With the two Titan Class Mecha unleashing their fury in close combat, all pretense that they might be able to win this fight was abandoned, and the warriors began to scatter, looking for a more survivable battlefield and a way into the Golden Legion city.
Because Max and Nico were in the first group to arrive, and hostile to the Cathedral Fleet, all the other forces assumed that they were local to the region. They didn't know why they had been sent to such a hellhole of a world with fifty metre tall combat robots that could win a gunfight with the average orbital assault craft, but they were not impressed with their Commanders when the orders came that the Mecha must be eliminated.
Some of the forces had realized that the Mecha had helped the local Greater Energy Being take out her rival, and that made them far too dangerous to be allowed to live.
Nico was laughing to herself as she intercepted the communications and sent out dozens of false reports and commands in return, confusing every force within a hundred kilometres, but the process wasn't slowing down her attacks.
Three more of the hover tanks were destroyed in the next five seconds, and the remaining forces were all in full retreat, trying desperately to escape from the twin Mecha.
[Hold back and let's pick another target that's getting too close to the city.] Max ordered.
The bombers had been sweeping the enemy advance in waves, slowing their progress to a crawl, which had allowed the Golden Legion time to regroup at the remains of the city walls in preparation for the siege.
Max had no intentions of getting bogged down in a fight like that, so it was time for them to find a new target.
The question was, what one? Every city within sensor range, save for the one that was currently full of crab drones, had the same problem. They were all in danger of being overrun, there were villagers, patrols and smaller running battles everywhere, and no way to tell what was strategically important without more knowledge about the region.
There wasn't much hope that the Greater Energy Being would be of any assistance, all of her attention had turned to altering the barrier around this place to keep more new arrivals from entering every time the Android Fleet bombarded a portal into oblivion.
Max could sense her frustration at both sides of that battle. Mostly the Cathedral Fleet, as they knew what was happening to her home, but also for the humans on the other side, who didn't seem to understand what the word "Moderation" meant.
What she didn't understand was that the lack of moderation was the whole point. They were trying to destabilize the region's spatial layers so badly that anything that tried to come to them would be torn apart without their intervention.
In the minds of the AI Commanders, it was the perfect answer. It wouldn't affect Warp Travel, regular portals within the layer were already unusable there, so blocking off portals from other layers completely actually improved security by increasing instability.
That sort of logic was completely foreign to her. Destabilizing space even more was not a good thing in her mind, no matter the reason.
That line of logic led her to a startling bit of information that Max had never expected to know. While time was fluid in many layers, not constant like it was in his home layer, if you destroyed the boundaries between the layers, it would cause a temporal anomaly. It might move that portion of space forward or back in time, or even freeze it, with a single second there being eons outside the affected area.
That was how the Rebel Gods had hidden themselves. They deliberately created a temporal anomaly, and because time wasn't truly moving there, it became nearly impossible for any other being to affect their hiding spot in a meaningful way.
The ancient humans had weapons that would alter time, but those were long gone, and hopefully never to return, in her mind. But nothing else, other than one of the Gods who supported the Mortal Species, could even dream of finding them, much less harming them.
Now Max knew how they had hidden themselves after the war had gone into this ceasefire, but the knowledge still didn't do him any good as there was no way for him to get at them.
[Commanders, the city is stabilized, and the city leadership is requesting a proper meeting with us. From the wording, I think that they want to do a celebratory dinner type thing to thank us for saving their asses with the drones.
Which they don't understand aren't living things, by the way. They asked what they eat.] The team leader on the Cutter reported.
Max sensed Nico's reluctance to return, along with a nascent plan to enable food consumption by the drones, so they could pretend that they were actual armoured crabs. It wouldn't be difficult to give them a mouth and a storage compartment in the belly if they increased the shell size a little.
That sounded like a lot of hassle for a small prank that would only cause misunderstandings later. It was better to just let them know right now that they were robotic.
[Let them know that we can be ready in a few hours. Do they have a requested location for the meeting?] Max asked.
[They are suggesting a bunker between the city and our location for the meeting. It appears to be unoccupied to our scans, but there is a chance that it is the panic bunker for their dignitaries, so it would be shielded from most of our scans.]
[Alright, I had expected them to demand something neutral ground, but a bunker works. Nobody ever wants to fight in a basement.] Max agreed.
Well, hopefully. Because fighting in a basement was a terrible idea. He had fought in underground complexes in the past, and when you only had one way in and out, every location was a death trap for everyone involved.
