[You just need to tag along] Hye corrected her, [Don't engage, not until I give you the signal]
[Got it!]
As she started to just chase the caravan without any engagement, the entire situation turned into a weird situation. The caravan and the fleet alongside it seemed like they couldn't leave the shielded area. They were safe inside, but they were still entrapped.
"They didn't use such a great weapon before, and that means they only can run it up for a limited amount of time," Hye kept analysing the Toranks' hidden card, trying to see through its main weakness.
To him, having such a weapon would have let the Toranks fleets and caravan pass through everything without any resistance. So the only explanation for not using it was some sort of limitation.
There was a limitation of movement, but that wouldn't matter as long as the shield would run for a very long time. But then he recalled how the shield got activated at first, and finally linked the dots.
The fatal weakness here was the time limit for using this shield. It seemed it could run for a short period of time, just a few hours at most. That meant once using it, the Toranks needed to run as fast as they could and not be in any hostile territory.
They'd either take down their enemies completely, which didn't happen as they wanted in the lady nymph's fleet case, or they'd take the express way out from the entire fighting area.
Hye started to believe more in such hypotheses. And to make sure things wouldn't take a turn they didn't prepare to, he made sure to share such theory with the other two, asking the pirate king to always adjust his position if needed to be on the collision course with the Toranks fleets.
Just in a couple of hours, the Toranks fleet changed their running direction many times already, making Hye more reassured about his earlier guess.
He preferred to not try and enforce them towards one route, waiting patiently for their shield to expire. And while doing so, he kept watching that portal vigilantly, waiting for any sign of movement there.
As it seemed, things didn't just escalate at one point, but at many points at the same time!
The chase kept going on for hours. All of sudden, the shield that protected the Toranks party vanished, turned into nothing in a blink of an eye.
It came without warning. And seeing this made Hye grin at first, before new development happened.
The first movement came from the Toranks themselves. It wasn't from the caravan direction, instead it was from a distant place in this region.
[We got new intel] the pirate king was the first to relay this over to him, [It's indeed weird, but I'll send them over to you to check]
"Weird? Let's see..." Hye was curious to know what made the pirate king describe this intel like that. And when he saw the reports sent over, he couldn't help but feel the same.
"A huge fleet appeared out of nowhere not far from here?!!" he muttered to himself while continuing to receive more reports. The more he read, the more surprised he felt.
It wasn't just one fleet, but so far five grand fleets were spotted in close by areas. On top of that, they all belonged to the Toranks race.
There was no clear indication before about any of these fleets. And seeing them appear out of thin air like that made Hye suspect this had already been planned beforehand.