The Homecoming Fleet set sail from New Orphus's starport, heading for the fallen regions of Orphus.
Though this miniature fleet of Transport Ships was equipped with manually operated macrocannons, at least it excelled at one thing: traveling quickly.
A second faster-than-light engine, separate from the Dimension Engine, was activated across the fleet. It accelerated them to dozens of times the speed of light, and the entire fleet vanished from New Orphus in an instant like a blurred image.
Ers stood aboard the relatively intact vessel that had been designated the flagship, Orphus's Revenge.
As the star map showed the fleet drawing ever closer to the fallen region, and the chances of reaching their homeland before being destroyed grew ever greater, the tension in Ers's heart gradually eased.
Cheers erupted aboard every ship in the fleet.
Tens of thousands of Navy sailors and an army made up of millions of volunteers rejoiced at the possibility that they might truly see their homeland again.
Some of the soldiers in the army, whose equipment was not even standardized, even believed they might be fortunate enough to land on some world within the fallen region, tread upon their ancestors' soil, and die beneath xenos weapons.
But in truth, they had not escaped detection simply because their operation was swift and small-scale, as some had expected.
The Menak Dynasty's void monitoring station on the border of its territory had detected them the moment they set sail. It simply had not attacked, because the station's overseer believed this tiny fleet was the vanguard of a far larger force.
To make the human fleet lower its guard, rush in after seeing that its vanguard had arrived unharmed, and then be completely annihilated, the void monitoring station allowed the tiny fleet it had identified as a vanguard to