Well, this wasn't exactly how I'd expected I'd meet the Dread Lords, but their reaction to my presence was exactly as expected.

I waited for their weapons to finish charging before making any effort to dodge - as they were using lasers, starting any earlier would only give them enough time to lead my ships and score a guaranteed hit. Their ship, while relatively near my fleet, was still thousands of kilometers away, meaning that, even with lasers, I would still have time to dodge their shots. And dodge them I did - in fact, I practically skated around their ship, dodging all of its shots, while firing back with all I could. While I was mainly using Swallows against them, I'd also deployed a new ship into battle - the Peregrine Class Cruiser. Armed with enough firepower to defeat an enemy battle group (five ships of similar size plus escorts), they dealt a lot of damage to the Dread Lord ship with their lasers... Well, they would have, except the Dread Lords had plenty of shields to tank the hits with.

Wow, I didn't expect them to be that tough.

Then they fired off some missiles, a few of which clipped some of my sparrows, reducing them to molten slag. A moment later, a powerful laser slammed into one of my peregrines, carving a hole through the ship. As the ship did not have a crew, nor did it have any need for one, this injury, while crippling, didn't put it out of commission, which the ship itself attested to with a laser shot of its own which managed to pierce the shields of the Dread Lord's vessel and inflict a light wound. The blwo wasn't enough to do more than make the crew angry, but it was something, and I was going to take whatever I could get.

My forces returned fire with the Dread Lord's vessel for another five minutes before something finally gave and I scored a lucky shot to their engines, leaving the ship dead in space. The Dread Lords tried to fight back, but since taking out the engine meant they were on emergency power and couldn't use their weapons, the worst they could do was hurl harsh language at me. Apparently emergency power was enough to keep communications running. Also, their ships were tough and I had horrible aim - according to my scans, the amount of bio-signatures on the ship right now was the same as the amount prior to the battle, so I hadn't killed anyone in this battle. That... well, right now, I was torn between finding it good that I hadn't killed anyone and berating myself for my terrible aim.

Well, that line of thought was going nowhere.

I quickly got to work moving a colony ship over to the crippled Dread Lord vessel to begin transferring over the crew, as I wasn't planning on leaving them to die. Yes, the Dread Lords were horrible living beings, but leaving them to float around in space until their life support systems failed was cruel, and if I did that, I'd be no better than them. I wasn't going to just tow their ship to my colonies, though - at least, not with them in it. If they managed to reactivate their ship while it was in one of my shipyards, well, I expected bad things to happen. So, carefully, I moved them into my ship (read: used arc throwers to knock them out, then tied them up and carried them into my colony ship), and set it on a course to my hub system. From there, I tethered the captured vessel to several of my peregrines and set a destination for one of my inner systems, but not the one the crew would be sent to - best to keep them split so they don't know how to follow me home.

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Across the galaxy, while I returned to my territory, the fires of war blazed on. The alliance was launching a push into Dread Lord territory, and had just succeeded in gaining a foothold in those hostile lands. The Drengin were taking advantage of the assault on the Dread Lords to plunder uninhabited worlds, the Korx were buys using the Black Market to make a fortune off of humanitarian supplies, and the Yor were bunkering down to whether out the storm. In other words, exactly how I expected them to act.

Well, time to change some of that.

I'd already sent the colony ships of the Iconians and Yor on their separate ways, hoping to gain goodwill with the owners/makers of those ships. As for the Drengin, I began systematically attempting to dismantle their invasion forces, targeting their staging grounds, as well as any fleets they had already deployed - which were plentiful, as the Drengin had picked a lot of targets, and if I wasn't present, they'd likely have been able to hold everything they were taking. That was...rather scary. Still, As long as I was around, that wasn't going to happen.

As for the Korx, well, that was proving to be more difficult - I couldn't directly harm them without screwing over a lot of people, so I had to get creative. While they were guilty of extorting people for humanitarian aid, for many people, they were the only source of that aid, which meant that removing them from a position of galactic power was, at best, going to cause problems. Of course, if there was another source of supplies, then I could deal with them without any repercussions.

It didn't take much analyzing of the Alliance's database to find out what kind of things were sent as humanitarian aid - what types of food, medical supplies, etc., etc. Once I had that information, it didn't take long to start synthesizing the various chemicals I need to make the medicines, while I already had food available. Once the various medicines and food were ready and packed, I started shipping them over to systems in need, free of charge. Hopefully, this would deprive the Korx of some their black market income and erode their influence, which would make them easier to deal with in the future.

Now I need to figure out what I was going to do next.

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AN: Read and Review! I value your criticisms!

This is Flameal15k, signing off!