Chapter 59: The Iron Fang Assault (Part 4)

Cunt crouching low to dodge the scurrying pirates, he crept all the way toward the bar. Seeing Taya sitting dazedly on the stage at a loss, Taya's eyes lit up upon seeing Cunt approach, regaining her vitality instantly. Just as she was about to say something, Cunt stopped her with a gesture.

"If nothing goes wrong, Kuken is about to collapse. I plan to stir up some trouble here and then escape with everyone using the escape pods," Cunt whispered.

"I don't know how I can help you... but a captain-looking guy mentioned just a moment ago that the armory is not far from here," Taya said.

Hearing this, Cunt grew instantly excited. He patted Taya's cheek and said, "Alright, wait for me here."

A moment later, Cunt ran back with an excited expression on his face. He pulled Taya into his arms and whispered, "Come on, I'll show you some fireworks... Haha! Three, two, one!"

Boom! With a deafening roar, flames soared through the corridor!

Taking advantage of the chaos, Cunt had sneaked into the armory, rigged a simple delayed-action igniter, and directly set fire to the blaster gas stored inside!

That armory was merely a storage room for the pirates' blaster rifles rather than the ammunition magazine for the cruiser's main cannons. Therefore, although this series of explosions blew apart several surrounding compartments, it caused no structural damage to the cruiser itself.

However, this blast made Kuken on the bridge erupt with fury. He grabbed the navigator by the collar and roared, "Who is messing around on my ship?! Is it those singing fools?!"

"I... I don't know..." The navigator, sprayed all over with spit, was already terrified and answered hastily.

"Useless trash!! You're all useless trash!!" Kuken pulled out his blaster, pressed the muzzle against the navigator's chin, and pulled the trigger without hesitation.

Bang! The navigator's head exploded instantly, splattering Kuken's face with blood and brain matter.

This, however, only stirred up Kuken's ferocity. He pointed at the doorway and roared, "Go and wipe out those singing ones! Leave no survivors!! And someone get the fire put out!"

Several pirates raised their blaster rifles and dashed out the door.

On the other side, Cunt had already led Taya and a dozen or so civilians running all the way toward the escape pods, with Kunto and Felasi among them. The pirates on the cruiser were all drawn by the armory explosion to put out the fires, while ship repairmen, executioners, and those who had been repairing the turrets earlier were running about in total chaos, leaving no one to pay them any heed.

Reaching the escape pods, Cunt urged Taya and the civilians to get inside, saying, "Don't worry! The people outside will rescue you!"

With that, he reached out to press the launch button.

Seeing that he wasn't coming in, Taya grabbed him in a panic. "My love, why aren't you getting in?"

"I need to see if there's a chance to capture this cruiser. You know my boss is currently short on ships," Cunt flashed a dashing smile, then closed the hatch and pressed the launch button.

Just as the escape pod launched, Tang Xiao, who was fiercely dishing out firepower while piloting his fighter, received the alert. He communicated over the comms, "Dispatch a few fighters to bring those escape pods back to the mothership! Everyone else, resume the attack!"

With six out of the eight point-defense guns unable to rotate, the Blade-class starfighters were raining fire upon the cruiser under virtually zero threat.

The cruiser Ironfang had been hit by over sixty Gemini missiles back and forth, but given the sheer bulk of this 315-meter-long vessel, its shields still hadn't been breached. No matter how one looked at it, the Blade-class fighter was still an assembled and upgraded piece of hardware; apart from the Gemini missiles, the firepower of those small infrared laser cannons was practically negligible to a cruiser.

Soon, however, the situation changed when three Hammer-class frigates joined the battle!

The two turrets on one of the Hammer-class frigates looked distinctly mismatched. Moreover, to power these two turrets, the frigate had been significantly bulked up to accommodate a larger fusion reactor, making the ship look like an inflated pufferfish.

Upon entering range, the two turbo-laser cannons on that Hammer-class frigate opened fire immediately! The powerful lasers passed through specialized high-concentration blaster gas, forming even more destructive particle beams—a unique weapon widely used by various combat spacecraft across the Star Wars universe.

Under the formidable power of the turbo-laser cannons, the shield strength of the cruiser Ironfang began to plummet rapidly. At that moment, the other two Hammer-class frigates also opened fire, launching a barrage of pale blue energy clusters that slammed relentlessly into the cruiser, bursting into clusters of electric arcs.

These energy clusters were not particularly fast, but under the current circumstances, hitting the cruiser Ironfang was hardly a difficult task.

These two Hammer-class frigates had also been modified, with their hull turrets replaced by ion bomb launchers. This was a weapon used by bombers in the Homeworld technology tree, highly effective against shields.

"Boss!! Our shields are running out of power!! Two shield generator banks have overheated and need a cooling cycle!" a pirate shouted in panic at Kuken.

With a ferocious glare, Kuken stared fixedly at the massive mothership outside the viewport. He slammed his fist onto the control console and roared, "Prepare to initiate hyperspace jump! We're pulling back!!"

He panted heavily like an enraged beast, "I'll remember this place! The Endor system!! Your colony is right here, you can't run away!! I'll be back soon! Bringing the Black Sun with me!!!"

However, after a flurry of inputs by the flight operations crew, one of them cried out in alarm, "Negative! The hyperdrive won't engage!"

"Damn it!! Why won't it engage?! We're not within a gravity well right now! Why won't it engage?!" Kuken bellowed.

With a pale face and trembling fingers, the operator pointed at the Kushan mothership outside the viewport. "It's... it's the gravity well generated by that mothership itself..."

"What did you say?" Kuken felt as if a barrel of ice water had been dumped over him from head to toe. He turned his head slowly and stiffly, staring at the gargantuan mothership hovering so close. "They... planned this from the very beginning?"

Because hyperdrives were susceptible to gravitational influence when engaging, they could only be activated in the absence of stellar gravity. In other words, a ship had to clear a planet's gravity well before initiating a hyperspace jump; forcing an engagement would result in the vessel being torn apart directly by the physical forces generated by the gravity upon entering hyperspace.

Even after entering hyperspace, the gravitational pull of various stellar bodies could still affect hyperspace travel. Thus, the so-called hyperspace lanes within the galaxy were simply safe hyperspace channels unaffected by the gravitational fields of various celestial bodies.