Nico engaged her thrusters and pushed Shattered Pride into the ranks of War Walkers, putting her far too close to use any of their high-yield weapons against her without causing more damage to their own troops than they did to her, and Max changed targets to support her.
First, he picked off the War Walkers that tried to move behind her, and then the snipers who might have been able to take advantage of her distraction to land a critical hit on the four armed demonic Mecha.
As he watched, Nico cycled through the energy frequencies on her blades, looking for one that would get through the enemy shields more effectively. For the first few seconds, it didn't seem to be making any difference, but then she found a frequency that their shielding was weak too, and the blades began to pass through as if they weren't there at all.
Nico sent him the details of the change she made, and Max applied them to his Disruptors with [Optimize], which allowed him to cut down swathes of War Walkers with every shot. It was pure devastation, and the Arisen Army couldn't adjust fast enough to stop them before they had eliminated every one of the spindly walkers in sight.
[Attention Koleska troops. Adjust energy weapons to use this frequency in order to bypass Arisen Army energy shields more effectively.] Max broadcasted to their allies.
"That hardly seems sporting." Nico laughed as Max finished his message.
"Oh, that's rich, coming from you. Who was the one that discovered the exploit, to begin with?" Max replied with a smile.
He searched his sensors for the best group to target next while Nico worked on improving all of her weapons with an algorithm that would keep exploiting the vulnerabilities in the Arisen Army shielding once they finally managed to adapt to the newest development.
And they would adapt once they realized that the whole planet full of defenders had the ability to get around their best defences. If they couldn't, then they wouldn't have become such a threat, to begin with.
Max's planning for the next attack was disrupted by an enormous explosion in space above them. One of the larger ships, either Arisen or one of the Koleska attack fleet, had been destroyed, and the pieces were raining down into the atmosphere.
That distraction didn't last long, though. It wasn't a threat to them. The pieces would burn up, so he picked a target that would lead them closer to the village so that they could protect any remaining civilians.
That was the point of this deployment, that the civilians were still alive when he was sent, so it would only be right to do his best to keep them that way, even if he could pad his kill count by going elsewhere, as Nico was thinking, as she contemplated ways to use Warp Torpedos in surface combat.
Just the activation of the Warp field would cause immense damage. The weapon itself would become irrelevant in a battle like this. And Nico knew it, but that didn't stop her multi-track mind from looking for more ways to kill things.
Max sent her the target position and activated his targeting skills to pick out the first targets from the group. He prioritized the Command Walkers and those evil artillery Walkers which could fire nukes at him before anything else, and his System had picked out nearly a dozen initial targets for him.
[Now that your weapons are optimized against their shields, why don't you try an Orbital Lance against them?] Nico suggested happily.
It was a very Nico tactic, but it wasn't a bad idea.
Max launched himself into the air and targeted the center of the enemy position. It was a good thing, too, they had dug trenches, and there was a large portion of the force that he hadn't initially detected with his scans.
But from this angle, he could get them all with an Orbital Lance-level attack, and he aimed it right for the center of the group, leaving only the outlying few stragglers the chance to survive.
The air crackled with energy as the Disintegrator lashed out at the enemy, vaporizing the majority of the War Walkers, as expected, but causing a secondary explosion from a shielded object that was buried under the ground.
The rippling explosion didn't stop at the camp. It continued to cascade down the line to the next Arisen position, where another chain explosion occurred, destroying hundreds more War Walkers before rippling a few more meters and stopping.
[What the Feth was that? I didn't even know that was an option.] Nico cheered as she watched the explosions.
[I think they buried a power generator and linked it to the next group over. They might all be linked, but after the second explosion, they would have cut the link to stop the cascading effect.] Max offered, giving his best guess.
He wasn't going to just get away with that stunt, though, and a huge amount of firepower was coming his way, forcing Cleansing Light from the sky to hide among the ruins where he couldn't be directly targeted.
[Oh, they're the big mad. That's even better. Now we don't have to go hunting for targets.]
Trust Nico to see the best in any situation, but she was right. Not only was every Arisen unit within fifty kilometres headed their way, but they were also sending dropships from orbit as well. His sensors had already picked them up and had plotted to target solutions for him.
High above his location, Commander Yuri was leading the newly trained students in the battle, with orders to observe the changes that they had made after a day in the human training programs. He had received the updates on the battle below, and he could see the dropships heading for the location where the two humans were fighting.
They were too far for him to deal with, but when the first one exploded, he realized that he didn't have to. The humans had come prepared to hunt anything that moved, and they were capable of taking out ships in the upper atmosphere without leaving their stations on the surface.
Soon, there would be a hundred more of those Mecha, and even if they weren't the same elite Pilots that had been sent this time, he was looking forward to the level of firepower that they would bring with them.
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