Chapter 6259 The Initial Approach

Chapter 6259 The Initial Approach

The duel between Patriarch Reginald Cross and the Tireless Engine shook the surrounding space and occasionally produced collateral damage that made everyone else avoid their clash as much as possible.

The duel had become separate from the larger battle taking place in and around Duqeste XI.

Venerable Rosa Orfan sighed as she restlessly sat inside her cockpit.

This operation was anything but ideal in her opinion. It was hastily planned and contained far too few redundancies. The safety margin was razor thin and had become stretched even further due to the early detection of the RA stealth vessel.

Venerable Orfan knew what General Ark Larkinson had in mind. Both of them were high-ranking expert pilots that had already reached their bottlenecks and could not make any further progress. Both of them experienced the same persistent desire to find a breakthrough opportunity and smash apart their stubborn bottlenecks.

Yet just because they were eager to advance to the rank of ace pilot did not mean they were willing to do everything and throw aside much of their caution.

General Ark obviously felt more comfortable with organizing a daring raid on Duqaste XI due to two separate factors.

FIrst, Patriarch Reginald Cross would be accompanying the expert pilots. The powerful Crosser ace pilot had already proven his chops as an excellent duelist and a veritable engine of destruction.

Reginald's presence not only ensured that the enemy phase lord would not be able to bully the expert mechs while they executed their missions, but could also serve as a potential failsafe for any teammate that was on the verge of getting killed.

Of course, the latter was not a solid guarantee. Anything could happen in a messy battle. If the Tireless Engine fought so well that Patriarch Reginald was unable to maintain situational awareness of what took place further away, then the expert pilots would all be forced to fend for themselves!

In other words, the safety blanket that General Ark was counting on to preserve the lives of himself and his fellow expert pilots was paper thin. It could easily be torn so long as the aliens were a little bit stronger or luckier.

This operation was by far her most dangerous action in years. The only battles that could rival the danger factor of this mission were the ones that took place before she transcended her mortality.

Combined with the fact that getting discovered early meant that the Lionheart, the Riot and all of the other expert mechs had to approach Duqaste XI in the open for all of the aliens to see, the native aliens had a much greater chance of taking down an expert mech and killing the pilot nestled in the cockpit!

All of these factors exerted a huge amount of pressure onto Venerable Orfan's shoulders. The lack of support from the rest of the 77th Warborn amplified her concerns and made her feel even more isolated and left to fend for herself.

This operation was by far her most dangerous action in years. The only battles that could rival the danger factor of this mission were the ones that took place before she transcended her mortality.

Those grueling battles against enemies that outnumbered her own forces had been difficult to survive, let alone win. A lot of fights only ended in the favor of the early Larkinson Clan due to a combination of luck and because the patriarch of the Larkinson Clan often managed to pull out a trump card.

This time, Ves Larkinson was nowhere to be found. Perhaps he might have a way of monitoring this battle from remote, but he had absolutely no way of intervening more directly.

That decreased Venerable Orfan's confidence and made her feel that she could not afford to make a single major error.

If she screwed up big time, no one would be able to bail her out! The other expert pilots would likely have their hands full in trying to fight while heavily outnumbered.

If the aliens brought at least 100,000 guns to bear on her expert mech, then that was a completely different story!

Although the chance of getting hit by a single massive salvo was not 100 percent, the probability that her expert mech's defenses would get tested was still a lot higher than before!

Much of the outcome of this grueling approach would be decided by the strategic decisions of the nunser commanders.

Would they opt to focus their fire on just one or two expert mechs, or would they spread their firepower around in order to test all of the machines or hope they would get lucky?

If the former was the case, then Venerable Orfan quickly realized that her Riot would likely get into a lot of trouble!

The Riot was hardly the most mobile mech out of the team, and most of her tech was a lot older as well.

As the distant enemy warships began to open fire with their primary and secondary armament, Venerable Orfan no longer focused so much on her concerns and shifted into a more combat-oriented state of mind.

The initial salvo of warship-grade energy beams tried to strike all 6 expert mechs equally.

The nunsers had clearly coordinated their fire as they not only spread their firepower in equally sized portions, but also tried their best to fire their weapons in grid patterns, making it a lot trickier to evade the devastating attacks!

Nonetheless, the range was so great and the warship armaments were so clunky that it did not take too much effort for the expert pilots to deftly maneuver their machines out of the danger zones in time.

The intuition of almost every pilot participating in this operation was top-notch!

Every participating Larkinson expert pilot was a seasoned veteran who had thrown themselves into the jaws of enemy warships many times in the past.

The only exception was Venerable Lothario Cross. The Crosser had broken through later than everyone else, so he was still a low-tier expert pilot.

More importantly, he did not have the luxury of accelerating the growth of his resonance strength by gaining access to general purpose cultivation elixirs.

His attempts to evade all of the powerful warship attacks was remarkably worse than that of the other expert mechs!

The nunsers apparently made the same observations, because Venerable Orfan could already feel that many enemies had shifted their attention away from her Riot.

While she privately felt relieved about it, she understood that her reprieve came at the expense of another comrade.

"Lothario!" General Ark barked over the communication channel. "Your expert mech is about to get focused upon by the main elements of the Ghirard Fleet. Don't think about anything except survival! Do not hesitate to divert your course and back off from Duqaste XI if you think you cannot keep your machine safe at closer distances. You can still support us from a distance."

"Roger that." Lothario responded. "I can still proceed forward. My 80th Element is fast enough. However, the smart metal that makes up my expert mech is not able to resist warship-grade attacks as easily as more solid expert mechs. I will try to prioritize my machine's survival as best possible."

Just before the warships unleashed their second salvo at the only expert mech made out of nanomachines, the 80th Element already veered off and even began to deploy a few decoys made of very thin layers of smart metal in order to confound the alien gunners and targeting systems!