Xyrin Empire Chapter 427

Chapter 427: Chapter 427: Final Battle?

“Ha,” faced with One-Way Street’s sudden questioning, I was stunned for a few seconds, then unexpectedly chuckled, “What’s going on? Did the great demon One-Way Street suddenly develop a sense of justice or something?”

“I just want to know if you’re up to some mischief that you shouldn’t be.”

That really stunned me–this hopeless Loli Fan!

Well, indeed, if one day you suddenly discovered that a man who appeared to be a kind-hearted, long-legged uncle adopting a girl you cherish is actually a super villain plotting to conquer the world and annihilate humanity, you would also feel uneasy and suspicious. Also, did you guys manage to parse that long sentence just now?

“Indeed, I am initiating an invasion, but you needn’t worry about that,” I shrugged nonchalantly. Even though he’s a helpless Loli Fan, at least his concerns for Little Misaka are genuine. “I’ve never had any ill intentions towards that little one, and with our power–do you really think I still need to scheme against you guys? You think too highly of yourself.”

“That makes sense,” One-Way Street admitted nonchalantly, his face still looking smug. “Just casually asking, didn’t expect you’d actually answer, ‘Emperor’–speaking of which, who are you guys at war with? I keep seeing your Imperial Soldiers buzzing around Shadow City every day and to be honest, I’ve become quite curious about this ‘monster’ war of yours.”

Knowing his way of speaking, I didn’t take the discourtesy in his words to heart. Just as I was about to answer, I heard the room’s door quietly sliding open.

A deep voice, slightly hoarse, arose in the room, drawing everyone’s attention: “The Emperor of the Xyrin People, I heard some guests have arrived on this warship…”

Closest to the door, Chichun Shili who was examining the crystal pattern on the sensor door, instantly looked up when she heard that somber voice and abruptly let out such a scream, then almost bounced up, trying to jump backward… well, more like tumble back.

Flower Pot Girl fell clumsly on the floor, her fingers trembling as she pointed at Zeratul, who was curiously bending down to observe her, and the latter, seeing the exaggerated reaction of the timid girl in front of him, innocently blinked and made a shrugging gesture to me.

“It seems I have frightened your friend,” Zeratul said in a muffled voice, “But are the mighty Xyrin People really frightened by the appearance of a Protos?”

I awkwardly stepped forward to pull Chichun up while explaining, “This is my cousin from the countryside…”

I felt that my explanation was terribly lame!

Not only did Zeratul’s appearance scare Chichun, but it also greatly surprised the other girls. However, after the initial fear settled, Uncle Z quickly enjoyed the cruel scrutiny of fourteen-year-old girls from Earth, his entire blue face almost turning pale purple.

Watching even a calm person like Zeratul exhibit such embarrassed distress, I couldn’t help but step forward to break up the circle and then introduced everyone one by one, the identities…

Yes, all of them are sisters from the countryside.

This introduction eventually made even One-Way Street roll his eyes at me, you can’t help but say that a pure and kind child like me really isn’t suited for lying!

“Hey, Director brother,” as Misaka Mikoto suddenly poked me gently from behind, taking advantage of Zeratul not paying attention, and whispered, “Is this alien your friend? Is he very poor? Why does his cloak have so many holes?”

“Dark Templar never care about outward appearances, rigorous training is the best solace for our lonely souls.”

Zeratul’s ears were sharp, as soon as Mikoto finished speaking, he responded in a dry tone, clearly, he was slightly annoyed by the earlier gawking.

Just as we were casually chatting, a broadcast from Bubbles using the flagship’s main computer suddenly filled the room: “Daddy! The No.7 Starship in charge of destroying the Noral Planet is about to be in position, and it seems they’ve encountered a major blockage from the Protos Natives. Do you want to come and see?”

“A major blockage?” Sandora and I exchanged glances, “Enough to intercept that warship?”

With that question, I, along with a raucous tour group of overpowering upstarts, headed to the command center, where the holographic projection system had switched to the image of the No.7 Starship. The Noral Planet, just appearing like a glass bead in front of the starship, was still far away, its pale-yellow mass seemed insignificant compared to the starship, just like Dingdang vs Megatron: they were still at a great distance.

Compared to the officers’ lounge, although advanced and magical, it was still a conventional rest area and the sight of the “Imperial Admiral” flagship command bridge was far more awe-inspiring. Standing nearly a hundred meters high on the commander’s platform, looking down at the huge two-hundred-meter radius command center with numerous officers busily issuing orders, the massive star map afloat with specks of light and the imposing holographic projection of the planet battleship and its surrounding massive fleet naturally elicited a series of astonished gasps from the Academy City tour group. At that moment, I suddenly felt that compared to us, who couldn’t help but try to save the world while out for a stroll, Tsuruya and her cohort were probably the most powerful tour group ever…

“Um… Brother Chen Jun,” Tsuruya was overwhelmed by the scene around her for quite some time before timidly pulling on the hem of my coat from the back door, “Where is the enemy? Is the fleet on the screen your army?”

