Elder Cultivator

As the trifold alliance’s fleet drew away from Roistea, ships swarmed towards them from around the various moons and the planet itself. Though they had pulled away before getting terribly close to the planet, the fleet was limited in its speed by its slowest member- that being The Independence. The battleship was not excessively ponderous, but its maneuverability was low and it took some time to accelerate in a new direction. Thus, the fleet’s curved trajectory didn’t immediately bring them away from the ships defending Roistea.

As Anton and The Independence began to take their first shots, the enemy fleet was already changing formation wildly. Some ships pulled apart, others gathered together. Anton found his shots suddenly targeting fortified positions where he had once seen weakness. The reaction was strange in its execution, but by the time he noticed Anton’s attacks were already close enough to strike. Since he was confident in breaking his way through the barriers regardless, he picked a few ships to focus on.

His arrows rippled into nothingness, showing little effect of the impact on the enemy barriers. Some had combined their power with nearby ships, while others displayed their resilient adaptations. Were they prepared for him specifically? There was no reason they wouldn’t be, to some extent, but he’d felt the barriers adapting even before his attack reached them. That could be done with conscious control, but somehow it didn’t feel quite right.

The Independence might have lacked mobility to some extent, but being prepared for omnidirectional space combat it had weapons facing wherever it needed. Projectiles launched and beams of energy swept behind them, powerful enough to tear ships in half but causing no damage… and likewise adapting instantly.

Was this a new advancement in barriers? No, that shouldn’t be it. There had been no signs of that anywhere else, so unless this was exclusive to Roistea it shouldn’t be the case. And the barriers themselves felt the same. It was just how they were used that was different.

WIth their previous battle experience, Anton and the gunners of The Independence coordinated their attacks on a smaller number of ships. The simultaneous bombardment should have meant the smaller ships couldn’t withstand the attacks, but they managed to avoid shots from The Independence while remaining adapted to Anton’s more mobile attacks.

The results should be the efforts of the Children of Fortune, however they actually functioned. Whether truly manipulating fate or simply reading probabilities or the flow of battle, the higher concentration of them in these fleets was making it annoying to take them out. Not that the ships were entirely unharmed. Even when adapted perfectly the barriers had some limits- they were just many times more efficient at resisting damage. The overpowering attacks of The Independence and Anton together did manage to slowly take them down, but there was the rest of the enemy fleet still remaining.

Because of their retreat, The Independence tactically withheld the fighters carried within. They had limited fuel and if they were left behind the rest of the fleet they would simply be lost. Thus, with one notable exception, the hangars remained closed.

Anton took stock of Ty Quigley entering the battlefield while also spotting notable presences at the rear of the enemy fleet. Two Worldbinding cultivators hanging around the back, their ships clearly able to catch up but lingering behind. Was it because they were hesitant to fight away from Roistea, or was that their optimal position? Unfortunately, those details had not been available for obvious reasons- weaknesses were kept secret as much as possible from other Worldbinding cultivators.

Ty Quigley’s ship accelerated and drifted unnaturally, moving in ways the ship’s thrusters simply didn’t allow. His motions brought him into the enemy fleet, his ammunition flying through the rows of ships with little effect. As he swerved towards an enemy ship they were already pulling away. One wing stretched towards them but could not reach… not by itself. As it would with a normal sword, the cultivator’s energy stretched beyond the blade itself, slicing through the enemy ship, the barrier splitting along with the enchanted wood beneath.

Now Ty had officially half as many ships destroyed in the battle as Anton. Sure, it was only one versus Anton’s two, but he couldn’t let a mid Life Transformation cultivator compete that closely with him.

Anton stepped up his game. He’d been initially unfamiliar with this strange style of defensive techniques by the enemy, but it wasn’t perfect. Anton drew upon greater power, his hands moving with great alacrity on his main bow while energy bows around him drew and fired themselves. He was hesitant to use one of his few remaining shots of Ascension energy to take out just one or two ships among the group, so he instead focused on a mix of quality and quantity.

His arrows initially targeted a dozen different ships, a handful focused on each. As they adapted and moved, Anton changed his target. The enemy fleet had basically caught up and was engaging the rearmost ships of their formation along with Ty crazily flying in their midst, so Anton’s arrows only took an instant to arrive… but he could still maneuver them enough to pick new targets any time before he hit.

He swapped targets a total of four times, finding that the enemy’s predictive powers were swift but imperfect. Another ship fell under his bombardment, and he participated in the destruction of one The Independence was targeting by forcing them to adapt to his attacks. He had to get much more serious than he would have liked against opponents significantly below him in power, but that was the only way to properly deal with them. His main concern was not exhausting himself in case the Worldbinding cultivators fully entered the battle.

Engaged in combat from behind, the ships from Weos took advantage of the gravity distortions around them to divert enemy attacks and reroute enemy ships that got too close. They were skilled at attacking out of their little bubbles of distorted space, but something about them made their attacks less predictable than the others because of it. Ceretos’ ships had nothing particularly special to mention about them except their reverse engineered versions of the barriers, keeping them relatively safe.

The trifold alliance’s fleet did take some losses, but they were staying ahead in casualties and stringing out the enemy forces. It was tempting to just wheel on them to take out the fleets and the vulnerable seeming Worldbinding cultivators, but Anton still was not confident that would go well. Likewise, Nicodemo didn’t suggest retracting the decision.

Finding an opportunity with few allied ships in immediate peril, Anton focused a few waves of shots on the rear of the fleet with the Worldbinding cultivators. They were able to avoid some of his shots, but they could simply wheel around and strike from behind. The ships were a step above the rest, however, and even accounting for their adapted barriers Anton wasn’t able to cause serious damage alone.

