ctnovel Chapter 70 The Great Treasure Existing Among the Stars!
Chapter 70 The Great Treasure Existing Among the Stars!
Chapter 70 The Great Treasure Existing Among the Stars!
On the flagship of the Fourth Fleet, Commander Armand knew he would lose.
From the moment the three fleets completed their encirclement, he knew he was doomed to lose. After all, the disparity in troop strength was too great, and morale within the fleets was low. This battle was destined to end in a dignified manner.
But he never expected that the Fourth Fleet would collapse so quickly.
Less than twenty minutes after the battle began, the first fleet led by Zhang Nanhai broke through the front line of the Fourth Fleet.
Three salvos sent away a frigate, three gunboats, and a destroyer.
The Fourth Fleet's all-out counterattack only managed to cripple the shields of a few enemy frigates and damage the side armor of two destroyers.
The combined fleet's casualty list remains at zero; the Fourth Fleet, despite its best efforts, could not defeat them.
This was the part that sent chills down Armand's spine.
Even though everyone is using Martian naval ships, and all of them are ships launched from the same batch of military industrial systems.
Why are the enemy ships always locking on a little faster than ours, and always firing salvoes a little earlier? Even the SA squadron's entry position is always stuck at the most unfavorable angle for the Fourth Fleet.
We were all taught by the same master, so why are you the only one who can break through my defenses?
"Destroyer No. 3 has lost propulsion!"
"Patrol gunboats' seventh, ninth, and eleventh signals have disappeared!"
"Aircraft carrier's outer shield has dropped to 31%!"
The reports from the bridge were increasingly jarring, and Armand stood before the command console, his fingers turning white from pressing the buttons.
Just minutes before, he was able to order the frigates to move forward and the destroyers to fill in.
Now, he has no ships left to deploy.
The escort of the Fourth Fleet flagship was completely stripped away, leaving the flagship carrier exposed to the direct fire control of the joint punitive fleet.
Zhang Nanhai had clearly been waiting for this moment. The six heavy cruisers of the First Fleet simultaneously turned their bows, and the six cold main gun aiming lines locked onto the hull of the Fourth Fleet flagship.
The next second, the intense light engulfed the optical window in front of Armand.
He only felt the entire aircraft carrier suddenly shudder, and the artificial gravity instantly disappeared.
The electromagnetic projectile tore through the remaining shields, pierced the bow armor, and penetrated the inner compartments along the central axis. The people on the bridge were thrown up like rag dolls and slammed to the ground, turning into pitiful pieces of flesh.
The Third Fleet's anti-ship SAs cut in from the outer layer, and several armor-piercing torpedoes hit the flagship's propulsion zone.
While you are sick, I will kill you!
Boom~~~
A white light flashed behind the ship, the propulsion tail flame broke off instantly, the entire aircraft carrier lost attitude control, and the huge hull slowly tilted in L4 deep space.
Armand looked up and saw a crack in the bridge dome.
Outside the slit was boundless darkness.
He suddenly remembered Lucian Vede's words, as well as the other party's decisions and actions.
Wade, you were right —
The thought had barely crossed his mind when an even more blinding white light engulfed everything; the First Fleet's final salvo had struck the reactor. All alarms, shouts, and tremors vanished simultaneously.
In the last instant, he saw the platinum emblem of the old church go out from the main screen on the bridge.
Click~
The flagship of the Fourth Fleet broke in two in deep space. The massive hull was torn apart from the inside by the reactor explosion. Flames burst along the deck, and shield fragments spread outward like shards of glass.
At Mars L4 point, the main force of the Fourth Fleet was annihilated.
The moment the Fourth Fleet flagship exploded in two, the Gaia battle report popped up in front of Zhang Qiming.
[Battle over—Victory!]
Our fleet successfully defeated the main force of the Fourth Fleet, which belonged to the remnants of the Cardinal Order's apology.
The enemy fleet's main force has been completely annihilated.
Ships destroyed: 0
[11 ships were damaged: 8 with minor damage, 3 with moderate damage, and no ships with severe damage.]
[Enemy losses: 1 medium-sized SA aircraft carrier — (The entire fleet has been annihilated)]
[Fleet Soul Experience: +1000 XP!]
