Chapter 478 Arcane Annihilation

Epsilon Indi, Air Orbit, Primary Orbital Fortress

The big issue about Air being a habitable moon orbiting a gas giant, rather than a regular habitable planet, was that even the so-called “stable orbits” were a mess.

The big advantage of that particular setup was that Anchor, the gas giant in question, covered a good third of all possible approach vectors to the inhabitable moon, and the lesser moons that surrounded the planet were perfectly capable of hosting massive laser and missile batteries, something humanity had taken advantage of decades ago, the original colonial government having been of a decidedly paranoid bent.

Yet that was not the source of the defenders’ confidence. Nor was the local field commander someone of sufficient power to cause such an effect.

No, that’d be the three S-Rankers standing in the command center of the largest station orbiting Air.

Arthur Wells cut an impressive figure, wearing an outfit that somehow managed to convey the impression of being both an old-fashioned three-piece suit and modern combat attire, Excalibur strapped to his side, practically radiating reassurance, the pair of mages in his trail practically invisible compared to him, even though they were presently in the process of creating a spell that could, quite literally, eat fleets.

Amelia Shaw, though God help you if you actually used the full version of her first name, and Patrick Lerch, some of Isaac’s old coworkers.

Patrick was a researcher at heart, rarely stepping onto the field of battle outside of anything save the direst of emergencies, and even then, he’d typically stuck to back-line support. The fact that he’d managed to reach the heights he had despite that spoke more to his skill and intelligence than anything else might.

And as for Amy, she was simply terrifying.

… she might be good at plenty of things, but there were only two things anyone who’d ever been on the same battlefield as her cared to remember: the massive fused spells she loved to throw around … and just how close she cut the warnings when she threw those.

Oh, there’d never been any actual incidents of friendly fire; she was better than that, but Arthur knew from bitter experience that it hardly felt safe if the world exploded behind you, the space you’d been a mere second ago suddenly consumed by whatever exotically murderous effect she’d unleashed.

And the two were resorting to a trick that was almost as old as the [System] itself.

Magic crackled between Patrick’s hands, swiftly condensing down as it acquired structure, first shifting into a fractal before finally shifting into something that could be best described as a “magic circuit board.”

A wholly new spell, existing at a level of complexity that Arthur half-feared would melt his brain if he tried to understand it.

And then Amy grabbed the spell and crushed it between her hands, drawing them apart to reveal a burning sun, rays of energy that practically hurt to look at, each laden with lethal intent … then she handed it back.

Once again, the spell warped and twisted in Patrick’s grip, swiftly changing back into something structured and, therefore, teachable, while having retained all of Amy’s enhancements.

Then, he passed it back over, for yet another infusion of power and additional capabilities that the spell really should not have been compatible with, and honestly wouldn’t have been in anyone else’s hands.

Back and forth it went, while the alien armada outside got ever closer.

***

The titanic missile batteries aboard the moon Cerberus were, by almost every conceivable measure, overkill. “Too much” was probably the nicest thing that had been said about it.

Yet even paranoids had real enemies, and today wasn’t even the first time that fact had been proven true.

A simple metal cylinder capable of withstanding a rocket’s engine was a serviceable launch tube.

A basic railgun and a suitably designed missile made for a good launcher, basically being what warships used.

A two-hundred-meter-long, sixteen-barreled turret anchored well over half a kilometer deep inside the lunar rock, capable of imparting such velocity to the guided weaponry it launched to functionally double the missiles’ effective range to two light minutes … that was absurdity made manifest.

The fact that there were no fewer than thirty of these artillery pieces on the moon, each shielded and protected by secondary energy weapons, barely even registered at that point.

And when they opened fire, the invasion fleet’s reaction was hard to mistake for anything but utter shock as they warped out of the way well before there was any reason to do so, reappearing on the far side of a large asteroid, though one still located well inside the missile batteries’ range, with any vector capable of reaching them leading straight through the drones that had been left behind.

