Song Chen stepped out of the Jump Channel, and space settled back into place.
The battlefield's roar, its tremors, and a tidal wave of energy slammed into him.
The first thing he saw was a sea of stars on fire.
It was a meat grinder. Song Chen had seen large-scale battles before. He had fought a defensive battle at the Node Defense Line and joined a squad to intercept a mothership in the 68th War Zone.
But this was different. There was no fortress, no fixed defensive line—only an allied fleet caught in the enemy's jaws and Blood-Eclipse Lifeforms blanketing the space around it.
The two sides were tangled across tens of thousands of kilometers of space. Wrecked ships, chunks of flesh, frozen blood, burned armor...
Everything drifted, collided, and shattered in the vacuum, weaving a haze of steel and flesh.
In the distance, a Moonshadow Civilization fleet was surrounded.
A dozen or so long, silver-white ships had drawn into a tight spherical formation. Scratches and scorch marks covered their hulls. Their shields had turned orange-red, with tiny sparks bursting across the surface.
There were too many enemies. Hundreds upon hundreds of bioships and vessels from subordinate civilizations bore down from every direction.
The Moonshadow fleet's outer warships fired as they drew inward. Each flash of their guns sliced several enemy ships to pieces.
But the enemy surged in like a tide. As soon as one wave died, another took its place.
Song Chen watched three bioships ram a Moonshadow frigate at once, snapping its hull in the middle. An instant before it exploded, the Moonshadow Warriors aboard were still hacking their way out of the cabins to fight the enemies swarming onto the deck.
Farther back, several enormous transports had lost all power and floated at an angle through