Chương 266: 109. First Strike Wins 2

I threw the weapons interface wide open, fingers moving almost by reflex. Missiles, pre-loaded. Energy banks, pre-charged. Firing arcs, synced. Fire-control priorities, re-ordered. The HUD at the tactical station bloomed layer by layer — like someone had laid out an entire orchestra of killing instruments in front of me and said, very kindly: All right. You're the conductor now.

And that's when I discovered something genuinely worth writing into the Yukikaze's operations manual — and, frankly, into my own personal commendation file. The Isolde positron beam turrets and the Tristan kinetic turrets could run active at the exact same time. No mode switch required. Which meant we didn't have to waste precious seconds like an idiot, choosing whether to open with beams or with shells.

Both systems could bite in together — one mouthful, all at once — enough to make the other side understand, in a single hit, exactly what it meant that the Federal Navy, however undermanned, however absurdly organized, however questionable its Captain's mental state — still had teeth sharp enough to draw blood.

"... Not bad design, actually." I muttered it under my breath, fingers flying as I finished re-ordering the firing sequence for every weapon system. I turned my hand over. My palm was soaked. Honest sweat. Turns out you really can be nervous enough to sweat straight through your gloves and still lay out a missile launch window with perfect precision.

That's probably the greatest achievement of an Academy education — it can't promise you won't be afraid, but it can guarantee that even afraid, you'll finish the job first. Ahead of me, Roy was locked onto the course and the hull-attitude corrections, his voice drifting back low.

"Coming around..." There was something very specific in that tone — half announcement to the ship, half announcement to his own heart: stop being useless, because there won't be another chance after this.

"Mm." I gave one short acknowledgment and said nothing more, pushing all my attention back into the HUD. The whole tactical display was updating by the second. The Imperial cruisers' stern profiles, heat signatures, fire-control blind spots, propulsion wake, the minefield's edge, our own overlapping firing arcs — everything converging toward one single instant. Almost there. Just a little more.

Right now the Yukikaze was a thin blade sliding along the spine of another blade — hugging the outer edge of the minefield, curling around behind the Imperial formation. I could feel the sheer, absurd proximity just from the relative-distance readout on screen. We weren't peeking at them from a safe distance. We were pressing our face in from directly behind their necks, close enough that it felt like we should be able to smell the scorch off their engine wash. Akari's voice cut in suddenly.

"Enemy hulls visual!" She stared at the sensor display, half her usual world-weariness scraped off her tone.

"Hoshino — they're showing us their ass."... A thoroughly unofficial way to phrase a report. But I liked it. Because it captured the tactical situation with total precision: the Imperial forces had just exposed the one angle they least wanted anyone looking at, completely unguarded, aimed right at us. I held my breath. The targeting brackets dropped into the green zone, one after another. Good. Right now.

"Isolde, Tristan — open fire!" The instant the order left my mouth, the Yukikaze's forward and broadside batteries opened up together. Isolde's beam tore through the dark first — a long, blazing lance of light, sweeping across the Imperial rear line with a precision bordering on cruelty. A heartbeat later, Tristan's kinetic shells cleared their barrels almost in the same instant, the recoil shuddering back through the ship's frame, like the whole hull had just clenched its teeth.

Light and iron, launched in the same breath. The sight had a kind of beauty that had absolutely no business existing in a moment built for killing. If Maki had turned around right then and told me to focus, I wouldn't have been able to argue — because for half a second, I genuinely thought it looked too beautiful to be used on people. The Imperial forces clearly had no time to appreciate it. The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

The innermost cruiser barely registered Isolde's beam scraping its outer armor before realizing something had just poked its head out at its rear quarter. Its stern lurched into a hard, panicked turn — clumsy, frantic, like someone jolted awake by a ghost in the middle of the night and trying to bolt before they'd found their shoes. It ran too hard, and stepped straight into the trap it had laid for itself. The minefield detonated along its starboard flank. Not one charge. A chain reaction.

The sector that had been wearing the disguise of static noise bloomed into a spectacular, deeply ugly firework display of death. The cruiser's belly was nearly peeled open on the spot. The whole hull twisted into an impossible angle inside the blast, as if something had gripped it by the middle and wrung it out, before the entire mass dissolved into a tumbling ball of fire and debris.

"First hull down!" Akari called. I didn't have time to spare even a token moment of pity for the other side's bad luck. Because Tristan's shells were already biting into the second target. The kinetic round didn't produce anything cinematic. It did something worse, and far more practical — it drove straight into the propulsion section of the next Imperial cruiser in line. The outer armor cracked first, then the internal structure blew out in layers, sparks and debris venting through the breach.

The ship's stern attitude went instantly wrong, its main exhaust plume snapping into two separate trails. It didn't explode outright. Somehow, not exploding made it look even more dead. Like a beast speared clean through the spine mid-sprint — the front half still trying to drive forward, the back half no longer listening to anything. The cruiser rolled once in place, its attitude control collapsing fast, fire-control arrays dimming right along with it.

