Going Native: Desire for Victory (ch. 74) (Patreon)

"They took the bait," Prince Tarble remarked, looking at a map of the galaxy as they stood in his throne room inside of the Warworld. Avery stood in line with a handful of others -- Generals and Admirals. Each hand-picked to take place in this bloodbath. And it spoke a great deal about Prince Tarble that Avery knew that everyone in the room was honored and proud that they had been picked, rather than terrified. Not that they weren't, but everyone felt more pride than fear.

This was the move that would end the war.

Two years after Tarble became the Supreme Commander and six months after what was left of the galaxy entered a Federation against the Trade Organization -- the war was entering its closing stages. During that six months, the Vega System became a deadly not-so-secret amongst the galaxy. Everyone had known that something was being built here, but no one knew what. And, recently, Tarble had announced that it was complete.

The galaxy responded exactly how Prince Tarble wanted it to. They decided to stop him and whatever he had built at all costs. No one knew what it was, but rumors and fear-mongering went wild. People pointed to the spell that Prince Tarble used to kill billions when he took his first Shield Worlds. And he had done that as a boy, with half the men and with half the reputation that he did now.

The conclusion that everyone came to?

A weapon to wipe out all sentient life outside of Trade Organization controlled space. They pointed to defense platforms and said that they were shielding, ignoring that it was simply Prince Tarble's policy to have a few to protect each planet. Such rumors were further encouraged when Prince Tarble stopped his push and gave orders to dig in. They didn't know anything, so all they could do was assume the worst. And they acted under the impression that the worst-case scenario was the truth. Prince Tarble had built a weapon so powerful, so terrible, that it would end the war instantly with the total annihilation of his enemies.

That was just the rumors swirling inside the Frieza-Force. Avery had no clue what the enemy thought the trump card was.

At the very least, it would seem that they were taking it seriously. Across the board, Avery saw complete mobilization across the galaxy. At any other time, Avery would freely admit that he would be shitting himself -- armadas were formed, empires and kingdoms throwing their entire might to stop Prince Tarble from enacting his vile plan. The opposition was almost too vast to comprehend.

Trillions of troops were on their way. Fleets that numbered in the hundreds of millions. The galaxy had united against a single foe and the power they could bring to bear was simply awe-inspiring. There was no other way to put it. The galaxy was committing everything that it had to stop Prince Tarble. This would be the single largest battle in the history of the universe. Nothing could come close. And nothing ever would again.

The hologram changed to display the Vega system. Thirty-two planets, or Thirty-three counting the Warworld. All of them had been converted into Shield Worlds. Countless mines, traps, and defense platforms drifted into the space in between. The planets were just staging grounds. The entire system was the battlefield, one handcrafted by Prince Tarble. Each planet housed armies numbering in the hundreds of billions, each further reinforced with robot armies. Each planet was defended with a defensive Armada. They would be outnumbered up to a million to one, but on the defensive with Prince Tarble here?

Let them come, Avery thought to himself. The battle would be a bloodbath on an unimaginable scale.

Prince Tarble turned around, his expression flat. "Any questions?" He asked, knowing that this was the last chance for them. He didn't ask if anyone had any second thoughts. Everyone here wanted to be here. There was a beat of silence as no one stepped forward, which wasn't surprising. In the end, the strategy was overwhelmingly simple -- dig in and make them bleed for every inch they took. Prince Tarble seemed unsurprised, because he nodded to himself. "Good. You know what's at stake, so I won't remind you. All that's left is doing what needs to be done and finishing this."

That was the dismissal that they all expected. Tarble still wasn't one for speeches, Avery thought to himself, catching Prince Tarble's eye as Avery turned away, matching in line with the other generals. His one-time Commander offered a curt nod, which he returned before he marched off to the teleporters. It felt like yesterday that Prince Tarble was stuck at knee height, new to the responsibilities of command when he took over the 501st.

"It's really going to end," Avery heard a general mutter, almost dazed as they left the throne room.

