Chapter 494: Ch
Yet, it was also facing the head-on attacks launched relentlessly by Ritika’s fleet. Under this onslaught, even the colossal fortress trembled, its structure letting out creaks that reverberated across deck after deck.
With every strike that landed across its pale blue shield, ripples of energy burst outward. While the shield successfully bore the brunt of the attacks’ fierce force and heat, it wasn’t able to block the thunderous shockwaves, which crashed head-on into the fortress’s outer armor—straining it and bending it slightly inward time and time again.
The command deck of the Radiant Prime had given way to panic long ago. Holographic tactical maps and graphs flickered, overlaid with cascading red warnings and alerts.
"Forward planar shield integrity down to sixty percent!" shouted the shield officer, her long hair trailing as dark brown wings flared from her back. Her hands continuously flicked across the tactical command interface again and again as fresh warnings kept appearing.
"Dammit, section 2A14 is almost near collapse! Nearby sections from 2A to 2B are also under concentrated attack by the enemy. Their energy attacks are seemingly interfering with our systems, specifically the outer reflector layer, faster than our cooling system can cool them. Hull structure HA-201 to HA-409 are heating up rapidly!" she spoke again.
"Re-redirect the additional cooling power from nearby sections through the subterranean heat lines!" the engineering director immediately reacted, bellowing from his lungs onto the comm with a raspy, strained voice. "Damage control squads 401 and 412, get moving! Repair the relays in these sections immediately!"
Technicians and cybernetic teams sprinted across sections HA-201 to HA-409 for emergency repairs, fighting through the constant tremors that their fortress was going through, which added more time and difficulty to their work.
"Damn it, why is this damn fortress shaking so much? Are the enemy attacks really that fearsome that their attack’s aftereffects are not only shaking our whole colossal fortress, but their heat is even damaging our hull structure and modules?" spoke one Republican with a pig-like face and human-like body.
Others just gritted their teeth, pulling lines through the walls, roofs, and underfloors—repairing what they could and strengthening what they could. At the same time, they strengthened the cooling pipelines, but nothing was improving.
Instead, they felt the heat around them increasing, and even through their heat-shielding body armor, they were still feeling it.
"Dammit, something’s wrong. Everyone, quickly, let’s get away from here!" the team leader spoke and quickly sprinted toward the exits. The others, too, didn’t question their team leader and hurriedly sprinted out, sharing the same uneasy feeling. Anyway, they had completed their work, so they had nothing to fear.
But as they moved out, someone couldn’t help but speak, albeit a bit cautiously: "Hey, don’t you all feel that this battle is becoming more and more weird and unfavorable?"
"You felt the same?" stated another person immediately after hearing this, and a few more joined in.
"I was suppressing it, but now that you have mentioned it... Indeed, the enemy, which just happens to be human—something hard to believe, but on the matter, word is they have wiped out three of the four supreme families, everyone in them, and their race." The person who spoke trembled as the words passed through his mouth. His emotions were mixed, but not overly so.
Everyone hearing this gave him a pitying look as they continued to walk, for he too was a member of one such clan. Not anyone special, but being part of one of the clans was still a matter of status; now, it looked like a curse.
The person seemingly pulled himself out of these emotions and said, "The weirdest thing is they only had a strength of no more than ten thousand ships or so, and yet they were able to destroy all three clans along with the foundations they held, and then they destroyed the armada that the President sent."
"Hey, I heard that as well. And as for that armada, they were weak," another rushed up and added immediately after the person finished.
Hearing this, the person shook his head. "Weak they might be, but they still had the same numbers as ours, and a few things those aristocrats had were even superior to ours. And yet they were still destroyed in not even a single day."
"He is right," supported the squad leader this time. "No matter what the defense was based on—quality or quantity—it was there, and yet they failed to hold for even a day. That signifies the humans’ strength no matter what.
Just look at us: being attacked from three positions, and yet we are helpless to even retaliate because the enemy is way too far away from our targeting range. That adds strength and weight to the enemy.
And now in this situation, even while protected by a shield, our fortress is moving toward collapse, at least in that section."
Others, hearing this, became silent, while some even began to shake and asked, "Wh-what should we do then, leader? By all that, doesn’t that mean the situation looks a bit hopeless to us?"
"A bit hopeless?" The leader turned around, looked at the person who spoke, and chuckled. "It’s not ’a bit,’ but a near-collapse situation."
Saying that, he turned to look at everyone on his team and took a single deep breath before speaking. "For now, everyone, you should stay close to each other. If things become too bad, we will make our way toward the hangar bay and retreat. You all are intelligent, so you should understand."
Saying that, he walked ahead again, leaving everyone on his team astonished, surprised, and filled with mixed emotions. But none felt any aversion toward the idea; in fact, they agreed with it mentally, even if they didn’t speak of it out loud.
This was a conversation that remained between this group of people, but at this point in time, these kinds of ideas were already beginning to spread among the few who were aware of the current situation—mostly those stationed within the perimeter walls.
Meanwhile, inside the bridge, the Grand Marshal overlooked all the chaos erupting around him as his officers tried their best to bring things under control. From what he could tell, things were not improving or steadying as they moved forward; instead, they were worsening.
Yet even then, he stood entirely motionless with his hands clasped behind his back, his uniform remaining straight and immaculate despite all the tremors and violent shaking the fortress was enduring.
At this moment, his state of mind was quite complex. He was caught dealing with two separate matters, to the point where he couldn’t even bring himself to properly check the status of his armada or the outer perimeter keeping their destruction at bay.
Nor did he react to the power surges blowing out across various sections.
Even when a few overhead panels broke loose and slammed down not far from him, he remained unflinching.
His crimson eyes were fixed solely on the primary holo-map, staring ahead and waiting for the tracking systems and radar to register the enemy so he could unleash his full might.
At the same time, the dark soul—shaken by the realization that, for all these years, it had been played by this youngster whom it had assumed was fully under control—was once again retaliating against the white Kalen.
This forced him to dedicate more of his mental focus toward fighting the dark soul, which he had begun to view as an unyielding cockroach that refused to die.
Push it to the brink of death, and the dark soul would rise again the very next instant, even stronger than before.
Coupled with the deteriorating situation outside, his frustration mounted steadily, and with no way to vent it, he could only bottle it up inside.
Because of this internal and external turmoil, his composed expression finally cracked, settling into a deep frown.
"Just how far away have these humans positioned themselves?" he muttered under his breath. "I have covered an entire light-year in these two and a half hours, yet they still haven’t been detected by our radar systems. Just how long is their firing range, dammit?"
No matter. I’ll reach them soon enough, he thought.
He raised his hand and signaled with a sharp motion, commanding aloud, "Push forward at full speed!"
All the while, Grand Admiral Mav’s fleet and High Admiral Ritik’s fleet were right at the rear of the Republican armada, which was speeding away from them and closing in toward High Admiral Ritika’s forces. They were not giving the armada an inch, increasing their own speed while launching one furious strike after another.
Though the distance between them remained between 2 and 2.5 light-years—a range at which the Republicans still couldn’t lock onto them and could do little more than helplessly defend—it provided immense breathing room for the two human fleets.
They could maneuver freely without worrying about defending against Republican counterattacks , granting them ample....