Rebirth of the Super Battleship-Chapter 583: Spatial Fluctuations!
After Xiao Yu’s attacking fleet and this fleet converged, under Xiao Yu’s gaze this fleet actually did not engage his fleet at all, but suddenly boosted its speed to forty-two times the speed of light. Regardless of Xiao Yu’s fleet continually closing in and launching an attack, they still fled at top speed.
Based on their course of travel, Xiao Yu could easily deduce that the direction of this fleet was precisely his rear, where the Home ships, planetary bases, and other garrisons were located. That was the heart supporting Xiao Yu in waging this war.
The war had gone on for decades. Xiao Yu’s warships had been lost beyond counting, yet up to now he could still mobilize more than fifteen million warships at any time. It was precisely thanks to the constant replenishment from the logistics bases that Xiao Yu could maintain his strength.
Like Xiao Yu’s side, Xiao Yu knew that the same process was occurring inside the Death Flower Star System. Warships were continually destroyed, soldiers continually died, but the Alliance’s enormous population base and those one hundred-plus planets meant they too had an unending stream of reinforcements. If a warship was gone, they built another; if a soldier died, they recruited anew. After all, the reproduction rate of intelligent beings is terrifying.
By this point the war had become almost a contest of logistics between the two sides.
However, in this aspect, Xiao Yu possessed a great advantage. The replenishment speed of Xiao Yu’s warships already exceeded the rate of warship losses. Only due to Xiao Yu’s computational limits was the fleet size, including the biological army, kept steady at around twenty million. The Level 5 Civilization Alliance was different. Their replenishment speed of personnel and warships could not match the rate of casualties and losses. Over these decades, Xiao Yu detected that the Alliance’s total number of warships had dropped from roughly two hundred million to less than one hundred seventy million.
Seeing the fleet dispatched by the Alliance suddenly accelerate, Xiao Yu was taken aback.
“What is going on? How can they possibly have such speed?”
In the interstellar era, a warship’s travel speed to a large extent represents a civilization’s technological level. Now that the Alliance’s warship speed had suddenly increased, did this imply something else?
Was it that the Alliance still had hidden strength only now revealed, or was it for some other reason? If the Alliance still had hidden strength, that would be extremely frightening, meaning their technological level was stronger than he had imagined, their technological progress faster than he had imagined, and thus the time left to him even shorter, to the point that he might not even have the originally estimated one hundred fifty years.
But after thinking it over, Xiao Yu rejected this inference. The reason was simple. He had been at war with the Alliance for decades and was already familiar with this opponent to the utmost. If under such circumstances they could still conceal their strength, that would be unbelievable. Concealing strength is not a simple matter. Hiding strength implies that many warships that need not have been destroyed would be destroyed, and many people who need not have died would die.
Following the thread of concealed strength, Xiao Yu obtained some figures. If the current strength were the Alliance’s true strength, and earlier their warships had only hidden it, then in these decades of war at least thirty million warships that should not have been destroyed would have been destroyed by him, and at least tens of billions of soldiers who should not have died would have been killed by him.
No one would do something so insane. Even with the former leader of the Pegasus Civilization’s ruthlessness, he could not commit such cruelty.
“Then only one explanation remains. This fleet is the Alliance’s trump card, something akin to my Blood Blade Squad. It is the Alliance’s pinnacle creation, small in number but of very high quality.” Xiao Yu quickly reached this conclusion.
“Trying to raid my rear? But do you have that capability?” Xiao Yu easily discerned the intent of these elite fleets. This still lay within the bounds of what he could accept. Even if these ships could reach forty-two times the speed of light, this speed was still slightly slower than that of Xiao Yu’s fleet, which meant the technological content and comprehensive performance of these warships still did not surpass Xiao Yu’s. Even so, it merited attention, so Xiao Yu decisively reversed the heading of his ships and temporarily abandoned the plan to attack the Death Flower Star System.
“First destroy these ten million warships, then we will talk.” Xiao Yu thought. “To harass my rear is not so easy.”
