Chapter 95: The Longest Hour

“We’re going to help, right?” Atticus asked, inadvertently cutting off Derek before he could kick things off himself.

“Of course we are.”

And that was all he said before triggering [Alcubierre Bubble] and hurling them towards humanity’s home star at faster-than-light speeds. They might not necessarily be able to directly change the course of the battle, but there was no doubt in his mind that they’d be able to get on the attackers’ nerves if they put their minds to it …

***

Sol, Mercury, Fleet Admiral’s office

This cannot be happening. This is impossible. This has to be a sensor glitch!

It was fortunate for everyone that Fleet Admiral Hunt’s [Splintered Focus] allowed her to split her trains of thought, one of which she left to spiral in panic as she set the rest of them to work, not having the time to even try to overcome that doubt.

There’d be a price to pay for that later; expanding her mind that much and working for the equivalent of months with every passing hour wasn’t something that would be pleasant to come down from, but also not a risk she gave a single flying fuck about.

Hunt sent threads of thought chasing down every possible reaction to this mess. Namely, sizing up her foe, reassessing her own strength, and simultaneously issuing orders.

Two. Hundred. And Fifty. Battleships.

Fifty had appeared spread out across the asteroid belt; the rest had dropped out of FTL right at the edge of the sun’s zone of interference that prevented long-range travel and were quickly heading deeper in-system through rapid use of tactical repositioning [Skills]. The latter were also splitting up into four groups … no doubt aiming for Earth, Mars, Venus, and Mercury respectively.

That was the force that had appeared, manifesting in space with absolutely no warning. Each almost twenty percent larger than their human equivalents, covered in things that were obviously weapons but whose precise nature wasn’t readily apparent. Even with them already having opened fire. The lasers were recognizable; whatever was tracing explosions with no clear source across everything in sight … not so much.

Against that were Sol’s defenses. Orbital fortresses around every planet except Uranus, Earth, Venus and Mars protected by four divisions of battleships and an appropriate assortment of escorts each, with another thirty orbiting around Mercury, a combination of the fleet base’s own defense force, and the ready deployment force, like the one that had been thrown against The Error.

In addition, Mercury also held a good chunk of the fleet’s battlecruisers, six divisions of them, thirty-six ships in all. None would be able to individually fight a battleship, but two- or three-on-one they’d be more than a match for one of the enemy vessels. If deployed by divisions, six-on-one? They’d casually obliterate any of the invaders, then quickly advance to do the same to the next one.

A further thread of thought activated every alarm and alert she had any degree of control over, simultaneously sending as many messages directly through the [System] to every S-Ranker in the solar system.

Orders went out, fleet formations already on the move, zooming in on specific targets.

And as for the rest of her mind … that was busy triggering every trap, emergency plan, and nasty surprise humanity’s most devious minds had come up with over the course of over a century.

Whoever was out there would learn just what kind of hornet’s nest they’d stuck their junk in!

***

Asteroid Belt, Ceres orbital complex

Outside of very few exceptions, there were only two kinds of thoughts in the minds of those aboard.

‘Oh God, oh God, oh God, we’re all going to die!’ and ‘Thank God they decided to spend the ambient mana to shield this place.’

For David Holmes, the station’s director, he allowed himself a small moment of relief that he had, in fact, indulged his paranoia enough to go through with the shielding, followed that up with a couple of seconds of internal cursing for not braving the bureaucratic hurdles and getting weapons too … then he had to face up to what was happening, for that shield was not going to hold forever. Or much longer, really.

Whatever those ships were shooting, it might not be showing up on sensors as anything other than a faint cloud, moving at a decent fraction of the speed of light, but wherever they struck, radioactive fire bloomed.

And right now, there were four. Goddam. BATTLESHIPS! Raining fire on Ceres. Alien ones, no less!

They’d merged from whatever FTL ability they used, manifested in real space, and simply started shooting, wiping out every freighter, shuttle, asteroid miner, and factory ship not inside the shields in a matter of seconds.

All save the Adrestia, which had been saved by mere happenstance, with the dwarf planet that was Ceres having been physically located between her and the attackers.

For all of five seconds, the passenger liner and all one thousand five hundred souls aboard had been safe.

That was how long it had taken for one of the attackers to blast its engines and accelerate to a point where its heavy laser batteries got a bead on the human ship.

A single salvo was unleashed, and the cruise ship was torn to pieces in an instant.

Holmes grasped the edge of his desk to steady himself, for reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with the tiny tremors that bled through despite the shields.

A wave of explosions suddenly bloomed all around them, countless radioactive detonations beginning to rip apart more distant constructs as salvoes that had been fired upon emergence finally impacted, beginning the process of wiping out all signs of human habitation within whatever range that ungodly weapon had.

That’d be them in a minute. And now, he had to do something.

“What the hell do we do? Do so- …”

Holmes didn’t know who was yelling, and didn’t take the time to figure it out either. He needed to think. And he couldn’t do so with this caterwauling in his ears.

“Shut up!” he hissed, raising a warning index finger in the general direction of the voice, only dimly aware of the fact that he’d inadvertently poked someone standing way too close in the eye … but far too much of his mind was focused on figuring out something he should already have gotten done decades ago.

What the hell can we do to hit those motherfuckers? This is an industrial station, damnit; it’s full of crap that’s dangerous if mishandled! We just need something that can be mishandled in a way that hurts them!

Cargo mass drivers?No, the safeties would take too long to override.

Autopilot shuttle kamikaze? They’d get shot down.

Something with the fusion reactors? Right, something … and why the hell am I doing this on my own?

“Everyone, figure something out; we need to hurt them! I don’t care what it costs, I don’t care what breaks, if it hurts them, do it!” he yelled, inexplicably proud of how much panic didn’t leak into his voice.

Even as he spoke, the shaking increased, the occasional spot failure allowing enemy attacks to strike the hull.

If they overloaded one of the fusion reactors, one of the big suckers that could power a battleship three times over, then used an engineer’s [Skill] to eject it and then try and aim it so it ended up on top of at least one of those ships out there … insane, destructive, wasteful, and a whole lot of derogatory adjectives could be slapped onto the plan, but the only one he cared about was “might work,” and that was all he needed to try it.

“Does anyone have a …”

He was cut off as the entire station shook, the shields clearly having gone down.

And before David Holmes could continue the conversation, he, alongside everyone else in the command center, was vaporized in an instant as a heavy laser tore through the station.

***

Fleet Admiral Hunt could feel a little bit of her soul break as she watched almost the entire habitat section of Ceres be torn away in a shower of plasma and shrapnel. And she let it, allowing the iron grasp of grief to metaphorically squeeze her heart in yet another strand of psyche while every other shard of her bent towards a single purpose: making those sons of bitches burn.

Something the murderers of Ceres were already being subjected to as an enraged S-Ranker tore them apart as though their hulls were mere tinfoil … approximately five seconds after it would have saved the station.

Fiveseconds too late.

Five goddamn seconds had cost nearly a hundred thousand lives.

That was the horrific theme of this day. Too late by intervals measured in seconds, if not milliseconds. A station here, a freighter there … the fact that the asteroid belt was outside the sun’s zone of interference made it far too easy for an enemy to drop out of FTL right on top of their targets.

Hunt’s eyes flicked down to the clock on her desk. One minute had passed. A single, goddamn, motherfucking minute! And the death toll was already beyond imagining.

But that was also the time required for one of their more formidable standby forces to reach full readiness.

“Rear Admiral Baker, are your ships ready for deployment?”

“Yes, Fleet Admiral Hunt.”

For this conversation, she did speak the orders out loud, rather than creating the sound purely through her [Skills].

“Rear Admiral Baker, initiate Lingchi!”

And she did not care one bit about how savage the grin creeping on her face had to look to anyone watching. For she was about to watch a full quarter of the enemy force disappear.

Above Mercury, a small fleet of ships was flying towards two of the plane’s catapults. The magictech masterpieces might be able to launch starships up to fifty light-years in an instant, ignoring gravity interference to boot, but they weren’t going to do anything close to that.

Instead, they were going to drop Baker’s missile cruisers almost directly on top of the force heading to Mars.

As it always did, reality seemed to hiccup; Hunt’s senses still not knowing how to interpret the strange creation that was the catapults.

Just outside Mars’ orbit, a full fifty enemy capital ships were already in the process of opening fire on the defending force … and then the missile cruisers opened fire. Which, in this case, involved temporarily turning the hull immaterial, following that up with a pulse of force that pushed every missile aboard out into space, unleashing the entirety of their magazines in a single salvo that could make even a battleship flinch.

Ninety missiles launched from each cruiser, a hundred and eighty bearing down on each of the enemy battleships, an attack that surpassed anything they could shoot down five times over at the bare minimum.

The enemy … they simply teleported away, dozens of capital ships vanishing like soap bubbles. Tactical relocation [Skills] were, sadly, quite effective at countering missiles, assuming one had any uses left.

Only an absolute idiot wouldn’t have used them in the face of that kind of overwhelming firepower.

And it’d have taken an even bigger idiot to not have seen that response coming.

So, she [Reset the Board], teleporting the entirety of Rear Admiral Baker’s flotilla back to Mercury, with every missile fired back aboard the ship that had launched it. Down the fuel they’d already burned, but this plan had been created with that in mind, and they’d built missiles to match.

Reality hiccuped again, the catapults launching Baker’s flotilla straight into the teeth of the enemy once again.

And, just like last time, the enemy simply warped away, this time teleporting past the cloud of missiles to emerge right on top of the ships that had launched them … but by the time they were ready to fire, the cruisers were no longer there, having been returned to the orbit of Mercury by another reset.

A third catapult activation, a third missile launch, a third evasive teleport, a third reset.

A fourth set followed. And then a fifth, the missile cruisers endlessly trying to pin down a force that could simply … be elsewhere. For now.

Because all of this was predicated on just a single idea: however long the enemy could keep that up, however many people aboard those ships wielded the oddly identical short-range teleport [Skills], she could do this longer.

It was the sixth cycle that the enemy finally ran out of second chances.

The enemy had already been shifting into a more spread-out formation that maximized the number of point defense turrets that could be brought to bear, but that was a mere drop in the bucket. Not bringing any escorts, only relying on the sledgehammer that was any even remotely well-built battleship, was going to bite them in the ass something fierce. Unless they were hiding one final teleport up sleeves these motherfuckers might not even have … they were dead.

Oh, they tried to fight, to burn their path through the missile swarm bearing down on them.

Thousands of missiles died in the first few seconds; some hit so hard the nuclear bombs serving as their warheads actually detonated on their own, the enemy’s cloud weapons remaining horrifyingly effective.

