Battle of Vilsert (6)

The Dauntless Fleet was a special fleet renowned throughout the Federation as invincible.

Since its establishment in the Large Magellanic Cloud, it had never lost a single spacecraft. Not even one crew member had been killed.

Yet now, it had lost more than a hundred thousand warships. While that number was not even a scratch to five cluster fleets, it was still an unprecedented first in the Dauntless Fleet's history.

However, the Sels Republic on the other side was in an even worse state. Having set out before the Sallamo Republic, they had suffered devastating losses over these ten hours, with the number of destroyed warships approaching the five-billion mark.

But no matter what, their numbers and civilization level were there. Despite having gone tens of thousands of years without fighting a major war, coupled with the extremely unfavorable terrain within the Current Mouth, they gradually established the rudiments of a bridgehead as reinforcements continued to arrive.

At the Current Mouth's exit, nearly a hundred million Silas Empire warships had gathered. The Dauntless Fleet's casualties consequently began to soar as well. From no losses in the first five hours to more than a hundred thousand warships lost over the next five, with eighty thousand lost in the final hour alone.

To deal with this situation, Lin Kexin had no choice but to order the fleet on the first line of defense at the forefront to fall back to the second. At the same time, because the second line stood a full 2 AU from the Current Mouth's exit, Lin Kexin committed the remaining three reserve clusters to the much larger hemispherical encirclement.

The five galactic clusters, together with a vast number of fire-support platforms, immediately suppressed the Silas Empire's momentum of counterattack. But it was only temporary. What remained depended