In a battle between forces comprised of over one division, the worth of a single ch had been reduced to almost nothing.
chs continued to fall and ships sustained more and more damage. The willingness to fight on and inflict more casualties to the opponents continued to burn unabated.
From the initial explosive start, the battle had turned into a lower-intensity battle of attrition. The two fleets widened the distance between each other and started rotating their spent chs in and out of their carriers in order to replenish or perform so ergency repairs.
Even though the ch Corps and the ch Legion worked their chs and ch pilots to the bone, they only had each other in their sights. No matter how much they suffered, as long as their enemies suffered with them, their willingness to get back in space remained steady.
The montous battle had a profound effect on Ves, especially when Dietrich returned with wounds.
"Will he make a recovery?"
"He’s still in one piece." Soone said. "That’s good, right? When a cockpit is breached, the pilot is always dead. Dietrich only got away with a couple of hard bumps so he should be back on his feet in no ti."
Ves truly hoped his friend would recover. The Whalers had suffered enough on the Glowing Planet and losing another ship from the Vesian sneak attack put them in a very somber mood.
He left the hangar bay and returned to engineering before stepping up to the command console again. Once he activated the plot of the local space, he noted that the two fleets still hadn’t shown any signs of retreating.
From his observations of this battle, he made two conclusions.
First, the rcenary corps and gangs stood no chance against a military force. While the chs of the ch Legion didn’t always trump over the chs of the private sector, the level of training, discipline and coordination beca a huge force multiplier that mowed down any undisciplined group of chs.
"No wonder Dietrich hadn’t made it. As far as the ch Legion is concerned, he’s a lone wolf with nobody else to back him up."
Second, the battle also showcased that the best chs didn’t always prevail. So of the bigger outfits like the Blood Claws fielded advanced chs piloted by their best champions. These chs cost about the sa as the Bloodbeak and featured compressed armor and a robust flight system.
They should have stolen the show when they faced a squad of cheaper Vesian chs, but in actuality the opposite happened. The ch Legion had no scruples in ganging up on these elites with an abundance of frontline space chs.
These frontline space chs utilized designs that barely looked like chs. They resembled spacecraft with arms, as their legs had been made redundant entirely. Instead, the designers extended the waist and stuffed so extra thrusters to enhance their forward acceleration.
Ves estimated that frontline space chs like these shouldn’t cost more than 15 million credits. On the plot, eight of them managed to isolate an advanced ch from its escorts. They pelted the unfortunate ch from all sides and quickly overwheld its defenses, shooting it into pieces.
The unlucky ch pilot managed to eject in ti, but the ch Legion didn’t let it off and sent out a single frontline space ch to tear it to shreds.
"Numbers and skill matter more than quality in a large scale battle like this. The value of an advanced is marginal in these circumstances."
At best, a coch with compressed armor lasted a little longer in battle. If they pilot didn’t possess the skill to back up his daring, even a coch wouldn’t be able to save his life.
Ves understood now why the ch Corps and the ch Legion utilized frontline chs and employed regular ch pilots with no prospect of advancing into a higher tier.
He also understood why the military let go of the advanced ch pilots who possessed so talent.
"It’s better to form a large, cohesive force than a smaller number of unruly elites."
The entire battle lit up a light inside his mind. His conception of chs and their use on the battlefield evolved to take into account a new kind of situation. Even though Ves had read the theory on the use of chs in massive battlefields, he almost entirely forgot about it. Only when he truly ca in touch with mass death and slaughter did he admit that he’d been wrong.
He kind of understood the System’s insistence on proliferating his designs. A top ch designer should not only aim to design the most exquisite chs for the most elite pilots, but they should also be able to design affordable chs for the common ch pilots.
Witnessing hours-long struggle fanned his desire to design a cheaper ch. The quality and performance between the different bottom-tier designs varied wildly.
Ves had already seen the worst in the chs of the Whalers. The designs utilized by the ch Corps and ch Legion possessed a lot more refinent without letting the cost get out of control.
Seeing them in action taught Ves a lot about how the ch pilots squeezed every bit of potential out of their modest chs. From moving in unison to focusing their fire, the importance of teamwork could not be overstated.
He also understood why ch pilots enjoyed much more prestige than the ch designers who made their machines.
"The differences between chs don’t matter that much compared to the training of the ch pilots who use them.
Just when Ves thought this battle would continue until the losses grew to an unsustainable level, a sudden accident on the battlefield changed the entire equation.
The ch Legion occasionally launched a volley of torpedoes at the ships of the ch Corps. Most of the ti, the Volari Starhawks and the other regints of the ch Corps whittled them down before they impacted a ship, but the extended engagent had reduced their number to half.
In those circumstances, the ch Corps still expected to be able to shoot down the torpedo volleys.
Yet the ch Legion didn’t send out a regular volley this ti. They held back beforehand to lull the ch Corps in a sense of complacency.
