- Edited
KrankysFirebrand48
Whilst the fleet was still getting away, the two red orbs, upon reaching the former position of the fleets center, detonated into another flash of red light, though rather than simply exploding, a... rather horrifying display played out in front of them.
As the red light intensified, the sensors detected a intense gravity well, drawing in all nearby debris from fallen ships and anything that hadn´t been fast enough or was too weak to stay out of the effective radius with a seemingly insatiable hunger, eventually, for just a brief moment, the light of it´s own explosion was drawn in as well, compressed to a tiny spot in the void...
Then...
A moment of silence, darkness...
That stretched time like eternity...
Then there was the third flash of red light, all energy and mass absorbed during the brief moment of terror, detonated outwards in blinding light and fire, consuming anything nearby and dwarfing the brute force of all other ship based weapons Stantine had witnessed to this day...
They were lucky Stantine had remembered the weapon and evaded in time, even though not all of them had made it the consequences of this attack could´ve been, so much worse...
As the explosion was still going the beasts which had headed to the projectiles, did a sharp turn, they split, avoiding the explosion and instead heading towards the scattered gbe fleet on either side, only to be met by heavy railgun shells and a volley of missiles, hard to avoid at the distance and the explosion behind them, strings of red light and plasma sparked through the void taking down missile after missile, but even they couldn´t take out the full volley under these circumstances, about a dozen of the smaller beasts fell, erupting into red mist and being drawn back to the rift, under an excessively violent telepathic screeching, now considerably more potent as the dying beasts were closer. Along with them two of the mid sized beasts took heavy damages, ones shell cracked open after being hit by a heavy railgun shell in seemingly lucky shot, another one lost two of it´s main weapons, to a volley of missiles intercepted too late...
Another two of the medium sized beasts were taken down completely having taken a hit or several by the railgun shells and then a volley of missiles to the same area, their screeches rolled almost like a shockwave through the area, if one were to be too close it would´ve been likely lethal.
Even the larger beasts didn´t go unscathed this time, one them losing a chunk of it´s sidespines, the other losing one of it´s heavy turrets, although their massive jaws prevented damaged to the eyes...
The beasts responded in kind, once the initially volley of missiles had either hit or been taken down, another, this time smaller, volley of their heavy turrets was fired towards the gbe fleet, as they GBE fleet was tracking the projectiles, another volley suddenly popped up on the sensors, but this one from the side, it came from the groups which had detached from the main pack, putting the British forces into the crossfire...
The situation grew more dire every moment, the beasts had reached the optimal firing range of the GBE weaponry, however, that also meant they weren´t too far away anymore from the fleet itself...