The pace of shattered weapons picked up further as the invaders’ lasers came into range, some merely sent drifting by “soft kills” that burned out sensors and wrecked guidance systems, others slagged by more direct hits …

And in the end, the cloud of ordnance was still dense enough to walk on. Of course, that also meant that every shot of the cloud weapon took them out several at a time, the tiny projectiles chewing apart the missiles with contemptuous ease.

Nine thousand missiles had been launched.

A little under nine hundred were left by the time they finally swept across the invaders’ formation, a bare handful falling to desperate last-ditch defensive fire before they finally struck home and detonated.

For a brief instant, even with an entire solar system’s worth of sensors scanning, the only thing anyone could see was a titanic cloud of expanding radiation and plasma that swallowed up the entirety of the enemy formation.

And when it had finally expanded enough for people to start seeing through, there were only seven ships left, all of them damaged, none of them looking like they’d be able to do much more than make Mars’ defenders waste a little bit of energy without some serious repairs.

Hunt tagged some destroyers to follow those. They’d have to be real idiots to head straight back to their base after disengaging, but if enough ships were chasing them, they might be able to get a good scan of where they launched from after they fled the solar system.

They were going to retreat, right? That was the only reasonable action to take here …

She watched in horror as their damaged warships threw themselves at Mars’ defenders, coming apart under the hammer blows of the primary weapons wielded by humanity’s warships. These people weren’t just willing to slaughter civilians, but also clearly had absolutely no care for their own lives …

“All ships, beware of enemy attempts to ram. And someone find out what the hell those clouds are,” she ordered, her tone much more even than her choice of words might have indicated.

The computer declared the explosions to best match small-scale fusion events, which they might very well be … but it was the computer. It could only compare things it actually had data on, and humanity had by no means exhausted all possible avenues of research.

For all she knew, they might be antimatter, which would be a truly titanic issue, and something they needed to know as soon as reasonably possible. And if it was something genuinely exotic, that would also be a mystery that desperately needed to be solved.

And then, she [Reset the Board] one final time, returning Rear Admiral Baker’s fleet to Mercury, where his ships would be reloaded, ready to do it all again, half an hour from now

***

Earth, Paris, Café de Flore

Emergency Alert from Fleet Admiral Hunt:

Sol is under attack by unknown alien forces. Ceres is under immediate threat.

Short, informative, terrifying.

Anyone crazy enough to attack here of all places, without any kind of declaration of war or threat display to boot, was insane enough to commit all sorts of unspeakable acts.

Arthur Wells rose to his feet in an instant, the sudden motion making everyone else in the cafe jump.

An assortment of random euro bills manifested in his hands as he blindly reached into his storage ring and threw them on the table. He’d almost certainly overpaid, but that was so far from his mind at that moment it might as well not exist.

Reaching into the vast arsenal that was the entirety of the [Skills] held by everyone in the [Round Table].

Some were already spoken for, being borrowed by one member or another.

But the vast majority were kept available as-is, ready for someone with a specific issue outside their [Skill]set to borrow.

[Continent Strider] came easily, clicking into place by the time he’d left the cafe, ready to open the portal to outer space without risking anyone else getting pulled in by the outrush of air.

The tear in space manifested before him, remaining for a bare instant before snapping shut behind his armored figure, Excalibur already blazing bright in his right hand … just in time to watch Ceres’ largest settlement break apart, the last flames guttering out as the air sustaining them finished venting.

And the bastards responsible for this atrocity were yet to flee … it was not a question of if they’d leave.

“[Mythic Action: Royal Decree: Only One May Leave].”

No, the only question was how he’d send them to whatever hell these alien bastards believed in …

He had hundreds of [Skills] at his fingertips.

In-case-of-emergency-break-glass [Skills] that would change the flow of battles, if not wars, when triggered.

Build-defining abilities so potent they practically were their wielders’ entire power set.

And synergies no single person ever should have been able to achieve.

All that was his … for ten minutes at a time, once a week, and “only” thirteen at a time. Honestly, the only real limiting factor there was the cooldown. Enough of one to force him to use his abilities judiciously.

It took a mere millisecond to select the right combination for the situation.

[Black Hole] to suck in the incoming weapons fire, [Mirror World] to trap what he gathered in a sphere the size of a basketball, where they could ping around within endlessly, and [Merge] to fuse all that energy into a single beam that continued to ricochet back and forth.

It took less than ten seconds for the enemy to cease fire, apparently having clued in on the fact that he was doing something, but there were still vast clouds of that explosive dust crap incoming, having been fired before the enemy had clued in on the fact that they might have made a mistake.

For the briefest of instants, a small hole opened in the outer wall of [Mirror World] and a beam of energy lanced out, hammering into the nearest enemy vessel amidships, sending it lurching away with a titanic hole in its side, systems all across it going dark as the internal infrastructure needed to power them was obliterated.

Whatever armor and defenses it had once had … clearly, it had been far from what would have been needed to block its own firepower thrown back into its face, concentrated on an area only a few centimeters across, even with how the beam had spread as it crossed the distance.

The three remaining battleships immediately increased their attempts at evasion, likely desperately attempting to come up with a way to attack that he could not turn on them … whether or not something like that was within their capacity to do, no one would ever find out.

Arthur hurled himself forward, magic picking him up and flinging him at the already crippled warship, Excalibur parting its armor with casual ease as he tore his way through it from bow to stern, anything that looked even remotely important cleaved in twain, leaving a drifting hulk in his past, ready for the boffins to dissect once this was all said and done.

The second ship took the unleashed beam on its stern, the near-impossibility of armoring engines’ external components allowing the ray of condensed energy to punch deep into some of the most sensitive equipment aboard.

It wasn’t entirely clear what he hit, only that it exploded with enough force to turn the entire ship into an expanding ball of wreckage.

The third had managed to place itself on his other side, his body between it and the orb of energy, and while Arthur could have turned … he didn’t bother. He threw Excalibur at it.

[Mythic Action: Titan’s Blade].

Once again, however armored the enemy ship might have been, a two hundred meter long sword out of myth and legend had simply never been a threat it could have been designed to counter.

With that ship drifting apart in two halves, the last enemy apparently panicked, beginning to fire on him even knowing what would happen … Arthur simply opened [Mirror World] fully, and watched the beam swallow his enemy’s attacks, then continue onwards to punch through the final battleship’s bow armor, and continued onwards until it erupted out the rear end. A moment later, the rest of the ship came apart around it, the exact reason once again both unknown and utterly immaterial.

***

UENS Julie d’Aubigny, bridge

“Those fucking cocksuckers! Motherless scum! I’ll …”

Everyone aboard the d’Aubigny’s bridge was ignoring Captain David’s tirade, the man himself included, as he let his cursing carry away enough of his rage to function normally. If some distant part of his mind had been aware of the break in decorum, he’d also have had the spare brainpower to realize that in the current situation, no one would care as long as they did their duty.

One might think that having the commanding officer cursing up a storm would hinder that … but David had long since had a policy of conducting all on-bridge communication through his favorite [Skill], [Clockwork Coordination]. Being a party-[Skill], it included mental communication as a matter of course.

Less than five seconds after the alarms had first started ringing through the ship, everyone was at their duty stations, reactors burning at full military power, capacitors filling in mere moments, weapons ready to unleash hell upon the enemies of humanity.

By then, David had also completed his analysis of the situation. The ships heading deeper into the system were going to be difficult to reach, and they were going to smash head-on into the strongest set of defenses humanity had ever constructed.

One battleship on its shakedown cruise should not meaningfully change the maths there, but out here, in the belt? They were only going to be reinforced once the inhabited planets were safe.

He was about to warp the ship over to confront the nearest enemy, then stopped himself.

For a new distress call had just come in. And while the ship he’d been about to go after had close to ten thousand human beings in its crosshairs … right now, a station of fifty thousand was freshly under attack.

David paused his tirade as he bit his lower lip, hard enough to draw blood, judging by the taste of iron on his tongue, even as he triggered [Alcubierre Bubble], space twisting into the iridescent warp for a mere moment before dropping the d’Aubigny back into normal space, a mere hundred thousand kilometers from their target, the station it was firing upon only a little further away.

The alien battleship was an ugly thing, boxy, almost a kilometer and a half long, with nearly three hundred meters on his own vessel, and slightly wider to boot.

Weapon-wise, the reports already coming in were making it clear that the enemy ship was equipped with lasers, but those were not being used right now.

Instead, a series of turreted weapons that were far larger than anything human ships used were spitting out tiny, dust-sized projectiles by the thousands.

Per second.

The enemy battleship was sweeping those weapons back and forth, vast clouds of highly explosive dust tracing deadly patterns across space … followed by that same pattern being drawn across the station’s shield in small yet still highly radioactive explosions.

“Fire.”

The command was given without hesitation, regret, or even necessity, if he was honest.

Light boiled out of the d’Aubigny’s bow as the twin heavy lasers that made up two-thirds of her primaries fired, unleashing beams of coherent energy capable of turning many a space station to slag in a single volley; the particle beam that was her third heavy weapon chasing the other two, mere fractions of a percent slower, secondary weapons firing in concert yet practically vanishing against the backdrop of raging energy already unleashed.

The railguns that dotted the d’Aubigny’s exterior had fired at the same time, but their slower projectiles trailed behind the energy weapons, spreading out into a grand pattern that would functionally guarantee that, no matter which way the enemy turned, they’d take at least some licks.

And while they were presently the slowest weapons in play, the full salvo of missiles they’d launched along with everything else was swiftly accelerating towards the enemy, more than capable of vaporizing the enemy ship in its entirety if it failed to react.

The enemy ship was beginning to turn, but even though it easily put most freighters to shame, by warship standards, it was a flying pig.

Although other implications of the term aside, “flying elephant” might have been more accurate. Big, threatening, and you absolutely did not want to be in one’s path if it decided to go somewhere.

That was a battleship, alright, a fact further demonstrated when the d’Aubigny’s heaviest weapons landed, and the enemy failed to be wiped from existence. But it was by no means left unscathed.

Even with ninety percent of the impossibly powerful lasers’ energy reflected away, even with the particle beam rapidly becoming decoherent as it neared the hull … all three struck an area less than ten meters across and blew straight through whatever armor the enemy had been packing.

Lasers began flicking out at that moment, several missiles being shot down before anyone could react; enemy point defense fire swiftly chewing its way through the d’Aubigny’s salvo until there was nothing left of it but a cloud of slag.

