Tavier At Umr's gaze, like a cold plague, swept across the known star map.
The power of the Old Ones was no longer just an erosion; it had begun an active, destructive expansion.
Its first chosen target was the Black Stone Starfield, located deep within the Alliance, rich in resources, and deployed with several Law Anchors and important observation stations.
This would become the Starfire Alliance's first large-scale frontal collision with the Abyss, a lament destined to be stained with blood and fire.
Alliance emergency assembly!
Alarms blared across the Star Alliance Court, the Viltrum Mobile Fortress Unyielding, and Earth GDA Headquarters.
Tavier's intentions were clear to the point of despair.
Destroy the Alliance's research nodes, dismantle its will to resist, and at the same time… search for something, something that caused His non-human will to show desire.
Analysis pointed to traces of the surviving power of the Titan Clan.
"Black Stone Starfield! All active fleets! Immediately reinforce! We must not lose it!"
The Alliance's supreme military commander, General Garzak of Solan, with a desperate fire burning in his lizard-like vertical pupils, roared through holographic communication to all member civilizations.
With the order given, an emergency assembly spanning light-years began.
The Viltrum remnants, as the frontline force most familiar with the cruelty of the Old Ones, were remotely commanded by Regent Trigg.
The Viltrum fleet poured out, approximately 120 razor-sharp assault ships and 30 heavily armored dreadnoughts, carrying modified soldiers with partial resistance to Old One corruption, leaping into the battlefield first.
Their mission was to tie down the vanguard of the Old One army, buying time for subsequent forces to deploy.
The flagship Unyielding was like a mobile steel star; Trigg's mental commands were cold and efficient.
The Solan Empire was known for its impregnable defenses.
General Garzak personally led the main force of 80 mountain-class battleships, like mobile fortresses, with armor as thick as mountains, equipped with powerful railgun arrays, and 150 Razor Peak frigates, responsible for close-range fire support and anti-ship combat.
This steel torrent formed the Alliance's front line of defense.
The Alliance Joint Fleet, a mixed fleet coordinated and commanded by the Cybernetic Intelligence.
It included 50 AI-controlled Logic Node Motherships, serving as information processing and electronic warfare cores.
100 destroyers and cruisers from Human and affiliated civilizations provided flexible firepower, and 20 Aethera Psionic Spire Ships, emitting a soft psionic glow, were responsible for mental barriers and interference.
A total of approximately 170 ships, symbolizing Alliance technology and cooperation.
The Earth Guardian Squadron, Earth's elite dispatched by Cecil against all odds.
Although there were only 12 of the latest Ark-class cruisers, their significance was immense.
Eve, Rudy, Samson, and others were stationed on the flagship Dawn, and the team carried the latest version of the Imaginary Equation Prediction Module and experimental mental interference devices.
Debbie remained on Earth, becoming a steadfast spiritual pillar in the rear, her broadcasts like a stabilizing force, inspiring the frontline warriors.
A total of over 500 warships of various sizes, carrying hundreds of thousands of warriors from various races, rushed towards the Black Stone Starfield, a space already twisted into a dark red hell by the power of the Old Ones, like moths flying into a flame, without hesitation!
The Black Stone Starfield was utterly transformed.
The once brilliant nebula had turned into a churning, viscous, dark red pus.
Giant asteroid belts were kneaded and reassembled by an unseen force, forming countless twisted, grotesque structures resembling living organs.
Space itself groaned, and light was distorted into blasphemous patterns.
Tavier's Door Incarnation did not appear directly, but His will was the supreme command.
The Old One's legions emerged from the folds of space, from the remnants of extinguished stars, and even from nothingness.
Void Abominations numbered in the millions!
Their forms were distorted, shapeless, like nightmarish creations molded from shadows, slime, and mad will.
They defied physical laws, traversing and leaping through the vacuum at bizarre speeds, attacking ships with claws, acid, and mental screams.
They were expendable, an endless wave of cannon fodder.
Behind the cannon fodder were the Concept Plague Carriers.
Their forms were undefined, sometimes like floating geometric fragments, sometimes like twisted light and shadow.
Their own attack power was not strong, but wherever they went, they spread an invisible conceptual plague, making metal as brittle as biscuits, causing energy shields to suffer logical collapse, making shipboard AIs fall into suicidal madness, and causing uncontrolled mutations in the flesh and blood of organic life forms!
