The Sky Eagle's prow-mounted exterminatus cannon slowly dimmed, its dazzling radiance seeming to linger in the void.
Between it and the Ironblood lay a long, narrow black expanse where all matter had been vaporized, standing out with startling abruptness.
Even within the vacuum of space itself, that region came closer to absolute emptiness.
Both the rebel fleet and the Imperial fleet tacitly kept their distance from it. Against attacks of this magnitude, their void shields offered no protection at all.
The commanders of every warship ordered their vessels away from the battlefield, leaving the grandest war to the true protagonists. They themselves fought enemy ships of equal class in more distant regions.
Soldier against soldier, king against king. At least until the main warships on either side had determined a victor, the war would continue in this seemingly fair fashion.
Across the entire Beta-Garmon system, more than two thousand Imperial and rebel warships were unleashing their fury upon one another.
It was an utterly terrifying number. Not even during the Great Crusade had naval warfare reached such a scale, yet now these mighty weapons born from humanity's hunger for conquest were destroying one another over conflicting ideals at the gateway to the Sol System.
Every second, warships became exploding fireballs. Once a ship was destroyed, its crew, laborers, and combat personnel had almost no chance of survival.
Even those who escaped aboard lifeboats from a warship about to explode had nowhere that could be called safe in a star system with such absurdly dense concentrations of vessels.
There was scarcely any room for tactics or strategy. A warship could be attacked from the front, rear, left, right, even above and below. The three-dimensional nature of the war made everything still more unpredictable.
Both sides continued trading losses. Only when one