David didn’t react to that. He’d expected it, sadly. They’d been too close when they’d launched; their guided weapons would never have been able to get up to speed against any kind of proper point defense setup. Which the enemy clearly had, with light lasers that the enemy had obviously expected to require significant point defense capabilities.

Just like how it seemed the other battleship had defenses against every weapon the d’Aubigny carried.

Electromagnetic deflectors to prevent particle beams from striking in a fully coherent state.

And the armor was the same magically cooled, reflective shell every post-[System] spacefaring species seemed to have figured out.

Clearly, this would not be a battle humanity won simply by wielding weapons the enemy had never planned to encounter.

But there were only so many things that could be done against kinetic weapons, short of dodging, and that was a task the alien warship had decidedly failed at.

Sure, they tried, yet for all the sheer power a battleship wielded, for all the massive armor that could shrug off an amount of damage that bordered on the incomprehensible … no elephant, even a flying one, could dodge bullets.

Plumes of debris and escaping atmosphere erupted from several spots on the enemy ship as it was sent staggering sideways.

That was when David saw the first signs of the other guy opening fire.

It was not the targeted fire of human energy weapons, or the carefully calculated spread of kinetic weaponry.

Instead, those dust guns were sweeping back and forth, vast arcs of the ungodly explosive dust spreading across an area that the d’Aubigny could not possibly escape with her drives alone.

David re-cast [Alcubierre Bubble] and shifted his ship’s position to the enemy’s other side, thrusters firing up at full blast the instant they returned to normal space, twisting the ship around to bring her primaries back into range, space before her bow twisting and warping to bend the heavy beams onto target …

The bastard vanished. A mere two seconds before the d’Aubigny would have been able to fire.

And two-point-three seconds later, their enemy reemerged into normal space, seven light-seconds away.

Still a little too close for missile use, even if the launchers hadn’t been another thirty seconds from being reloaded.

But within easy striking range with another tactical FTL jump. The universe blurred, and the d’Aubigny emerged to see … nothing. Another moment later, the enemy likewise reappeared, once again well out of range of their energy weapons. Apparently, their enemy hadn’t even bothered to wait and see where David’s ship would emerge; they’d assumed the jump was going to lead into an attack, and chosen to move “elsewhere.”

For a brief moment, he got the mental image of both ships as cats, glaring at each other through a closed window. They could see each other; they could theoretically even get at each other … but actual, meaningful engagement simply wasn’t going to happen.

If they’d been in a star’s, or even a planet’s, zone of interference, they’d have been limited to warp-type [Skills], the bare handful of activations held by the crew.

Out here, however … this would not stop until they’d run down every mana pool belonging to everyone who had access to long-range FTL capabilities. That amounted to thirty-one individuals on the d’Aubigny, and her contingent was on the low side. Unless the enemy folded first, they’d be able to continue this dance right up to the point where the rest of the system had been swept clear of enemies, at which point reinforcements would come down on the enemy like the hammer of an angry god.

That thought helped assuage his frustration. For a brief moment. Then the enemy seemed to … oblige?

A pulse of energy washed out from the other starship, the first sign of serious supernatural abilities the enemy had shown to date, and immediately, David knew that both of them had just been cut off from any faster-than-light shenanigans.

There was no guarantee that couldn’t be turned off if it looked like the enemy was losing, but for right now … no more dancing. From either of them.

Five light-seconds separated them, though inertia was presently carrying them apart, not that either of them had any plans to let things lie.

The other guy knew the d’Aubigny would interfere with whatever he’d try, and there was no way in hell David was letting that murderous bastard get away.

“Let’s dance, motherfucker!”

Mentally, he reached out towards [Spatial Jump], the [Skill] he normally used for warping around when [Alcubierre Bubble] was unavailable due to stellar proximity. Unsurprisingly, it was likewise suppressed.

Five light seconds.

One and a half million kilometers.

That was the distance his ship had to survive crossing; then they could gut that bastard.

And those damn dust guns were already firing, space between them rapidly becoming filled with lethal clouds, even as the d’Aubigny returned fire with her railguns. But unfortunately, the enemy was far better equipped to saturate space between them and guaranteeing at least some hits.

The icon indicating missile availability flicked green at that moment, and a mere thought sent thirty missiles spiraling out into the void, spreading wide and aiming to come at the enemy from all angles.

“Lieutenant Commander Hayes, you got this. Ride us right down that bastard’s throat!” David sent to the d’Aubigny’s helmsman.

Chances were, the young man did not, in fact, “got this,” but proper motivation had let people pull off some genuinely impossible victories in the past. “The morale is to the material as three is to one,” or however that quote went.

“Close the gunports on the primaries.”

That one went to the foursome handling the weapons. Unless he’d badly misread both the situation and the reports starting to come in from the rest of the solar system, there was little chance his ship would cross the intervening distance with much on the outside of the hull intact.

And as that order left David’s lips, the enemy landed their first clean hit.

The entire goddamn battleship shuddered just as a line of red damage markers flashed into existence along her dorsal hull, one of the dust streams having slashed across it like a titanic whip of radiation and plasma, vaporizing weapons, sensors, and armor plating alike.

He grimaced and barked a couple of additional orders. But in the end … there were only so many ways to improve on “dodge the enemy’s fire.”

His missiles slipped into the range of the enemy lasers at that point and almost immediately began to die, the enemy point defense barely impeded by the fact that they were coming in slightly more quickly this time due to having had longer to accelerate.

The dance continued, both battleships accelerating all-out towards each other, long-range weapons almost futilely firing at each other, railgun rounds zipping across the intervening space while vast clouds of dust were sweeping through space in the opposite direction, a brilliant curtain of lethal intent.

Where the former hit, armor exploded, and shrapnel was sent scything into the interior of the alien warship.

Where the latter struck, nuclear fire burned away a little more of David’s ship’s capabilities.

And with the enemy weapons being what they were, they were landing a lot more hits.

Even in the face of all the magic the humans had to throw in the face of the attacks.

Armor repaired itself as the engineers used their [Skills], individual turrets popping back up out of wrecked hull plating like a mechanical jack-in-the-box. Evasive maneuvers that were just a little bit more effective than they should have been, subtle spatial warping that made twisting the ship out of the path of an unavoidable attack actually possible … all coordinated with the clockwork precision of the Julie d’Aubigny’s [Multifaceted Captain].

Yet in the end, all that magic could not change the simple fact that, by the time they were close enough to use them, they might not even have the weapons left to attack with.

When the d’Aubigny launched her fourth salvo of missiles, they were wiped out a mere instant after they’d left the tubes. For the enemy lasers came into play at that point, with beams that were heavier than any of the secondary weapons the d’Aubigny carried but still woefully short of the heavy primaries that would seal the enemy’s fate …

For now, they weren’t doing much damage when the armor did its job. Where David’s ship still had its armor, they were “merely” vaporizing the surface even as well over ninety percent of the energy was reflected off into space, only a second strike to the same area able to strike deep, and even that only worked if it landed before the armor’s enchantments were able to vent the heat.

Everything else simply splashed off almost harmlessly. If it struck the armor. But the d’Aubigny had precious little of that left. Much as that thrice-cursed dust seemed to specialize in “surface” damage, when the enemy was able to bring other weapons to bear, the openings that created could easily become fatal.

“Keep the primaries covered!” David snapped, more sensing than seeing one of the weapons officers reaching towards the button that would allow them to use the d’Aubigny’s heaviest weapons. “We’re only going to get one shot at this!”

The ship continued to tremble as its hull was being flayed, massive chunks of armor simply breaking apart or being blasted clean off the hull as the anti-laser properties burned away in nuclear fire.

By this point, d’Aubigny’s engines had long since stopped burning, thrusters stopped firing, sheer momentum being all that carried her onward, everything about the ship’s orientation designed for one single purpose: to make sure the intact weapons on the side of the vessel turned away from the enemy, the ones that were “protected,” stayed that way until they could do the most good.

And a mere five seconds later, the battleship crossed the invisible line in space her captain had drawn, had set as the trigger for his plan.

One final twist. One small puff of the thrusters, spinning the d’Aubigny’s alignment by a single degree, exposing the two railguns they’d kept tucked away behind her bulk. They survived a mere tenth of a second after their protection ceased before being wiped away in a burst of nuclear energy, a good bit of the hull leaving with them …but they survived long enough to fire.

The railgun darts flashed across space, too quickly for even computers to react, let alone respond, and hammered into the alien warship’s hull, tearing clean through the armor and the rather conspicuous bulges in the hull they’d been built atop. Bulges that, according to the sensors, had hidden two of the enemy ship’s six electromagnetic generators that powered their deflectors.

There’s a reason everyone else has a lot more of those, and redundancies up to whazoo.

The savage grin David sported as the enemy’s primary defense against particle beams went down was utterly unbecoming of a navy officer, and he did not care one iota, nor did he give a single flying fuck as it grew even broader.

Especially when he triggered [Kinetic Absorption], robbing all projectiles that hit the d’Aubigny’s hull of their momentum. Another gamble. If those things exploded due to some enchantment or technological detonator, rather than pure force of impact … as bad as that would have been, the [Skill] worked. And his ship was, however briefly, rendered immune to those accursed dust cannons.

What happened next moved too quickly to instruct verbally, but it went off without a hitch nevertheless as the heaviest weapons humanity had ever built into a starship fired at point-blank range.

The gunport for the first of the d’Aubigny’s primaries blew in an instant, a shutter damaged beyond use blasted away by a brief burst of power to clear the way before the lance of charged particles flashed out so quickly it was almost indistinguishable from light speed, barely disrupted by the other ship’s crippled defenses, and tore through the hull like an artillery shell through soft dirt, leaving behind a massive crater in the armor.

A gap in that ludicrously reflective crap that had foiled the previous laser strikes …

The second of the d’Aubigny’s primaries activated, the torrent of energy that poured forth flashing through the opening and making the metal within boil, erupting out of the hole as a titanic eruption of plasma and escaping air.

And by the time the third laser fired, it was utterly impossible to see what it hit through all the crap spewing out … at least until it came out the opposite side of the mass-murdering bastards’ battleship.

Even as the other ship spun away, everything that should remain on the inside of a starship geysiring out of both massive hull breaches; its lasers fired, raking across the d’Aubigny’s wrecked armor, and all the “dust” still embedded within.

Much, no, most of the latter was simply burned away, flashing into plasma along with the hull … but not all.

Ultimately, the requirements for nuclear fusion weren’t that stringent. Enough heat, enough pressure, and material that could, in fact, fuse. The lasers provided the former, the explosions provided the second, and the “dust” provided the latter.

