The Warlord (8)
And so time flowed on and on, until a full half-year had slipped past.
The final clash between the returning Warlord and the Southern Allied Fleet now loomed right before them. The quiet certainty that whichever side claimed victory here would hold the galaxy’s fate in its hands had already settled, however faintly, into the minds of everyone present.
“Haaah…”
“O God, please watch over our fleet.”
Some sought the divine to ease the crushing weight of the moment. Others, however…
“Look at this—here’s a picture of my girl.”
“...What.”
“So yeah… once this war’s over, I’m heading home and proposing to her.”
“!”
“Get off our ship!!”
…were busy scattering dozens of death flags with cheerful abandon. The pre-battle chaos had reached a fever pitch.
Yet that chaos vanished in an instant.
“Warlord’s forces confirmed at six hundred seventy light-seconds ahead!”
“Well then. Here we go.”
“Will you please just get off our ship?!”
With every heart praying this would truly be the last battle, the guns of every allied fleet stationed in the south roared open as one.
As with every war in this world, a head-on, bull-headed charge could only end in a pure contest of raw power…
“Retreat! Fall back!”
Perhaps they simply could not withstand the merciless all-out offensive led by the Warlord himself. The allied vanguard fled in a scramble so desperate it was almost pitiful to watch.
“Behold! Those cowards turn their backs on the Warlord and run!”
“Attack! Keep pursuing them!”
As the entire front began to buckle, the Warlord’s fleet seized the opening and poured through the breach like a flood.
But…
“You think we can’t use the same tricks you do?”
“Oh.”
The Warlord’s ships that had been chasing the retreating allies melted away under the overwhelming firepower of the Holy Sevelian Empire’s ultimate weapon, dispatched in advance for this very moment—Countess Ash, the Grey Nightmare.
“Now! All ships, one-hundred-eighty-degree reverse!”
“Sevelian technology is number oooone in the wooooorld!!!!”
With the mighty Ash at their head, the allied fleets shattered the Warlord’s forces and once more began shoving the battle line forward.
“W-what the hell is that thing?!”
“It appears to be a new flagship the Sevelians just deployed… but it’s far too large and far too strong!”
Suddenly confronted by a ship that would have been top-tier even in the game, the Warlord’s ranks grew more restless by the second.
“Fire! Concentrate all firepower!”
“Boss, we definitely punched through the shields, but there isn’t even a scratch on the armor!”
“What.”
And because she was composed of the nanomachines of an ancient civilization, any ordinary damage regenerated in moments. Even troops fanatically devoted to the Warlord could not escape the psychological shock.
Yet…
“If we just ignore that giant ship, we can handle the rest!”
“All fleets except the ones in front—flank them and hit their sides!”
“Waaaaaah!!”
“In the name of the Warlord!”
Proving he had not claimed the title “Warlord” for nothing, he instantly crushed the panic among his forces. Leaving only the ships facing Ash’s advance, he sent the rest to strike the allied flanks—and not with honest two-dimensional maneuvers, but with full three-dimensional spatial tactics.
“Hahahah! You idiots!”
“Th-this is a war crime!”
True to their pirate roots, they even reversed their ships in open defiance of every regulation. All manner of bizarre stratagems were about to crash down on the weakened allied wings—when suddenly…
“Out of the way! Move!”
A single corvette streaked through the Warlord’s formation at blistering speed. To a fleet, one little patrol craft was nothing; they simply ignored it and pressed on.
“A-above us!”
“Space beasts! Space beasts are attacking!”
The Warlord’s ships that had been swinging around to hit the flanks were suddenly swarmed by a horde of cosmic monsters and plunged into utter chaos.
There were space jellyfish that snapped corvettes in half with massive tentacles; space slimes that spat hyper-alkaline fluid and dissolved entire armor plates; crystalline parasites that slipped in through thruster nozzles and drained energy dry; space whales that rammed destroyers and snapped their keels. Every grotesque abomination imaginable poured in, and the Warlord’s fleet took sudden, savage losses.
