Ears had never seen such an enormous fleet.
When he insisted on joining the battle and, at the Tyran Navy's request, transferred with his followers onto a cruiser, the vessel he was aboard sailed with the main fleet directly to the outskirts of the occupied Orphus Sector.
The Necron fleet, which also possessed the power of prophecy, had long since assembled there to wait.
The Kasa Dynasty slept beside the Menak Dynasty, yet the Menak Dynasty had been unable to catch them. Even after gathering all its ships, the dynasty's fleet still did not outnumber the Tyran Navy.
Yet it was still a number that filled Ears with despair at a single glance. There were probably more than ten thousand ships.
The two sides engaged the moment they met.
As Ears stood by the porthole, trying to learn how the Tyran Navy fought, he realized this was a pure fleet battle utterly devoid of tactical or strategic embellishment.
The warships formed combat formations and bombarded each other from a distance of one light-second.
Before the two fleets had even closed to one light-second apart, all manner of beyond-visual-range weapons had already taken turns firing. The Tyran Navy's Particle Lances were firing before they had even dropped out of faster-than-light travel.
After the beyond-visual-range phase devolved into an evenly matched, low-efficiency stalemate, both sides tacitly chose the simplest and most effective approach: close-range combat with maximum firepower, seeking only to determine victory in the shortest possible time.
When Ears was young, he had followed his father on the Golden Crusade. As captain of a ship and a descendant of Orphus, his father had answered the Regent and Warmaster's call.
He had ventured deep into the Eye of Terror and witnessed the Brumm Campaign and the Iron Ring Campaign, wars that had