Admiral Adar Talon of the Galactic Empire's Twelfth Army watched the analysis footage provided by the technical department with a grim expression. It showed the moment the Imperial-class Star Destroyer Grance was hit, filmed by another Light Cruiser nearby. Not long afterward, the Grance was sunk.
The footage was rather blurry, because those missiles had been flying far too fast. However, their blue exhaust flames were still fairly distinct.
After processing, they were finally able to make out eight missiles rapidly approaching the Grance Star Destroyer. Although the warship's close-in defense guns and turbolasers fired frantically, they only intercepted two of them.
"General, right here." As he spoke, the technician slowed the footage to one-twentieth speed.
On the screen, the remaining six missiles advanced frame by frame, while the flames from the explosions of the other two missiles spread frame by frame beside them. Then something astonishing happened—the six missiles suddenly vanished!
Immediately afterward, five incredibly violent explosions erupted across the hull of the Grance Star Destroyer! The missiles had hit! One of them had even struck the towering bridge of the Star Destroyer directly!
At the same time, one missile seemed to have been stopped by the shields and exploded against them. This made the image even more chaotic and difficult to discern.
"That was what we thought at first..." the technician said as he adjusted the playback. "But later, we discovered that wasn't the case... In the combat footage of this attack, there were only thirty frames between the missiles disappearing and hitting their target. We conducted a careful analysis using an intelligent system, and then found this frame."
He pressed several buttons, freezing the image on one frame of the video. However, it appeared to show nothing more than the warship being struck and engulfed in flames.