The Harbinger continued to soar towards Nahmatiix, now being so close to the world that the vessel, even in its extensively damaged state, was not even five minutes away from its salvation; the space directly above Nahmatiix was a region of space mostly dominated by Nahmatiixian forces and their doubly-traitorous defences. The ever-expansive, space-centric network of skypiercers that dominated this area glistened beautifully in the light of countless nuclear detonations. The byproducts of these atomic conflagrations were enough to generate a dazzling array of multicolored lights across the skies of Nahmatiix, providing a morbid, beautiful backdrop to the carnage occurring across and around the world; those on the planet's surface who had not been mobilized, were instead mesmerized.
Where the Harbinger went, the battle seemed to follow, as both sides rushed to the support of their imperators. This trend had only been broken once the craft reached the skies just above Nahmatiix, where a hastily-organized group of half a million Traitor warships lay between the galaxy's two claimants. Behind them, the planet of Nahmatiix, frighteningly close to the entire affair, loomed, its countless skypiercers and high-orbit space stations making maneuvering difficult for the Nahmatiixian forces who guarded it; by pure coincidence, the glimmering spire of the Nahmatiixian planetary government building stood in clear view of both sides. Surrounding this building were the shattered wrecks of numerous defensive stations, all of which had been destroyed shortly after Felcamaxa's hack to preserve the integrity of what had become the Traitors' Capital Complex, their loss being one of the only examples of Traitors destroying their own defensive platforms in the wake of the EWCC's capture. Indeed, the Traitors may have been regretting their choice now: Lassarha's pursuing force, originally quite small, had been steadily reinforced to the point where it was now a strategic threat in its own right.
The Harbinger, at present, was steadily advancing towards its planetary government building. Both of the navies above knew that if the Harbinger were to land safely on the surface of the labyrinthine world, finding and ending Heralax would be nearly impossible, and this only served to further inspire them both. With the Harbinger already beginning its landing sequence on a flat stretch of city, and with any attempt to try and avoid the hostile blockade doomed to be intercepted, Lassarha wasted no further time before commanding an all-out assault on the defensive blockade of the Traitors' capital planet, and it was but mere moments until Terilan fine-tuned and then distributed this order. Lurching forwards, their nuclear weapons brandished proudly and a tidal wave of ordinance already darting through the ether towards their foes, the pursuing Loyalist force complied without hesitation or mercy for those whom they fought.
As the Loyalists advanced, however, the Nahmatiixers, supported by untold numbers of fighter craft, rushed to meet their quarry; though hundreds of thousands of civilian fighters were mercilessly obliterated by indiscriminate nuclear fire, there were millions more seemingly pouring out from the void of space itself. The people of Nahmatiix had their gleaming planet behind them and retribution their hearts; they would not yield to an invader, they would not relent to save their imperator, and they would sooner see their system burn to ash than shake hands with defeat. Crying out with a single voice, "humanity endures!" the Traitors rushed into the desperate fray. Their determination was a testament to Nahmatiixian character, and the power of the Nahmatiix system itself; the extent to which Heralax had mobilized them was a monument to the strength of his rule, and his ideals. There were multiple hundreds of billions of people on that world, nearly all of them owned and could operate fighter-like craft, and almost all of these would happily clamber into the cockpit and charge suicidally into battle for their consul and imperator. Even without a Traitor armada of tens of millions of warships to defend the system, the people of Nahmatiix themselves would ravage any invading force.
It was not long until the two fleets collided; Lassarha's force, comprised of some of the most elite and heaviest vessels the Loyalist armada had to offer, found their equals in Heralax's almost entirely Nahmatiixian reserve. The occasional battlegroup of rank-and-file Traitors or Loyalists that soared into the battle found themselves cut down with ease as some of the most skilled forces in the galaxy took turns nuking each other. Tehkria-classes, their own hulls a weapon, smashed Traitor cruisers aside or nuked them to ashes, only to find themselves cornered by their prey's allies; at such close ranges, the two battle-lines of colossal warships stood little chance of intercepting each other's warheads, and the combat threatened to devolve into a free-for-all as warship duelled warship with munitions powerful enough to level half a planet. The Ineffable, as it contained the most valuable soldier on the Loyalist side, lay just behind the front line and fired away at its many foes with long-ranged weaponry, all while the Ruthless, heavily damaged from its recent ordeal and being unwilling to risk total destruction, instead engaged lesser vessels on the less-chaotic flanks of the Loyalist formation.
