Five thousand Imperial warships, like phantoms emerging from the abyss, slowly revealed their massive silhouettes.
But what awaited them was not the open navigation route they had anticipated, nor a safe airspace for assembly.
It was a graveyard.
Jump Point Z-78 had long been transformed by the Federation into a tomb specifically prepared for the Imperial Fleet.
This once clear cosmic airspace was now completely blocked by billions of tons of warship wreckage.
Shattered bows, twisted engine rooms, melted armor plates.
Layer upon layer, stacked like a metal graveyard suspended in deep space.
And within the gaps of those wrecks, countless space trip mines lay hidden, invisible to the naked eye.
Together with the starship debris, they formed a deadly, interlinked trap.
Just waiting for the Imperial Fleet to charge right in.
The next second.
The terrifying effects of spatial overlap erupted instantly.
The hulls of five thousand Destroyers, Cruisers, and Battleships forcibly overlapped with the wreckage already floating here.
Not a collision.
A fusion.
The hull of a Battleship and half of a Cargo Ship's armor plate appeared at the same coordinate point.
Alloy armor was pierced like paper.
Engine rooms were split open down the middle.
Reactors overloaded and exploded upon contact.
Inside the hulls, corridors, compartments, armories, and wreckage merged in a grotesque amalgamation.
The soldiers didn't even have time to scream.
Their bodies fused with the metal ruins, becoming a blurry mist of blood and alloy shards.
The entire warship disintegrated, fractured, and exploded from within the instant the jump completion occurred.
The entire airspace was instantly engulfed in flames.
Even more deadly were the space trip mines scattered throughout the gaps in the wreckage.
The intense spatial fluctuations caused by the jump directly triggered their fuses.
A chain detonation swept across the area like dominoes.
Intense flashes of light erupted one after another.
Each flash represented the sympathetic detonation of a warship.
Shockwaves pushed wreckage and surviving warships into collisions with each other.
Bows smashed through hull sides.
Engine exhaust flames ignited leaking fuel.
The entire Jump Point Z-78 became a boiling sea of fire.
Among them, the most tragic was the Imperial Berserker Fleet's flagship, the Warrior-class Battleship.
This four-kilometer-long leviathan had just completed its jump when its bridge location precisely underwent spatial overlap with a piece of wreckage and a trip mine.
One second.
The bridge was brightly lit.
Generals and officers were staring at holographic screens, ready to issue assembly orders.
The next second.
The Commander, staff officers, and communications officers were bisected at the waist by a massive ship plate.
And a cold space trip mine materialized right in the center of the command console.
Without any warning.
Intense space ripples directly triggered it.
White light exploded from the core of the bridge.
The high-strength alloy shell shattered like glass.
The entire command layer was instantly vaporized.
Shockwaves tore the entire warship apart from the inside out.
The bridge collapsed.
The main hull fractured.
The main cannon magazine detonated sympathetically.
The massive Battleship broke into two pieces within seconds.
The front half tumbled away wreathed in flames, while the rear half's engines exploded in succession, transforming into a fireball that devoured everything.
It was torn apart from within, alive.
Five thousand Imperial warships.
Less than a minute after jump completion.
Ninety percent had already become wreckage.
The surviving warships were trapped by debris and minefields.
Soldiers were flung about in the out-of-control vessels, swallowed by flames, or sucked into the frigid cosmos by leaking air currents.
The Federation didn't even need to fire.
Jump Point Z-78 had become a collective grave for these five thousand Imperial warships.
Aboard the battleship Eros, on the bridge.
Commodore Ethan Fletcher clutched his belly with one hand, the other gripping the command console for dear life.
His face was deathly pale, sweat pouring like rain from his forehead.
Through the viewport, he saw hell.
Burning wreckage.
Explosive flashes.
Friendly ships disintegrating.
And the metallic ruins, torn apart by spatial overlap, now unrecognizable.
"Damn it..."
His voice was hoarse, trembling uncontrollably.
"Who piled so many starship wrecks into the jump point!"
Before the words faded, he coughed violently, spewing thick, dark blood.
The blood splattered across the command console, a horrifying sight.
He felt something foreign inside his belly.
Cold and hard, something that didn't belong in his body.
He glanced down at his abdomen.
A small breach in his uniform.
Bloodstained edges, but not much.
He knew what it meant.
During the jump, a piece of starship debris had overlapped directly into his body.
Gritting his teeth, he lifted his head, mustering his last strength to roar.
"Jump out now!"
"Jump out now!"
The communications officer's fingers danced frantically across the control console.
Fletcher continued.
"Send a message to General Thatcher..."
His voice grew weaker.
"It's a trap..."
"Don't jump..."
"Don't..."
He didn't finish.
His body went limp.
Sliding down the command console.
Collapsing unconscious on the floor.
Chaos reigned on the bridge.
But just as the remaining Imperial starships prepared to initiate their jumps and escape...
Outside the viewport.
Red dots of light suddenly flared to life.
Hundreds of them.
Dense and countless, emerging from gaps in the wreckage, from the shadows of ruins, from all directions.
It was the activation glow of jump interference devices.
A piercing alarm sound simultaneously blared inside every surviving Imperial warship.
"Warp engines forced to shut down!"
"Spatial curvature fluctuations abnormal!"
"Jump conditions not met!"
On the bridge, every face turned ashen.
Then, more lights ignited.
This time, blue ones.
Streaking in from the distant void.
The tail flames of Swift fighter craft.
Hundreds of Swift fighters, like a swarm emerging from darkness.
Pouncing from all sides toward this airspace already trapped by debris.
They weaved through gaps in the wreckage.
With astonishing speed.
Agile as if alive.
One Swift fighter emerged between two sections of debris, its wing-mounted laser cannons firing simultaneously. Two azure beams pierced a destroyer attempting to restart its engines.
That destroyer's bridge exploded, its hull beginning to tilt.
Another fighter dove downward, four dogfight missiles detaching from their racks, precisely slipping into a breach along a cruiser's broadside.
The missiles exploded inside, tearing the cruiser apart from within.
A third, a fourth, a fifth...
More and more Swift fighters flooded into the airspace.
Their attacks were precise, lethal, and merciless.
The Imperial warships, trapped by the warp interference, their routes of retreat blocked by wreckage, and utterly terrified by the recent spatial overlap, were completely unable to mount any effective resistance.
A Battleship's Main Cannon was still attempting to rotate when it was simultaneously locked onto by three fighter craft.
A torrent of laser beams poured onto its Turret base, completely destroying the entire turret.
A Cruiser's captain gave the order to abandon ship, but as soon as the Escape Pods were ejected, they were picked off one by one by the fighter craft waiting on the perimeter.
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