The situation on and above the Glowing had deteriorated enormously in the past week. Ghanso Larkinson spent more time in space than in the fleet carrier. Everyone only caught four to five standard hours of sleep, and some didn’t even bother going to bed.
Right now, the Vri Starhawks battled arge fleet of unknowns who didn’t consider the Mech Corps to be an obstacle. Unlike the other pirate fleets who constantly tried to maneuver around their forces, this strange group of carriers and spaceborn mechs boldly tried to bulldoze through the Starhawks.
"Who are these guys?! I don’t recognize any of their models!"
"They’re exiles from another star sector." Old Man Alex replied as he endured another barrage ofsers in front of Ghanso’s Vhedra-S. "All kinds of scum are attracted to the frontier. These fellows must havee to our star sector to excavate some treasures before they decided to go for the Glowing instead."
In truth, the Vri Starhawks outnumbered the unknowns, but the invaders obviously consisted of some elite force. Much of their mechs turned out to be second-ss and possessed a distinctive edge against the cheaper mechs used by the Mech Corps. If not for their excellent training and coordination, they would have been smashed to pieces by the foreign mechs.
Watch out for those orange-striped mechs!" Lieutenant Fairfax warned. "They’ve shaken off our elites and are heading in our way!"
Ghanso quietly cursed the foreigners. Why did everyone want to stick their fingers into the pie that represented the Glowing. Was a’s worth of junk exotics that much worth the effort?
The Vri Starhawks learned quickly not to underestimate the orange-striped mechs among the foreigners. Besides being better quality mechs that boasted significantly higher specs, their pilots all appeared to be advanced pilots that had reached their upper limits. Even though theycked the deterrence of an expert pilot, so many elites gathered into a single squad could affect the course of the entire battle.
"Ghanso! Focus on their rifleman mechs! Suppress them as best as you can!"
"On it!"
The battle had turned into a wild battle for speed and maneuverability, which made it hard to secure a kill. The iing enemies approached Ghanso’s squad with so much eleration that his Vhedra-S only scored some ncing blows with itsser rifle.
"They’re circling around us!"
Insteading of shing head-on against Fairfax’s squad, the orange-striped elites took up a wide orbit around them. Ghanso kept firing calmly despite his disadvantageous position. The frequent skirmishes he’d been through beforehand had polished his instincts to the point where he scrubbed any clues that he’d once been a rookie.
"They’ve got more rifleman mechs than us! I can hardly hold my ground here!" Alex yelled over them as his space knight took an increasingly more severe beating. "We should bring the fight to them!"
Ghanso agreed with his squad mate. "Alex is right, lieutenant! Please give us the order to engage!"
His Vhedra-S rapidly umted heat as its rifle spat out beam after beam. Most of them ended up sshing ineffectually against his opponent’s superior armor. It took sustained hits on the same location to dosting damage.
In a battle with such speeds, Ghanso found it impossible to aplish such a tall order. His beam often sshed all over the ce. Any pilot whose mech got hit would instantly juke in a spin or in a different direction. The more surface theser beam affected, the shallower the mark it left on the armor.
"Captain Rynsel and her men are on the way! Just hold out for ten more minutes!"
As he fired another ineffectualser beam, Ghanso nced at the proximity map and noted ten iing friendlies approaching from below. Everyone on the squad cheered at the thought of being reinforced. These elites had been hammering their rifles at their mechs. They wouldn’tst more than a minute at this rate.
"Alert! High energy emission detected!"
"Iinget!"
"That’s not aet, that’s a mech!"
A bright blue-white re approached the section of space where Ghanso and hisrades fought against the foreigners. Their collective sensor readings quickly resolved the iing contact as an unknown mech of a unique design. One thing stood out the rest. It outputted as much energy as five heavy mechs.
"Oh mother! We’ve kicked the ho’s nest!" Alex eximed. "HE’S COMING STRAIGHT FOR US!"
Theet-like mech crashed straight towards Alex’s mech. Its extreme rtive speed hardly allowed anyone else to respond to its appearance in time. Ghanso narrowly engaged his mech’s flight systems to back up, just in time to evade a narrow glowing stripe that passed just in front.
While theet mech darted away, the space knight that had always stood by Ghanso’s side suddenly parted in half from the waist before exploding in a violent congration.
"No!" Ghanso yelled as he couldn’t believe how fast his partner’s space knight had been killed. "Alex!"
Old Man Alex didn’t have the time eject. His odds of survival was nil.
Captain Rynsel’s squad suddenly stopped and turned around. "Fairfax! Disengage right now! You just got hit by an expert pilot! He’s turning around for another pass!"
Everyone panicked when they heard they faced an expert mech. Lieutenant Fairfax swiftly ordered everyone to split up and flee in separate directions. Even with Alex’s mech, the entire squad stood no chance of surviving against a single expert pilot.
"AArghh! I’m ejecting!"
One of their squadmates had to eject because the foreigners that had continued to circle around them took advantage of their loss of cohesion. The orange-striped elites had shifted their aim so smoothly that Ghanso suspected that they must have practiced this tactic.
"He’s here!"
This time, the expert mech shed two of their mechs in quick session. Only one of their squad mates ejected in time. The other perished when his mech blew up.
Ghanso felt immense pressure to eject, but he held back due to the obligation to bring back his machine intact. The Mech Corps took a dim view on those who wasted their expensive war materiel. He continued to pray that the expert pilot wouldn’t target him next.