It wasn’t entirely clear what exactly the Bastard had been hoping would happen, the missiles being redirected at and expended against the drones, or that whoever was in charge of the missiles would stick to trying to destroy starships, thereby letting the drone swarm reap a bloody harvest … but the actual calculation was very simple.

A bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, and unlike their motherships, the drones could not warp away.

Nor could they, as it turned out, properly defend themselves against missiles in the first place.

These particular drones had been equipped with moderately powerful lasers meant to be used against starships. They’d have been pretty nasty if they’d been able to pull that off, but energy weapons used in an anti-missile role needed to have a much shorter cycle time to be effective.

Dozens of missiles died on the way, utterly vaporized by weaponry far too powerful for the job at hand; the hundreds that survived hammering into the loose cloud of autonomous weapons platforms and obliterated their targets, several outright colliding and still reducing their targets to nothing.

Mere moments later, the first wave of macrons blasted through the debris field, on a direct path to the moon that was already in the process of unleashing a second salvo of missiles, the wave of incredibly fast smart weapons parting around the far faster ray of infinitesimal particles to race straight at Cerberus.

A ripple of tiny explosions joined to temporarily blot out the turret, the shield briefly flaring into the visible spectrum.

Humanity’s attack, on the other hand, was far more interceptable.

Twenty missiles burned up in the fire of the enemy’s heavy battle lasers, turned to plasma in an instant. Twenty out of nearly three hundred. There was not enough time for the heavy weapons to fire again.

That was what point defense was for; thousands of small, fast-firing turrets opened up, slashing dozens from space in just the first couple of seconds, the number quickly rising into the hundreds.

These were not occasions of complete destruction; in fact, if they weren’t moving as fast as they were, retrieving and fixing them up would have been perfectly feasible.

But all it took to remove a missile as a threat was a “soft kill.” Fry the targetting sensors, destroy a few maneuvering thrusters, and they’d simply go careening off into the infinite black beyond the alien fleet.

A [Skill] rippled out from Cerberus, passing harmlessly through the intact weaponry but sinking into the damaged ones, and in one glorious moment, all the ones that could exploded.

Modern sensors, be they human, Cessid, Assai, Koinian, or some other alien race’s, were good. Very good. Good to the point where most attempts at stealth were outright pointless, and attempting to blind them typically required effort in the same order of magnitude as hiding in a star’s corona.

It took less than a millisecond for the eruption of light and radiation to be seen through. Being blind for even that short a span could be fatal, though, if it happened at the wrong time.

A mere seventeen missiles struck the invasion fleet, hammering home at such speeds that their warheads were practically superfluous.

Six smashed into the lead battleship, the detonation of their onboard nukes merging into a titanic eruption that both denied any observation of the ship within, and gave lie to any possibility of its survival.

The second battleship ate seven, being wiped from space with even greater ease.

Four struck a third, two reducing its bow to a massive crater, a third detonating halfway down its length, the fourth “merely” skimming along the armor in its stern quarter, reduced to a wake of plasma that melted its way into the engines, its warhead having become a casualty of the collision before it could blow, not that the starship was particularly well off for the failure.

And the remaining two missiles had somehow managed to both lose track of their original target and failed to coordinate with the rest for a combined strike that could actually destroy a capital ship in its entirety, careening into the depth of the alien formation …

For a brief moment, it seemed like they would wind up wasted, then a last-minute calculation in the suicidal artificial brain that controlled them nudged the pair into the path of the one ship they actually stood a good chance at wiping out.

The carrier might not have had very much left to do, now that its drone payload had been deployed, but no one would really complain about it being reduced to scrap metal.

For the next quarter of an hour, explosions littered the Anchor planetary system, the purely kinetic macron guns having little issue targetting Cerberus’ weapons emplacements and Air’s orbital fortresses at range, while the moon-mounted turrets sent an utter maelstrom of missiles back.

Slowly, the invasion fleet was swarming across the mess that was anchor’s orbits, overwhelming missile salvos with a flood of macrons … trying to, at any rate. The most they really achieved was reducing them to something their point defense could “handle.”