A Solan battleship was infiltrated in its engine room by a Plague Carrier, and instantly the entire ship's molecular structure became unstable, disintegrating silently like a sandcastle, its crew unable to even scream.
Space Fold Behemoths, vast creatures like mountains, composed of solidified spatial fragments and Old One energy!
They were slow but unstoppable, wielding giant claws made of distorted force fields, easily tearing through the thick armor of Solan battleships!
The main guns of Viltrum dreadnoughts would often only leave temporary ripples when striking them.
They were the Old One's battering rams.
Floating at the rear of the battlefield, like giant neural ganglia, were dark red tumors.
They were Tavier's blasphemous whispers, forming a mental pollution field covering the entire starfield.
Those with weak wills instantly went mad, and even with mental protection, prolonged exposure would lead to sluggish thinking and rampant hallucinations.
The Aethera Psionic Spire Ships became crucial in combating them, their soft psionic glow clashing fiercely with the dark red whispers, erupting into silent mental storms in the void.
As both sides reached the battlefield, the battle instantly escalated into a white-hot frenzy!
The scale and ferocity far exceeded any civilization's historical records!
The Viltrum fleet, like the sharpest dagger, plunged first into the ocean of abominations!
Trigg's command was ruthlessly precise to the millisecond.
Assault ships formed suicidal wedge formations, using themselves as bait to attract large numbers of abominations, then the dreadnoughts' destructive energy main guns followed closely, providing saturation coverage!
Each impact was accompanied by the fall of several assault ships, turning into cold cosmic dust.
Modified soldiers piloted small assault craft, like suicide squads, rushing towards the weaknesses of the Plague Carriers and Behemoths, trading self-destruction for small tactical gains.
The Viltrumites' fighting will was chilling, but casualty numbers soared at an alarming rate.
General Garzak's roar echoed through the communication channels.
Mountain-class battleships formed a tight defensive line, their thick armor and powerful shields enduring the impacts of the Space Behemoths and the tearing of the abominations!
The railgun arrays spewed destructive beams, plowing temporary vacuum zones through the wave of abominations, but these were instantly refilled.
The frigate fleet, like agile hounds, circled and attacked the Behemoths, attempting to find their core weaknesses, at the cost of warships constantly being crushed by giant claws or disintegrating from plague infection.
"For the glory of the Empire! Yield not an inch!"
Garzak's roar was the last stubborn defiance of the steel bulwark.
The Cybernetic Intelligence's Logic Node Motherships, like calm chess players, processed vast amounts of battlefield information at high speed, precisely allocating firepower, and paralyzing the Old One army's local coordination.
Human ships provided flexible fire support; new energy weapons were significantly effective against abominations but had limited effect against Behemoths and the plague.
The Aethera Psionic Spire Ships were the mental backbone of the battlefield, extending massive psionic shields, strenuously resisting the mental assaults of the Whispering Echo Nodes, while continuously purifying the burgeoning mad thoughts within friendly warships.
Many Aethera warriors bled purple psionic blood from their seven orifices, yet still gritted their teeth and persevered.
Sesser's flagship, the cruiser Dawn, did not directly participate in the most intense firefight but maneuvered at high speed at the edge of the battlefield.
Eve's team operated the Imaginary Equation at full capacity, attempting to predict the fluctuations of Old One energy tides and spatial weak points.
"Report! Predicted that Sector D7 will face a concentrated impact from Space Fold Behemoths in 27 seconds, intensity exceeding anchor point tolerance!"
Eve's voice was calm and urgent.
The information was instantly shared with command.
A surviving assault ship squad unhesitatingly turned around, charging towards the Behemoth swarm, sacrificing themselves to forcibly interfere with the Behemoths' attack path, buying precious seconds for the anchor point to reinforce!
At the same time, the experimental mental interference device fired at full power at a Whispering Echo Node; although it failed to destroy the node, it successfully reduced its whisper intensity by 15%, greatly alleviating the pressure on the frontline Aethera warriors.
Earth's strength, though small, precisely struck at the joints of the Old One's system.
The battlefield was like a giant meat grinder.
The Alliance fleet's line, before the Old One's endless power, was like a sand embankment repeatedly scoured by the tide, constantly compressed and forced back.
Warships, representing the pride of civilizations, turned into burning wreckage, and countless heroic lives vanished in the silent vacuum.
