"What does it look like I’m doing? I’m joining the battle as planned!" Hye said. He shot her a look of genuine confusion, as if she had suddenly developed amnesia regarding their entire mission profile.
"But... you have no ships left to support a planetary invasion!" she cried, gesturing wildly at the map showing his twenty scattered detachnts. "Your fleets are completely entangled with the greedy coalitions you lured in. Even with the four that weren’t attacked, you don’t have the numbers to contest a sector this crowded!"
"You’ve spent all this ti checking every corner of the sector, and yet you forgot to look at the space right around us?" Hye asked. He leaned back into his command seat, casually raising a leg and resting it over the armrest. He watched her with a look of pure, mischievous amusent.
Olana froze. The logic of his statent hit her like a physical blow. She instantly summoned a dozen new sensor windows, recalibrating the short-range scanners to look past their own hull’s signature. Her breath hitched as the screen populated with a sea of friendly icons that hadn’t been there monts before.
"You... You have even more ships to deploy?!!" she stamred. Her body trembled faintly with the shock of it. She pointed a finger at him, her voice rising in a mix of accusation and awe. Hye didn’t bother with a complex explanation; he simply let out a short, triumphant laugh.
"Who said those twenty fleets were all the ships I brought to this party? And who said those were the only warriors I had at my disposal?"
His words left Olana paralysed in her seat. She sat in a stunned silence that stretched for several long minutes, her mind struggling to reconcile the sheer scale of the deception.
When she finally found the strength to look at the updated fleet count surrounding their flagship, her heart hamred against her ribs. The armada gathered here wasn’t just a reinforcent—it was massive enough to form five entirely separate, full-scale battle fleets.
"Are you telling that these ships—every single one of them—is packed to the brim with Soulers?" she asked, her voice cracking as she gestured toward the map in defiance of the impossible reality. Hye rely shrugged, offering no verbal confirmation, which was an answer in itself.
Before she could press him further, he stood up and pulled a specialised combat suit from his spatial inventory.
"Where are you going now?!" she demanded.
"What else? It’s ti for to go and personally collect my trophies," he said. He gave her a sharp wink before tearing a hole in space-ti with his staff. He stepped into the shimring portal and vanished before she could utter another word.
"Bastard!" she cursed at the empty air where he had stood. She slumped back into the command chair, her face flushed with a mix of anger and exhilaration. "I swear, he loves playing these gas with . He actually enjoys my ignorance and my silly questions!"
anwhile, Hye materialised in the centre of a chaotic, high-intensity engagent. He had marked these coordinates before the battle began, expecting to drop into the cold vacuum of space, and the universe did not disappoint.
His first action was to deploy a small, high-speed shuttle. Using it as a mobile platform, he began his grim work: harvesting the "bones" of the fallen.
As he worked, he systematically drained the inventories of the destroyed enemy forces, his spatial storage filling with a king’s ransom in materials and artefacts.
Once a zone was picked clean, he retracted his shuttle, blinked across the sector to another coordinate, and repeated the process.
The harvest was efficient, taking less than half an hour for the primary sites. However, Hye knew Olana would likely have moved the flagship to a safer or more strategic position by the ti he finished.
He decided to take a wider tour of the peripheral skirmishes, collecting a massive secondary haul of resources before finally returning an hour later.
He prepared to portal back into the vacuum where he had left the ship, but to his surprise, he felt the solid floor of the deck beneath his boots the mont he stepped through the rift.
"Hahaha! For the first ti, I actually get to see that look on your face," Olana’s voice rang out, interrupted by fits of genuine laughter. She looked genuinely delighted to have caught him off guard.
Hye blinked, looking around the bridge. "You actually stopped the entire fleet’s advance and waited for to finish my scavenger hunt?"
He thought he had found the answer to why he had landed inside the ship, but as he looked at the tactical monitors, he realised he had drastically misunderstood the situation.
"I only stopped this ship," Olana corrected him imdiately, her voice brimming with a playful smugness. "As for the main fleets, they have continued their advance exactly according to the flight plan."
Hye turned his attention to the grand projection map. A quick scan confird she was telling the truth; while their flagship had lingered to retrieve him, the five massive armadas he had recently unveiled were already carving paths through the sector like a quintet of silver arrows.
"Good girl," Hye said, reaching out to pat her head as if he were comnding a prized pupil.
"I still enjoyed that look on your face far too much," she giggled, freeing herself from his touch with a flick of her hair and a dark, mischievous laugh.
She didn’t seem to mind the patronising gesture as much as she enjoyed having finally caught the ’monster’ off guard.
"So, did you collect your precious trophies? My sensors showed you only lingering for a few minutes at each battlefield before jumping to the next. That seems like a very short ti to scavenge a graveyard."
"I got enough," Hye replied simply. He didn’t feel the need to explain the efficiency of his collection thods or the specific value of the bones he had harvested.
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