In total, the battle took less than twenty seconds from the first shots fired to the last. At the end of the fight, every Grand Dragon that had been attacking was dead, 45% of the Socialist Republic's forces had been completely destroyed, the northern half of the country was a massive blazing inferno, and my chassis was more than a little singed, but was still fully functional and largely intact. Below is my best attempt at re-constructing the exact sequence of events according to recordings salvaged from various black-boxes, databanks, and other storage sites. Given the short duration of the fight, it will be taken second-by-second.

T = 0 seconds

The opening second featured a massive exchange of fire between the perimeter defenses and the massive swarm of Grand Dragons, as missiles streaked into the air and blasts of nuclear fire lanced across the sky. Though often protected by well over 30 meters of my massively durable armor materials, the anti-dragon batteries still quickly melted under concentrated Dragonfire equal to several cumulative megatons of TNT, resulting in the perimeters being rendered nonfunctional almost immediately. The sheer temperatures also led to 90% of the missiles fired being destroyed before they could clear the mushroom clouds.

The perimeter defenses did however manage to wreak a massive number of casualties on the approaching swarm of Grand Dragons; one simply doesn't outright ignore explosive yield equivalent to multiple kilotons of TNT focused directly on their forehead. Considering the efficient fire allocation I had tuned the perimeter defenses for, this led to around 210 Grand Dragons dropping dead effectively immediately, their braincases blasted open by precisely aimed nuclear fire.

During the first second, the SRA's mobile forces went comparatively unscathed, on account of both the Dragons focusing fire on the nation's stationary defenses, and the relatively long range the engagement was currently taking place at.

Said arguments most emphatically did not apply to the Grand Dragons when I blinked my current chassis and the 180 new battleships I had personally constructed directly into the middle of their swarm. I scored a melee kill on one dragon via tele-frag as I arrived, and the Dragon Eraser cannon arrays I had mounted fired 180 homing plasma pulses, each slamming directly into a Dragon's head and giving them at the very least a debilitating concussion; usually the resulting injuries were outright fatal. This was coupled with the withering barrage of firepower delivered by my battleship fleet, which accounted for another 90 or so Grand Dragon kills; this was largely on account of not all the guns being aligned immediately after jumping, necessitating additional time for each battleship to bring their massive plasma cannons to bear.

In summary, by the end of the first second, the perimeter defenses were completely trashed, 480 Grand Dragons were dead, around 5,900 were still alive, allied mobile forces had taken negligible losses, and the heavily forested northern frontier of the country had been lit entirely on fire.

T = 1 second

At this point, about half the dragon swarm switched to attacking the mobile units which were still moving to intercept, and the other half brought their heads around to try and destroy me and my advance attack force. In the case of the former subgroup, this was a very small traversal of their beams in angular terms, but superheated nuclear plasma still swept over around 30 miles of terrain, setting massive forest fires as they traversed. This is when the battleship forces really started to suffer, as nuclear fire was focused upon them and proved remarkably hard to dodge.

Still, Nanotube Aerosteel still was far more resistant to nuclear fire than Grand Dragon scales. This meant that the second second saw only 30 or so Battleship Equivalent casualties among the main force. Much to the Deep Machine's chagrin, most of this firepower loss was from their smaller, more fragile fighting units. Those built to my specs (which largely equated to building everything that didn't need to be something else out of solid armor) were holding up much better, continuing to pummel Grand Dragons even as they received a beating in turn.

For my advance forces, casualties were significantly lighter, losing only three battleships. This was despite the tighter focus of the dragonfire leading to greater destructive power; largely, this could be attributed to the much shorter dwell time from the dragons having to turn their beams more, but also the closer range making dodging much easier; the same amount of linear acceleration translated into more angular difference, meaning the Grand Dragons had a harder time staying on target.

This second, my 180 massive plasma cannons fired again, each mission-killing a Grand Dragon in one shot. Another 120 casualties could be accounted for by battleships with my advance force, as they brought more of their guns on target. Meanwhile, the main force had finally managed to open fire effectively, their more diffuse (but still lethal) fire accounting for 220 Grand Dragons killed.

As a side note, this demonstrated a major benefit pulsed proton cannons had over continuous beams. Namely, they concentrated more of their destructive energy into a shorter length of time. This not only reduced energy lost to the atmosphere, but it also eliminated the need for the beam to dwell on target, since it delivered all of its killing potential in one short, sharp shock.

Summing it up, a total of 5,380 Grand Dragons still lived at this point in time. Losses had dropped effective battleship numbers to 1,270. Forest fires had been lit deep into the country's interior, though they hadn't had much time to spread yet. Oh, and a swarm of 360 nuclear missiles had just been released from my launch tubes.

T = 2 seconds

The third second of the battle saw another 500 Grand Dragons die to various 'giant plasma cannon to the face'-related causes. In addition, the first few missile kills of the entire engagement took place, as those in closest proximity to my battleplate chassis took multiple megatons of kaboom directly to their vital organs. I didn't stick around to watch the kaboom, instead teleporting to the edge of the Grand Dragon swarm before opening fire again.

