Now before us, as we reeled on in that terrific battle that seemed to us to have endured for ages, there was glowing a great mass of light in the heavens, the stupendous cloud of flaming gas that was the nebula ahead, glowing there among the galaxy's stars that seemed but tiny sparks beside it. Straight toward its flaming mass our ships were whirling, locked still in our awful grapple! For the moment I turned from it, though, as in the struggling mass beside us three serpent-ships flashed down upon a single galaxy-ship. Our force-shafts shot out and crumpled one of them even as it flashed down, while at the same instant the crimson rays of the attacked ship annihilated another. In the same moment, though, the death-beams of the third ship had leapt downward, had swept through the galaxy-ship from stem to stern, annihilating all life inside it and sending it crashing away into the mass of struggling craft about it, while the third serpent-ship leapt toward us. But at that moment, over the throb of our generators and the hiss of our force-shafts, there came to my ears a dull, tremendous roaring sound that drowned out all else, while about us at the same time, about all the ships of our onward-reeling mass, was flooding a vast sea of flaming gas, a fiery ocean into which we were whirling! "_The battle's going inside the nebula!_" yelled Jhul Din, over the thunderous roar of flame about us. "Hold our ship with the rest!" I shouted thickly back to him. "It's going to be fought to the end this time!" Now all about us was a single titanic ocean of glowing gas, as our thousands of struggling ships reeled into the great nebula's raging fires. Through those fires we could make out dimly the shapes of the ships about us, whirling and battling on still in that hell of flame, the heat-resistant hulls of them all enabling them to withstand the comparatively low temperature of the nebula's sea of flame. On and on, striking, whirling, grappling, we raged, force-shafts and death-beams and crimson rays stabbing through the glowing gases that flooded between us, carrying death and destruction still from ship to struggling ship. For still ships were flaring crimson and vanishing, were staggering aimlessly away as the pale beams swept them, or were crumpling and collapsing as our force-shafts struck them, all life inside them annihilated as they collapsed by the inrushing sea of flame, now.