar already anticipated this response. She ceased to Enfeoff the Karma Cutters as they had already done their jobs and shifted her most powerful form of empowerment to a company of Rigid Wall mechs from the Living Sentinels!
The defensive space knights excelled in defense, and these ones had been especially modified and upgraded to resist even more transphasic attacks than usual!
"Our defenses are impervious!"
"We are the walls that stand in the way of destruction!"
"The blessing of the Saint Commander shall make us impervious!"
The Rigid Walls formed a half-sphere formation that covered the Fey Fianna with multiple thick and overlapping tower shields and armored mech frames.
As temporarily empowered Barons, the Rigid Walls proved far more effective at withstanding enemy firepower than ordinary small craft!
Even so, there were limits to how much firepower they could resist with the help of the Saint Commander's true resonance.
Melkor was not skilled enough to be able to sustain and control the active spell array
while on the move. His Fey Fianna needed to remain stationary in order to keep the confinement array as strong and stable as possible.
This instantly negated the best defense that small craft possessed against warship-grade gun batteries.
All of the mechs were stuck in place, making it trivially easy for the powerful primary and secondary gun batteries of enemy cruisers and battleships to bombard their coordinates!
Rigid Wall after Rigid Wall endured crushing amounts of damage that could have easily flattened a city district.
The mechs honestly shouldn't have been capable of tanking direct attacks from the most powerful guns of orven warships.
They were actually quite lucky that the native aliens had not developed the habit of mounting enormous spinal cannons onto their largest hulls.
Perhaps this might change in time with the help of cosmopolitan intervention, but for now the Rigid Walls were performing admirably well with the help of the Minerva's empowerment.
However, the Living Sentinels were only able to deploy so many Rigid Walls for this onerous task.
While the Saint Commander frequently rotated the spent and worn out Rigid Walls with fresh ones that were previously hovering on standby, the rate of depletion was too high. The Larkinsons would soon run out of defensive mechs to shield Melkor's mech against bombardment!
"Jannzi, is your Bastion ready to give me a hand?!" Commander Melkor urgently requested.
"I am sorry, Melkor, but Zren-Divar's plasma sword has overloaded most of my defenses. I can barely maintain a resonance shield at this time. Don't worry. There is another defensive mech on the way. His machine is more modern than mine, and has yet to sustain as much damage, so he should serve you well."
Melkor soon understood what Jannzi meant as an expert mech that possessed a similar configuration to the Amphis Extremis flew to his Fey Fianna's side!
The Blood Star Mark II had arrived!
"Benjamin!"
The father of Ark Larkinson and the grandfather of Ves Larkinson had been faring decently well during the battle.
Though his expert offensive space knight did not engage in any flashy theatrics, the machine instead fulfilled the role of a troubleshooter.
The Blood Star Mark II had flown across the battlefield and helped out the soldiers by breaking formations of elite phasefighters, assaulting and disabling sub-capital warships with hulls bristling with anti-mech armaments and more.
Now, Venerable Benjamin Larkinson arrived where he and his expert mech were needed the most. The Blood Star Mark II quickly took over much of the burden from the Enfeoffed Rigid Walls and did a much better job of resisting the incoming attacks! The resonance shield generated by a high-tier expert pilot and a high-tier expert mech was much more effective at withstanding punishing blows that were powerful enough to demolish city districts!
"How long can your Blood Star last?!"
"A minute or maybe a minute-and-a-half, but not much longer." Venerable Benjamin spoke. "I have sustained relatively little damage so far, so my resonance shield is in good condition. The firepower that the enemy warships are bringing to bear is still difficult to resist even for expert mechs like my Blood Star Mark II. My battle partner's defenses are not as exaggerated as that of the Bastion!"
Both of them fell under the space knight classification, but they were designed with completely different purposes in mind.
The Bastion exemplified the concept of extreme defense and sacrificed nearly every other advantage in favor of raising her ability to resist attacks to the limit. Her most recent performance clearly proved the value of such a machine, and everyone gained a newfound appreciation for an expert mech that they previously looked down on for being slow, clumsy and lacking in agency.
The Blood Star Mark II possessed respectable defensive attributes, but did not compromise too much in terms of mobility. The living expert mech was meant to be a relatively mobile assault unit that could fulfill flexible roles on the battlefield.
The expert offensive space knight was able to switch from a defensive assignment to an offensive assignment with ease.
While the Blood Star Mark II's was not as good at resisting a huge amount of attacks as the Bastion, his mobility allowed the machine to evade many devastating attacks.
Unfortunately, when assigned to a task of defending a static target against focused attacks, the Blood Star Mark II was clearly out of his element!
Fortunately, Melkor shared a piece of good news.
"You don't have to weather the storm for long, old man. Joshua doesn't need much
time to finish off his enemy."
Inside the damaged but still functional resonance-empowered spell array, the Everchanger had finally tasted first blood!
The toxic and dangerous phasewater-infused blood from the orven lesser phase lord did not harm the Bitter Scimitar in the slightest.
In fact, the D-arm had developed an instant liking for phase lord blood!
The weapon was originally forged as a highly saturated transphasic hyper weapon, so getting exposed to phasewater posed no threat to its material structure.