142: Chapter 144 My Battery is Your Flagship

The four Light Feather frigates scattered in the pitch-black vacuum, forming a textbook cross-fire formation.

A blinding red glow ignited simultaneously at the main gun muzzles of all four ships.

Li Cang did not bother looking at the skyrocketing high-energy alarm data; his fingers swiped directly across the holographic buttons of the tactical channel.

"Number Eight, to the bottom right of that headless corpse."

He pulled up the first-person feed transmitted by the Astartes from inside the enemy flagship.

"Pull out that blue-glowing energy conduit," Li Cang's voice was as cold and hard as ice, "then plug in the emergency jumper cable from your fusion backpack."

In the corridor on the third deck of the alien flagship, strewn with severed limbs.

The Number Eight recruit kicked aside the sizzling, blood-leaking remains of the Commander.

Without breaking stride, his heavy magnetic boots stepped directly onto the thick energy conduit connected to the main control room's core reactor.

This was a main artery supplying energy to the ship's Energy Shield.

Number Eight bent down, his hands clawing at the complex electronic sealing lock ring on the outer layer of the conduit.

The hydraulic whir of his mechanical servo-arms echoed through the cabin, and the outer layer of the conduit, reinforced with high-strength fibers, was torn open with terrifying cracks.

Snap.

The locking ring, along with the connection port inside, was ripped off, and blue high-pressure energy fluid instantly sprayed all over Number Eight.

The paint on the surface of his pitch-black master-crafted power armor hissed as it was scorched by the corrosive liquid, but he did not even blink.

He reached back and pulled out the emergency jumper cable from his fusion backpack.

This cable, usually only used to temporarily recharge heavy weapons, was now being used as a brutal blood-drawing tube.

The thick, long metal connector was rammed directly into the ship's conduit, which was still spraying fluid.

The moment the currents met, Number Eight's power armor erupted in a blinding cloud of static sparks.

If this were an ordinary human, the surging high-voltage current would have instantly incinerated them to ash.

But this body, modified by Gene Alchemy, withstood the devastating shock to his neural nodes.

Not only did he withstand it.

Inside the command cabin, on the system panel in front of Li Cang, the progress bar representing the War Axe frigate's energy reserves began to skyrocket like crazy.

He had no intention of using this energy to repair the ship.

He slammed the control stick down hard.

On the outer side of the makeshift armor plates, which had been forced onto the War Axe frigate using load-bearing pillars, a ring of ghostly blue Energy Shield suddenly deployed.

This was a temporary defensive net forcibly propped up by electricity drawn from the enemy flagship's reactor.

The moment the shield was generated.

Four blinding heavy particle acceleration beams slammed into this unstable membrane simultaneously.

The immense impact force followed the shield's feedback nodes and smashed directly into the fragile keel of the War Axe frigate.

The seams bonded with rapid-repair gel began to tremble violently, and the screeching groan of metal fatigue echoed in every cabin.

This temporarily borrowed shield would never withstand the next salvo.

Li Cang did not expect it to hold, either.

While issuing the defensive command, he poured all of the other massive energy he had just intercepted into the [Warp Gravity Jump Engine] at the stern.

The ghostly blue plasma exhaust instantly flared from a faint glimmer into a blinding, thousand-meter-long dragon of rage.

The War Axe frigate's massive, unaerodynamic black hull began to surge forward, pushing the wreckage of the enemy flagship, which was even larger than itself.

He was not running away.

He was using the dead ship as a massive siege shield, launching a reverse death charge directly into the incoming gunfire.

In the command tower of the first enemy auxiliary ship, the alien adjutant's tentacles tapped frantically on the console.

"Target acceleration is spiking abnormally!"

"It is pushing our flagship forward!"

"Fire!" The auxiliary ship Commander's mechanical eyes nearly popped out of their sockets, "Destroy the flagship and that monster together!"

But it was too late.

The War Axe frigate, carrying the massive wreckage of the warship, smashed through their safe firing range with overwhelming force.

The flagship wreckage acting as a shield continued to flake off and disintegrate under the dense particle beams.

Large chunks of armor plating and burning cabin debris scattered in all directions like rain.

This thick "meat shield" perfectly absorbed all the long-range firepower.

When the last main gun blast exploded deep within the flagship wreckage, the War Axe frigate's ferocious anti-aircraft tower ram finally pierced through this metal corpse, revealing its blood-stained edge.

Boom!

The first auxiliary ship did not even have time to perform an evasive maneuver before being cut in half by this solid giant spike that had pierced through the flagship wreckage.

The War Axe frigate forced its way through the middle of the broken auxiliary ship, the rough rivets on its side scraping against the auxiliary ship's engine room, creating hundreds of meters of deadly sparks.

The sparks detonated the opponent's reactor, and a brilliant fireball bloomed silently in the vacuum.

Li Cang did not watch the fireworks.

His hands blurred across the console, forcibly altering the engine's gravity vector distribution.

The War Axe frigate dragged a bizarrely obtuse jagged line through space, suddenly shaking off the riddled flagship meat shield.