The entire human battleship was flung away as though slapped by a giant’s hand, power systems initiating emergency shutdowns as portions of its very armor were briefly transformed into nuclear explosives, conduits tearing and superstructure crumpling until suddenly, the entire ship went dark.

Gods, I hope we got the fucker … David thought as he did his best to check up on the ship’s status.

It took a second for the lights to switch back on fully, the engineers no doubt having managed to re-route power around the damaged sections, but the information the screens showed only confirmed what his [Skills] had already told him … about the Julie d’Aubigny.

The fact that the ship had been crippled had already been clear.

The fact that their enemy was in even worse shape, seemingly incapable of even moving, was only so big a comfort. Their enemy might still manage to escape… or get enough weapons back online to destroy the d’Aubigny.

The orders to the engineers had already gone out, and reiterating that they needed working weapons back right the hell now would only serve to act as a distraction. There really wasn’t any topping the “I need weapons back, I don’t care what you have to break to make that happen, or if they ever fire again afterwards” he’d already issued.

He had an idea. It was arguably genius, inarguably insane … and probably the only option left on the table.

David pinged the commander of his ship’s marine detachment.

“Major Parnell, I need you to rip open the hull above our forward port magazine.”

The response was uncharacteristically confused.

“Sir?”

“Major, I need you to open a path between that magazine and outer space, then start physically throwing missiles off the ship. We’ll control them from here.”

The sound of metal tearing filled the ship almost immediately, each crash and screech drawing a new flinch out of the d’Aubigny’s captain … but after not even twenty seconds, the first nuclear-armed missile showed up on the tactical plot, awaiting directions, swiftly followed by two more.

“Launch all missiles at the enemy as soon as they become available.”

If the enemy ship still had the point defense available to defend itself, they could always wait to gather a larger amount to throw at once, but right now, hitting their opponent hard before repairs could be made was the name of the game.

Resisting the urge to cuss up another storm, or give additional orders purely for the sake of feeling like he was actively contributing, David had his eyes fixed on the screen as a new missile icon showed up every few seconds and began to ride a pillar of plasma towards the other battleship as their drives kicked in.

Any moment, the enemy might manage to get even a single point defense laser online, to get the resources in place to counter his final gamble … a fear that never left him right up until the first missile struck the enemy’s hull.

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The hammerblow of a nuclear weapon detonating smashed into the bow of the alien vessel like the fist of an angry god, armor flashing into plasma, superstructure buckling, the ship tumbling away with nothing left of its front end save a gigantic glowing crater.

If they’d been about to get something fixed over there … well, it wasn’t on the verge of intactness anymore.

The second missile struck the armor just below the stern, transforming the enemy vessel’s tumbling into a chaotic spin as it was sent spiraling away, sporting a second glowing crater, and no doubt further internal destruction.

Missiles three and four struck almost as one, striking home amidships, the already damaged superstructure practically folding around the titanic fireball.

Even if they somehow managed to get the engines fired up now, they were more likely to wind up snapping the ship’s spine than actually start moving.

That was absolutely no reason to stop throwing missiles at them, however.

As the enemy starship was swallowed by blooms of nuclear fire, the d’Aubigny turned hard to port and began the long journey of limping back towards Mercury.

***

The destruction of the fleet going after Mars had opened up certain tactical options.

For example, the twenty-four battleships that had been needed to protect it could now be shifted over to cover Earth and Venus, yet they’d be able to shift back just as easily, as long as they stayed near the catapults orbiting humanity’s home, bringing Earth’s defense fleet up to thirty-six capital ships, more than a match for the fleet bearing down on it when combined with the defense installation and the S-Rankers who’d decided to help but refused to follow her directions.

Mars also had an entirely untouched orbital defense array, including missile satellites that still held all their munitions, eight orbital fortresses, and every escort ship that would be left behind as she shifted the battleships over to Earth.

At the same time, the entirety of the battlecruisers from Mercury were being dispatched to wipe out the enemy forces in the belt, throwing entire divisions at individual enemies. While half of Mercury’s defending battleships would be relocated to the belt to deal with the enemies there, while the other half sent to reinforce Venus.

Which left the forces going for Mercury facing nothing but fixed defenses. And her.

She’d almost feel sorry for them, except … well, everything.

Smash the fleet heading to Earth with overwhelming force, sweep the belt with concentrated forces to defeat the enemy in detail, and crush the force heading towards her location personally.

With the destruction of the force meant for Mars, the balance of military power in the solar system had flipped solidly back into humanity’s favor.

It was no longer a question of if they’d win.

It was a question of how many millions of people would die before it was done.

***

Earth, Akashik Academy, far too deep in the underground facilities

There was a certain logic to building these rooms impossible to teleport into and out of, considering the sheer power and portability of the items.

However, finding himself at the very bottom of the construction during a genuine emergency and being unable to respond was certainly a … troublesome situation.

And, unlike the first dean of this academy, Leon Schmidt did not feel it was his place to tear his way out of the building via the most direct way possible.

Even so, he was still an S-Ranker at the Level cap with enough power at his fingertips to rend mountains and win wars on his own.

His [Aura] flooded out from him, his frustration and anger making it boil as it washed through the corridors ahead, making it obvious to even the dumbest individuals that they’d better get the fuck out of the way. And no one who’d already gotten down here could even remotely be considered “dumb.”

Corridor after corridor of people pressed up against the walls flashed past before Leon finally left the high-security section.

At that point, the wards went from “I don’t care if you’re a god, if you want in here, you’re walking” to a mere “no human being could possibly teleport past these.”

So, naturally, he tore them all to shreds, the [Reaper’s] scythe manifesting for a brief instant to rend defenses that could have held off an army for hours in an instant.

[Journey Beyond] triggered next, hurling him across space in the span between two heartbeats, and leaving him floating in space, staring down the barrel of a titanic gun. Well, guns, the entirety of the enemy fleet.

[Sling of David] activated immediately, vacuuming up every scrap of information visible to him, and sending out information on every possible weakness and source of secondary damage. The places where even the humble slingshot could take down even a legendary warrior.

An insufficiently repaired section of damaged armor here, a point defense weapon with a stuck motor that would not be able to track properly, a reactor that, while armored, was still well within what he could reach within a single strike, and lacked the safeguards to avoid annihilating the entire ship if he did so.

For a brief moment, he was contemplating the best place to plant his scythe … and then [Limit Breaker] went off like a nuclear bomb in his chest, flooding his body with power until it was full to bursting. And then sending even more afterwards.

Something about these enemies had set the [Skill] off to a degree he’d never experienced. Even World Bosses did not provoke such a reaction, yet … it didn’t feel like he was facing just the fleet. There was something grand behind it, some kind of … something that one of his most foundational abilities considered such an integral part of the force before him that facing one part meant facing a whole.

The paralysis from the flood of power and information lasted perhaps half a second, but that was easily long enough for the first lasers to be thrown his way.

Yet even trapped elsewhere, [Omenic Danger Sense] activated and he lurched out of the way entirely unconsciously, the void of space as stable as a planet beneath his feet … a split second after the veil of surging strength fell away from his eyes, he was already moving.

Had he not had the absurd level of experience of controlling suddenly expanded strength that decades of battling Raid Bosses solo had given him, Leon was absolutely certain he’d have wildly careened straight through the formation without landing so much as a single hit.

Instead, he smashed into the nearest invading battleship like a furious meteor, armor cratering, the entire hull crumpling inwards until eventually even the vessel’s spine folded around him …

Boom!

Seemed he’d crushed the reactor by accident, but all the surge of fire and plasma achieved was temporarily blinding him. And even that did little to impede his progress.

Leon triggered [No One Escapes Death], searching not for anyone in particular but rather simply going after the nearest concentration of life that was moving in the right direction … not that there was anyone else present to confuse the direction.

His vision cleared just in time to reveal the hull of yet another enemy ship, only for him to be once more blinded by the flare of a failing fusion reactor.

A third ship was torn in half a moment later when he finally managed to land a clean strike with his weapon instead, finally destroying an enemy while retaining the ability to see … but by the time he’d come out the other side of the wrecked ship, he was greeted by empty space.

Apparently, they’d all left, the next trigger of that damn teleporting [Skill] carrying them away. And the one he’d have needed to follow was on cooldown.

Son of a bitch.

***

Hunt shifted a small but substantial portion of her thoughtstreams to analyzing one small battle that had happened on the outskirts of the system.

One battleship that had been in the belt conducting a drill, the Julie d’Aubigny, had managed to confront and destroy an individual enemy. Thankfully, Captain David seemed to have managed to edge out a win despite his ship having been practically battered into a wreck in the process, but the information he’d provided may shift the entire course of the battle, if not the war that was sure to follow this entire affair.

Because the enemy, and by God did they need a better name to call these bastards, had just revealed their playbook.

Use the cloud guns to remove everything on the hull of her warships, destroying the armor’s near-immunity to laser fire in the process, then use their own lasers to deliver the killing blow.

And with enough of those mystery weapons, they’d be able to get as close to saturating space with fire as was physically possible.

A new message window popped up on her screen, pushing her view of the solar system to the side, automatically minimizing it.

There were very few people with that kind of automatic access, and several of those were some of the last individuals she wanted to talk to in the middle of a battle … yet the one who showed up was the one man she’d desperately hoped to hear from.

Standing in front of a camera, cooking as exhausted as she felt, his uniform in that slightly too perfect state that spoke to it having been hastily zapped onto his body via a [Skill] no more than a couple of seconds ago, stood Admiral Park, sporting his finest “mad scientist grin” as he declared, “Macron Guns.”

“You’re going to have to be more specific,” Hunt ordered flatly, eyes fixed on the view of the solar system.

“Macrons. Tiny particles fired via electrostatic acceleration at a rate of several thousand a second. “

Normally, Hunt had near-infinite patience for the man responsible for a truly staggering portion of the fleet’s home-grown technology. Today …

“I know what a macron gun is,” she snapped. “Macrons don’t explode like miniature fusion warheads!”

She immediately regretted it… for about two seconds before she shoved those feelings off on the same trains of thought that were already wrestling down all distracting feelings about the overall situation.

“They do if they’re filled with deuterium or tritium. It’s one of the early fusion generator designs, launching macrons filled with heavy hydrogen isotopes into a solid object with enough force to induce nuclear fusion for a net gain of energy.”

“Defenses?” she asked.

“Evasion, kinetic dampening enchantment, physical impediments, any flame that functions without oxygen, certain physics-based catalyst [Skills].”

“Inform me of any further discoveries,” she ordered, then severed the connection.

That was … helpful, certainly, but nowhere near as much as she’d hoped. Most of what he’d suggested were things that were either a standard part of the fleet’s combat doctrine. Or required advanced preparation that they were in absolutely no position to put into place.