"Second hull disabled, fire control severely degraded!" Akari reported. Good. One sunk. One crippled. An ambush isn't measured by how spectacular the first blast looks. It's measured by how long it takes the other side to catch up after the first bite lands.

"Parsifal — full spread!" I pushed the missile window wide open. More than a dozen anti-ship missiles broke from the Yukikaze's launch bays in one breath, trailing short, bright tails as they knifed forward. Compared to beams and shells, missiles have always carried a strange character of their own. In your hands, they're calculation — sequences, locks, button presses.

The second they launch, it's a little like throwing dice hard at the universe, and all you can do afterward is wait and see whether the world feels like being reasonable today. The Imperial forces weren't there to be practice dummies. The instant their rear line broke, the vanguard and flanks threw up an intercept net. Several missiles were burned down mid-flight, bursting into brief strings of sparks. Others were shoved off their original trajectories, forced aside as if by an invisible hand.

But chaos, once it starts rolling, stops caring about logic. One missile threaded an impossibly tight angle between the enemy's intercept fire and a hard-turning cruiser — missed its original target entirely, and instead drilled straight into the midsection of a different Imperial hull that was still trying to correct its heading. The next second, fire blew straight out of the ship's belly. Not a clean, localized detonation. The kind that rips the internal structure open along its whole length.

The outer armor bulged first, then split, and the entire hull peeled outward as if the pressure inside had finally won. It didn't shatter to pieces on the spot — it dragged half a burning body sideways on pure momentum, flung violently off its line.

"Third hull heavily damaged!" Akari's voice had stopped sounding like a report. She was doing live commentary on a death. That half-wrecked Imperial hull scraped straight across the flank of its wingman. Not a clean ramming kill. It didn't need to be. It was enough to knock that cruiser — the one that had been trying to come about and sink its teeth into us — completely off its line. An entire row of external fire-control turrets sheared away in the process.

Forced into an emergency evasive yaw, it was shoved further outboard by its own ally's wreckage streaming in from behind. The entire rear formation collapsed at once, like a chessboard kicked over — the neat propulsion wakes and firing arcs that had been there a moment ago were now one tangled traffic accident, every ship getting in every other ship's way.

"Fourth hull damaged and out of formation. Fifth hull's fire-control solution scrambled — rear formation's broken!" I stared at the tactical display, for one second genuinely unable to believe my own luck hadn't betrayed me at the exact moment I needed it most. Not all five hulls destroyed. That would have been a fairy tale. But this result was bad enough, vicious enough, and effective enough. We'd bitten a massive gap straight out of the Imperial fleet's rear line.

Tobita watched the string of ID markers on the tactical display go dark, drift, flicker, and drop out of formation, and still found room for a short piece of commentary.

"Which is exactly why the tactical officer's seat needs someone like a lieutenant." He paused. The corner of his mouth moved, just slightly.

"Luck is part of the skillset." My mouth twitched right back. Was that a compliment, or had he just formally reclassified me as some kind of high-risk gambling instrument? No time to argue the point, though. Because the Imperial forces weren't corpses. The vanguard hulls finally began forcing their turns. Enemy main-battery pre-charge signatures spiked hard. Multiple fire-control lock warnings hit my HUD almost simultaneously, red enough that it looked like someone had dunked the entire screen in blood.

"Enemy formation coming about!" Lan reported, cold as ever.

"Multiple fire-control chains locked on this ship!"

"High-energy spike, aft starboard—" Akari hadn't even finished the line before an enemy beam scraped along the Yukikaze's outer flank. The whole bridge lurched hard. Not a direct hit — but a graze felt worse in its own way, like someone dragging the flat of a red-hot blade the length of your bones. Warning lights jumped two levels at once. Damage alerts for the outer armor and shield interface flickered at the edge of my vision.

"Starboard outer armor scraped. Shield fringe attenuated." Aida's voice cut in from behind, brisk as a medical chart slapped straight in your face.

"Still not dead. Please keep up the good work, everyone." Good. That was extremely Yukikaze. Tobita didn't so much as blink.

"Roy. Maximum battle speed," he said.

"Clear this sector. Now." At the helm, Roy answered with his entire body.

"Copy! Maximum battle speed!" The Yukikaze's main drive exhaust flared out hard. The acceleration wasn't romantic. It was vicious. The whole ship kicked like something had planted a boot squarely against its stern, hurling it along the pre-calculated escape vector. Roy had both hands locked dead on the controls, forcing this steel beast — freshly finished biting, and now very much ready to run — to hold its line. Ahead lay the afterglow of explosions. Alongside, the edge of the minefield.

Behind, an Imperial cruiser formation that had finally caught up with what had just happened to it. And we tore straight through that tangled mess of fire and wreckage in one motion, and got out. Hit and run.... Fuck, that felt good. But I kept my eyes on the tactical display, watching the enemy ID markers still strobing across it, and I knew perfectly well — That bite had been clean. It was nowhere near clean enough to start smiling yet.

Because the Imperial forces we'd just stabbed hard in the back were almost certainly about to turn around and show us, in detail, what payback looks like. And the Yukikaze had only just started running from the first wave of the hunt.