In the morning, the Warp Daemons that attacked had failed to inflict any real damage on the mining base before its defenders blasted them back. For the Koprulu Sector's Terran elites, who were experienced fighters accustomed to battling all kinds of enemies and monsters, the assault had been nothing to worry about. It had been entirely within their expectations, and at most amounted to a minor skirmish.
But for the refugees and survivors, it was a completely different matter.
At least several thousand dead daemons had been left in front of the base. To the refugees and the local officers and soldiers, such an astounding body count could only be considered a rare, decisive victory!
After all, they had fought those daemons for nearly three months. The survivors had firsthand experience of the daemons' strength: their immense power, tough hides, terrifying psychic abilities, and endless array of magic that defied the laws of physics. They remembered it all too well.
The fact that Canopy Star had now been almost completely overrun, and that nearly two-thirds of its human population had been slaughtered or turned into daemon thralls, said it all.
And so!
When they saw that the base really could drive off those terrifying monsters—the daemons that had emerged from the Warp Rift—the survivors who had been forced to eke out a wretched existence in the underground mines immediately came to regard the base, and the human force that claimed to hail from the Koprulu Sector, far more favorably.
At that moment, having finally glimpsed a ray of hope in their despair, they had already begun to think of these people from the Koprulu Sector as their saviors.
But unlike the survivors, neither Darius nor the other Hero Federation officers considered the battle particularly noteworthy. They continued working at a