Fiction:Attero Dominatus/Mirus Campaign/The Battle of Demogorgon Prime

In the baleful eye of its sun, a world stood. The capital of a Gigaquadant-spanning empire, it stood as metaphor for the defiance of its ruling race. Its capital city lay as a monument to the pride of its leaders - a mural on which its denizens celebrated their superiority. Beyond that it was dotted by a network of nigh-impenetrable fortresses - towering bastions designed to obliterate the attempts of lesser species to topple the rulers of this world. Vast lines of statues - those of heroes of ages past guarded its boulevards, encouraging its defenders on while the planet itself seemed to be a guard dog, hellbent on serving its master's to the last.-

But this world was not Mirenton, nor Alcanti, not Paris, not Mou' Cyran, nor any of the capitals of the other great powers. It was beset on all sides by the raging fury of virtually the entire Gigaquadrant. It stood as a symbol for the hubris and arrogance of the Dominatus. In the dead eyes of those statues, both on the great roads of Malogenesis or in its museums lay a smug look of the Dominatus' defiance. In the black and gold hulls of the remnants of the fleet defending it lay a metaphor for what historians would question as either a brilliant gambit or delusional insanity. Yes it was an entire system built to celebrate the grandeur of the Dominatus and to defend it at all costs - a mighty cliff reinforced by the arrogance of its masters, but against it came a tide of all those it had wronged - a roaring storm of both ghosts from the past and enemies from the present.

This is the story of every pebble making up that cliff and every drop of water making up that wave. It is a story of two pugilists locked in a mortal struggle - one on the ground, biting like a rabid dog at his aggressors fist, and one above, gouging out the eyes of his opponent. It is a story of glorious works of art and sculpture erased by the unending firestorm of war, of the flickering lights of countless lives being extinguished by the callous disregard of history's march, and of the last dying breaths of mortals who had fancied them gods.

This is the story of the invasion of Demogorgon Prime.

The War So Far
For 4 years, a war had raged, a slave revolt on December 27, 2791 had ripped through the Tyranny, and in response to the weakening of the Dominatus juggernaut, its rivals had gone to war with it. However, Dominatus fortune as well as an uncoordinated initial effort meant that the Dominatus recovered enough to launch campaigns in the distant galaxies of Bunsen, Borealis, Andromeda, and the Plazith Rim against their opponents, campaigns which came frightfully close to a Dominatus victory before leading to the Dominatus being vanquished from these galaxies. After the defeat of the Dominatus in these galaxies, these races banded together, forming the Anti-Dominatus Coalition, and lead an attack on Dominatus Mirus, attacking at the hypergate system of Manticore. In a series of cataclysmic battles, they took Manticore and much of the surrounding territory.

Despite this, the Dominatus counterattack drove them back to Manticore, where the cataclysmic second battle of Manticore took place. The largest naval battle of the entire Domiantus War, it was an event watched with eager and panicked eyes by both the participants of the war, and other prying eyes. The betrayal of the Dominatus by the ULE, which the Dominatus believed would help them, broke the stalemate and led to a Dominatus military retreat that culminated in the destruction of the hypergate, leaving the extragalactic forces stranded and the Dominatus navy wrecked. The ensuing campaigns saw the Dominatus rebuild their strength while the ULE and the remnants of the Invasion force battled alone against the Dominatus.

The Dominatus nearly succeeded in the defeat of these dismembered and undersupplied forces until the second invasion group arrived from a tour in deep intergalactic space and reestablished supply lines. This began a nigh-unstoppable push in which the Dominatus lost more ground everyday than they gained. While it was a slow grind against the might of a Gigaquadrantic hyperpower, it was an inexorable march which saw the Dominatus pushed back in spite of their new weapons developments. Despite the inclusion of scorched earth policies and daring tactics such as the use of Cyclops special forces and increased cooperation between its constituents, the Dominatus found themselves in an increasingly precarious position. With the fall of the Overseer Citadels, even the Imperium of War abandoned the Tyranny while the Troodontid Empire refused to intervene. Without any allies left, the Dominatus were left to fight alone.

Acting Tyrant was banished while more insane minds in the Dominatus General Staff influenced the demigod like child Tyrant Castigon Mortarius Heimdall to invest solely in the TIAMAT, a Dominatus hyperweapon that rewrote the fabric of the universe itself. The Dominatus strategy then hinged on a delaying act while the TIAMAT was developed as much as possible, with the end goal of using it in a final apocalyptic battle over Demogorgon Prime to defeat the ADC. The unstoppable ADC advanced eventually brought it to the home systems of the Dominatus where they waited patiently, mustering forces in preparation for the final battle of the war. Both sides pooled their forces and waited for the orders to prepare for the end of days.

The End of Days
An uneasy silence swept through the most fortified system in the Gigaquadrant as the Dominatus and their "children" awaited what all knew to be the final battle of the war. The shattered remnants of the Dominatus navy, spearheaded by the Mark III Ascendancy Class Ultracarrier Ascendancy looked at the entrance point to the system imbued with uneasy feelings. On one hand, their entire late war strategy had centered around preparing for a final massive confrontation over Demogorgon Prime.

Their aim was not to win the battle - they were too far outnumbered, but to delay the invading forces while the somewhat functional TIAMAT charged its main weapon. Tyrant Castigon Mortarius Heimdall had made the ultimate sacrifice and embedded himself, the product of the Dominatus' latest attempts to enhanced themselves, into the TIAMAT, which Dominatus scientists had supreme confidence in working. With this knowledge, the last fleets of the Tyranny were filled with a mixture of feelings - a sense of excitement at the opportunity to save their vaunted Tyranny, an alternating sense of uneasiness and acceptance at their impending morality, a sense of anxiety towards their final battle, and the cold unfeeling devotion to duty that had been programmed into them.

Below on Demogorgon Prime itself, the ground forces waited for the inevitable invasion - in their towering citadels, their eldritch, cathedral like bunkers, and their imposing walls, they waited. The shield was estimated to be strong enough to blunt the worst of the bombardment of the entire projected allied fleet, forcing the ADC to land ground troops for both symbolic and practical reasons. The Dominatus had prepared the entire planet as a monument to the carnage to ensue - the spires which dotted the planet looked condescendingly down at the drop sites, while those in the bunkers prepared to bathe their forsaken home in their nemesis' blood. Their goal was merely to tie up the allied ground forces till the Tiamat went into effect, and an ensuing counterattack would crush those foolish enough to think they could conquer the Tyranny's home.

All manner of denizens inhabited the thought to be impregnable bastion of Dominatus power. Dominatus armor and mecha waited patiently in emplacements and hidden caverns while synthetics, overseers, and Dominatus manned the emplacements. Even the twisted and mutated wildlife of the defiled planet rallied with their Dominatus masters, waiting in the land, the air, and sea, to feast upon the helpless corpses of physically living but damned souls. In hidden locations the Dominatus' largest warmachines sat, ready for the call to attack and visit ruination amongst the ADC. Impelled by both arrogance and desperation, the Dominatus had prepared Demogorgon Prime for the wrath of the gods. Perhaps they fancied themselves composers, creating a symphony of destruction to rhyme with the last verse of their national anthem.

With martial might, and brilliant minds, we make gods kneel before us All that exists, and even more, will be driven before us. Our foes perish, crushed by our will, swallowed whole by oblivion. We will prevail, unstoppable, the Tyranny will rule all!

One could even say that the angry ghosts of those who had gone before looked to the slaughter with enticing and eager smiles. The dead eyes of the cyclopean statues of the Tyranny's heroes which dominated the streets of Malogenesis seemed to have grins etched upon their unmoving faces. The scenes of art and music at the Tyranny's cultural bastions seemed to echo the delusional bloodlust and determination of its defenders as the Dominatus pictured in scenes depicting the wholesale slaughter and holocaust of civilizations, both past, present and future, looked encouragingly at the beings taunting the Gigaquadrant.

The Face of Mortality
No longer Acting Tyrant, but instead the head of the land-based defense of Demorgorgon Prime, Wolframicht Stahl paced the colossal halls of Apogee, the Dominatus military headquarters. The simulations had informed him that he had created as defensible a planet as possible, but the steadfastness and confidence that informed his tone as he gave final orders hid a mind wracked by doubts from the outcomes of the previous campaigns.

He had asked for the power of an Acting Tyrant and had been granted it - he had spearheaded the initial Dominatus defense of Mirus. He had no excuse for failure as a commander save for his own insufficiency - there was no Medusa to blame as in the campaigns of 2791, 2792, and 2793. And it had seemed that perhaps at Manticore, the Dominatus might have snatched victory in this cataclysmic war. But their strategy, one based on complete ruthlessness and overwhelming force both drew new enemies such as the Apalos, and inspired current ones to a fanatic defense. And in the end, the fragile honor between thieves and criminals, the weak and faulty glue in their alliance with the ULE ended with a betrayal all should have seen coming.

In the days that followed, the Dominatus attempted to use their last reserves to consolidate a frontline while the ULE relieved the ADC forces. Despite cutting off the ADC by destroying the Manticore Hypergate, and bleeding out the ADC invasion force to such an extent that only the Tralor could launch offensive action, the Dominatus had lost enough that the General Staff no longer had faith in Stahl. Indeed he was demoted back to a General Staff position while minds who had faith in the Dominatus' most advanced weapons hinged their strategies on those.

