The result was a perfect, lethal pincer. The sudden arrival of thousands more suited warriors—pouring not from the "alien" ships but from these common local vessels—shattered the enemy’s morale instantly.
Panic, cold and infectious, rippled through the coalition. The commanders realised that if they didn’t break out imdiately, their window of survival would slam shut. Without a word of coordination, the temporary alliances crumbled. Every race and faction forfeited the objective and attempted a desperate, chaotic retreat.
If only one or two fleets had attempted to flee, they might have escaped the dragnet. But with thirty different armadas trying to turn tail simultaneously, they beca their own worst enemies.
Massive dreadnoughts collided with escort frigates; flight paths intersected in a tangle of engine wakes and panicked navigation. They obstructed each other’s paths so thoroughly that they beca a stationary target—a wall of confused steel.
To fan the flas of this chaos, Hye issued a new set of commands. He instructed his Soulers and Reapers to bypass the frontline hulls and board the smaller, faster ships deeper within the enemy formations. He wanted the massacre to start from the heart of their fleets and work its way out.
The reports coming back to the bridge were harrowing. To the victims, the attacks seed to materialise from the very air they breathed. The sense of omnipresent death instilled a level of fear that transcended re tactical failure; it was a psychological breaking point.
"You are... truly sothing else..." Olana said, her voice barely a whisper as she grasped the sheer scale of the slaughter.
The massacre lasted for hours. As the carnage unfolded, back-channel reports began to flood the sector’s communication arrays. Other forces, those who had stayed on the sidelines, were beginning to realise the terrifying extent of Hye’s preditation.
Everyone was intimidated—including Olana. She knew the tiline better than anyone. She realised with a start that Hye had finalised the coordinates and set this entire bloodbath in motion before he had spent those intimate hours with her. He had been a picture of calm, never showing even a speck of the ruthless commander while he was in her arms.
She looked at him now, her eyes wide, feeling as though she were seeing the "Human Anomaly" for the very first ti.
"Don’t give that look. You have no reason to fear ," Hye said, clearing his throat as he noticed her trembling. He turned away from the flickering screens to face her directly. "You are one of my people now, Olana. You shouldn’t think of the way the rest of the universe does."
"Regardless of whose side I’m on, you are a monster!" she said, shaking her head. She felt a strange mix of dread and admiration; he seed to possess an endless supply of arrogance, backed by the power to make that arrogance a reality.
"Don’t bla the fisherman for being prepared when the fish are greedy," Hye laughed, the sound echoing through the bridge.
He waved a hand, changing the projection to a wide-angle view of the entire sector. "This reminds —is this the only location where my ships were targeted?"
"Ah, no. Out of the twenty different fleet clusters you scattered..." Olana paused, her fingers dancing across her auxiliary screens as she cross-referenced live combat data.
"Fifteen others are currently reporting identical engagents. That makes sixteen out of twenty clusters currently engaged in active combat. It’s a significant draw."
"So only four were left unhard?" Hye studied the grand map. Sixteen of his traps had been sprung. It was a massive engagent, yet he looked almost disappointed.
"Do you have a count on the total force commitnt? How many of the gathered forces actually moved against compared to the total presence in the sector?"
"You want to know how many stood their ground and didn’t fall for the lure?" she asked, correcting his phrasing with a sharp, analytical edge. She went silent for a few minutes, crunching the numbers provided by her intelligence network.
"Only twenty percent of the independent races and factions joined the attack on your ships. In terms of total hull count, they only sent around one percent of the total collective force gathered in this sector."
"Only one percent?" Hye asked, his eyebrows shooting up in surprise. He had expected the allure of his ships to draw in a much larger crowd—more moths to the fla.
"Even if your ships are a juicy prize, there is a much bigger al on the table," Olana said, gesturing toward the centre of the map. "Look. The planetary protection is officially down. The grace period is over. As you can see, the vast majority of the forces are ignoring your skirmishes and heading straight in to claim the worlds."
Hye looked at the hundreds of icons streaking toward the newly vulnerable planets. The real war was beginning.
As Olana had predicted, the protection period had expired only minutes ago. Through the primary viewport, Hye watched the grand spectacle of the universe in motion.
Hundreds—no, thousands—of fleets were burning their engines at maximum thrust, racing deeper into the heart of the sector. Each commander had a target in mind, a world to claim, and a legacy to secure.
To Hye, the sight of so many armadas moving in such perfect, desperate unison was a breathtaking scene of raw power. To Olana, however, it was a source of mounting anxiety.
"The window is opening, and we are stuck here," she muttered, her eyes darting between the tactical readouts. "We’ll have to wait until your scattered ships can extract themselves from those traps you set. At the rate the others are moving, the pri worlds will be occupied before we—Wait, what are you doing?!!"
In the middle of her protest, she felt the hum of the battleship’s engines change from a low drone to a violent roar. Hye had seized the manual controls and pushed the vessel forward with everything the reactor could give.
The ship lurched, accelerating at a velocity that pushed the inertial dampeners to their limits, aiming directly toward the closest high-value planet.
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