Humanity Endures

Part 12 - Bravery and Bloodshed | Chapter 2

The Steadfast's gauss batteries shone a crimson red with the heat of overuse; merely being in the Battle of Nahmatiix caused stress not only for the people who fought it, but for the ships they commanded. The munitions fired by the Steadfast found themselves a droplet of water in a far-greater wave of Loyalist fire, and this tide effortlessly tore apart any Traitor formation that tried to break through to Lassarha. The entire Traitor front had recently found themselves under attack from not just a restored Loyalist force, but from their own defensive network, and their losses had come to reflect their new, precarious situation, though this did not make their own attacks less lethal. Hundreds of thousands of Loyalist craft were shattered into steel splinters in reprisal as the merciless war continued to claim its due.

The Traitors' usage of Nahmatiix's EWCC to cripple Loyalist forces had resulted in the annihilation of millions of crippled Loyalist ships, all of them being easily ripped apart because they simply couldn't fight or maneuver, yet in their eagerness to end the battle against a foe who could not fight back, the Traitors had become exposed. Their advance had become staggered and weakened, while the Loyalist lines, mostly in the same arrangement that they were in before, retained a structure that allowed them to return their terrible losses on their newly-disorganized enemy. Thus far, in the wake of their counterattack, the Loyalists were succeeding, and their foes were dying; even those smaller detachments of vessels fighting in theaters other than the main one by the world of Nahmatiix continued to hold their ground against the impossible odds before them, and at great cost to those who attempted to dislodge them. The state of the battle more or less remained unchanged, except that both sides had suffered even more losses, and the fighting had somehow become even more brutal. The dead threatened to outnumber the stars in the void, but the living kept fighting — both imperators remained alive, and their righteous causes with them.

Felcamaxa's force fought on against a foe four times their number, holding the Traitor station with exceptional bravery and ferocity that, before the Battle of Light's End, had not been seen for thousands of years; after Light's End, however, this caliber of heroism had become a saddening sight, common amongst the last defenders of falling worlds who resisted the alien menace until their last breath. Now, over Nahmatiix, this noble bravery and ferocity was being wielded against fellow humans, as if they were as monstrous an enemy as the aliens. The entire Battle of Nahmatiix was characterized by a terrible brutality that could have only been born from the deaths of hundreds of billions at the hands of the alien scourge, and the efforts of both imperators to place the blame for many of these deaths on each other.

The battle was a tragedy indeed, but Terilan had no choice but to add to it in the name of survival, and the future. With Felcamaxa's force being well-trained and well-entrenched, Terilan did not see the station falling within at least half an hour, and as Nahmatiixian defences continued to pulverize Nahmatiixian ships, he realized this gave his fleet an opportunity. His mind awash with data, decisions, and drugs, Terilan required little time to dream up ways to exploit this opportunity. Connecting with his vice-admirals, they and Terilan devised a strategy with such efficiency and speed it was as if the entire admiralty were but one brilliant mind; in reality, it was a networked system composed of countless brilliant minds. A general offensive plan was created in just under two minutes, and Terilan, the survival of the entire Loyalist cause resting on his shoulders, wasted no time in ordering this plan into action.

The following moment, with breathtaking unity and organization that only the aliens could rival, the Loyalist forces, previously holding relatively static positions, charged the Traitors before them en masse; striking at thousands of subtle weak-points in their foes' formation, the calculated, massed assault began to ravage the Traitor ranks with untold amounts of ordinance, all of it carefully applied to ensure maximal butchery. For Terilan, leading the Loyalist navy, he had to distance himself from the idea of civility or honor that so defined his cause, even if it pained him to do so: alien or human, he was at war, he had enemies, and his duty was to kill them for the sake of his nation and people. The truth that every soldier inevitably learned was clear in that moment: war was no clean affair.