Legacy of the Void Fleet

The moment the Star Shield shattered like brittle glass under the relentless blow, Dier violently coughed up a mouthful of blood. His aura plunged drastically, weakening in an instant as a severe backlash struck him from the catastrophic destruction of his law-infused barrier.

Dier didn’t even have a split second to wipe the crimson from his chin before he froze, staring ahead in raw horror.

Still dense, overflowing with apocalyptic fury, the dark-crimson beam surged unobstructed toward the command bridge.

”NO! WAIT—!”

Dier’s desperate roar was instantly cut short.

The beam bored straight through the flagship’s reinforced hull. A cataclysmic eruption of pure destructive energy detonated from the point of contact, greedily swallowing and obliterating everything in its wake. The pride of the armada—along with every soul and instrument of war aboard—was erased at the atomic level in mere milliseconds, if not faster.

In its place, an incandescent, blinding red miniature sun blossomed in the void. It engulfed the flagship of the Brutal Blood Grand Fleet entirely, while the surrounding shockwave tore dozens of nearby escort vessels to shredded scrap before vaporizing them into nothingness.

Not too far away, Captain Gorath clung to the edge of the command railing, his knuckles long turned bone-white from the desperate, unconscious grip he maintained. Across the bridge of the super-battleship Blood Spire, emergency sirens blared in a deafening, dissonant chorus, barely drowned out by the groaning of the ship’s superstructure as kinetic and energy barrages hammered their energy shields at brutal intervals.

”Hard starboard! Reverse auxiliary thrusters! Fast!” Gorath barked, his expansive divine sense locking onto a high-intensity salvo hurtling directly toward them.

With that maneuver, they successfully slipped past the incoming barrage, just as they had managed to evade several heavier salvos before—the sole reason the Blood Spire was still intact and kicking rather than consumed by the raging storm of destruction around them.

Yet Gorath didn’t relax in the slightest. ”Break their targeting lock on us! Don’t let them predict our vectors, damn it!”

”We can’t shake it, Captain!” one of the helmsmen shrieked back, his fingers flying across the tactile consoles in a desperate blur. ”Their tracking arrays are far beyond our tech grade! Their firing arcs and precision are impossible to break—we can’t shake the lock!” He gritted his teeth in sheer helplessness.

BANG! RUMBLE!

A violent tremor violently racked the Blood Spire, nearly throwing Gorath off his feet and slamming him back against his command seat.

”Shield integrity down to thirty-two percent!” the shield operator cried out in stark panic. ”Secondary DC coils have burnt out completely reducing the sheild generator intergrity! Another volley like that and our primary barrier will collapse entirely!”

Gorath gritted his teeth hearing this. His mind raced back through the countless wars and desperate crises he had clawed his way out of over thousands of years of service. He knew they couldn’t just keep dodging and absorbing punishment like this—he had to find a way out, and fast.

First, overload the shield generators into an ultimate state the moment integrity threatens to fail completely. Second, disengage all safeties and limiters on the primary and auxiliary reactors, using a sub-light burst to punch out of this kill zone. If we can trigger a short-range micro-warp jump, it might buy us a few precious minutes of breathing room...

Before the thought could crystallize into an actionable plan, a sudden, blinding luminescence flooded the command bridge, white-washing everything in sight.

”Ahhh! Wh—what is this light?!” someone cried out.

”I can’t see a damn thing! What’s happening?!” others yelled in frantic confusion.

The glare was so searing that it scorched the vision of everyone on the bridge. Gorath was no exception; he instinctively threw an arm up to shield his eyes. His immediate assumption was that another nearby allied warship had succumbed to the human vessel’s onslaught, with this blinding flash being the detonation. Still, this is far too intense... he thought, his brow furrowing.

Right then—

RUMBLE! GROOOOAN!

A monstrous shockwave slammed broadside into the Blood Spire, violently tossing the super-battleship like a dried leaf caught in a hurricane. Unsecured crew members across the decks were hurled from their stations, crashing brutally into bulkheads and consoles.

Through the chaos, deafening proximity sirens wailed across the bridge: ”Shield integrity down five percent!”

”Optical feeds! Bring up the main optical feed, NOW!” Gorath roared over the alarms, the shuddering impact and the lingering flash striking his heart with a terrifying spike of dread.

