Defeated Troops

Watching their side lose despite its absolute numerical advantage, watching their warships get harvested by Humanity like weeds, the Orange Star Civilization no longer had its former confidence in certain victory.

Yet deep down, they still believed their race was exceptionally superior, far superior to humans. The only reason Humanity had won was because it had obtained the Pioneer Treasure.

They had not lost to humans, but to advanced civilization technology. There was nothing shameful about that.

The most urgent matter now was to bring news of Humanity's extraordinary growth after obtaining the Pioneer Treasure back to headquarters, lest the headquarters fleet blindly walk into destruction at the hands of Human Civilization as well.

But with the war having reached this point, a calm withdrawal was clearly unrealistic, because the Orange Star Civilization's remaining eight hundred thousand warships were all entangled with the scattered Human warships.

If they tried to retreat directly, given the formidable combat power displayed by the Human warships, many vessels would inevitably expose themselves through their retreat maneuvers and be destroyed even more easily.

Their losses would only grow worse.

Humanity had few warships, but they were extraordinarily agile. Their seemingly predictive evasions and seemingly predictive strikes were simply monstrous. The Orange Star Civilization's warships had no confidence that turning around now would not send them straight into an attack fired at some unknown moment.

Thus, their only option was to sacrifice part of their fleet, using a fierce, desperate encirclement of the Human warships to cover the withdrawal of the others.

The sooner they made this decision, the more warships they could use, and the more could escape.

And once they successfully left the effective strike range of the Human warships and entered maximum Warp speed, they would have escaped.

However, they could not flee