The human defensive fleet, in the meantime, had its ships turn in place and begin burning their engines at full, sliding past Air, soon putting the moon between themselves and the Cessid battlefleet … though what the enemy wasn’t seeing was the ships beginning to change course, using the gravity of the lunar body to slingshot themselves around it. Soon enough, they’d be erupting straight into the face of the invading force at a far higher velocity than they’d have carried had they simply begun closing the distance directly.

***

Arthur closed his eyes as he drew upon the [Round Table], pulling up half a dozen [Skills] that would combine into an absolute nightmare for their enemy.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Ready!” the two mages confirmed, wearing a pair of nearly identical, rather disturbing grins.

[Absolute Target Lock], [Spell Multiplication], [Escalation of Carnage], [Preternatural Suppression], [Acrane Exponentiation], and [One-Way Portal], though only the last [Skill] had an immediately visible effect: a small tear in space flaring open against a clear portion of the command center’s wall.

Almost casually, with a motion he’d have likely missed if he hadn’t been looking right at her, Amy flicked the unholy abomination they’d spent the last quarter of an hour creating through it and out into space.

At the same time, the second part of the trap snapped shut, trapping the enemy in a slower-than-light environment that disabled any FTL-based shenanigans that may have allowed for escape.

Humanity might not yet have had the dampening field magic the alien hive used completely figured out, certainly not to the point where its ships could be equipped with something similar. Nor was it even entirely clear what would have to be sacrificed to free up the required power.

However, that did not mean that building something capable of doing the same job was beyond their ability. Bigger, probably less efficient, and far from mobile, but it did the job.

Not that the enemy would realize there was any need to run … for about two more seconds. For that was when the spell finally triggered, splitting into three, each shooting into a separate stream of macrons hammering the human defenses, where each separate bubble of energy seemed to come apart, splintering into countless lesser fragments that, in turn, homed in on even more of the enemy’s weapons fire.

Had they lingered there for more than a couple of milliseconds, it was quite possible the enemy might have, if not outright figured out what it was doing, at least shut down the weapons the spell was very clearly interacting with … before anything of the sort could happen, the now pint-sized fuck you launched itself up the stream of particles, detonating the tiny core of fusionable material as it passed and absorbing any energy that failed to escape as light, leaving a road of small flashes behind as it sped up to close the distance.

That drew a response: the alien ships, who’d clearly noticed beginning to initiate evasive maneuvers as they tried desperately to get out of the path of the plasma bolts bearing down on them …

Ultimately, with the severely limited pool of active [Skills] the horde of identical bodies had available, and teleportation being blocked, it all came down to some very basic mathematics.

The projectiles were fast, and the enemy ships … simply weren’t.

Not even a second later, the first one struck, the bolt of plasma slamming into and through the turret that had fired its “components,” the armor beneath giving way like dirt beneath a backhoe, then lancing through the next several compartments before finally coming apart a good thirty meters within the hull … though saying it “stopped” would have been wildly misleading.

For the place its journey had come to a rather abrupt end had been the holding tank feeding the entirety of the bow-mounted macron gun. The projectiles might have been designed to explode by the heat and compressive force generated by impacting a slab of armor, but a bolt of superheated plasma crashing into them was certainly capable of detonating at least a few.

And from there … well, what did explosions create but heat and pressure?

The battleship’s bow exploded in a shower of radioactive debris. Swiftly followed by a second eruption of debris as something decided it had had enough and released its stored energy in the most violent way possible. And then a third explosion rocked the ship, swiftly followed by several more traveling down the length of the vessel, leaving it a drifting hulk.

A split-second later, the battleship next to it staggered sideways, then blew an instant later. A third “only” saw most of the weapons on the exterior of its hull blown off, a fair number of sensors, maneuvering thrusters, and lasers having become collateral damage.

And after that, far too many things happened at once for Arthur to keep track of anything specific without wasting the [Round Table’s]-charges, though watching the entire enemy formation ignite was its own kind of fun, made even better by knowing that the as-of-yet-unnamed spell had enough of a “return to sender” function that it would mostly be the macron guns that were the bane of the human fleet that were burning, and that even the enemies that survived would have had most of their teeth knocked out.

