An opening salvo of missile and plasma beam fire from the few remaining Holy Union ships was all that was needed for the 1st Fleet to begin its maneuvers. Arkhan tended to occasionally allow his foes a ‘first shot’. This was due to his reasoning that if an opponent fired first, then they were in the wrong, thereby giving his forces the right to act in ‘self-defense’. Mind you, the Angels had long since ‘attacked first and without provocation’, but that did not matter to Arkhan now. Now it was just a way to give the nearly beaten Angels that last bit of hope and to be ‘sporting’.

Of course, the second after the Angelus Holy Union’s ships opened fire, Arcadia’s ships did so too. While Arcadia did not have the same range advantage as the Holy Union, it more than made up for it in sheer volume. Combine this with the fact that the surviving AHU ships were not using their greater range to their advantage and instead merely closing the distance, and you had a recipe for a massacre.

Mobile Suit Golems dodged and weaved through the fire from both the Angelus Holy Union and the Arcadian Galactic Commonwealth as they themselves closed the distance between them and their targets. At the last moment, they all opened fire at extremely close range, letting tens of thousands of oversized bullets, missiles and particle beams rip into the now poorly shielded ships of the AHU Navy. It only took a few more seconds of this mix of warship, Mobile Suit Golem and Mobile Armor Golem fire to remove any remaining shields from the equation, exposing the damaged armor and opened innards of said ships and permitting many more shots to do significant damage to both the armored and exposed hulls of their foes.

After a few dozen engagements, the Arcadian military had devised a specific way of dealing with enemy vessels. The best way to deal with these Angel warships in particular was to target any exposed systems first in deliberate, coordinated strikes. Usually, targeting the exposed shield generators was the first priority once the initial shields had fallen. This was to make the subsequent strikes far easier. After all, it would take much more firepower to continuously deal with the regenerating shields while also dealing with sub systems.

After the shields came the main weapon batteries, then thrusters/ propulsion systems, then the bridge and finally everything else. Arkhan had learned from watching movies and playing games that having exposed sub systems was a bad idea, and having an exposed bridge was likely just as bad if not worse. That was why, even though it wasn’t nearly as cool, he had not only the bridge of each and every ship in the navy squirreled away deep inside the ship but also as many sub systems as possible. Because while surveying the battlefield through windows was cool, avoiding death by stray shot, kamikaze attack and/ or direct fire was even cooler.

But this was not the case for the navies of the galaxy at large. They seemed to be under the impression that being exposed was a great strategic move. This was one of the many, many reasons why Arkhan. Asharia and most of the AGC thought that the ship designers of the UGN and the AHU were a bunch of damned idiots.

But back to the engagement.

Due to the splendidly executed Hyperspace Ram, most of the Holy Union ships were in less than ideal states for the conflict they were in. Some suffered deep gauges from where debris had torn through their ship like someone took a few random swings at a Styrofoam block with a meat cleaver, and others had massive holes in places where there should have been ship. One of the larger ships had gotten lucky(?) and only suffered a single wound.

The downside for that ship was that the wound in question was a hole in the hull running from near the front to just in front of the rear engines. This was a gap in the defenses that Arkhan’s creations were exploiting the ever-loving hell out of. After all, any time they managed to capture an enemy vessel they had more goodies for the techies back home to play with.

The battle was going far too easily for Arkhan to feel comfortable. Yes, he had dealt a crippling blow to the Angels, but this just felt like too flimsy a resistance, even for such a battered foe.

“A cornered and injured beast bites twice as hard, so why aren’t you biting?” Arkhan mused aloud as he watched the damaged AHU ships go down one by one. Then his eye hit upon one ship in particular. It was a large vessel, and it seemed to be equipped with a sort of ‘spinal mounted’ weapon. The entire front section of the ship was devoid of any weapons aside from one massive ‘Fuck Everything Gun’ that seemed to not only take up the front but had a barrel that ran down the middle of the ship.