Anton considered going closer to try something. He still had the Star Catching Net, and though it wouldn’t be as large or as destructive as it would be right near the surface of one of his assimilated stars, he’d developed it to a great enough area that it should be undodgeable. If he caught one of the ships in that, the fleet could focus fire on them. He decided against that in the end. If the attempt succeeded it would be worthwhile, but even if they destroyed the ship they wouldn’t necessarily kill the Worldbinding cultivator aboard. Star Catching Net was designed to cover a square kilometer of area, but the individual gaps were approximately a meter wide- enough for an actual person to just slip through. If they could maneuver themselves in space they could return to the planet or the other ship. It was possible Anton would kill him there, but if the plan failed he would just reveal the technique to people who could actually do something about it later. He needed a proper opening for that, forcing it would likely result in failure.

With both fleets properly engaged in battle, it seemed the predictive powers of the enemy dropped significantly. With many different attacks that could all cause harm, there was little they could do to resist perfectly. With Anton, The Independence, and Devon’s chains directly impacting the battlefield it didn’t matter if the two Worldbinding cultivators were actually doing something or not- Anton thought they were even if he couldn’t directly detect it. Regardless, it wasn’t enough. They were a quite significant distance away from Roistea, and the enemy fleet finally had to give up. It wasn’t long before the trifold alliance was far enough from any disturbances that they could safely make use of their interstellar travel methods, leaving the Okloi system behind.

-----

For all that she had a clearly visible hole through her, the Great Queen seemed in remarkably good health. Then again, Anton wouldn’t have expected much else from a hand sized individual who could carry a full grown human. Even if she was feeling particularly weak, supporting her own body weight should be trivial.

With a face that didn’t show expressions in a way that was recognizable by humans, her thoughts were generally unreadable unless she intended to show them, though Anton’s time spent around her and other void ants had given him a bit more understanding. Her casual attitude while it had been pulled out was more of an effort to maintain dignity than an actual disregard for the seriousness of the injury.

“How are you faring?” Anton asked straightforwardly as The Independence moved through subspace. “I rarely see you with sufficient injuries to know how well you recover.”

The Great Queen displayed her legs, not as a word but as an example of her previous wounds against Bala Sykora’s bone mountain. “I am able to sufficiently coax my body back into shape, though we have a few specialized healers among us. They will remove stray shards of chitin from my thorax and acquire for me regenerative medicines.” Her antennae twitched in a way Anton interpreted as amused. “I do not require large quantities of anything, though the process is still slow despite my size.”

“Natural energy infused medicines mostly just gets dissolved when it touches you, doesn’t it?” Anton asked. “That would make the more wondrous effects difficult to obtain.”

“The effect is lessened with access to internal areas,” the Great Queen signed, trusting in Anton to keep the necessary parts secret. “Thus, my internals will take well to whatever is given. My outer layer can be recovered to a suitable level in a short time thereafter through active effort. Full recovery will take longer.”

Anton nodded, “I see. It’s a good thing the battle ended when it did, if you were exposed like that.”

“It is not a particularly concerning weakness to be vulnerable when there is a hole straight through your chest,” the Great Queen pointed out. “It would be more efficient to simply target my brain or vital organs, had one the ability.”

“What about cracks?” Anton asked. “Or is that asking too much?”

“You can let people believe what they would like about that. I shall simply point out that we do not just negate energy that directly touches us, but potentially that within some variance of range.” The Great Queen was quite able to eat her way through defensive energy, which varied in thickness between a few millimeters and a handful of centimeters, depending on skill and desired effects. Thicker wasn’t necessarily better. Of course, if she simply negated everything she touched that wouldn't be an issue, but Anton had seen her and other void ants literally tear away chunks of natural energy.

“I don’t suppose I can help out with anything?” Anton asked. “I do have medicines.”

“Void any physiology is quite different. I would need to consult one who had properly studied those details, and I assume you as well.”

“A fair point.”

“You could help remove extraneous bits,” the Great Queen offered. “I have no hands to reach in there myself, and handling it now instead of later might be preferred. A matter of weeks could result in uncomfortable complications.”

Thus Anton was left with the puzzle of how to move millimeter scale chunks of a material that resisted natural energy. The answer was surprisingly simple in the end- the puncture wound was sizable enough for Anton to fit thin tweezers into her. A proper doctor might have been a better choice, but the queen had none among her royal guard and she did not trust most humans enough to let them try. Not that she distrusted humans. If it was an emergency she would have accepted what they could give. But given that her health was not deteriorating, she could wait.

Anton was surprised to find he could sense the Great Queen’s internals. He had to specifically narrow his senses into a thread that didn’t touch the outside of the puncture, but her organs didn’t have the same level of energy negation as the chitin. It still seemed resistant, but not nearly so much. Because of those senses, he could also pick out places where they didn’t work- tiny chunks of chitin broken away by the thorn, lodged in organs Anton found it difficult to compare to human ones. The thorax mostly had a series of tubes, seemingly for nerves, blood, and a digestive tract if Anton was right.

He picked out little bits of chitin, focusing to keep his hands steady. He could support his hands with natural energy while leaving the tweezers free of it, as it would just be a waste. When he finished he had a goopy pile of black pieces and some vital fluids.

“Thank you,” the Great Queen said. “I feel better, if only a little. If I could ask for something more…?”

“What is it?”

“A special treat?” she wiggled slightly. “Just a bit of ascension energy?”

Anton grinned. “For a wounded friend? Absolutely.” He wasn’t sure if it would actually help her recover at all- though he knew some amount of it aided her growth. Either way, he was advanced enough in Fleeting Youth to supply her whenever she asked. She didn’t consume terribly much of it at once, and she was careful not to be too needy about such a thing.