“You two are going to be alright?” Arthur asked his two companions, both of whom were looking exhausted, bordering on wiped out.

Patrick simply nodded half-heartedly, head already buried in a notebook he was now furiously scribbling in, while Amy made a shooing motion from her position leaning against a wall, drinking from a flask.

A second [One-Way Portal] put him out into space a moment later, at the very edge of the dampening field, beginning to fly straight at the remnants of the alien armada, chasing after and quickly catching up to the human warfleet.

Not that they needed the help.

Down to merely their lasers, which would be firing against fully intact armor meant to foil just such weaponry, while their own defenses had been utterly gutted, and overall … referring to them as “doomed” was honestly giving them a truly shocking amount of credit.

***

Tau Ceti, UENS Dauntless, Flag Bridge

In the end, Miyazaki would only be taking fifty-three battlecruisers through the catapult into the Sigma Dracnosi system. Many of the ones being left behind were still in relatively good shape, all things considered, but only ships that were in near-perfect shape wouldn’t be a liability in this next system. Only having a single warp charge remaining certainly didn’t help either.

Even if Water was likely the least endangered of the Core worlds.

“All ships, accelerate at maximum,” he ordered.

The enemy was capable of warping several more times, and had proven to be absurdly well-coordinated when doing so, while his forces’ movement was wholly reliant on their engines.

But given a sufficient mismatch between their relative speeds, they might be able to reduce the enemy’s accuracy down to basically nothing.

Ahead, the catapult loomed.

And a split second later, virtually every alarm on the bridge blared to life as one as the entirety of the Dauntless leaped like a startled puppy.

Collision, weapons fire, damage, decompression … if there was an alert that wasn’t screaming in panic, it was because the sensors needed to perceive the threat in question were presently flying off into the distance behind thebattlecruiser as a loose cloud of individual molecules, scattered somewhere amidst the expanding fields of debris that used to be Cessid battleships.

The battle in Sigma Draconis had largely been restricted to a long-range duel around Water, being fired at both by the orbital defenses and the navy ships hiding amongst said defenses, while the invasion fleet remained in an orbit so high it barely even qualified as such, using their macron guns as impromptu long-range kinetics, slowly burning through the shields of the orbital fortresses one by one.

Also, this was the only drone swarm that was, in fact, identical to the first one Miyazaki had encountered, being of the point-defense variety, rendering long-range missile fire almost useless.

And while the enemy had been engaging in evasive maneuvers in an attempt to avoid a repeat of the earlier catapult-powered sucker punch, that could only go so far when they were also continuing to unleash long-range fire, thereby forcing them to maintain the comparatively stable gun platform that required.

Thus, when the two catapults around Fire launched Miyazaki’s force right into this fleet’s face while the battlecruisers had been accelerating all out for a while …

The two forces had passed each other at a relative velocity equal to roughly a third of light speed, or roughly a hundred thousand kilometers a second.

It took less than a single second for the human formation to pass through the alien flotilla, and barely three to go beyond the reach of the enemy fleet’s lasers, not that any of the alien battleships had bothered to turn around to bring their heavy lasers to bear.

Thus, in that brief moment, not only did Miyazaki’s battlecruisers unleash their lasers and particle beams, but also used their missiles more as impromptu kinetics than the precision-guided weaponry they actually were, their launchers merely shoving them in the direction of the target, the inertia of the motherships practically doing the rest. And that inertia was something the railguns benefited just as strongly from.

Just like all the other invasion fleets, the aliens’ Sigma Draconis fleet had been made up of seventy-five ships, sixty battleships and fifteen carriers.

Had.

Thanks to having been fed targetting data by the system’s defenders, the human battlecruiser formation had emerged with targetting solutions already complete, while the enemy’s computers had been forced to try and cook something up at the last moment.

There was not a single human battlecruiser that had emerged from the clash unharmed, but only Incomparable had been destroyed, that ship having had the supreme misfortune of having rammed an alien ship when both vessels dodged in the same direction through some of the worst luck Miyazaki had ever seen.

