Space beasts were often like that. Their resilience could be ridiculous right up until the mont it ended.
But survival in that state was not the sa as a threat. The alpha had lost speed, coherence, and control in a single exchange. Even if it had not died outright, it was finished in almost every sense.
The rest of the pack seed to understand that before any of them did.
The Fenrir reacted with imdiate fury.
The death or crippling of the alpha shattered whatever loose hierarchy had been holding the front of the migration together.
Instead of continuing to chase the easier targets Solenne had dangled in front of them, hundreds of beasts shifted all at once and turned toward Lysara and Rhoswen’s position, pulled by the clearer, more hateful source of destruction.
"There it is," Lysara said quietly.
The true chase had begun.
Aurelian did not hesitate.
"Start engines. Maintain distance. Draw them wide."
The two upgraded ships accelerated almost at once, their new pursuit drives proving their worth the mont the battle shifted into movent.
They did not flee in disorder. They ran cleanly, maintaining the exact gap needed to keep the pack committed without letting the beasts close to effective striking range.
Behind them, the Fenrir surged forward in a furious mass, their earlier discipline gone, their behavior reduced now to vengeance and hunger.
Against slower opponents, that kind of pack pressure could quickly beco fatal. Against warships that moved just a little faster than the beasts themselves, it beca a trap.
Lysara and Rhoswen fired while moving.
So did Solenne from the flank.
Her aircraft kept cutting into the sides and rear of the pursuing mass, launching missiles, kinetic bursts, and precision strikes whenever the Fenrir bunched too tightly.
The beasts could not ignore her completely, but neither could they afford to turn too much toward her while the ships ahead kept burning them down.
The result was a long, vicious running kill.
For nearly two hours, the battle stretched across the open space between Redglass’s twin stars, the pack chasing, surging, and dying as the fleet led it in widening arcs and steadily stripped it apart.
Every few minutes, another knot of Fenrir lost montum and dropped behind. So died from accumulated wounds.
So turned too sharply and found Solenne’s aircraft waiting. So managed to get close enough to feel dangerous for a heartbeat before laser fire cut them apart.
Eventually, the change beca obvious.
The pack’s rage remained, but its confidence did not.
The Voidshade Fenrir were not brilliant, but they were not mindless either. Enough of them had died by now that the survivors were beginning to understand the shape of the fight.
They could not catch these enemies. Every mont they continued the pursuit, more of them vanished.
Their prey was hurting them from directions they could not answer well enough, and the enormous burst of fury that had followed the alpha’s fall was starting to rot into confusion.
The first deserters appeared a few minutes later.
A handful of Fenrir broke from the pursuit line and turned outward, trying to escape toward the edge of the system rather than keep following the ships that had been bleeding them the whole ti.
Others noticed. Then more did the sa. The shape of the pack began to wobble, then loosen, then visibly fray.
Solenne’s voice ca across the channel, calm and focused. "Scattering has begun."
Aurelian nodded once, though she could not see it. "Release the reserve strike elents now. We end it here."
She had been holding so back exactly for that mont.
Fresh waves of aircraft surged in from broader angles, no longer baiting, no longer conserving themselves for control, but cutting off lines of retreat and collapsing the beast pack inward. At the sa ti, Aurelian brought in another layer of response.
Combat fras and heavier intercept units deployed.
Until now, he had kept them out of the thick of it because there had been no reason to throw them into the most dangerous part of the pursuit phase.
But now the battle had entered its last and ugliest shape. The Fenrir were breaking apart, and broken predators were often most dangerous when cornered.
The fighting intensified imdiately.
In the earlier phases, most of the violence had happened at range, asured in beams, missiles, and controlled flight paths.
Now it beca closer, faster, and far more chaotic. Fleeing Fenrir smashed into the intercept lines.
Combat fras grappled, tore, or blasted beasts apart at distances where mistakes were punished instantly.
Solenne’s aircraft started taking more damage as individual Fenrir, no longer bound to the failing pack movent, lunged wherever they could still reach flesh or tal.
Several strike craft died in that phase.
A few combat fras were torn open as well, their wreckage spinning through the battle line in jagged pieces of burning alloy.
Rhoswen watched one of the closer intercept kills flash across the tactical display and gave a low breath through her teeth. "They’re nasty at close range."
"Yes," Aurelian said. "Rember that."
That was part of why this hunt mattered. Not only because of the yield, not only because of the combat value, but also because it taught.
Every species had patterns. Every threat had its habits. If he and his fleet were going to keep expanding into the frontier, then every clean lesson learned now would be worth the resources spent on it.
The collapse ca suddenly after building for a while.
One mont, the remains of the pack still had shape, ragged and thinning but moving as a recognizable body.
Next, sothing in the center failed completely, and the whole structure gave way. Whether it was the last aningful sub-leader dying or simply the point where instinct stopped favoring cohesion, Aurelian could not tell for certain.
What mattered was the result.
The Fenrir broke.
Not in disciplined retreat, not in any way that deserved the word organized, but in a raw scattering panic.
Individuals and small groups flung themselves in every direction they thought offered escape, abandoning one another and any sense of pack movent. It was too late for that to save most of them.
"Close the net," Aurelian ordered.
Solenne’s reserves did exactly that.
The final phase beca extermination.
Aircraft, fras, and ship batteries cut down fleeing beasts across the outer lanes of the battlefield, intercepting them before they could reach clear escape vectors.
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