CHAPTER 19: CH-19 NOT LIKE THIS! NOT AT THIS PACE!

The battlefield was a symphony of destruction—Flashes of plasma, Streaks of railgun fire, Shimmering trails of blade-light as mechs clashed with insectoids in every direction.

From behind, the human fleet delivered heavy supporting fire. Though the flagship of this expedition was a dual-class research vessel with limited armament, the broader fleet was a different story altogether.

Battleships. Destroyers. Frigates.

While insectoid vessels typically relied on overwhelming numbers, the human fleet boasted superior engineering, precision, and raw firepower.

In one-on-one duels, a single human warship could go toe-to-toe with two—sometimes even four—enemy vessels and emerge victorious.

Their guns roared across the void, providing the mecha units with overwhelming fire support, blanketing the enemy flanks and backlines in a storm of light and death.

But the humans had more than just firepower. They had innovation.

Mechs, while powerful, were limited by their internal energy cores. In battles of this scale, prolonged engagements often drained their reserves faster than they could safely replenish them. Normally, they’d need to retreat to a carrier, resupply vessel, or industrial mothership—but not here.

Not today.

Because this fleet—like most modern human armadas—was equipped with Link Technology.

A revolutionary invention by the genius minds known as the Celestial Designers, Link Technology allowed ships to share power, shielding, and auxiliary systems with mechs in a defined radius.

(And as for who these Celestial Designers were, and what they truly meant to the rise of human civilization...That was a story for another time. A legacy too vast, too layered, to unfold in the middle of a battlefield. But soon. Very soon.)

Now, that system was in full operation.

Every forward unit received streams of power, T-5 grade pulse-shields, and field support from the ships behind them. T-5 mechs, which were vulnerable and under a lot of fire as battle continued, were now fought under barriers projected directly from capital ships, amplifying their survivability and firepower.

Enemy strikes that would have crippled them were now ineffective, absorbed by reinforced shielding matrices shared from Tier-5 battleships.

It gave the 8,000-strong mecha legion the breathing room they needed—And the freedom to push harder, strike deeper, and break the enemy lines with relentless fury.

But even as the human fleet gained momentum—led by two ace pilots carving through the enemy ranks like celestial blades—they knew the truth deep down.

This victory was nothing but an illusion.

A fleeting high before the storm.

The human commanders, seasoned in countless campaigns, recognized the danger instantly. Unless they destroyed the Tier-5 Insectoid Hive Mothership—the central node buried at the far end of the enemy formation—this battle could drag on indefinitely. That ship, the size of a small moon, was not just another target. It was the core, the brain, the birthing heart of the swarm.

And worse yet, it was heavily shielded. Not only did the Hive Mothership sit behind the full force of the insectoid mother fleet, but it also maintained its own clusters of shielding—interweaving energy domes powered by harvested life-force and strange crystalline cores. To breach it wouldn’t simply take firepower—it would take timing, sacrifice, and unyielding will.

While the human fleet succeeded in destroying several mother-class insectoid warships—be they Tier-3, Tier-4, or even a few Tier-5—the Hive Mothership had begun replacing them at a terrifying pace. Although slightly slower than the rate of destruction, the sheer fact that it could create more of them during battle confirmed a grim truth:

The Hive had a deeper energy source.

Somewhere within that monstrous form was a pulsating reserve of life energy—vast enough to support mass-scale war production even during combat. And unless they stopped it, this war zone would become a prolonged meat grinder. The humans would run out of strength long before the insectoids ran out of ships.

It was a race against attrition. And it was already becoming costly.

Though the mecha units continued to dominate in skirmish duels, the strain on their pilots began to show. These weren’t just soldiers—they were Advanced Mech Pilots, warriors who had surpassed human limits by entering a state of cultivated resonance with their machines. Willpower wasn’t just a metaphor for them—it was their core weapon.

But will is finite.

And even gods must rest.

The two ace pilots, who had already taken on over fifty mother-class ships between them, began to slow. Their Domains—energy auras unleashed by their cultivated connection—still burned brightly, but faint flickers of instability appeared at the edges. Their reaction time dulled by a fraction. Their strikes, just a breath slower. In a battle this intense, even fractions could mean death.

And the enemy noticed.

