"Wiped out? How could that be?!"
Inside the command tent, Charlie's face was filled with disbelief.
If he could previously attribute their defeat to the enormous disparity in strength between the two sides—to his own inability to fight back—then this time, the Barton Empire had dispatched a full fifteen warships!
Although he did not know exactly who had commanded the battle, it had to be the other two fleet commanders of the North Sea Fleet besides himself!
Whichever one it was, their ability was beyond question.
According to Charlie's reasoning, even if the fifteen warships under their command could not defeat the Great Zhou Fleet, they should not have been completely wiped out!
This was simply too outrageous!
Unless...
As his thoughts raced, Charlie suddenly remembered the bombardment his flagship had endured.
Everything had happened so quickly that he had not even known what was going on before the blast sent him tumbling into the sea.
"If it was that kind of attack..."
"But that still doesn't make sense!"
According to Charlie's thinking, with the two fleets roughly equal in size, even adding that kind of explosive attack, he found it difficult to imagine a scene in which the Barton Empire's fleet could not even retreat and was completely wiped out.
While Charlie was agonizing over this, the victorious Great Zhou Fleet had already returned in high spirits.
Among them, six ships had clearly come under attack. Their decks were stained with copious amounts of blood, and the Barton Empire's flags still hung from their masts, making them especially conspicuous in the eyes of the prisoners of war.
After docking, the Great Zhou sailors quickly disembarked. Immediately afterward, they escorted one tightly bound figure after another off the ships.
Seeing this, the soldiers who had remained behind to guard the