"Slowly sinking into despair amid confusion, slowly struggling amid despair, and meeting death amid struggle... this is the beauty of war..."
Kloros rested his chin on his hand, watching in rapture as the fleet under his command tore apart the battle star that dared to resist him, bit by bit.
He enjoyed his enemies' desperate struggles. They brought him immense pleasure.
Within the Wulf Empire, Kloros had a nickname: the "Crypt Lord."
He excelled at weaving traps for his enemies, then slowly drawing the net tight once they stepped inside, reaping the final fruits of victory amid their despair.
The white dwarf's self-destruction had been his handiwork, wiping out the Twin Stars' enormous fleet in one stroke.
As the Locke Conglomerate's strategist, he had known from the outset that, given the sheer size of the Twin Stars, even if the Locke Conglomerate managed to swallow them whole, it would suffer heavy losses in the process.
Only by annihilating the Twin Stars' main fleet in a surprise attack could they use their superior numbers to occupy and absorb the Twin Stars' territory at their leisure.
The Conglomerate was a business, after all. It sought profit, and only this approach would make the war profitable for the Locke Conglomerate.
"Heh! With your masterful planning, my lord, how could these inferior races possibly stand against you?
"How could they have guessed that we kept expanding the wormhole to put them under immense pressure precisely so they would keep massing their forces?
"Those fools even thought the little fleet they sent to infiltrate our territory could move through it unopposed. If you hadn't gone easy on them and only allowed the Fifth Fleet to hunt them down, did they really think they could have escaped unscathed?
"Letting them take some information back was merely