With the arrival of so many more bodies, the work of the drone bombers to drop mines all over the open ground between the trenches and the defence lines was increasingly important. But they wouldn't be working alone to keep the enemy from charging straight into the defenders.
Against their usual practices, the Hunters had assembled an entire squadron of heavy artillery that would shell everything within fifty kilometres, with the aim of wiping out future infestations.
The spores in this area seemed to have matured, but they would have to burn the bodies of more recent battles in order to stop that from happening again, and still, the camp would not be safe.
There had been battles all over this planet, leaving billions of Myceloid bodies and exponentially more spores that could germinate into future generations.
By the time the Hunters realized their mistake, they had lost too much ground to stop the invasion, and they lacked the ability to get into orbit to cleanse the planet and start over.
Retreating back through the Anomaly and barricading the other side was deemed not to be an acceptable option by the Alliance Government who had hired them, as the risk of a breach was too high, and the Myceloids could cause untold damage if they managed to get spores through the barrier and onto a populated world.
The Government was taking the Klem method of expansion into their calculations and considering the possibility that the spores would remain viable in space for an extended period of time, which would allow even a small cluster to infest multiple planets at once.
The Klem was a terrifying existence to them after the last incident where they were introduced to Alliance worlds, and the thought that there might be an even smarter version of them, which was just as warlike, had the government officials in a panic.
Compared to the reaction of the Alliance, the humans had taken the news of an opening to a deadly region full of hostile aliens much more easily. They were used to conflict. The entirety of human existence was built around conflict and strife. So, they sent guards and went about their days.
That was the attitude that Max and Nico were teaching the Androids as they started to build up crenellations in front of the Mecha to take the brunt of the early assault and prevent the massed firepower of the incoming Myceloids from tearing through them.
One-on-one, they were no match for even a regular Line Mecha, much less these upgraded ones, but by the billions, nearly anything could be a life-altering threat.
Max briefly considered bringing in the new Super Heavy Mecha, but they would only draw more fire on the front lines, and if they flew up to get a better angle, they would attract the attention of the ships in orbit.
So, the defences were bolstered, and the Hunters' camp prepared for a battle of monumental proportions. It was the sort of battle that legends would be written about. They would sing songs of the day that ten thousand hunters faced down an army ten thousand times their size and lived to tell the tale.
Even in the annals of human history, such odds were recorded as legend. It didn't matter if you had the advantage of high ground or prepared defences. When the enemy outnumbered you by thousands of times, only the greatest of heroes would prevail.
Another wave of Drone Bombers left the hangar to replace the last group when it was shot down, and the thunder of the Hunters' artillery began to roll with the booming rhythm of a marching band's drum beat.
A drumroll for a dozen seconds, then a split second of relative silence, and another bout of rolling thunder as the guns worked their way from the marked minimum to maximum distance of their barrage range.
That could only mean one thing. That the Myceloids hadn't been slowed down enough by the Drones, and the bulk of their forces were closing in on the five-kilometre mark. No matter how intense the artillery was, not much would stop them at this point. There were too many of them, and they had already learned the techniques necessary to make it through no man's land.
The closest of the attackers was past the trench line already and into the land mines that the drones had spread out.
The first line was vaporized by the randomly placed explosives, but the horde had a plan for that. The next group was sent with energy barriers and long chains to beat the ground as they moved forward.
The Mecha and the Hunter Suits didn't make it easy on them, and the trench line began to build up a substantial wall of bodies for the attackers to charge over, but the wave didn't stop. They simply treated the dead as additional fortifications and had more and more of their fighters charge individually through the open ground, hoping to set off the mines without endangering anyone else.
"It's brilliant in a suicidal sort of way." Huntress Khan mused as she watched the tactics and picked off the attackers who were coming over the wall of flesh that had been built in front of the trenches.
"You have to admire their persistence. Even the Klem would have backed down by now. But I think that they have more in mind than a simple mindless assault, don't you?" Nico replied.
Sure, the front lines were taking horrific casualties, and the advance had come to a grinding halt, but the rest of the army was coming up fast from the older battlefields, and once they arrived, the real battle would begin.
Max mentally calculated the strategies that they could use to reach the camp while firing at the attackers with well-practiced precision. Then it came to him. The Klem had used the same tactic before. They were building up a wall of bodies to throw across no man's land to set off all the mines when the main army arrived.
The resultant explosion and the thick smoke from the smouldering bodies would hide the advance of the second wave, and they might be able to reach the first line of the camp relatively unscathed.
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