Perhaps in his campaigns against the ULE after, he saw some success, blunting their offensive while the new Dominatus fleets went after the ADC in Operation Medusa. But it was too little, too late - the arrival of the second Allied Invasion Group at the Battle of Terminus as well as the funds devoted to new research as opposed to current designs saw a Dominatus navy too weak to do anything but fight a fighting retreat. Perhaps under his lead, if all resources had gone into Mark IIs, his campaigns against the ULE would have succeeded and he could have forced the ADC into a ceasefire, but such counterfactuals were the bread and butter of the myth of Dominatus invincibility.

Stahl knew as much as anyone that the myth of the unstoppable Dominatus, the fastest growing empire in the Gigaquadrant as of late was one that never acknowledged their luck. They could have been crushed like an insect by the ULE in its early days and could have been easily expunged from its extragalactic holdings by those galaxies' resident powers. Only a supreme amount of fortune, infighting amongst the incumbent powers, and random luck let the Dominatus enter a position where their meteoric rise was not immediately stomped out by cautious foes. It was this luck that had allowed them to get this far, this luck that had allowed them to not have been stomped out in 2792 by a unified enemy, and this luck that had let them fight against the entire Gigaquadrant.

And so he saw that the results of this defensive campaign, one in which the Dominatus lost ground everyday as one in which reality was finally catching up with the Tyranny. And even he began to agree, as sector capitals were lost, overseer citadels overrun, that the last best hope of the Tyranny lay not in the cold rationale of traditional military tactics and stratagems, but in the lunacy of trust in their last great weapons. He did not share with those who didn't already know the bleakness of the situation - for in his resigned mind, he saw that the fanaticism and insanity of blind faith in miracles was a better motivator than the acknowledgement of the cold nihilism of an uncaring universe.

A Feverish Dream
The last years of the war saw the Dominatus military machine degenerate into a massed craze of scientists, generals, and admirals vying for the limited resources they had. Each supposedly war-winning invention that was deployed though quickly proved itself to be simply too little and too late in the face of the growing allied Juggernaut. Dominatus and overseers who martyred themselves for the most extreme augmentations simply saw themselves blasted apart when ADC air supremacy found them on their rampages. In the cold calculus of ADC commanders, earth-shattering bombardments could be called down upon their own troops if it meant the annihilation of the ever-rarer Dominatus. Ultra-Heavy vehicles saw themselves utterly dominate the battlefield till they found themselves utterly and hopelessly outgunned by ADC starships. The Mark 3s were a nightmare for ADC forces the first time they were encountered, with stories of small Mark 3 strike groups crushing small Allied fleets circulating through the Allied consciousness. But this fear was eventually quashed completely by the sheer weight of Allied forces and numbers. Even the Dominatus Nemesis Missile program, which culminated in the launch of an integralactic hyperspatial weapon of mass destruction finished only with the destruction of a tiny sliver of Allied industrial capacity in Plazith. Indeed, such an experimental weapon served only to anger the Allies rather than do anything substantial.

Perhaps to the average allied trooper, the Dominatus still inspired an incomparable degree of terror. One can imagine the feelings felt by an Allied trooper when confronted by an army wherein the baseline trooper was a 4 meter tall cybernetic soldier with an exoskeleton comparable to advanced power armor. Indeed, such a trooper must have felt that such an army was the product of the feverish imagination of a maniac hellbent on making an army based not on the constraints of reality and logic but on the crazed ideas of fantasy. But those with a strategic view felt only a sense of cautious encouragement : each day presented another vanquished nightmare. These days the Overseer Citadels had had been razed to the ground, permanently preventing the Tyranny’s production of its signature super soldiers. In one such episode, Paragon Uriel Ultanos presided over the complete destruction of the gaudy spires of Sybaris. He saw each spire of gold melt into formless rivers, each marble edifice crumble into dust, and each diamond shattered into an invisible mist. In another, Imperator Caligustus ordered Bruteigon and whatever Berzeker his fleet could reach to be rescued from the jaws of death as Mirusians and Hegemony alike ruptured the fragile crust of Chaedes with flood basalt to erase the Dominatus presence on Chaedes forever. Those overseers which the War-Imperials could not reach in time and those who simply refused to retreat -of which there were many- burned even as they drowned in molten rock. To add insult to the injury, the Imperium of War then not only retreated from Dominatus territory altogether, correctly assuming the ADC could not waste further time by chasing them, they began to draw up plans to reannex the Bellus subsector should the Tyranny fall. Each day saw the Dominatus pushed back, some encircled and destroyed, some starved of supplies and annihilated, and others pushed to their breaking point. Indeed the apocalyptic battles that took place, especially those over the Dominatus’ sector capitals, proved to be abattoirs to the ADC, battles with the casualties of smaller wars. But once those worlds were silenced, as they inevitably were by the combination of a mass of allied bodies and tactical genius, the Dominatus were deprived of both significant prestige and industrial capacity. Yes, a trooper on one of those desolate wastelands, surrounded by mountains of dead comrades and faced with the prospect of an attack by the Dominatus’ newest weapons could feel a sense of dread and futility, but those on top saw a clear path to the destruction of their mortal foe.

The Dominatus, on the other hand, having formed a temporary junta saw everywhere their latest attempts to turn the tide fail, and put their faith in a crazed plan that would be laughed at by saner heads had it not come at such a dark time. It called for the Dominatus to buy as much time for the development and testing of the new TIAMAT as possible. Indeed, the Dominatus hedged their bets solely on their most unpredictable, but by far their most powerful weapon on war. The Dominatus were committed to paying any price for their long-term survival, and thus the allies saw the Dominatus change tactics. Frenzied offensives became the norm amongst the previously retreating Dominatus. These attacks were so ferocious and sometimes damaging that they forced the ADC to stall temporarily, reinforce its lines and plan cautiously before proceeding. Unknown to the Allies, these last attacks were draining the very last of the Dominatus’ strategic reserves; if they had known how utterly desperate the Dominatus were, perhaps these furious, sometimes cataclysmic attacks, were indicators of the ADC’s nearby victory.

Dominatus “heroes” if they could be called as such demonstrated acts of valor comparable to the Allies’ own at the colossal Second Battle of Manticore. In the defense of the Stygian Gate, the offense at Terminus, and the Lanat campaign, they demonstrated an uncanny degree of tactical acumen and shrewdness hitherto not seen. But all in the Tyranny knew that the war had progressed to the point where there was simply no hope in winning through the proven methods of the past. One poem written shortly after some Dominatus archives were recovered after the war compared the Dominatus strategy to a professional army sacrificing itself in the hopes that a group of cultists could summon an angry god. Indeed by the end of the war, the Dominatus had succeeded in developing the TIAMAT as far as they could, and had prepared for an epic confrontation with all the forces they could muster at Demogorgon Prime, where the TIAMAT had been moved. The development had taken so long that it only had a chance of working when the Thanatos subsector had been breached, and paranoid Dominatus had destroyed their own naval Installation after developing the TIAMAT. It was obvious to all in the Tyranny, that in this last battle, quite literally everything would be decided.

The Heart of Darkness
Allied Intelligence had ascertained many things about Demogorgon Prime. Indeed, even without any reconnaissance, the majority of the facts pointed to an unsavory conclusion. In this last battle, the fate of the war would be decided. In this last battle, the Dominatus would deploy each and every last one of their forces. In this last battle, they would face the most defended system in the galaxy and the remnants of the Dominatus’ once thought unstoppable navy. To those allied commanders who had once planned for the defense of Mirenton or Alcanti when it was thought the Dominatus would batter through all of their defenses, they envisioned a system made fortress, one perhaps more defensible than the Dominatus sector capitals or Hypergates. But each one was prepared to pay the final price to exit the war.

Outside the Demogorgon system, the allies pooled an utterly gigantic fleet, one perhaps only exceeded in size by the one that battled at Manticore. The allies were perhaps at the economic and industrial breaking point due to the cost of waging such a titanic war in a foreign galaxy, but they stood poised to enter the ring one last time. Commanders recognized the time as one likely to never again occur. Speeches youths are forced to memorize were made that day as the most powerful militaries of the Gigaquadrant gathered one last time to descend on the Dominatus. Perhaps Emperor Wormulus’s speech entitled “Why?” in which he expounded on the DCP’s greatness.

Why are we here?

''It is not to form a new order! It is not to have material to boast about! It is not to prove ourselves to our superiors!''

''The current order is one we have created! We have planet-wide annals dedicated to the history of our supremacy! We have no superiors!''

Why are we here?

''It is because the Gigaquadrant has forgot why we are Plazith’s hegemon. It is because a rising power thought they could challenge us and wrest away our pre-eminence. It is because the Gigaquadrant is forgetful, and needs it burnt into its consciousness that the Delpha Coalition of Planet’s supremacy is not an ephemeral tumor brought by luck, but mandated by our destiny.''

Why are we here?

