He merely raised his head, looking through the main observation window already covered in cracks.
He saw the ultimate brilliance that filled his entire vision, stealing away all color.
The last reflection in his pupils was the cold, distant, starlike flash from the Federation warship's gun muzzle.
Then, the light swallowed everything.
The bridge, along with the upper structure of the lower half of the hull, was not destroyed but erased under the torrent of particles.
It was as if the most skilled eraser had cleanly wiped it from the canvas.
Everything there—command personnel, control consoles, alloy structures, life support systems—instantly sublimated in the heat of hundreds of millions of degrees Celsius, leaving not even debris behind.
Only a massive cross-section with smooth edges, glowing with a dull red molten light, remained exposed to the vacuum.
Below the cross-section, internal pipelines hung and snapped like torn blood vessels, flickering with dangerous short-circuit sparks.
With its command center and most of its superstructure lost, the massive hull of the Venom Fang was completely out of control.
It began to tilt and rotate slowly, silently, as continuous sympathetic detonations on its port side continued to gnaw at its body.
Like a beheaded giant beast subjected to lingering death, it dragged its burning remains through inertia, sliding into eternal darkness.
As for the other Imperial starships, there was even less to say.
Under this third round of attacks, some were struck in their ammunition depots, triggering violent sympathetic detonations.
Others had large portions of their hulls sheared away by heavy particle beams.
Even some smaller destroyers were directly vaporized by the residual effects of the main cannons.
After these three rounds of attacks, the Demon Claw Fleet was left with barely over a hundred starships.
On the flagship bridge of the Kunlun Mountain - Modified, the atmosphere was eerily calm, a stark contrast to the burning hellscape in the distance.
On the main screen, the remaining flickers of the Demon Claw Fleet resembled candles in the wind, flickering in the cold void.
Qin Beiwang stood with his hands behind his back, his gaze fixed on the struggling Imperial ships.
There was no triumphant pride on his face; instead, it held a trace of complex scrutiny.
That Imperial commander was a true warrior.
Faced with a beyond-visual-range strike beyond comprehension, he did not panic or retreat.
Instead, after suffering the first round of heavy damage, he dared to seize the so-called recharge window and ordered a full assault.
It had been a long time since he had seen such courage and decisiveness, still attempting to counterattack in a desperate situation.
Previous opponents would often lose their will to fight after the first volley, turning tail and fleeing.
But this opponent, enduring the overwhelming disparity in firepower, crashed his fleet's flesh and blood against our echelon firewall.
A pity.
He sighed inwardly.
Admirable courage, but war, in the end, is a cold game of technology and calculation.
"Commander!"
Zhuang Zhixuan's voice rang out beside him, filled with genuine admiration.
"Your strategy of concealing forces was truly a stroke of genius.
If all the T5-class battleships had been deployed openly from the start, the enemy would likely have retreated at full strength after the first round."
"We would at most leave behind some stragglers, never achieve the current annihilation posture."
Several senior officers around him nodded in agreement, their gazes filled with admiration as they looked at Qin Beiwang.
Such a tremendous victory, with an exchange ratio approaching zero casualties, was largely due to the commander's tactical arrangements.
Qin Beiwang merely smiled faintly and waved his hand, his eyes still fixed on the screen.
He felt little pride within.
If the opposing force had been a reinforced mother-class fleet, equipped with three complete classified fleets,
then his twenty-eight T5-class battleships, divided into three rounds of echelon firing, would likely have been unable to cripple the enemy completely before they closed into effective firing range.
The firepower density was still insufficient to fully suppress a massed assault of that scale.
Twenty-eight ships were just enough to fill three rounds of volleys, with recharge buffers needing to be factored in between.
However...
He glanced at the tactical data link on the side.
The eight battleships that had withdrawn to recharge after the first volley were already showing energy readings climbing back into the green zone, their main cannons nearing full recharge.
If he ordered them to advance again for a fourth volley...
From a tactical perspective, it was not unfeasible against a reinforced mother-class fleet.
On the bridge of the Kunlun Mountain - Modified.
Qin Beiwang's gaze swept over the tactical star chart, where the red dots representing the Imperial Fleet had grown sparse and dim.
He hesitated no longer.
Clear orders were issued.
"All Swift fighters, launch!
Mission objective: clear the remaining enemy Wyvern fighters and cooperate with the fleet to eliminate all remaining Imperial combat units.
Entire fleet, free fire."
The final mop-up phase of the battle began.
Countless dark blue specks swarmed out from the Federation Fleet's escort flotilla—dense groups of Swift space attack craft.
They surged toward the already scattered and greatly diminished Imperial Wyvern fighters with extreme acceleration, like eagles diving into a remnant flock of sparrows.
Autocannons and dogfight missiles from both sides traced countless fleeting beams of death across the void, but the battle was overwhelmingly one-sided.
The Tier 4.5 Wyvern fighters, facing the more agile and coordinated Tier 5 Swift groups,
were swiftly cut apart, hunted down, and turned into silent, exploding fireballs.
Meanwhile, the Federation Fleet's artillery fire, like a tide of death, blanketed the Imperial starships still struggling or attempting to flee.
Three of the deadliest heavy particle beams tore through space first, slamming into an Imperial T5-class battleship still trying to organize its defense.
Two of them struck its main thruster array with precision.
There was no violent explosion, only the extreme infusion and annihilation of energy.
The massive thruster nozzles and the rear engine compartments rapidly melted, collapsed, and vaporized in the blinding white light, like wax figures scorched by intense heat.
Within seconds, a large portion of the warship's aft structure was erased. The hull, now powerless, spun out of control, exposing its vulnerable broadside and belly completely.
Immediately after, subsequent beams and secondary battery salvos from other battleships hammered into its unprotected interior like iron mallets striking a shell-less nut.
This time, destruction erupted from within.
First, sympathetic detonations spewed light from multiple breaches, followed by a series of invisible, grating groans and snapping sounds from the keel of the entire warship.
Its hull began to twist and fracture from multiple points of impact.
Finally, in a massive explosion that swept through the entire vessel from the inside out, it completely disintegrated.
Splitting into several large, burning fragments, it was hurled in all directions.
With the destruction of this T5-class battleship, the two Empire stellar carriers that had been trying to hide in the shadow of the capital ship were suddenly exposed to the direct firepower of the Federation Fleet.
The Tiger Claw and Leopard Claw, these colossal objects that had once unleashed swarms of carrier-based craft that blotted out the sky, now appeared exceptionally clumsy and fragile.
Their shield strength was far inferior to that of a battleship; to provide energy for the carrier-based craft, their shields had already been maintained at a relatively low level.