"It is," Avery agreed, spotting a round platform of glowing light. "We just have to do our part." He added, heading to the platform. He was well over two hundred years old, and he had seen more death and destruction in the past decade than the previous centuries put together. And the war would end. Prince Tarble would end it. All it would take is more death and blood, but it would be worth it. Prince Tarble would make sure of it.

Stepping into the platform, there was a brief countdown before Avery's vision went white. When it faded, Avery found himself standing on another platform in a different location. Instead of the walls of the Warworld, he stood underneath an open sky. The planet that he was in charge of defending. Ten billion troops were further reinforced with fifty billion droids, of which he had the means of production to create a hundred billion more.

"General Avery," Technician greeted, appearing next to him as he likely returned from his own meeting. Prince Tarble was micromanaging the preparations, focusing on tech, magic, soldiers, and fleets all at once. "The battle shall begin shortly."

Avery looked up to the sky -- the shield that cut the system off could be seen. Most of it was too small to see normally, but there were systematic lines of dots that were the satellites that protected the system. They were the curtain that would be dropped. "We're ready," Avery said, turning to his long-time friend. They had been a part of the 501st since Queen Teach, but they only ever first spoke on Rench. The topic was the likelihood of the Saiyans eating them. The odds had been likely if it wasn't for Prince Tarble stepping up.

"We are," Technician agreed, offering a thin smile. "It would be prudent to make final preparations while we still can." He pointed out, before quickly walking off to do exactly that. Avery watched him go for a moment before his gaze drifted back to the sky. An odd feeling tugged at his chest and he had been a soldier long enough to know what it was.

"I'm going to die," Avery told himself. He didn't know if the words meant that he would die now, or even any time soon. But, one day, one way or another, he would die. It was just more likely to be today than any other day on account of the trillions of enemies coming to kill them with a determination beyond imagination, because they thought that it was a victory or the death of everything that they loved.

He shook his head, dismissing the thought. It didn't really matter. They had a solid chain of command, they had redundancies… even if this planet was lost, the battle wouldn't change. The outcome wouldn't either.

Because this battle would end the war.

Because this battle was completely meaningless.

Avery took in a deep breath, deciding to take Technician's advice and make a few last-minute preparations. While he still could.

…

"I never got to take my shot at Tarble," Vas suddenly announced from their position, everyone watching the counter tick down from their scouter. Avery glanced at her, noticing that she idly played with a strand of lightning between two fingers. She noticed him looking at her and gave an unrepentant shrug. "It pissed me off when he picked me for the 501st. He looked like a brat, and he was royalty. Principle of it all."

A small huff escaped Avery, "He should have the time when the war's over. Ask him then. Just make sure that you live to ask him." Avery told her, looking at the hologram that displayed the planet that he was on. They were currently located deep underneath the planet's crust to avoid casualties during the initial bombardment. His scouter ticked down, going from minutes to seconds left until engagement.

"Yeah, he will. I wonder what his reaction will be?" Vas questioned, her tone amused rather than grim.

"To getting challenged?" Canda questioned her, railgun in hand, waiting for another two clones of herself to appear.

Vas shook her head, "With all the free time he's suddenly going to have. I'm not sure he knows what fun even is," Vas pointed out. The banter might have continued, but the timer hit single digits. They spiraled down -- nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two…

An alert was sent to them all that the shielding that protected the Vega system had been dropped. Avery brought up a view of the invading force and despite all of his experience, his stomach clenched at the sight. He saw ships from every race and empire, and he saw a lot of them. The words of millions, billions, and more were thrown around so often these days that they had almost lost their meaning, but even with a partial viewing of the invading fleet, Avery truly felt the impact of such colossal numbers for the first time.

There were so many ships that it was almost as if there was a solid wall of them that suddenly rushed forward to invade the system. And that wall of ships would encompass the entirety of the Vega System -- more than that, the wall wouldn't be just a single layer thick. The battle began immediately when the enemy's sacrificial ships sailed forward, eating the initial barrage of the defensive platforms that had been constructed.