''It is not to fight the Dominatus. It is to fight the doubts that are perhaps present in the minds of those who have forgotten who we are. It is not to raze this miserable excuse of a planet to the ground, but to completely incinerate the thought that at any time in the future, history will forget about the Delphi Coalition of Planets. It is not to gain another war story, but to demonstrate to those who perhaps have not seen that such stories are regular to a civilization such as ours.''

Why are we here?

''It is because we are the linchpin of the current order for a reason. It is because we are a necessary force for order. It is because the Dominatus are but a hiccup in the vast march of history and we are the synchronized stomping of the boots.''

Why are we here?

''It is because the Dominatus have forgotten what exactly it means to fight the Delpha Coalition of Planets. It is because in their pride, they have thought themselves our equals. It is because they have forgotten why we will stand and they will fall.''

Why are we here?

Because we are order, and they are chaos.

Because we are civilization, they are barbarians.

Because we are destined to succeed, they are destined to fail.

Why are we here?

Why have we always been here?

Why will we always be here?

Because we are the Delpha Coalition of Planets.

But the volume of oratory gave way to the silence of prayer.

They prayed to their gods.

They prayed to themselves.

They prayed to fate.

They prayed to free will.

They prayed to technology.

They prayed to magic.

And in the vast darkness outside the Demogorgon system, their prayers floated aimlessly, looking blindly for answers.

Only tomorrow could the damned be separated from the blessed.

Tomorrow was Judgement Day.

Moment of Reckoning
It was a story that repeated itself numerous times before. An infinite armada of ships surging through the vast voids of space to a battle. The unceasing brutality and scale of the war had numbed even the most sensitive of souls to the unending horrors of a war against a mortal species that fancied themselves the masters of the gods themselves. Despite this, the cold and dried up scars which criss-crossed the skins, hides, and exoskeletons of the Tyranny’s myriad foes rustled with a burning fire that stood in stark contrast to the scabbed and necrotized flesh of ennui and callous monotony. For in this battle, they saw a doorway out of the several years of an eternity in hell.

They counted amongst themselves veterans of the colossal battles of the war. Veterans of such battles of the Deathstorm, of Invictus, of Manticore, of Terminus, and of countless other such meat grinders flew through the dark, uncaring void of space to smite their mortal enemy. Perhaps even the Junction, the unbelievably ancient power, more a force of nature and a fact of the universe than a civilization perhaps felt a tinge of emotion, one long denied to their jaded selves as fully appreciated the feast to come.

And on the other side of the vast void the Tyranny’s sensors displayed a fact seen on countless other monitors in the past - the might of the Gigaquadrant falling upon a single system. Who knows what the Allies would have felt if they had seen the Dominatus and their minions turn to the last god that they had faith in. This god was not the supposed cold rationalism and knowledge of their supremacy that had served as the basis of their condescension to supposedly lower races but instead the lunatic fanaticism and zealotry of a civilization whose fate hinged solely on a miracle.

In that desolate region of space, shrouded under the baleful eye of Demogorgon, the Dominatus stood watch. Perhaps in the few moments before Armageddon they paused to reflect on a time they had been plotting the victory parades that would take place after the conquest of Mirenton, Alcanti, Paris, among countless other Gigaquadrantic capitals. The most circulated book in the Tyranny, a fantastic and wishful alternate history imagined a conquest of Alcanti and the destruction and complete humiliation of Uriel. These giants had stood over mountains of dead enemy corpses in the individual embers of battle that constituted the initial campaigns against the Allies and had gorged themselves on the all-encompassing fear that they inspired in their enemies.

To most Dominatus, the most appetizing meal they had was not that in which pain and agony filled their enemies completely. This was insufficient. They needed their foes to fully acknowledge the superiority of the Tyranny. They needed their foes, to abandon hope and maoschistically embrace futility. Only when an enemy’s soul died, having fully submitted itself to the Dominatus did the ravaging of the enemy’s body give any pleasure. It was an almost orgasmic feeling for a Dominatus to see a once-strong foe cross the threshold into hopelessness and despair.

The oldest amongst the Dominatus, those who had fought during the Wars of Reunification had enough vision to acknowledge that this sense of futility and hopelessness was knocking at their door. Only the flimsy bastion provided by in the insane hope of the TIAMAT’s success prevented them from crossing this threshold. And they had delayed testing whether this bastion would hold up to the cold and inexorable march of reality. But the day had come in which they would have their moment of reckoning.

The storm had come.

Death Comes to Us All
The same words that described the carnage of battles such as Asphodel, Manticore, Terminus, the Deathstorm among others rang through in this final stanza of war. But all knew that they were writing the last lines in this long epic. This was, like every other invasion of an extremely important Dominatus location less a battle but more a tsunami crashing against a mountain. The Tyranny's twin flagships, the Infinity Class Titan Infinity and Ascendancy Class Ultracarrier Ascendancy arrogantly stood vigil over the incoming tide. They were the twin peaks of the Dominatus' last fleet, a motley selection of Mark 3s, Mark 2s, and stationary defense installations. Each wave was repulsed, but each wave gradually eroded the cliff.

The last 2 Dominatus Grand Admirals knew that they were simply holding a delaying action for the yet unseen TIAMAT to charge up. Indeed, they could see their fleet gradually diminish as the unending waves kept coming. Each passing second saw the blood-red shields of the Dominatus dissipate more and more. Each passing second saw the black and gold of the Supremhydron lost in the blinding light of the ADC's firepower. Each passing second saw the Dominatus navy become more and more of a memory than a fighting force.

This was not as much a battle against ADC but inevitability. The Dominatus navy knew that it was a dead man walking, slowly dragged by the chains of fate to the execution block. It struggled with all of its might, lit with the fiery determination of an animal backed into its last corner. It was obvious to all that this was a war with no quarter for any party. The Dominatus' nigh-magical weapons, made possible by their technological wizardry sounded less like the the mathematically perfect feats of unimaginably complex engineering but the last desperate shouts of a dying animal fending off the reaper.

Indeed the Dominatus seemed to scream and roar, not just at the ADC but at history. It was a roar demanding the universe remember the Tyranny. It was the Dominatus clinging to their delusional and genocidal narcissism and trying to etch a last legacy into a realm so dedicated to pushing them into the cold void of oblivion. They fought not just the incurable miasma of history but the conflagration of the hate of all those they had angered. But their shouts grew more stifled, more hoarse, as they choked on the results of their hubris. Their frantic movements, once those of organized resistance slowly but surely became the involuntary convulsions of a dying man.

There was nowhere to retreat too. There was no next battle. Only death. And even death itself denied the Dominatus solace. For each destroyed Dominatus ship and each dying Dominatus did not go into a rest knowing that it had served its duty and that history would remember their sacrifice. They went into the void tormented by the twin mistresses of anguish and uncertainty, the former a reminder that they had not destroyed enough of the enemy, and the latter a reminder that even if they had, it was most probable that the Dominatus would cease to exist.

The Dominatus tried to stand against the furious storm for as long as possible. They were a colossus of flesh and bone that stood at the epicenter of history taunting the whole universe. But Each hole made in the Dominatus line was a line that could not be filled. Each ship destroyed was once which was gone forever.Each bone broken, was one that would never again men. Each piece of skin ripped off by the maelstrom was one that would never again grow back. And with each sickening snap, and each flayed piece of skin, the Dominatus were forced to kneel, for even the most determined of men is unable to stand with broken knees and broken elbows.

But even kneeling, the Dominatus fleet did not give up. When it could not stand like a man, it moved like a furious but wounded dog, biting and barking furiously at the cold and unstoppable banshees of eternity. And when it could not move like a dog, it instead squirmed like a worm, trying to bite at the cold iron of fate's boot. But fate does not care for the determination and valor of those destined to be vanquished. The cold calculus of reality gives advantage is not swayed by pathos or ethos but simply logos.

It had become a sick cliche of this war that the ADC would suffer titanic casualties in any battle against a well-defended Dominatus position, and this was no different. But that did nothing to change the outcome. For the now worm-like Dominatus fleet was squashed slowly, painfully, and certainly by the march of history. Infinity imploded upon itself after having been built several months prior. Ascendancy descended unceremoniously into the void of space.

Time was not of consequence to anything but the TIAMAT. The battle unfolded in its preordained way. As was usual, the Allied fleet suffered monstrous losses. But for the first time, The Dominatus fleet was reduced to nothing more than a footnote in history. The once proud fleet that had menaced each galaxy of the Gigaquadrant was now simply an ever-changing fog of cosmic dust permeating itself throughout the system. The roar had been silenced, the fierce growl slowly having subsided into the death croaks of a gurgling corpse.

For all the Allies knew, they owned the space above Demogorgon Prime. To them, all that was left was a siege that would rhyme with the battle that had just concluded.

The Deluge
The ADC had prepared for the eventuality of a planetary invasion. It was a move made necessary by the Dominatus planetary shield, and beyond practicality, a move justified by its symbolism. Each and everyone of the ADC's constituent nations had a vision of their flag on the Tyrant's spire. Each and everyone of them had the same vision of the Dominatus' monuments purged from history. Each and everyone of them had a vision of the Dominatus consciousness, forged in the marble and steel of Malogenesis, the planet's capital, ripped from the annals of time.

