Chapter 493: Ch
Several defensive installations fared far worse; their shields held for only a few agonizing seconds before shattering completely. The raw kinetic and energy payload plowed straight into their exposed hulls, reducing the stations to crippled, burning wreckage within minutes.
Kalen’s brow furrowed sharply. "Damage report! Give me an immediate status update on the fleet!"
"Grand Marshal! Critical damage across defensive sectors K-4, K-6, and K-7 through K-14!" the officer reported cautiously, a flicker of hesitation in his voice as he sensed a subtle, unfamiliar presence in the commander he had served for years. "Their shields have completely collapsed, and primary weapons systems are offline. As of now, they have lost all combat capability."
"Hmm..."
The white Kalen pondered the report for a brief moment before issuing a steady command: "Order immediate evacuations for all personnel aboard those crippled stations. Have the adjacent defensive installations shift formation and plug the gaps left in our perimeter."
He paused, his eyes narrowing slightly as he followed up, "What about the other fortresses? Aside from our own and the Lunar Fortresses, how is the rest of the battle line holding up?"
"Minimal structural damage, sir!" the officer answered swiftly. "Their shields held the line and are already recharging. We have engineering teams on active standby—if any primary barrier approaches critical overload, they can cycle it offline and engage the auxiliary shield generators while the main grid cools down. All in all, our defensive shielding remains well within operational reserves."
"Good," Kalen replied with a decisive nod. "Order the armada to pivot hard toward the port flank and advance at full speed. If the enemy refuses to come into our engagement range, we will bring the fight directly to them."
"Yes, Grand Marshal!"
The officer snapped a crisp salute, his face flushed as adrenaline surged through his veins. The aggressive order ignited a primal thrill in his chest, making his heart hammer with anticipation—and he wasn’t alone. Across the entire bridge, a subtle, fanatical zeal began to infect the crew, an eerie shift in morale that went completely unnoticed in the heat of the moment.
Within minutes, the massive armada reorganized its formation, pivoting hard toward the port flank and advancing at a deliberate, steady burn.
Aboard her flagship—the Super Star Destroyer Odyssey—High Admiral Ritika was the first to detect the maneuver.
"High Admiral!" a sensor officer called out urgently, following protocol even though Ritika was already staring at the tactical telemetry. "Movement detected in the Republican armada! They’ve changed vectors and are advancing rapidly toward our flank!"
"I see it," Ritika replied calmly. "Relay the order to the rest of the fleet: prepare for direct ship-to-ship engagement. In the meantime, maintain a continuous bombardment. Let’s see if we can force a clean breakthrough before they close the distance."
"Right away, High Admiral!"
Simultaneously, across the vast theater of war, Grand Admiral Mav and High Admiral Ritik detected the fleet movement through their own long-range sensor grids. Both were mildly surprised that the enemy commander—unable to lock onto their precise positions and refusing to remain a sitting target—had chosen to aggressively advance into the dark to hunt them down. Yet, it made sense; whoever was leading the enemy fleet possessed sharp combat instincts.
Stationed in different sectors, both commanders independently arrived at the same tactical conclusion.
"Prepare the fleet for a head-on clash," Ritik commanded his bridge crew, his eyes fixed on the holotank. "Ramp up the firing rate and keep the pressure dialed to the maximum on the Republican vanguard. The moment you find an opening in their line, pour everything we have into it!"
A short distance away, Mav took the tactical escalation one step further.
"Prep all combat mechs and starfighter squadrons for immediate deployment," Mav ordered, his voice cold and steady. "This time, their objective isn’t just interception. Once they breach the frontline, their targets will include the enemy capital ships themselves. Have the pilots brace for high-gravity maneuvers and prepare for the added combat load!"
Meanwhile, the Republican armada forged ahead through the void of the star system like an enraged beehive—a colossal swarm of over two hundred thousand warships.
Super battleships, standard battleships, battlecruisers, missile cruisers, fleet carriers, destroyers, and heavy assault craft advanced in an interlocking, concentric spherical formation.
Encircling the entire host was an outer perimeter of heavy defense towers, eight medium-category stellar fortresses, and three converted lunar fortresses.
It was an ancient tactical doctrine used across countless races and eras, modernized into a three-dimensional spatial bulwark specifically engineered for scenarios like this—forging an ostensibly impenetrable shield wall in every conceivable direction.
