102 The Eve of Ruin (2/2)

The time to fight had come.

Reed and Lu'um stood up together and said their farewells to Astor, Horatio, and Ophelia before they left. When they stepped out of the room Reed said, ”What do you think their chances of survival are?”

Lu'um furrowed her brows and said, ”Less than ten percent, at best. But you have to consider that they won't be going alone. With a semi-competent conqueror as their captain, I suppose you can bump it up to twenty-five percent? Even then, they're going to have to do their very best in order to get numbers like that…”

The arrangement of the North's forces had already been formed during the wait for the other fleets. Conquerors would be assigned their own squads of contenders to lead. Together, they'd be deployed onto the battlefield after an initial barrage by the fleet's supercruisers.

They'd been assigned to clear out what remained of the warships' bombardments and push the offensive line forward to the Reef, where the heart of the Infested lay.

The true objective of the operation was to destroy the unknown Class-A Extradimensional Entity — the source of the invasion's forces.

Reed felt the fluctuations coming from the ship itself and knew that it would not be long before the fight would begin. The warship's Anima reactor had begun to spin faster — it was starting to power up in order to handle the load of maintaining its shielding, among other things.

The Silver Winter had come equipped with heavy Anima-powered accelerator cannons capable of laying waste to scores of Infested at a time, something not seen on other ships in the fleet. The accelerator cannons and the warship's experimental shielding required an enormous amount of energy — as a result, the ship was built with twin Majestic-class Anima reactors.

It was designed as an ultra-heavy supercruiser at heart, one that could withstand a fight against multiple opponents in its class and survive. In essence, it'd been created to combat other warships in the event of a possible war against another empire. Of course, that was not what the Kingscrown family had said it was for when it'd been first unveiled.

According to the Kingscrown family, it'd been designed for deep-range exploration into the Shadowlands without additional assistance. A titan of a ship that would be capable of venturing into the unknown regions of the Shadowlands in search of new Ancient Mulian artefact hot-spots. An exploratory ship, they said.

Needless to say, the other empires never bought the excuse. They knew what it had been created to do.

”Do you feel that?” said Reed. ”I can feel the storm getting stronger, even from here. They're waiting for us on the other side…”

Lu'um nodded and said, ”It's going to be a tough fight. The abomination has had plenty of time to prepare for us. It is likely that it has already created defenses of its own.”

”Don't think that it'll be last time. You caught that one early when it had barely descended before it'd built any of its defenses. This one has already had ample time to prepare itself for whatever we have in store for it. These abominations become increasingly harder to kill the longer they had time to grow…”

Infested Pupae were monstrosities that fed upon stars themselves for sustenance, after all. Once mature enough, they'd become nigh-unkillable leeches that'd drain the life out of entire planetary systems at a time. They would enclose space-time around themselves and their prey, forming a cocoon of warped reality, a shield of sorts that was almost impossible to pierce through.

It would only release the shield until its work was complete or if it had been killed from the inside.

Wherever these eldritch gluttons traveled to often went dark after they left.

In that way, the Ancient Mulians had been able to plot the movements of the Infestation during the early days of the Great War. They'd track the disappearances of the stars in the night sky. At first, it had worked with great success but as the war raged on, fewer and fewer stars shone in the night sky…

Until the day had come that there were no more stars.