Ravens of Eternity

372 Blood on the Line, Pt The two Imperial battleships both took on incredible amounts of damage – with one taking far more than the other. The two Felrahn reinforcement fleets absolutely hammered the battleship that faced off against them, and shattered its armor with every moment that passed.

Their rail cannon slugs also struck any broadside turrets that were exposed, and smashed the chitin protecting them as well.

A number of their stinger-like weapons were blown apart and thrown out into open space.

Not that the Drogar battleship stopped firing back. They shot their own particle-charged slugs at the Hegemony ships, even as their own frigates and fighters advanced down the far right flank.

Worse, the topside chitin armor slid open and released the massive hovering particle beam turrets inside. All were plated heavily with chitin armor, and held large stinger-like guns. Far larger than the ones on their broadsides.

Each of them turned towards one of the Felrahn battleships and fired their dark orange beams at them.

The destructive beams of energy completely disintegrated any fighters and mecha and even frigates along the way, then struck the battleship squarely on its armor. There was no force and no heat as a typical electron beam would create. Instead, Imperial beams split matter apart through pure nuclear fission.

Entire sections of Felrahn armor was eaten up by the hungry beams, and rendered completely useless. And because the weapons were so effective, they hardly left anything in their wake save a few scraps of inert base materials.

Worse, they absorbed any produced energy straight back through the beam, and converted through their demimatter energy core.

.....

Energy which they immediately fed into their power-hungry antimatter defense field.

A pulse of energy swept out from the Imperial battleship and captured everything in its immediate surroundings. It took hold of every shard of chitin that had been shattered to pieces, big and small, and pulled them all in.

Along with them were countless splintered, bent, and blunted tungsten carbide slugs that the Felrahn had fired at them.

And instead of pulling it all tightly against its scarred and battered surface, the battleship instead focused its defensive field a dozen meters away. It instead created a loose shield, composed of billions of chitin shards.

A bit like one massive sand barrier, condensed and compressed by the antigrav field that held them.

Although it strengthened their defenses, it also prevented their starboard guns from firing out. After all, their own slugs would strike their chitin particle shield, and get trapped in their own antigrav field.

But it certainly didn’t stop them from firing their topside beams, not in the slightest.

The Felrahn admirals were in utter awe at the defensive position that the two Drogar battleships had taken. Both had erected antigravity shields made with chitin particles. It was so effective that any slugs they fired into it impacted the chitin ‘sand’ uselessly. All they did was add more mass to their defenses.

Even the cluster missiles they fired didn’t fare much better. Although the bomblets still exploded across the surface, the antigrav field kept the shards from getting thrown around in every direction.

All they accomplished was to turn any large chitin chunks into smaller chitin shards.

On the other side of the fight, the defensive Felrahn fleet and the orbital station met similar problems. The battleship that they faced off against also blasted them apart with their devastating beam weapons, and erected their defensive antigrav field at the same time.

The Felrahn attempted to fire their own thermic beams at the enemy to bypass the chitin particle shield, but found them to be severely lacking. Although some expected their beams to slag the chitin shards, all that happened was a slow increase in temperature.

It hardly mattered if they focused their beams or concentrated them – they were almost completely ineffective.

“Gods-damned lizards,” cursed one of the Felrahn admirals. “Their improved armor literally ignores our weapons.”

He stared at the reports in the screens attached to his command chair, and lamented their weapons’ absolute ineffectiveness.

“Do we have absolutely anything else in our arsenal?” he yelled out. “Or are we gonna have to start ramming those things?”

“Sir, we still have our torpedoes,” said one of the bridge officers nearby. “And we have our fighters and mecha – we could take the fight right up to them.”

“Our torps’ll never get past those antigravity defenses. They’ll just get captured along with the rest of our slugs.”

“We could hit the opposite battleship, sir. If the one up front is going to shield up against us, then we hit the one shielding up against the orbital station. Right in the back, as it were.”

The admiral turned to his officer with eyes wide. Of course!

“That’s genius, captain,” he said. “Relay the plan of attack to the rest of the admirals on the field. Make it happen. And aim for those big guns! Turn ’em into useless slag.”

“Yessir!”

Word quickly spread to the other two Felrahn fleets, and the admirals quickly adjusted their strategies and positions. They adjusted their lines of fire, even as the Imperial battleships wore away at their armor plating.

Then, once they were all in position, angled every available torpedo tube they had, and fired.

Dozens and dozens of heavy torpedoes cruised towards the Drogar battleships. Each one was incredibly large, almost the size of corvettes. They all zipped forward with incredible momentum as their rear thrusters blasted with maximum energy.

Each of them sailed clear over the Imperial battleships up front, past the carrier in the middle, and slammed into the battleships on the far end.