The spatial structure of the Black Stone Starfield became even more fragile, and giant spatial rifts, like greedy gaping mouths, swallowed both warring sides.
In the most chaotic core of the battlefield, space rippled violently like water.
A blurry silhouette, composed of pure non-Euclidean shadows, the incarnation of Tavier At Umr, briefly appeared for an instant.
His abyssal eyes, made of stardust and madness, coldly swept over this bloody stage He had orchestrated.
The Alliance's desperate resistance, in His eyes, was perhaps just the meaningless struggle of ants.
His will did not linger long on the brutal battlefield but, like invisible tendrils, penetrated the chaotic energy storms and shattered space, extending beyond the battlefield, into the deeper darkness of the universe.
He was searching, searching for those things that once emitted cold order but now carried chaotic fluctuations, making Him instinctively feel both threat and desire.
Those were the remnants of the Titan Clan's power.
He sensed it.
In a distant area, several star systems away, recently corrupted by the power of the Old Ones, where the spatial structure was abnormally twisted, a faint but extremely unique energy fluctuation remained.
That fluctuation contained the power of order, yet was mixed with chaotic static, like exquisite porcelain covered in cracks.
It was the unique fingerprint left by the Titan Clan's power after being eroded by the Law of Collapse.
Tavier's incarnation instantly vanished from the core of the battlefield, as if He had never appeared.
He seemed indifferent to the outcome of the Black Stone Starfield, uncaring about the survival of the Alliance fleet.
His goal was higher, more fundamental.
To find and devour those wounded wedges of order, to completely eliminate the last forces in the universe that could pose a potential threat to His existence, accelerating the process of all things returning to one.
Tavier's departure did not alleviate the pressure on the Black Stone Starfield; the Old One's legions still attacked madly, driven by His lingering will.
The Alliance's losses reached a suffocating level.
The Viltrum fleet lost over 70%; assault ships were almost completely wiped out, and dreadnoughts were heavily scarred.
Trigg's Unyielding suffered heavy damage, with life support systems briefly in critical condition.
The Solan heavy fleet lost 40%; nearly half of the mountain-class battleships were destroyed, General Garzak's flagship armor was torn, and the General himself was severely wounded and unconscious.
The Alliance Joint Fleet lost 35%.
Several Logic Node Motherships suffered logical collapse and self-destructed after being infected by the Concept Plague; over half of the psionics on the Aethera Psionic Spire Ships fell into permanent desiccation due to mental exhaustion.
The Earth Guardian Squadron lost 3 cruisers; Amber's Dawn suffered shield overload and multiple hull damages, but its core systems and research team were preserved.
Finally, relying on the remaining Law Anchors erupting at the last moment, briefly stabilizing local spatial energy, and the desperate rear-guard charge of the Viltrum and Solan remnants, the Alliance main force managed to painstakingly withdraw from the meat grinder of the Black Stone Starfield.
The retreating fleet was heavily scarred, and behind the viewports were countless tired, sad faces, showing the relief of survival but also fear for the future.
The Black Stone Starfield, once a strategic stronghold, was completely transformed into a paradise for the Old One's power, covered by churning dark red pus and twisted stellar wreckage.
The Starfire Alliance paid a heavy price, merely temporarily preserving some scientific research capabilities and the fleet's framework, slowing the absolute speed of the Old One's expansion, but achieving no strategic victory.
However, even more desperate news arrived.
After Tavier At Umr briefly appeared on the battlefield and departed, His powerful energy signature pointed in several directions deep in the universe, all showing traces of chaotic fluctuations left by the Titan Clan's power after erosion.
The Old God's target had now shifted to those once-lofty guardians of order.
The Alliance was like a candle in the wind, and the warriors who lit this candle, after witnessing the horrors of the Abyss, could only lick their wounds, bearing their scars and a faint hope for the future.
Waiting for the next desperate charge… whenever it might come.
And Earth, that blue cradle, temporarily escaped, but no one knew how long this tranquility would last.
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T/N: While I am an inexperienced Translator, I have a Patreon! While it may seem empty as of now, webnovel will get 2 Chapters Every Day, and advanced chapters will be uploaded on Patreon.
It may not seem worth it now, but maybe in the future. Who knows!
patreon.com/TripleCrown07
If you guys wanna check it out.