2868, Double Battle Meditation
April 22, 8 BBY, 6:30 PM, high orbit above Coruscant, crash site of the Guardian Super Star Destroyer.
The fall of the Super Star Destroyer shattered the morale of Imperial Navy officers and men at every level. At this moment, more than 2,000 Star Destroyers remained in the Galactic Empire's fleet around Coruscant, but their formation had already been scattered. Those warships desperately fled toward the range of Coruscant's Orbital Defense Cannons, hoping to find cover.
The Guardian's fall was not an ending. It was the beginning of the collapse.
That nineteen-kilometer-long Super Star Destroyer had once been the proudest banner of the Imperial Navy. Its very name was a deterrent—Guardian, defender of the Empire, the Emperor's iron fist, protector of order. Now, it was slowly and irreversibly falling through Coruscant's orbit.
The hull broke apart at its center, and the front and rear sections gradually separated under the pull of gravity. Countless flames erupted from within the fracture, followed by an even more violent internal detonation that blasted the rear section into two pieces.
Debris flew in every direction. Some struck the cities below, while others crashed into warships still fighting... Around it, the Imperial fleet's formation had completely collapsed.
When a soldier saw his most powerful warship—the steel behemoth he had believed could never be sunk, the symbol of the Empire's myth of invincibility—turn into a burning sea of fire and fall from space, his mind instinctively reached one conclusion: this war was already lost.
The Empire's remaining two thousand-plus Star Destroyers had lost all will to meet the enemy. They frantically retreated into the range of Coruscant's orbital defense cannons. They were not going there to fight, but to seek shelter. Those Imperial-class Star Destroyers that had once swept across the Milky Way