The fleet unleashed a hundred thousand drones in the next five seconds, while Sylvie stared in awe. The efficiency, the lethality, the organization. It was beautiful to the forgotten AI.
The Androids had deployed from the bays of Creeping Darkness, but they were all in one bay, and even for their limited numbers it took them ten whole seconds to get out of the door. It was smooth, but it should have been far better if they were properly organized for combat. That was a failing on her part.
Max felt the panic of the Energy Being as it realized that this was an ambush. Nico had collapsed the boundary between the layers so that it couldn't retreat, and there were dozens of ships here now, all optimized to fight his species.
The Cathedral Ships had a massive number advantage at first, but the damage from the Antimatter Torpedoes, which it didn't quite understand, had wiped out two thirds of their fleet instantly. It had to report this to the others. The psychotic and genocidal arm of the ancient humans had returned, and it was hunting them, not the other way around.
With the interference from the collapsed layers, there was no way to tell if its comrades had received its warning before the Greater Energy Being decided that discretion was the better part of valour and began to flee through the Prime Layer, as it termed the one that Max and the others lived on.
They had caused too much damage for their own ships to travel, Warp Bubbles wouldn't stabilize, and they couldn't shift between layers in the battleground, so it was feeling safe for the moment.
All that it needed to do was reach the edge of the disturbance, and it could slip away through the layers again and recover from the injuries that it had taken.
An Orbital Lance from Creeping Darkness made a direct impact as it tried to flee, and the creature was bleeding energy as it fled, but it couldn't form into Lesser Demons in the maelstrom of distorted laws and chaotic energy caused by the massive damage of Nico's first strike tactics.
The outgoing fire from the World Ship began to slow as Sylvie devoted more resources to keeping her shields up against the enemy's last ditch attempt to destroy the greatest threat in the region, until suddenly the battlefield fell silent.
The Greater Energy Being had mostly escaped, the Cathedral Ships in the area were annihilated, and everyone was stuck at less than light speed travel rates, for a region that extended larger than the planetary radius of the nearby star.
"Well, that was fun. We should do that again sometime." Nico sighed with satisfaction.
"I do not recommend that. The repair of this zone will take sixteen hours before it is stable enough for Warp Travel, and even after that, it will not be able to sustain another battle for centuries." Sylvie informed her.
"Wait, you can fix this?" Nico asked.
"You did this without knowing that it could be fixed?" Sylvie retorted.
Max was about to speak when he received a notification from the System Nanobots.
[Optimization materials detected. Optimizing.]
Max wasn't sure what it was talking about, but he was happy to have any new breakthrough that it could find.
He had never expected that it would manage to analyze and adapt the ability to absorb the energy from destroyed energy beings after watching the guardian of the Golden Legion do it, though.
A wave of energy slammed into his body like a Plasma Cannon to the chest, and every cell of Max's body began to glow with energy as the Nanobots happily fulfilled their mission and began to remake his body into what they viewed as the optimal combat form.
Not a full energy being, that form had already proven to have drawbacks thanks to its lack of stability in various layers of space. The nanobots had determined that they could create a stabilized hybrid, and they were drawing upon the computing power of every AI and Android in the region to help them finish the adjustment.
That wasn't something that Nico could miss, even if she weren't aware of her nanobots actions with her level of attunement to their machinery.
"What are the nanobots doing?" Sylvie asked as she released her excess computing power to them.
"I think they're trying to remake Max, but they didn't have the processing power to figure out how to do it on their own, only an understanding of the theory." Nico suggested.
She wasn't completely sure either, but it seemed like a logical answer.
Slowly, Max's body began to stop glowing so brightly over the course of the next three hours, until finally the mobile suit was forcefully powered down and fell away from him, showing the current state of his body.
It looked like someone had drawn Max on a bowl of pudding, jiggling and amorphous. But it was slowly recompiling him into himself again.
They could all see the bones rebuilding themselves, followed by the tendons and muscles, until finally, there was a full and intact Max standing in front of them again.
Nico could feel the satisfaction of the System Nanobots as they completed their work and released the excess computing power that they had borrowed from everything in the area. Whatever they had done, it must have been a success of some sort.
Just when she thought it was over and Max was going to wake up, there was a sudden shift in the energies nearby, and the leftover energy in the region from all the destroyed lesser energy beings, as well as the trail of energy left from the Greater Energy Being, began to flow toward the World Ship.
This wave didn't seem to remake anything, but Max's eyes were glowing gold, and getting brighter as he absorbed more energy.
The whole region began to shift as the excess energy was absorbed, and the layers began to rebuild themselves, leaving the battlefield looking as good as new, and Max's eyes glowing with a golden light that made the whole room blindingly bright.
Then the light began to fade, and the System showed Max a new message.
[Available Energy Miscalculated. Please return the additional energy source to the immediate vicinity to complete the process.]
