They had to resort to a few little tricks to cause trouble for the Starfish. Otherwise, as time passed and the Starfish sank more into Habinte, they would only grow more unhinged.
Xi Yan could already imagine the foreseeable future: the Starfish Republic would fight the fleets of the Habinte Unified Worlds and the Keen Empire alone, and with humanity helping those two powers, the war would not end anytime soon.
The longer the war lasted, the more fleets the Starfish would commit. In economic terms, all of those were sunk costs.
Once those sunk costs accumulated to a terrifying figure, pulling out would no longer be possible. The Starfish would have to obtain Habinte's Gaia Planets, or all those sunk costs would have been for nothing.
This could very well trigger a universe-wide war.
After all, many momentous events had grown out of seemingly trivial incidents.
A young man from Serbia fired a shot that shocked the world, workers in America dumped tea from England into the sea, a Warmaster was cut by an unknown weapon, and one rainy day, someone with blue hair came in and told you they were quitting the band...
Once the war continued, the Starfish would inevitably go mad, and then humanity would have no choice but to commit fleets to keep fighting. At that point, there would be no turning back.
Then both sides would commit even more forces and call in their allies for support, until what had begun as a war between two nations became an all-out conflict engulfing the entire universe...
So this could not be allowed to continue! What if, while the Milky Way was engulfed in fierce fighting, a Ghost Signal suddenly arrived one day, echoes from subspace came from beyond the galaxy, a dimensional portal opened somewhere,