Damn. That one stung, despite being far from the first vessel he’d lost in combat, the fact that the enemy had lost nineteen, doing little to relieve that.

And then, he triggered [Abyssal Anchor], linking the fleet to the planet below, dragging his ships around it as though in the hold of its gravity, despite the fact that the speed at which they were moving would have normally ruined that plan.

In twenty minutes, if nothing changed, their fleets would clash again. And even the first clash had taken a sufficiently big bite out of the alien point defense capability that a long-range engagement was no longer in their favor.

As such, the remaining battleships began to decelerate, allowing the planet’s gravity to begin to pull them in.

The carriers, though, those were running and already near the edge of the zone of interference.

It seemed like the Bastard had come to the conclusion that there was no reason to lose them here, and that the best way to inflict meaningful damage was to close to laser range even though the stationary defenses had been nowhere near reduced enough to make that a good idea.

To believe that the thirty-seven battleships they had left would be able to survive long enough to pour fire onto the floating cities down below, with any ships they managed to inflict upon the ships and stations in orbit being a bonus.

And almost immediately, the alien vessels began to die.

Missiles beginning to sneak through fractured point defense, scouring entire sections of hull clean while shattering the armor beneath into utter uselessness.

Long-range lasers began to burn through damaged sections, while railgun rounds simply crushed whatever they struck into whatever lay beneath.

One by one, the Cessid ships began to come apart, even as their own weapons were beginning to seek out the weaknesses they had cleaved open from long range upon the orbital fortresses.

For a few minutes, it seemed like both sides were headed for coannihilation, wiping each other out effectively to the last.

Until the invading ships passed through the defense constellation’s perimeter… and thereby came within range of the powerhouses stationed aboard the stations, those poor, unfortunate souls wielding world-shaking power that had not come part and parcel with the mobility to actively engage in space warfare.

In that single instant, seventeen surviving ships became nine.

That was the point when the alien fleet slipped beneath the defense constellation, the civilian satellites still below them practically melting away as they became targets of opportunity to warships not quite close enough to strike at the surface without having their lasers attenuated to the point of uselessness by the atmosphere, the Bastard’s forces continuing to close with the chance to commit the worst war crime since the dawn of human history.

And thus, the Sigma Draconis invasion fleet became the first to come within fifty thousand kilometers of a planet empowered by the World Item “Cipactli’s Distilled Fury.”

Obtained from the World Boss modeled after the primordial monster from Aztec mythology from whom the Earth had been fashioned, a man (and god) eating beast that was kept placid via blood sacrifices, this particular magic item did one simple thing: it empowered planets. Gave them teeth. Let them throw hands, even, should an enemy manage to get close enough for that to matter.

So, when the first enemy ship crossed that invisible boundary, Water woke up.

Or rather, the Kraken that the planet apparently favored as a manifestation, massive tentacles formed from hardened water beginning to rise from the depths, reaching out towards the utter fools who had failed to appreciate the sheer lengths humanity was willing to go to in order to protect its most important worlds.

Cessid battleships were tough bastards, to the point where even nuclear bombs detonating directly against their hull were rarely sufficient to destroy or even disable them. Not against an intact one, at least.

Yet when a thousands-of-kilometers-long tentacle of hardened water whipping through orbit with enough speed that even the base within the atmosphere reached hypersonic velocities struck the lead vessel, the ship was, for lack of a better word, pasted. And the rest did not survive for much longer.

Miyazaki had seen more resistance be put up by bugs being flattened by a steamroller.

The one drawback to the World Item’s active effect triggering was the cooldown, which would certainly be an issue if the enemy was allowed to get this close again …

Nine battleships got within reach of the Kraken.

One survived the pass across the planet’s skies, beginning to open the distance once more, accelerating at speeds that were likely pushing the chance of catastrophic engine failure into an area where it could be described using whole numbers to describe the percentage.

Behind it, a gigantic squid’s beak manifested in the ocean behind its stern, seemed to “suck in,” and finally spat.

