Fifteen minutes later, all the warships in Yang's fleet had entered the blue protective layer. From the perspective of the DL361 system on the other side, it would have looked as though these battered Earth ships had sunk into the near orbit of that deep-blue gas giant, only to be captured by its atmosphere—laden with liquid metal—and its immense gravity, then destroyed in the deep-blue abyss.
After all, even a Titan-class ship would meet a miserable end if it lost power and was caught by a gas giant's mass. Before its tremendous gravity could tear the ship apart, the atmospheric pressure from the liquid-metal layer would crush it to dust.
In the vast history of space exploration by this generation of galactic civilization, plenty of giant ships had been destroyed by the gravity of stars and black holes. There had never been any shortage of unfortunate souls who met their end within the gravitational reach of a gas giant, either.
And in war, using celestial bodies to destroy enemy ships was itself a subject well worth studying.
So, in the cosmos, the deep atmosphere of a gas giant, infused with liquid metal, could often play the part of an abyss or a hell. In many terrifying tales of spacefaring adventures, the colossal leviathan that devoured the stars had, after all, been born on just such a planet.
...All right, given how the Tianshu campaign had unfolded, it was fair to say that a horror story had come to life.
But this time, the experience was completely different. Perhaps because they had gone through several trials, the people in Yang's fleet didn't hesitate. As though passing naturally through a gravity well, they entered the gas giant's atmosphere in an orderly fashion at low cruising speed.
The moment they physically made contact