The deluge was such that even with the almost impossible technological wizardry of the Domiantus shield, the skies were set aflame by the fury of the bombardment. Fire and light rained from the heavens replete with the screaming howls of countless strike craft buzzing about like a horde of locusts. But the damned on the ground did not for a second consider resignation to their fate. The planet shouted with defiance as the myriad anti-aircraft installations shouted back in defiance. Molten streams of metal traveling at near relativistic speeds impaled Allied craft, screeching missiles incinerated others while bolts of raw energy disintegrated yet more.

And yet as parts of the virtually endless swarm were incinerated, more flew down from above to fill in the gaps. But yet a darker, more pervasive, and less porous cloud appeared. The lowest layer of this cloud was one composed almost solely of prisoners, expendables, and other such undesirables. Indeed the DCP had conspired to punish races and empty some of its prisons by transferring a multitude of prisoners from their cells to landing craft. Indeed the sheer weight of numbers and the wide spaces involved meant that a large amount of these craft eventually hit the ground, only to be pummeled mercilessly by the almost city-sized bastions of the Dominatus.

One can imagine the horror an an average infantryman felt upon landing. To get out of the landing craft alive was to be greeted by the sight of burning skies from which countless angels fell to the gnawing mouths of the hell below. And if one survived past that sight, it was to be greeted by the unweclome sight of the sheer power of the Dominatus military installations. Spires several kilometers tall, nestled in city-wide citadels formed the centerpiece of the Dominatus defense. These utterly massive fortresses could cause catastrophic levels of damage to landing zones with a single barrage, and arrogantly stood with a nigh-omniscient view of the entire battlefield. Beyond these spires stood numerous other bastions, town-sized installations that towered over the landscape. These sentinels gazed down upon the tiny allied soldiers and without so much a thought banished them from existence. The smallest such defenses were cathedral sized bunkers which marked the god-forsaken land. While lacking in the raw firepower of their larger brethren, they were dispersed such that the average allied trooper was always perfectly exposes. The overlapping killzones meant cover against one bunker was simply the firing line of another, and as the day would show, only the piles of dead ADC troops would provide any sort of cover.

And perhaps for the more average species of the ADC, one can imagine the ensuing horror they felt upon being hit, even by indirect fire. For the all encompassing body suits or power armor to be breached meant full exposure to the maddening environment of Demogorgon Prime. It was to see ones skin scourged by the ravages of heat, or frost, or a poisonous fog. It was for a small wound to fester with the radioactive and chemical waste that permeated the evil fog. It was for still living men to be consumed from the inside out by the parasitic and invasive flies that constituted the lowest rung of the planet's food chain. But the cries of men eaten alive from within by the mutated abominations that populated Demogorgon Prime were drowned out by the cacophony above. The arbiters above had no thought for mercy or respite, and the pleas below were only assuaged after the gentle shepherd of death ended the torture.

The first waves were always damned. They were never meant to accomplish anything against the Dominatus defenses. They were merely there to serve as bait.

Tip of the Spear


Above the carnage below, the Allies prepared for the next phase of the offensive. The objective was to damage the Dominatus bunker system enough so that it would no longer preclude the possibility of landing heavier equipment. The Allies were thus forced to rely solely on elite ground forces in conjunction with air support to take these bastions. The usual suspects were involved - DCP Ultra Troopers and Legionnaires, Draconis Marines, Wraith Legionnaires, and Blood Dragons, French Parachutistes, Fordanta, ISF Paladins, ULE Commandos and Cybertroopers, the Junction’s monstrosities among others. But in this battle, the Olympians of the Enlightenment Collaborative were also deployed at the tip of the spear. These fearsome troopers, each designed as a counter to the Tyranny’s monstrous Overseer legions had seen action in the later stages of Mirus during the conquest of the Overseer Citadels and little else. Even then, they had played second fiddle to the non-Mirusian powers of the Allies. This, at the time, was warranted due to the relative inexperience of the Olympians though it still caused significant resentment amongst the more prideful of Olympian Creeds. At Sybaris, for example, the Solar Siblings and their Arhat Elegant'e has refused to do battle alongside the reformed Sons of Hedon Template Hedon Morillium. At Hunn, the Storm Strikers were nearly wiped out when they struck out alone to claim the head of the Horsemen of Destiny's Template, Nephillheim, and would only be saved by the intervention of the nigh-immortal and at that instance quite mad Phase-Hunter. In the aftermath of the battle for Masoch, the Tartarian Arbiters had nearly clashed with the Katarian armies fighting alongside them for failing to reinforce them, arguing that this had been a deliberate move to keep them out of the final section of the operation, though in reality the Aeoneonatrix fleet en route to their position had vanished alongside the entire Aeoneonatrix Empire. At the time of the battle for Demogorgon Prime however, this problematic behavior had been stamped out by rapidly mounting experience. Finally, the Collaborative found an opportunity to deploy its best at the very tip of the spear.

The Mirusians, save for perhaps the ULE had always been considered auxiliary troops by the rest of the Gigaquadrantic hyperpowers and superpowers which constituted the ADC. Even when they were assigned to frontline combat after linking up with the ADC, they did not receive the assignments or the rewards that similarly accomplished ADC troopers received, no matter how important their contributions might have been - and as the ones knowing the lay of the land, they often were. All that would change during the battle for Demogorgon Prime, during which Barda Clett had pleaded successfully that the Olympians could stand alongside the very best of the ADC in a fight against a once thought unstoppable foe.

Epizoume Toicho of the Celestial Hoplites stood in the assault bay of his personalized Stormstrike Hover-Carrier waited intently for the order to attack. He was personally charged with leading the assault on the Dominatus command post bunker overlooking a key Mendel War-Guardianship site. The Shock Troopers of Cicoluis needed that command post cleared before they could deploy the brunt of their armored divisions, and early attempts at landing had been thwarted by the sheer power and accuracy of the Dominatus artillery. It was up to three Arhats and their elite retinues to clear out this command bunker, one significantly better defended than the average defense bunker, so as to clear the way.

The viewport he looked out of gave him a vision of a world seemingly designed to kill him. He had only heard reports of the carnage below. He could only see it through the footage provided to him as an officer, the looks of anguish on the faces of his fellow commanders who, if not on the ground, saw their forces virtually exterminated by the Dominatus defenses. Epizoume Toicho, the first full Olympian, had killed dozens of Dominatus in duels, and many more of the overseers and beyond that many more of their synthetic war machines. Raballut Ulthoon of the Knights Ultima, the passenger of the ship to his right, had fought against a Dominatus Sovereign Executor and survived. Alphahpla of the Shrouded Slayers, presumably the passenger of the ship to his left, had kept his deployments so secret that even the Tyranny’s infamously efficient Terpeschoire Spy Network could not accurately pinpoint them. It were rare feats that put them on equal footing as the many more famous ADC fighters, and ones they took pride in. But perhaps Epizoume’s biggest claim to fame was having survived the first-wave assault on the Dominatus stronghold of Krieg, its northernmost sector capital. But even a warrior of his caliber, and a leader of such a brood remembered with sadness what being part of the first wave was like.

In Epizoume’s mind, it was to walk through a literal meat grinder while being shot at from all sides, it was to talk through plains on which not rain fell, but fallen landing craft and artillery shells, and it was to take shelter in the mounds of the corpses of ones comrades so as to have a brief respite from the slaughter. Each minute counted - the earlier he captured the command post, the earlier his allies could be saved from such a horrid fate. Epizoume Toicho could not accept the plight of the average War-Guardian, Clone Soldier or Biotic Trooper, to be killed before having fired a shot at the monsters who burnt their worlds and desecrated their culture. He could not accept that the Dominatus did not even consider the Collaborative to be equals of their other foes. He could not accept that the Dominatus, a constant reminder of the continuing nightmare, still breathed.

As Arhats, the most well-trained idividuals the Collaborative could deploy, Epizoume Toicho, Raballut Ulthoon and even Alphahpla led from the front. They were at the very tip of the spear, the first ships in the Olympian wedge. Theirs were the first to fall through the heavens into the hell of Demogorgon Prime. Theirs were the first wracked by the hungry winds and vicious lightning of the planet. Theirs were the first ships to initiate evasive maneuvers as they neared the target. The ablative cover of non-Olympian landers and other such strike craft provided them some respite, but the sheer power of Dominatus anti-air began taking its toll amongst their rapidly moving landing craft. The wedge split up, each contingent going to its assigned bunker, and at this moment, Ulthoon put them all on the speaker to inspire them. Such had always been his way, a moment of reprieve before the run trough the gauntlet, a moment to remind his troops -and to remind himself- for what they fought.

''Olympians, what do you see before you? Is it the volcanic hell that is Vestibon, one of the triple wombs from which the Dominatus abominations sprang forth? Is it the arrogance of the Dominatus, made into stone and steel by their technological wizardry? Is it an ever-lasting insult to our dignity of our civilization? An insult that if not addressed is a lasting indictment on who we are as a people? The Dominatus are a repudiation for all that we stand for! They are a vile beast that cannot be reasoned with, and today, we have the opportunity to rid the Gigaquadrant of this monstrosity.''

