<h4>Chapter 3680 Good and Evil</h4>
As time went by, the expeditionary fleet flew closer to the pakton refugee fleet.
Thetter still hadn''t made any attempts to elerate away from its attackers. Neither did the paktons choose to elerate towards the humans in order to make their guns more effective.
Both sides experienced an increase in the rate of hits after a while. Not only were the marginally shorter distances making life easier for everyone, they also became more proficient innding their shots under difficult circumstances.
The alien warships incurred more scars, especially the ones that the higher ups designated as priority targets.
However, despite their poor conditions, the pakton bird-shaped vessels were showing a lot of resilience.
Ves and many other people knew that this wasrgely because their firepower was being scattered across arger surface area.
A mech would already be lucky enough to avoid another miss. It was a luxury to try and make theser beams converge on specific weak points.
As a result, while the alien warships undoubtedly endured a lot of shots, the damage inflicted by thousands of mechs did not actually amount to anything substantial at this time.
Sure, their systems were deteriorating and the aliens were having greater trouble maintaining their earlier level of performance, but their powerfulser cannons still kept firing!
The alien attacks were slowly having an effect. Unlike the weaker and much more scattered firepower from the human mechs, the pakton warships did not experience as many challenges in concentrating their firepower.
As long as one heavyser beam struck a human warship, the attack would certainly burn through a couple of armoryers if the shield generators had sumbed.
The consequence of this was that the bow sections of all of the human vessels in front were ckened and seriouslypromised.
While ships like the Graveyard, Gorgoneion and Spirit of Bentheim still had plenty of matter for the aliens to burn through, their buffer was shrinking by the minute.
"Repairing all of this will be expensive!" Ves idlyined.
He did not begrudge all of the damage. He would rather end up with a more expensive repair bill than see more lives being lost.
Besides, with the Diligent Ovenbird in the fleet, the fleet did not have to detour to another pitstop in order to effect the necessary repairs.
As long as the Larkinsons weren''t too picky about the materials, they could slowly restore the surface damage of the affected starships.
Ves feared that the damage wouldn''t be constrained to this level. Once the alien warships began to pierce through the final forward defensiveyers, a lot ofpartments, shipponents and lives would get lost soon.
There was little he could do, though.
Under ordinary circumstances, the Larkinsons could deploy their space knights in front of their more vulnerable vessels, yet that was not a realistic option.
Some of theser beams were sorge that they engulfed mechs entirely!
The Larkinson defensive mechs either melted into g or deteriorated to such an awful condition that the mech pilot had no choice but to eject the cockpit!
As a result, a lot of defensive mech pilots felt useless at the moment. Aside from firing potshots at the pakton fleet with their spare rifles, they could not perform their traditional role of defending their more vulnerablerades.
Not even the new Rigid Wall mechs, of which only a handful of copies existed in the fleet, dared to stand in the way of those warship-grade attacks.
The new defensive mech of the Living Sentinels might provide a lot more value in battles against other human forces, but it had not been designed to take part in this kind of battle!
As Ves observed all of this happening from the bridge of the Spirit of Bentheim, he began to regret some of the choices he had made before the start of the current design round.
Back when the expeditionary fleet was parked in Vulit, he became so excited by the sessful recruitment of four rtively young and capable Journeyman Mech Designers that he did not put as much thought into the kind of enemies he would face.
It couldn''t be helped. He along with many other Larkinsons fought against hostile human forces for so long that they all defaulted to preparing for the next fight against a human opponent.
Though Ves was certain that the Golden Skull Alliance would exchange blows with other human forces sooner orter, right now alien fleets posed a greater threat to his fleet due to special circumstances.
What he should have done was to prioritize projects that were much more effective againstrge and individually powerful threats such as warships as opposed to smaller swarming threats such as mechs.
"We could really use more mechs with bigger guns." Ves wanted to palm his face.
The Larkinson Army didn''t field a lot of Transcendent Punishers and Eternal Redemptions either. Both mech models might not be entirely up to date for the Red Ocean, but they still inflicted a lot more damage on average than otherparable ranged mechs due to the greater calibers of their weapons.
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Yet because they only amounted to a couple of hundred machines, their collective weight of fire wasn''t overwhelming enough. There were too many mechs in the Larkinson Army that would do fine in a fight against other mech forces but were relegated to sidekicks in this battle against alien warships.
Suddenly, one of his projected control panels shed.
"What has happened?!
"An enemy attack has managed tond on a heavily-damaged section of our hull and trigger a minor power surge. The efficiency of our remaining forward shield generators has dropped by 19 percent and will remain so until our damage control parties have remedied the faults."
Ves grew a bit more ufortable when he heard that. The Spirit of Bentheim was part of the vanguard of the fleet because she was substantially more armored than the other nonbat vessels of the Larkinson n.