The key takeaway in her mind was the fact that macron guns were functionally useless for orbital bombardment; the projectiles would burn up well before they got anywhere near doing damage.

She could also see that, while there were a lot of powerful people down on Earth who’d roused themselves into action, very few of them had actually left orbit, and among those who’d actually confronted the alien warfleet, none had had the necessary [Skill]set to stick with the enemy across prolonged engagements.

Which meant the fleet there would easily be able to smash the incoming enemy … at the cost of fighting among very valuable infrastructure, all of which would likely have at least some people aboard.

It was at that point that a new report came in. Apparently, Admiral Miyazaki was sending in the marines with orders to drag anyone still aboard non-military stations off said stations and relocate them somewhere safer.

They’d no doubt get all sorts of shit over that once this was over, but that was oh so far besides the point at that moment. It was, perhaps, a sign of her having spent far too much of her time dealing with that kind of nonsense that it had even crossed her mind.

She … the yawn forced its way out of her even as she tried to clamp down on it with every iota of willpower she could muster. It seemed she was on the verge of overdoing it. And she needed to remain capable of acting for when the enemy went after Mercury.

“Operational control is hereby passed to Admiral Miyazaki aboard the Perseus,” she ordered. “I am personally taking command of Mercury’s defenses.”

[Splintered Focus] seemed to collapse in that moment, the strain of having to work on multiple thousands of issues at the same time dropping precipitously, until she was “only” dealing with issues in the hundreds, still continuing to rack up a sleep-debt that was only growing more and more mountainous … but it was one she’d be able to put off paying until after the ships heading towards Mercury were gone.

***

UENS Perseus, bridge

Two jumps to close with Mars, six used more in a futile attempt to escape Hunt’s stunt the artillery cruisers. That was the confirmed limit of the enemy’s tactical relocation ability.

That gave Admiral Miyazaki a good idea of how many his enemies seemed to have by default, and that was more than enough to firmly bring the hammer down on these bastards.

And the enemy had already used up five of their jumps just getting this far.

There was also a clear indication that, unless their opponents were playing some kind of game, their warp-[Skill] had some kind of cooldown linked to the ship itself when not actively under threat.

Which could mean the enemy were attempting to force him to make incorrect assumptions, that they genuinely had to labor under that restriction, or … or they were insane berserkers who did not care whether they lived or died, just as eager to throw their lives away as those ships over Mars had been.

[Echoing Authority] spread through the fleet and the thousand-ish “civilian volunteers floating in space around his flagship, connecting him to each and every one, allowing him to speak straight into their heads, something that was especially important if his communications officer was to be believed, and only three of the people out there had thought to bring a communications device that did not require them to be actively looking at a screen.

Not to mention that many of those people had more firepower than his battleships.

There was a time for fancy maneuvers, a time to bring down the hammer, and a time when he really wasn’t in a position to get creative.

Thus, the plan: a single firing pass to get behind the enemy, making sure to degrade their point defense as much as possible before the satellites launched their missile swarm, and making sure to capitalize the instant the enemy used those last two warps for any reason.

And the fewer of their own the humans used, the better.

“Anyone not capable of repeated mid-range teleportation, land upon the outer hull of the nearest warship.”

There. Now that everyone would be able to keep up … the rest of the plan could proceed.

[Abyss Cloak] caused darkness to bloom all across the field, each covering an area the fleet could plausibly be hiding within. Stealth in space was hard, bordering on impossible, but blocking direct line of sight and creating too many hiding places to be conveniently checked could create a damn good approximation.

And he’d made sure to drop one of the clouds on his own position, and a second right beside the enemy. It was the exact place he’d have selected as the target of an offensive teleport.

It was also a blindingly obvious tactic. The reflexes of a startled cat had nothing on the enemy fleet’s reaction as they warped away … and the human fleet hadn’t even budged.

Then he draped the [Shroud of the Abyss] across their new location. It might not be very good at blocking enemy teleportation, nor did it last very long, but until someone ran face-first into it, the [Skill] was utterly undetectable.

Whether it kept some enemy vessels in the target area, got the entire enemy force to waste their last warp, or simply forced them to spend some more energy to escape the trap, it would doubtlessly do something when his fleet appeared right on top of them.

“All ships, on my mark, warp!” Miyazaki ordered, and the ships vanished, hurled across space with their own variant of a short-range FTL jump.

They reappeared an instant later, their formation a ragged mess as slight differences in the [Skills] used compounded across a flotilla containing nearly two hundred ships. Though having put the battleships out in front gave the escorts a few moments to get back into a proper formation, without running the risk of a few destroyers ending up in the line of fire without proper support.

Compared to that, the coordination the enemy had displayed was utterly unreal. Either someone on the other side had one hell of a coordination [Skill], or their enemy had a tyrannical culture that had resulted in a spate of utterly identical [Classes] and warp [Skills]. Either explanation would be a problem.

The last two seconds until contact seemed to pass in an instant as he dove into the fleet command network, assigning targets, clearing firing lines, prioritizing which enemy battleships needed to be removed from the field first.

Macron guns were already flooding the space they were about to move through with explosive clouds, several ships flickering in place as they ran into the [Shroud of the Abyss], energy weapons flickering back and forth between both fleets …

But by the time the human fleets’ tagalongs got into range, the firepower being thrown around by “mere” technology was rendered utterly superfluous.

It started with a pair of alien battleships suddenly bursting like popcorn kernels, everything meant to be on the inside being folded onto the outside, its armor seemingly replaced by torn-open compartments as it folded in on itself …

And that spectacle was almost entirely forgotten about when the rest ranged on the enemy.

There were no words for the utter cataclysm that tore the alien fleet to pieces.

No names. No adequate descriptions beyond the tiny flashes of the familiar that words could be attached to in a vain and desperate attempt to somehow conceptualize just what on God’s green Earth had just transpired.

A city of light that crushed a battleship like a beer tin can beneath a steel-toed boot.

Light that felt like it should not have existed in reality, erasing another.

Swarms of things that felt like they had been torn from the deepest recesses of a madman’s brain, devouring not only the ship but seemingly the space it moved through …

For the sake of retaining his sanity, Miyazaki let his eyes defocus, doing his best to keep tabs on what was happening without focussing on any particular portion of the localized Armageddon his forces were now passing.

As he stared at the utter devastation left behind in the fleet’s wake, there really was only one comment to be made, even in the privacy of his own mind.

Damn, I’m glad they’re on our side.

Though it was quickly followed by the next few, mostly concerning just how badly he’d misread the balance of forces.

The compact really did make it easy to forget just how powerful the people at the top are, didn’t it?

And once they were done mopping up here … Venus seemed to be in need of support.

***

Sol, just outside Earth orbit, ten kilometers of the Perseus’ starboard bow

As far as Tanja Thoma knew, the “plan” had been for this pass to be merely the opening salvo. Weaken the force, create gaps in the point defense, burn them down with missiles from the satellites, then crush whatever was left.

As for what had actually ended up happening … she was currently staring at the shattered wreckage of the force that some absolute brain-dead moron had seemingly believed to be a genuine threat to Earth.

Needless to say, they’d been very, very, wrong.

In fact, it was only “thanks” to Admiral Miyazaki that any of the enemy had survived at all. His firing plan had been so conservative that the ships that had been struck had been destroyed with a spectacular level of overkill, to the point where the survivors hadn’t even been targeted at all, only having gotten caught in the very edges of the cataclysm humanity’s strongest had unleashed.

The aliens had been in an incredibly spread-out formation, and yet ships that had been thousands of kilometers from the actual targets had become collateral damage.

They could have run.

They should have surrendered.

They, instead, accelerated towards Earth and the stations above it, their intentions abundantly clear.

Whether they were too stupid or fanatical to do anything else, or simply in a berserker rage wasn’t something she could ascertain, and, quite frankly, it didn’t bloody matter.

They were mass murderers, war criminals by every metric of every species who had the concept. And they were going to be treated accordingly.

Tanja triggered [Judge at the Threshold], mouth set into a grim line as she stared at the retreating engine flares.

The [Skill] lying at the very heart of [Choser of the Slain] was … terrible, beautiful, and brought with it genuinely horrific implications.

People on the edge of death could be tipped across it, or pulled back. However, for every individual who stayed on this side of the veil, a sacrifice had to be made. Mana beyond what was already contained within the cooldown [Skill’s] own pool, blood, life … though the [System] had never specified who the last option had to come from.

Tanja closed her eyes, the verdict she was speaking burning in her mind like a crimson star of blood and death.

Then, she began the sort things.

Human, and murderous alien asshole.

To be saved, and to be sacrificed.

Those raised up from the sickbeds they likely weren’t in yet, and those who would be hurled into perdition … or so she assumed, considering what was supposed to await war criminals.

And then, she shoved. Anyone targeted who was not healthy enough to resist simply died, forced to shuffle off this mortal coil. Any living being she went after that was at least a little injured, and lacked sufficient vitality to resist the effect, was struck off the census with the same ease as literally crossing names off a ledger.

Officers and other high-Level specialists would likely be at a point where they’d have put enough points into Fortitude that it’d take a serious injury to bring them into instant kill range. And the alien marine-equivalent was almost certainly at least partially focused on the Stat as well.

Everyone else, however, was dead. How many that amounted to, and how many humans were pulled back from the brink as a result, remained to be seen …

Tanja opened her eyes, watching the results of her actions.

Half the enemy ships simply went careening off into random directions, as though the pilots had died at the controls … though the fact that the autopilot had clearly failed too was weird. Yet another mystery for the pile … a pile that was literally anyone else’s job to deal with. Any of her siblings, really, though Viktoria would likely be as stuck helping out in the infirmary as Tanja planned to be.

“This is Tanja Thoma, to all who receive this message. I am available to offer medical care.”

The first dozen or so times, that kind of response to disaster relief had to be accompanied by a rundown of her limits. Nowadays, everyone either knew or had ready access to abilities. Especially the fact that no one who’d been dead for more than eighteen minutes could be resurrected.

And dealing with that was much more important than watching the navy wipe out what was left of the enemy force.

***

Venus, Orbital Fortress Alpha, Command Center

Space between Venus and the incoming alien force seemed to ripple as Vice Admiral Zhao unleashed his magic, forging a veil of illusion that, in the end, showed absolutely nothing that differed from reality.

Of course, that illusion blocked out so much of the sky that it would be functionally impossible to miss the fact that it was, in fact, an illusion. For starters, he’d only been able to put the stars that were hundreds of light-years away within the illusion he created, only half a light-minute from the enemy.