''Look at the hellish swamps below you. They are made of mud. They are made of mesh. They are made of bone. They are made of flesh. Our comrades wither and rot because these bunkers yet stand. If you were to see the look of sorrow on a general’s face, the suffocated moans for help of a War-Guardian, or the clipped wings of a Biotic lander, you would recognize that we have the most important task of the invasion.''

''Today the Gigaquadrant grants us an entrance to the grand stage. We have but a change to prove ourselves not just as warriors, but as a nation. We are here to send out the message that we have arrived. We have arrived as a nation of warriors, dedicated to the consecration of all that is right and just. We have arrived as Olympians, the ambassadors of the Collaborative. For it is through us today that those above will judge our civilization. We have arrived as liberators of the galaxy, from slavery to the Dominatus, from slavery to terror, from slavery to the rampant abuse of unholy power, from the tyranny of Demogorgon Prime, from the perversity of twisted science, and from a nightmare.''

It is by our hand, and by our hand alone, that these shackles are broken.

It is by our hand, and by our hand alone, that we cast off these chains.

It is by our hand, and by our hand alone, that the oppressed defeat the oppressors.

Thus all Tyrants Die!

The anti-aircraft fire had taken its toll, but the Olympians had reached their position. They leaped off their transports to the bunkers below. It was as if vengeful angels were descending from heaven to smite the demons below. It was not only the elite retinues of the Ahrats themselves who descended, seismic spears, power longswords and energy dirks pointed at the ground below. They were supposed by the full weight of Olympian airpower - while Stormstrikes, Blitzwinds, and Talonbolts swept in to directly provide cover for troops on the ground, Shockravens, Thundereagles, and even Typhoonphoenixes loosed their deadly payloads on the Dominatus positions. Dominatus Arachne Class Mecha, specifically made for fire support and air support contested these skies, and they barked in deadly symphony with the Dominatus’ stationary AA defenses against the aerial onslaught above.

Epizoume and his Creed descended like comets upon the earth. Their numbers thinned due to the sheer weight of Anti-Aircraft Fire, which not even their escorts nor other forces in the battle could fully distract, but each passing second saw them get closer and closer to the top of the bunker. A blazing meteor of gold with artisan-etched markings of vibrant green, the sacred colors of the Enlightenment Collaborative, his golden aspis a blazig protective disk held in front of him, his trident crackling with earth-scattering force, Epizoume Toicho prepared as his Immortal guard entered firing range of the Dominatus troops below.

Still screaming from the heavens, the Epizoume’s Immmortals opened fire using their Hardlight weaponry on the Dominatus synthetics below. In return they received the full firepower of the Dominatus infantry garrisoning the bunker. Annihilator Variant Chiliarchs, the most commonly found heavy weapons users in the Tyranny, opened fire with gatling railgun and mini-MHD cannons. Slugs of insanely accelerated metal and molten streams of transuranium fired at relativistic rates took their toll amongst the heavily armored Hoplites, who despite their heavy and advanced armor were still not invulnerable to heavy Domintus infantry ordnance. Their response, however, was equally devastating. It seemed that the wrath of all of the Collaborative had fallen upon the Dominatus, and the Dominatus were reeling. The initial hardlight fire took its toll, but only in the aftermath of the frenzied onslaught of spear, longsword and dirk use that followed the seismic impact of the combined landing of all three Olympian Creeds did the Dominatus forces begin retreating from the rooftop.

Ulthoon himself, leader of his Creed, cleaved a Dominatus Daemon-Class mecha in two. The leader of the rooftop’s garrison, the fearsome, 15 meter tall Apex Daemon known as Charon was so heavily armed that each of his barrages killed groups of the Celestial Hoplites and Knights Ultima alike, despite their advanced powered armor. Ulthoon thought this to be an unacceptable, and in one slash of his falchions, immobilized the synthetic beast by wrecking its hip joints. Charon turned his full firepower upon Ulthoon, but the enhanced Volver effortlessly dodged this and with the insane agility and strength befitting of an Ahrat, leapt into the air and with all his might, forced his falchions through Charon’s face, before boosting downwards and cleaving the mecha in half.

Having secured the rooftop, the Creeds split up as the Olympians proceeded downwards and medical craft took the scores of wounded back. Only their enhanced constitutions prevented the wounded from succumbing to the fearsome environment of the planet, as their bodies resisted the massive flies that seemed out new hosts. Proceeding to the corridors below, they encountered some of the Tyranny’s more powerful synthetic soldiers. The Excubitors, veteran Chiliarchs transferred to newer and stronger bodies, contested their advance.

The Excubitor’s most common weapon was the SERSMME Multi-Stage-Projectile Rifle. Created for use against the DCP’s Commandoes, and the Draconid Imperium’s marines, its main design specification was that one shot be able to penetrate both the shielding and the armor and then completely destroy the soldier inside. Against such a fearsome weapon, many of the Celestial Hoplites succumbed. But emboldened by the presence of their Ahrat and propelled by the heroism and courage befitting of the Olympians, they rapidly closed the gap, slaughtering the Excubitors in close ranged combat.

The sounds of gunfire and swords on steel tore through the corridors of the baroque and sinister bunker, but even with the increasingly dire death toll, the Hoplites pushed on to the command room. It was perhaps lightly defended by comparison, the rest of the garrison having been eliminated it and the Hoplites cleared it out with ease. But before they could celebrate, they found themselves assaulted by Akemainyu himself. Akemainyu had himself heard of the Hoplites and their countertactics to his Eternal Guard. Thus he felt the urgent need to skewer Epizoume Toicho on his beam katana and had teleported to the bunker using its internal teleporter.

The Hoplites were alerted to his coming with the faint screams of Angels split in half by the ludicrously powerful katana. Crafted by the Dominatus themselves in credit for Akemainyu’s service, it was almost as if the Hoplites’ armor and shielding, the pride of the Olympians and the Collaborative, was nothing but tissue paper in the face of such a ludicrously powerful foe. Even alone, Akemainyu seemed vaguely unstoppable. The corridors presented such an environment that the monster couldn’t be flanked, and his onyx black armor was splattered only with the remains of the Hoplites.

Epizoume Toicho raced forwards to confront this monstrosity and eventually found him in a corridor, having pulverized the head of one of Epizoume Toicho’s veteran Immortals by stomping. Incensed by such a callous show of force, Epizoume sprinted towards the towering Mahanyan monster, which let loose such a massively powered wave of energy from his katana that even Epizoume was thrown back. Akemainyu them charged towards Epizoume, sword held high. It was only barely that Epizoume was able to begin parrying the abominable foe’s strikes and even then, with each parry he was forced back.

After some fighting, Akemainyu had pushed Epizoume to a wall, and kicked him against it with such force that he scattered the Ahrat’s armor and flung the enhanced Soldarian through segments of the wall. Amused, he walked to the now prone Epizoume Toicho and stomped down on the Ahrat’s chest while holding his katana high for a final strike. The weight of his foot prevented Epizoume from moving before he condescendingly taunted the Arhat of the Celestial Hoplites, the one that was supposedly trained from birth to be his better, one last time.

Akemainyu - ''I was wrong in having thought you a challenge. Any last words, worm?''  Epizoume - Thus all Tyrants Die!

Akemainyu chuckled before bringing his blade down. But right at the midway point, Epizoume swung his shield to block Akemainyu’s crushing boot and flung his trident upwards into Akemainyu’s eye. Roaring in pain, Akemainyu let one hand off his katana to rip out the trident. Grabbing it as if it was a large toothpick, he slowly took it out of his left eye socket before chuckling again. But midway through this chuckle, Epizoume drew another weapon and implanted this kopis squarely into the arrogant Mahanayan’s skull through the provided opening. Bristling with energy, the kopis incinerated the Mahanayan from the head down as Akemainyu’s screams were overpowered with the iridescence of the Celestial Hoplite Arhat’s weapons, henceforth to be amongst the most revered relics of his Creed. Soon, all that was left of the towering 8.5 meter tall Overseer Template was a pile of goop inside broken black armor.

Epizoume Toicho had defeated one of the most powerful of the Dominatus’ Templates, and successfully cleared the bunker. Wounded and exhausted, he was dragged by an alarmed Raballut Ulthoon and an expressionless Alphahpla as well as the remainder of his Immortals to the rooftop above. There, on the cathedral-sized bastion did he finally see the fruits of their collective labor. Though they had paid the price in extremely heavy casualties, but through the efforts of the Olympians, the War-Guardian landing zones, specifically those of the Shock Troopers of Cicoluis were much less hotly contested, and they could start bringing down the big guns. The Olympians had proven that they could stand with the Gigaquadrant’s foremost powers as equals in combat, and from that day on, no ADC commander would consider the Mirusians as anything else but equals in the field of combat.

On Fire We Fly
To Kyrennus Varus Savenior, stepping inside the belly of an AO-8 dropship was nothing new. The veteran of dozens of combat drops even prior to the Dominatus War, he was truly personified the dignified experience and animal ferocity of the Talon Marines. Clad from wing to wing in some of the best armor that the Aetheral Talon Body could afford him, he took each step slowly and somberly as he entered the dropship for the last time. As the doors closed, he took a final breath before awaiting the order to drop.