No one in the room could breathe as they watched the flashing lights of battle. The lack of sound made the silence that much more oppressive. Bombs sailed forward into the fleet's positions, detonating and carving away chunks of their formations, but for every one ship that was destroyed, a thousand seemed to replace it. More sailed forward, pushing against the first line of defense -- an outer ring of defense platforms and drone fleets, all just to bleed the enemy for each inch of space that they took.

Another alert came that a defense platform had already been destroyed, allowing a portion of the Federation fleet to surge deeper into the system, only to be bombarded from the second and third preliminary defensive lines. There was an insane diversity to the weapons -- lasers, plasma, missiles, railguns. Avery saw glimpses of nukes being used, bombs that deleted portions of ships, or in their entirety, by creating a black hole to swallow them. Massive laser beams erupted from the defense platforms, punching through the encroaching enemy ships and carving a line through them.

The invading fleet returned the losses blow by blow -- in minutes, the first defensive line crumbled, the second was already breached. The bombs and mines caught some by surprise but were mostly taken care of by sending fighter drones into them. The vacuum of space was filled with points of light, so many that they outnumbered the stars themselves. Another minute passed, and the second preliminary line was breached, but they just melted ships as they approached.

Carnage, Avery thought. There was no other word for it. No other word came close. The Federation fleet pushed into the system, determined to stop whatever Prince Tarble had planned, and they refused to flee. Every second that Avery watched the video feed, he was watching millions die. The enemy just pushed forward relentlessly, breaching the third preliminary defensive line, more ships sailing forward to approach the planets.

The battle… the battle hadn't even started, Avery thought. That was the preliminary defensive line. That was just barbed wire to slow down the enemy and make them bleed. They weren't even real defenses. That much was proven when the first true defensive line unleashed their first volley -- the combined might of millions of ships, further supported by planet-to-space artillery and a network of defense platforms surrounding the planets. The invading fleet appeared to have been hit in the face with a brick, the wall of firepower stopping them cold for just a moment.

They were brave men, Avery thought as the Federation pressed forward, returning fire. All across the system, the Federation just accepted the losses, paying the price in blood to inch forward. They had the ships and lives to pay for it, after all. The Federation Armada sailed past the destruction and the corpses of their allies, filled with a single-minded determination to reach the planets and stop whatever was planned.

The defensive fleets moved into position, getting ready for a slugging match, while Avery eyed the icons that represented the fleet and his planet. With thirty-two planets, one would think that each one would be a defensive line, but planets were too spaced out for that to work. Instead, each planet was essentially a knife to the back to whatever force that went beyond it. He was on the twentieth planet in the system that once housed a race of slugs or something -- meaning that the Federation would be able to push straight for him.

Another alert came telling Avery that the defensive fleets for his planet had engaged the enemy. The Federation outnumbered them millions to one, but they were bleeding themselves on their defensive positions. Even still, they just pressed forward, paying no mind to the carnage around them. Or, rather, they were motivated by it. Avery knew that rage well -- when you suffered such losses… hurting the enemy back mattered more than winning.

Both sides were completely prepared to die. There would be no retreating. There would be no flinching at the cost. There would just be blood and death on an unimaginable scale.

The Federation fleet launched drop ships and pods in the direction of his planet, intending to land their armies to carve out a foothold. Drone fighters began swarming them -- for every one that made it to the planet's surface, ten had died in the harshness of space. The issue remained that there were simply so many that every one in ten was still hundreds of thousands of enemy combatants that were sprinkled across the world.

Vas and Canda looked to him, but Avery shook his head. "Let the machines eat the losses," Avery ordered, using the hologram to predict the trajectory, and the droids in question would respond to crush any invaders. The drop pods landed, sprinkling themselves across the surface, and almost immediately they were being barraged by droids and defenses on the surface. Mines, gun turrets, traps, and more.

