This City ship was the last remaining large ship in the Lucca fleet.
After this City ship's energy shield went out, it took less than ten minutes for the Ghosts to extinguish all the remaining Lucca ships.
Hawke had been watching all this in silence. Hawke saw that the last ship of the Lucca fleet, a smallest of the village-class ships, was panicking through the battlefield full of ship wreckage, occasionally hitting tiny pieces of ship debris and bursting into a shower of sparks on its shields.
It was fleeing at over 6,000 kilometres per second and Hawke could see that it was speeding towards the Epsilon Eri system, but it could not escape annihilation.
It took the Ghosts only a few seconds to catch up with it, and three seconds later, its energy shield went out.
It lost its life, like a cold corpse. But its corpse was still speeding along, and at its current speed it would reach the ε Eri system in a dozen years.
This is the last Lucca ship, and its death will mean the destruction of the Lucca fleet.
The Lucan fleet, strong enough to crush Hawk, was wiped out in an hour and a half by a second class Ghost race. The Ghost Race's battle prowess left Hawke in a state of shock.
After eliminating the last Lucan civilisation ship, the Ghost Race began to move towards Hawke as he watched nervously.
"The final moment, is it finally coming?" Hawke thought silently.
In his heart, Hawke desperately hoped that a miracle would happen, such as, after destroying the Luca fleet, the ghosts would leave on their own, or that they would still have their spiritual intelligence and would recognise themselves as human descendants.
But even Hawke, himself, thought it was a luxury.
"I, I guess, am not that lucky." Hawk thought with a bitter smile, "It's not exactly insulting that I, a small level three mechanical civilization, would die at the hands of the famous Ghost Race of the Galaxy."
"Hey, Luca Two, do you have any last words to say?" Hawk asked.
"Last words? I only hope that in hell, the evil gods will punish me a little less." Luca Two shook his head and smiled bitterly, "I have betrayed my civilisation, the heaven of the true gods, and I will certainly not be able to go there."
"Don't you forget that those clansmen who didn't betray the true gods died before you did." Hawk pointed with some amusement at the wreckage of the ship in the middle of the battlefield and said somewhat mockingly.
Lucca II closed her eyes and sat down on the ground for the few seconds that the Ghosts were about to arrive, no longer speaking, as if performing a magical ritual.
Hawke sighed and looked to the distant starry sky, where, there was a dull star.
"Goodbye, Mother." Hawke said a silent goodbye to the sun.
Then, Hawke directed his gaze at the rapidly approaching Ghost Nation.
The Ghosts did not emit visible light, so Hawke could not see them. But through the instruments, Hawke could sense their presence quite clearly.
"Are you ... the unyielding souls of my dead clansmen? Refusing to rest because of resentment, hatred, that's why you go on a killing spree of any life you see? I, I have been trying to avenge you all, ah. But I hate that I am so weak that I cannot even find out who the enemy really is by now. Strike that, the Ghosts are growing extremely fast, hopefully you will grow to at least the fourth level, and by then, neither the Guardians nor the Scavengers will be your match."
"Then ... kill all the living beings in the galaxy. Since we humans are already extinct, the galaxy, too, has no need to exist." Hawk's mind was filled with madness, "As long as we kill all the civilizations in the galaxy, we will naturally help our race to take revenge - the one that exterminated the human race must be in the galaxy."
"Goodbye, dear people." Hawke sighed and began to wait for death.
In the next second, the Ghosts swooped into Hawke's fleet.
Faced with the Ghosts, who had all but wiped out Lucca's fleet in an hour and a half, Hawke could not muster any thought of confrontation. For Hawke understood that any act of resistance would be futile.
The shields of the dozens of village-class ships lined up in front of the fleet, directly facing the Ghosts, went out first. It was at this moment that Hawk understood the Ghost Race's method of attack.
It was an extremely powerful pure energy attack! This kind of energy attack was not the same as the killing principle of an energy cannon. It seemed that what was contained within the Phantoms' bodies was an extremely strong negative energy, which was not dark matter or antimatter in the usual sense, but a purely negative energy level, somewhat similar to the negative mass particles that caused the Hawking radiation phenomenon in black holes.
If Hawk's shield is like a glass of warm water with a temperature above zero, then this negative energy is ice extremely close to absolute zero. The moment this negative energy met the ship's shields, the engines that fed the shields inside the ship immediately went into overdrive, as a large amount of energy was being siphoned off, as if the heat of the warm water had been neutralised by the cold ice.
