Humanity's Greatest Mecha Warrior System

The five camps that they had taken the first day gave them a grand total of three kilometres of territory on the planet in every direction from the camp.

That was hardly a notable achievement, but at least they hadn't lost any of the fights on the first day with their hand-picked teams.

"I think that we might need to increase team size for tomorrow." Huntress Khan sighed.

"Yeah, some of those fights were far too close for comfort, and we're not looking to lose people during this phase.

The only problem is that we're sending out brand new Android Mecha with them, and they have no combat experience. They're good, but they're new and don't have the data set to fight the Myceloid horde in this sort of situation.

We can keep updating the units as we go, but they'll all only get one extra battle per group." Max agreed.

That was the flaw in their plan. Since the Mecha would hold the camps with a minimal number of Hunters, they would have to wait to be attacked before they gained any additional experience.

For those closest to the camp, that was rather unlikely, and within days, the perimeter would be pushed out well beyond their position.

But there wasn't a better option other than to swap out the team that was at the camps, and that would annoy the hunters who didn't get any chance to fight at all.

They were almost certainly going to get requests for that scenario in the next few hours, Max knew. He could see it in the minds of the first five Champions that they wanted to continue on and have weaker Hunters take over the camps they had claimed.

"Will that be an option? They need to be able to take a challenge if something walks past the front lines, but we don't have many capable Huntresses to spare." Max asked.

The others conferred for a few minutes, and then Khan nodded. "We can do it. The weakest who are eligible will take over until everyone is deployed. Then, they will be changed out for trainees and go to the boundary to fight.

We believe that the Myceloid horde will take that as our numbers increasing and forcing out the weak, so it shouldn't cause mass chaos."

"You can give the first group the good news in the morning then and prepare a few more teams. Every ring will usually have more camps, with the way the survivors have settled.

It looks like our diversion of the flood waters made this region one of the more desirable territories around."

The strategy team got to work planning the change while Max focused on the thoughts of the Myceloids to pick out which ones were the most powerful leaders, which camps were weak, and how they were reacting to the sudden expansion of the Hunters' territory.

They didn't seem upset about it at all and were blaming the camps for losing the fight. But that didn't mean they wouldn't try to take them back. There were a number of wandering groups still that hadn't found a good spot and some camps that were overcrowded and wanted to expand.

"I can sense at least three groups that are looking to take the camps we claimed today. Their opinion is that they obviously must be stronger than us since we cover our fighters in metal, and they want the good spots." Max informed the room once his mental investigation was done.

"Impressive. Alright, we will tell the first five champions to hold for a few days, and we will let everything settle before we push out again. That will also give us time to get more drones and androids ready for combat.

As long as we can keep the Alliance investigators out of the way, we should be fine for a while."

That was another ongoing concern. The Alliance didn't fully trust their report on what had happened here and suspected that the Hunters were exaggerating the orbital aspects of the battle since the inability to form a Warp Field in this region was well documented.

"How long can we keep them at bay? We've got a lot of evidence, but we can pad it with minor details and drown them in evidence if we have a few more days." Nico suggested.

"That will have to do. It's fairly obvious what happened. The problem is that we don't know who they were fighting. The sooner we can get solid evidence on that, the better.

Nico frowned and nodded. "I will get right on that. It's been bothering me all day, not knowing who was fighting up there. It looks like mutual annihilation, so they must be tough, but there haven't been any reports of another species being active in the region."

Everyone in the strategy team split up into their respective tasks, and Max worked on understanding the minds of the Myceloids. The more he worked at it, the further his range was getting, and now he wasn't having too many problems picking out the thoughts of every Hunter as well as every Myceloid within fifty kilometres.

The better he understood the horde, the easier it became to compartmentalize them into their villages and then subgroups within the villages by task.

It was a bit like organizing a library, putting similar ones together for easy reference and then skimming through them to find what he needed.

The practice was making it easier to strategize, and with the group thoughts set aside like that, it became very easy to spot trends, where whole groups would begin thinking of the same thing.

That was alerting him to groups on the move, challenges about to happen, and even one particularly disgruntled camp that was about to have a revolt because the Boss beat up the only one of them who could cook.

In short, their nascent society was in utter chaos, but somehow, it was still functional, and Max had a front-row seat to watch it grow and evolve into proper factions.