The Mech Touch novel Chapter 3293

Chapter 3293: Shameful Dwarf

The stubborn dwarven soldiers were driving Ves crazy!

On one hand, he admired their bravery, their discipline and their willingness to keep fighting under unfavorable circumstances.

On the other hand, these were exactly the qualities that caused the Larkinsons and their allies to keep losing mechs and lives even after the outcome of the battle was unlikely to change!

The Ferril punitive fleet even decided to send their capital ships on a suicide charge in order to create an opportunity for the dwarven soldiers to escape from the battlefield with their lives intact.

The Great Ram was one of those vessels. Her command center had become a lot more somber than before after General Kebrinore issued the order that would likely doom the vessel.

The various officers and operators all faced their leader as he addressed them for the last time.

"Our courier vessels are ready to load our most crucial personnel in order to evacuate them from this star system." He announced. "Our expert pilots, our engineers and our other talents must be preserved. As for the remainder of our personnel, they will have to take their chances on our combat carriers."

The dwarves no longer sought to achieve victory. Instead, they attempted to minimize their losses as much as possible.

The greatest priority lay in the personnel that represented the core of the three mech divisions. The Molten Hammers, the Slug Rangers and the Hivar Roarers did not want to be erased from existence after this battle.

The surviving expert pilots who either managed to retreat in time or managed to return alive after ejecting from their expert mechs shouldered a great burden of propping up their mech divisions while bearing the shame of a catastrophic defeat.

General Kebrinore did not have the mind to pay attention to the stigma that would likely haunt the fleeing survivors for the rest of their lives. As someone who had lived through the worst of the original rebellion, he cherished the lives of his fellow dwarves a lot more than preserving their illusionary 'honor'!

Though some of their fleet carriers possessed dual FTL drives that allowed them to transition out of the star system in an instant, the current chaos on the battlefield created too many gravitic disturbances that made it impossible for them to escape.

Any ship that wanted to enter FTL travel had to distance themselves from the action, and that was impossible to accomplish for the capital ships!

They were far too prominent to the enemy. The vengeful humans would never let them go, so the dwarves decided to use these great ships as decoys in order to allow hundreds of dwarven combat carriers to split up and run in many different directions.

It was unlikely that the human force would be able to chase after so many sub-capital ships and take them all down in time for them to finish cycling their FTL drives and successfully making it out of the Fordilla Zentra System!

This was what the dwarves were fighting for. If they did not do everything in their power to stall the advancing humans, then there was a great likelihood that no Ferril soldier would be able to make it out of this battlefield!

"The Vulcan Empire shall never fall as long as it has enough soldiers to defend its sovereignty." He told his men. "I never wanted this outcome to happen, but dwarves like us are never graced with luck. The way for us to survive is not to stubbornly fight to the last man, but to preserve the essence of our strength so that our dwarven state is not deprived of all of our soldiers."

This was why as soon as secure communications had been restored with the rest of the fleet, he ordered his forces to prepare for an all-out counterattack just so that they could maximize the chances of evacuating their key personnel!

General Kebrinore looked down onto the deck. "This is the cruelty of warfare in space. The winner usually gets everything while the loser risks total annihilation. We can't settle for half-measures. We must cut our losses and make use of any assets that will be lost to the enemy anyway."

He sighed as a bot floated towards his position. The sturdy bot began to do something that shocked all of his staff.

The bot shaved off his giant, majestic grey beard!

The beard that conveyed so much authority and prestige to the old war hero was pretty much a national treasure to the Vulcanites. To see the famed and celebrated general shave off his entire beard was a mark of shame was that so consequential in Vulcanite culture that several dwarves even came close to fainting!

"Noo!"

"General, stop!"

"This isn't your fault!"

General Kebrinore did not command the shaving bot to stop. He ruthlessly kept his head still as the bot not only cut off his impressive facial hair that pooled all the way to the deck, but also held his broad and masculine chin still as the bot shaved it clean!

The simple change caused General Kebrinore to look almost unrecognizable to the servicemen. A clean-shaven dwarf was an extremely rare sight in Vulcan society. Only the most detestable failed dwarves would ever go as far to remove their beard to this degree.

The fact that the general went as far as cutting off his mark of honor and accomplishment signified that he was taking full responsibility for this defeat!

The general kept looking down. The once-proud beard that had graced his body for decades lay dead on the deck as if it was a fallen warbanner.

The shaving bot picked up the beard and moved over to a younger dwarven officer.

"Please bring my beard back to headquarters and tell high command that I am sorry."

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