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.
With battlegroups of Loyalist warships converging on them from seemingly every direction at once, dispensing nuclear fury on any craft unfortunate enough to be in their way and shattering those who survived with waves of gauss fire, the Loyalists' organized assault was greatly aided by the Nahmatiix's hacked defences, which routinely made weak-points in the Traitor lines where there were none before. Some of those Loyalist ships performing harassment operations outside the main theater of battle nearby the planet of Nahmatiix itself coalesced into small formations and charged the Traitor armada from behind or above, their relatively small incursions not doing much to evict the Traitors from that region of space, but instead disrupting their formations even further. Even where this was not possible, the attacks distracted the Traitor forces and compelled them to respond, inhibiting their ability to reorganize or counter Terilan's main assault without sustaining greater losses. Such was the ferocity of the sudden Loyalist onslaught that many of those besieged Traitor ships, under vicious attack from all sides and unable to withdraw, were not just reduced to smouldering wrecks, but to floating puddles of molten slag, the ships and crews having been morbidly reshaped into this by an excessive number of nuclear warheads or too many jets of still-lethal plasma fire. With death filling the void of space itself, escape pods became a way to prolong one's survival by little more than seconds.
As the Nahmatiixian forces surrounding the Steadfast's salient were routed, they were then caught up in other waves of routing Traitor vessels that had been driven back by other, nearby forces. The tangle of treasonous warships was incapable of putting up much resistance in this state, and as such, many of them were cornered and slaughtered with all the apathy of a bored student running a wargame simulation on an easy difficulty — though, in the confines of reality, such a maneuver resulted in the deaths of hundreds of millions of people.
As Loyalist spearheads met and joined each other, the Steadfast's following swelled to encompass a million warships, and came to comprise the flagships of three admirals; Terilan, Ulyasitaxran, and Lassarha herself. Charging forwards, protected by a bodyguard of a few dozen battlegroups, the Ineffable itself brought the fury of Tehkria down upon countless traitorous vessels. The craft's nuclear bombardment melted through hundreds of craft while its gauss armament pulverized hundreds more, though these were far outclassed by the blinding fusillade of its antimatter cannons, and the resulting eruption of lethal flame that periodically reduced entire traitorous battlegroups to ash. Though the Traitors remained far more numerous than the Loyalists, and would doubtless recover their advantage eventually, they had been set back massively — and had presented Theten with a new opportunity to shatter them irreparably.
As Traitor forces all around the Steadfast and Ineffable melted away under the Loyalist assault, the main objective of Terilan's plan came tantalizingly within reach. The Harbinger, Heralax's flagship, was but a few hundred thousand kilometers away, and hidden behind nothing more than a fleeing, disorganized gaggle of leaderless vessels interspersed amongst a thin veneer of experienced escort ships; with an overwhelming and eager Loyalist force nearby, Terilan realized that he stood a chance of ending the war right then and there. The Harbinger, of course, was no easy target: it was incredibly durable like any Tehkria-class, greater in size than both the Ruthless and the Steadfast, while it was only slightly smaller than the Ineffable. The Harbinger's hull was covered with bleeding-edge gauss weaponry, and the warship hosted more fighter squadrons than any other ship in the entire galaxy — truly, the craft was impressive, and Terilan almost felt it a shame that he would have to destroy it.
