Humanity's Greatest Mecha Warrior System

Max saw that the other units were nearly cleaned up, which meant it was time for his and Nico's squads to move forward, setting themselves up for the next stage in their battles.

[Sector 1, all units that have confirmed the clearance of their zone, move forward to the following location designated on your map. Units passing through zones with ongoing combat will assist until that zone is clear.] Max ordered.

His path would lead him straight to the forest without passing through combat, but Nico would cross over a unit that was having issues with Klem that didn't want to stay in the battle and kept retreating underground in a deadly game of hide and seek.

If they couldn't be brought under control, he would authorize the use of heavier orbital munitions to collapse the tunnels and crush them, but so far, the Fusion Flamers were doing the job and forcing the Klem back up to the surface.

They were using them quite a bit, and Max could hear the sizzle and pop of burning Klem every time the Unit's leader reported in. It was probably a good thing that they had Androids for that job, as the noise was sure to make more than a few human pilots squeamish, and the smell would be horrendous to any infantry unit that they had in the area.

They were far from the only ones on the planet that had been forced to resort to the tactic, just the only ones in his immediate sector who were having that particular problem. The Klem force was unprepared for a battle on this scale, with so many different tactics in use at the same time.

Their group consciousness wasn't able to adapt to them all at the same time, leaving certain units in excellent positions against their robotic opponents, but others utterly annihilated due to using the same tactic against a unit that was prepared for it.

It could be a limit of the Klem Queens, but Max was beginning to think that there wasn't a fully developed leader here. Perhaps an immature one, but an actual Klem Queen was supposed to have no problem coordinating a planetary battle while this one was clearly struggling.

It was good news, and his arrival at the next destination brought even more good news to Max and his Unit. The heavy Klem biomass presence that they had detected in the area seemed to be entirely made up of Klem pods which hadn't hatched yet.

[Spread out and destroy every pod and possible Klem hatchling you encounter. Fusion Flamers, don't be afraid to start a forest fire. It is more important that the Klem hatchlings are all eliminated before they can pose a real danger to our troops.

Finding the enemy's reserves early on was always a bonus, and the pods were very much like the reserves for the Klem force. All that mattered was that they never got the chance to hatch and that he found them all before the Klem Swarm or other small creatures could relocate them.

Fortunately, between the Disruptors and the Fusion Flamers, the Battalions could walk across the designated zone with full coverage, leaving nothing alive. Of course, that meant there would be no trees, grass, or anything else left in their zone, but it wasn't the worst thing possible, and it would help draw out any hidden forces that the Klem had in the area.

They were always protective of the pods and put them somewhere that they considered relatively safe, like nestled under the canopies of this dense forest or in caverns. The orbital scans didn't detect any caverns in this region, but he would double check, in case the Klem had done something sneaky, like fill the caves where they were hiding their extra pods up with something that would show as a solid on the scans.

Even filling them with water could fool the scans into thinking that it was a natural body of groundwater, like an aquifer, so he could never be too careful. The one thing that they would always have in common was the need for an above-ground entrance so that the freshly hatched could get out and so that the units sent to trigger their awakening could get in.

The Mecha were all on the lookout for any hidden entrances to tunnels, but so far, there was no sign of any such thing in this zone, which was almost entirely razed to the ground within the hour. All that was left was to check the bottom of a small lake, and he would be ready to move to another grid and assist the teams which had encountered real resistance.

Max took Cleansing Light down into the depths of the lake, checking for any hidden tunnels, caves or Klem pods, but found the region suspiciously clear. Every other likely spot in the zone had been full of pods, but there wasn't a single one in the lake at all.

The question was, where did they go?

With the assistance of sonar and a pair of drones, he had the whole lake bed checked for ground density, thinking that a filled tunnel would have a different density than solid rock. Even if it was full of water, they should detect it, but he didn't find anything at all.

His instincts told him that he was missing something, but he just couldn't figure out what it was that he was missing.

They were just finishing up the zone when it occurred to him. There likely were pods there, at least before he arrived. They didn't leave over the ground since the traces would have been detected, but if a swimming Klem or a small one walking along the river bottom had carried them out underwater, the flow would have hidden all traces of them, not even leaving behind the telltale traces of birthing slime that Klem pods usually carried with them.

A quick check of the map showed that the river ran to another lake, a much larger one than the one in his zone, and it was in the fourth round of zones marked for exploration. If it was left undisturbed that long, the pods could very well be hatched and spawn a massive Klem force to fight an unsuspecting Mecha Battalion, which had been lulled into a sense of complacency by the lack of enemies.

Or did that even happen to Androids? Not being able to read their minds was inconvenient, but for most of his career, he hadn't had the range to read other Pilots' minds while he was fighting anyhow, so he should really be used to it by now.

[Unit, prioritize assistance from lowest progress to highest until all zones in this cluster are cleared. I will proceed to the lake at the other end of this river in an attempt to find the missing pods.] Max informed his Battalion.

He was an addendum to the standard Battalion anyhow. They could function without him for a few hours. Plus, they would be headed closer to Nico, and she would keep them out of trouble even without his instructions. She had been keeping a close eye on the progress of the Android army, which she saw as her creations, despite the fact they were literally clones of an alien android that she had imprisoned and reprogrammed.