chapter 188

POV: Verrona

“The Varani cruisers have launched another wave of plasma bolts, fire counter missiles!” the captain of this battle barge yelled.

I had only seen those weapons once before. They were devastating unless you had countermeasures against them. They were the pinnacle of technological weapons that did not need any magic for them to work.

The ship rocked again as we were hit by another massive rail shot. Each one increased our heat load by a few percent, which immediately started to go down from the heat dissipation systems of this battle barge.

Being here was beyond annoying. We had been close by, chasing down one of the remaining fleets of my father's previous massive navy. Each time I think of him, I need to sink into my clarity skill, which helps centre me.

Now I understand why he was so twisted and could get angry so fast. To think that he believed this skill to be a detriment was truly madness. The tactical screen updated again, showing the current struggle we were in and how precarious our situation was.

Many times, under the command of my father, we dodged adventurers’ guild calls to clear dangerous portals. How many lives could we have saved by showing up during that time? I will never know, but I do regret failing to understand how much of my father’s choices hurt us.

The elven dominion as a whole was fractured now. I was no longer fighting only my father, but a different ideology from the one our ancestors followed on our homeworld. My father, and all that are following the same ideology, believe our ancestors were wrong, as it led to the collapse of our homeworld, but even then, there was corruption.

My Duke has made it clear to me and provided historical evidence to show that our species is flawed like any other. It was hard to accept that, as my father did a pretty good job at ingraining elvish superiority. What truly helped shatter that illusion were the people who surrounded my Duke, and that human.

My heartbeat picked up as soon as I thought of him. Mostly in anger, but also from the memories I had of us. When my Duke explained his deal with him, we fought, and he let me get in a few strikes that did make me feel a bit better. The years have softened my anger even further, but I would still like to see my blade shine near his neck.

The battle continued to rage all around. It was a true slug match that I had never been a part of. Usually, battles of this size became like this, as holding a firm formation was tactically better than flying around trying fancy manoeuvres to achieve breakthroughs.

The thing about moving fast is that, yes, when firing weapons, you add more speed, making each attack stronger. The problem with that is you yourself will be flying faster, which means each hit you take from your opponent’s attacks also has that extra speed your ship has.

This means each attack for both sides is more deadly, but the ones attacking will also be using up more fuel to accelerate and then change directions afterwards.

So here we are, sitting about 1000 kilometres from one another in a wavy line that is constantly changing as some ships move forward and others back. Supply ships move back and forth constantly, bringing ammunition and everything else needed to keep this fight going.

The current three clusters of fighting were all centred around the portal. Varani had pushed away from the portal itself, but not too far, as the portal was where they were getting supplies from. Some smaller and faster ships were doing dangerous attack runs on those supply ships or chasing down scouts of the Varani.

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Each of these three clusters was a chaotic fight up close, but if you zoomed out enough, they did become structured. My job was to monitor the overall situation and report any important changes. Every once in a while, we had a report of new squads joining the battle, as enough new ships had shown up in the reinforcement zone.

That area was large enough that if every Varani ship, before we ever destroyed one, were trying to block it, they would still have to be incredibly lucky to be able to engage a ship that dropped out of FTL before it could enter FTL once again.

This slow behemoth of a battle barge only takes 16 minutes to re-enter FTL after dropping out. It might seem like a long time, but space was stupidly large, and even if you were unlucky enough to stumble upon a blockading ship, it would have to be strong enough to get past your defences to destroy you before you could escape.

Time continued to pass annoyingly slowly. We had been up for quite a while now, and it might be time to get a shot of stimulants to keep myself awake. Another notice came of a ship joining the battle. My eyes briefly glanced over it before I went back to monitoring the deteriorating situation of the third battle group.

“Wait, what was that?” I looked back to see the name of the ship, my eyes blinking, my brain trying to catch up. Selecting the ship displayed more information. My eyes fixated on one line. ‘Captain Remi Graves.’

