44. Crimson Red Fighter, 2nd Encounter

After screaming out loud, Abyssal manually took control of the ship and steered hard right avoiding the direct collision course with the crimson red fighter. Knowing that the momentum would keep her going in the same direction, she quickly turned her ship around and pointed her two mass drivers at Astral, shooting a couple of nano infused projectiles at her. She then fired several class C missiles, infused with her nanomachines, as well. The ship trembled at the power of the shot and Abyssal felt a slight headache.

During the past months, she had learned a few things. One was that it didn’t matter where she was pointing at in space. This was not like earth or games where the ship will move forward based on where one is looking at. The ship will still continue moving even if she turns around— her velocity will not change. In her previous fight with Astral, she made the mistake of fighting as one would fight within an atmosphere. This time she would fight like how one fights in space.

The second thing that she learned was that, as long as she could get any amount of her nanites onto the enemy ship, she could assimilate it and victory would be hers. Firepower would not matter in such a situation, she would win this fight in a single hit!

The only problem was that… this was Astral she was talking about. She never actually did manage to land a hit on Astral before and that seemed to be the case right now. Astral beautifully weaved through her shots and with small open slits in her ship, shot accurate laser beams towards the class C missiles, intercepting them before they even got close to Astral. All of this while not letting up on the immense barrage being rained up Abyssal. Each shot hit Abyssal, causing minimal damage. Each red beam of light hitting Abyssal felt like someone poking small needles into her.

[Collision with the enemy in T-minus 4.] Abby announced.

“Nyaa! She’s still coming at us, nyaa!” Meica yelled out. She stared at the displays in front of her as she gripped Abyssal’s personal drone tightly.

“Wait, what?” Abyssal said out loud as she looked at Astral’s trajectory. She was adjusting her direction to eventually collide with Abyssal who did a hard right. Within a few seconds, the two would collide at a 30° angle. Knowing this, Abyssal tried moving either right or left to avoid collision, but Astral would mimic her movements and adjusted herself accordingly.

‘Tsk, what is this? Some sort of suicide fighter?’ Abyssal clicked her imaginary tongue and shot more mass projectiles towards Astral to throw her off her course. Seeing the projectiles coming at her, she started doing a weird flight manoeuvre. As she approached head-on to abyssal, she spun around in a steadily increasing barrel roll.

Every single one of Abyssal’s shots missed as she did this manoeuvre. Once she had gotten close enough, she stopped before taking a slight second to adjust herself and boosted even harder towards a ramming collision towards Abyssal.

Abyssal thought Astral was crazy. Colliding like this would mean imminent destruction for both of them. Abyssal didn’t even have the time to say her prayers when the Crimson Red Fighter directly rammed into Abyssal. However, during this crucial moment, Astral did a slight turn and completely missed Abyssal.

Or so Abyssal thought.

Despite their hulls not even touching each other, Abyssal could still feel hers being ripped apart as Astral passes by her. She felt an immense amount of pain as a large chunk of her hull got disintegrated. Not knowing what the hell just happened to her, she quickly took a look at the crimson red fighter which passed right by her to see just exactly what Astral did to her. What she saw was the sight of a slightly red translucent bubble around Astral’s ship— her ship completely intact.

‘... force fields?!’  Abyssal thought to herself. She seemed to have been hit by the external part of Astral’s shields.

As if it wasn’t enough, Astral did another manoeuvre, doing a spin and turned her ship around to face her. It was akin to seeing a car doing a forward 180— except in space. Once the ship was facing Abyssal, the crimson red fighter did a strafe towards Abyssal’s right and started hammering at her with small laser beams. Included within the small barrage was a larger laser beam aimed right at Abyssal’s thrusters.

That large attack missed due to Abyssal also turning around to face the Crimson Red Fighter. Though it did hit a large part of Abyssal’s spaced armour which was blown away by the sheer strength of the shot.

Abyssal adjusted herself and they were now moving in parallel, both of the ships shooting at each other. However, no matter how much Abyssal tried to shoot at the red fighter, all her attacks would simply hit thin air. On the contrary, Astral was hitting a good majority of her shots and although it did very little damage to Abyssal— though she was slowly accumulating it. The tiny damages added up over time and started to eat through her hull. Astral was clearly trying to get her into an inoperable state, or maybe just like last time, she was playing with Abyssal.

“Oww oww ow ow. Arghh! I’m getting dumpstered here!” shouted Abyssal.

Sure, the newly upgraded fierce class was stronger, but it was certainly not strong enough to go toe to toe with this ace fighter. Every single part of that ship was clearly more advanced than whatever Abyssal had.

‘That ship is like cheating!’ Abyssal thought to herself. She was panicking under the constant assault from Astral. Her hull made weird noises from every hit she took from the small machine gun laser strikes.

“Can’t run away, nyaa? Abyssal can’t do anything, nyaa?” Meica’s ears and tail swooped downwards when she asked that. She too could hear the damage that Abyssal was taking.

“She’s faster and more manoeuvrable than me, no way I could shake her off!” Abyssal replied as she continued shooting at Astral. Her only chance of winning was to actually have one of her nano infused projectiles hit her. That was if it could even pierce through her force fields.

“Uuu…” Meica whimpered as she held onto Abyssal’s drone tightly.