The engines lasted less than a second before they burned out from the overload and immediately the shield went out. The instruments that Hawke had placed within the ship sensed a massive EMP-like radiation sweep through and immediately, all the wiring inside the ship burned out.
The ship was dead.
The first batch of dead spaceships, there were fifty of them, among them, eighteen country-class ships and thirty-two village-class ships. They lasted a total of one point three seconds.
The second batch of dead spaceships, thirty-eight in total, of which, there were ten country-class ships and twenty-eight village-class ships. They lasted for a total of two point six seconds.
"Eh?" Hawk noticed this strange phenomenon. It seemed that the killing power of the Ghosts, was weakening. Hawk watched the movements of these Ghosts somewhat strangely.
He knew that it had taken the Ghost Race less than two minutes to destroy Lucca's flagship, the provincial ship, so by this calculation, it was impossible for the Ghost Race to destroy their own ship so slowly.
Gradually, there was a speculation emerged from Hawke's mind.
"It seems that ... they don't want to destroy my ship. They ... only seemed to have destroyed my ship unintentionally because they couldn't control their own energy. Moreover, their control over their own energy is rising, the number of my ships destroyed is decreasing, and the time they last is getting longer."
The third batch of destroyed ships confirmed Hawke's suspicions. In the third batch, a total of twenty ships were destroyed, the order of magnitude was further reduced, moreover, they were all village class ships, in addition to a few country class ships that seemed to have been attacked, but their shields did not go out, only after the initial phase of overload, they gradually stabilised and suffered no damage other than the shields becoming much dimmer.
Through the instruments inside the ship, Hawke felt as if, these ghosts, were encasing the ship.
A ray of hope grew in Hawke's heart: "Could it be that they are really my people? They have come here, not to destroy me, but to help me take out the Luca fleet?"
"But if that's the case, why didn't they leave after they wiped out the Luca fleet? They're wrapping my ship? What are they ... trying to do?"
Hawke couldn't think of an answer.
The fourth group of destroyed ships was all that was left. In the process, hundreds of other ships had been "wrapped" by the Ghosts.
Hawke waited silently, watching as the ghosts, who might have been his own people, slowly wrapped around his ship.
After the fourth group, three ships were destroyed, Hawke's ship was not attacked again.
More and more ships felt this strange energy, more and more ships were wrapped up, and gradually, an hour later, even Hawke's flagship, the New York, was wrapped up in this strange energy. Apart from a flicker of the energy shield, the New York did not suffer a single bit of damage.
Through the quantum communication system, Hawke saw that in the New Homeworld, Luca II had opened its eyes at some point, and it looked at all this with shock, exclaiming incredulously, "Oh my God, the Ghosts can actually do other things besides killing? This, this is really too shocking, this is a huge discovery, if it is reported to the Guardian Alliance, it can gain at least 30,000 Alliance contribution points!"
"Could it be, could it be that you, master, are a child of God who has been favoured by the true God?"
Hawk snorted at this, and he didn't bother with Luca II. After the New York was wrapped up, and after another half hour, all of Hawke's surviving 100,000 or so ships were wrapped up by the Ghosts.
The next thing Hawke saw was that the Luca fleet, which had lost all its life, was slowly approaching itself, or rather itself was approaching the Luca fleet, and after ten minutes the two fleets had mixed together, and then the Ghosts, in turn, wrapped those Luca ships that were largely intact.
Then Hawke observed a singular phenomenon.
The glow of the stars in front of Hawke suddenly changed colour. They radiated a light that became blue and azure, while the glow of the stars behind Hawke became blood red and blood red.
Blue like the sky, red like blood.
"This, this is red shift and blue shift!" Hawk was shocked beyond belief, "Such an intense red shift and blue shift!"
The blue shift represented approaching and the red shift represented moving away. This phenomenon indicated that at this moment, Hawke's fleet, was approaching at an alarming speed towards the front. Hawke made an estimate that, under the wrapping of the Ghosts, he was moving at a speed of at least ninety-nine and a half percent of the speed of light!
And that was only a rough estimate; the actual speed, in all likelihood, was even higher than that.
"These Ghostbusters, no, my people, they seem to be trying to take me somewhere!" In shock, Hawke came to this conclusion.