"Let's take a quick look at the Scalian mothership to see if there is anything different before heading back," Ivan calmly looked up at the three-dimensional surface of the universe as he calmly spoke.
"Shouldn't we head back first?" Iris asked.
"No, there's very little to nothing we can do. Four individuals can't make any difference to a battle of this scale."
Ivan despondently shook his head. He was truly powerless to make any significant effect on a battle as he was but one individual. If all the Celestials were here, they may be able to split up and wreak havoc amongst the insides of the ships, assassinating key personnel, but he couldn't do much by himself.
Half an hour had progressed since the beginning of the exchange of fire. 2,000 Scalian warships were left out of the original 5,000, including the mothership. Meanwhile, the Galactic Fleet had only 1,200 left from the original 10,099.
70,000 mechanoids continued to fight above the main battlefield against 50,000 Scalian wardolls, alien mechanoids designed in imitation of the mechanoids, but with four arms to match the Scalian physique. They desperately tryied to break through the Scalian wardolls in order to assault the warship and hope to salvage the battle, but the wardolls were relentless to the point they would give their lives just to prevent a single mechanoid from breaking through their line.
"They won't last until reinforcements come," Ivan declared sardonically. "Let's at least force that mothership to blow itself up while we are there, that should give them a little breathing room."
Ivan lead everyone as they rapidly infiltrated the Scalian mothership. It was a monstrosity from sheer size alone, and as Ivan followed Mazur to sneak a peak at several technologies, he couldn't help but shake his head.
"It's disappointing, despite the greater size of the ship, they use the exact same technology, just inflated it," Mazur shook his head despondently. "But this ball of antimatter, it has to be at least 10 miles in diameter, to think they would carry so much with them. This ship is going to cause a massive gravitational fluctuation when it blows, make sure to dive extra deep into subspace or we'll still be wrapped up in it"
The amount of antimatter in the engine room was basically a small moon. Who would have thought that at the heart of this monster, an amount of energy more than enough to clear out the Galactic Fleeet from several sectors was stored.
"Let's go to the bridge. For such a large ship to lead their fleet, they may not be willing to activate the self-destruct sequence unless their ship is doomed to fall anyway," Ivan smile and led the search through the ship in search of the main bridge.
Luckily enough, the bridge was huge and with massive screens of the battle progress being displayed, Ivan and the others found it relatively easily.
As soon as Ivan and the others passed through the wall and into the bridge of the ship, the crewmembers in there had been prepared and immediately opened fire with antiparticle rifles. Ivan and the others truly were caught off guard, but they were still within subspace so the suffered no damage.
"Ssso it wasss sstill useless. What are you'sss, human? No, you'sss are not human," The Scalian commander of the mothership spoke in a drawl, but it was still the galactic common language.
Ivan looked at the commander, a hulking Scalian almost two heads taller than the rest, and replied with astonishment, "You can talk the common language? I certainly didn't expect that."
"Anssswer my quessstion, human."
The commander loomed over Ivan with its huge body, taking on a foolishly aggressive stance. The rest of the Scalian soldiers were at the same time ordered to put down their weapons, which were proven to be useless, and retreat to a safer location.
Ivan frowned and quipped, "What are you talking about, didn't you answer your own question?"
The Scalian seemed to be offended and it hissed threateningly at Ivan in a way the latter simply couldn't understand.
"I suggest you work on your common language a bit more. If you can't speak it properly, then you will never be able to have a conversation with the other party."
"No conversssation! Answer me, what are you'sss?!"
"You can refer to us as Celestials," Ivan paid little mind of the Scalian's intimidating posture and just took it as the nature of their race.
Uninterested in talking more with someone who he couldn't properly communicate with, he walking straight through the Scalian commander and began inspected the ships main console. The language was strange, like hieroglyphs to his eyes, and when he tried to press a few buttons he was automatically locked out.
The Scalian commander stood rooted to the spot stunned briefly before turning around. He glared at Ivan and stated, "You'sss touch that which is not yoursss."