With this kind of sweeping attack, every invader was killed. Just like how the first wave of the Federation fleet was carved away, the first wave of soldiers was meant to simply soak up losses and carve out a small pocket that the fleet could use. There were plenty of machines amongst the first wave, Avery saw through the camera feeds. Yet, there were still plenty of organics. Avery watched them try to dig in, to carve out a small sliver of the planet, only to be overwhelmed.

Air support bombarded their positions, droids put pressure on them from all sides. They were simply too few to hold out, no matter how they tried to. Avery watched a squad through the video feed of a droid -- back to back, firing in every direction while a magic-user offered some sort of shield. It just wasn't enough. The shield flickered, then collapsed, and each member of the squad was gunned down. Dozens of shots coming in from all sides, tearing through their personal shields and then into their bodies.

Others were having a bit more luck. Some species having a natural defense to the lasers that the droids hit them with. To those, the droids simply rushed them and self-destructed. For each droid that was lost, the production centers inside the planet replaced them. Squads, then divisions of droids all mass-produced within minutes and placed in a queue to head up to the planet's surface.

All the while, the battles in the sky raged on. The Federation fleet was in position to engage the defensive fleet, and the two were just hammering each other. Ships were lost every second on both sides, filling the sky with so many explosions that they outnumbered the stars and were brighter than the sun. Chunks of space ships fell from orbit, crashing down on the planet's surface -- so did attacks from the Federation fleet as they tried to bombard the planet, some attacks slipping through the defensive grid.

They were killing their own men, Avery noted as an energy blast impacted near a Federation squad, vaporizing them as well as the hundreds of droids that surrounded them. They were just attacking the planet with reckless, suicidal abandonment, intent on carving out a foothold somewhere so they could land more soldiers.

It was hard to watch, almost. Avery and his army were inside of the planet's core -- an organic army because Prince Tarble didn't trust droids with tasks of importance. So, for the moment at least, they were safe and just watching thousands of enemy soldiers die every second. Maybe millions. And what they were seeing was just a single planet in the system. The inner planets were better protected, so the fighting there would be more intense. It was difficult to imagine.

Billions were dying as they stood around and waited for the Federation to reach them.

Between the bombardment and the debris falling to the planet, a gap in the planet's defenses began to open. There were fewer anti-air platforms, the defensive platforms were damaged, the drone swarms were caught between too many tasks of taking out the soldiers that landed… more and more soldiers made it to the surface through sheer brute force. As more soldiers began to surface, they were able to meet up and join forces, which in turn allowed a pocket to form.

In response, Avery imput a code and sent WMDs on their locations. The pockets vanished in massive explosions, killing hundreds of thousands with a press of a confirm button. It was a delaying tactic, but one that wasn't perfect. It seemed that the galaxy adopted Prince Tarble's approach to utilizing diverse abilities. A team of magic users managed to protect some of their pockets.

And instead, they triggered another defensive measure. Their act of magic attracted the attention of a curse placed on the planet -- all across the pocket, soldiers began turning on one another. They fired into the backs of their squadmates, beat each other to death with a savage and unnatural intensity. A curse of rage, courtesy of the Red Lanterns. Narra had offered to make the curse, but Prince Tarble had refused her -- much to everyone's relief. She still hadn't shaken off the stigma of the spell that was used on the Shield Worlds.

The pocket quickly collapsed in on itself, wiping themselves out to a man. And the curse of madness spread. Every soldier on the planet was cursed with it, tearing into each other and into the soldiers that landed on the planet near continuously. The room that Avery stood in was so silent that he could hear people swallowing thickly. It was another delaying tactic, forcing the enemy to contend with their own soldiers as well as the droids, while also erasing any progress that they had made thus far.

Avery paid more attention to the fleet above. It had been outnumbered to start with, and the longer the battle went on, the worse of a position it was in. The defensive platforms were being chipped away, destroyed one by one. The surface-to-air support was taking hits as well. The fleet itself was suffering rather extreme losses. It was a contest of endurance, and in those contests, the one with the most will always win. A tipping point for the skies was nearing, the battle turning against the defensive fleet as, for every ship that they destroyed, another two replaced it.