It seemed that after the initial novelty, Tsuruya had begun to realize that the so-called “war” was not a game.

“That starship fleet is just one of hundreds of divisions of the Imperial Vanguard Army,” I stated, causing everyone’s jaw to drop, even One-Way Street almost staggered and fell, “As for our enemy– it’s that planet there, we plan to destroy it completely.”

After this second statement, several young girls who grew up in a peaceful environment became completely silent.

After a while, Misaka Mikoto, looking somewhat bewildered, tentatively asked me, “Director brother, did you just say… you want to destroy that planet?”

“Do you think interstellar war is a game?” I didn’t answer, but Vega bluntly did: For an Imperial Officer who holds the military mission above all else, the girls’ giggly attitude at the warfront was utterly irrational.

In this aspect, Scorpion Sister completely ignored the severe cluelessness of her direct superiors.

I comforted Misaka Mikoto, who had fallen into a brief daze, then quickly withdrew my hand before the jealous Bai Jing Heizi could pounce on me: “That’s why I said, this isn’t a place for you to be playing around. We are engaged in a war, a war that could potentially lead to the extinction of a race–you’d better stay away from these things.”

“The opponent is my brother’s enemy!” Tsuruya suddenly clenched her fist, her expression serious, “So they definitely deserve to be eliminated!”

“If that old bastard Aresta doesn’t prioritize quality education in the development policies of Academy City, I’ll kill him!”

Though that old fox is already dead.

“Where are their counterattack forces?”

Sandora asked sternly, then a section of the gigantic holographic display immediately zoomed in, revealing several golden warships adorned in typical Protos style right before us.

The massive ships shaped somewhat like triangles, their core area faintly revealing huge crystal structures and rows of buildings and machinery. A pale blue, semi-transparent hemispherical shield covered the central part of these warships, resembling an ecological ball nestled within a large triangular alloy board. According to our calculations, the single side length of these massive warships reached over two hundred kilometers…

Holy Mother Ship–I finally saw the strongest warships of the Protos People. It seems they really got thrashed by us these past few days.

“Taldarim has defiled these Holy Artifacts!” The moment Zeratul saw those giant warships, he said in a low and angry tone, obviously very angry. To the Protos, qualified to utilize a Holy Mother Ship–a monument of their race–was not something everyone could afford, especially a group immersed in spirit drugs heretics, whom Zeratul believed their audacity to use the Holy Mother Ship in such a blind war was unforgivable.

And another reaction was even more intense than Zeratul’s…

Little Baobao, who had been hanging around my neck and hypnotized herself into becoming a koala, became ecstatic the moment she saw that dazzling fleet. She immediately started waving her little arms and legs and danced towards the direction of the holographic projection, mumbling an unintelligible series of monosyllabic words that still didn’t make any sense.

Sandora, who luckily can communicate wonderfully, immediately translated for me, “The little one says she wants those shiny plates…”

Zeratul’s face twisted subtly; now, a piece of good news and bad news. The good news was that the holy artifacts of his own race seemed to have survived the war, but the bad news was that they might become the playground of a little loli for a long while.

“Command the starship fleet to control firepower, try to capture the enemy’s mother ships.”

Upon my directive, the already deployed escort fleet, ready to unleash their full firepower and eradicate the enemy’s escort ships, suddenly tightened their formation, activated the fleet’s joint shield, and prepared to capture the enemy’s mother ships with the help of the energy raider.

“Have them be cautious of the distance, a large group of enemies might be hidden under the Holy Mother Ship’s force field. Can our anti-invisibility devices detect them?”

“Of course, Emperor,” Sivis nodded at me, “But it will take a few minutes to decipher this unfamiliar invisibility mechanism. The ultimate technological product of the Protos people has some fight against us.”

Indeed, our caution proved effective. The invisibility field around the Protos’ Holy Mother Ship was larger than we had anticipated. When the vanguard escort ships of the starship fleet were still a full four hundred thousand kilometers away from the enemy, a series of explosions abruptly erupted on their ghost energy shields.

According to the firing range of the Protos main battleship, the Holy Mother Ship’s invisibility field probably covers an area of a hundred thousand kilometers! How much do you think the electricity bill would be for that in a month?

However, the enemy only managed to launch a surprise attack once, and the Xyrin Host, installed in the core of the starship, cracked the principle of invisibility in less than three minutes. A massive energy field erupted, sweeping a million kilometers around the starship. Under strong interference, the hidden Protos Fleet instantly revealed itself, densely packed, covering the sky…

“Wow, again with these numbers…”

It’s not the first time I’ve been amazed by the scale of the Protos people’s army. You’d feel the same way when those who should prioritize a policy of elite troops suddenly resort to oceanic tactics to withstand the onslaught.