In other words, it was blindingly obvious.

Any human starship would automatically network with all other nearby ships, identifying disparities between the images captured by all the various sensors, especially focusing on detecting any differences between where the background stars were meant to be and where they were showing up, picking up on any and all “anomalies.” That then allowed one to triangulate the locations of the illusions and from there, it wasn’t much of a step to getting a firing solution. And chances were the enemy had taken similar precautions.

That was fine, however. The real trick came afterwards. When the veil dropped, revealing something wholly different, leaving the enemy questioning just what was real and what was an illusion, created where no one could see. Done properly, that’d keep one’s enemy twisting into knots trying to discover what was real and what was a trick right up until you punched their lights out … but that was hard when fighting opponents with inhuman psychology.

What the enemy was seeing was the human fleet in a spread-out formation, with enough space between each ship to reduce the efficacy of the macron clouds, both offensively and defensively. The human ships would not be clustered up, and as a result, any missiles they launched would benefit from the same.

Macron guns combined with the vast munitions stores the enemy had proven to have were the closest thing to an area weapon to exist in space, but in space, there was always a way to spread out further.

That didn’t really change the fact that the best target was still the center of the human formation … as it appeared to be.

The real formation was more akin to a gigantic donut, with the center being where all the fleet’s missiles would be funneled into, a gigantic coordinated time-on-target salvo that would be stacked onto until the enemy either did something or it reached a point where the computers were no longer able to control the swarm.

Even if the enemy wound up destroying most of it, the long-range fire wasted on those would let the battleships get into energy range with most of their heavy weapons intact, at which point this would devolve into a one-sided slaughter.

As nasty as the enemy design was against an opponent who had to close through real space, they were seemingly vulnerable to getting jumped.

Speaking of …

“Don’t let them establish those dampening fields,” Zhao ordered. “Until they reach orbit, do not allow yourself to be put into a situation where you cannot warp out of the path of their macron guns.”

Of course, he’d barely finished speaking when the first enemy ships warped right on top of the human fleet. Four of them. Near perfectly positioned to be out of the path of the missiles that the enemy had been oh so certain were hidden somewhere in what was almost certainly an illusion.

Near perfectly. The people on the fourth battleship would barely even have had the time to notice what was about to happen before being swarmed by nearly twenty missiles and reduced to a mess of twisted metal and glowing plasma. And the other three didn’t even bother trying to engage the human force; they simply continued onwards towards the planet.

The real damage had been done, though. Zhao’s subordinates had teleported away the instant the enemy had warped in close. And poof, there went the carefully built formation.

Tricky bastards …

But that hadn’t achieved much. Because now the enemy was now down a ship, and had three more caught woefully out of place, and out of warps.

Yet then a second group of four battleships warped straight into the human flotilla’s formation, which promptly made its escape again.

Was that really the plan here? Jump enough ships into the formation under Zhao’s command that, in all likelihood, they’d be able to deploy the dampening field before being destroyed, and then keep that up until the rest of the alien fleet caught up?

Or simply run the human fleet out of warps, then drop whatever of the enemy forces were still capable of it on top of them?

New orders went out. They were to save the last warp to return to Venus’ orbit, nor were they to dodge to any location from which they could not do so.

And that was when everything went wrong.

When the fourth group of enemy ships teleported into his formation, for whatever reason … several of his captains hesitated.

The weapons fire exchanged was not simply the perfunctory spray of turret-mounted secondaries that occurred between the detection of enemies and the captain, executive officer, or helmsman teleporting the ship away.

No, the captain of the Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar had taken the two seconds needed to activate his ship’s spatial targetting array, and fired all three primaries into the guts of the nearest alien warship.

That ship did not manage to deploy its dampening field, little surprise, considering how it was staggering away, bleeding atmosphere and shedding debris.

The others, however, did.

Even though the de Vivar’s intended jump had been a mere two seconds after the rest of the human fleet, that left her as the last human vessel facing four enemies, stuck inside a dampening field created by a force she could in absolutely no way overcome.

Zhao was already barking orders, starting with telling the de Vivar’s crewto abandon ship, and ending with ordering the rest of the fleet to not jump into that hornet’s nest to rescue one ship.

About half listened.

The other half warped back to deal with the four alien vessels tearing the de Vivar to shreds.

Giving the enemy exactly what they seemed to have been planning for, judging by just how quickly half the enemy fleet warped straight into the rapidly escalating skirmish, carefully positioned to be able to fire their macron guns for several seconds before momentum carried them into mutual laser range.

At which point the rest of the human formation shattered, warships leaping into action not as the united force they’d been trained to be.

Against an enemy whose coordination and willingness to sacrifice individual ships for the success of the mission would no doubt be considered legendary after this battle concluded …

The next thirty seconds were nothing but utter chaos as Zhao tried to get control of the goat rope the forces under his command had turned into. He didn’t even bother trying to give specific orders, just trying to get some general semblance of order and coordination into that mess.

Had that state of things lasted much longer, there was little doubt in Zhao’s mind that his forces would have been wiped out.

Except that was when the battle for Earth ended, and the four catapults surrounding humanity’s homeworld began to drop coordinated groups of capital ships in the rear of the enemy line of battle. In a matter of seconds, the enemy went from outnumbering the surviving human warships to being on the wrong end of three-to-two odds, and a coordinated force to boot systematically eviscerating the alien warships.

Not even two minutes later, that portion of the battle was won.

Several seconds after that, the three vessels remaining of the group that had caused the initial “relocation” had the supreme misfortune of entering missile range of the defense constellation. They were met with a wall of missiles.

Five hundred missiles for four battleships was certainly high-key overkill, but at this point, Zhao was too mentally exhausted to comment on the waste, and too focused on the battle between ships to really notice how many had been launched beyond “enough.”

Mere moments after those four had gone up in nuclear fire, the last enemy ship died, already battered to a wreck by the time the Götz von Berlichingen speared it on its heavy particle beam.

It was at this point that a new threat symbol flared to life in the belt as the shield around the catapult feeding most of Sol’s exports fell and the construct itself came apart in a matter of seconds, wreathed in explosions for a mere couple of seconds before a ripple of unreality washed out from the failing array of carefully aligned spatial magic, incoming clouds of exploding dust sent careening away seemingly by accident before the wreckage of the catapult tore itself apart.

The death of the immense ring was not the titanic explosion of a failing reactor, or the slow disintegration of a crippled ship in a tailspin, centrifugal force ripping it to bits.

Instead, it was like something was punching the metal, or maybe eating it. Piece by bloody piece, chunks were being taken out of it, some vanishing, others instantly repositioning, twisting away at new angles, until what remained resembled a cactus that had been used for target practice, still continuing to disintegrate.

Hell.

***

The lack of professionalism in her gleeful expression would, in the future, no doubt be put down to sheer exhaustion, rather than her normally iron self-control having been shot for practically the entire duration of the battle. A lie she’d support with plenty of enthusiasm, assuming she remembered to do so further down the line.

One final teleport, the last, unless the enemy had sacrificed the entirety of the Mars fleet to sell the lie, dropped fifty battleships into orbit around Mercury.

And mere tenth of a second later, there were only thirty-four of them remaining … really, what the hell had they been thinking? Teleporting that close to her, in such a tight formation, no less=

Oh, sure, she might not have gotten all of them, nor had she been able to make them end up on top of each other, but making three-quarters of them emerge so close together that collisions were functionally inevitable?

Well within her wheelhouse.

And at the speeds at which those ships traveled, a “collision” wasn’t merely the impact of two ships that caused metal to crumple and frames to warp. Instead, all that kind of impact left behind was superheated plasma, the momentum transformed into such heat that there were no naturally occurring materials short of neutronium whose response was anything save instant vaporization.

Only ten ships actually hit each other in the first instant, but as plumes of plasma and the occasional “fragment “ went careening through the cluster she’d created, those around them were forced to make emergency evasive maneuvers.

And while any one ship could do that easily, in that kind of mess, with everyone else madly maneuvering at the same time, forced to dodge not only the debris but everyone else’s own desperate attempts at evasion, with every collision further adding to the chaos … the fact that two-thirds of them had made it out of that chaos intact spoke to a truly absurd degree of coordination.

More than her fleet could have managed, Hunt had to admit. But just being able to dance would not save the rest of them.

A mere twelve light-seconds were all that separated the enemy force and the planet she stood upon. Physics said that neither of them would see what the other party did for twelve seconds, but the enemy had long since entered the area where her [Skills] gave those rules the middle finger and offered her real-time information without requiring any kind of relay or intermediary agent.

And if her opponents lacked that same capability, then Hunt would buy a hat just so she could eat it.

Thirty-six battleships against zero … and a defense constellation built to handle that many with ease, without her. Seeing that she was present, however, the only way the enemy might succeed was with the help of some kind of superweapon, but if they’d had one, it’d have almost certainly been used already.

“Launch missiles.” She ordered. “Two salvos.”

And, from the cloud of missile-bearing satellites that surrounded Mercury, five thousand guided weapons swarmed forth. Potentially enough to end the battle on their own, but by no means guaranteed to do so.

“Fire Mjolnir.”

Oh, nice as it might have been if someone had actually managed to scrounge up the Hammer of Thor to chuck at the aliens, and there were a few master chiefs she’d have trusted to make that happen, the gigantic particle beam she’d had built was the next best thing.

A weapons array over two kilometers long, twice the length of the largest warship humanity had ever constructed, a titanic turret that scarcely could have existed on a planet with greater gravity, magic or no magic … it had been the most powerful technological non-explosive weapon humans had built before the inside had been enhanced by spatial magic, lengthened ten-fold, allowing the immense power of the dozen fusion reactors powering it to push the beam of near light-speed reactors even closer to the universe’s seemingly absolute speed limit.

It was enough to tear a battleship in half at fifteen light-seconds with a single shot, putting the enemy flotilla well within range. But only taking out one felt like less than she could do.

For a brief instant, space between the barrel of the gun and an enemy battleship crunched, reduced to little under ten thousand kilometers.

At that kind of range, Mjolnir did not tear through its target. Itreduced it to vapor, then continued onwards, only a small fraction of its power spent … then it twisted back around and speared a second vessel, which was likewise completely obliterated, before the beam hit yet another patch of warped space and was sent careening at a third target.

It was the fourth ship which remained intact, which in this case meant it was “merely” torn in half as about half its mass was vaporized in an instant, sending the bow and stern spinning away in different directions … and, twisting like an electric serpent, slashed through a fifth alien battleship, tearing off its bow in a spray of hard radiation and plasma before finally meeting and smashing into the sixth one’s bow, melting a seventy-meter-wide hole through it before eventually running out of steam somewhere deep within.

