This border outpost had originally been built to deal with pirates and smugglers. Its armaments were powerful enough to threaten the small and medium-sized ships that could pass through the Abyss Nebula. The most advanced deep-space probes could not guarantee round-the-clock, gapless surveillance of the Empire's borders, but they could at least reduce the number of outlaws slipping through to a level the imperial government could manage.
Of course, since their main opponents were profit-seeking criminals, this equipment was more than sufficient. After all, even with the Empire's manufacturing technology and financial resources, they couldn't possibly place a Skyfortress capable of taking on a Titan in every border system.
But now, the reality the imperial military had taken for granted ever since the age of interstellar exploration had crumbled.
Huge, bizarrely shaped warships emerged from the crimson nebula, leaping like ghosts into their remote star system. They were hideous, but the soldiers at the outpost had no doubt that any one of them could wipe them out from hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, as easily as kicking aside a pebble that had landed nearby.
These soldiers weren't uniformed bureaucrats who had grown soft from years of peace and never seen bloodshed. But the frontier outposts facing the Abyss Nebula were tasked with dealing with smugglers and pirates. They had never imagined a fleet of this scale would appear here.
It was like a mountain outpost guard armed with purple-tier light weapons watching a horde of Type 59 tanks charge down a slope at an angle of at least seventy degrees.
Under the circumstances, the imperial soldiers were so terrified that they had no time to consider that most of the giant ships in their system weren't even warships at all.
Fortunately, perhaps because the outpost was disguised inside an