During all of this, the communicator rang again. Astral’s voice could be heard within: “Aren’t you much sturdier than last time? You got some upgrades or something? Not that it matters though. You are still one hundred years too early to beat me.”

‘Are you gloating to me? Seriously?! First, you attack me out of nowhere, and now you gloat to me? What’s wrong with this woman!’ Abyssal yelled out internally.

…

‘Oh right! Dammit, why didn’t I think about it earlier!’ Abyssal said as she did a facepalm. ‘Abby! Open up communications, send this to an open channel!’

[Communications opened.]

“Hey! Stop attacking me! I surrender alright! We got a civilian on board in here! I’ll leave the place immediately alright, so stop attacking me alright!” Abyssal yelled out into the communicator. She even stopped attacking. She wasn’t hitting the crimson red fighter anyways, so might as well.

Despite Abyssal saying that she surrendered, Astral never stopped shooting at her. However, Astral did return the communication through the open channel.

“Heeeh… so you can talk back. And a woman too at that, huh? Interesting,”

“Don’t heeh me! Why are you even attacking me! Just stop already!” Abyssal yelled out as she shot two more projectiles at Astral. Two attacks which she avoided almost seamlessly with a sharp left and a right strafe.

“Why? You really are clueless, are you? I’m here to teach you a lesson to actually follow other’s advice. I told you to leave the place and go back to wherever you came from, yet you still frolicked around the sector like nobody’s business. By the way, your aim sucks, you should get a better targeting system.”

“What the F— I was about to leave the place when you suddenly shot at me!”

“Didn’t seem that way to me. You were heading straight towards me. Do you know that not responding is the easiest way to get shot at? What are you? Some sort of newborn baby?"

“I wasn’t heading—! Actually, just stop shooting at me already!”

“Why should I?” Astral snickered.

“What the hell?! What is this! You won! You are just bullying me at this point. You are just a big bully!”

Something must have struck a nerve, because just as Abyssal yelled that, Astral stopped shooting in entirety.

‘Oh, she stopped. Phew…’

“Hmph. There are bigger bullies than me and you would have just died on the spot against them. I hope you learned your lesson here. Now get the hell out of here, I’m not joking when I say this place is going to get dangerous.”

Astral then paused for a while before letting out a whisper: “...I’m getting too soft.”

Moments after she said that, a small notification came into Abyssal’s consciousness. It seemed to be a message mailed directly into the communicator that Astral gave to Abyssal all those months ago.

‘This is…’

“Here. If you have no other place to go then go to these coordinates. I got a friend named ‘E’ that could help—”

*BOOM!

Suddenly, a large explosion occurred right in front of Abyssal, at the crimson red ship that was facing her. Just as sudden as the explosion, came Abby with another notification.

[Incoming second transmission from an open channel. Voice only, identity unknown. Enemies detected on radar. 3 Tsubame Class] Abby said before pushing the display of three Tsubame class ships, flying towards their position. They were in a scattered formation, approaching Abyssal from three different directions.

“A bully you say? What a surprise.

Do you feel enjoyment from fighting the weak? All that strength just to fight an opponent who could barely defend herself?

Such a disgrace. As expected of a person who pilots a red coloured chicken into battle.

As the freedom freaks would say: Fight someone your own size,” a female voice came out of the communicator. She too was using an open channel broadcast.

“What the hell did you just call me?! Who the hell are you!” Roared Astral as she appeared from the smoke of the explosion, unscathed. She charged up her large beam weapon before promptly shooting at one of the three Tsubame Class ships. The beam was so large that it could engulf the entirety of the ship. The beam hit and half of the ship disintegrated to nothing, leaving only the front end, the cockpit of the Tsubame class, intact.

Abyssal was shocked to see that such a small ship and gun could let out such a devastating attack. Though she recovered quickly and took this chance to step on the pedal and get out of there as soon as possible. However, Abyssal would find out that she would not be escaping so easily. The remaining two Tsubame launched various missiles towards Abyssal.

‘Eh? What? She’s aiming for me?’ Thought Abyssal as she deployed some chaffs. She expected to take some damage from the multitude of missiles flying towards her and prepared herself for the pain.

Lucky for her, Astral who was nearby, activated her point defence system and launched dozens of small lasers that destroyed every single missile coming towards them. As soon as she did that, she launched another attack which disabled another Tsubame Class. Soon after that attack, she launched one more attack towards the final Tsubame Class fighter. The fighter, knowing Astral’s attack pattern of disabling ships instead of outright destroying them, was able to dodge the attack narrowly.

“... you are getting on my nerves, red chicken,” said the female voice, her tone indicating that she was not happy at what Astral did to her two fighters.

“Ohh? After all that big talk about fighting someone your own size, aren’t you a little bit too weak here?” Astral called out. The crimson red fighter going all out trying to destroy the final Tsubame class.

As if responding to that taunt, the space around an area, about 600 000 kilometres away from Abyssal started to distort. Large white sparks appeared and started to concentrate into a small sphere of pure energy. Seconds after that, a vortex appeared and engulfed the sphere before disappearing. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, in the place of the energy vortex was a large pinkish battlecruiser with a large pagoda. On the battlecruiser were nine large main guns.

“Yap further, red chicken,” said the female as the battlecruiser aimed her nine big guns towards Astral. Scores of dozen more Tsubame classes ejected the large battlecruiser and entered the battlefield.