Chapter 7500 Hostile Environment

The Hypeh-Tekas System did not welcome the combined fleet.

At first, the surrounding miasma of death and negativity pressed upon the souls of the human crew members.

Just staying on the edge of the star system already made these people feel uncomfortable!

Yet this turned out to be the least of their problems.

Only a little over 10 minutes passed before the soldiers began to report another alarming development.

"Ghosts!"

"Ah, I am under attack!"

"How are they getting inside?!"

"Damn! My knife passes right through their bodies!"

"How are you able to shoot them down!?"

"Use hyper weapons!"

"If you have a companion spirit, now is the time to test its strength!"

Various shades and apparitions flew through the hulls of various starships and launched attacks at any humans in sight.

As long as they could get close enough to their prey, they could drain the souls out of people's bodies!

However, most of the soldiers hadn't been completely caught off-guard. The deathborn may have been a relatively obscure phenomenon, but red humanity still possessed a few records about their properties.

Though these vaguely humanoid ghosts had shown a near-complete disregard for material obstacles, many forms of hyper technology and E energy manipulation could still pose a threat against their existence!

After the initial panic and confusion had passed, the soldiers quickly got their act together.

They swung their hyper blades through the bodies of the ghosts, causing their already-weak intangible forms to disperse almost immediately.

Others raised their rifles or brought their integrated armaments online and opened fire at low power.

The soldiers quickly learned that material firepower made very little difference. It was the hyper technology incorporated in their firearms that truly made a difference.

It only took a little bit of testing to understand that the most efficient way of clearing out the ghosts while keeping collateral damage to a minimum was to employ hyper laser weapons.

Though almost all infantry-grade laser weapons in the combined fleet also happened to be transphasic, this particular property brought more disadvantages than advantages.

Transphasic attacks had a much greater chance of endangering other people and damaging sensitive equipment!

However, it was very difficult to retool them into non-tranphasic weapons, so most soldiers had little choice but to aim their weapons carefully and make sure that there was nothing important behind their targets.

Large amounts of hyper transphasic laser beams therefore seared the bulkheads on almost every ship of the Premier Fleet and the Bluejay Fleet!

The Larkinsons, Terrans, mechers, fleeters and collies all struggled to carve out safe spaces within their starships.

Tens of thousands of ghosts broke down and turned into messy energies in a short amount of time.

However, more of them arrived from every direction!

Minutes passed as the soldiers kept trying to assail the humans. Their human or alien-like expressions displayed mindless hunger and ferocity. It seemed that whatever thinking processes governed their behavior solely fixated on killing and devouring the living!

The good news was that these weak but extremely numerous deathborn completely ignored the sensitive and expensive hardware around them. It was not as if they could inflict much effective damage against all of the first-class parts if they wanted to. Everything was built according to the highest specifications of human civilization, which meant that they were shielded and hardened against a variety of different attacks!

However, this also meant that every human unceasingly attracted ghosts to themselves. Their souls and vitality seemed like the most delectable nectar to these weak and starved ghosts. They completely gave into their feral instincts and converged upon the living beings like moths to a flame!

If not for the fact that it was mostly the soldiers stationed closer to the exterior of the hulls that attracted most of the deathborn in the first place, the service members working deeper inside the starships would have faced endless harassment as well!

Though the former were able to hold out quite well so far, the tide of deathborn remained unending.

"They are coming from all around us! I suspect that this entire star system may be riddled with deathborn!"

"That is impossible! It would take much more slaughter to produce so many of them! A large concentration of deathborn must have been stationed here in order to intercept new arrivals. That means that they are not unending."

"Well, it sure looks like it, because we have been killing them for over 10 minutes non-stop and the tide has yet to taper off! If this surge of attacks does not subside, we will begin to suffer losses!"

As well-trained as these soldiers may be, they had never been trained to fight such a massive horde of intangible life forms.

Their hyper laser weapons and other hyper armaments may have given them the capital to fend the ghosts off, but none of these weapons had been designed for this specific purpose.

It was quite inefficient for them to clear out the deathborn with weapons that packed a much greater punch in the material realm than the ethereal realm!

"We need to employ solutions on a large scale if we want to keep everyone safe!"

It was at this time that the mechs attempted to disperse the ghosts.

The Omega Threshers resting inside the bunkers came to life and began to fire their diverse weapon systems at the ghosts and dark miasma surrounding their positions.

Each powerful Omega Laser Cannon managed to sear through at least thousands of ghosts in a straight line!

The Larkinsons had procured the latest generation of Omega Threshers, which meant that they were all models that incorporated hyper technology from a previous small generation.

Even if the application of hyper technology was already outdated by the standards of the present, they still channeled enough E energy to inflict effective damage to the deathborn, especially when they were already vulnerable to infantry-scale hyper attacks!

In contrast to the Omega Laser Cannons, the other armaments of the Omega Threshers proved much less effective.

Their wrist-mounted hyper plasma sweeper cannons could disperse ghosts, but these weapons consumed so much energy that the cost of using them against such weak targets was extremely cost ineffective.

