The The mines are silent. Only the sound of dust being whittled along the rubble by the northern wind can be heard on this side of Sentai Mountain. Still, security is tight. There are ever vigilant guards patrolling the perimeters and listening devices and sensors honed in to detect any movement within the caved-in mine shafts.
The raw materials are no longer accessible to either robot nor human. Meca One and his various copies along with his legions of Iron Drones and Devastators are on the run. They are without their resources to create an endless supply of robots and mechas, the large exo-frame vehicles that have been converted into deadly war machines. That is not to say they are beaten, their numbers are still greater than the remaining human population but not significantly so and although they still posess a huge number of mechas they are not as effective as the human pilots who themselves are restocking their own ranks with machinery of their own. Without access to a plentiful supply of raw materials, strategy would be the key to victory.
Ryo, newly promoted to Chief Engineer and in command of his own company of Alpha Troopers (the front line infantry that do not use the large exo-frame mechas but perform the duties of defence and front line support with their high technological weapons, vehicles and exo-suits) has learnt to be careful with integrating technology. Painfully so with the events of the Golden Tower still vividly clear in his mind and haunting his every actions. He has taken apart every Cyclone Defender exo-suit and ripped out and replaced every bit of Golden City technology with designs of his own making, swearing that nothing in his charge would ever be manipulated by outside forces again.
Sensei KeiKen has tasked Ryo with the problem of maintaining and enhancing the mecha numbers. Scavenging was the main order of the day for most of Ryo's company of men, looking for metals to re-cycle and re-purpose. There is enough material outside of the deep mines to repair most of the damage from skirmishes (of which there have been few) and for everyday maintenance, but not nearly enough to build new mechas to swell the ranks. There is, of course the huge cache of Golden City mechas lying the other side of the Golden Tower wormhole Ryo activated. However, there is also an immense army of Meca One's mechas piloted by Devastators and Iron Drones - all fortunately deactivated, but should that change then so would the human's fragile stronghold in the war. KeiKen wants to recover as much of the technology beyond the wormhole as possible believing that the Golden Tower overrides on the Golden Guardians, Blade Titans and Sky Guardians can be disabled, but Ryo is opposed to this. It was the first time he had ever disagreed publicly (or privately) with the Sensei, a show of defiance against the man he had respected all his life above all others. Takeshi agrees with Ryo but holds his voice along with Hikaru and Ha-Ya-To who are more or less stunned into silence. It is only when Hitomi sides with Ryo, stating that the risk is just not worth it that changes her grandfather's insistence on reclaiming the tech.
The new Memorandum 2015 grants a small tactical force entrusted with the task of permanently deactivating any and all robots situated on the other side of the wormhole. Currently a small team of four EXO Force land and air pilots headed by Takeshi are on the other side, they have set up a base camp with the aim of destroying the deactivated robots of Meca One and salvaging what raw materials they can. No electronics or anything with circuitry is allowed to return through the wormhole, and Takeshi has ordered his team to incinerate everything they find. He is fully behind Ryo with this one. It's going to be a long mission, but Takeshi is intent on completing it personally and returns after each trip leading a new sortee. He has insisted that no-one should enter the wormhole without his explicit permission and has setup his own personal land mecha team to guard it Earthside, Takeshi's men are fiercely loyal to him. Each one owes him their lives, in one way or another they are in his debt and not even the Sensei would be able to get them to stand down. Ryo has a small team of Alpha Troop technicians helping sort and recycle the mecha mechanisms recovered by Takeshi and his small team of two Grand Titans, and an Aero Booster.
Meanwhile, Ryo had been revisiting the old technology. It was solid technology, not as sophisticated as Golgen City tech but no less effective. Power core technology provided immense energy output, but it was difficult to construct and even the robots could not replicate it, their early mechas that used it were modified human-designed mining mechas and their early attack vehicles used spare power cores from the supply stores in the quarry as the source for their energy canons. It was a high output design but such was the potential of the power core that this output was but a trickle of the power core's actual potential. The robots tried to open the floodgates to the power core's output, but Ryo knew that due to it's purposeful design it would become unstable if that was ever done and the robots proved him correct leaving several large craters where they had tried.
What intrigued Ryo most as an engineer was the Supernova mecha, it had a focused energy blaster connected to a power core, but it's high power attack was from solar energy collectors that focused all that energy into a high discharge capacitor which was the Supernova's Trident. Despite all that power, it couldn't damage the Striking Venom. Ryo had been reconstructing his own version of the Supernova, like the Grand Titan XS he had constructed it from the ground up and had painstakingly assembled every bit of insulated cable, welded every single rivet. However, he didn't have a shell to start with. Just blueprints. This Supernova was constructed from the nut up, literally.
Ryo wanted to include high discharge/high capacity storage cells into his Supernova, a lot of cells. And he didn't like the Trident, instead he multiplied the number of energy canons in proportion to his extra cells. That was a lot of energy canons. Supernova's solar collectors would collect the energy which would be stored for discharge from either the Trident or (more effectively) stored to a much higher capacity inside Supernova itself for a devastating blast that would be more than quadruple that if the Trident. The beauty of Ryo's design also meant that Supernova's power core could trickle charge all of it's cells for high discharge in a little over a minute, which meant that this mecha was no longer restricted to daytime strikes. This bespoke mecha would not be mass produced, it was too costly to produce in quantity and it's sole purpose was firepower, a siege weapon. It couldn't compete with a Grand Titan on a head-on assault but at distance it could destroy anything before it got close enough to pose a threat.
In what seemed a subtle but significant show of rebellion, this student of Keiken removed all the subtle flashes of white from this Supernova's colour scheme. Replacing it with a fully yellow with red paintwork over the standard grey and black exo frame. Sensei Keiken's use of Golden City technology may have saved the humans of Sentai Mountain, but it was his irresponsibility that used it to create Meca One the source of all the misery and terrible tragedy that has afflicted the humans. Ryo wanted this mecha to show no allegiance to the Golden City, despite it's golden appearance.
A storm was coming, a mechanical storm ready to take on all who stood in its way. It would not be an easy battle but they were prepared for it now, and it had to happen. Sooner, rather than later but before that battle commences there would be more pieces to play in this game of chess. Strategy would be the key to victory.
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