A Battle That Hardly Counted as a Battle

Strictly speaking, the battle at the Gravitational Boundary could no longer be called a battle. It was a chaotic chase. The Vengeance Legion's high-speed warships that we had separated scattered into more than a dozen formations, and each formation deliberately broke its own ranks apart. They raced back and forth near the boundary, flying wildly in every direction. They were astonishingly fast and constantly made rapid jumps across distances of several light-seconds, like a thousand teleporting locusts. They had abandoned all coordinated combat, because the pilots of those small ships knew that without mothership support, lone small craft could not confront the enemy's mixed fleet head-on with any tactic. Our interception forces could only follow suit, jumping all over the enemy's probable routes and making sharp turns. Bright, brief blue-white flashes kept blooming in the depths of space—the main guns of Assault Ships and single-pilot fighters firing. Yet compared with that, very few warships were hit directly. Most high-energy beams merely grazed past their targets, and quite a few ships teleported away an instant before being struck. The vicious reaction speed of the automatic evasion systems produced by Shilin Technology was plain to see. Of course, the fighters' pilots were genuinely formidable as well. I did not know the Vengeance Legion's soldiers, but the troops under the Empire's new army were all the sort of ruthless characters who could race three-wheeled bikes through downtown traffic against the traffic police. Ahem, I knew that analogy was not quite appropriate here. What I meant was: two groups of high-speed spacecraft constantly jumping, maneuvering, dogfighting, and firing in space really was far more thrilling.

This chaotic pursuit would probably last much longer than we had expected.

"Luckily, we separated their Escort Fleet from their mothership formations," Sandora sighed softly. "Half of them were