What the hell was he doing here, and why did he only get here now? Was he purposely late? Seeing his estimated time of revival, he had only been late by an hour or two. That was strange, but not important right now. Why was he going towards the third battle group alone? Is he crazy? Well, yes, he is, but not this kind of crazy.

I wanted to focus more on that ship, but I had a job to do. Still, whenever I could, I would pull up Forward Horizon’s current location. Two other squadrons had been ordered to join the third battle group, as they were starting to be pushed pretty hard. If we had more, we would have been sending more to that fight.

With the stimulant keeping me going, it was easy to see that if the third battle group’s situation didn’t improve, this entire fight for this system would be in jeopardy, and that was exactly what I reported to the captain.

“A dire situation. Can any be sent from the first or second battle group?” the captain asked me.

The fleet command already knew of the problem, but they didn’t see any ships we could spare. “No, captain. If we send any, we would be in the same situation as the third battle group.”

“All we can do is try to win here as fast as we can. Let’s push a bit closer to the Varani’s third tank ship. That should improve the hit percentage of our squad and the surrounding squads.”

What the captain didn’t mention was how that would also increase the number of times we would get hit. We were barely keeping up with the heat dissipation for the capital shield.

My earpiece crackled to life as my second in command contacted me. “Captain, you have a message.”

That was strange. “Send it through.”

On one of the displays, a simple message showed. Oh, he could be so vexing at times. “Hey, you still mad? Talk after battle question mark.”

He did write out the question mark, which was one of the signals we agreed upon to show that it was him speaking and not some impostor.

Taking a page from his book, I simply sent back: fine. No matter how angry I am at him… please don’t die.

The Forward Horizon finally made it close to the third battle group, burning quite strongly. What was he doing? He was making himself a perfect target. We had a few cameras pointed that way, so we could see the overall battle structure, but nothing truly specific.

Soon, the Forward Horizon showed up on the cameras as it moved into frame. It had its back turned towards the Varani. My eyes caught some flickers of light; were they already being shot at?

My fingers dug into the handrest in panic. Was he about to die? But nothing seemed to happen to the ship itself, seemingly continuing its course without any problems. There were more flashes, each one perhaps a pixel or two in size. My eyes were barely good enough to understand what I was seeing.

Fuck it, I sent an order for one of the cameras to focus on the Forward Horizon. It shouldn’t affect our overall sensory data. I simply needed to understand how they were surviving.

They were now at the same velocity as the third battle group. Slowly, the image of the Forward Horizon was getting clearer. They were indeed being fired upon, but the shots either missed or were destroyed by some type of point defense.

I remembered the report I read a while back. Remi had improved the Forward Horizon’s offensive capability by quite a lot, utilizing magic-tech weapons. A quick scan request showed that the Forward Horizon indeed had a magical signature that came from a large mana battery.

But his shield shouldn’t be so good. I expected them to go behind a tank ship, as the Forward Horizon was a frigate-sized vessel. Remi, of course, didn’t do that. Instead, they seemed to park themselves on the front line, right beside a besieged battlecruiser that had to take the job of a tank instead of dealing damage as it was originally supposed to do.

My anxiety grew as the Forward Horizon moved to hold a defensive flank of this battlecruiser, tanking so much fire, while at the same time, the Forward Horizon’s weapons never stopped firing, doing significant damage to the Varani ships close to their location.

“Verrona, what are you doing?” the captain asked me. I looked towards him in confusion. “You seemed to be spaced out for a bit there and missed your regular report.”

I tensed when I noticed the time, realizing how much I had focused on the Forward Horizon. Quickly, I checked the other battle groups, where nothing had changed. Reporting that, then continuing.

“The third battle group has been reinforced. Their front line is stabilizing.”

“That is some good news. Continue to keep an eye on it, but don’t get too sucked into only one area of the whole battle.” That was the lightest punishment he could give me. I should have received some sterner words for sure for my lack of awareness.