Though he could have instructed his people to put the Spirit of Bentheim in the back, that was a cowardly and slightly illogical move.
Hemissioned the factory ship so he knew how much damage she could take. If he insisted on removing her from the vanguard, then another and likely more vulnerable ship would incur damage instead.
As a result, Ves acquiesced to the decision to have the Spirit of Bentheim function as a shield even though he and many of the people he cared about were aboard.
He hadn''t even ordered his wife and child to move to another ship!
Part of that was because he wanted to keep them close to him. If the Spirit of Bentheim ever became separated from the rest of the fleet for some reason, then at Ves he still had his immediate family by his side.
Another part of it was there was no clear alternative that was better.
He would never put his daughter on a vulnerable civilian vessel such as the Vivacious Wal or the Dragon''s Den. Their hulls may be rtively thickpared to sub-capital ships but in rtive terms they were the equivalent of giant tin cans!
If the alien warships were able to focus their firepower on any of them, then the ship in question would not fare well from the bombardment!
The more defensive vessels such as the Graveyard and the Gorgoneion were much more resistant towards damage, but they went out of their way to attract more firepower in order to fulfill their roles.
Ves felt it was just fine to leave Aurelia aboard the Spirit of Bentheim. He even wished he could hug her at this moment, but that would only distract him from the developing situation.
After a few minutes, he received a new hail. He epted the call, causing Cbast''s projection to appear by his side.
Just like every other Larkinson, she was wearing protection that could keep her alive in the event of vacuum exposure. She donned a familiar heavy infiltrator suit that was covered with modr equipment.
"Ves." She nodded towards him. "As you know, our Blinding Banshee has been scanning the enemy ships non-stop. It was only until recently that our more powerful active scans have started to provide us with more detailed observation data. Look at these results."
She called up another projected screen that showed vague snapshots of the alien starships.
Different fromst time, their resolution was higher and the images were also projected with maps that measured heat, mass and other indicators.
What stood out from Ves was that certain weird bits were moving in and around the hull of the pakton ships.
In the visual images, they looked like tiny ck blobs.
"What am I looking at, Cbast?"
"Voribugs."
"What?!"
Ves leaned closer in order to study thetest readings in greater detail. Now that she had pointed it out to him, he quickly found that her conclusions were quite usible!
Practically all of the alien vessels showed strange activity that fit the pattern space bugs eating through their hulls.
The infection on some vessels was greater than others, hence the reason why the ships didn''t dare toe too close to each other.
It also exined why the pakton fleet hadn''t attempted to elerate in any direction. The ships that were most badly affected by the Red Ocean''s native menace were so riddled with metal-eating space insects that their sub-light propulsion systems no longer worked!
What Ves found peculiar about the paktons was that they sought to defend their entire fleet rather than leave the crippled ones to their fate.
This was not the most rational decision to make, and that made him feel ufortable.
Cbast noticed his difort and smirked. "Bad guys are not supposed to feel guilty about their actions, you know."
"I am not feeling guilty." Ves quickly shot back. "I just find it distasteful to clean up the leftovers of the Big Two. They could have been more thorough in wiping out the aliens."
"Then why did you choose to proceed with this attack?"
"You know very well why we are doing this. Aside from all of the rewards we can gain from defeating this fleet, we also need to harden and shape the mentalities of our nsmen. They don''t live in a fantasy gxy here. It''s better if I expose the cruel reality of our invasion of the Red Ocean now than under more uncontroble circumstances."
"You know this will make a lot of Larkinsons doubtful about themselves if they survive engagement." Cbast stated as she crossed her arms. "Since the start, you propagated a culture in the n that is based around honor,passion, integrity and all of those other nice buzz-words. Our days were much simpler back when we fought back against clear aggressors that we could paint as evil. It''s a lot harder for us to maintain the high ground now that you are forcing them tomit an act that everyone regards as dishonorable."
"It has to be done, Cbast. Besides, we stand to gain tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of merits if we destroy these alien vessels. That is not as much as I''d like, but still worth the effort if we can minimize our losses."
The woman gazed deeply at him. "You don''t care about the merits. Not really. You''re enjoying this. You enjoy putting others into ufortable situations. Perhaps you don''t go out of your way to mentally torment your own nsmen, but you don''t mind taking advantage of this opportunity to throw them off-bnce."
"I am not enjoying this!" He insisted. "I am doing what I think is necessary to mature my soldiers and make them ready for the struggles toe! Everything I do is logical. Our n will grow stronger once we pass this hurdle."
"Even if ites at the risk of painting us as the bad guys?"
"There is no good or bad in the Red Ocean. There''s only the strong and the weak, and I would rather fall in the camp of the former than thetter." Ves answered.