General Grayfall closed his eyes for a moment, but after only a few seconds of despair, he regained his composure. After all, in the great battle in the Modan System, the main guns of the Wanghu and several battlecruisers had repeatedly punched through the shields and main armor along his ship's flank. Of the three primary power cores, one had been blown up, and another was operating at less than half its former efficiency. The fact that the engines could still run at full power was already an unexpected blessing.
He'd never expected the backup shields to hold for long. Still, for them to fail at the hands of a few small ships was like Tyson taking a clean uppercut to the chin from Little Four. It was downright humiliating.
But looking at it another way, losing the shields was, in a sense, a good thing. There was no need to agonize over it anymore; they could devote all their remaining energy to the engines.
And that wasn't the only "good news."
As it happened, an ion beam had scored a direct hit on the thruster assembly at the rear of the flamethrower ship beside them.
The battered giant had lost all its shields back in the decisive battle at Modan. Against the Imperial warship's sharpshooting—an attack as accurate as a machine gunner getting his head blown off from eight hundred li away—it had no way to defend itself. An explosion at the engine section vented through the rear exhaust port, creating a fire-laced shock wave that nearly tore a huge hole in the ship's final section.
At this point, not even the finest damage-control crew and master engineers could repair it.
The ugly gray-black flamethrower ship finally lost the power to keep moving. Instead, it only grew more ferocious.