Even with air dominance, landing upon a Dominatus fortress world was a risky undertaking. It was for a skilled pilot to dart like a madman through barrages of anti-air fire that close-air-support struggled to take out. It was for a marine to fight the biological and cybernetic monstrosities of a civilization that justifiably threatened an entire Gigaquadrant on open ground. It was to know that the encounter would end in either victory or death. Even though Kyrennus was familiar with these grim realities, and even though he was amongst the most well-trained of the Gigaquadrant's professional soldiers, his mind always found a way to drift.

Perhaps it drifted to memories of his homeworld. Perhaps it drifted to memories of previous campaigns prior to the Dominatus War. Not this day. As he looked to the camera-ports and remebered the strategic maps showing the disposition of the baroque and cyclopean Dominatus bunkers, he remembered an operation that though past, was seared permanently into his memory. Looking at the god-forsaken world beneath him, his mind flitted to a similar memory - the assault on Sybaris.

...

Corporal Kyrennus looked out at the camera-ports as he pondered his mission. Orders had come from a senior figure high command that contingents from his legion would be assigned to a critical mission. Details were sparse and released on a need-to-know basis, but Kyrennus knew that it would involve infiltrating the production lines of the Sons to recover the Ultima Servilis serum. While in his craft, he reviewed likely scenarios as well as the foes he would probably have to face.

After the fall of Invictus, command of the Sons of Hedon had been shared by its three most powerful Praetors: Sodom, Gommorah, and Moloch. During the Mirus Campaign, each had received extensive modifications and enhancements with effects which reflected the atrocities they had each committed during the Andromeda Campaign. Sodom, who had committed unspeakable crimes involving eating and consumption of Andromedans had turned into little more than a maliciously intelligent mass of teeth, tongues, and jaws held together in the shape of a Draconis. Gommorah, who had committed numerous crimes of the flesh, had turned into a seething mass of tentacles and tendrils clad in the almost impervious armor of an Overseer Praetor under the command of an appallingly sick but commensurately capable mind. But first among equals, both in power, and sheer evil was Moloch.

Despite having fallen from their pre-eminence after the fall of Invictus, and then later on during Archon Stahl’s reforms, the Sons still represented one of the most frightening foes faced by the Anti-Dominatus Coalition.The defeat at Invictus and their inability to eliminate Uriel as well as Medusa’s death had seen them lost their often envy-inducing position of prestige. However, it was a foolish man who presumed that any of this led to a loss in either combat effectiveness or sheer bowel-inducing terror. The Sons were recipients of some of the earliest Overseer enhancement programs : vehicles and exoskeletons created specifically for Overseer use were often first tested by them, and they often provided the first volunteers for the yet untested second-stage enhancements given to Overseers.

Overseers of the later stages of the Mirus Campaign were very different from those in the first stages of the Dominatus War. The combination of second-stage biological and cybernetic enhancements, even more advanced  equipment and armor, and years of experience as well as doctrinal changes meant that the overseers that survived, while not nearly as numerous as those which had gone forth in the Tyranny’s extragalactic campaigns, were potent enough that more often than not, they were considered one man armies. Indeed, in their latest form, Overseers were encountered considerably less frequently, but when they were, the ADC often considered the squads which had made first contact to be dead men walking. Whereas at the start of the war, this was mostly due to the sheer novelty and shock  of the Overseers as much as for their power, now it was simply because

For a squad of elite shock troopers such as Draconis Marines, who while formidable, were not super soldiers, to come up on top against a few Sons of Hedon was considered a rare event. In this manner, the men under Kyrennus command had distinguished themselves as amongst the few who could be counted to perform admirably well against the Sons through a combination of skill, creativity, and pure luck. It was for this reason that after Uriel had ordered the ITN Marines to secure a copy of the Ultima Servilis Serum for Draconis on Sybaris, that Kyrennus’ men had come to the top of the recommended list.

Kyrennus was a veteran of many a landing, and had seen many a planet. However, Sybaris seemed different - it was less a planet and more the delusional fantasy of a deranged and insane epicurean given nigh-infinite resources. It was a planet defined by rampant and wanton excess - the complete and utter lack of balance on the world. Kyrennus' target was the single most opulent palace in the entire planet, a sprawling citadel formerly occupied by Hedon Morilium himself. One in which gold was considered the least valuable material, decorated in patterns that took the Draconis proclivity for the arts to an obscene extreme. Kyrennus had to rapidly shake himself from the twisted mirage. At least the aphordisiac-like perfume that defined the atmosphere of the world was partially burnt away by orbital bombardment and the dust plumes of mass Talon Ground Legion landings, while the saccharine symphonies emanating from the ground were drowned out by the sounds of mass shelling. If they were not, Kyrennus may have very well been tempted to take off his helmet and plummet to the ground.

Steeling his mind, he turned back to the task at hand - his men would find the Ultima Servilis Serum. Another team would disable the fortresses' main power supply, and another would cover the exfiltration. High Command had repeatedly stressed that this was a stealth mission and that confrontation with Overseers was to be avoided if possible. To this end, the teams had been equipped with the most advanced camouflage and dampening technologies the Andromedan Commonwealth had access to. They had also been given anti-tank armaments in case of any unavoidable circumstances. Slipping beneath the sensors in their stealthy AO-8 variant, they landed on a rooftop and began deploying.

While most drops would have had Kyrennus and his squad hopping from the AO-8 and softly descending on afterburners, the maximum stealth requirement made this option inappropriate. Instead ,and to maintain maximum stealth, the craft hovered above one of the palace's rooftops. High enough so that the crew could safely jump down without assisted technology. Landing softly, the 15-man marine team quietly moved to the closest access hatch. With a laser cutter, one of the marines cut away the door from the lock. Opening the hatch softly, they descended one by one into the palace's interior, ducking for any form of cover as each one dropped through into the unknown realm.

Kyrennus and his troops had grown accustomed to the baroque and cyclopean interiors of Dominatus fortresses. But upon entering the hallways, they were instantly assaulted by a crass gaudiness to which previous experiences could not compare. Kyrennus himself had to reprimand his troops and remind them that they were quite literally in the belly of the beast as they advanced.

The gaudy decorations interior did not get any easier to bear as the team moved though the hallways. The team split up to some degree, staying close but making use of alternate hallways to spread themselves out on the way towards what intelligence would identify as laboratory storage. At every corner, soldiers ducked, checked for signs of patrols before calling their companions to follow them as they slipped silently down the hallways. The noise-cancelling modifications to their gear allowed them to slip around unheard, on a few occasions a crossing had to duck into adjacent and generally empty rooms to avoid a patrol.

As they descended, it became apparent this was more than a recovery mission, it was an education on the twisted abominations the Dominatus had planned to install as masters of Andromeda. Bunks and bedrooms were one thing, closer to the ground level the squad had on occasion ducked into dens where at first glance were abnormal prisoner pens. Later discovering the submissive nature of these docile occupants were perhaps of the most unfortunate kind of prisoner, servants to the aberrant creatures that called such a twisted domain a place of comfort.

The mission came first, and these souls would have to wait until the structure was liberated of its original owner for any hope of freedom. The soldiers resolved to continue on their mission.

They felt themselves get closer and closer to the laboratories and vats. It was not just intelligence that told them they were getting nearer, but an unnatural uneasiness that gnawed at them more and more as they went on. They enter a room that stank with rotten and unnatural flesh, with unsuccessfully fused alloys and bone, with wings torn in half by the weight of augmentations. It was a room that echoed with cracks and drips and what almost seemed to be screams from mouthless heads.

Although sealed from the stench in their hermetically sealed suits of armour, a few of the marines began to choke ,moving their arm to their faces. One of them, of enlisted rank, had broken formation to observe one of the piles. With gentle kicks to move the mound of aggregate flesh and metal, they looked back to their partners.

Marine - What exactly did they put their own kind through? Fireteam Leader - ''Does it matter? It's bad enough they have been killing our own and dragging them to a living nightmare, now they're slaughtering their own for the sake of a stronger being.'' Marine - It's a total mess if you ask me. Other Marine - Praise to that.

Perhaps Draconis stealth fooled even the enhanced Sons of Hedon, but a nightmarish bark vaguely reminiscent of that a Sarshaan emitted sent chills down the spines of the marines. For a Sarshaan to be present meant that one of the Equites Ferrum was present. It was a situation that Draconis marines were trained almost explciitly to avoid - a 16 meter long enhanced Sarshaan clad in armor ridden by an Imperator of the Sons of Hedon was not exactly a foe that the marines wished to fight. The beast sniffed and paced as it tried to ascertain the location of the marines, who were forced to acknowledge that they had a fight on their hands.

With silent hand gestures, the marines spread themselves out across the room, hoping the Sarshaan would miss them. Communicating though their built in comms, their voices dampened by the padding an plating that insulated them from the foul air and fouler smell, concerned what to do. In days past this creature was mounted cavalry. Mutated by the twisted science of the Dominatus and ridden by a veteran of this depraved Overseer legion, observations put tis creature as an easy match for armoured vehicles. Bringing grenades, explosive rounds and explosive packaging, the anti-armour weaponry that had hoped not to use would be their best option.