The logistics bases were far too important to Xiao Yu. He could not allow any mishap there. The loss of any one planetary base or any one Home ship was unacceptable to him.
Xiao Yu’s fleet quickly caught up to this raiding fleet and immediately launched a fierce attack. In curvature space, no conventional weapons can be used. The only usable weapons are negative matter cannons and spatial weapons. Thus, in the unseen curvature space, endless torrents of negative matter and strands of black filament began to strike the fleet ahead. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝒆𝒘𝙚𝓫𝙣𝙤𝒗𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢
Xiao Yu’s attack produced immediate effect. He saw large numbers of warships lose the ability to maintain curvature flight under his assault. Deprived of the energy to bend space, they were forced back into normal space and then, under a storm of artillery fire, exploded with a roar and shattered into debris. Yet this fleet did not counterattack. They ignored the fierce assault from the rear, evading when they could and tanking it when they could not, all the while pressing forward rapidly.
An ominous premonition began to rise in Xiao Yu’s heart. Under his command, the Earth stationed in the rear, the biological army, and some other warships all entered a state of combat readiness, arrayed in strict formation there and prepared to attack from front and rear to annihilate this force completely.
The distance to the rear was not far. At this fleet’s speed, it would take only about one hour to arrive. In that one hour, Xiao Yu unleashed a fierce offensive against this fleet and eliminated a large number of enemy ships, but the fleet still never struck back. They only kept their heads down and rushed forward, as if reaching Xiao Yu’s rear was more important than their own lives.
Under normal circumstances, this fleet would have had no chance of breaking through Xiao Yu’s lines to reach his rear. But this mode of ignoring everything to rush onward, even at the cost of their lives, lay outside ordinary logic. Faced with such a crazed fleet, even with advantages in both quality and quantity, Xiao Yu still found it somewhat taxing to block them.
In just one hour, during this single hour, Xiao Yu destroyed more than two million enemy warships. This combat result would normally have been impossible. Having paid such a grievous price, this attacking fleet finally obtained its outcome. It at last reached Xiao Yu’s rear, entering the engagement range of the three million garrisoned warships and the Earth.
A fierce assault erupted instantly. At this moment, the attacking fleet finally disengaged from curvature space into normal space and, for the first time, began to fight back. They arrayed themselves into various battle formations, some for defense, some for offense, and others assigned to outer harassment and pinning operations.
“To wipe out this fleet will cost me less than five hours, while completing arrangements in the Death Flower Star System will take at least five days. I have time to spare.” Xiao Yu thought. “Sending a fleet to die just to pin me down? Useless…”
At this moment, something occurred on the battlefield that startled Xiao Yu once again.
He found that ever since he began transporting the star, the Alliance had repeatedly done things that surprised him. But this time was different. Xiao Yu saw that these Alliance ships had actually begun to employ an attack method he had never seen before.
Under the effect of this weapon, space itself began to ripple like water. The spatial fluctuations immediately affected the matter in this sector, and the matter also began to ripple. When the spatial ripples subsided, that matter had been twisted beyond recognition, its original appearance entirely lost.
Xiao Yu clearly saw one of his Town-Class ships enveloped by a patch of rippling space. Then, like an image in water stirred by a breeze, the Town-Class ship began to writhe wildly. During the writhing, tiny explosions and all kinds of sparks burst out incessantly. Its shield system quickly went dark. When the spatial ripples calmed, the Town-Class ship had become a heap of scrap metal, entirely without value for repair or even salvage.
At the same time, a City-Class ship was also enveloped by a patch of spatial ripples, but by the time the ripples ended, this City-Class ship had not been destroyed. During the spatial rippling, however, Xiao Yu detected a vast energy expenditure.
This was very clearly an attack mode of spatial weapons. Xiao Yu had always believed that below a Level 6 Civilization, only he possessed spatial weapons. But now he discovered he was wrong. Spatial weapons were not possessed by him alone. The enemy before him, the Level 5 Civilization Alliance, possessed them as well.
