Max pushed his unit forward toward the enemy as he unleashed the Disintegrator on a wide dispersion pattern. Now that he knew the vehicles weren't properly radiation shielded, there was no reason to put all his power reserves into attacking, the pilots would die either way and disable the vehicles.
The aliens cursed the Mecha squad as it advanced, and the vehicles died an instant before the bombardment started, leaving them confused and trapped within the destruction.
None of them seemed to understand that the weapon Max was using was not visible to their eyes, or to most sensors, and for the first few seconds, confusion reigned.
Then the officers managed to get things back under control, and the survivors took positions either under the disabled vehicles or in craters to begin returning fire.
The Void Shields over the Mecha flickered with the incoming barrage, making it clear that this group were not a bunch of pushovers like the first one had been, and prompting the Androids to do their best to take out the more dangerous weapons first.
The concept of "Heavy Weapons" didn't seem to apply to these aliens, as all the rifles were about the same size, but the type and power of the output varied wildly from one to another.
It was impossible to tell if they had just picked up different generations of weapons, or if this was deliberately done as a form of camouflage so that their enemies wouldn't be able to tell in advance what sort of capability they would be facing.
If that was the case, it was actually an ingenious solution to having their more important units targeted at the start of the battle. Too many times, Max had been able to cripple the enemy simply by observing them for a few seconds, and with a Mecha army even a half blind fool could tell which were the units with the power.
But with Mecha, the largest were also the hardest to damage, and the smaller units were much faster, and quickly became a close combat threat. Or at least they did the way that Max used them, and they were about to again.
While the Thunder Guns rolled their bombardment back through the lines of the enemy soldiers, the Corvette Class units charged.
Max waited a few seconds as they engaged the front ranks of alien survivors, and then activated the thrusters to put himself between the light Mecha and the charging arachnid walkers.
They were larger than the Corvette Class units, and with multiple limbs, they were deadly in close combat. The light Mecha were much better suited to digging out hiding infantry than the Titan Class unit was, and Godslayer towered over the battlefield as Max chopped downward into his first target.
The sound of rending metal filled the air as Max pulled the blade free and turned his Disintegrator on the next walker, which tried to barrel roll across the ground to get out of his range.
Unfortunately, it didn't know that Max was still firing in a wide cone pattern, and the walker seemed to roll over onto its back and die when the beam obliterated the pilots inside.
The others spread out to encircle the gigantic Mecha, and the Void shield flashed with energy as the Plasma Cannons blasted.
He leisurely turned to engage the enemy, letting them panic as his unconcerned movement. His shields were very nearly keeping up with the bombardment, and even if he stood still, it would take them hours to get through and damage his actual armour.
Then, in a flurry of action, Max crouched and swung his leg out, kicking one of the walkers off into the distance before impaling another with his blade and using the sword as a pole to rotate over to knee drop another of the walkers.
The brutal impact crushed the metallic body, and a small chunk of the impaled walker followed his blade through the next attack, only flying free as the sword slammed into another target and cut a deep furrow in the ground.
The warriors weren't going to stand for that, and they charged forward, creating a firing line to take down Max's shields so that the remaining walkers would have a chance to take him down.
The remaining aliens' despair was so intense that Max could almost feel it on his skin, and it filled his mind as the light Mass Drivers turned on the warriors.
Explosions threw dirt and body parts into the air as the rapid fire mass drivers sprayed munitions in an arc across the battlefield, narrowly missing a few of the warriors who were fast enough to trick his targeting systems.
A strange rocket hit Max's shield, and passed right through to detonate on his armour, shocking him enough that he nearly missed his parry against the incoming forelimbs of the other arachnid walkers.
The weapon had to have been made by the Cathedral Ships to fight against each other, there was no other force that Max knew of that used that shield technology. But now that they had used it, they knew what worked against him, and the warriors crowed in victory, even as a Mass Driver round turned the rocketeer into a fine red mist.
Max sensed the warriors closest to their supply vehicle rushing to replace their weapons with ones that would work better against the Mecha, but that was a mistake that they couldn't have known they were making.
The action told him exactly where the supply was located, and Max lobbed a trio of nuclear Thunder Gun rounds into the location, wiping the betraying minds from existence, and hopefully taking the munitions supply with them.
There was no way that the enemy could have anticipated that, and their frustration told Max that they thought it had been a lucky shot, a blind fire artillery shell that had gone off target while the Mecha were targeting the next wave of infantry.
The Super Heavy Mecha were currently bombarding an area near there, where the sensors had picked up more incoming infantry, but the enemy was learning quickly, and were hiding among the trees and rubble, doing their best to obscure their advance and not draw fire before they could return it.
