Chapter 360: Helplessness
On the surface of the warship’s hull, the Space Octopuses displayed remarkable agility, their twisting, weaving movements making them perfectly suited to the environment. Their unpredictable maneuvers often caused the laser array and close-in defense cannons to miss their targets, with many shots striking their own warship instead.
While these stray hits couldn’t breach the ship’s armor, the repeated impacts were far from ideal.
Some larval bodies were shot down or even killed, but the numbers of the defensive weapons were also rapidly dwindling. The Space Octopuses, with their upgraded bio-armor for increased resilience and re-optimized tentacle strength, demonstrated destructive capabilities far exceeding expectations in close combat.
Against these biological weapons, the mechanically rigid constructs of the Daqi warships appeared utterly powerless once engaged in melee combat.
That such a scenario could even occur was a rarity, the result of a series of coincidences creating the perfect conditions.
First and foremost, the enemy had to be within close range—a critical requirement. Secondly, the enemy’s warships had to be few in number, led by a commander either unfamiliar with swarm close-quarters tactics or prone to mistakes. Additionally, the presence of an electromagnetic megastructure was indispensable. These factors were all interdependent, and the absence of any one would render the strategy ineffective.
While launching 300 meter mature bodies was not overly taxing for the electromagnetic megastructure, it could only fire one at a time, even at maximum frequency. If the enemy fleet were too numerous, a single coordinated salvo could obliterate the mature body before it ever got close. At longer distances, as seen earlier, if the enemy warships had time to fire a second volley, switching their main cannons to burst energy mode could also halt the mature body’s advance.
The presence of the electromagnetic megastructure was straightforward enough—without it, the mature bodies would lack the speed to traverse the battlefield quickly enough to reach their targets.
Take the earlier scenario, for instance. If the mature bodies had to rely on their own propulsion, they wouldn’t have been able to catch the Daqi warships. Even if the ships had remained stationary, they could have fired twenty salvos by the time the mature bodies arrived.