What was worse was that their mid-ranged Phase Disintegrator Cannons inflicted almost no damage to the intangible bodies of the ghosts!

This shouldn't have been a surprise, as both weapons mostly relied on affecting their targets in the material realm.

Plasma weapons did not receive that much of a power boost from hyper technology. They always relied on inflicting massive amounts of thermal damage in order to destroy their targets.

While the deathborn did show signs of having an aversion to heat, it was not realistic to cook them to death!

"The luminar crystal cannons mounted on the Tortuous Scream are ripping through the ghosts like a hot knife through butter!"

This turned out to be the most effective weapon to employ against the deathborn swarming from every direction in space.

The Tortuous Scream had only briefly opened fire with her primary gun emplacements, but quickly shut them down again.

It was overkill to rely on the huge battleship-grade cannons to clear out all of the deathborn!

Not even a battleship could withstand the consumption of all of her primary armaments opening fire for so long!

The converted alien battleship needed to save her large caliber firepower for more worthy targets.

Fortunately, the modified Omega Threshers served their current purpose well enough. Their Omega Laser Cannons had been designed with persistent use, so they could easily keep firing low-powered energy beams for half a day without requiring intensive maintenance.

Even so, the hundreds of Omega Threshers stationed on the Tortuous Scream and throughout the rest of the Premier Fleet could never stem the tide of deathborn all by themselves!

The other first-class multipurpose mechs such as the Dracoloid also could not make much of a difference.

Sure, their formidable first-class gauss guns and plasma guns were all weapons designed to overcome tough transphasic energy shields or thick transphasic armor belts. They all packed a punch, which also meant that they tended to exhaust themselves quickly if they continuously fired their weapons!

Even their signature flamethrowers could only burn for so long before the fuel reserves of the Dracoloids ran dry!

Under normal circumstances, the Dracoloids infamously replenished their 'fuel tanks' by biting into their prey and devouring chunks of powerful exotic matter!

With the help of a powerful internal material processing system, the Dracoloids could convert some of the ingested materials into makeshift fuel, enabling them to spray out more exotic flames!

Yet this cycle became completely invalid in the current situation.

The Dracoloids could not dig their teeth into prey that did not possess a material form from the start!

The intangible deathborn could at most be killed by the hyper materials incorporated into the teeth, but it was far too inefficient to rely on this method to kill the deathborn all around.

All of this meant that the Dracoloids fared much worse than the Omega Thresher under the current circumstances!

"These deathborn are everywhere! They are constantly trying to drill inside my mech!"

Strangely enough, while the deathborn only had to expend a moderate amount of effort to pass through the hulls of different starships, they experienced much greater obstruction when they attempted to phase through the structures of every mech!

No matter whether they were conventional metallic mechs such as the Dracoloid or living biomechs like the Rosenstorm, each of them were able to keep the deathborn at bay and protect their pilots.

This was especially the case for the prototype Woodsap mechs, which attracted far more deathborn than other targets, but also demonstrated much greater effectiveness in destroying these ghosts!

"The defenses of all of our standard mechs are holding out so far."

That did not surprise numerous people.

"Mechs are effectively a fusion between a human and a purpose-built war machine." Ves described. "When the former interfaces with the latter, they not only cover each other's weaknesses, but also fortify some of their existing strengths. Their spirits are no longer vulnerable and exposed. They can combine forces with the spiritual foundations of their own machines. The results will be even better if we fielded any of the RA's exclusive true mechs."

"Most of the mech pilots are still reporting elevated strain and pressure. Their resistance may be better, but it is not endless. We will have to pull them back before they wear out entirely."

Ves sighed after hearing that. "I feared that would be the case."

True mechs would have been able to persist much longer against this kind of threat.

The Red Association had been known to field true mechs, but Ves had yet to encounter them in the wild.

The mechers were too stingy with them. They treated true mechs as their trump cards and tried to preserve the secrets of their signature complete neural interfaces as much as possible!

As far as Ves knew, the RA had not assigned any true mechs to the Bluejay Fleet, which meant that it was a complete fantasy to see them in action today.

Enough time had passed for him to understand the nature of the so-called deathborn a lot better than before.

Previously, he could only rely on third-hand information to gain an impression of these ghosts.

Now that he was able to observe them up close with his own senses, he finally managed to prove and disprove his guesses!

"These deathborn are similar to demons, but they are not identical."

This conclusion fell in line with his guesswork. It was like looking at cousins who shared at least some relation but clearly grew into distinctively different directions.

Demons did not spawn easily. They were lower in number, but each of them also tended to pose a greater threat on an individual basis.

Not so for the deathborn. The threshold to their formation was apparently a lot lower. This meant that they could spawn in much greater numbers, though every entity was much weaker as a consequence!

Another peculiarity was that the deathborn did not show much if any hostility towards each other.

In the absence of greater prey, they probably refrained from attacking each other, which was very different from demons, who did not hesitate to devour their own kin in order to evolve into greater forms!

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