He slowly began to speak.
"Admiral Armstrong."
Armstrong looked at him. Scott did not turn around.
"If this Stargate is destroyed."
His voice was soft, as if stating a fact unrelated to himself.
"The three Sequence Fleets on the front line will be isolated forces."
"Once the Federation reacts and cuts off their route of retreat..."
He paused.
"Three Sequence-class Fleets, tens of millions of people."
"Surrounded and annihilated."
"You and I."
He turned his head and looked into Armstrong's eyes.
"Will be the Empire's sinners."
Armstrong did not speak, but he knew what Scott meant.
If the Stargate was destroyed, the fleet would be annihilated.
And the two of them would still be alive.
A court-martial would be their end.
Accountability, thorough investigation.
Their families would be implicated.
Unless...
Scott did not continue. He simply turned around and faced the screen once more.
The countdown for the meteorite was ticking down by the second.
Armstrong looked at his back, still standing straight and tall.
He suddenly understood.
Scott had not failed to consider it; he had already made his choice.
Armstrong closed his eyes briefly.
When he opened them again, his voice was calm as water.
"The flagship will not retreat."
Scott glanced sideways at him.
Armstrong did not look at him, calmly adjusting the medals on his uniform.
"The Stargate Defense Fleet, flagship self-destruct."
He paused.
"It is an acceptable way to die."
Scott looked at him for three seconds.
Then, the corner of his mouth twitched slightly.
Not a smile, but a kind of release.
"Then let it be so."
He turned back to the communications officer, his voice regaining the steadiness befitting an admiral.
"Issue the order to all warships of the Marbas and Abaddon Combined Fleets..."
He paused before continuing.
"The flagship will engage the incoming target alongside the Stargate.
All fleet formations are to retreat swiftly to safe positions. After the Stargate is destroyed, execute a breakout on your own and report the battle situation to the Theater Command."
The communications officer's finger hovered over the send button.
He understood.
Everyone understood.
On the bridge, no one made a sound.
Only the meteorite's countdown continued its cold, relentless ticking in the corner of the screen.
Countdown: 8 seconds.
Distance: 1.55 million kilometers.
In the previous wave of attacks, the meteorite's speed had been significantly reduced.
Yet, this still did not change the outcome—the meteorite would collide with the Stargate.
Flagship bridge of the Abyss Destroyer.
Outside the viewport, the meteorite now filled the entire field of vision.
No longer a distant point of light on the star chart.
It was a physical entity.
A mountain range.
A giant hammer about to smash into their heart.
"FIRE!!"
The roars of the two admirals exploded simultaneously on their respective bridges.
The Abyssal Destroyer. The Demon Prince.
Two Imperial flagships, two floating steel fortresses.
All weapons that had been charged.
The Plasma Cannon Array, the Vertical Launch Missile Units, the Close-in Laser Defense Batteries, the Broadside Railgun Turrets.
Roared in unison at the same instant.
The azure energy beams, dense missile tail flames, and sublight tungsten alloy projectiles, like the final breath of a dying giant beast, slammed mercilessly toward the approaching star of death.
At that moment.
Scott suddenly turned his head to look at the tactical screen.
There, not a single blue dot representing friendly forces was executing the flagship's order for an independent breakout.
They were not retreating, not turning, not fleeing.
They were accelerating.
Accelerating toward the Stargate, accelerating toward that meteorite, accelerating toward death.
The outermost edge of the Stargate Defense Perimeter.
The Guardian-class Frigate.
Captain Lieutenant Link stared fixedly through the viewport at the colossal rock growing ever larger, its surface still embedded with the wreckage of Imperial warships.
"All ships—"
He roared.
"All weapons! Fire!"
Beams shot from the thin barrels, blasting a small shower of rock fragments from the meteorite's surface.
Like poking a charging elephant with a toothpick.
The next instant, the meteorite drew near.
So near that its gravitational field reached the hundred-meter-long small vessel before the body itself.
Lieutenant Link felt the hull lurch violently downward.
Not from impact.
From tearing.
The shield generator didn't even have time to activate before the entire frigate's hull structure disintegrated under the kneading of those invisible giant hands.
Armor plates peeled, tore, and curled like sheets of paper.
The keel emitted a teeth-grating metallic groan, then snapped.
The warship did not explode, did not burst into flames—it simply shattered.
Breaking into dozens of pieces of metal debris of varying sizes.
Tumbling and scattering in the gravitational wave oscillations, then crushed, swallowed, and dissolved by the meteorite's trailing cloud of rock dust.
Not even the flash of an explosion had time to bloom.
Only a few fleeting wisps of ion mist remained.
A speck of stardust, insignificant upon the giant's body.
The Indomitable-class Heavy Cruiser.
Captain Rodriguez gritted his teeth, the muscles of his jaw bulging into hard lines.
"Full-power shield, hold!"
A pale blue heavy energy barrier erupted into existence before the bow, seven times thicker than that of a standard destroyer.
The thickened impact armor at the bow gleamed with a cold, hard metallic luster outside the viewports.
All secondary cannons roared simultaneously.
Beams, shells, missiles poured like a torrential downpour onto the meteorite's surface.
Rock fragments erupted.
For a giant eighty-two kilometers in diameter.
It was inconsequential.
The shield erupted in a blinding golden light, trembling and flickering violently, emitting a death rattle hum.
One second.
Two seconds.
...
Five seconds.
Boom—!!
The golden membrane of light shattered completely, scattering into billions of fragments of energy.
The meteorite's rocky body directly smashed through the cruiser's core compartments.
Not piercing through, but filling them.
The bridge, reactor chamber, ammunition depot.
All matter, before that irresistible colossal force, was compressed, crushed, and packed solid.
The blaze of the reactor detonation gushed from every gap in the hull.
Then tore the entire warship in two.
One half of the hull, carried along by the meteorite, continued forward.
The other half became a tumbling, out-of-control wreck, trailing the lingering flames of the sympathetic detonation, gradually left behind.
The Stargate Core Defense Perimeter.
The Demon Prince and the Abyssal Destroyer, two battleships merely a few kilometers long.
Before an eighty-two-kilometer-diameter meteorite.
Were like ants before an elephant.
The two most powerful T5-class flagships of the Empire, the pride of the Imperial Navy, the expensive steel behemoths.
At the moment of contact.
Their bows collapsed—not pierced, but flattened.
The Frontal Composite Armor, hailed as capable of withstanding continuous missile bombardment, proved as thin as a cicada's wing and as brittle as a withered leaf before the Meteorite.
The hull crumpled from the bow, layer upon layer, all the way to the stern.
Compartments, turrets, the Bridge, the reactor.
Every structure, every piece of equipment, every crew member.
Under that irresistible, colossal force, they were compressed, kneaded, and crammed into a twisted mass of metallic debris, crackling with sparks and shrouded in a plasma mist.
The bow smashed into the stern, the stern embedded itself into the hull.
In less than 0.3 seconds of impact, the entire warship was flattened into a metal pancake.
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