Terilan then ordered this overwhelming force towards its prey, and like the limbs of a titanic body obeying their brain, Terilan's fleet acted in unison and with the near-perfect coordination that one could expect from such well-trained, well-commanded warships. The entire battle, though it was destructive, seemed almost like art in some respects; there was a certain, terrible beauty to thousands of years of martial development being pitted against itself to decide the fate of a species. Soaring through the wreck-filled ether, the Steadfast and its million-strong fleet purged whatever pitiful opposition remained with nuclear fire, flying past and often through the Traitor lines, which were so disorganized by the front-wide Loyalist offensive that they hardly even attempted to fight back. Reaching the Harbinger after ten minutes of vicious fighting, the immense force of Loyalist warships, outnumbering their opponent more than a hundred times over, engaged the Harbinger's own, depleted escort. In spite of the odds, the roughly twenty thousand elite ships defending Heralax, led by the Traitor Prime Admiral Keziaxan himself, and comprising so many heavy ships that it put Tehkrian battlegroups to shame, met the Loyalist advance with ferocious, determined fire, as well as a swarm of fighter-craft let loose from the force's carriers; the stand was heroic by itself, and it also served to rally ships from the rout around them. Terilan's fleet was forced to stop, lest they be ravaged by the unexpectedly powerful tide of ordinance; unlike Heralax's own followers, even the most elite Loyalists were reluctant to blindly throw their lives away for their cause. Heralax's escort fleet, adopting a highly-mobile, fluid, and perfectly-executed formation, proved difficult to target, and the vast majority of Loyalist munitions either missed their targets or were destroyed by the Traitor admiral's raider-class ships. Terilan, his mind awash with grim tactical reports, cursed violently: while Heralax's escort made a last stand, the Harbinger had begun to flee, and with each second that elapsed, more and more Traitor ships, having been mostly left alone by the Loyalist fleet that sought to kill their imperator, reorganized, sighted their admiral's last stand, and rushed in to join the desperate fray. With the passage of each fleeting instant, both the Harbinger, and the Loyalist victory, moved further away, and Terilan was powerless to stop them in the face of such a surprisingly determined defence. Fascinatingly, Heralax's flagship was not taking a direct path towards its own lines, but rather it flew on a course that took it through some of the most intense engagements of the battle. Though this meant he was still in danger, with Terilan so far away and with most of the Loyalists in those critical engagements being too occupied to attack him, Heralax was nonetheless much safer than he had been before — the position for his Loyalist counterparts was very much the opposite.
Terilan swore and cursed, though none of this improved his tactical situation; the nervous breathing of fearful officers grew louder around him, and his bridge vibrated slightly as a vicious nuclear barrage from a Traitor frigate slammed into his hull. Fearful of his lack of gains, and quickly becoming more surrounded as the Traitor armada began to stabilize around him, Terilan ordered an unrestrained assault on the swelling Traitor force in front of him in a desperate attempt to reverse the perilous situation; some lighter ships hesitated to obey the potentially suicidal order, but this was no matter. As Terilan's Tehkria-classes surged forwards, themselves being immune to most of the fire they faced, the Nahmatiixian force scattered, ravaging the Loyalist formation with weapons fire and taking few losses by itself, though ultimately, this force was incapable of stopping the Loyalists' inexorable advance. With the Ineffable at the head of the pursuing formation, Terilan, inspired, saw a way to reverse his expedition's fortunes.
***
Amidst an increasingly worrying tide of tactical and operational data, a textcomm from Terilan that was both simple and brilliant slammed into Lassarha's mind; another moment, and she had relayed the order to Yezalax. The Ineffable then shook as if it had been struck by a moon, the metal superstructure of the vessel shifted and groaned under the strain of recoil, and every sailor was forced to brace themselves in the wake of the action: the antimatter cannons had been fired. Travelling at nigh-relativistic speeds, the quartet of rounds fired soon either found their mark or slammed into something along the way; two of them impacted a very unfortunate Nahmatiixian frigate that had moved into their flight path and annihilated everything nearby, while the other two directly impacted the port-side of the Harbinger, engulfing the craft in searing white light that could rival a star, while obliterating anything and everything around it. For a moment, it seemed like the expanse of space itself quaked with the force of the detonation, and the entire battle watched the explosion with a mixture of horror, morbid awe, and, for the Traitors, panic — what everyone wished to see was whether the Harbinger was still in one piece, and, perhaps more importantly, whether Heralax still was.
After a few precious moments, during which the Ineffable's engines worked ever-harder to approach their quarry, the radiant orb encompassing the Harbinger faded; beneath it was the Harbinger, a new six-kilometer wide-and-deep hole bored into its port side, though its engines still burned defiantly, and Heralax still proudly broadcasted to the rest of the system, informing them that he was, in fact, alive.