A bolt of water, a million or so metric tons or so of Water’s ocean, lanced across space, the enemy apparently failing to detect it, judging by the lack of evasive maneuvers, and then it “splashed” into the battleship’s engines. Likely, running the engines that hot had actually managed to blind the sensors.

For an impossibly brief moment, the bridge crew of Dauntless was treated to the genuine absurdity of a starship’s directed plasma thrusters having been extinguished.

Yet the universe did not bend to the rule of cool, and thus, the moment did not linger as the water that had struck an area that had never been intended to contend with liquid, never mind liquid moving at such speeds.

Something gave way within the alien vessel and the ocean’s parting gift vanished inside; the attack’s progress was all but trackable by the rate at which airlocks burst outwards in sprays of water, and systems went dead as the electronics within were swamped by more dampness than even modern electronics were capable of handling.

And then the ship began to drift, thoroughly disabled.

Miyazaki was already in the process of calling up the leader of his flagship’s Marine detachment when the alien ship exploded. Not in the usual manner of catastrophic failure of the artificial sun lying at the core of every fusion reactor, but rather half a dozen smaller detonations in vital areas that made the whole vessel come apart in an unusually wet cloud of debris.

Scuttling charges, then … apparently, the bastard did have inbuilt self-destruct capabilities beyond their reactor.

***

Sol, Mercury, Fleet Command Center

The carriers were getting away. That could not be allowed to happen, yet taking more guard forces from Sol was unacceptable, and the Core systems needed what ships they had remaining.

“Send in the Triumphants,” Hunt ordered, taking a couple of seconds to figure out who was free and held sufficient rank, then teleported the admiral question onto the Triumphant’s bridge with barely a second of warning. Not the flag bridge, because that was presently devoid of personnel and lacking half the gear it was supposed to have, but the ship’s bridge would serve in a pinch.

“Ma’am, they’re only on their …”

“I know,” she cut the objection off before it could be completed. “But we can’t let him get those carriers back.”

Because while the battleships were a massive problem, once destroyed, they were gone, and reinforcements had a turnaround of, apparently, two months.

Those carriers could come back fully armed the instant they’d picked up more drones. And while that might mean going all the way back to the shrouded cluster, there was every chance the Bastard had set up a couple of manufacturing plants somewhere nearby, ones small enough to be shielded from scrying without the dead spot becoming obvious.

It was what she’d have done.

Yet the fact that these were the only carriers the enemy had even tried to save was making her teeth itch. Had those things been booby-trapped?

Admittedly, using them to destroy the hyper-modern Triumphant-class battleships would have required the enemy to know the ships existed, and be sufficiently aware of the locations of all of humanity’s warships to know that they’d be deployed. And that would be assigning the Bastard near-omniscience.

Occam’s razor said that Sigma Draconis had been the final battle, that humanity’s enemy had only realized that he should save the carriers now, but honestly, fuck “Occam” and the horse he rode in on.

Relying on the easy explanation being the true one was a fantastic way to fall victim to enemy feints.

Yet a couple of moments later, the six battleships appeared in the path of the alien carriers, heavy beam weapons firing a split second later … and pretty soon, there was nothing left but dust and debris.

Alright. Maybe not everything was a trap. But it could have been …

And then the same comms tech who had passed the previous message spoke up yet again.

“Neo-Lakonia reports they handled the attack on them. No casualties, twenty battleships down.”

Hunt sighed in relief. That was a weight off her chest. They’d won … this round. With the sheer goddamn insanity of their enemy, they were guaranteed to face another.

Not to mention that, ultimately, peace simply was no longer an option. After the battle of Sol, humanity’s rage had already been unfathomable, yet now, after the enemy had proven to be a persistent threat?

Even if, by some miracle, a peace treaty were created, it would no doubt be shattered in months by angry crusaders seeking to permanently end the threat.

Her body was occupied giving orders as she coordinated the cleanup and rescue efforts, but her mind was out in the far reaches of space, with the scouts they had sent out into the black to hunt the most assholish threat humanity had ever faced.