"Ah! My first death!"
"No way, we can't even get close!"
"I came here to be cannon fodder, sure, but not to hand them free kills like this!"
"Boohoo... My sacrifice feels utterly meaningless..."
A crowd of combat players wailed over the comms channel.
Faced with an area-wide barrage, the first two attack groups, consisting of missiles and fighters, were soon reduced to ashes in the high-energy radiation flooding the battlefield. Both were wiped out.
Without the vast numbers of friendly units providing cover, the nearly thousand Sword Immortal Type II mecha behind them were like skinny-dippers caught by the ebbing tide, completely exposed to the enemy's naval guns.
"Bzzzz!" The ten close-defense secondary guns distributed across each Ironwall Warship began charging, their muzzles glowing faintly as they slowly turned.
With assistance from Multispectral Electro-Optical Radar, the fire-control systems swiftly locked onto the nearly thousand incoming targets and instantly allocated firing assignments. Almost every Earth Army mecha was targeted by three or four naval guns at once.
The next instant, countless crimson high-energy beams swept across space, weaving a dense, dazzling web of anti-aircraft fire beneath the stars.
"Boom! Boom! Boom!" The Earth Army mecha were already struggling against the omnipresent gamma-ray bursts. Now subjected to precision fire from multiple naval guns, they were cut down in swathes before they could even approach the enemy, exploding into scattered sparks on the battlefield.
In the end, only a handful that had luckily evaded the secondary guns' salvo managed to reach attack range. They could be counted on two hands.
"Go! We only have one chance to attack!" Seeing their armor values nearing the red line, the surviving remote operators steeled themselves.
Dark red longswords slid free from their backs. The six surviving Earth Army mecha performed several evasive maneuvers at their