Ivan merely rolled his eyes. "You realize your people are currently attacking a planet which is not yours, right?"
"War, all isss owned by the victorsss."
"So if I killed you, I would own this ship?"
"All isss owned by the victorsss," the Scalian commander repeated itself.
Ivan merely gave up on trying to understand the thought process of these Scalians. He called Mazur over and hoped to learn how to trigger the self-destruct system. Despite studying it, without knowledge of their language and understanding the exact hardware composition, they couldn't even remove the lock.
"Hey, how do I self-destruct your ship? You're not worried we'll learn your technology?" Ivan asked the Scalian commander who was trying to grab him and Mazur in frustration, but his hands kept passing through them, as if they weren't there.
The Scalian commander refused to say anything, and also seemed to not want the mothership to blow up for some reason. After talking a bit but getting nowhere with the alien, Ivan commanded Valeria to kill it.
"Can we blow up the engine ourselves?" Ivan pondered audibly.
Mazur gave it some thought and said, "No, we can't. If we did, we too would be swept in the resulting blast We can make a breach in the gravitational field, which would wreck the mothership though."
"Very well, let's do that."
Ivan took one final glance at the battle displayed on the monitors. The Galactic Fleet only had 72 ships left, compared to the Scalians 620, and were about to be completely annihilated. There were still seven minutes until reinforcements came, so the remaining ships were taking wild evasive manoeuvres while flying around in order to draw out the remaining time. The mechanoids were almost completely defeated while the Scalian wardolls still numbered over 10,000.
Mazur took charge in the engine room, he pointed out a large number of energy extractors to be destroyed. Iris also joined in on this task, breaking them by stabbing into the third-dimension with her iron spear. The Antimatter Core had at least ten thousand energy extractors drawing out energy whilst also maintaining the gravitational field.
They destroyed several hundred of them in quick succession, planning to weaken the gravitational field on one side and allowing the antimatter to burst out by itself.
"Descend immediately! The entire thing is about to break down!" Mazur called out with wide eyes before rapidly fleeing into subspace.
Ivan, Iris and Valeria immediately fled as well, not even glancing back at the failing containment field. The gravitational field rapidly weakened and could no longer contain the antimatter. The small moon, once free of its containment, immediately reacted with the air in the ship.
At first, everyone on the mother ship experience an odd feeling of limbo as if time had extended, right before the chain reaction of antimatter reached a critical point and the amount of excess energy being released reached a quantity so large it was impossible to measure at that moment with even the most state of the art devices.
The explosion tore the mothership into fragments within a millionth of a second. Shortly afterwards was a massive quake in the three-dimensional normal space as a gravitational storm formed in space, instantaneous wild fluctuations in the gravity constant which were capable of tearing a ship apart like paper. The closest to the mothership were directly annihilated by antimatter, further fuelling the chain reaction in the explosion, while those further away were torn apart by the expanding gravitational storm.
Ivan, Mazur, Iris and Valeria spat blue blood as the gravity storm even affected subspace, the high points of gravity causing the surface of the universe to spike into subspace, tearing any nearby four-dimensional bodies apart. Ivan and they were lucky to flee early, but they were still hit by aftershocks which damaged their organs.
"What the hell, aren't you the specialist on energy? Why did it suddenly go critical?!" Ivan shouted at Mazur with a vicious expression.
Mazur coughed awkwardly and explained, "The design of the containment field was better than I expected, by removing those energy extractors, it should have weakened the field where they were, leading to antimatter slowly breaking free. Unfortunately, the remaining extractors instantly compensated for this and the gravity field was dispersed evenly. With the gravity around the entire core weakening evenly, the change in pressure of containment was not enough to safely store the antimatter. The rest is as you can imagine."
"At least some good came of it. Have a look, at least half the remaining Scalian warships were destroyed," Iris comforted Ivan and wiped the blood off his mouth tenderly with her sleeve.
Ivan looked up at the still chaotic third-dimension and sighed. It's true, the end result was still better than they had expected.