War Core 4, Chapter 39.

Chapter 39.

“Can you get a shot at Hssim?” Hugh asked. Sadly, the battleship had little room to maneuver inside the arena, despite its size.

“Negative, that guardian is blocking my line of sight. My secondaries can engage his air mechs and the units on the Ssath flanks, but that’s it right now,” Nix advised.

“Fine, hit the guardian with your main guns, but keep everything else you have focused on Ssath,” Hugh ordered. The Ssath air mechs, a total of almost sixty units at this point, rushed past the guardian, many falling to the giant claws of the beast as they sped toward the biggest threat on the battlefield, Nix’s battleship.

Nine 16-inch main guns roared, The oversized plasma shells hitting the guardian’s shield only a fraction of a second later. With most of the defensive turrets powering the shield destroyed, Nix’s barrage was enough to finally bring the shield down. With the sound of shattering glass, the shield collapsed. The surviving turrets around the battlefield exploded as the backlash from the shield collapsing overloaded their power supplies. Several of both Hssim’s and Hugh’s forces that were near the turrets got sprayed with shrapnel from the explosions, causing dozens of casualties. Two of Nix’s shells made it past the failing shield and one blasted apart several limbs while the other hit the massive body of the beast, tearing a divot into its thick armor.

The enemy air mechs began to assault the battleship. With five separate shields protecting each section of the ship, the initial gunfire was shrugged off. Secondary weapons swatted Ssath from the sky, while the dedicated light mech anti-air variants went to town with their cannons. Sixty enemy air mechs were shredded down to twenty by the time they flew over the walking ship. Bombs dropped down and explosions rippled along the battleship, causing some of the shields to drop. There wasn’t the catastrophic explosion from the shield generators as there had been with the guardian, but Hugh could access the ship’s information to see that they weren’t coming online for the rest of the fight.

Some superficial damage was taken to secondary gun mounts and parts of the ship’s hull before the last enemy air mechs were hunted down by Hugh’s Skyraiders. Human air mechs seemed to have an advantage over most other races, and their pilots were considered some of the best. Inside the arena, Zacharias’ air force had trouble maneuvering inside the giant dome of the volcano, limiting their effectiveness and making them easier targets for the few anti-air units the Ssath employed.

Having focused mainly on the Ssath since the start of the fight, the guardian took notice of the giant ship that was the first unit to cause it actual damage. Any tentacle that could target the battleship was firing beam after beam into the vessel. Armor melted and the aft main gun turret exploded under the assault. A second volley of the surviving main guns slammed into the body of the guardian, tearing into its armor. The rounds didn’t penetrate, the guardian was too tough for that, but they did weaken it to the point that Hugh’s main battle mechs were getting hits through the weakened sections.

Hugh pulled up the battleship’s structural integrity rating, watching it drop rapidly from 80% to 60%, then down to 30% as the tentacles relentlessly hosed down the ship with their powerful beams. Despite their reach, the tentacles were too far away to reach the ship with their claws, but the beams seemed more than enough to do the job. Nix was going down fighting, and his secondary guns were extracting a toll on the Ssath and several of the tentacles.

A string of explosions erupted around Hugh’s avatar, hurling him off his feet and into the far wall of the cavern. As he tried to stand, the five avatar defensive drones flew out and crashed into the incoming artillery shells, protecting Hugh from the second barrage of Ssath artillery. Hugh’s shield was still intact, but he needed to move if he didn’t want to make the Ssath’s job easy for them. He began to sprint, moving to put himself behind the bulk of Nix’s battleship which would hopefully shield him from the incoming fire.

“They’ve spotted Hugh’s mech, get after those enemy artillery units,” Zacharias ordered to his surviving air mechs. A dozen machines began to drop bombs and strafe the Ssath light and medium mechs configured as artillery units. As with Hugh’s force, the artillery mechs only made up a small fraction of their overall forces, so the air mechs only had to deal with eight artillery mech platforms.

Having been fully upgraded, the Skyraiders had the gun pod attachment, giving them a total of six of the 20mm guns to go with a similar number of bombs. Zacharias had been a bit devious and had replaced half the normal 250lb bombs with pairs of millipede eggs, which landed to explode around the artillery mechs before the millipede mech inside emerged and tore into the damaged Ssath units. Having dealt with the enemy artillery threat, the surviving quartet of air mechs began to attack the annihilator they had identified as Hssim’s avatar. Only a few cannon rounds peppered the mech before the rest of the Ssath focused their effort on the air mechs and brought down the last of Hugh’s air power.

“They took out our air force, but we have Hssim spotted, hit him with everything that can reach him,” Hugh ordered. Everything that could reach him consisted of three artillery variant main battle mechs. Their guns chugged out rounds of indirect fire. While they had a low chance of hitting Hssim, whose avatar maneuvered far better than a normal annihilator, even near misses would degrade the avatar’s shield with their explosive power. Hugh’s shield was down to a 12% charge but was slowly ticking back up.

“Keep clear, Hugh, the battleship is going down!” Nix shouted. Hugh could see the danger, the battleship’s power supply was going critical as two tentacle beams bored into it. With no threat of enemy artillery, Hugh left the cover of the battleship and ran as fast as his avatar could take him.

He didn’t make it far and the force of the explosion pushed him across the rocky ground. The avatar’s shields failed and Hugh felt a searing pain as his back was bathed in plasma fire from the explosion. Warning icons flashed, telling him that the mortar tube and the precious repair drone mounted on his back had been destroyed. His avatar was at 91% functionality, but he no longer had a way to repair it. Several troops around the battleship were also out of the fight, including all of Hugh’s air defense mechs that had stood by to assist it against the enemy air attacks.

