Qin Beiwang chuckled softly.
"More likely, he's filled with regret."
Everyone was taken aback for a moment.
Then, even louder laughter erupted.
"Regret?"
"More than regret, I bet he's sick with it!"
"Hahahaha!"
"If that commander knew all four thousand of his ships have become our building materials, he'd probably cough up three liters of blood!"
Wave after wave of laughter filled the air.
Qin Beiwang did not join them.
He simply stood there, a faint smile playing on his lips, waiting for the laughter to gradually subside.
Then he spoke.
"Continue deploying the trip mines."
The crowd quieted down.
Qin Beiwang continued.
"At the same time..."
"Tow all the starship wreckage outside the warp point inside it."
His gaze swept over everyone present.
"We are going to completely block this warp point."
The bridge fell silent for a second.
Then, a unified voice rang out.
"Yes!"
Block the warp point.
Let the next batch of the Imperial Fleet taste the same fate as those five thousand ships.
The orders were swiftly relayed.
Large numbers of destroyers and cruisers detached from the fleet formation, heading toward the airspace littered with wreckage.
The destroyers were responsible for laying the trip mines.
They weaved through the gaps in the wreckage, deploying space trip mines one by one in the most concealed locations.
The mines themselves were small, only a few meters in diameter, nearly invisible under the light of the star.
Once deployed, they would wait silently.
Waiting for the next batch of prey to walk into the trap.
The heavy cruisers were responsible for towing.
Operating in pairs, they approached the massive wreckage.
From their bows, several hundred-meter-long, high-strength tungsten carbide alloy steel cables slowly extended.
The cables were thicker than a man's waist, their heads fitted with sharp, conical locking clasps that gleamed with a cold, hard metallic luster under the starlight.
Like the fangs of a giant whale, they plunged fiercely into the armor gaps of the wreckage.
Locked.
Fastened.
Hooked onto the internal keel.
"Towing preparations complete."
"Begin."
The two cruisers simultaneously tightened the cables.
Their engine nozzles erupted with blazing white tail flames, thrusters at full power.
The immense pulling force caused the hundreds-of-meters-long wreckage to shudder violently.
Armor plates cracked and peeled away layer by layer.
Debris scattered and flew into the void.
But the wreckage did not shatter.
Under the pull of the cables, it began to move slowly.
Dragged toward the depths of the warp point.
Dragged toward that death zone already piled high with metallic ruins.
They were not salvaging.
They were moving tombstones.
One ship after another, one section after another.
The wreckage of those once-mighty Imperial warships was towed by the heavy cruisers like corpses into the core region of the warp point.
They merged with the earlier wreckage, becoming part of this metal graveyard.
Destroyers weaved among them, deploying trip mines in the shadows of the wreckage.
One.
Ten.
A hundred.
Half an hour later.
The operation was complete.
Once again, the warp point was filled with starship wreckage.
The wreckage was piled layer upon layer, densely packed, with almost no gaps.
And those thousands of space trip mines were hidden in every corner of the wreckage.
The destroyers and cruisers completed their tasks and slowly retreated back to the fleet formation.
Now, they waited for the next batch of Imperial warships to warp in.
Meanwhile, at the S-22 Jump Point.
Blue warp light erupted once more.
The second batch of Imperial warships, five thousand strong, arrived right on schedule.
But what awaited them was wreckage identical to that at Jump Point Z-78.
After annihilating the defending forces at the S-22 Jump Point, the Celestial Pole Star Fleet had done exactly the same thing as Qin Beiwang.
They dragged all the wreckage of those starships into the jump point.
Layer upon layer.
Densely packed.
Then, they laid trip mines.
Deployed jump interference devices.
Everything was ready.
They only waited for their prey to arrive.
Thus, the moment 5,000 Imperial warships completed their jump, they found themselves trapped in a metal graveyard.
Spatial overlap.
Warships and wreckage forcibly merged.
Escape pods, before they could even be ejected, were destroyed one by one by Swift fighters waiting outside.
The jump interference devices activated, making escape impossible.
Twenty minutes later.
Inside the S-22 Jump Point, not a single intact Imperial starship remained.
Five thousand.
Annihilated.
Elvira Star System, outskirts of the AEWL-849 Jump Point.
The scene here was completely different from those two jump points clogged with wreckage.
This was a true inferno.
Two hundred thousand Federal starships pressed forward, blotting out the sky.
Their formation was so dense it seemed boundless.
Destroyers advanced, cruisers flanked the wings, battleships held the center.
A standard Assault Formation.
The hatches of all stellar carriers were wide open.
Countless Swift fighters surged out like disturbed swarms of bees.
Their tail flames drew dense blue trails in the void, like a moving galaxy.
On the opposite side.
One hundred and fifty thousand Imperial starships arrayed themselves in a massive defensive formation.
Battleships at the forefront, cruisers behind them, destroyers on the outermost perimeter.
Griffin fighters rose to meet the Federation's offensive, tracing countless crisscrossing trajectories in the void.
The fighter groups of both sides, the moment they made contact.
Collided.
Volleys from plasma main cannons tore through the darkness.
Not one or two.
But hundreds of thousands.
Those energy torrents crisscrossed the void—some hitting their targets, some grazing past, some colliding mid-air, bursting into blinding blossoms of energy.
The heavy armor of battleships began to melt layer by layer under the continuous barrage of main cannon fire.
Peeled away like an onion, layer after layer.
Each beam could tear a charred, meter-deep fissure in the armor.
Cruisers and destroyers engaged in close-quarters slaughter at even closer range.
Shields flickered, armor tore, engines exploded.
Those once-mighty warships turned into burning wreckage one after another.
Debris fragments scattered like a torrential rain, striking the shields of friendly ships and sending out ripples of energy.
Explosive fireballs bloomed in succession.
Like an endless fireworks display.
The most brutal was the fighter slaughter.
Swifts and Griffins darted frantically through the dense anti-aircraft fire network.
Tracer fire from autocannons wove a golden frenzy.
Every second, fighters were hit.
Some exploded mid-air.
Some trailed thick smoke as they plummeted.
Some, with engines struck, turned into burning meteors, dragging long trails of flame before crashing violently against the broadsides of battleships.
"Boom!"
Explosive flames shot skyward.
That fighter vanished.
The broadside of that battleship was dented with a massive crater.
Some fighters, unable to pull up in time, crashed directly into the bridges of cruisers.
Piercing through, exploding.
The entire bridge was blown away.
Some fighters, disoriented in the chaos, plunged headlong into dense missile swarms and were blasted to pieces.
The entire airspace was filled with flames, wreckage, and energy turbulence.
Nowhere was safe.
No ship dared claim it would survive the next second.
On the bridge of the battleship Ares, General Slater stood motionless before the command console.
Beyond the viewport, explosions flared without end.
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