Lassarha gagged, and spat onto the floor of her bridge, declaring, "So long as that knave lives, humanity withers; so long as he lives, I will endeavor to kill him — this I swear!"
Grasping her gold-plated coil rifle in her left hand, Lassarha waved her armored right fist in Yezalax's direction, "My orders are as follows: follow that fucking ship, and wipe it from the face of this proud galaxy!"
"Yes, my imperator!" was the bridge's reply.
Lassarha's reasoning was sound: if her flagship, being commanded personally by herself, destroyed the Harbinger and killed Heralax, then her legitimacy would be forever established, and the Traitors' morale would be broken — this, and the fact that she wanted the bastard dead as quickly as possible, drove her decision. The Ineffable's engines began pushing the limits of their FSA as it and its escort barrelled past hundreds of thousands of Traitor craft, exchanging fire with many of them, yet not stopping to fight them properly. Seeing what Lassarha was doing, Terilan immediately ordered a multitude of battlegroups after the vessel to support it and its chase, before deciding to join the pursuit of Heralax personally. Within moments, the Steadfast, still coordinating the battle at large, soared after Lassarha with a minuscule escort numbering roughly fifty thousand at its back — this escort was purposefully small in order to allow Terilan to pass through Traitor lines, without being entangled in them. His mind flooded with MECS, Terilan nevertheless remained impressed by the sheer absurdity of what he was doing, and the stakes attached to it. Not only was an imperator chasing an imperator on what nearly amounted to a sightseeing tour through the most intense regions of the system-wide battle, but if he or Lassarha were to somehow succeed and kill Heralax, then they could very well win the entire civil war.
Launching a barrage of nukes ahead of them to annihilate any fighters in their way, Terilan's force, darting through the rapidly-subsiding tempest of flame, soared past hundreds of thousands of Traitor vessels, suffering damage the entire way, as a wave of rallying Traitors advanced on the many ships Terilan had left behind. With even most Loyalists ignorant of Terilan's purpose in detaching from the rest of the fleet, most of the Traitors, eyeing a much larger, more exposed formation, may have fired at his force, yet saw no reason to pursue him. The Loyalist ships that had been part of the initial race towards Heralax, yet had been left behind by both Terilan and Lassarha for this next stage of the chase, began to make a rapid withdrawal back to friendlier space. Now being even more maneuverable, Terilan's main force raced forwards nearly unopposed, for the tide of Traitors before them was moving too quickly and in too disorganized a fashion to hope to stop a strong, condensed formation, led by a vanguard of elite Tehkria-class, even if these Traitors were perfectly capable of ravaging this formation with nuclear attacks. Lassarha's pursuing forces sustained terrible damage as it chased after Heralax, and countless Loyalists craft threw themselves ineffectually against Heralax's escorts, getting themselves destroyed in the process and destabilizing the engagements they had been a part of; Terilan realized that this must have been why Heralax adopted the flight path he did in the first place — to inflict yet more crippling losses on his foe.
Soaring through the Traitor lines at an astonishingly quick pace, Terilan and his small force sighted the Ineffable a few moments later; the Loyalist flagship, all of its turrets firing as the craft fought for its life and that of its fleet, engaged both the Harbinger and a swarm of Traitor craft that buzzed around its stubborn escort. Ordinance and munitions, numerous enough that if piled together they would be larger than a frigate, was exchanged between the two imperator's flagships; the Ineffable continually circled around the Harbinger, attempting to direct its weapons fire on the gaping, six kilometer-wide hole in its foe's hull and armor, while the Traitor flagship spun and adjusted itself to safeguard this area while it attempted to break away from the engagement altogether. Stray nuclear barrages regularly annihilated smaller craft participating in the fight, and thousands of ships from both sides dove on the Imperatorial warships in futile attempts to win the war; some even attempted to ram the Tehkria-classes, though all who attempted this were either destroyed before they could impact their target, or were evaded completely. With millions of people manning each titanic flagship, their collective wills and minds dedicated to fighting in a mortal, destructive duel between colossi that could decide the fate of the galaxy itself, Terilan found himself awed, despite the MECS in his veins urging him to remain focused.