“Don’t tell me that little corvette earlier dragged these things here…?”
Realizing the trap, the Warlord’s forces howled in fury and swung their guns toward the beasts.
“You damn monsters… Fire! Kill them all!”
“They’re nothing but sashimi ingredients!”
Even space beasts were little more than a herd of zebras on the African savanna to a full-scale battle fleet. In less than an hour the swarm that had ambushed the Warlord’s forces was reduced to drifting chunks of meat.
But the attack was far from over.
“They’re coming again!”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!”
Drawn by the small, swift corvettes, the beasts kept arriving—dozens, then hundreds at a time—sowing extreme confusion through the Warlord’s ranks.
“Don’t forget about us!”
“Ah, damn it.”
The allied fleets were never going to miss an opening like that.
“Just as planned—while they’re tangled with the beasts, all forces advance!”
The Loyrakan Republic, whose heavy battleships had been wiped out but whose remaining ships were still intact.
“Latch onto their fleet! Become part of the glorious plumage!”
The Rixi Republic, which had kept a low profile yet always done its job diligently.
While the Holy Sevelian Empire tanked the front, the nations holding the allied wings finally threw themselves into the fight in earnest.
Even so, the Warlord’s majesty remained unshaken.
—Bwoooooong!!!
At the blast of his signature war-horn, the Warlord and his personal fleet raced across the battlefield, instantly reinforcing every threatened sector. He was teaching his enemies, with his own body, exactly what mobile defense looked like in real combat.
Yet no matter how many fleets he led in a one-man rampage, in this precarious situation he was nothing more than a single thread of hope holding the line.
Our Warlord is tearing them apart.
Except for the sector with that giant flagship, the allies are manageable.
If we can just deal with those space-beast bastards, the rest will fall quickly.
That was the hope they clung to.
But…
“We have arrived!!!!”
“Emergency transmission from fleet command! The Mekt-Fuchs fleet has begun an offensive from the Warlord’s rear!”
“Ha, fuck.”
“Grmzz… kts… hnz… tssb…”
From the vulnerable rear of the Warlord’s fleet—where they had thought him crushed—Mekt-Fuchs returned with a blade of pure vengeance. And this time it was not the high-speed cruiser task force he had favored as a “lesson of the war.”
“Fleet command reports: the entire Mekt-Fuchs force consists of corvettes and torpedo boats…?”
“Whoa.”
Had Arto been watching, he would have exclaimed, “Whoa! Corvette-torpedo spam!” The composition was so grotesquely lopsided that no one in this world had ever attempted such madness. To every observer—and to the Warlord’s fleet as well—it was a completely alien form of warfare.
“Whatever they’re thinking, fire! Don’t let them close!”
“Launch the fighters! Prioritize engine destruction and stop them cold!”
Even in the middle of a chaotic battle, the Warlord’s forces responded with impressive speed.
—Boom! Crash!
Because every ship was a corvette or torpedo boat, Mekt-Fuchs suffered catastrophic losses on the approach…
“Now! Fire!”
…yet the suicidal torpedo-spam that closed the distance anyway inflicted annihilating damage on the Warlord’s rear.
“Ah—aah…”
“The carrier’s going down! We can’t hold this sector any longer!”
The damage that began in the rear spread through the entire Warlord force like mold. Combined with the sacrifices of the Mekt-Fuchs fleet and the renewed frontal assault spearheaded by Ash, the Warlord’s army was finally split clean in two.
The moment that happened, the fleets that no longer had the Warlord among them lost all will to fight.
“...Run. Just run!”
“The Warlord, everything—it’s over! If you want to live, run!”
Caught between space beasts and the allied fleets in a nightmare collaboration, they fled in every direction, each ship for itself.
That was the instant the Warlord’s downfall was sealed—the same Warlord who had once plunged the entire eastern galaxy into the flames of war.