“We indeed have a sparse population, but we can compensate well using drone technology,” Zeratul said, his tone hinting at confusion, “But what puzzles me is that the Holy Mother Ship itself also possesses invisibility capabilities, although that would slightly reduce their invisibility field range. Still, compared to becoming a target for everyone, preserving the mother ship should be the best choice.”

“They can turn invisible too?” I was startled by this unexpected news, then immediately ordered, “Notify the starship fleet not to cease the disruption field, the Taldarim army might be up to something!”

At this time, half a light year away from our flagship, the battle between the two sides had heated up.

The Imperial Starship Fleet formed a dense, united formation, a “foolish tactic” that should be avoided in a space war where both sides have ultra-long-range bombardment capabilities. However, the Xyrin battleship’s approach, and the combined shield it formed which was comparable to a mother -tar, completely reversed the tactical inefficiency. The Taldarim’s huge group of warships divided into several waves, using fast and numerous “Phoenix Fighters” as a suicide squad for preemptive strikes to draw our energy raiders’ attention. Then, before they turned into debris, the enemy’s rear Curved Light Ships seized this brief ten-second window to launch a saturation strike. As an energy raider could only support a limited number of energy channels at one time, sacrificing a large number of suicide squad members proved to be an effective strategy: This was the only feasible tactic reluctantly devised by the Protos people after suffering heavy losses due to energy raiders in several exchanges. Those doomed Phoenix Fighters demonstrated Taldarim’s madness by abandoning some attacks and defenses to use their remaining energy to ram into our shields. Even if they ran out of energy during the flight, by using their massive kinetic energy, these metal shards could still pose a slight threat to the Xyrin Fleet, and that slight threat could become significant with numbers as high as tens of thousands.

Intense explosions began to light up the cold, dark background of space. The destructive starship fleet and Taldarim’s fleet, which gambled with numbers for victory, temporarily reached a stalemate. Due to our “capture the enemy mother ship” high-difficulty command, the starship fleet commander adopted a very conservative tactic aimed at continually depleting the enemy’s numbers, eventually breaking through their layered defenses to approach those several huge Holy Mother Ships. This kept most of their main cannons in a restricted use state, while Taldarim, having suffered greatly in front of the energy raiders before, naturally didn’t dare to let their precious main battlecruisers fire rashly. They continually used drones and kamikaze formations to wear out our shields, trying to quickly bring the energy raiders into a cooldown state.

Boring, I still want to see what the attack of the Holy Mother Ships looks like–these things are set so that just one could turn an entire planet to glass. In terms of destructive power, it almost matches our Eternal-class Mother Ship (of course, the protection ability and sustained combat capability are incomparable, and the Eternal-class is mass-produced on our side), but Taldarim clearly doesn’t want to test the capacity limit of the Empire army’s energy raiders with their precious mother ships…

To be honest, I think the situation of those Holy Mother Ships is really awkward now. They should be the most powerful warships but are inhibited by the energy raiders’ power from using their main cannons or even daring to approach the front lines a bit. I know they have an even stronger space weapon: Black Hole Generator. But speaking of space technology, the Xyrin people are the ancestors in this area; after the starships locked down all surrounding space, not to mention causing spatial collapses, it’d be impossible for Taldarim to even think about using space transmission to escape.

So, they really just turned into a stack of shiny discs, like ornaments at the back of the battlefield.

Tens of thousands of Protos fleets angrily attacked the starship fleet’s joint shield, creating a giant light barrier near the fire line of both sides, resembling a curtain wall. The Xyrin’s mother ship, that huge planet, had been in a state of silence from the beginning, with only red light flows swiftly sliding across the cracked earth’s crust occasionally, all its mechanical structures remaining dormant. On one side was the vast but tiny “small ships,” and on the other side was the ship dimly glowing with red light, its crust cracked revealing its core–a bizarre starship. The vast disparity in size between the two made the entire battlefield look as if a group of angry icebergs were attacking an apple–what kind of bizarre metaphor is this?

“We should send some support troops over,” seeing that behind Taldarim there was still a continual flow of spaceships supplementing the battlefield, Big Sister slightly frowned. “Taldarim seems to treat this encounter as a final battle; their numbers are so large it’s suspicious. ‘Zero,’ although powerful, has rather simplistic armaments. Engaging in the tactic of human sea strategy would be quite dangerous for a planet battleship.”

Indeed, now I also feel that the numbers of Protos people are a bit too bizarre–far exceeding their defensive fleets previously deployed outside the colonization star, even using race mileposts like Holy Mother Ships for a war of attrition, it’s impossible not to have any doubts.

“Divert some elite fleets from the main forces over there.”

After a moment’s consideration, Sandora made the most efficient decision; those starship fleets were too slow. By the time they arrived at the battlefield, both sides would probably be almost dead.

The “Imperial Admiral” nearby elite mother ships received the order, tearing through space in a spectacular light curtain, rushing to the battlefield. (To be continued, if you want to know what happens next, please visit www.NovelHub, more chapters available, support the author, support genuine reading!)