Something about its movements was off, but it wasn’t due to the lack of five of its seven main thrusters making it move slowly, nor due to its guns being either totaled or stuck in one position or another. He just had a feeling that he needed to get as far away from that one ship as possible. Thankfully, it was far enough away that it wasn’t actively participating in the battle. It was just slowly limping towards the fight, not even bothering to fire its main gun; a main gun that was trained on his position, and mounted to a ship that was limping in a straight line towards the middle of the battlefield.

The majority of the foes no longer had weapons to use and tried to resort to ramming, but if there was one thing Arcadia had invested heavily into for its warships, it was sublight movement speed. What was supposed to be a ram would turn into an elegant ballet where one ship would move around the other like a pair of dancers. Of course, one of the ships would still be taking a pounding from the other and its allies, but it was more soothing a sight than you might expect.

There was still one thing detracting from this dance of death.

“That ship… I don’t like it….”

That one battleship with the spinal mount weapon kept crawling closer, and Arkhan’s bad feeling only intensified.

“Fuck it all to hell. Shoot it with whatever we can spare.”

As Arkhan gave his command, he was met with a voice.

“Can I play with the big, shiny boat?”

It was the idiot Neue Ziel which had ranked up into a Neue Ziel II.

“Go wild.”

There was a pause before the childish giggling started and the already large Mobile Armor Golem increased its size and rushed the slowly advancing battleship. Once the idiot got up close, it opened its claw arm and swung its massively oversized beam sword down onto the rounded, metallic white and gold vessel and…

KABOOM!

The gigantic beam sword had made contact with the leak and set off a cascading reaction that turned the ship into a brilliant and absurdly massive ball of molten metal and plasma. Under normal circumstances, Arkhan would have been quite miffed that he had lost a MAG, but this was no ordinary case. Because…

“Oooooooooh! Pretty lights! Sooooooooo sparkly!”

It would take far more than an exploding battleship to destroy that idiot.

“That was a close shave.” Arkhan thought as he watched the fireball fade and a blackened, but otherwise perfectly fine Neue Ziel II fly back towards the slowly ending fight. “If it had gotten too close… I don’t even want to think of how much damage that could have caused. How many would have been destroyed due to that…”

Arkhan watched the battle from both the photoreceptors of his creations and the cameras installed on the exterior of the Adeptus Deorum. There were only a few ships left in the Holy Union’s navy, and they were being taken down one by one. Arkhan looked at one screen in particular, focusing on it with such intensity that the ambassadors took notice and tried to find what Arkhan was looking so intently at.

Then it arrived in sight. A fifteen-mile-wide asteroid with thrusters and a hyperdrive strapped to it dropped out of FTL Space. Then another one appeared. Then another, and another and another. Soon enough the screen showed twenty asteroids of roughly the same size making their way slowly across the Heaven System towards the planet of Heaven Prime. The ships that had been bombarding the planet from orbit left and the first asteroid’s thrusters fired up to their maximum output.

“Oh no… Please tell us that Operation: Fallen Down isn’t….”

The first asteroid fell into the atmosphere of the Angels’ home world. As soon as it struck, another one followed suit. Then they all did, one by one, until every single asteroid had struck the planet at max speed.

“Do you know how you deal with a race hellbent on murdering all sapient life aside from themselves in the galaxy? You can’t use diplomacy, and you can’t use economics. The only language they understand is genocide. They sought to extinguish my people, your people and all other people from this universe, so I gave them a taste of their own medicine. How many of your worlds have they rendered devoid of your civilizations, hm? This is what they get; this is their Judgement Day, and they have been found wanting.”

Arkhan turned to face the horrified ambassadors and anchormen/women with a look that mixed indifference with acceptance.

“Do unto other as you would have done to yourself. They forced me to use the Golden Rule. There was no other way to win without significant casualties and no other way to avoid crippling myself in the process. I am not happy about this, but they brought this on themselves.”

Arkhan walked out of the hall and stopped just outside of earshot of the ambassadors and news crews.

“And now, the cleanup begins… All these planets, all of them destroyed utterly by my own hand… It will take a while for the terraforming tech to be used and a while longer for them to make the planets livable, but I have time. Now, as for the UGN and its people; how will they act, and what will they think?”

Arkhan chuckled to himself as he made his way to his personal quarters. Things were about to get all the more interesting.