A holographic projection flickered to life directly in front of him. The optical sensors swiftly adjusted, auto-focusing on the coordinates where the blinding glare and cataclysmic shockwave had originated—a point far too close to the Blood Spire.

Gorath’s breath hitched in his throat.

An icy chill shot down his spine, his blood running cold in an instant. The color completely drained from his face, and the crystalline gem embedded in his forehead dimmed to a dull, lifeless haze.

The epicenter of that detonation was the exact sector where the flagship Brutal Blood had been stationed—where Grand Commander Dier, an esteemed powerhouse of the Star Law Realm, had stood flanked by the armada’s core guard of dozens of peak Tier 3 super-battleships.

Now, all that remained in that expanse of space was a gargantuan, violently churning sun of blazing scarlet.

”N-no... no way... the... the flagship...” Gorath whispered, his voice trembling so violently that he could barely shape the syllables. ”The Grand Commander... the flagship and its twelve layered shields... they’re... gone? Completely erased?”

”No, no, no... how could this happen?!” Hearing those fractured words, the bridge crew pieced the horrifying reality together, their discipline shattering into raw panic.

”That vessel isn’t ordinary—it’s definitely beyond Tier 4! We can’t fight that monstrosity! We can’t!”

”Flee! We have to run!” another officer shrieked.

Before Gorath could wrench his mind out of shock to restore order on his bridge, a sensor officer shrieked at the top of his lungs:

”INCOMING! HEAVY-CLASS ENEMY SALVO LOCKED ONTO OUR VECTOR AND CLOSING FAST!”

That single warning obliterated whatever fragile composure remained aboard the Blood Spire. Complete, unadulterated madness took hold.

Overwhelmed by sheer terror, Gorath lost his footing and slammed hard onto the cold alloy deck, momentarily helpless. Yet, even as cold dread seized his limbs, his primal instinct to survive refused to die. His sanity held on by a thread. Veins bulging, eyes bloodshot and wild, he roared with every ounce of air in his lungs:

”EXECUTE EVASI—”

The command died in his throat.

Without warning, a terrifying weightlessness seized his body. He began to drift upward, as if the ship’s artificial gravity generators had been violently ripped offline in a microsecond.

Before his eyes could even register the shift, the heavily armored hull of the bridge and the reinforced Tier 3 transparent armor blew apart into millions of jagged shards. Meter-thick, hardened alloy bulkheads imploded inward. The high-velocity cloud of shredded glass and shrapnel ripped through everything in the bridge at incomprehensible speed.

The bridge crew had no time to deploy defensive arts. Even the elite among them—some having reached the peak Paragon rank—had their physical bodies pulped into crimson mist in an instant.

Gorath watched in frozen horror as his officers disintegrated into clouds of blood before his eyes. Then, even he—a near-peak Starlight Realm expert—felt a crushing, universe-rending agony cave in from every direction.

Wh-what is happening...?

The thought had barely surfaced before his consciousness shattered into absolute nothingness, plunging Gorath into eternal, silent darkness.

BOOM!

The entire Blood Spire split apart from its midpoint, violently shattering into countless massive chunks and jagged alloy fragments.

Scenes of devastation like this were playing out across the entire battle line of the Star Empire’s grand fleet. Every second, every fraction of a breath, warship after warship was blasted apart in mere moments.

Minutes trickled by. As the explosions raging across the star system gradually subsided, the Obliterator dialed back its lethal barrage. First to cycle down were the super-weapon systems, followed closely by the heavy primary and secondary batteries. The last to fall silent were the eighteen thousand pulverizers, which continued to thunder across the void before their rate of fire slowly tapered off, finally grinding to a halt.

A chilling stillness settled over the battlefield, broken only by the sporadic, delayed detonations of ruined hulls drifting through the dark.

Aboard the Obliterator, the Red Empress was the first to speak.

”The Star Empire defense fleet has been completely wiped out, Kallus.”

”Mm.”

Kallus offered a casual nod, his expression indifferent, treating the absolute slaughter of an entire armada as little more than a routine test fire.

”Well, that was rather boring. But at the very least, we got to test a fraction of the firepower the Obliterator packs,” Kallus muttered, giving a lazy shrug with his left hand while his cheek remained propped on his right fist. ”Still, it leaves much to be desired. They were just too weak. I still don’t have a clear picture of this ship’s true, unrestricted limits. What a pity... what a pity.”