The Mech Touch

Both sides happened to stock them in abundance, but the problem was that the enemy fleet generally consisted of smaller and more cramped vessels. That meant that the weapons of mass destruction they were able to safely contain and deploy against their targets were generally less destructive on average!

Fort Rock happened to become the focal point of enemy weapons of mass destruction because the cosmopolitans and native aliens at least figured out that its continued existence inhibited their greatest strengths far too much.

So long as this space fortress was knocked offline, the enemy craft and vessels could unleash a much greater portion of their true capabilities!

Unfortunately, Fort Rock was such an obvious target that the mechers and the fleeters had invested a lot of spare resources to fortify it in a short amount of time. The asteroid base practically welcomed the incoming nuclear and antimatter missiles with open arms, because There was more to the torpedoes than was apparent on the surface. Ves had tried to apply spiritual engineering to the munitions in an attempt to make them alive and see if he could make them more potent and destructive.

Unfortunately, the results were mixed.

The Antimatter Missiles generated a lot of energies, but had very little influence on E energy.

It couldn\'t be helped. They were simply containers for relatively minute quantities of antimatter. Their technological complexity was predominantly in their containment, safety measures, guidance systems, ECM and ECCM systems and other auxiliary functions.

In short, there was very little Ves could do to augment the most important explosive components directly with the use of E-technology. It also didn\'t help that Ves had not been involved with the design and production of the original antimatter warheads.

Ves silently lowered his evaluation on antimatter missiles. They were still useful, no doubt. Their production was relatively simple once a group was able to produce antimatter on a reliable basis. Antimatter munitions could easily be scaled from obliterating starships to cracking the crust of entire planets!

Unfortunately, the annoying properties of antimatter and the extreme difficulty in trying to do anything else with it made it incompatible with phasewater technology, hyper technology and more important E-technology. Ves could only think up indirect ways to augment their effectiveness beyond the sheer amount of energies they unleashed when they came into contact with ordinary matter.

Antimatter munitions were therefore a \'dead-end tech\' in his eyes. Perhaps a Star Designer like the Missile Messiah might be able to come up with an entirely new paradigm that successfully blended antimatter weapons with the aforementioned techs, but this was probably a low priority issue to him since neither side wanted to make too much use of weapons of mass destruction.

The Hyper Spatial Crusher Torpedoes launched by the Doomspreader yielded much more fruitful results to Ves.

Ves had hastily stuffed each of these special torpedoes with spare superdrives that he and a team of naval engineers had deliberately messed up. They removed the safeties, scrambled the settings and even inflicted physical damage on a number of subcomponents just to make them more volatile than usual!

He then proceeded to stuff the torpedoes with a strong and compact but short-lasting power source as well as vaguely relevant hyper materials to amplify the instability of the \'warheads\' even further.

The use of hyper materials made it much easier to make this torpedo alive.

Since the Hyper Spatial Crusher Torpedoes weren\'t actually designed to explode, the living munitions were actually able to make a more substantial difference this time!

The 5 arche lesser phase lords had been able to resist a multitude of antimatter attacks by relying on their absurdly strong transphasic archeshells.

Regular archeshells were already resilient enough, but the ones cultivated by phase lords were many times more resilient!

It did not surprise Ves at all that arche phase lords tended to be famed for their damage resistance. They were literal tanks that could withstand ten times more punishment than the phase lords of other species so long as they were able orient their archeshells towards the incoming attacks.

They were especially great at resisting unempowerred attacks, which explosions generated by antimatter warheads happen to fall into. This was another reason why red humanity did not really like to throw around antimatter weapons during the Red War.

However, the deviously designed Hyper Spatial Crusher Torpedoes were different. As long as they continued to hover in front of the 5 turtling phase lords, the unstable superdrives were clearly exerting very strong stresses onto their archeshells!

The rudimentary living entities that Ves had imparted in the torpedoes increased the suffering even further. Even though they were very crude and simple, he had made sure to infuse the living weapons with malice, causing them to subtly control and direct the unstable spatial activity even further towards the phase lords!

Pain clearly radiated from all 5 arche phase lords as their archeshells were more important than the rest of their bodies as far as they were concerned!

Any crack or major break in their archeshells produced agony to a level that could drive mortal arche to suicide!

The phase lords became so wracked by pain that none of them could muster the concentration to destroy the Hyper Spatial Crusher Torpedoes that were continually creating more and more gaps in their shells!

If Ves knew that his attempt to create a pure transphasic weapon worked so well, then he would have begged Admiral Tensen to strip a few superdrives from the hulls of the less important combat carriers of the Bluejay Fleet.

The Hyper Spatial Crusher Torpedoes not only induced a lot of stress on the phase lords that foolishly stuck close to each other, but also hindered the Distance Shaper from working his magic!

The orven greater phase lord were already being hindered by all of the space suppressors and warp interdiction fields. The volatile activity generated by the Hyper Spatial Crusher Torpedoes completely deprived him of a way to relieve the pain on his allies!

The greater phase lord cautiously started to advance. He was clearly reluctant to do so, but the only way for his power to take effect under all of the suppression was to reduce the range.

