Chapter 44 43:
Thragg, upon observing the sensors, understood the geometry of his disadvantage. His little more than 400 pure Viltrumites, although invincible in singular combat, faced 22.8 billion enemies.
The cost of each Viltrumite death would suppose for the Tripartite Coalition an approximate of 120000 ships and more than 2000000 soldiers. Or that would have been the matter, had he not made the decision to take the reins of the situation with his own hands.
There was no turning back now.
On the enemy side, farther beyond, what could be witnessed was nothing more than aligned interstellar lights, there they awaited.
In the presence of the great nebula, three commanders of the Luminus Coalition observed the deployment of the Viltrumite Empire.
So much time had passed, so many deaths had occurred, that even the most bloodthirsty seemed horrified by the level to which the conflict had reached.
For the Coalition, more than 250 years had already passed since the beginning of this resistance campaign, and what would then become known in the annals as the Battle of the Withered Tree was about to begin.
General Lanther, supreme commander of the space forces of the Tripartite Coalition, held in his hands one of the six hundred and forty-two existing Piercing Spears.
The general, veteran of one hundred and forty border skirmishes and successive victories against the imperial general himself, kept his fingers resting over the activation shaft accepting that for better or worse, in this final battle they would make history throughout the entire galaxy.
At his right flank floated an Aizir of the ancestral guard, firstborn son and legitimate heir to the throne of the dominant warlike race in the sector.
His height exceeded four meters, and his hair, of a red that seemed incandescent even in the vacuum, fell over shoulders covered in golden runes.
The Aizir, prince Thuk-Ooohr, wielded a two-handed hammer, the legendary divine weapon Stormbreaker, measuring raw electricity as if it were an organic extension of his will.
The third figure was a heroine of the Cosmos Empire, she was none other than Captain Cosmos.
She was part of the technological elite of the Tripartite Coalition.
Her combat suit, classified as Vanguard-Ultra model, contained a miniature Dyson sphere-type pectoral core that continuously generated controlled fusion energy.
The sensors of the enemy fleet, deployed more than two million kilometers away, registered that source of power as a small sun being born in the middle of the defensive formation, that empress was a monster.
Her capacity to channel and redirect stellar energy made her the only operative capable of countering, even if only temporarily, the tactical superiority of the Grand Regent.
The three knew what was at stake. The intelligence reports, confirmed by long-range reconnaissance, indicated that Thragg himself was leading the offensive.
The implications of these events had to be taken with utmost seriousness, because a being capable of unifying by force his own almost indestructible people supposed a difficulty that guaranteed the possibility of their own mortality.
If the Tripartite Coalition of Luminus failed, the millennial tree would be cut down, its roots of interstellar gas dissolved, and its people scattered or enslaved by these soulless demons.
Filled with strength and irritability, anxious for battle, the Aizir raised Stormbreaker.
"WWWWWWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRR!!"
With that battle cry transmitted through magic, the golden runes on his skin began to pulse with an increasingly accelerated rhythm, and the electricity flashing around him went from being a mere static discharge to a contained storm.
The hammer, raised above his head, absorbed the energy of the runes, of the heroine, of General Lanther himself, becoming a focus of power that visually distorted the surrounding space.
When the weapon descended, the vacuum itself seemed to tear apart.
A thunder of cataclysmic proportions erupted from the hammer, expanding in a plasma ring that traveled hundreds of kilometers in all directions. The swarm ships of the Viltrumite vanguard, at least one billion of those technological shells crewed by colonial races, were volatilized upon contact.
There were not even explosions, everything simply stopped functioning for a moment.
There were barely survivors in the first Viltrumite lines, but the die had already been cast.
The ten point eight billion Aizir warriors who formed the floating wall responded in unison, their axes and enchanted armor shining with the same golden radiance. The four point eight billion of the Cosmic Force activated their synchronized attack systems.
The seven point two billion Lanther adjusted their mobile planetary weapons.
In response, the Viltrumite tide began to advance and with it, annihilation.
The colonial forces, billions of sacrificial infantry, formed the first wave. Behind them, millions of Venatici deployed their energy shields while the Viltrumite cruisers, in the rearguard, coordinated the orbital bombardment.
From the "Eye of Argal" turrets and the swarm ships, billions of disintegrating beams descended like rain upon the Coalition lines.
The intermediate space became a wall of continuous plasma and for every second of advance, twelve million projectiles saturated the vacuum.
The great battle had begun.