[Fleet Soul Level Upgrade: Level 1 New Formation Class → Level 1 Trainee Class]
[Level 11 Training Bonus: Fleet Weapon Damage +5%]
[Special Loot: Retrievable Ship Armor Module, Heavy Cruiser Main Gun Spare Parts, Complete Vertical Launch Units x17, Shipborne Reactor Auxiliary Coil x3, Cardinal Order Encrypted Shipborne Aircraft Soul Fragment x1, Repairable Second-Generation Sea-Based SA x7]
Zhang Qiming looked at the battle report and his face lit up with a smile. This battle was fought brilliantly.
The three fleets should have won on paper, but the clean victory still exceeded his expectations.
Not a single one of our ships sank, only a dozen or so were damaged, while the main force of the Fourth Fleet was swallowed up in one gulp.
More importantly, his previous conjecture was confirmed.
As long as he is in charge of the campaign under the name of the supreme commander, even if he is not the front-line commander of the fleet, the entire joint punitive fleet can still benefit from the Gaia system's battle settlement and machine soul experience bonus.
This is crucial.
In Stellaris, the ship spirits are basically a pure, un-moe version of XX-ships. Their steel hulls are their entire bodies, and their cannons and engines are their breath and heartbeat.
The newly formed Class I ships are at most just getting to know their own hulls.
Only at the second training level can one truly begin to develop a fleet consciousness.
The stronger the machine spirit, the better the ship's hull, and the more powerful its cannons and engines!
Moreover, some carrier-based aircraft souls possess unique characteristics, and such beings are known as ultra-rare hulls.
As for whether such an extremely rare ship hull as a female version of a machine soul truly exists—Lao Zhang had never heard of anyone finding one in his previous life.
However, in the player community of my previous life's world, there was a group of XP enthusiasts who had been looking for this thing.
There is a guild called [The Great Treasure], and the entire guild has only one ultimate goal: to travel to every corner of the galaxy and find the legendary ship spirit that can be personified into a humanoid form.
Their guild's motto is: "Ship girls are the true treasure of the stars! Our guild's sole goal is to traverse every inch of the galaxy and find the legendary ship souls!"
The Great Treasure Guild also claimed that they were carrying on the will of their predecessors.
As for their so-called ancestors, they refer to certain robots who call any native inhabitant "elf" and are dedicated to finding endless energy; and drowning ducks searching for the true One Piece on the Grand Line, striving to become the Pirate King.
Zhang Qiming always felt that the predecessors mentioned by the Great Treasure Guild were far more accomplished than them, the younger generation.
Although the guild's mission may sound far-fetched, their map exploration skills and ship research abilities are recognized as the best in the entire server.
The best posts from the Big Treasure Guild on the forum, excluding a few crazy ship girl praise posts, are mostly of extremely high quality.
A post detailing the past and present of rare ship hulls, blueprints for ships exclusively traded by interstellar black market dealers, recipes for crafting rare, limited-edition machine souls, and powerful, one-of-a-kind rare ships held by interstellar pirates.
The above content is what Lao Zhang considers the true secret treasure of the stars.
Therefore, he had read many of the rare ship encyclopedia posts from the Great Treasure Guild, and it was from those posts that he learned that there was an ultra-rare aircraft carrier with unique characteristics in the Border Starfield.
This ultra-rare aircraft carrier possesses a variety of fleet-level trait bonuses, among which the one that Zhang Qiming is most concerned about is its special ability similar to "sword nurturing technique".
The aircraft carrier is the sheath, and the SA unit is the sword. SA units that stay in the aircraft carrier for a long time will receive special machine soul nurturing, and at the same time have a very high probability of awakening their own exclusive machine soul.
Once awakened, these SAs can also link up with the aircraft carrier's soul to form a true carrier-based military force.
If Mars successfully develops the [Seventy-Two Solomon Machine Skeleton] in the future, and combines it with this super carrier that has the ability to nurture machine souls, then Holy Terra will have a complete closed-loop super carrier system, from the carrier to the machine, from the machine soul to the military force.
It's important to understand that possessing seventy-two super-type mobile suits allows them to form a carrier-based military force alongside a supercarrier.
This fleet is absolutely amazing!!!
This fleet can not only aim for the nine-star level, but it can even touch the ten-star level. The upper limit has been directly maximized. This is what the Great Star Treasure should look like!
Therefore, after unifying Terra, Zhang Qiming must find a way to get his hands on that supercarrier that is currently hidden in the border star system and remains inconspicuous.