The leaders of the Golden Skull Alliance couldn't decide on their next course of action. Their current strategy was not that impressive at the moment. For now, the expeditionary fleet had settled on Intercepting any nearby alien raiding fleets in order to earn easy sums of MTA merits and bulk salvage. So long as their scouts diligently scouted the environment and prevented any alien forces from sneaking up without notice, the expeditionary fleet had a good chance of taking down three to five raiding fleets while incurring only minimal losses. Ves did not necessarily object to doing this for a time. The Larkinson Clan needed a lot of MTA merits to acquire high technologies and gain access to greater services that were necessary to form a small but fully-fledged first-class fleet. However, what Ves desired even more was phasewater! Many of his new and upcoming Larkinson mech design projects demanded the acquisition of a huge amount of phasewater! Without thousands of kilograms of this highly desirable substance, there was no way for the Larkinson Clan to fabricate all of the Storm Swords, Elephant Projects, Transcendent Punisher Mark Ill's and other transphasic mechs needed to comprehensively upgrade the Larkinson Army! What he needed was gigantic quantities of phasewater, and the only way of obtaining what he and his clan required was to attack a more important alien target. Right now, that either meant attacking the Ophidia System or the Eminent of Torment. The former was a lot easier to accomplish, but it still entailed a relatively tough fought against large quantities of alien assets! The amount of phasewater that the expeditionary fleet could obtain from this alien staging area would also be limited. Numerous interrogations already revealed that the aliens periodically shipped away all of the truly valuable goods. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝙬𝙚𝓫𝒏𝓸𝓿𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝙤𝓶 No, the real goal that Ves and his clan should be striving for was claiming the Eminence of Torment's bounty! Not only would the Golden Skullers gain the right to field a genuine warship, but they were bound to harvest much greater quantities of phasewater! The phase lord's fleet was bound to accumulate a lot of phasewater. This was because the staging area at the Ophidian System occasionally transferred batches of this vital substance to the Eminence of Torment rather than any important alien strongholds in the rear. Even if the so-called Torment Fleet did not have a lot of readily available phasewater on hand, the Golden Skull Alliance could always extract it from the phase lord's flesh! The Eminence of Torment's apparent body was only a condensed version of his true form. Just like the Trampier of Torment, his real body must be at least as large as a small starship! Even if the concentration of phasewater in his enormous mass of flesh and blood did not exceed 0.1 percent, that still amounted to a huge quantity of phasewater in absolute terms! Ves felt pained by the fact that the bodies of the phase whales that the expeditionary fleet defeated in the past ended up in the hands of the Mech Trade Association. Aberrant or not, any phase whale could easily contain thousands of kilograms of phasewater on account of their substantial mass! The MTA merits he received for defeating the unclean whales and criminal whales paled in comparison to the profits earned by the mechers. The Red Two were the greatest scammers in the Red Ocean! No other organizations had become so proficient at robbing people of their spoils and making their victims feel grateful in the process! Ves narrowed his eyes. If the Golden Skull Alliance somehow managed to track down and Intercept the Eminence of Torment, he did not believe the Red Two would be able to arrive quickly enough to claim the carcass for themselves. The rules and regulations surrounding the bounties did not state anything about needing to surrender the entire bodies to the Red Association or the Red Fleet. This was not always possible as the carcass of a dead phase lord may be too big and heavy to ship back to human space in a short amount of time. The additional risks and troublesome logistics might also deter a lot of pioneering organizations from putting a lot of effort into hunting down the native gods. In short, this was a good opportunity to defeat a phase lord and carve up his exceptional body before the Red MTA arrived to steal away the best spoils! Ves met with Calabast in private in order to ask a few additional questions. "Do you have any indication of the concentration of phasewater inside's Eminence of Torment body and blood stream?" "No. That is not the sort of information that mortal aliens should be aware of." Calabast replied. "We can only draw from a variety of sources that the Eminence of Torment has only barely become a phase lord. He is over 800 standard years old but he has never made any progress due to his injured condition. The other orvan gods hold him in contempt because of this. There are rumors that the reason why the Eminence is assigned to oversee the raids on human space is because he has taken refuge in the Red Cabal. He is hoping that the phase whales will agree to cure his condition in exchange for his service." That sounded interesting. The Eminence of Torment turned out to be a tragic figure. Ves wondered what exactly happened that caused the alien god to botch his transformation and whether it could be remedied. I le suspected that the phase whales were just leading the poor fellow on. The Red Cabal ultimately treated him no differently from a slightly more superior form of cannon fodder. Calabast decided to ask a question of her own at this time. "Just out of curiosity, is our mutual friend Ylvaine able to track down the Eminence of Torment's coordinates?" She asked. "You have been banking on his predictive capabilities to