However, this was ultimately a redundant move, as the Hyper Spatial Crusher Torpedoes eventually got shot into pieces after a number of archeships hastily diverted their cannon fire from the Bluejay Fleet to the stationary torpedoes!

"Damn." Ves cursed. "I don\'t even want to know how much money crumbled into pieces."

The absurd effectiveness of the Hyper Spatial Crusher Torpedoes was largely attributed to the powerful properties of first-class superdrives. These were extremely expensive ship systems that demanded a lot of phasewater. The only way that first-raters could justify the expense was to assume they would get used for a long time, possibly for over a century.

To use up these superdrives in less than a minute was a massive waste, though Ves personally did not think so. He still believed it was worth it to throw so much money away to inflict severe wounds on the 5 phase lords!

The aftermath of this wave of weapons of mass destruction looked a lot worse for the lesser phase lords. The beautiful and radiant archeshells of the lesser phase gods all looked cracked and broken.

Yet despite the terrible looking appearances of these native gods, Ves could still sense the strong stubbornness and resilience from these enemies!

"Be careful! The arche phase lords are hardly down for the count! Their archeshells have received severe damage, but it is regenerating even now. Their phasewater organs as well as most of their flesh remains unharmed, and they had shed remarkably little blood due to their archeshells taking the brunt of the damage."

Their combat effectiveness still remained intact for the most part, which was bad because that still gave them the capital to approach and bulldoze Fort Rock with their bulky bodies alone.

Ves gripped his Oceancaller tighter and estimated whether he had a chance of stalling or defeating them. He soon shook his head.

"Stripping their spatial barriers and cracking open their archeshells has removed a lot of their defensive buffers, but that is exactly what they are for. I don\'t think I can defeat 5 of them in their current state."

His experience combined with his recently acquired fighting skill enabled him to estimate his chances against other opponents a lot better than before. Judging how he would fare in a fight against others was partially based on data analysis, but also partially based on pure intuition.

He just knew that he would get beat up by these seemingly injured but still ferocious phase lords!

To him, the arche phase lords were just putting up an act. They were cunning enough to deliberately show signs of weakness so that they could lure a person just like Ves who greedily wanted to finish the job in person!

The arche phase lords may excel at defense, but they could not rely on this role to win their bouts. They needed to possess offensive solutions as well in order to stay alive.

Since that was the case, Ves tried to rein in his eagerness to confront them himself and instead focused on his Doomspreader.

Ves needed to take advantage of the vulnerabilities of the enemy phase lords while they still existed. This appeared to be the perfect opportunity to test the Hyper Nanomachine Plague Torpedoes!

He had not yet exhausted his stockpile of torpedoes!

"Load 2 Hyper X-Ray Torpedoes in tubes 1 and 2. Load 2 Hyper Nanomachine Plague Torpedoes in tubes 3 and 4."

Ves needed to take advantage of the vulnerabilities of the enemy phase lords while they still existed. This appeared to be the perfect opportunity to test the Hyper Nanomachine Plague Torpedoes!

As their name suggested, the nanomachine plagues were extremely virulent and fearsome. They were like plagues in the form of tiny machinery. They were unscrupulous about devouring any materials that their tiny nanomachines could break down and absorb, either on their own or through cooperation!

The fight raged on. Both sides appeared to have exhausted their initial stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. They may carry a few more devastating weapons in their vaults, but they were not in a hurry to deploy these exceptionally cruel and destructive solutions.

The Dark Zephyr Mark III Revision 2 continued to play hit-and-run games with the Arena Lord of Ya\'gwasa.

Cosmopolitan mechs combined with alien phasefighters had begun to exchange fire with red humanity\'s first-class multipurpose mechs.

The warships hailing from both sides continued to slug each other with their gun batteries and missiles, though the hulls belonging to the enemy fleet were clearly faring worse in this contest.

One of the most acute shortcomings of the enemies was that they did not employ support link technology!

The warships and combat carriers of the Red Association and the Red Fleet had all linked up using the three common variations of support link technology.

Shield link technology had massively helped the RA and RF hulls withstand the salvos of weapons of mass destruction sent in their direction! n/ô/vel/b//jn dot c//om

Though the shield link arrays had endured too much stress and no longer worked at full effectiveness, they had served their purpose and enabled the Bluejay Fleet to weather a part of the storm.

"Tubes 1 to 4 are loaded, sir!"

"Target the arche lesser phase lords. Prepare to launch the Hyper X-Ray Torpedoes in tubes 1 and 2. Wait 7 seconds before firing the Hyper Nanomachine Plague Torpedoes in tubes 3 and 4."

"We have dialed in the settings, professor."

"Launch!"

Four torpedoes launched from Doomspreader in a staggered pattern!

The archeships crewed by aliens concerned about the state of their gods tried to intercept the torpedoes before they could reach their destinations, but the mechs and warships of the Bluejay Fleet did their best to run interference!

Only a short time passed before the two torpedoes reached their programmed coordinates and began to pump concentrated X-ray radiation into the prepared archeshells of the alien phase gods!