But to shock the beast they had a plan - the foul air was perfect for an incendiary, and although they were close to the objective, they assumed the Sons would design this chamber so as to not allow the foul air to escape. Ready at the four corners of the room, marines tossed incendiary grenades into the air, exploding around the Sarshaan and igniting the foul gases that lingered in the air surrounding them into fireballs.

The beast and its rider rose up as the flames engulfed them. Of course, the Tyranny's armor meant that a fireball would only shock the beast and burn the paint, but pure animal instinct meant that the beast rose up on its hindlegs to roar, exposing its relatively unarmored belly to the Draconis marines. As the beast reared, some of the marines behind it fired magnetically-propelled rounds, designed to pierce dense armour, into the gaps in the pits of its legs. On the front, other soldiers did similar, aiming for important locations in the creature's anatomy. Modified by dark sciences or not, this beast behaved much the same as smaller versions documented extensively by the Draconis. Some of the marines might have even known how to ride one in more civilian circumstances, all in all, knowing where to hit. The rounds impacted and blew out 2 of the creatures legs as well as some of its vital organs. The internal explosions blasted those limbs off while throwing the rider off. The creature however, reacted by limping with an almost prenatural speed to the nearest marine, and while bleeding, swallowed the marine whole before roaring in triumph.

The marines responded with more rounds. Fireteam leaders tossed adhesive grenades to squadmates who then tossed them at the beast. Companions of the engulfed marine resorted to concentrated fire in the beast's belly. All but two moved and fired almost forgetting about the cast-off rider. The beast roared and limped, using its tail to swat a marine with such force that his armor cracked. The rider had come to his senses and began to advance on the marines. However, the marines had created such a potent killzone that the Imperator was within seconds, hit by two anti-tank rounds, severely wounding him. The beast on the other hand, was fighting a losing battle as its regenerative abilities were insufficient to deal with the seemingly never ending barrage of grenades and anti-tank shells. The rider was only able to get a single fatal shot off with his massive sonic carbine before he was killed by yet another barrage, while the beast's remaining legs were blown off, rendering it mere target practice for the marines.

Despite their victory, the marines had paused to consider the casualties they had suffered in the surprise attack - the engulfed marine was a crushed and half-digested mess of armor, blood, and bone. The one swatted to the wall was paralyzed due to the sheer impact and was only mobile due to the sheer resilience of the suit's internal servomotors. The one shot at by the rider was less a man and more a slurry of organic fluid pouring out of two holes on either side of his armor. There was a silence at the surveyed losses. While the marine who had hit the wall had survived, made mobile only by the mechanisms in his armour's limbs, the two other marines were unrecoverable. Marines had managed to cut open the beast's belly and extract the half-digested body, his ID tags were partially melted but were roughly legible, while the empty armour, although punctured and its occupant no longer recogniseable, the compartment where his tags were held was largely intact. Counting their losses they took a moment to reflect - Kyrennus was a veteran against the horrors the Dominatus had produced, but pulling though each encounter cleanly with monstrosities like the Overseers never got any easier. He never made it public, but sometimes he wished for the days when a neutralisng shot did not completely destroy the body. But that is an easy thing to dream, as courtesy was rarely seen on a true battlefield.

The troops continued through the gateway at the other end of the room and entered what could only be described as something spawned from their most feverish nightmares. As one of the larger Overseer legions, the production and enhancement facilities of the Sons of Hedon were some of the largest in the entire Tyranny. The vats beneath Hedon's fortresses were an industrialised orchestra of biological perversion. As the troops pensively walked through the abominable building, they saw the Sons at all levels of enhancement. Newborn Draconis clones were first pumped with the first installment of the Ultima Servilis serum. There nascent wings were then eviscerated with scientifc precision before being replaced by synthetically engineered polymers. Other Sons at different stages saw their bones pulverized and replaced with a lace made of synthetically engineered carbon nanotubes. Regardless, everywhere they looked, the marines could see comatose Draconis, if they could even be called that, operated on by a mad symphony of surgical machines and test tubes which pumped only Lifefather knew what into them. And for some were not really comatose - Kyrennus could see their faces distort in unspeakable agony as mouths that were sewn shut refused to open. But perhaps the most disturbing part were the live vivisections that took place. Kyrennus was a hardened man, but he could only balk as surgical machines tore open Draconis who were kept alive only by the Dominatus' perverted technology and had their internal organs replaced. Sybaris was one of the last Overseer Citadels to be taken, and he had heard reports through the ADC grapevine of the horrors one would face, but everywhere he looked, he was still faced with the numbness associated not just with staring into the Dominatus abyss, but diving head first.

There were mutterings throughout the squad. Soldiers looked away, others tried to keep down their rations. Squad leaders occasionally received requests of “permission to regurgitate rations, sir" from queasy soldiers. Kyrennus’ officers knew it easily: They had stepped into a realm of nightmares, a place where not even the darkest of horror stories could ever put to words. Then one of Kyrennus’ sergents spoke.

Marine - Corporal, this place should be reduced to ruins. Kyrennus - That's not our mission, sergeant.

The sergeant stopped. Through his helmet he glared with disgust at his commander.

Sergeant - ''Not our mission? Look around you sir! If this war doesn't end every aberrant around us is an enemy.'' Kyrennus - The priority is intel recovery sergeant, when the ground forces clear the frontline and secure the fortress, we can deal with these...

Kyrennus paused - what word describes the monstrosities he was looking at?

Kyrennus - ''Well I don't know what to call them. They're certainly not Draconis.'' Sergeant - ''They don't deserve a name. They're tyranny bioweapons, no need to go giving them monikers.''

"Names hold power" as the ancients texts say. To give something a name is to give it an identity. There were military codes for hostile entities of all kinds. A proper name? Words could not describe how vile and perverse the vat creatures were - to give them a name was to recognise them as something more than a weapon of flesh.

Almost immediately after this conversation, they stumbled upon a vial of Draconis Ultima Servilis serum that had not yet been injected into a proto-son. Taking it out, they soon noticed the lights go out - the other squad had obviously done their job of taking out the power supply. Remembering their orders, they made their way back in the pitch black darkness of the citadel. Kyrennus could not believe that they had accomplished their mission - against the Dominatus, things were never as simple or easy as they first seemed. But today it seemed, they had seen the very worst of the Dominatus military machine, and after this, they could see nothing worse.

The marines maintained a level of professionalism at all cost. The more experienced marines knew that they were only half-done: Now they had their objective, sealed away in a back-mounted storage compartment Kyrennus had attached to his armour, now they had to leave. They needed to return to the rooftop, using the darkness to ease their escape.

As on their way in, the marines spread out, covering multiple corridors. They had priority item on them, and keeping scattered not only reduced the chances of a patrol finding the entire team, but only one of several teams - if discovered - had the serum.

All seemed to be proceeding as planned. But then, the communications channels blazed with a scream from the team assigned to destroying the power supply. And then a barrage of fire from the marines. But the fire made an impact only on the walls of the citadel. But the walls seemed to respond with a laugh, if it could be called that, that sounded across all the communications channels of the squads involved. It was less a laugh, and more the anguished screams of dozens of Andromedans and ADC personnel from all ages and walks of life. It was a laugh that boomed over the more panicked fire of the marines. It was a chorus of screams that was joined by another, and another, as more of the marines succumbed to a foe that was moving too fast for them to see. But through this chorus, one could hear the panicked attempts of the other squad leader's attempts to reorganize and figure out how to deal with the threat. But even soldiers as professional as the marines could not keep up completely steel discipline against what seemed to be an invincible and sinister force of nature.

Kyrennus desperately attempted to establish contact with the picked-off squads. Each channel was accompanied by screams and gunfire. With hand gestures and comms code, Kyrennus ordered for his squad to engage combat synchronisation. In a blink, Kyrennus was able to see the video feeds of his squad leaders alongside his own. There was no hint as to what the assailant was, but it was fast and was picking off marines one by one.

Almost as Kyrennus had established contact, it seemed that the monster decided that it was time to be serious.In but a few moments, Kyrennus saw the linked monitors of the other squad's marines go off in quick succession. In fact, the marines were neutralized at such a rate that the screams did not subside before they were joined by new ones. It seemed like only a moment after the team leader, the squad's last remaining member had cursed at the unseen foe was his helmet removed by what seemed to be a tendril and pointed at the terrified face of the marine. It was through the night vision of his helmet did Kyrennus see an image that would accompany him for the rest of his life. Held immobile, the marine cursed and screamed while two massive hands held his face in place. It was then it seemed a massive array of twisted biological implements - living saws, scalpels, and tendons seemed to emerge from the marine's assailant. Kyrennus saw as slowly, this surgical nightmare blazed with a dark energy and scraped off the still-living marine's face. Most disturbingly, Kyrennus saw as the still emoting face seemed to get absorbed by the implements, flowing to the edge of the immense wing at the edge of the visor. All Kyrennus could hear was the new laugh, a chorus of anguished screams that had gained a new member. And then, before the comms went dark, he heard the monster speak for the first time. The frenzied and tortured mass screamed in unison.