Hunt stared at the ship for a long moment, waiting for it to explode.

It wasn’t so polite as to oblige her, though it was also no longer moving under its own power, nor showing any other signs of being anything other than a wreck. Whether it was the crew or the technology that had been wiped out by the radiation was a question that would be answered later, and the ship might still be playing possum … but it had still been heavily damaged.

Which left thirty ships, facing almost five thousand missiles. Granted, with the ability to flood the space between them with dust clouds from the macron guns, they’d likely have a surprisingly high interception rate, but in the end, they were still screwed.

The “correct” response to that kind of missile swarm was to burn a warp, relocate to a position the missiles would not be able to redirect …

But, well, the fools had used the entirety of their warp-[Skills] to get here. They’d be forced to run through real-space, against a pissed-off human fleet who’d managed to retain that maneuverability. If they ran, they wouldn’t get anywhere.

To be specific, Hunt had fifteen battleships to throw at whatever was left when the first salvo from the satellites hit.

Thousands of missiles died as they crashed through the clouds of high-velocity particles the enemy had thrown up as a defensive screen, hundreds more burned as they ran into the laser perimeter, and in the end, a mere hundred and forty-odd hit home.

Seven battleships were wiped off the face of the universe.

Four more went spinning off in various directions, battered into wrecks by a handful of direct strikes, or perhaps a few more near misses.

And the last two were “just” left leaking debris and atmosphere while managing to remain in formation.

Ten light-seconds of distance left, and Mjolnir had finished recharging.

Another torrent of energy tore across the star system, wiping another battleship from existence before careening back and forth across the formation like the first had.

Hunt sighed, massaging her temples, trying to banish the mounting headache long enough to end this fight. This time, she’d only gotten five, but the few that were left by that point would never survive the missile salvos that was launching … not.

She caught sight of one of the young lieutenants she liked to use as gofers staring at her in open-mouthed amazement.

“They didn’t make me Fleet Admiral because I can have the same idiotic conversation fifty times in a row without throwing someone out an airloc- …”

Ciara Hunt didn’t even manage to finish the joke before she passed out, head smacking into her desk with a dull thump. [Splintered Focus] might have let her cram the work of months into minutes, but there came a point where the strain could overwhelm even her constitution.

However, the beauty of missiles was that, unlike Mjolnir, they worked just fine without her putting her finger on the scale. And, on the screen only the lieutenant saw, the last enemy battleship bound for Mercury shattered under the hammerblows of the nuclear warheads the fleet had just hurled in their faces.

***

Sol, Outer System, Dragonfly, ten minutes earlier

They returned to a star system on fire.

Obviously, alien ships were tearing their way through the belt.

A whole lot of something had gotten wrecked above Mars, not human ships, judging by the spectroscopic analysis the computer had done automatically.

And there were still two separate fleets on an intercept course towards Earth and Venus, though the latter planet was currently sufficiently near Mercury that the Navy’s HQ might also be the target.

Neither of those was liable to need help, nor would the Dragonfly be able to reach the battles in time. [Flash Forward] was excellent for tactical maneuvering when too deep in a gravity well to use [Alcubierre Bubble], but it was absolute ass in terms of purely crossing distance under those restrictions.

The belt catapult would have been able to solve the latter issue, at least, except the place where it should have been was presently a titanic cloud of wreckage surrounded by flickering eddies of space-time that would probably turn the Dragonfly inside-out on contact. Or make something else, equally horrible, happen; he wasn’t sure whether anyone had ever figured out what breaking a catapult did, specifically. It was abundantly obvious that the one he was looking at wasn’t going to be working anytime soon, however.

Going after the ships in the asteroid belt, on the other hand, was the obvious, easy choice, and the freedom of travel being outside the sun’s zone of interference provided made this about as safe as punching a murderous alien’s battleship on the nose could possibly be.

The plan was about as bitch-basic as could be made without being stupid. It went as followed:

Step 1: teleport behind the enemy battleship

Step 2: shove as much fire as possible up their keister

Step 3: skedaddle

And, of course, use the Moebius Array to shorten the distance between the Dragonfly’s bow and the target so they could do step 2 from a safe distance, while relying on their armor and his [Energy Screen] to survive long enough to run.

Of course, there was always a chance that being so near to a battle would result in them getting hit by debris or stray shots, but who cared?

The risk of getting randomly hit by something might be immensely higher there than it was elsewhere, but even with a thousandfold increase in likelihood, a one-in-a-trillion occurrence hardly got turned into something that necessitated concern.

And even if it had been higher … no one aboard the Dragonfly cared at this point.

This was a fight they could theoretically stay out of. Practically? None of them would ever forgive themselves if they did.

Space around them warped as Derek triggered [Alcubierre Bubble], dropping them behind an alien battleship currently fighting off seven heavy cruisers and winning. Even with human ships taking full advantage of the fact that they could teleport freely, the alien captain had done a remarkable job of keeping their engines intact and laying down a lethal web with those infernal dust guns, leaving no paths of attack possible without eating at least some damage.

Problem was … “some damage” was an amount that [Energy Screen] let them shrug off.

The Dragonfly roared back into normal space, appearing at the very edge of the range of the enemy ship’s lasers.

Then distance between them collapsed, his ship’s primaries briefly firing at point-blank range.

And a split-second later, the heavy railgun slug punched through the armor plates that managed to snap into place despite the mere fraction of a second the enemy ship had to react, like they were made from tissue paper, before hammering into the shockingly delicate electronics that lay at the very deepest part of any starship’s engines, turning them into little more than plasma and high-velocity shrapnel that went scything clean through whatever lay beyond.

When the ultra-relativistic electron beam flashed through the resultant gash and ripped through the wreckage of the enemy ship’s engineering spaces, hosing down everything around it with gamma rays as it went.

The alien battleship was sent staggering forward by an internal explosion, the entirety of its engines going dark.

Well, it’d still be able to move around via magic or [Skills], but in terms of technology? That ship was going nowhere.

That trick had mostly worked due to money, namely, the family money that had bought the research facility that had built him this ship.

The next step, the one he’d only now decided to take … that was all him. All his own power, all his own creation. He’d designed it to work with almost any material, but what was available here, venting plasma and leaking hydrogen that was supposed to be converted into the former before being fired from the engines, that was the perfect subject.

[Cosmic Event: Birth of a Star].

In an instant, every “applicable” bit of matter around the targeted area was sucked into the spell, superheated and compressed until atoms began to fuse and promptly exploded. Inside the enemy vessel, if only barely.

When the forward three-quarters of the battleship went spinning away, flipping end over end, tumbling through space … until it exploded, seemingly from its reactor having gone critical.

His sucker punch, even if it couldn’t be repeated anytime soon, had taken out a battleship. And killed so many people.

Derek swallowed, staring at the screen, when that realization hit home.

The same screen that was showing far more pinpricks of light than just stars. In fact, most of the brighter ones were the glowing wreckage of habitats and civilian starships, each representing hundreds or even thousands of lost lives.

And suddenly, he did not feel bad anymore.

Instead, he was left to gaze in shock at the gauge representing the remaining strength of the shield his [Skill] had created.

Twenty-three percent.

“Holy fuck, that was way too close …” Atticus sighed, then started to laugh, turning his seat towards Derek, one hand raised, a hand that Derek tried to high-five, only to find the distance was just barely too great when they were both restrained by seatbelts.

“Boys,” Ye-in groaned, gesturing towards the front of the bridge, where an “incoming transmission” warning was blinking. From the UENS Exeter.

Derek accepted it immediately, attempting to school his expression into something more appropriate, ruthlessly suppressing the urge to check his clothes for stains or rips. If there were any, he’d have fixed them when he’d put them on, and he’d done nothing capable of causing either since.

“Thank you for your help, Dragonfly. Are you capable of repeating that maneuver?”

“Everything except the finale,” Derek replied. “And we have preparations to make before we can do the rest.”

“Understood. Exeter, out.”

“We just got a data dump from the navy,” Ye-in reported. “General tactical analysis, and a list of the current crisis points.”

The latter would be very useful in a few minutes; the former was depressing.

Overall, it seemed to boil down to “the belt is being torn to shreds, while all the reinforcements were stuck shielding inhabited planets with a hundred times as many people, each.”

This left the people out here out to dry … but there wasn’t a better response. Because the planets had to stay covered, especially after the belt catapult had been destroyed, rendering a swift return impossible.

Mana poured out of Derek as he reinforced the [Energy Screen], though he had to down a mana point before he could top it up fully; the shield gauge topping out just as the Moebius Array clicked over to “ready.” Assigning the extra magic regeneration to increasing its recharge rate had definitely been the right choice.

Ready … save for the fact that he was out of mana, which was why this time around, Ye-in was jumping the ship.

Their target peeled out of the sphere of warped light that was [Alcubierre Bubble], a battleship currently tearing the remains of an industrial complex into even smaller pieces. Whether this particular bastard was attempting to make sure there was nothing salvageable, or doing his or her best to kill the survivors, was anyone’s guess, and utterly unimportant.

Both the Dragonfly’s primaries smashed into the ship’s stern, ruining engines that weren’t presently firing … until a titanic burst of plasma sent it staggering forward when something combusted.

It was damage that would be annoying, but far from crippling, and the enemy ship was already burning its thrusters to spin around and bring its heavy lasers to bear, dust guns sweeping around to create a lethal net expanding every which way … and the Dragonfly was already gone, Ye-in’s [Alcubierre Bubble] pulling them out of the path of the attack and depositing them in empty space a light-minute “above” the belt.

“That was clean,” Derek decided after checking the shield gauge, which hadn’t even budged. Apparently, that ship hadn’t been watching for attackers dropping out of FTL right on top of it.

As he watched the ship they’d just sucker-punched, a group of four human battlecruisers appeared from a burst of light, dropping back into reality in a diamond formation, flashing across the alien warship’s stern in less than a second, raining fire down onto it as they went past, leaving the battleship coming apart as it was sent tumbling, breaking into three pieces.

By the time the shots fired from the human warships’ railguns had crossed the intervening distance, all they did was smash the wreckage into even smaller pieces.

It was enough to make a man feel inadequate …

“I mean, sure, that’s what we’d be doing if we had their firepower,” Derek finally muttered, a mock-pout on his face that he did his best to keep in place even as his brain finally combined what he’d seen with everything else he knew.

Namely … one of the things the info dump from the Exeter had shared was that the battlecruisers had been deployed in groups of six. And he was pretty sure that those scorchmarks and missing weapons weren’t just an artistic choice on the part of the people who’d constructed them. In fact, looking at the broader picture, there were only eleven battlecruisers left, total, all of them damaged. He might not know how many had been assigned to Sol to start with, but it surely had to have been more.