In the next couple of minutes, the expert pilot targeted their reinforcements. Captain Rynsel feebly tried to resist, but eventually had to eject.
Just when Ghanso thought he made it away, the expert pilot curved his high-speed trajectory in a straight path towards his Vhedra-S.
"He’s on to you, Ghanso!"
"Eject already! You don’t stand a chance against this expert!"
Ghanso didn’t want to abandon his mech so soon. Even if his fellow Starhawks wouldn’t me him for the early ejection, it still would have left a stain in his heart. As a mech pilot born to the cause, thest thing he could tolerate was to carry a brand of shame. Such a shame had a high chance of affecting his potential advancement to expert pilot.
The Vhedra-S threw all caution to the wind and fired beam after beam at the swift and relentless expert mech. No matter what tricks Ghanso pulled off, the expert pilot dodged his aim again and again. It was as if the expert read his mind!
Even then, Ghanso never gave up his attempt tond a single hit. He even increased his rifle’s rate of fire to a ruinous level. Even if he stopped firing right now, both his mech and his rifle had been ruined irrevocably.
Ghanso didn’t care. His mind sublimated during the brief interval as the expert mech came closer and closer. He vented his grief for losing Alex and his fellow squad members through his weapon. Eachser that struck out into the vacuum of space was another defiant scream to the unfairness of facing an expert pilot without support.
"Come on! I need a hit! Just one hit!"
In the final three seconds, Ghanso had be so fired up that his mind momentarily breached an invisible barrier. At that moment, a spark of me exploded within him that guided his aim towards another direction.
Hisser only scorched the expert mech for 0.15 seconds. The incredibly skilled expert swiftly adjusted his course before theser could even begin to burn away the outer coating.
"Pull out!"
This time, Ghanso listened to themunication channel. He sent out a mentalmand which instantly disconnected the cockpit from the rest of the mech. The sudden loss of connection jarred Ghanso sufficiently that he didn’t witness his cockpit escaping from the mech in time for the expert pilot to sh through the rest of the frame in a single sh.
Instead, as soon as he recovered, heughed. "Hahahaha! I scored a hit! I scored a single hit!"
As his cockpit flung away from the battle and followed an arcing course to the rear lines of the Starhawk fleet, Ghansoughed and cried at the same time. Heughed for surviving an encounter against a dread expert pilot, and he cried for the friends he would never be able to see again.
"Damn this Glowing? It would have done this gxy a favor if it came across a ck hole and disappeared beyond its event horizon."
Battles erupted across the entire orbit of the Glowing. The Vesians had also been hard-pressed to hold back as many pirates as possible. In the meantime, hordes of pirates and mercenaries slipped through the gaps and descended to the surface of the Glowing.
Battle raged throughout the airless skies above the rogue. The pirates fought against the mercenaries, the mercenaries fought against the military, the military fought against the pirates, and the pirates fought among themselves.
Infighting was rife even among allies in the same fleet. It only took a couple of stray shots to ssh against a nominal allied outfit to provoke a brawl. Even the pirate lords that browbeat the small outfits together couldn’t alleviate the constantly rising tempers.
Broken mechs and chunks of space ships kept descending from above in regr numbers. Back at the base erected by Walter’s Whalers, their turrets sporadically fired at an iing artificial meteorite from above.
Sometimes, even the rifleman and cannoneer mechs had to lend a hand in order to break apart a particrlyrge piece of spaceship debris.
Still, that was child’s ypared to the iing pirates. Sometimes, elements of a pirate fleet got so confused that they lost their course andnded somewhere close to the red zone upied by the Mech Corps. Any mech carriers thatnded in the vicinity of the Blood ws and the Whalers had to be destroyed before they could get away.
"You’ve improved!" Fadahplimented Rae as she swiped the head off a pirate mech in a single blow. "It was justst week when you could barely hold on against a single pirate."
"That scum was an elite!" Rae spat back as her Sliverath danced around the disarrayed pirate mechs with as much grace as the ckbeak. The two made for an intimidating pair, and together with Dietrich’s long-ranged support they developed a practiced routine. "I’m hungry. I hadn’t been able to eat my lunch all day. Let’s wipe these bastards out fast before I starve to death!"
The mechs aligned to the Bright Republic fought without holding anything back. Ever since Ves submitted his undercharged energy cell designs, every mech received the new energy cells. While the mech pilots faced a couple ofplications due to their lower capacity and unstable energy supply, they all sighed in relief because they wouldn’t get blown up anymore.
Naturally, such a momentous development couldn’t be kept to themselves. The Mech Legion somehow got ahold of the designs and began producing their own recement energy cells.
Some of the other well-connected factions such as the Dragons of the Void followed suit.
This had divided the forces on the in three.
First came the Mech Corps and the Mech Legion who had fully converted their energy cells to the safer designs.
Second were the poorer pirate outfits and mercenary corps who didn’t possess enough connections to get their hands on the valuable designs for the safer energy cells.
Third were the iing pirates, mercenaries and treasure hunters who just descended upon the. Since they hadn’t been subjected to the surface energy fields for long, their energy cells hadn’t developed an overcharge yet. This would change in the next couple of days, but until then they swaggered around theirnding sites, provoking trouble wherever they went.
Thus, the Blood ws and the Whalers constantly had to fight the smaller outfits while the Mech Corps mopped up thergest concentration of scum. After fighting multiple battles, everyone started to feel the strain.