On the bridge of the Light of Dawn, Helovia stood before the holographic hololith, her long silver hair glowing with a cold, metallic sheen under the dim lighting.
The moment she assumed command, the gentle aura of the sweet little sister completely vanished. In its place stood the cold, imposing authority honed over thirteen years as the Planetary Governor of Aurelian.
"Schrödinger. Blood Angel."
Her voice was crisp and icy calm. Reflected in her deep green eyes were the dense clusters of fleet icons holding position in Dal's high orbit.
"What is the cooling status of the cruisers' macro-batteries?"
"And the auxiliary fire-support platforms?"
Schrödinger Bro pulled up the real-time telemetry panels. The power readings for all five cruisers were climbing at a visible rate.
"Macro-battery cooling progress at 87 percent. They'll be fully primed in under two minutes."
"Broadside lance batteries cycle faster. They're already at 92 percent."
"Torpedo tubes have completed auto-reload. Ready for a second volley on your mark."
He paused before adding, "The frigate squadrons still have 93 percent of their missile payloads remaining. Sustained bombardment capacity is fully optimal."
Blood Angel stood on the opposite side of the console, his fanatical gaze locked onto the hololith. Scores of red arrows were swarming from across the planet, all converging directly on the Royal Court... the Dal reinforcements.
His voice dripped with murderous intent.
"Helovia, auspex sweeps confirm at least twenty-two massive Dal troop columns currently mobilizing toward the Royal Court."
"The largest concentration is moving across the Northeast Plains. Estimated strength exceeds eight hundred thousand infantry, led by a Dal general in heavy black carapace."
"It seems they believe they can drown us in sheer numbers."
Helovia gave a curt nod. Her slender fingers danced across the hololith, tracing several critical coordinate markers.
"If that is their intention..."
Her voice suddenly dropped, turning as chillingly sharp as fracturing ice.
"...then relay my orders."
"All cruisers and frigates of the First Dawn Fleet, re-align bombardment arrays."
"Target Priority One: All mobilizing Dal reinforcement columns. Focus fire on the largest and fastest-moving formations."
"Target Priority Two: Power nodes, manufactorums, and command centers across all twenty-seven major Dal terrestrial cities."
"Specifically target any massive infrastructure registering high-yield energy signatures."
"Target Priority Three: All remaining anti-air batteries and ground fortifications in the immediate vicinity of the Royal Court."
Helovia looked up, the azure sphere of the planet below perfectly mirrored in her deep green eyes.
"Commence orbital bombardment."
"Let these xenos, who view humanity as nothing more than livestock, understand..."
"...the true meaning of judgment raining from the heavens."
The orders transmitted across the entire armada in a matter of seconds.
The five cruisers began to maneuver simultaneously, their multi-kilometer-long hulls carving elegant, lethal arcs through the dead vacuum.
Energy readings spiked across the main battery platforms. A deep, bone-rattling hum resonated from within the massive barrels of the macro-cannons.
The fifteen frigates scattered like a hunting pack. The heavy blast doors of their missile silos slid open in sequence, exposing dense clusters of warheads primed for launch.
Crisp acknowledgments flooded the bridge vox-channel:
"Light of Dawn, macro-locks confirmed... Target: Main Dal force, Northeast Plains."
"Will of Daybreak, lances primed... Target: Energy centers across the three southwestern cities."
"Crimson Conviction, torpedo bays open... Target: Remnant anti-air grids on the Royal Court perimeter."
"..."
"All units, firing solutions synchronized."
"Open fire."
--
Planet Dal, Northeast Plains, en route to the Royal Court.
General Grosh Whitney, clad in black armor, rode atop a massive, genetically augmented war-beast.
The creature stood over five meters tall, resembling an ancient Terran mammoth violently spliced with a crocodilian. It was covered in thick, overlapping keratin plates, and each of its six tree-trunk legs left deep craters in the earth with every step.
Grosh himself stood at an imposing three point one meters, a veritable giant among a species that averaged around two.
He wore custom-forged, black composite carapace armor, deeply scarred and scorched by countless battles. Strung from his pauldrons were twelve embalmed, perfectly preserved human skulls...
...trophies from his past conquests.
"Faster! Push them faster!"
Grosh's roar thundered like an artillery blast over the heads of his eight-hundred-thousand-strong army.
This force was the absolute elite of Dal's eastern continent. Every single soldier had participated in at least three major "harvests"...
...the Dal term for the routine culling and butchering of the human livestock pens.
They were heavily armed. The whine of charging energy rifles blended into a singular, deafening drone. Hundreds of crude armored transports rumbled through the ranks, flanked by twenty massive, eight-meter-tall combat walkers...
...makeshift war engines cobbled together from technology pillaged from ancient human colonies.
Above the marching host, a pale yellow energy shield generator operated at maximum output.
It was one of the crowning technological achievements of the Dal.
By refining energy from native crystalline veins, they projected a deflector field capable of weathering sustained fire from most conventional energy weapons.
"King Charles has commanded it!"
Grosh hoisted his massive, double-bladed great-axe, its edge stained black with dried human blood. The blades caught the glaring light of the local star, reflecting a sickly, dark red sheen.
"All forces must reach the Royal Court within three hours! Tear these human invaders limb from limb!"
"Drag their commanders before His Majesty alive..."
"His Majesty will personally crack open their skulls and feast on their brains!"