Even though there were dozens of alien wrecks drifting in the belt, those victories had clearly not been free.

Derek picked out a new target, which was looking like it had been put through the absolute wringer. Bow missing, half the engines burned out, half a dozen gashes, one of which nearly reached the ship’s spine …

It was in such bad shape that under any other circumstances, opening fire without giving the opportunity to surrender might have constituted a war crime.

Under “other circumstances,” the enemy would almost certainly have not proven themselves determined to fight to the death.

Derek was fully aware he wasn’t so much “coming to terms with killing” as he was letting his fury that began to boil higher and higher with every passing second of seeing what these bastards had done cloud out any doubt about this course of action.

This time, it was Atticus who jumped them, the alien ship visible for a mere second before the heavy particle beam speared through a hole in its armor and tore through the spot that seemed to house the reactor, judging by the location of the battleship-obliterating internal explosions they’d observed. Or maybe it was something else highly explosive.

Whatever they’d hit, it obligingly detonated, reducing the alien warship to an expanding cloud of plasma and debris in an instant … though by the time Atticus had started dragging them away, the shield gauge had dropped back down to sixty-two percent.

Someone on the other ship had been quick on the draw. Or maybe that one had simply been in a position to keep its weapons in standby mode, ready to fire on anything that tried to ambush it.

It was after this third sucker punch that the enemy seemd to finally take notice of them in particular. Or maybe they’d simply found an annoyance that wasn’t a division of battlecruisers moving as one, a target that could actually be removed in a single quick firing pass.

The roar of [Danger Radar] triggering blew his concentration to shreds, leaving Derek blinking in confusion for a couple of seconds before his brain caught up with what was happening.

“We got incoming! Evade and prepare!”

And [Scholarly Admiral] turned all that into concrete instructions. Plans. Actions.

Oh, he still found the borderline-telepathic communication creepy as hell, but the combination of [Scholar of War] and the party-[Skill] Isaac had taught him was OP as hell.

Because what should have been utter nonsense had actually translated into “maintain evasive action to make sure the enemy wouldn’t emerge from FTL with a clean firing solution” as well as “make sure we can hit the enemy when they emerge.”

And a mere second after he’d finished speaking, the battleship erupted back into normal space right before them, [Cosmic Awareness] highlighting the emergence point a split-second before it happened.

Fifteen hundred meters in length, wider than the Dragonfly was long, and covered with enough weapons to vaporize his ship in seconds.

Derek could feel his heart leap into his throat. This felt very different when they weren’t getting the jump on one of these things … but there’d been enough of a warning that they hadn’t not gotten the jump on their foe.

Engines burning at full, the Dragonfly was hurled forward, straight at the bastard warship, ripple-firing off all eight of her missile cells even as their turrets tore into the alien vessel’s visible weapons while enemy lasers flashed past just beside them, where they would have been without advanced warnings.

For about two seconds, they were pouring fire into the hull of the alien war machine from point-blank range.

That was when the shield-gauge flashed empty, and the Dragonfly shook, the screech of tortured metal ringing across the bridge.

“It’s blocking [Alcubierre Bubble]!” Atticus snapped. And Derek realized that their vector going throuhg the enemy ship prevented him from using [Flash Forward] to escape …

“Fuck.”

And around them, their ship was rapidly being torn to shreds.

That lasted for a mere moment before the world flickered, [Void Shift] carrying the Dragonfly off a direct collision course even as the missiles impacted, and Derek poured the entirety of his freshly regenerated mana into triggering a [Flash Forward] that carried them free of the enemy’s weapons range. Unless …

“Can you guys jump?” he asked.

“We’re good,” Atticus laughed, and out of the corner of his eye, Derek caught the pilot giving the main screen the finger. Glancing to the right revealed that Ye-in was doing the same exact thing.

And with the Party active, it took a mere thought to make sure Mimi was fine too.

Though it was equally easy to sense the rage boiling within their firebrand of an engineer. Yep, he’d be hearing from her about letting “her” ship get shot up.

Derek put a hand on his heart and felt its frantic hammering slow down into something slightly more normal.

Ye-in threw the feed from a satellite on the main screen at that point, showing the series of deep craters in the battleship’s hull where the missiles had impacted.

That was the one small advantage kinetic warheads held over their thermonuclear cousins: a nuke needed to detonate before the impact broke its detonation mechanism.

A slab of steel driven forward by rockets did not.

Less damage overall, but most of it would be inside the enemy as shrapnel punched deep within.

Not that he’d have taken that as his cue to go after the battleship again. They’d mauled it pretty good, doing a lot better than they realistically should have been able to, but short of firing their primaries down into the engines, even the Dragonfly had no chance at bringing down a capital ship on her own.

[Danger Radar] roared a warning once again, and this time, Derek didn’t even bother to think about a proper response. He barked the order, and the Dragonfly flashed away, leaving the damaged battleship floating in space behind them, well out of range.

Cursing internally, he downed enough mana jellies to completely fill his pool while rendering his regeneration down to basically nothing.

Yep, that thing was pissed.

And now, the others seemed to be turning. Not all, but a significant chunk of what remained.

He might have expected that one battleship’s commander to pull an Ahab and do something stupid in the name of revenge, taking personal offense to what Derek had just pulled … but seven? That was the kind of thing that could cost one the whole damn battle, and there was absolutely no way any of them had caused enough damage for that to be worth it.

Once again, [Danger Radar] flared to life, and yet another warp removed them from the path of the attack. Honestly, if this particular [Skill] didn’t define each of those enemy jumps as a “surprise attack” and found them worthy of warning about, they’d already be dead.

“If they’re going to be behaving like stubborn bulls, I guess we’re playing matador,” he decided. “And we’re staying the hell out of the way of their attack. No more engagements.”

That was followed by a distant, “And if we get shot at again, you fix it!”, rather pointedly shouted instead of being transmitted throuhg the party.

“Deal,” Derek broadcast back, letting out a single soft laugh despite himself before his mood fell again.

And then they had to dodge into FTL once more.

Seriously, how badly did we piss these guys off? And how? Are they some kind of warrior culture that I’m now in a blood feud with?

The next several minutes gave him an answer to the first question, at least. And that was “a lot.”

Even when the ship chasing them got raked by groups of battlecruisers, even when one of the alien warships somehow sideswiped a piece of debris, reducing every weapon along one side of the ship to vapor in an instant, they stuck to the Dragonfly like flies on shit.

But, unlike military ships and their larger crews, their newly upgraded light cruiser only had four people’s mana pools worth of energy to jump with. And Mimi had to devote hers to damage control; the rest of them had little left.

“We’re done.” Derek declared. They were in absolutely no position to continue their previous efforts, neither in terms of their ship or [Skills], triggered [Alcubierre Bubble], and dragged the Dragonfly off into interstellar space.

“We … ow. Fuck!” he yelped as a couple of fist-sized snowglobe-looking things containing a model of one of the alien battleships smacked into his chin before dropping into his lap, one landing in a rather sensitive spot.

He glared down at the mystery things before groaning and facepalming as he put it all together. Apparently, the [System] thought it was being cute.

[Starship Aspect] gave him Aspects for starships he defeated in battle.

Through his own declaration, the battle had ended for them.

And since they’d been accelerating when the damn things had spawned … smack.

Hardly the most dignified way for that to have gone, admittedly, but they were all still alive, and he had a damn ship to fix.

***

Interstellar Space, en route to Sol

Isaac wasn’t conceited enough to assume that the enemy had chosen this moment to strike specifically because he wasn’t present.

However, he was also too aware of his reputation to assume it wasn’t a factor.

And the next step was obvious: return at maximum possible speed, and fucking slaughter anyone who hadn’t managed to flee by the time he arrived.

That thought continued to burn in his mind for the next ten minutes as he tuned out the swirling chaos of the [Alcubierre Bubble], doing his damdest to reach a distance which he could cross with [Continent Strider]. Damnit. He’d been abusing it far too much, preparing so much for the apocalyptic attack that he’d been unable to respond when the enemy launched a not-quite-apocalyptic attack before everything was ready.

When he finally crossed that invisible boundary, he dispelled his FTL [Skill], crashing into the star-speckled void of interstellar space for a mere moment before a portal swallowed him, dropping him right on top of where the latest information he had access to had put an enemy starship.

Isaac’s sensory [Aura] boiled out of him, sweeping through the battleship, casually tearing past every protection and info-sec enchantment built into it, all in search of one particular component he knew it had to have.

At the same time, space around him began to bleed as he let his second [Aura] reach full power, the [Aura of the Crimson Dawn] making him appear like an avenging angel, bearing a halo of blood, as he threw himself at his enemy, the [Aspects of the Apocalypse] burning beneath his skin.

[Speed of Hati] not only tripled his already ludicrous speed, but also allowed him to run on empty space, while [Power of the Behemoth] made every step land with that much more force, the fact that the “platforms” he was kicking off were technically indestructible making his acceleration truly unreal …

Someone on the enemy ship would notice him two seconds from now, and attempt to use some kind of short-range teleport to dodge … but the fact that he could see that far ahead into the future made it a moot point.

Isaac threw his sword, blade glowing with the energy from [True Cut], the enemy [Skill] coming apart before it ever had the chance to truly activate.

Then, he triggered [I Am The Sword], the moment of absolute invulnerability and immovability turning the collision between him and the enemy ship into the far more spectacular display of him punching clean through the vessel like a particularly savage meteor, his [Aura] vaporizing several bits of important-looking machinery he hadn’t quite managed to hit, but when he struck the reactor, none of that really mattered anymore.

The artificial star that was contained within the enemy’s fusion reactor might have only survived for a split-second after its containment failed, but that was more than enough time to consume the entirety of the vessel it had been powering mere moments ago.

“Alright, where’s the next of you bastards…” Isaac muttered to himself as he began to look for his next target. But there were none.

Instead, there were a myriad of distress calls he was not equipped to help with, transmissions that comprised entirely of streams of curses that left him wishing he could do the same, and desperate arguing about what the ever-loving fuck had just happened.

He’d seriously have to get on the latter … but right now, he had the time to take a couple of seconds to center himself.

Humanity had a new enemy.

An enemy who was perfectly willing to throw a weight of metal equivalent to half their goddamn navy into the meatgrinder and refused to retreat even when all was clearly lost.

An enemy who was clearly insane, but too capable to be entirely stupid.

And in the end, for Isaac Thoma, there really was only one response to be made:

Ah, shit, here we go again …