At the core of the battle, however, is where many of these ships, almost all of which were more intact than the Ruthless, flourished; Tehkria-classes, employing nuclear armaments equal to those of dozens of lesser craft, tore at each other with ferocity matched only by the aliens, though against armor of such quality and scale, even this ferocity did not achieve results quickly. Frigates weaved throughout the carnage, ramming any fighter craft before them into pieces regardless of whether or not they were friendly, as they sought to support their larger allies; these warships were routinely and viciously targeted by the all-encompassing bombardment of nearby Tehkria-classes, but being piloted expertly, these craft were able to evade almost all of the munitions sent their way, despite the limited room to maneuver. Many Nahmatiixian fighters were shredded by invisible bursts of laser fire or were ripped apart by hyper-precise torrents of gauss projectiles, these being issued forth from any of the tens of thousands of raiders that the Loyalist force relied on to screen them from, and otherwise counter, the swarms of Traitor fighter craft — the Loyalists' own fighters were, of course, woefully insufficient for the trying task. Still, despite their being individually outmatched by every ship class there, the endless swarms of fighters, weaving through the carnage with the grace of water, did not relent. Raiders, frigates, and cruisers were all gutted and torn to pieces by the people of Nahmatiix, who threatened to turn the tide of the engagement by themselves, and yet again proved their worth as a martial people. The Traitors' raider-class ships, without fighters to engage, instead hunted their Loyalist counterparts or screened missiles for larger ships, with mixed success. The battle between humanity's finest had, so far, mirrored the bloody stalemate that existed throughout the rest of the system; it was difficult to imagine that despite the heroic efforts of so many, so little had been accomplished.
Tehkria-classes, humanity's passion for war made manifest, circled and tore at each other in unspeakably impressive clashes of ordinance and willpower; frigates and cruisers either served to support their allied craft or engaged each other in contests of maneuver, and swarms of Traitor fighters ravaged anything larger than them while surviving the endless Loyalist reprisal fire, but for each second of the battle that passed, Heralax, aboard his greatly-weakened flagship, drew further away from Lassarha's force. This problem grew graver with each passing instant; maintaining her current action was not feasible, and Lassarha saw but one way to remove the Nahmatiixian blockade before her. Dispatching orders to a sweat-stained Yezalax, Lassarha felt the entire Ineffable shift as the craft's engines reached FSA in moments; a few seconds of hard burn, and the craft, along with a nearly-nonexistent escort, now hung just above the battle between Heralax's blockade and Lassarha's force. Around it buzzed a light swarm of Traitor fighter craft that were about as consequential as dust would be to an enforcer, and approaching it was a number of massive Traitor battlegroups, though none of these were nearby enough to interrupt Lassarha's next action.
The Harbinger, though it was some distance away and behind a few thin layers of ships, lay within the sights of the Ineffable; with its antimatter cannons being only one volley away from depletion, Lassarha wasted no time in ordering the weapons used — if Heralax wanted to reach the surface of his world quickly, Lassarha would help him.