Pressing on through lines of rapidly-intensifying, universally merciless combat, the Steadfast and its vengeful captain soon caught up with its quarry and unleashed its considerable armament on the already-damaged Harbinger, which was gradually acquiring a new escort as Traitor vessels it passed rushed to its defence. This escalating duel between the three capital ships had quickly become one of the smallest yet most ferocious engagements the battle for Nahmatiix had yet seen, though this was an engagement that the Harbinger was weathering surprisingly well.
The ruthless clash between the trio of ships continued, the situation becoming more desperate for the Loyalists with each passing second as the Prime Traitor's ranks swelled. Fire from Nahmatiixian defensive stations, as well as from the escorts of both the Ineffable and Steadfast, kept the majority of Traitor warships from striking at Lassarha, but it was unlikely that this Loyalist escort would be able to continue their defence against such overwhelming hostile forces. It was in that moment that the Harbinger, its frontal and rear maneuvering thrusters flaring up, turned and shot off in another direction, taking it somewhat closer to the front line, and closer to Nahmatiix itself. Terilan scoffed: moving a damaged ship even closer to the front line was a tactic that he thought insane, but nevertheless, it was a tactic he had to react to.
Commanding his and Lassarha's warships to continue their pursuit through the swirling maelstrom of death that was the front line of the battle of Nahmatiix, Terilan also laid the groundwork for a series of breakthrough attempts along the Harbinger's flight-path, intended to reach the pursuing Ineffable and Steadfast where these breakthroughs could reinforce the depleted escorts of the Loyalist flagships. The Harbinger, having been locked in constant flagship-versus-flagship battle for the past ten minutes, was on the verge of implosion, and this presented a strategic opportunity that Terilan could not afford to ignore. With the Traitors' unorthodox usage of the EWCC earlier, and with their far-superior numerical situation since the beginning of the battle being taken into account, the battle had lost any possibility of being won conventionally — Heralax had to die, or the Loyalist fleet would do so in his place.
As such, paying no heed to wayward gauss bursts or the occasional, lethal orb of nuclear fire in its path, the damaged yet still glistening hulls of the Ineffable and Steadfast shot through the void and continued to exchange fire with the Harbinger, which, thanks to surprisingly good maneuvering on the part of its pilots, and thanks to good fortune, had gained a slight distance lead over its Loyalist counterparts. The escorts of the warships, both pursued and pursuing, were as embattled as their host vessels, and were forced to try and survive the battle around them, and this was no easy feat; being smaller, weaker, and with some of them being significantly less fortunate, many of these escorts succumbed to destruction in their flagships' stead. Worse still for the Loyalists, due to the proximity of the duelling vessels, the Ineffable could not utilize its now-loaded antimatter cannons, as this would kill not just Heralax, but also likely Lassarha, Terilan, and most of those amongst the respective sides' escort fleets. Taking such a course of action could be good for no one, and this was precisely why Heralax had forced Lassarha into that situation.
The desperate chase continued through the bloodied expanse of space, weaving in and out of last-stands, deadly offensives, and brutal stalemates, with wayward vessels from both sides being randomly annihilated in stray nuclear chain-detonations, or riven by bursts of gauss fire originating from the surrounding war; for those unfortunate few who were a part of the pursuit, the sheer scale of the horror unfolding around them was readily apparent, as was their own mortality. With each second that passed, the Harbinger and those chasing it drew closer to Nahmatiix; with each second that passed, the Loyalist fleet moved closer and closer to utter annihilation; with each second that passed, the need for incredible fortune or a genius strategy on the side of the Loyalists grew all the more apparent, and with each terrible second that passed, it became more clear that such a thing was unlikely at best. For the first time since the battle had begun, Terilan began to lose heart, and countless other Loyalists felt the same.