The immense force of Cleansing Light’s arrival caused Chaos among the weaker Klem, but it immediately drew the strongest defenders’ attention. The Klem shared a mental bond, and the death of the Behemoth that Max had landed on would not go unnoticed for even a second.

Max could see that dozens of Klem Shredders and a handful more Behemoths were headed his way already. However, they were being careful to remain as much behind cover as they could, so he couldn’t get a clear shot at them without blasting through the hills and buildings, which risked destroying valuable evidence.

Max wasn’t sure if that was deliberate or simply a coincidence based on the locations that they were coming from. Still, it was annoying, so he decided to draw them out by setting the Disruptors to a wide dispersed beam and eliminating every Klem Warrior and Swarm insect within half a kilometer of his location, giving himself lots of room to work.

That was the key. The Shredders rushed him the moment that he began the mass clearing of the smallest of the Klem, screeching and racing across the sand with incredible speed.

They weren’t alone either. Swarms of Klem Gargoyles had taken to the sky, darkening the air around Max with their wings and beginning to fire spikes at him from their elevated positions. They didn’t do anything against the mighty shields of the Titan Class Mecha, and Max turned his defensive lasers against them, downing dozens of them a second while he targeted the Shredders with his Disruptors.

The Klem might not be considered conventionally intelligent, but they did understand some basic tactics, and after the first wave of Shredders went down, they began to adapt their tactics. The thick top chitin of their comrades survived the beams, mostly dispersing the energy, so the second wave picked them up to use as shields, forcing Max to return to a concentrated beam to blast the incoming insects.

These ones had adapted perfectly to the desert, nearly white on the leathery portions, with a dull and slightly orange chitin armor on their fifteen-meter tall bodies sporting six cruelly spiked forelimbs, and running on their hind two legs, or on all eight legs, depending on the surface.

If it weren’t for their immense size and the heat signatures that Cleansing Light was using to pick out the best targets, the Klem would be nearly invisible from even a low-altitude flight. That was the Klem’s strongest evolutionary advantage, their adaptive camouflage coupled with their ability to spawn exactly the type of creatures that they needed for an invasion.

Max continued shooting, tearing through the Shredders as fast as they could approach for most of a minute before the weight of the swarm got them into melee range. Max took a moment to annihilate a Behemoth with a concentrated blast of all three Disruptors on his right arm, then brought his sword down, splitting apart a pair of Shredders and then another three on the backswing.

Max switched to a flowing combat style that would keep his blade in constant motion, piling Klem bodies as fast as he could while the defensive Lasers fired at their maximum rate, working to keep the Titan Class Mecha from being overrun.

They had underestimated the Klem presence in this area. The scans hadn’t detected all of the ones that were hiding underground, and the flow never seemed to slow, despite the hundreds of Heavy Mecha sized Klem Shredders that Cleansing Light had downed.

[45 Seconds to Cutter approach] Max’s timer reminded him.

No more time to take half-measures, even if they were doing their best to save the human ruins. He had to eliminate the Behemoths in the area so that the new arrivals had time to get settled in before they were facing a living wall of chitin and rage.

Max took Cleansing Light up into the air, using a dispersed burst of the Disruptors to clear the skies of Gargoyles and then targeting the last two Behemoths that he could see at the moment.

The enormous Klem were both barrel-shaped, six-legged types with pressurized chemical storage in the majority of their torso, corrosive enough to eat through Mecha armor in seconds and forceful enough that they could fire over impassive distances. Max’s blasts tore holes in their torsos, splattering the area in corrosive liquid that ate through their surroundings and their allies alike.

Those were always the highest priority target since they could cause wide area damage to a Mecha Company, but they were so heavily armored that a single hit from a Heavy Mecha wasn’t always enough to take them out.

For the moment, the Klem had been reduced to Shredders and some Warriors, and the mass had swarmed close to Max’s location, leaving the landing zones of the Cutters reasonably clear of hazards.

The Battalions were already exiting their Cutters, which would return to high altitude flight and offer air support for their charges, anything that they could to clear the area of Klem so that they could search for the suspected labs in the ruins.

[I think they like you, Commander. I don’t think I have ever seen so many Klem on a single planet, much less all in one location.] Colonel Klinger laughed as his Super Heavy Mecha, Claret River, began raining Artillery shells down on the Klem forces while his arm-mounted Ion Destroyers flashed constantly, wiping out the Shredders that were headed for his landing zone.

[I am a likable person. Why wouldn’t they like me?] Max returned, pulsing his Disruptors at a half dozen targets at once, vaporizing the Shredders in an instant.

[Drone support incoming. Thanks for clearing the airspace so we can work.] Nico’s voice informed everyone as black specks appeared on the horizon as the Drone Fighters approached the battlefield at supersonic speeds.

Max would have loved to have many more of the Drone Fighters, but they lacked the pilots to send as many as he would hope to use into battle. A few hundred was a good start, and could control the airspace over a grid sector without much trouble, but with ten thousand of them, he could enforce a no-fly zone over an entire continent, making it much easier for his Mecha to deal with enemies, and eliminating all possibility of the enemy openly maintaining supply lines.