Their heavy, pointed noses struck the relatively unprotected chitin at the battleships’ other sides, shattered the armor and exploded violently. The force of their impact rippled across the chitin armor, and literally split them apart into tiny fragments.

Worse, many of the torpedoes were aimed at the hovering weapon systems floating along their topsides. They struck at them mercilessly, and blasted them open with violent force. The exoframe beneath their thick chitin plates was wrenched open, and all the mechanisms inside were ripped apart.

Numerous stinger-like barrels were thrown around into space, even as the rest of the turrets were blasted to oblivion.

Any torpedoes that struck the main battleships’ bodies blasted apart the armor and wrenched open their exoframe, even as half their beam turrets were dismantled. The Felrahn tore open massive wounds in the Imperial battleships in a single devastating attack.

Though the Imperial fleet didn’t seem to adjust their tactics to respond to it.

On the bridge of the Imperial carrier, the Drogar swarmchief standing in the middle chuckled at all of the devastation happening around him.

Reports of the damage that his battleships had sustained filled the projected data streams right in front of him. At the same time, multiple live feeds of the battlefield were displayed on the giant screen that surrounded the bridge.

“These Hegemony rats are truly so very fearful,” he said with a sneer. “They’re attacking us from so far away!”

One of the swarmchief’s tactical officers stood up next to him, and snorted with derision.

“I suppose they aren’t as stupid as we first imagined, hm?” he said. “They know how fragile their armor is, so they’re forced to stay away from our close-range weapons.”

“I imagine they believe themselves to be winning this fight, yes? Damage report.”

“Swarmchief Alethii,” said one of the technicians at their terminal set into the floor below. “Our battleships have sustained an average of 19% exterior damage. One has also received substantial internal damage – nearly 7% of its exoframe has been weakened.”

Alethii rubbed at his chin in thought as he reviewed the numbers that surrounded him. He swept through a number of reports, seemingly content at what was inside them.

“This is well within damage projections,” the swarmchief said. “What’s the status on our assault ships?”

“Still moving up the right flank, swarmchief,” another technician replied. “They are already being fired upon by defensive ships and have taken less than 5% casualties.”

“Have them advance faster. I want them engaged with those Hegemony fleets quickly. Then we can launch our little surprise. I can’t wait to see how they react.”

“Yes, swarmchief. Orders relayed.”

The flanking Imperial fighters and frigates charged forward with greater speed on receiving their orders. Despite the fact that the Felrahn destroyers and frigates were firing on them relentlessly, they kept on charging in an arc towards the Felrahn front line.

Clouds of AA shells burst along their trajectory and filled the space between them with red-hot tungsten balls. The flak struck their chitinous hulls with great force and caused cracks to spider everywhere. Small slivers and chunks broke off and were flung into the void.

But none nowhere near enough to cause serious damage.

And thanks to their improved chitin, they shrugged off the intense heat that the shrapnel exuded. Instead of getting embedded, they simply bounced off without having done any thermal damage at all.

The Felrahn’s smaller weapons also hardly did any damage. They fired their chainguns straight into the enemy’s paths, but most simply bounced off harmlessly. The best they could do was chip off tiny amounts of chitin from their armor.

Even the Felrahn’s interceptor fighters couldn’t do much damage to them. Many shot forward to meet them, and fired every weapon they had at them – cannons and chainguns and beams and missiles.

While they did chip away at them, it took far too much to do far too little. Bullets and slugs merely bounced off their robust chitin, beams did absolutely nothing, and all the missiles did was cause them to veer slightly from their flight paths.

Humanity’s last generation weapons were no match for Drogar’s next generation armor. All they did was waste their munitions.

And the Drogar pilots knew it. They ignored their enemies with absolute ease, and settled into attack runs across the Felrahn capital ships.

As per their usual tactics, they hugged close to their hulls, and fired their stinger-like tri-weapon systems at the armor plating. Their thin, bright orange beams sliced the titanium carbide plating neatly and easily.

In fact, they were practically tuned to do exactly that. The energies of each of their weapons were optimized specifically to destroy Felrahn plating. They attacked the atomic bindings that held them together, and literally cut them apart with fine precision.

There was literally nothing that could stop them as they carved up the Felrahn battleships and Hegemony carriers.

Any that tried were destroyed by the Drogar frigates that flew alongside. Their robust particle-charged repeaters ripped into their enemies with absolute ease.

But even that wasn’t the most devastating attack that the fighters and frigates inflicted. The moment they began to swarm the capital ships, they activated their port dampening fields.

And in doing so, completely shut down the Felrahn ships’ ability to use their teleport away. Their energies coursed across their hulls, sunk deep into their circuits, and severely suppressed the teleport modules deep inside.

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