“Hugh, are you okay?” Maddison asked.

“I’m good, and the Ssath don’t seem to have anything to hit me with just yet,” Hugh said. Cartwright maneuvered several of his main battle mechs to screen Hugh from the line of sight of any of the enemy mechs, but the ground near him began to rumble, just like it had near Dalven’s command post.

“I think the Ssath have another of those burrowing attacks going down,” Hugh said. More troops pulled away from fighting the avatar to circle the area where the hard crust of the volcano arena floor began to bulge upward before splitting open. Ssath infantry poured out, only to be cut down by Hugh and his forces. The twin 20mm guns on one arm of Hugh’s avatar tore apart the mechs in only a few hits, and the minigun on the other arm hosed down the area, preventing only a few damaged mechs to emerge and engage his forces.

“These are AI-controlled, I guess we know the answer to whether Hssim still has some rewards on tap,” Maddison said. She was right, unlike the attack on Dalven’s command post, this was just a summoning perk or skill, just like his drop beacon. Thinking of the beacon, Hugh shifted his view and looked for Hssim on the battlefield, spotting him among a group of his annihilators.

“How come he gets an annihilator, and you just get a pumped-up infantry mech?” Maddison complained.

“Can I say something?” Derek asked. Hugh was surprised he was still on the chat line, most of the gamers had been knocked off the net when the command post had fallen, and Hugh could see only four were left online, two at each remaining forward base.

“Go for it, we don’t have time to ask permission. If you’ve got something let us know,” Hugh said, finding it surprisingly easy to multitask while piloting his avatar. He was still hosing down infantry emerging from the tunnel, keeping track of his forces and talking on the command line.

“I don’t think Hssim has an annihilator as his avatar. We know the annihilators are an amalgamation of several Ssath mechs. He’s likely only one of several joined into the monster. He’s giving it a boost, but it shouldn’t be that much more powerful than a normal mech given that his avatar only accounts for a percentage of the total mass,” Derek said.

Hugh remembered the annihilators from the battle in LA. They consisted of a Ssath heavy mech, as well as several light and medium mechs, melded together. The head of Hssim’s avatar was different from the others, as were the cannons over its shoulder, but the rest of the avatar looked to be made up of normal Ssath units.

“Hssim is a heavy mech forming the head and upper body of that thing, the rest of the body is normal mechs,” Hugh said.

“It’s still a powerful mech, more powerful than any of ours,” Maddison said.

“With the battleship out of the fight, it looks like the guardian is shifting his focus,” Cartwright added. Hugh could see several of the tentacles still engaging Hugh’s mechs, but a good portion had moved over to engage the Ssath, in particular, the annihilators attacking the guardian directly.

“I think we can confirm that the guardian mech is operating on some kind of an aggro system, like an MMO. We can…” Derek said before being cut off.

You have lost a forward base.

Hugh looked toward the forward base in his zone, it had fallen and Derek must have been one of the gamers operating from that location. He couldn’t think about what might be happening to Derek inside his combat pod while the GCA calculated whether he would live or die. The force that had overrun the forward base was now heading toward the arena. They had a ways to go, but they would arrive before long, and Hugh would need to move some of his depleted forces over to block them. His other forward base was still in the fight, but the number of defenders kept dwindling and it wouldn’t be long before it succumbed as well.

Cartwright and Tran organized forces to cover the entrance to the arena and hold back the automated attackers, but his forces were starting to run thin. The Ssath were in the same predicament, a strong force of annihilators and other troops held the entrance. Nothing was getting past them, but from what Hugh could see, they were damaged to some extent and were being whittled down by the continual fire of the attacking mechs.

Neither side had a way to repair their mechs now, and even Hssim’s powerful annihilators were showing damage. None of them still had active shields and more than a few had been turned into smoldering wrecks by the guardian. As for the guardian, it was heavily damaged, with over half its tentacles destroyed and the main body breached in several places. If they brought that down, the attack waves might cease, but at the moment, it was doing more damage to Hssim than to Hugh.

Hugh had a few tricks left in his pocket as well. The forces emerging from the tunnel that Hssim had summoned were destroyed, and another tunnel hadn’t appeared. It was time to return the favor. Targeting the annihilator that Hssim was part of, Hugh summoned the Drop Beacon of the Vanquished, only to have it fail as a new system prompt appeared.

Invalid target area, an obstruction that is too dense for the drop pod to penetrate has been detected.

It was the sealed top of the volcano arena. The drop pod had to come from space, and it couldn’t crack through the armored dome above them, leaving one of Hugh’s best weapons useless. Thinking fast, he realized the drop beacon wasn’t totally useless as the targeted the automated forces that had destroyed the forward base. They were closing in on the arena with a constant stream of troops following behind.

From space, a steak of fire appeared as the drop pod homed in on the target that Hugh had selected. The biggest threat in the group was the single destroyer that had survived the battle for the forward base. The drop pod hammered into the destroyer, breaking its back and taking it out of the fight. When the hatches over the drop pod burst open, Hugh was glad to see it was a swarm of Yaelar mechs emerging. Dalven was out of the fight, but at least his units got to be represented in the last stages of the battle.

Twenty Yaelar infantry mechs emerged from the drop pod and tore into the attack force. They were too outnumbered to prevail, but they would grind down the enemy numbers into a manageable size for the thin screen of troops guarding the entrance to the arena. With the drop pod expended, Hugh had one last card to play, and this time, he didn’t get an error message about deploying it. He was about to introduce Hssim to the Turret Swarm.