Their next volley carried fifty percent more torpedoes this ti.
The mont the Vesians launched their latest volley, the ch Corps knew they’d fallen into a trap.
Many chs of the Volari Starhawks tried to disentangle from their dance with the Grand Chasers, but failed to break away. The Grand Chasers knew that this was their coup-de-grace and did all they could to bind the Starhawks in place.
The other regints that hovered close to the fleet went in action to take out the torpedoes. While they felled a fair number of explosive payloads, it was never enough as the surviving torpedoes filtered through the dense rain of fire.
Even though a handful of ranged chs hastily erged from the carriers to help out their comrades, a couple of torpedoes still made it through in the end.
Four ships suffered severe damage. One torpedo missed its mark due to being subjected by an intense amount of ECM.
However, its programming forced it to continue on with its terminal flight and just happen to strike a nearby ship.
The damaged ship just happened to be a transport carrying a large-scale dinsional smoother.
The mont the ship blew up, a strange pulse of spaceti wracked the impact site. The imdiate area around the wreckage deford in so way. The chs nearest to the damaged site splintered apart into tiny hand-sized pieces as if their chs ran through an indestructible net.
The disaster spooked the ch Corps, and the brass quickly issued a call for a general retreat.
The massive fleet comprised of the ships from the Bright Republic finally moved away from their Vesian counterparts.
The Volari Starhawks pulled back as well. Though so of the Grand Chasers showed signs of moving in pursuit, they received orders to pull back as well.
As the distance quickly widened, the chs stopped shooting each other as their shots increasingly missed the mark.
"Why did they retreat all of a sudden?"
He understood why the ch Corps retreated in the face of such a disaster. Without the dinsional smoother keeping the local spaceti stable, they risked getting felled by another anomaly. They had to rearrange their formation as quickly as possible and that took ti.
The ch Legion should have pushed their advantage and exploit the opening revealed by the ch Corps.
Then, he looked at the live feed of the area in space where the dinsional smoother had been torn apart. Debris thrown away from the explosion halted their outward expansion and started to reverse.
The site of the explosion thrumd and vibrated as if a singularity ca into being.
Instead, sothing more miraculous happened. Ti seed to reverse as the broken parts converged into one. A blast reappeared, but this ti it started outwards and compressed inward like an implosion. The debris lost their deformations and slotted back into a single whole transport as if it had never been destroyed in the first place.
The torpedo that struck it got restored as well, but it traveled away from the previously-dood ship as if ti continued to rewind.
"What?!"
Ves scratched his head. Had the ship really been restored to whole, just like that?
Then the torpedo slowed down mid-flight, before travelling forward as if ti had been flipped in the right direction again. The torpedo juked back and forth as if it dodged a storm of counterfire and made a drastic turn as it got affected by ECM before impacting the transport yet again.
The exact sa explosion happened and the ship got destroyed in the exact sa way. Besides having been left behind by the fleet, nothing appeared to have changed.
Monts later, ti reversed yet again, and the debris pulled back together until the ship ca back to life. The torpedo that felled travelled outwards again as hale as if it had just been launched.
A spike of fear ran through his spine as Ves continued to watch the sa event happening over and over again. Of all the things he expected when a dinsional smoother got destroyed, he never realized it could actually lead to a strange loop in ti.
"What the hell is a dinsional smoother made of?"
Ves had the conception that humanity had been playing with fire when they ca up with such a device. Although its ability to force space and ti to remain stable proved useful, the dangers resulting from improper use scared the living light out of his soul.
When Ves thought about the attempts to overload the dinsional smoothers aboard the Gregarious Wrath, he broke out a nervous sweat.
No wonder the ch Corps pulled out so quickly. Even the ch Legion wanted nothing to do with the anomaly despite already passing it by. Their excessive caution indicated that the anomaly might expand and engulf others into this seemingly endless ti loop.
"At least they stopped fighting."
The battle might have made sense to the higher ups, but Ves always worried about getting the Happy Jelly shot out from underneath him. As a forr transport vessel, it lacked the toughness and structural integrity of a purpose-built combat carrier. Even a single ch acting out alone would be able to cripple the Jelly.
The two fleets continued to drift apart, going in slightly different directions as they made their way out of the Glowing Zone.
One remarkable thing happened as they made their final leg of the journey. Rescue parties from both sides flew back and descended on the debris field to pull out any survivors that had been left behind. A handful of transports also grabbed so of the smaller intact containers and brought them back to their fleets.
Ves found it remarkable that the rescue parties went out of their way to avoid each other. Not a single ch or shuttle clashed against each other.
It seed that even if the Republic and the Kingdom hated each other’s guts, they still possessed so sense of humanity.
"This should be the end of this campaign."
After seventy days of traveling, fighting, and making a profit, the survivors would finally return ho with their booty.
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