Starship against starship. Amid the silent artillery fire, shrill streaks of light interweaved through the void. The Walter family fleet employed the space pirates' specialty, the frog-jumping tactic. Through short-range curvature-space jumps, they forcibly boarded the interstellar fortresses. However, one heavy hatch after another slowly opened, and millions upon millions of unmanned combat drones surged out. Above the torrent of drones was an even larger swarm of space torpedoes.
Ion beams sprayed from the rear engines, flashing without pause. One mechanical platform after another opened fire at full power, blasting star shuttles into fireworks in the vacuum. Massive starship main guns slammed into the surfaces of the interstellar fortresses, plowing dozens-of-meters-wide trenches through their thick outer layers.
"Charge! For the Legion!!"
At the very outskirts of the Legion fortress, a "sub-fortress" slowly opened. Five thousand Pioneers stared coldly at the Walter troops charging toward them. Though they were only mechs, they were peak second-tier mechs, equipped with large X-type reactors, AT fields, and consciousness-pack controllers. They were armed to the teeth.
These five thousand mechs could be said to be one of the High Engineer faction's greatest trump cards.
As the tractor beams flickered, the mechs collided head-on with the Walter ships employing the "curvature frog-jumping tactic." In that single clash, one-third of the Pioneer mechs were lost.
Even more astonishingly, the number of enemy ships destroyed was nearly the same as the number of mechs lost.
No matter how powerful the Walter family was, it was still only a band of space pirates. Expecting it to produce third-tier starships was utterly unrealistic. Being able to mass-produce ships was already an impressive achievement.
If one had to describe it, the gap between starships and ships was probably like the gap between an aircraft carrier and an armed fishing boat.
Earlier,