By then, the proxy war involving the Habinte Unified Worlds, the Keen Empire, and the Starfish Republic had reached a fever pitch. The two sides fought for territory along a front stretching from north to south.
The Keen Empire committed most of its main fleets to confront the Starfish fleets in the south, while the Habinte Unified Worlds practically sold its own backside to the Human Empire in exchange for massive fleet support, allowing it to fight the Starfish farther north.
The Sea of Stars Most Holy Human Empire sat grinning in the northern Milky Way, enjoying the show while investing in Habinte and watching the two countries battle to a standstill.
In the Starfish Republic's Core Sector, the hungry Kaleidoscope Bugs continued devouring its energy supplies. The Starfish were hamstrung at every turn, and the effects showed on the front lines.
They seemed to sense something was wrong and suspected that the damned Kaleidoscope Bugs were part of some country's plot. But who could say? The agents had covered their tracks perfectly. No one knew Xi Yan was responsible.
As time passed, the campaign reached a critical turning point.
There was a star system in the middle of the front, protected by layer upon layer of defenses.
It housed one of the Starfish Republic's megastructures.
The Pancake Array-no, the Sentinel Array.
The Sentinel Array's powerful sensors could scan the entire Milky Way Galaxy directly, detecting every fleet that had not taken special measures to conceal itself. It was the Starfish Republic's source of intelligence, letting it track every fleet movement along the front and rendering conventional tactics useless.
It was effectively a full-map vision cheat.
In the game, the Sentinel Array usually made computers lag horrendously because it had to display the positions and movements of every fleet in