"Still, the gains are not bad," Hye muttered, watching the last of the stragglers disappear into warp.
He didn’t bother to give chase. Those who fled into the local universe held no further value for him.
Over the course of the day, his appetite for standard, normal bones had begun to wane; they were becoming the lowest denomination of his currency, cluttering his inventory with a value that felt increasingly negligible.
Unless he stumbled upon an exceptionally high grade of normal bone, they were effectively useless in his eyes. Instead, his focus had shifted entirely to the future: the Dark Realm bones.
Their value was astronomical—sky-high compared to anything the local markets had ever seen. After twenty years of the Toranks dominating the trade sectors with standard bones, the market had reached a point of saturation.
It was stagnant, bloated with common currency. Introducing a different, higher grade of bone was the only logical answer to maintaining economic hegemony.
This single engagent had been a windfall. From the wreckage of the two fleets, he had acquired a massive stockpile of black-grade Dark Realm bones and a significant number of the rarer red-graded variants.
Most impressively, he had managed to secure double-digit figures of an even higher, unnad grade of Dark Realm bone—treasures he hadn’t yet whispered about to another living soul.
As for the normal bones, he decided to keep accumulating them in a secondary cache, hoping he might eventually find a way to resolve their plumting market value.
"I spent half a day fighting them, yet my biggest gains only ca the mont I committed a large-scale deploynt of my Soulers and Reapers," Hye thought, leaning back in his command chair as the bridge crew began the process of cleaning up the debris field.
"But I also gave them too much ti. Because I let the battle linger, they managed to analyse my patterns and find a way to slip my reach."
Hye sat in the silence of his ship, ticulously deconstructing the battle that had just concluded. He sumd up the raw results and analysed the performance of every unit, trying to see the tactical flaws in his own design.
The use of such a massive number of Soulers and Reapers simultaneously was a double-edged sword.
To utilise twenty million warriors, he needed a corresponding number of ships to serve as carriers and relays, expanding the reach of his influence.
In a prolonged, large-scale engagent, this posed a significant risk—especially if he wasn’t stationed close enough to provide direct oversight or if his carrier ships were targeted by long-range suppression fire.
Furthermore, he had learned a hard lesson about the adaptability of his enemies. By giving them hours to watch his warriors in action, he had inadvertently allowed their generals to deduce the chanics of his tactics.
They had figured out the timing of the jumps and the vulnerabilities of the deploynt phase.
"That ans even if I use an overwhelming number at the start, a competent enemy will find a counter eventually," Hye reasoned, his eyes narrowing.
"The mont I deploy my warriors, I cannot just let them swarm. I need to simultaneously lay down a hard barricade—a gravitational or kinetic interdiction—to stop any ship from initiating a jump. I need to kill the escape before I kill the crew."
By the ti his ship returned to the rendezvous point to et with Olana, Hye had already run through dozens of tactical variations in his head. He was refining his art, turning a blunt instrunt of slaughter into a surgical tool of galactic conquest.
"You need more spaceship suits? What for?" Olana asked, her voice echoing with confusion as Hye stepped onto the platform.
She had expected him to be exhausted, perhaps even satisfied with the loot from the battle. Instead, he had returned with an even more demanding request.
Hye knew that in every successful scenario he had envisioned during his return trip, the primary bottleneck was always the sa: deploynt.
To counter the adaptability of the grand races, he needed to be able to deploy even more Soulers and Reapers at a mont’s notice. He needed an army that was entirely suited for the void.
If Hye’s vision for the coming month had been limited to a single, localised theatre of war, his current resources might have been deed sufficient. But he was not a man who played for minor stakes.
He intended to fracture his forces, scattering his warriors across dozens of disparate battlefields simultaneously.
This level of multi-vector aggression was the only way to capitalise on the hatching worlds before the grand races could cent their control.
The initial, more conservative plan of deploying a single million warriors per world was no longer tenable in his mind.
To ensure absolute dominance and prevent the kind of organised retreats he had witnessed in the previous skirmish, he needed to deploy at least ten million suited warriors per target, if not more.
Scaling his ambition ant scaling his logistics; to cover more battlefields at this heightened density, he desperately needed more suits.
When it ca to his fleet, however, he exercised a rare mont of restraint. He decided not to overcommit his capital ships at the outset.
He remained uncertain whether every enemy would react with the sa panicked retreat he had just observed.
His revised strategy was first to flood the zones with his deadly, low-profile warriors, then watch and ticulously analyse how the various races responded before committing his heavier, more valuable assets.
Yet, even with a lighter naval footprint, the sheer volu of infantry required far exceeded his current inventory.
"Are they really that difficult to acquire?" Hye asked, his voice echoing in the quiet chamber.
He hadn’t wanted to pressure Moth for more, operating under the assumption that the one hundred million suits provided by the Hescos represented the upper limit of what their current logistics could spare.
He had viewed the suits as high-value military assets. However, as Olana began to speak, her tone was dismissive, almost amused.
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