On the other, more unfortunate hand, battleship losses this second spiked to 120, mostly among the main force as the Grand Dragons focusing fire finally burned through the massively thick armor plating of my machines and slagged vital internal components. Also, more everything was set on fire.

In summary, around 4,800 Grand Dragons were still on the attack. The perimeter defenses hadn't gotten any less trashed, if anything they'd just gotten even more melted. The equivalent to 1,150 battleships were still operational. The forest fire situation had also gotten sufficiently worse that had I the time to think of such things during the battle, I would have already been completely resigned to contracting Nature Dungeons to simply install a new ecosystem, seeing as the current one was pretty much fried.

T= 3 seconds

This is the point where Grand Dragon losses started to taper off a bit thanks to casualties starting to pile up on my side. Only a bit, though; the vast majority of the forces on my side were still up and shooting. Coupled with the massive salvo of missiles that was starting to really slam home, a total of 470 Grand Dragons suddenly found themselves subjected to swift, efficient death this second.

Fortunately, the logic of 'taking more casualties reduces firepower' also firmly applied to the Grand Dragons assaulting the country I'd put so much work into, as the casualties they managed to dish out only equaled 100 battleships taken out of the fray in terms of raw firepower removed. The radiant heat from all the nuclear fire flying around was also dramatically increasing the ambient temperature of the battlespace, threating to ignite parts of the country that had so far been lucky enough to avoid a direct hit.

Summing up the damage; 4,330 Grand Dragons were still alive, 1,050 battleship equivalent units were still active in addition to my chassis, and yes, shit was still on fire.

After that, the battle contained few, if any surprises. Massive casualties continued to mount on both sides as both forces dwindled. However, the dragons dwindled much faster than my allied forces. By the fifteenth second of the battle the total number of dragons up and flying around was a definitive zero, and after that it was simply a matter of finishing off those which were immobilized but not killed.

Fifteen seconds. That is how long it had taken for this battle to wreak untold destruction on everyone who's wellbeing I held dear. That is less time than it takes most people to say a complex idea. Less time than it takes to walk across a large room. Less time than was necessary to reload the main guns on an Iowa Class Battleship.

Whoever was responsible for this was going to die, though not painfully. There was no point in prolonging the existence of someone who would bring about this level of ruin. No, they were simply going to die as quickly and as thoroughly as possible.

[hr][/hr]

On the moon, a couple of bored Gremlins were watching the display for the concealed telescope arrays observing Terra's goings-on. Jared slurped a smoothy made out of various types of berries as he observed the world below, while his partner Shena ate an excessively spicy sandwich. Currently, Luna was over the planet's night side. Every once in a while (couldn't be more than 45 minutes between incidents), there was a brief flare of light as some Grand Dragon or other incinerated some poor sod, reminding every Gremlin on the moon quite firmly that the beautiful blue-green world below was most emphatically not a safe place to live.

Behind the Gremlin couple, their trio of children began making a series of varied noises, as the oldest girl giggled, hogging the miniature Clockwork Spider all to herself. Meanwhile, her two little brothers whined loudly, infuriated at not getting any time with the toy. On the spider's part, it clearly wanted nothing to do with any of these immature Gremlins, frantically scurrying in an attempt to get away and get back to what it was supposed to be doing. Which was probably cleaning; a very important task when your life support was dependent on keeping everything absolutely spotless.

Thus, Jared and Shena scurried over to their daughter and pried the automaton free of her grip before settling in for a long talk about why not respecting other sapient life was both wrong and suicidally stupid in the long run. They'd barely gotten halfway through their talk when they noticed their youngest, Hexnut, go very still and raise his hand.

After a few moments, Jared asked "Hexnut, did you want to ask me something?"

To this, the young Gremlin clumsily hovered a meter or so into the air and pointed at the screen, asking "Dada, why planet on fiah?"

Immediately, the pair of Gremlin parents turned back to the viewscreen, looking on in horror as they clearly saw an entire subcontinent lighting up with Dragonfire. Immediately, they got back to the console and began to work the viewing systems to zoom in and get a better look at what was going on, engaging Mana Thematograph mode at the same time.

Immediately, the Gremlin observers were confronted with an utterly ludicrous quantity of Atomic Clockwork mana, far beyond even the annual consumption of the entire Lunar Gremlin Republic. Even more worrying is that pretty much everything that ran on Clockwork Mana tended to be very good at not letting said Mana leak, unlike, say, Nature Mana. That stuff got everywhere no matter what you did, which was rather annoying for the life support engineers. Either way, you really shouldn't see such large amounts of Clockwork Mana just floating around barring extreme circumstances, especially not Atomic Clockwork.

Still, they didn't get an answer as to why exactly such a massive amount of that theme of mana was just floating around until they finished re-focusing the BIG optical telescope, the one with the 45-meter focusing mirror. That answered the mystery, as it clearly revealed hundreds of massive flying war machines in various states of damage, literally thousands of dead Grand Dragons, and a single floating triangular structure that massively outgunned everything else in the battlespace.

Jared and Shena nodded to each other, before the lady of the pair immediately grabbed the telephone hotline, and as soon as she heard someone on the other end, she cut straight to the point, saying "The Titan of Steel is alive. I repeat, the Titan of Steel is alive."