In the mountain pass, the state of the battle had suddenly taken a turn for the better, in Nico's mind. The enemy forces had given up on trying to reach their base through stealth, and they were regrouping to make a push to eliminate Nico's force from the pass and take the mountains as their stronghold.
If you could hold both ends of the pass, with forces in the mountains, it would be incredibly difficult to force you out of the region, which was what Nico was planning right now, with the aid of the troops that Max had ordered back from the battle at the base.
She held this end, and they were almost to the other. Once they were in place and the units could spread through the mountains, they would have their secondary stronghold from which she could deploy more troops, thousands of kilometres away from the main base.
Even if their god wasn't intervening, there was a good chance that the Myceloids would soon discover where the Alliance troops were gathered, so having a secondary point in the mountains from which they could create a similar clearing pattern would throw the enemy off balance and force them to split their forces.
The other side was under control for the moment, as the full offensive force had swept through and forced back the enemy troops, but on this end, they were just getting ready to fight.
From what Nico could tell in the satellite imagery, there were at least four of the fifty clusters gathered nearby, all within thirty minutes' travel once the attack began, just waiting on whatever their signal was to begin.
"They're moving. Everyone in position, fire the smoke grenades into the treeline, make them work for it if they want a line of sight reading on us." Nico ordered.
The smoke grenades contained small metal particles that blocked or scrambled most types of sensors. Normally, that would be a serious issue for them as well, but with the satellites in orbit and Max's [Unified Force] extending from his Mecha through the entire battlefield, they only had a few surprises incoming.
Those would be the stealth units, and a few sneaky groups of warriors who had managed to evade satellite detection for long enough that they had evaded the target monitoring updates.
The defenders had dug a trench line across the pass at Nico's direction, moving them out of easy targeting positions, while the majority of the force was hidden in the mountains, either out of sight or in carved foxholes. Nothing in Nico's force was going to be easy to destroy, but they still had a full 180 degrees of engagement range in the foothills.
The first shells began to detonate near the trench line as the enemy lobbed covering fire at Nico's unit to cover their advance. They were right on time, and from what she could tell, following the tactics of the same combat style that they had been using since the first time that she met them.
[Wait ten seconds and then begin bombardment.] Nico ordered.
That should be long enough for them to believe that the defenders had been forced to take cover, which would embolden the attackers into a full charge, where they could overrun the Mecha lines using the superior close combat ability of the warriors to their advantage.
[3,2,1,Now] The Battalion Commander narrated as the timer ran out, and then energy weapons lit up the clearing between their trench line and the trees, fired level with the ground to explode against the first obstacle in its way.
Then the artillery of the Thunder Guns and light Mass Drivers began to explode through the foothills, scattered in a wide and randomized pattern over a fifty-kilometre radius.
Nico wanted the enemy to know that simply retreating wouldn't get them anywhere. The artillery was not intended to destroy them, but to drive everything within the radius into combat.
"Purge the Traitors!" The warriors shouted as they charged into combat through the overwhelming barrage of energy blasts.
The genetically enhanced super soldiers had little trouble dodging the larger Plasma blasts now that they could see them, but the volume of fire was making it difficult to keep up that level of evasion.
[Second Rank, begin the close fire artillery bombardment.] Nico ordered.
The attackers' cheers of triumph turned to screams of pain as the ground exploded around them, torn apart by Mass drivers, and the front ranks of the assault turned to a bloody mist.
The assault faltered as they realized that only death awaited them if they made it past the smoke and closer to the Mecha lines, but Nico had no intentions of letting them run away to look for another way across.
[Front lines, fan out. Area suppression pattern, Delta Three.] She ordered as she pushed her Mecha up and out of the trenches to charge into the smoke and flames of the burning forest to engage the enemy stragglers.
"She's insane, you know that, right?" One of the Valkia Archangel scouts asked his Commander.
"Yes. But she's right, and she's winning. Let's get out there and clear the enemy from the hills. We're all linked in the targeting systems, there shouldn't be friendly fire incidents as long as everyone pays attention to their altitude and doesn't get below Mecha height." The Commander replied.
They had incoming fire warning systems that would alert them if they were in the path of an incoming artillery shell, but the energy weapons, especially the Disintegrator, would be very hard for them to avoid if they flew too low.
Flying high through the burning canopy of a forest in the middle of a firefight had its own dangers, but a simple forest fire wouldn't damage their shielding, only make it nearly impossible to see where they were going, and possibly lead to some embarrassment when they ran into trees.
[Speeders, follow the Valkia. Stay tight above the tree line, I don't want the enemy radar to detect us.] The Shin unit's Commander instructed. Hundreds of small speeders with heavy energy weapons mounted to them followed a thousand Valkia scouts into combat, filling in the gaps between the advancing Mecha, and herding the enemy troops into the main firing lines.
What was coming for the enemy wasn't a battle, it had been set up as a wholesale slaughter.