Whether it would truly hold under pressure, however, remained to be proven.
At the same time, roughly three light-years out in the deep void beyond the star system’s immediate gravitational influence, two allied fleets totaling just over three thousand six hundred ships—where the smallest vessel was a heavy battlecruiser and the largest a Super Star Destroyer—surged forward at breakneck speeds.
Arranged in a piercing spearhead formation, their propulsion thrusters roared with blinding brilliance as weapon batteries along their hulls glowed in a kaleidoscope of lethal energies, unleashing an unrelenting, continuous barrage toward the Republican armada.
The light-years between the fleets turned into a sea of fire.
The incoming salvo tore straight through the Republican armada’s early interception grid, striking the energy barriers of the defense towers, the eight stellar fortresses, and the lunar fortresses simultaneously.
It was a torrential storm of devastation: ultra-dense kinetic slugs, hyper-charged plasma bolts, graviton torpedoes, and terrifying dark-hole warheads.
The Republican armada answered in kind. Massive rail cannons, heavy plasma batteries, and spinal ion cannons barked in a thunderous rhythm, while millions of point-defense turrets desperately tracked the incoming projectiles—yet their interception rate barely hovered between twenty to thirty percent.
Unable to neutralize the overwhelming barrage in flight, the outermost ring of the defensive perimeter bore the initial brunt of the catastrophic bombardment.
Positioned at intervals of forty to fifty kilometers along the perimeter across the port, stern, and starboard sectors, each massive defensive spire absorbed thousands of direct hits every second.
Their energy shielding strobed violently from the opening seconds of impact. Within minutes, the shield generators hit their thermal thresholds and collapsed under the strain.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
The defensive barriers shattered like brittle glass, leaving nothing between the incoming warheads and the Republican towers. Dense kinetic shells struck first, buckling the forward composite armor plates inward.
Seconds later, hyper-charged plasma payloads washed over the exposed superstructures, flash-melting several square kilometers of reinforced alloy in blinding infernos.
As the towers’ structural frames began to crumple, direct hits from heavy anti-matter and graviton missiles struck their cores.
Miniature suns blossomed against the pitch-black void before collapsing into violent implosions, leaving behind only shattered debris where multi-kilometer spires had stood moments before.
Wide breaches were tore open across the Republican formation. Yet, before Mav and Ritik’s fleets could exploit the gaps they had created, fresh defense towers surged out from the inner layers of the armada to take their place, seamlessly locking into position and restoring the crystalline shield.
The Republican Armada’s fleet logistics, already prepared for such a scenario, executed an immediate repositioning action.
Once the formation’s outer perimeter—which was also the most critical part of the formation—fell, a replacement heavy defense tower platform, quickly moved in from the inner perimeter, fired its thrusters, and slotted seamlessly into the vacant coordinates while maintaining pace with the armada. It also instantly raised a fresh crystalline shield envelope, sealing the breach.
Not far away from these defense towers, the conical-shaped, medium-class fortresses—all eight of them—were bearing an even more exaggerated volume of attack and pressure, going through their own ordeals at that moment.
So much so, the whole hull structure of these fortresses was continuously vibrating under the collision of hundreds and thousands of attacks, if not more, striking their shields.
These attacks were like thunder, constantly bombarding them without any stop. Their more powerful, heavy-class shield generators were already reaching peak bearability, just like the defense towers.
With each passing second, the shield generator’s cooling conduits were vaporizing under the peak upward load, and sparks were rising from the generator like thick bolts striking around randomly across the shielding room.
Before long, the management system quickly shut it off, and a nearby auxiliary generator began to operate.
The fortress shields flared once again with new power, causing the cracks that had appeared all over the shield near that area to quickly vanish, allowing the shield to recover to its peak strength and continue to bear the fierce attacks landing on it.
At the port quarter and starboard quarter, two of the three lunar fortresses were faring a bit better. The same could be said for the bow-area lunar fortress, known as the Radiant Prime. The largest of all the moon fortresses—reaching a diameter of 2,500 km, carved from a dead moon, and encased in layered, refined T3-class super-steel—it served as the head of the armada and its most dominant power.
Yet, it was also facing the head-on attacks launched relentlessly by Ritika’s fleet.