Published at 15th of June 2026 6:36 am

Chapter 7514 Primitive Formation

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What happened to the Geirne Fis made Ves even more vigilant towards the enemy.

Ordinary deathborn could never strip the RF destroyer of all life in such a short amount of time.

Even if they operated under activated death energy that had gained enhanced erosion capabilities, the shift was way too dramatic!

"Be careful!" He transmitted over the command channel. "There must be a powerful enemy or enemies lurking near us! If they can ruin a destroyer like the Geirne Fis in such a short amount of time, then they can probably do the same to a cruiser or a battleship. This is not a feat that can be done by any ordinary deathborn."

Though the presence of more powerful variants of deathborn had not been confirmed, Ves was 99 percent certain that they had already arrived!

An invisible form of pressure descended over the entire combined fleet as everyone had to take this unknown threat into account.

The continued lack of information on this new type of adversary continued to generate a lot of apprehension.

Dangerous shadows lurked behind the dark curtain. Like patient hunters, they had made sure to stay out of sight. The longer they remained hidden, the more the humans feared their eventual pounce.

Ves did not feel good about this at all. He had worked hard to climb up the ladder and build his own power base so that he could transform from prey to predator.

All of the years he spent on building the Larkinson Clan and growing his relationships with organizations such as the Red Association should have firmly allowed him to grasp the initiative in every fight.

Yet this unexpected encounter with an entirely new race and civilization from M87 made him feel as if he had regressed.

Due to the enemy's dominant energy fields, the deathborn possessed most of the cards. They held all of the initiative. They could attack, hide or retreat at their leisure.

The fact that they had chosen to launch an attack while the combined fleet was still in transit to the inner system suggested that the deathborn most likely possessed the strength to contend with the invading humans!

While there was a possibility that he was overestimating how much power the deathborn could bring to bear in this fight, Ves would rather err on the side of caution in this case.

Saint Jannzi Larkinson, who had been observing the battle from an observer's seat in the bridge of the Tarrasque, managed to make this deduction as well.

She frowned as she gazed at the local plot. Her nature as a defender made her aware of how certain key vessels appeared awfully vulnerable to enemy attacks. The new ace pilot deeply wished that the Design Department had already repaired and upgraded her precious Bastion.

"Saint Commander." She softly spoke. "My… intuition tells me that our enemies are not trying to chip away at our forces. That is too marginal for them. I would rather believe that they are targeting our core assets, most notably the Tarrasque or the Tortuous Scream. If I was in command of their forces, I would try to draw away our ace mechs and other assets to create an opening to launch an overwhelming strike at one of our most important leaders or ships. They want to weaken us as much as possible before we arrive at the doorstep of one of their bases."

"Noted." Casella responded. "I have already envisioned this potential scenario, but your feedback has adjusted my appraisal of the likelihood that our alien adversaries are indeed preparing a decapitation strike. Please be assured that I have already put contingencies in place."

"Perhaps it would be more prudent to deploy the Fiery Axe and her Ascended Giants in advance." Ves suggested as the leader of the Phase Lord Department. "If the deathborn have made the decision to bring out their best, then we should do so as well."

The Saint Commander evidently disagreed. "Patience. We must be vigilant towards the enemy, but not impatient. We are not yet certain whether this is a ploy to expose all of our trump cards in vain. The Ascended Giants must remain on standby. I would prefer not to reveal them before we have arrived in orbit of Hypeh-Tekas II. Once we have reached this destination, then the human phase lords can do much more damage than in an empty patch of space."

He could understand her reasoning.

The Ascended Giants possessed a lot of destructive potential.

They might not be as good as the upcoming Promethea Mark II when it came to wrecking infrastructure, but they were numerous!

The combined fleet would definitely need their strength if they wanted to ruin whatever grand scheme the deathborn had implemented on this critical planet.

If they exposed all of their Ascended Giants in advance, then the native aliens and the deathborn would definitely be able to adjust their defenses and prepare more countermeasures.

This was the problem with challenging intelligent and observant opponents!

Ves really did not want to give the deathborn enough time to prepare their own versions of anti-phase lord armaments.

Such solutions probably bypassed the powerful true bodies of the Ascended Giants in order to target their relatively weak spiritualities directly!

Though Ves was hopeful that their superdimensional raiments could provide at least some measure of protection against intangible attacks, he would rather not put this assumption to the test!

"I hope that you will eventually decide to field our giant friends from the Red Collective sooner rather than later." Jannzi said as she still disagreed with the Saint Commander's considerations. "What is the point of bringing along so many well-equipped human phase lords when you are too reluctant to make use of them? They should be the ones to protect our vulnerable ships and crew, not the other way around."

It was clear to both Ves and Casella that Jannzi felt frustrated beyond belief that she could not take to the field herself and take action to protect vulnerable assets from enemy attacks.

Though Ves truly wanted to get her back in the saddle, he and his wife still needed to finalize the Promethea Mark II before they could work on the Bastion Mark II Project!

While he thought about how to find shortcuts that could accelerate his design work, the First Sword Mark III continued to displace more dark miasma.

The ace mech had moved deeper to the point where the dark energies returned to the space that she had previously visited.

The sight looked a bit surreal.

The deeper the First Sword Mark III ventured into the compromised part of space, the more glaring her Saint Kingdom became.

It was as if a bubble of sharp reality had forcibly imposed itself inside a cloud of darkness!

While Saint Dise carefully sought to track down the other human starships that had gone missing, the Woodsap mechs that had ventured well outside of the protective range of Casella's Command Field all seemed lost and adrift!

The squad lead by the Second Elf was the first that deduced that they may have been wandering in circles.

The deathborn must have employed some sort of sorcery of qi formation that erased their sense of direction!

"Form a battle network!" Caracalla Shuku roared! "If the power of mortals cannot break the spell, then let the power of our goddess pierce through this veil!"

Ves had not deprived the users of his Woodsap mechs from forming a battle network.

He no longer considered this ability to be an exclusive trump card.

The Red Collective had conducted extensive research of all manner of qi formations.

Battle networks no longer became a mystery to them. They could replicate this once-exclusive method themselves, though it was a lot more cumbersome to do so with non-living mechs.

Nonetheless, seeing as the collies had managed to deduce the principles by themselves, Ves saw no reason to treasure his battle networks so highly anymore.

While he was not willing to give it away to the public for free, he still felt they could add even more value to his elemental Carmine mechs.

Thus, the Woodsap mechs and mech pilots began to form a primitive formation all by themselves.

Despite the lack of training and unfamiliarity with battle networks, the Woodsap mech pilots all knew what to do practically by instinct.

The living biomechs had been designed with this purpose in mind. They took care of much of the details, allowing their human pilots to focus on synchronizing their thoughts and emotions around a unifying pillar.

To the Terran test pilots, the strongest subject that could unite them in mind and spirit was Gaia.

This was especially the case for the elves among them, who had literally ingested the universal life energy supplied by the Mother of Earth!

The dark miasma that had become ubiquitous in the Hypeh-Tekas System may have dampened all of their connections to the female ancestral spirit to the point the connections became inert, but their coordinated efforts to call upon the power of the goddess still yielded a result.

The battle network did not succeed in prying open a gap in the blockade.

The participants were way too weak for that, and their numbers were not enough to accomplish any grand feats either.

What they did manage to do was to stimulate the dormant seeds and traces that Gaia had left upon their bodies and spirits!

Caracalla Shuku and the other elves in the squad felt this most acutely!

Each of them had the illusion that a seed had sprouted in the depths of their soul. This foreign seed did not feel threatening at all, because they all instinctively felt that a piece of Gaia had taken root!

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