"ROAAAR!!!"
Eight hundred thousand Dal soldiers roared in unison. The sheer sonic force of their battle cry violently shook the low-lying brush across the plains.
They were the proud Dal. The undisputed masters of this world. The apex civilization that rightfully treated humans as livestock and meat.
For centuries, they had slaughtered tens of billions of humans, transforming every human settlement on the planet into sprawling abattoirs.
In the eyes of these soldiers, humans were nothing more than talking two-legged sheep—a convenient source of protein and manual labor.
And now, a human fleet dared to launch an unprovoked assault on their homeworld?
It was blasphemy.
It was an insult that had to be brutally washed away with agony and blood.
Grosh's roar abruptly caught in his throat.
The veteran general snapped his head up, his crimson pupils violently contracting.
The shield monitors suspended above the army suddenly shrieked with a deafening alarm. The field integrity readings plummeted from 100 percent straight down to 37 percent in a microsecond.
The next second, the sky ignited.
It wasn't the light of Dal's sun.
It was a blinding, incandescent pillar of white-hot light, fifty meters in diameter, punching straight down through the atmosphere.
The ultimate weapon of a voidcraft. The macro-cannon.
A full broadside from the Light of Dawn's main batteries.
Four solid-slug alloy warheads, moving at three percent the speed of light, slammed directly into the Dal army's vanguard shield.
The pale yellow deflector field held for exactly 0.8 seconds before completely shattering, exploding into a shower of dissipating energy fragments.
A heartbeat later, the warheads made landfall.
BOOOOOOM!!!!!
The first shell struck dead center in the vanguard's armored column.
The moment the eight-hundred-ton alloy warhead made contact, its antimatter core detonated.
A sphere of pure, blinding white light three hundred meters across erupted from the impact point, instantly followed by the shockwave...
A literal ring of annihilation expanding outward at five kilometers per second.
Grosh watched in sheer horror as his most elite unit, the Black Talon Armored Battalion, simply ceased to exist.
Thirty-two main battle tanks, seventy-seven armored personnel carriers, and the five thousand two hundred elite soldiers riding within them were instantly vaporized in the extreme heat of the antimatter annihilation. Not a single trace of ash was left behind.
The second shell annihilated the center of the formation.
The third shell cratered the artillery positions in the rear.
The fourth shell surgically erased the entire sector housing the twenty combat walkers.
And this was only the beginning.
FSSSHHH... FSSSH-FSSSH-FSSSH!!!
A deafening, despair-inducing shriek tore through the sky.
It was the missile barrage launched by the frigate squadrons.
Over five hundred warheads of various payload types plummeted from outer space on trails of brilliant blue fire. Like a net woven by the Reaper himself, they completely blanketed the plains.
High-explosive, armor-piercing, incendiary, and even neuro-toxin payloads engineered specifically for biological targets.
The explosions merged into a continuous, rolling sea of fire.
The shockwave violently threw Grosh from the back of his war-beast, sending him crashing into the dirt twenty meters away.
He struggled to his feet. His black composite armor was laced with deep fractures, and his left arm hung at a grotesque, unnatural angle. Bone had snapped.
He looked around.
The grand, eight-hundred-thousand-strong army that had been marching in absolute glory just one minute ago was now a burning hellscape.
The plains were pockmarked with craters, the largest spanning over two hundred meters across and impossibly deep.
Shattered armored transports belched thick black smoke. The wreckage of the combat walkers lay strewn about like violently disassembled toys.
The bodies of soldiers were piled high... no, most hadn't even left behind intact corpses.
Scorched limbs, blackened viscera, and a thick, muddy slurry of green Dal blood painted the earth.
The surviving Dal soldiers wailed in agony.
Some, their legs blown clean off, dragged their spilling intestines across the dirt.
Others had suffered horrific burns, their skin carbonized and sloughing off in chunks.
Still others, infected by the neuro-toxin warheads, writhed in violent spasms, their muscles involuntarily contracting until their bodies curled into grotesque, tight spheres.
"G-General..."
A member of the honor guard staggered over to Grosh. Half of his face was missing, green blood bubbling furiously from a massive gap in his cheekbone.
"We... we lost at least... two hundred and ninety thousand men... in the first strike..."
Grosh didn't answer.
This general, infamous for his cruelty, simply stared blankly at the sky.
Through the slowly dissipating smoke, he could faintly make out the silhouettes of the voidcraft prowling in orbit.
Those human ships hovered there like utterly indifferent gods, staring down at the dying struggles of ants.
"Humans... how could humans possibly possess firepower like this..."
Grosh muttered to himself, before suddenly erupting into a hysterical, maddened roar.
"This isn't fair! This isn't—"
His roar was instantly drowned out by a fresh chorus of explosions.
This time, the artillery fire was coming from the ground.
Two heavy artillery brigades of the Dawn Defense Force's Third Legion had established ambush positions on the edge of the Northeast Plains over three hours ago.
Now, with the orbital bombardment having thrown the Dal army into utter chaos and completely shattered their formations, the hidden artillery finally opened fire.
Three hundred self-propelled guns roared as one.
The piercing shriek of shells tearing through the air and the thunderous detonations of their impacts wove together into a symphony of absolute death.
The last thing Grosh ever saw was the moment a 152mm howitzer shell slammed into the earth five meters in front of him.
Then, the darkness swallowed everything.