Ravens of Eternity

347 The Defense of Sorallus, Pt The flanking Hegemony fleet moved and swayed and swirled around the Federation ships they surrounded, and kept them contained as they maneuvered all around.

And though they exchanged weapons fire against each other with equal ferocity, the fact that the Federation ships were squeezed together and bunched up meant they took far more damage than they needed to.

Shots that missed their intended target often ended up hitting whatever was behind them.

The Federation ships struggled to push themselves out of the envelopment – no matter where the fleet maneuvered, Lucifer ensured that they were clamped down tightly. Ze punished them hard with concentrated fire every time they attempted to push out, and kept them in their place.

Every ship in the Federation interception fleet was pummeled mercilessly, and their armor was torn apart further with every passing moment.

All but one.

One of the four Federation cruisers had taken some spillover shots, but was otherwise completely untouched by the Hegemony fleet. Lucifer had highlighted it across all their targeting systems, and ensured that no-one struck it.

Ze had bigger, brighter plans for it.

“Damocles,” ze ordered. “Time for you to turn that Fed pawn into a Hegemony queen.”

.....

“Aye sir,” replied Rear Admiral Nehara.

Enemy flak bounced off the Blade of Damocles’ armor as it maneuvered into optimal attack range. It swerved closer towards the swarm of slowly-disintegrating Federation ships from above, and angled its weapons towards its target with decisive precision.

Two massive cannons along the ship’s portside specifically adjusted their aim, then fired immense shells right at the cruiser. They slammed on its topside, and embedded themselves into the thick armor plating. More than that, they punched into the structure beneath, clear into the very top deck, and lodged themselves partway through the cruiser’s outer shell.

Inside, their drill-like points poked through the ceilings and into multiple passageways and rooms menacingly.

Then, the two cannons fired again and again, and embedded more and more shells onto the cruiser, until there were a dozen of them clustered somewhere in the center.

Each one released nanite swarms just after impact that fused them to the hull, and sealed the punctures from the vacuum of space. And once the atmosphere inside was no longer leaking out, the drills opened up in sections like petals, which allowed the Corvus Republic’s Boarding Force to jump out and drop down.

Dozens of power armored commandos slammed down to the floor, quickly regrouped and organized themselves, and ripped through whatever personnel or drones were in the vicinity.

In the end, there were three teams of power armored units, each one led by Freya, Kali, and Xylo. Each of them hardly wasted any time and quickly ran towards different sections of the cruiser itself.

But they weren’t the only ones in the boarding capsules.

Raijin also descended down from one of them, and she joined the half dozen wolves who decided to be a part of their assault.

“Where to?” asked one of the wolves, telepathically.

“Engineering,” Raijin answered back, aloud. “We must take it over as fast as we can.”

She then flew down one of the passageways, towards the rear of the ship. And despite her speed, the wolves followed alongside her. They dashed into a long-legged sprint and kept up without skipping a beat or without faltering in their pace.

One of them edged closer to her as they traveled.

“We smell enemies ahead,” he transmitted. “Incoming. Fast. We wish to draw first blood.”

Raijin simply nodded in response, and on seeing that, the wolves shot forward with blinding speed. Their sprint turned into a full-on gallop and dashed far ahead in the blink of an eye.

The six of them ran down the passageway ahead of them, drawn towards the scent of their prey. It fell lightly in the air, but grew thicker as they neared. More than that, they could hear as the Federation response team ran closer – as their feet scampered across the floor, as their equipment rattled, and as their breaths drew in and out.

The wolves shifted their bodies into titanium, just as they neared an intersection, where the scent of the Federation soldiers seemed thickest. Then, the first three pounced just as the soldiers appeared from around the corner.

Absolute surprise was plastered on the Feds’ faces as the massive metal wolves leapt at them. Their claws were stretched out, and their snarling maws revealed rows of pointed teeth.

The first few soldiers were toppled to the floor, painfully. Never mind that the wind was knocked completely out of their lungs – the sheer impact of the dense wolves shattered their bones wherever they struck. Even more broke into pieces as their bodies hit the floor.

Their robust armor did almost nothing to protect them from the blows, and their helmets did nothing to prevent their minds from being completely dazed.

One was killed outright, when the force of the impact snapped his neck. The blow was strong enough that his head was almost knocked straight off his body.

The rest of the soldiers that were still in the side hallway immediately fired their heavy SMGs at the wolves. They were filled with absolute panic at their vicious and lethal attack, and almost instinctively fired in response. They poured round after round into the beasts, as though their fingers were frozen in position over their triggers.