The immense inertia caused the frigate itself to emit a groan as if it were about to fall apart.

But it successfully latched onto the second enemy ship attempting to turn and increase distance.

"Ram it." Li Cang did not slow down.

The Dark Gold engine's gravity tear erupted again.

Just as the enemy ship's stern ejected high-energy particles to escape, it was tightly dragged back by a powerful gravitational field.

The War Axe frigate used its extremely thick side armor to ram into it with zero technical finesse, like an out-of-control dump truck hitting a sedan.

Blinding sparks sprayed wildly across the metal surfaces squeezed between the two warships.

The enemy ship's left engine was crushed into flat scrap metal, and the entire hull lost its balance in the vacuum, spinning like a top.

The War Axe ignored this crippled ship that had lost power; utilizing the reaction force of the impact, it adjusted its bow and aimed at the third target.

It was a light frigate, the smallest in size but extremely fast.

Its Commander had clearly completely broken down and was frantically increasing engine power, wanting to jump into the Warp to escape this meat-grinder of a star sector.

Li Cang stared at the rapidly receding red dot and sneered.

He connected to the underlying control circuit of the bow torpedo launch tube.

"Corvin."

Li Cang's command echoed in the dark mechanical repair bay.

"Present."

A dull sound of metal grinding arose.

The dreadnought mech, which had just been salvaged from space a quarter of an hour ago and was covered in frost and meteorite scratches, was forcibly pushed into the number one launch tube by the lower elevator.

The heavy radiation-proof hatch slammed shut behind him.

This steel coffin, which contained half a dead man and could only fight positional warfare on the ground, had now been stuffed by Li Cang into a torpedo launch tube that needed to withstand dozens of Gs of overload.

"Your old buddy just gorged itself a bit," Li Cang said, looking at the energy bar on the screen that was about to overflow, "the initial velocity of this torpedo might be a bit high."

"Engine output normal, power claw locking program ready."

Corvin's voice was without the slightest fluctuation, as if he were not facing being shot into the absolute zero vacuum, but a normal target practice session.

Li Cang pressed the red launch button.

The entire bow of the War Axe frigate seemed to be struck by a giant hammer, sinking downward violently.

A mass of high-pressure gas mixed with dazzling plasma sparks erupted from the number one launch tube.

A chunk of pure black iron nearly four meters high, with no aerodynamic design, was shot toward the fleeing light frigate at a speed far exceeding that of a conventional anti-ship missile.

This living torpedo named "Corvin" carved a straight, deadly trajectory through space.

The stern of the light frigate was already rippling with the characteristic distortion of a Warp jump.

In another second, it would be able to completely escape this purgatory.

But Corvin did not give it that second.

The dreadnought mech's posture in the vacuum was extremely ugly, like a brick thrown away casually.

But the mass of this brick was so great that the light frigate's weak rear Energy Shield could not achieve full interception.

Bang!

Corvin did not smash through the armor.

His massive metal body slammed hard onto the top of the frigate's stern thrusters.

The heavy power claw on his right arm erupted with a high-frequency decomposition force field exceeding its design limits the moment it made contact.

The metal claws, digging deep into the thruster casing, were like three red-hot daggers stabbing into cheese.

Corvin used his remaining half of a human brain to calculate the internal structure of the ship.

There was no need to aim for complex crystal circuits.

"Found you."

The barrel of the Plasma Cannon on his left arm was rammed directly into the crack just torn open by the power claw.

He did not even warm it up.

He pulled the trigger directly, while simultaneously forcibly shutting down the confinement magnetic field of the cannon barrel.

This was a purely suicidal burst.

An extremely violent blue-white plasma fireball detonated completely inside the light frigate's most vulnerable design flaw—the engine combustion chamber.

In an instant.

The prey trying to escape was swallowed by the high-temperature fireball expanding from within, and the hull exploded directly above the low orbit into thousands of glowing pieces of metal junk.

Corvin's dreadnought mech, scorched red, was thrown far away like a fallen leaf in the shockwave of the explosion.

Four warships had encircled them.

Three were smashed, one was crippled.

Li Cang piloted the War Axe frigate, covered in scars and leaking air everywhere, and hovered slowly above the crippled enemy warship that was still spinning.

The fourteen Astartes who had just completed the boarding massacre walked out of the crushed flagship's main control room.

The gaps in their armor were stained with unknown purple and green blood, which had frozen into eerie ice crystals in the void.

The hatch of the War Axe frigate opened again.

The fourteen giants followed the zero-gravity tether back onto their own ship.

There was no cheering or celebration throughout the entire process.

Only cold and efficient tactical execution.

Dense settlement prompts popped up on the main system screen.

[Destroyed Sacred Mechanicus Alliance - Light Feather Formation Ship 2.]

[Destroyed Sacred Mechanicus Alliance - Light Feather Formation Ship 3.]

[Destroyed Sacred Mechanicus Alliance - Light Feather Formation Ship 4 (Crippled).]

Li Cang clicked on the reward list, which was dyed gold, a flash of extremely insane clarity in his eyes.

The first wave of dividends from the Battle Royale had been secured.