The Hive Mothership, not some mindless beast but a cunning apex predator, adapted. It changed its strategy completely. Rather than continue fruitless skirmishes with the mecha armadas, the insectoid fleet did the unthinkable—it began ignoring the mechs entirely.

Instead, they shifted their full firepower on the human fleet.

Suddenly, thousands of insectoid warships focused their heavy weapons—corrosive energy beams, dark matter missiles, gravity torpedoes, and capital-grade acid bombardments—on the research fleet’s main formation. The intent was clear: break the humans’ infrastructure. Cripple their ability to deploy, repair, and recover.

The tactic caught the humans off guard—but not unprepared.

Thanks to superior sensor technology and AI-aided interception protocols, over 85% of the incoming fire was neutralized mid-space—exploding harmlessly in interception fields, or getting absorbed by high-frequency shield layers. But the remaining 15%?

It got through.

And while that might seem insignificant, in a battle of this scale, it was more than enough.

At first, the damage was manageable. The shields of human ships—especially the bulkier ones—absorbed the impact without much difficulty. But as the barrage continued, minute instabilities formed in shield harmonics. Energy reserves fluctuated. Stress lines appeared in even tier-5 hulls.

And then, the first crack appeared.

Not in the front lines. But at the flanks.

Tier-3 class frigates, which had been maintaining formation and suppressing side assaults, began to fall under the focused fire of multiple insectoid units. One such frigate, the Valkrin Hope, took three direct hits from capital-grade corrosive beams. Its shields collapsed instantly. Its hull, though reinforced, was not built to withstand such punishment. Within seconds, it began to buckle.

The crew managed to teleport nearly 70% of personnel out before the core detonated.

But the ship was lost.

And it wasn’t the last.

The Hive Mother had learned. It began targeting only the weaker ships—support vessels, communication nodes, outer flanking frigates. Ships not built to endure the front-line assault. The goal was simple: fracture the fleet from within. Break the coordination. Sow chaos.

Human commanders reacted swiftly. The weaker vessels were ordered to fall back behind the main line, and in their place advanced the bulk carriers—massive behemoths that served as the mobile hangars for mech deployment.

These bulk carriers were not only shielded with some of the most advanced tech available to the Federation—they were armored with dual-phase hull plating, designed to endure even direct fire from tier-5 destroyers. Their defensive turrets, though rarely used, now spun up and returned fire with calculated precision, holding back the encroaching swarm.

The battlefield shifted again.

A wall of steel and resolve rose between the Hive and its prey.

And still, at the heart of it all, two ace pilots danced through fire and death—wills flickering, burning, wavering, and rising again.

They knew what was coming.

Because if they didn’t reach the Hive soon... no one would.

An hour passed.

The battlefield had become a graveyard of wreckage and burning ambition. The human fleet, once brimming with confidence and momentum, was now teetering on the edge. Their losses were mounting—far faster than their progress.

Despite all efforts, the Hive Mind remained untouched.

In that hour of relentless combat, the humans had achieved some success. All T-2 and T-3 class insectoid motherships had been wiped out. Soldier-class vessels were completely eliminated. Over half of the T-4s had been destroyed, and nearly 60% of the T-5 ships were gone. By raw numbers, they had dismantled nearly 1,100 enemy motherships.

And yet, the battlefield still swarmed.

Based on earlier projections, barely 150 motherships should have remained by this point.

But there were still over 400.

Of those, 50 were fully armed T-5 class behemoths. The rest were a mix of resilient T-3 and T-4s. The reason was obvious—and terrifying. The Hive Mind’s core mothership, nestled at the far end of the insectoid armada, was still producing reinforcements. Its production rate had slowed, yes, but not stopped.

And neither had the losses on the human side.

The 10,000-strong mechanized unit formation had dropped by nearly 2,000 active mechs. While 90% of their pilots had been rescued or recovered thanks to emergency teleportation systems, the remaining were lost—scattered as data fragments or corpses among the stars.

Worse, the surviving mechs were showing signs of decline. Their combat effectiveness had dropped by nearly 40%. Energy reserves were waning. Domain fields were flickering. Willpower—no matter how refined—was not infinite.

The fleet itself had suffered too. Eighty ships lost: fifty of them Tier-5 class carriers, the core of their mech deployment force. The rest were T-3 frigates and crucial support vessels. Of the 320 surviving warships, most were in poor condition—shields nearly depleted, armor strained, crews exhausted.