And in just ten minutes, all seven fleets—about seventy thousand ships in total, roughly ten thousand per fleet—vanished into the space gates, leaving the dark and cold void behind them empty once again, as if they had never been there to begin with.
Kallus, the Red Empress, and a contingent of Imperial Guards remained aboard the Obliterator and its two escort ships.
Soon after, each of the seven space gates gave a single ripple before shutting down, and the blue, water-like substance dissolved and disappeared completely, just as it had appeared.
The shimmering, blue water-like currents within them broke apart, scattering into nothing. To the untrained eye, it was little more than beauty fading.
But to those who knew, those rippling waves were quantum particles—reshaped and bound by the gates' arcane machinery into portals stable enough to pierce the quantum tunnel, carrying fleets across the stars with speed and precision no ordinary drive could match.