With a series of four thunderous shots that reverberated throughout the hull and half-deafened all of those in the bridge, the Ineffable dispatched its antimatter warheads towards their target at incredible speed; the first of the warheads detonated prematurely, so as to clear a number of Traitor vessels that stood in the way of those behind it; the second found itself embedded in a Traitor cruiser, which it promptly reduced to ash in a detonation which grew to claim hundreds of other Traitor warships. The last two warheads, however, being both expertly-aimed and inordinately fortunate, reached the Harbinger mere instants later; with their horrifying destructive potential being fully unleashed upon the already battered flagship, the Harbinger became engulfed in a sphere of solid white flame, which soon subsided to reveal that the craft had been ripped in half and thoroughly cauterized, with all life, turrets, armor, thrusters, and shielding utterly purged from the surface of the vessel. As a shockwave spread across the Harbinger's crumbling hull, both smouldering halves of the craft began to plummet like flaming, building-sized anvils to the surface below, vast shards of metal shearing off their misshapen forms, while the artificial atmosphere of Nahmatiix tore at what remained of the already wrecked vessel's hull. Under the rain of steel, dozens of skypiercers and any who may have been inside them were brutally compacted; smaller chunks of ship, or even the crippled hulks of escort vessels that had been pulled towards the planet by the relentless force of gravity, were skewered on the pointed tips of elegant skypiercers or lodged into their sides. Some violently crashing ships even destroyed these structures entirely, killing any who were foolish enough to remain within the tall buildings during a raging battle. As the Harbinger hurtled towards the fearful ground below, many of these skewered ships were dislodged from their temporary resting places and began falling once more, either being impaled again, or following the Harbinger to the most unlikely, yet arguably most deserved, of destinations — the Nahmatiixian planetary government building itself. Heralax's center of government was mere moments away from being destroyed by his own flagship.
The grim rain of shattered warships, heralded by the landmass-sized Harbinger, smashed through the aerial cityscape of the ecumenopolis like only a Tehkria-class could; the ship's impact was like that of a meteor. After a minute, the two halves of the broken vessel slammed into the surface of the hapless world, half-detonating, as the impact was so forceful that it deafened and then killed most things within a hundred kilometers of itself, while simultaneously kicking up a smothering tempest of dust and metallic debris, filling the sky with smog and choking those survivors below it; the impacts on the world-city of Nahmatiix, however, were nothing compared to the misery that the ship itself, or Heralax's government center, suffered. Many of the ship's lowest decks were compacted by the force of the fall so that they merged with the planetary government building, the majority of which had been utterly annihilated the moment it had been hit by one half of the falling Tehkria-class. Almost all of those aboard the flagship were slain by the sheer kinetic force of what they had just experienced, while those who survived rarely did so without sustaining a number of broken bones or external wounds; the eardrums of those who were onboard were made into nought but pulp, while those who were for any reason not in their seats and secured by restraints followed this gruesome example.
The cataclysmic arrival of the Harbinger obliterated almost everything around it, and threatened to obscure the sky itself for all of the dust that it kicked up. However, as the battle raged and as the Harbinger's arrival had succeeded in dislodging a number of vessels, many other warships continued to hammer the region of the city surrounding the wreck of the Harbinger even though the vessel was crippled, slaying even more of those within, and scores of those hiding in the ruined city beneath the wreck. With the decisive display almost certainly killing everyone within both the government building and the ship itself, a wave of relief overcame Lassarha — though the impact had doubtless cost a great number of lives, as Heralax was dead, millions more would be saved, so long as her foes did what Lassarha expected them to do, and routed en masse at their imperator's death. As this had happened, she was well-positioned to win both of the wars that she had inherited, saving humanity from the alien menace, and putting an end to the lethal madness that had consumed Nahmatiix and so many other systems like it. However, just as she made ready to praise her good fortune to those among her side who still lived, her hopes were shattered when the following message blanketed the airwaves of the system, its point of origin being the Harbinger's barely-functional bridge.
"I still live, and with me, so too does the dream of a restored Empire, and of a restored humanity. I shall rejoin the fray the moment I find a new warship to host me, but remember: this battle is almost won. Fight on, and win, for the good of us all!" so went the message — despite being blown out of the sky and crash-landing into his own government building, Heralax Tekran, an insidious insect, had yet again evaded Lassarha's boot; almost certainly, his Tekran genetics and inordinate fortune were what had spared him. Lassarha openly cursed at the thought.