track down high value targets. Is it possible for your pet prophet to provide us with the phase lord's current coordinates?" "I'm not sure. Give me a minute." Ves mentally contacted the Great Prophet for a minute. Once he obtained the answers he needed, he regained his focus but did not look too optimistic. "Ylvaine is powerful enough to predict the Torment Fleet's current coordinates, but... it is much more difficult to predict its future trajectory. This is not that useful because by the time we reach this location, the alien fleet has already moved far away. We will have to invest a lot of time to make sequential predictions that slowly allow us to close the distance." "That can take months or years." Calabast replied. "Not only that, but most of our starships are equipped with old-fashioned standard FTL drives. Only warp drives and superdrives are able to travel freely in the large void between stars. Our fleet can only intercept the Torment Fleet with all of the forces that we can load inside the Spirit of Bentheim and a handful of other superdrive-equipped starships." That was indeed a huge limitation. Human FTL drives were fast, convenient and reliable, but they also had the enormous downside that they worked similar to an ancient rail system in space. Any starship that entered into FTL travel could only move from one star system to another star system in a fairly direct trajectory. While there were ways to forcibly interrupt their journey and cause them to return to realspace in the middle of an interstellar void, this was not a practical way to intercept the Torment Fleet! "The Spirit of Bentheim is equipped with three second-class superdrives in total." Ves noted. "We can dismount two of these drives and install them on a couple of fleet carriers if possible." "That will still limit us to bringing only a fraction of the amount of mechs at our disposal. Do you really want to risk an attack against a phase lord and his fleet which is no doubt well-equipped with just a couple of thousand mechs?" "We can concentrate all of our highest performing mechs in our strike force. We both know that the ace mechs will do much of the heavy lifting." "I might support your idea if we had 7 ace mechs under our control like before, but we don't have enough to give us a comfortable safety margin." "We might be able to challenge the Torment Fleet with a smaller quantity of mechs as long as our machines have all been upgraded to quasi-first-class standards." Ves proposed. "That... may be possible, but how long will that take?" Calabast retorted. "Currently, I see only three possible ways we can successfully intercept the Torment Fleet. First, we do as you suggested and wait until we have built up an elite force of quasi-first-class mechs. Second, we find a way to acquire and install a large quantity of warp drives or superdrives onto our starships. Third, we learn from the example of the Gemini Family and look for additional allies to bolster our numbers. I personally prefer the latter as that is the most expedient option." She was right. If Ves couldn't wait to complete the first or second options, he could settle for attracting a bunch of like-minded allies in order to gather enough superdrive-equipped carriers to catch up with and attack the Torment Fleet with confidence! However, that entailed giving up a large proportion of the spoils. Ves did not want to be left with only a fraction of valuable phase lord body parts. "Let's wait and collect more information." He told his spymaster. "We can still refine our plans and come up with better options. Try and look beyond the obvious targets. There has to be a lot more than just the Ophidia System and the Eminence of Torment. There are lots of occupied star systems beyond Torald's borders." "We did manage to collect enough intelligence to give us a rough understanding of dozens of occupied star systems that are located deeper into alien space than the Ophidia System, but attacking them is not worthwhile. They are either occupied by relatively minor races that do not offer enough valuable plunder, or they are fortified to the point where our mech forces are bound to suffer serious casualties." Ves furrowed his brows in thought. "Can you pass on the intelligence of those star systems? I would like to take a look at the information myself. All of those planets that have long been occupied by the indigenous aliens are bound to hold a lot of goods." He began to entertain ideas about targeting these star systems. So far, the indigenous aliens were enthusiastically raiding human colonies. Why not turn the tables against them and raid their own territories in retaliation? Who said that humanity had to remain on the defense? As long as his expeditionary fleet managed to catch the indigenous aliens off-guard, it should definitely be possible to plunder an established alien planet and get away before any reinforcements arrived! Of course, Ves could not directly send the expeditionary fleet into alien space on a whim. The Golden Skull Alliance needed to follow a process and gather enough information to lower the risks of this operation. Ves clearly understood that a lot of his fleet's past successes had been due to good preparation and developing a thorough understanding of the opposition. It only took a single mistake to destroy the fleet and cause everyone who took part in an ill-fated adventure to lose their lives! Even so, Ves did not give up on looking for alternate and more lucrative raiding targets. This was the only way for his clan to quickly obtain lots of phasewater. Ves smiled at Calabast. "Ylvaine is slowly growing stronger over time. He is gaining more and more nourishment from the environment Just like all of our other design spirits. Who knows. He may be able to provide us with a prediction that may give us a golden opportunity to overtake the Eminence of Torment. We just need time to grow."