Max charged at the nearest of the Arisen attack fighters, knowing that the ships didn't have any melee weapons and were hindered by slow-aiming main weapons and a lack of secondary weapons that could threaten the Titan Class Mecha.
Though it dodged, his kill was still certain until his alarm blared an impact warning, and Max rolled to the side as an energy beam came in from behind him, shattering the craft's shields and leaving it open to his blade.
The energy sword tore the attack fighter in half, and Max moved to the next target, joining the Knife Ears dance with his comparatively huge and clumsy Mecha.
[I want their gravity technology.] Nico complained as a kill was stolen from her by a blade-winged craft that did an impossibly tight dice roll and used its wing blade to cut apart the enemy after Nico's Disruptor took down its shield.
By Max's quick calculation, that roll should have generated over a hundred times standard gravity, well over what the human technology could compensate for, but the craft definitely had living occupants in it.
He could sense their minds and their hatred for what they called "The Eternal Enemy."
Again he unleashed the Orbital Lance at the Cube, allowing them to sacrifice fighters to mitigate the damage done to their shields, and again the Knife Ears attack fleet covered for him when the return fire came, forcing the Arisen to spread it out or risk them breaking through the weakened point in the shields.
The nimble craft wasn't actively targeting him, and they were distracting the Arisen Cube's retribution, but at the same time, they also didn't hesitate to shoot through his positions if there was a target on the other side.
He didn't sense malice, though, only amusement and hatred for the Arisen. His life simply didn't mean anything at all to them, so they saw no reason to feel bad about shooting at him or to actively attack him.
What mattered to them was his firepower. They wanted Cube's shields down so that they could tear it apart.
So, that was what Max focused on. Every chance he got, he fired a round at the Cube, until by lucky coincidence, a dodged Mass Driver round and the Orbital Lance hit the shield at nearly the same instant, causing a breach that the attack craft quickly swarmed through.
The blades on the wings seemed deliberately designed to tear apart the hulls of the Arisen ships, and deep furrows formed as the small vessels raked the Cube, then retreated again before the shields could be brought back online.
When they came back up, the shields were a quarter of what they were to start with, and there was no defensive fire from that side of the Cube at all. The Knife Ears had targeted the weapons and shield generators the first chance they got, and Max could see that this battle was soon to end if the Arisen didn't flee.
They were tenacious today, though, either unable or unwilling to leave the fight with their great enemy, and they were standing strong, turning the Cube so the weakened side was away from Max and Nico, and continuing to send out fighters.
Max grabbed the Mass Driver from his back and linked his targeting data to Nico. As soon as his next Orbital Lance was fired, they would fire together and try to take out the shield on this side of the Cube as well.
With two out of six sides disabled, they wouldn't have enough fighters to defend the mothership, and the small attack craft could easily defeat them, making this combo a slow death for the Arisen vessel.
Arisen Fighters vaporized, and attack craft flickered out of the way, moving to high warp in an instant and rapidly changing directions, then returning to the fight after the beam had passed by.
The defensive weapons of the Arisen weakened the beam before it hit the shield, but there were no fighters left to stop the Mass Driver rounds, and the Knife Ears were stopping any of them from trying.
The shots hit home, and the first round hit at full Warp power, collapsing the shield and letting the second round punch deep into the Cube, setting off chain explosions that the attack craft took advantage of to swarm the whole ship.
They disabled shield generators, defensive weapons, and airlock doors that let the fighters out. Every strategic point on the Cube was crippled in a matter of seconds.
Another Mass Driver round from Nico hit the very center of the Cube, and with a flash of green light, it went critical. There was a ball of eerie light and a ring of debris as the vessel exploded, then silence as the fighters it sent out went dead in the air, either knocked unconscious or rendered unable to function with the loss of their mother ship.
They were torn apart so long that Max didn't get a chance to check, and then with a quick wing dip and a flyby, the Knife Ears ships returned to the main battle.
It was their thoughts that drew Max's attention, though, not their actions.
[So, there is life still in the Ancestral Home, and they are learning to use our old toys.] The pilot was thinking as he flew past before he focused again on the main battle.
"Nico, I know what they are, and so do you. Those Knife Ears, as the Koleska called them, are Darklings." Max announced when he recognized the language and the description.
The ships weren't the same as they were in his past life, but the description fit, and he spoke their language, so it had to be them.
"Darklings? How is that even possible? I thought they went extinct?" Nico asked, then realization set in for her as well.
"They didn't all die. They simply left. What else do you know?" She asked.
"They called our Galaxy the [Ancestral Home]. Do you know where they came from originally? Perhaps we can start reassembling the map as we knew it then.
"The Darklings had been a menace for a million years. Nobody knew where they originated from. If it was our Galaxy, though, the timeline fits. They disappeared from the furthest reaches of Alliance territory a million years ago, and nobody knows where they went.
If they went to hound the region where we were in our last lives, that simply means that we're still nowhere near there, or at least, the Alliance isn't. This region might be, but I don't know of any nebula that would be the size of a thousand Galaxies." Nico replied.
"I got the feeling that they have been fighting the Arisen for a very long time now. They called them the Eternal Enemy. If there were answers to our questions, they might have been ground into dust by a million years of war." Max sighed.
"Look on the bright side. We speak their language, and they have shiny new toys that they might be willing to part with." Nico cheerfully added.
"Not likely. Not shooting us is about as far as their tolerance goes, and that only covers not deliberately shooting us. Accidentally shooting through us to get to another target is clearly fair game." Max reminded her.
"Well, there's that. But I still have hope."
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