Sneak Peek - The Last Angel: Ascension, Chapter 53 (Patreon)

I've been meeting my target every day this week (knock wood), so I'm farther along than I expected by now, but we're still not looking at a Christmas Day upload (more likely the 28th/29th), but I wanted to give you guys a sneak peek of what's coming up in the 53rd chapter of Ascension.

Enjoy!

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Eighty-five percent of his fleet was destroyed, crippled or otherwise ineffective. Those numbers didn’t suggest victory. Fleet battles were more often decided with far less proportional losses. A third, a half. Perhaps two-thirds in true massacres. Not this much. No, those kinds of losses indicated a monstrous mismatch or incompetence of the highest order.

The Noble Fleet Lord massaged his temples. He had been out-matched. The Spirits-damned hound had cut inside him. Not entirely unexpected. It was difficult to hold the Space Force at distance, even more so when they had been accelerating towards you for hours. Many of his peers disdained the ‘blunt’ tactics of the Space Force, but their leaders were not less intelligent than those of the Argosy: only more direct in their strategies. The Argosy needed whatever advantages they could get against the Triarchs’ hounds, forced to rely on technical and tactical trickery to even the odds. When they couldn’t…

…you get eighty-five percent casualties.

“I suppose,” he mused aloud. “That this should be considered an even exchange.”

“My lord?” Minor Fleet Lady Glides Very Softly inquired, cocking her head. The Askanj­-illth was Jirrico’s fleet operations adjutant. She and a half-dozen of his staff were in a wardroom planning Severance’s next move. For what that mattered. Their next move was dependent on what their ‘friends’ chose to do. Chrysalis and Cocoon didn’t respond to hails; at least not to those from their supposed allies.

The Compact palisades were pulling back. A third of them had been lost already. Without faster mobile ships to drive the hostiles into their envelopes, they didn’t have the range nor speed to bring Chrysalis and Cocoon to battle; the former had disengaged from them after destroying the missile Chariot, cutting its way back through the Compact fleet and the latter had driven the hounds from Jirrico’s ramparts. Neither had been in any hurry to face dozens of Compact palisades, preferring to pull back and snipe them from range.

That was worrisome. He didn’t have any good metrics to determine what kind of damage either of the AI ships could absorb, but he knew both were heavily damaged. If they preferred a long-range duel instead of breaching the enemy lines, they must be hurt indeed. Reinforcements would be coming. They couldn’t linger here much longer, but the AIs weren’t pressing the attack.

No, he didn’t like that at all.