The admiral realized it too. The defensive fleet's posture changed, shifting from purely defensive to a wide-open charge. Hundreds of thousands of allied ships sailed forward, heading directly into the Federation fleet's advancing line. They were shot down in mass, but it was a suicide charge. The moment that the defensive fleet was in range, the ships began to self-destruct in spectacular explosions of light and darkness. Antimatter reactors would do that -- each one on board for that exact maneuver.

Avery switched to another feed, finding that the admiral and shipmates in question appeared inside the planet's core with them. It might be a tradition for the captain to go down with the ship, but Prince Tarble wouldn't tolerate such loss.

The explosions tore through the Federation lines, debris and energy waves from the explosions causing a chain reaction amongst the tightly packed ships. However, the Federation simply sailed forward through what Avery could only describe as hell. With the defensive fleet gone, the ships sailed forward, and rather than be stopped, they were only annoyed by the drone swarm. Avery had the droids withdraw to the second later of the planet while the ships began bombarding the surface into oblivion.

Avery felt shockwaves of it all the way down to the planet's core, though that was probably just his imagination. The production of the droids ramped up significantly, both to replace their losses and to defend the labyrinth of tunnels and hallways that led downward. Each that would be further defended with traps, turrets, explosives, magic, and more. The Federation had undoubtedly won the fight for the sky and the planet’s surface, but every inch they took down… their progress would be measured in inches.

"Damn… reminds me of Rench," Avery remarked to himself, but the room was so silent that everyone heard him. "Only we aren't starving or in danger of getting eaten by Saiyans." He added, earning some grim chuckles in response. In theory, they were in a similar situation, only vastly different. They weren't invaders stranded on an enemy planet. This planet was theirs and the Federation had no choice but to throw their men into the jaws of death to take it. Simply because they didn't know enough about Prince Tarble's plan.

Their ignorance was their biggest weakness. They had no choice but to take every planet, because any one of them could house the deadly weapon that would end the war. They were just throwing bodies at the problem, hoping to smother it under the weight of trillions and oceans of blood.

Avery watched them secure the planet's surface as quickly as they could before troops began making their way down to the next layer. They were greeted by choruses of gunfire, killing all of those that entered. The ships above began ramping up their own orbital bombardments, intent on making their own entrances, and it worked to a degree. More troops poured down the new entrances, throwing themselves against the droids. It was urban combat at its absolute worst. It was designed to be that way. The defenders had every advantage and the attackers simply had to accept the losses to advance.

At the rate they were going, it would take weeks until the soldiers reached the core of the planet. A month to secure it completely. Given that they assumed that time was not on their side, the fleet continued their bombardment, intent on blasting the entire planet apart if they had to.

An alert made it to Avery, one that earned a thin smile from him.

The entirety of the Federation forces had committed to the attack. As such, it was time to drop the curtain on them.

Avery pressed a holographic button, and said curtain was dropped. A magical force field expanded up from the core of the planet, expanding upwards to the sky above where it then promptly adopted a wispy green light. A magical shield designed by Narra's people. It wasn't perfect, but when the satellites were teleported into position, making a layered shield around the planet similar to the one that had protected the Vega system? That's when it became the perfect cage.

The forces on the planet were now trapped, cut off from the ships above. Now they were forced to continue one inch at a time without the fleet above making it easy for them. There were still millions on the planet, but that was manageable.

Because the curtain wasn't simply dropped over the planet that Avery was on. The curtain was dropped over all of the Vega system, now trapping everyone inside until only one side remained.

Avery took in a deep breath, "Let's go to war, ladies and gentlemen."

The urgent battle just became an endurance contest.

It all came down to what would last longer -- their defenses or the invader’s numbers? Avery had faith it would be the former, but even if it wasn't…

It didn't matter in the slightest. Because even if the Federation managed to win this battle? When the curtain was raised once again, they would find that they had lost the war.