Waiting

The Lashudia Clan fleet had deployed the largest force in this battle. In their bid to secure the first victory, they had sent a full two hundred million ships. However, half had previously been split off for the flanking plan.

The remaining half had been stationed at the very front of the battle line, and with no Outer-Ring Civilizations assigned as cannon fodder or shields, they had also suffered heavy losses. By the time the retreat order was issued, only a little over seventy million remained—fewer than eighty million.

After Conrads issued the retreat order, the Lashudia Clan warships followed arrangements made in advance. While the other civilizations were still arguing over who should leave first, they had already turned around, withdrawn to a safe position, and begun accelerating into warp.

But what had once made the aliens envious turned into panic in the blink of an eye. The Lashudia Clan had provided a perfect example of what not to do, showing the aliens that the Zerg had not refrained from detonating their energy systems because they could not, but because the timing had not yet been right.

Of the more than seventy million Lashudia Clan warships, roughly twenty million were successively destroyed on the spot. The light of their sympathetic detonations eclipsed the radiance of distant Zerg No. 1 Star.

Fewer than twenty million warships forcibly entered warp. Though no one could see what happened to them afterward, their fate was equally worrying.

The flagship of Conrads, commander-in-chief of the Coalition Army, was among them. Although quantum communication technology could penetrate warp space for communication, the commander-in-chief had yet to respond to any messages sent by the various Coalition Army races.

Nearly ten million Lashudia Clan warships had not entered warp space. Instead, they had intended to flee directly