Once they were safely settled back into their hiding spots, Max began to take inventory of the battle going on above them. He hadn't noticed, but the fleet was beginning to look a bit sparse, so either they had forced the Arisen fleet to back off and abandon their ground troops, or a large number of additional ships had been destroyed.
The fleet messages were still overlapping heavily, and the deployment orders were constant, so the battle hadn't slowed down at all, but for the moment, it appeared that the Koleska were on the winning side.
The team that was being led by Commander Yuri seemed to be winning some commendations today, as they were being mentioned multiple times by the upper Command structure, and they had just cleared another point.
Hopefully, that was the result of Max's training, but he couldn't very well ask his fellow Commander about it in the middle of a battle, so he contented himself with listening to reports and scanning the surface for movement.
Using Nico's skill to link into the satellite network, he had a pretty good idea of what was going on on the surface, but it didn't look like he would see combat during this break. There were other Arisen Army units in the area, but they were actively avoiding his position, even making detours when their route would take them too close to where Cleansing Light and Shattered Pride were resting for the evening.
While that wasn't completely surprising, it was a bit annoying. If they had followed the routes that they were on, Max could have eliminated a number of small patrols silently while he was on watch, but instead, the Arisen Army had made a good note of where he was, and they were going to make him chase their units down tomorrow.
For two hours, he waited for the Arisen to change their minds, then turned the watch over to Nico and went to sleep. With their system advancements, neither of them needed a lot of sleep, and if they pushed it, even one break would be enough, but the position that they were holding was keeping the Arisen Army away from the civilian target behind them. Though it meant that they were missing out on combat, it also meant that the civilians were safe for the moment, which was in compliance with their mission here.
The Koleska didn't care how many they killed. They only wanted them to secure the civilian population until the blockade could be broken and a rescue effort could evacuate them.
Another two hours passed, and Nico sent Max a ping to wake him up. Not only were the Arisen forces avoiding them, but they were also leaving the entire region. The satellites showed that they were pulling back for a full offensive against the capital cities and abandoning the rest of the planet.
Over half of their orbital fleet was gone, either having fled or been destroyed, and Max could sense the desperation in their tactics.
"I think that we scared them away." Nico pouted as Max woke up for his watch.
"That's fine. We can just go hunt them in the morning. They will still be there unless the Koleska does something extraordinary and wipe them out in a matter of hours. One more watch each should be enough to get us ready for the day, and then we can make plans based on the current situation."
Max felt Nico's mind go quiet as she fell asleep again, but not completely silent. She was still having dreams of charging the War Walkers.
Nico really never would change, but her thoughts were happy, and there were a few good ideas in her dreams. Impractical, in the way that all dreams were, but just crazy enough to be adapted to real life.
Nico took the final shift, but Max didn't get his full two hours. New objectives were sent from the Koleska fleet to support the evacuation of the civilians in their region, as the Arisen Army was in full retreat, leaving the planet after destroying three capital cities and being driven from the wilderness areas, as well as the other cities.
That was good news for the locals, their planet had taken heavy damage, but the ones who were still alive were likely to stay that way.
"Why don't we take to the air, and we can guard against approaching War Walkers from a higher vantage point? It would allow us to use range to our advantage, and we already know that they are afraid to confront us directly after yesterday." Nico suggested.
"That's not a bad idea. A little warning would go a long way to keeping the Arisen Army from trying anything dumb, and it would distract them from the city itself since they could see us so much more easily." Max agreed, then launched Cleansing Light into the air to hover over the middle of the city at a height of a thousand metres.
Max's sensors detected the crowds beginning to come out of their homes in the city, either to face their death head-on or because they realized that Max and Nico were the saviours of the city. There was no way to tell how much of the current events they had managed to overhear, but within ten minutes, there were large crowds in the street, looking up at the two hovering Mecha, which were so different from the ones that their own species used.
Max searched the area for remnants of the Arisen Army, but there was nothing left to see. They had spent the whole night leaving the area for more target-rich environments, and there weren't even stragglers left behind at this point.
"Hey Max, where are the shells of the War Walkers we destroyed yesterday? I mean, we killed thousands of them, but I don't see a single one left on the ground. The rest of the traces of battle are still there, even the crater where the first Mass Driver round landed, but I don't see any loot." Nico informed him.
That couldn't be right. They had both been watching the area all night, and that battleground was well within their engagement range. There hadn't been anyone there to take it away, but every sensor he had showed the same thing. There was nothing left.
"What do the satellite logs say? I didn't see anything that could have possibly taken them away, and I didn't notice them disappearing either." Max asked.
Nico spent a few minutes scanning through the sensor logs from the satellites as well as both of the Mecha before she reported back.
"It looks like they just faded out of existence one at a time. Check this out. They're all there an hour after the battle, but two hours after the battle, there clearly aren't as many, then every hourly update, there are fewer and fewer.
I isolated a few timestamps, and you can see the pieces fading out of sight as well as from the sensors on our Mecha. I've never seen anything like it."
"I will ask the Koleska about it later. It might be related to how their ships seem to simply disappear when they decide that it is time to leave. If they have some sort of cloaking or transport technology that we don't understand, I want it. Maybe not as much as you want it, but I want it too." Max joked.
"I'm glad you understand."
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