Though she knew well that the message could be faked, and that Heralax could be dead, the mere fact that the bridge of the Harbinger, the most fortified part of the vessel, was mostly intact, meant that this was likely not the case. Cursing under her breath, Lassarha followed up Heralax's message with her own,
"Asking you to keep fighting after what you have been through is something I do not want to do; it is something I have to do. The human and Tekran races depend upon your actions today, and on whether or not we kill the Prime Traitor! Continue the struggle, and we shall triumph over the Traitors today so that we may later triumph over the alien scourge!"
In the wake of the Loyalist imperators' words, the system above saw a flood of angry, accusatory communication between the warring armadas; the battle, despite already being the most vicious thing to blight the skies of Nahmatiix for millennia, seemed to intensify further.
Lassarha knew that her remaining forces would be unable to survive the Traitors' assault on all fronts for much longer — she had to bring the battle to a conclusion, and she had to do so quickly. Those remaining Nahmatiixian forces that stood between her and the remains of Heralax's flagship, having been weakened by the Loyalists' determined assault and Lassarha's devastating antimatter barrage, were disintegrating; any reinforcements bound for the engagement were sparse enough that they posed little threat, and the swarm of fighters permeating the battle was in the process of being driven back to Nahmatiix by wave after wave of nuclear volleys. Doubtless, there were many more Traitor warships gathering for another attack on Lassarha's force nearby, and they were numerous enough that Lassarha's escort-turned-blockade wouldn't be able to withstand them for any reasonable amount of time — she needed reinforcements, and even then, the resulting engagement would be desperate.
With a sparsely-populated corridor between her ships and the main Loyalist line remaining open for the fleeting present, Lassarha ordered as many Loyalist warships to her position as she could, while also sending out a request for the remainder of her ground-force reserves to enter the fray, and prepare for a ground-based assault on the surface of Nahmatiix itself. This was done to try and execute Heralax, before his escape to a less-perilous region of the traitorous planet could lose the battle for the Loyalists; though she could instead opt to nuke the surface of Nahmatiix indiscriminately in the hopes of killing Heralax without so much as setting foot on the world, doing so would not only jeopardize her image and rally the Traitor fleet above against her, but it would create a lasting enmity between the people of Nahmatiix and Tehkria that would persist so long as portion of the former's surface remained a charred wasteland. A conventional invasion, though it might be more costly in lives in the short-term, was the only way to win both the battle and the hearts of the galaxy, Lassarha calculated. By killing Heralax while not ravaging the surface of a human world with an atomic assault, Lassarha would break the hearts of those Traitors fighting rather than harden them, establishing herself as an alternative without casting herself as a heartless butcher of human civilians. There also remained the chance that she could bring the entire Empire under her control immediately — if the grisly spectacle of Heralax's death was great enough.
Lassarha was tired of spilling human blood, but to stop the terrible carnage around her, she would happily spill a bit of Tekran blood. Communicating with those thousands of veteran majority-Tehkrian troop-transports that were breaching into normal space nearby, Lassarha ordered them to descend on the embattled world below, with the singular aim to put Heralax Tekran to death. Whether or not this was a realistic goal was to be seen. As the waves of Traitor ships assailing Lassarha's foothold began to intensify, and as the trickle of Loyalist reinforcements began to slow, however, it became clear that time was, not for the first time, firmly on the side of Heralax. Lassarha's space-borne forces were once again in a desperate situation, their only hope being that the war on the ground would be won quickly — doubtless, seizing a part of the surface of Nahmatiix would be more challenging than seizing the EWCC, but it had to be done if the Loyalists were to win.
There was no question about it: nearly everyone on the surface of the world would be hostile to the Loyalist invaders, and when the battle had begun, the Traitor government had distributed vast quantities of cheap arms to the civilian populace; Lassarha expected the resultant opposition to be even more numerous and ferocious than the resistance provided by the billions of Nahmatiixers who had taken to fighter craft and joined the battle in space. To expect anything less than a prolonged mutual slaughter on the surface was to be hopelessly naive. Lassarha suspected that nuclear bombardment would be more compassionate and less costly, but, as millions of Loyalists plunged towards the death-filled planet's surface, most of them likely plunging towards their own deaths, she sadly accepted that the rest of the galaxy would not see it the same way.