The Mech Touch novel Chapter 3678

Chapter 3678 Without Honor

What were they doing?

Melkor had been asking this question ever since he deployed in battle with his fellow Avatars.

Certainly, he was glad to be fighting alongside his men and women. Their Bright Warriors gleamed bright and gold as their surfaces had been polished up to an exquisite shine. The mech technicians responsible for caring for them had little else to spend their time on due to the lack of battles as of late.

The new model luminar crystal rifles silently barked laser beams into the distance. Since the pakklaton fleet was so distant, the attacks all seem to converge in a single point.

In truth, much of the extreme-ranged attacks missed their mark by hundreds of meters or numerous kilometers. It was just too difficult to land consistent hits when the margin of error was so miniscule.

The Avatar Commander wasn't bothered by that. The marksmanship of his ranged specialists were satisfactory and he could hardly ask more of them. They actually outperformed every other mech legion in the Larkinson Clan.

Not even the famed Transcendent Punishers of the Eye of Ylvaine fared any better in this regard. Their mechs were predominantly designed to output massed firepower at medium to long ranges and were not built with too many supporting systems that could help them achieve pin-point accuracy.

Sure, they had the help of their big guy Ylvaine, but from what he could see, the Ylvainans already fell back to relying on themselves after seeing that the extreme range effectively rendered the prophet's guidance useless.

What Melkor actually found disturbing was the nature of their target.

"Since when has the Larkinson Clan stooped so low that it considers a refugee fleet to be a legitimate target?"

There was no denying that the alien fleet not only carried a lot of civilians, but had also suffered from a lot of deprivations over the course of its flight from its original home in the region that humanity designated as the Torald Middle Zone.

While there were many alien races where the concept of a civilian population didn't exist, from what Melkor had researched on the galactic net, the pakklaton race had a lot in common with the human race.

Just like humans, the pakklatons cared for their young, expressed a lot of love towards each other, cared for their fellow avian beings, experienced sadness when their relatives died and possessed a strong sense of duty towards the defense of their weak and vulnerable.

The pakklaton refugee fleet exemplified that latter principle when the Larkinsons finally detected movement.

"Sir, the warships are moving! They have engaged whatever sub-light propulsion systems that are still operational!"

"What are their headings and what are they doing?"

"The warships… the warships are moving in front of their civilian ships. They are using their bulk to cut off our line of sight from their more vulnerable vessels."

Melkor would have admired this decision if the adversaries were humans. Since they were aliens, he felt a lot more mixed about this. It was weird to associate honor and duty to aliens.

Just like any human, Melkor had been inundated with lessons on how the aliens were evil and wished nothing more than to wipe out all of humanity.

That may be true in an abstract sense, but he could hardly imagine how this sad and ragged-looking alien fleet could pose a threat to anyone.

Even if the fleet successfully made it away, the surviving pakklatons could not possibly make a comeback. The Red Ocean would fall into the hands of humanity sooner or later.

Was it really vital for the new owners of the dwarf galaxy to wipe out the natives to the last alien?

Surely human civilization should be powerful enough to grant mercy to these helpless refugees.

The Red Ocean may be smaller than the Milky Way, but it was filled with star systems, many of them barren and not worth the effort to colonize.

It wouldn't take much effort to allow the alien remnants to settle on these worthless territories. As long as the Big Two maintained an outpost in these places, they could make sure that the colonies built by the pakklatons and other conquered aliens remained isolated.

So long as the aliens were not allowed to arm themselves again, their threat to human society would be nil.

Melkor, Jannzi and the other clansmen he had spoken with considered this the most realistic compromise they could make under the circumstances.

Humanity would grasp the Red Ocean with or without their support. This was an inevitable trend that no one could stop due to the huge level of commitment to the invasion and the enormous amount of interest groups that profited from the conquest.

No one could stop an avalanche once it started.

However, as the stronger party in this conflict, the human race could still hold true to its noble values and ideals even as it expanded its territory.

Yet instead of trying to coax the fleeing pakklatons into surrendering, the leaders of the Golden Skull Alliance only had destruction in mind.

Melkor had attended the top-level meetings and tried to steer the leadership in this direction.

His suggestions never found purchase. They might as well be rocks sinking into an ocean.

What disturbed him the most was that he heard no inkling of doubt or guilt from Ves.

Though Melkor always knew that the patriarch had always been more of a realist than other Larkinsons, Ves did not even pretend to pay lip service to honor this time.

Was Ves even a Larkinson?

"Maybe I am being foolish." He muttered.

Ves and many other clever-sounding leaders rationalized their actions as contributing to humanity.

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