"Velinkar to fleet. Concentrate fire on the remaining Azura ships while their tranfer effect is down, do as much damage as you can." Even to himself, he sounded defeated.

They'd lost.

Velinkar sat for a dangerously long moment, his eyeglows closed. 

And that was it. They were out of back-up plans. There were fighting an enemy immune on the practical level to logitics and supply chains that was also functionally immune to the their primary weapons (rendering all conventional tactics moot); that was much bigger than they were, with much stronger individuals (Lichemaster, they'd put the High Command to flight with only one such individual), who could see their attacks coming; and that had not even seemed to flag under the attritional attacks that should have made living creatures start to flag. The Aotrs had just (at a huge diplomatic cost) sent away a chunk of the enemies' fleet... And they were still losing decisively, due to the amount of damage the Azura had inflicted with invulnerable, while their flagship absorbed all the fire.

And once the fleet lost, the ground force's successes were meaningless, since they'd be mopped up from orbit with no counter. (And even that success felt more due to the whims of fate than Aotrs tactics; already, the tide was turning as the Azura advanced.)

[Friction roll: 3]

This was what it was like to fight an out-of-context problem, in reality. Every strategy he concocted failed; every time he thought he had a handle on what to expect, the Azrua drew out another exotic technique or ability they Aotrs had no counter for. 

He'd been prepared for this to fail. The [i]Misericordia[/i] had already been taking the fire of the entire fleet the moment the Aotrs had found the invulnerability field had emerged and they'd all switched fire - there had been no real reason to assume a concentrated attack would have been more effective, or even that the Lord Foul Skream's dispel would have worked. 

His desperate, literally suicidal Phase Two would have been to open a Gate to right in front of the Spacial Splinter cannon, with the reverse side of the Gate facing it, so the Azrua's visual-only detection wouldn't have seen it past the one-directional gate, whereas the cannon would have a clean shot, and shoving the enemy vessel through with a suicidal ram of his own. And that clearly wouldn't have worked. 

He'd been prepared for his plan to go wrong. But the way in which is went was so [i]completely[/i] unexpected - so out-of-context - that they had no answer to it. 

Other than to do exactly what the Azura wanted. Conform to them.

 

A long time ago, a young living Velinkar had been in a place where he was surrounded by people who had always just the same attitude. Conform. Where you had to be just like everyone else - oh, you could have eccentricity, but only so long as even in your eccentricty, you had to do all and be all the things that you were expected to do so; ultimately Be Assimilated. To speak out was to be targeted and repressed by the angry horde of the "how dare!" Or you could choose to be silent and meaningless, beneath notice, take your pick. He'd been powerless; in complete isoloation from the alien mindset around him, one driven by an ingrained cultural self-centric arrogance, factionalism and grinding apathy. He'd hated it. He'd hated every moment of being trapped in that place, with no way out and nothing but a long, slow slide into murky grey nothing as the future.

And then one day when the Aotrs had arrived. He'd seen them; seen his chance and gone with them without hesitation. [i]Escaped.[/i] He ever regretted for a moment what he'd left behind; but he'd never forgotten, not even after all these centuries. That chance, that escape - he'd been both figuratively and literally prepared to die for it. Then... And again today.

Fighting the Azura felt just like being back there; trapped and powerless, with no control save what you could scrape by yourself in the meaningless and at the whims of fate whether you lived or died, no matter what you did or didn't do. The feeling was an old, familiar and bitter one. 

And now, the Aotrs were committed. Smash, without tactics or subtlety, the way the Azura liked it, until the Aotrs were broken or the Azura broke.

Hells, even if they won this round, it was clear that the Azure Skies were far too big for the Aotrs to fight; an apparently minor faction was soundly beating the best the Aotrs could give them. And at this point, any victory would be pyhrric at best; the losses they had suffered over this campaign far out-weighed the limited gains they had made.

The only thing the Aotrs could do now was accept the defeat and try and mitigate that loss as much as possible.

He opened his eyes glows and returned his attention to the losing battle, for the first time for a long time feeling every century of his age.

In the end, perhaps there was no escape after all.

	*	*	*	*	*	*	*

The [i]Doomskreig [/i]had no counter to that extraordinary attack except one - sheer size. The Azura had not teleported to the power core - and they surely would have done if able - so the only thing the Aotrs could do was make it hard for them to get there.

The [i]Doomskireg [/i]shut all systems off entirely. Every bulkhead opened and for a moment the Azura charged fowarded - only to find the bulheads were opening because the Doomskreig was venting its entire atmosphere. No atmosphere, no light, no gravity. And just before the power shut off entirely, every bulkhead shut back down and locked, with the last manual locking system.

The Azura would no doubt get to the power core - from experience, the Generous Knight would likely slaughter her way through personally if nothing else, and the Aotrs had no counter to her if she was even half the strength of the Furnace Knight. But... They'd have a long walk, and have to cut through every bulkhead and door on the way. And then they'd have to make up an interface to get a computer controlled system to work without actually having a computer. The captain, having been continously appraised of events with Lord Foul Skream suspected they had magic that might do that regardless. It might not even slow them down much.

But it bought some time. Time to Gate out to the [i]Doomskrieg[/i]'s escort what few living crew they had, while the Aotrs crew went to the weapons systems, and pulled out the critical components. Time while the Generous Knight was busy occupied taking the ship to not be in command of her fleet and ground force, in the hopes that some cracks might finally show, and the Aotrs would be able to at least effect a retreat in good order.

	*	*	*	*	*	*	*

Behind it, seemingly forgotten, the Spacial Splinter array drifted on the last push of the [i]Doomskrieg's[/i] tractor beams, the only weapon the Aotrs had that might prevent the Azura's terrible sun plague from overrunning the galaxy. Despite its size, alone against the dark of the void, it was a seemingly tiny dark shape, silent and fragile.