But over the course of seconds, stopped one by one. Each of them realized that nothing they did had any effect. Their bullets simply bounced off the wolves’ titanium bodies and continued to ricochet down the titanium carbide hallways that surrounded them.

Shock and fear and awe filled them, and backed up slowly and carefully. At the same time, the other three wolves crept forward ever closer. They growled menacingly as they advanced.

One of the Federation soldiers fumbled in sheer panic as he attempted to reload his SMG with a fresh magazine, and very nearly dropped it. But the one next to him instead puffed his chest out bravely.

“Y-you think we’re scared of you?” cried one of the soldiers. “Well, you’re in for a real treat!”

Though he kept on backing up along with the rest of his team, he quickly pulled a large grenade that was affixed to his armor, then loaded it into the bottom of his heavy SMG. He then slid the grenade panel closed and aimed his gun downrange.

With shaky hands, he squeezed the trigger just as the wolves pounced.

He grinned as his SMG’s launcher shot the grenade round straight at the first wolf, but it turned into disbelief almost immediately after. The wolves’ bodies all shifted from a solid metal to an incongruous, bright blue plasma.

In an instant, they swept through him, and through all of the Federation soldiers around him. The wolves poured lethal amounts of energy through the humans in a flash of light, and absolutely fried all of the organic matter they passed through.

Whole sections of the soldiers’ organs and muscles and tissue and skin all burned to a blackened crisp while the rest of their bodies shook and shivered and trembled from the electric shock.

The wolves shifted back to their normal forms just before they landed back down on the floor, but quickly turned back around to their prey. Not that they had anything to do but watch as the Federation soldiers’ bodies fell one by one to the floor, dead.

Arcs of electricity swept up and down their charred armor and equipment, even as their limbs quivered and rattled uncontrollably.

At the same time, the first three wolves back at the intersection tore apart one of the soldiers they had pounced on. He apparently still had some fight left in him, and fired on the wolves point-blank with his SMG.

But they simply grabbed onto various limbs and literally pulled him apart from multiple directions. His screams filled the hallways briefly, until one of the wolves clamped down on his throat, and bit down hard.

“He should have pretended to have died instead,” Raijin said as she floated up to the intersection.

Not that she stopped to look, and kept on going.

“Come,” she continued. “We have much to do.”

The wolves quickly followed after her, further towards engineering. And they dealt with anything that was in their path, either with metal claws, or lightning jaws, until they came to Engineering.

Raijin floated into the section, and marveled at its size. The cruiser’s engineering bay was incredibly vast – multiple decks were wrapped around an open middle, where a massive power generator hovered.

She looked down the open middle, and saw that the generator stretched all the way down to the very bottom. Then she turned towards the wolves.

“We had better be careful here,” she said. “We would not want to damage anything important.”

“Hey!” someone screamed “You’re not allowed to be in here!”

Raijin turned to look, and saw a number of engineers running in her direction. Each of them drew out their sidearms from their holsters, and began to point them at her.

She simply raised her palm at them, and told them, “Surrender.”

They didn’t.

In response, she fired a single arc of lightning that struck the closest advancing engineer. It struck him right in the chest, which stopped him dead in his tracks. Then, it arced out to the others that were advancing with him at the same time, and struck all of them as well.

All of them were immediately stopped by the brief attack, and they clutched at their chests in pain. Their faces were wrenched with fear and awe as their bodies simply shut down. All of their organs simply stopped working, as though they were thrown out of sync with the rest of their bodies.

Each of them fell to the ground, one by one, as their hearts went into cardiac arrest and their lungs breathed their last.

Raijin looked up from the bodies, and shook her head in disappointment. Then she hovered over to the closest terminal, and touched it lightly. That mere touch activated it.

More than that, she began to pour herself into it.

Her nanites quickly swam through the node itself and went straight towards the controlling circuit. They gained physical and digital access at the exact same time, and completely bypassed every security measure in her path.

Then, as an invading nanite swarm, she dropped her engines into the code and began her takeover of the cruiser’s engineering bay.

She quickly shut off every single physical entrance into engineering, and completely sealed it off from the rest of the ship. At the same time, she took complete control of the ship’s operational intelligence, then isolated it from everything.

Engineers across every deck were in utter shock as they were kicked out of whatever system they were currently in. Whatever work they were attempting to accomplish simply vanished.

And when they turned around to look for answers, only found growling wolves to respond to them.

Before they could do anything, Raijin’s voice came through every sonic emitter in engineering, and echoed up and down the open center.

“Surrender,” she said. “Or be nullified.”

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