??? - Kyrennus, I'm coming.

Gritting his teeth there was no time for subtlety. With anyone left, Kyrannus ran - his pace assisted by the motors in his armoured limbs. The marine's death scarred him deeply, the screams raced though his mind both hearing the screams echo though the halls and remembering what he just saw. In his escape he hoped none of the other Sons would get in his way - if there were any - and moved with haste to reach the marines guarding the extraction point.

The mad dash almost drew the fire of the marines guarding the corridor to the dropzone, where their AO-8 was waiting for them, but almost as soon as they passed into the AO-8, they heard a similar sinister sound.

Kyrennus - Get this brick airborne, now now now!

The panicked shouting and the malicious laugh gave way to the flapping of giant wings. The marines in the corridor let loose a fearsome salvo of advanced weapons-fire, and relief swept through them as the flapping stopped.

Kyrennus could only see through the camera-ports of the AO-8 in the midst of the lift-off sequence as a moving tornado of wings, an unnaturally long whip, and a massive battleaxe burst through the marines in the corridor. The pitch black darkness gave away only screams and the sound of the rampage itself. Kyrennus watched alarmed as the abomination tore through the elite marine barricade as if it was nothing. As the lift-off sequence neared completion, he questioned what kind of monster was capable of such damage and sadism. It was then that, quite literally, speaking of the devil lead to its summoning.

In the illuminated rooftop, Kyrennus finally bore witness to the force that had exterminated two squads. It was a towering Draconis, perhaps taller than even Hedon himself with the ancillary augmentations and appendages that crowded the beast. Its wings bore the anguished faces of not only ADC soldiers, but also civilian men, women, and most disturbingly, children from Andromeda. Its stomach, while ostensibly protected by armor, split like a many-sided mouth into a maw of horrific implements of torture and surgery. With each one of its movements, the wind seemed to impel the tormented souls that defined its body to sing in pain.

Kyrennus had heard stories of Sodom and Gommorah. But he had dismissed the stories of this last Draconis as mere exaggeration. Barracks-talk had centered around a Draconis who had tormented Andromedans to the extent that they would sacrifice their dearest loved ones to a fate worse than death. It was a Draconis who tortured parents to sell the souls of their children, comrades in arms, the souls of their best friends, among countless others. Perhaps those damned souls had once lived merely as his prisoners. But now, they were subsumed into his body, screaming extensions of the brute's mindless sadism.

It was with this unwelcome sight that Kyrennus finally acknowledged that Praetor Moloch of the Sons of Hedon was real, and that if anything, the tales associated with him only downplayed the terror he inspired. That the demon Moloch was real sent a paralysing chill down his spine. The thought that the vat-grown creatures deserved no label paled in how to describe Moloch. "demon", "horror" and "hellspawn" were all appropriate. The sight of a demon who by the mere sight clearly made prisoners part of his own body defies any thoughts that he could have been anything but a nightmare incarnate. Something compelled him to open one of the hatches and look at the entity from the dropship.

He opened it just in time to see what would forever strike him as the most flagrant example of a mutated Son's incredible power. Moloch had thrown his axe into the AO-8's weapon and targeting systems, essentially disabling them, while he coiled his impossibly long whip around one of its wings. Kyrennus could only look in shock as he saw the beast, pulsing with raw power, fight with the activating thrusters of the aircraft. It struck his mind as simply impossible - not even an Overseer Praetor should have been capable of such raw strength. It was almost as if Moloch had the ability to temporarily channel the life essence of his captive prisoners into the enhancement of one of his attributes. Kyrennus could only watch as Moloch tugged the whip and brought the ship closer and closer to a standstill.

Kyrennus held on as the dropship was rocked about. With the craft's weapons disabled, any weapons required a manual effort. Fumbling about, he pulled up from below the bay a heavy repeating fusion cannon. Moloch was out in the open, he could not move so long as he tugged at the dropship like an angler with a large fish. Centre mass, that was the most effective target to hit. After charging up, He pressed down on the trigger, releasing a hailstorm of particle cannon rounds on this one single beast. Under most circumstances, anyone encountering this illuminated rainstorm would have been riddled to fried meat and charred armour.

Only due to his special Dominatus-artificed armor, a privilege given to only templates, and the most esteemed of Praetors was Moloch able to weather the storm. But even someone given the most advanced in "infantry" armor could see the shields deplete. Knowing that a long-term engagement was a losing proposition, Moloch channeled all of his strength into one tug, and with that last struggle, the AO-8 came crashing down.

Moloch did not bother to check the crash site as he seemed to almost instantly teleport to Kyrennus' location. Trapped beneaththe repeating fusion cannon, Kyrennus could only look up in horror as Moloch removed his helmet. Instantly, Kyrennus was saturated with the perverse smells and tastes of the planet. But he was soon brought back to reality as he stared into the open gaping maw of Moloch. Struggling in vain, he cursed and wished as the appendages got closer to his face.

It seemed a miracle answered him when in a split instant, a mecha even taller than Moloch smashed into the acting commander of the Sons of Hedon. Casting Moloch to the ground was a titan machine vaguely in the form of a Draconis. Flanked by two great amber wing-like sails emerging from its back, the machine stood over the downed Son. As Moloch was the epitome of darkness, the machine was plated in a white almost radiant coating, the edges of the various plates trimmed with decorated gold. But the most significant detail was upon the machine's head: Flowing from the right eye socket, dancing decorations surrounded a motif that to Moloch was instantly recogniseable - the mark of a full Dominatus.

Moloch, while dazed by the power of Uriel's personal mecha, was even more stunned that it possessed the mark. But this amazement was soon replaced by rage - entombed in a vat of aminotic fluid beneath the mecha lay the man who had killed Hedon Morilium, Father of the Sons of Hedon and chosen of Medusa Heimdall. Moloch had been on one of the last ships that left Invictus, and had  prepared vigorously for such an encounter. He had painstakingly developed a strategy to deal with the one who the Dominatus knew as the Destroyer of Invictus, Slayer of Lord Hedon, Dread-Bane of the Dominatus, the Great Worm, and the Devil of Andromeda. Now, in addition to that, he had to contend that he was facing one who, by the account of an unknown party, had gained some kind of parity with his Dominatus masters. If not for his prowess as a warrior and his dedication to vengeance, perhaps Moloch would have been intimidated.

Uriel stared silently, denying any satisfaction from responding to Moloch's rage. Instead, the mecha drew a greatsword from a compartment in their back, and held the point end in Moloch's direction.

Moloch's strategy was never to engage Uriel in a duel - even a Praetor of his standing could not best Uriel's personal mecha in a test of raw brute strength. Despite this, to deceive Uriel, he entertained the notion by parrying Uriel's greatsword with the axe he had retrieved from the burning AO-8 as well as his whip. Such was the force of each of Uriel's blows that Moloch was forced to give ground even when such blows were parried.

Moloch was playing a dangerous game - only his short bursts of insane speed could allow him to fight long and well enough to trap Uriel into the thought that this was going to be a duel. While perhaps he could have channeled his energy into short bursts of insane power aimed at beating the mech, Moloch had a separate idea.

Indeed, after a long battle, Uriel ended up impaling Moloch belly-first on his sword. To his surprise, the monstrous Praetor along with his chorus of voices laughed as an almost ichor like blood leaked from the wound. Deep inside the machine, Uriel had understood enough of the Sons to know that Moloch was enjoying the pain. The mech tilted its head. Drew the sword out and with a great swing aimed to land another blow on the titan. It was with a surprising gust of wind that Moloch embraced the mecha with both his body and his whip. The Draconis aberration’s body split open as a wide array of internally held biomechanical and cybernetic wires and tendrils snaked around the mecha. It was almost as if instantaneously, the mecha had been covered in a web-like mesh of Moloch's entrails.

Moloch smiled as he executed the moves he had rehearsed time and time again to bring down the slayer of his father. Channeling all his energy, the web worked against the armor plating of the mecha, gradually tearing apart, dissolving, and piercing the mecha in strategic locations. Uriel could only watch helplessly from his vat of aminotic fluid as the abomination snaked his way through the giant mecha. Struggling in vain much like Kyrennus, Uriel felt a feeling of dread similar in magnitude to that he had felt on Invictus when his vat was pried out of the mecha and onto the floor.

Withdrawing himself and returning to what could be called his normal form, Moloch stood over Uriel with his abdominal implements pointed at Uriel's face. Seeing that he was about to execute Uriel, Moloch had streamed this on every communications channel and speaker on Sybaris.

Moloch - ''It is an insult to my masters that your wear the mark. It is an insult to my legion that the Slayer of Hedon still lives. It is an insult to me that you are not screaming. But these are all errors. And errors are not mistakes unless they are not rectified.'' Uriel - When you are cast into the void...ask your progenitor why he carved the mark!

Moloch paused for a single moment, his enhanced brain needing extra time to comprehend the implications of Uriel's statement. In this single moment, a titanic Draconis, about as large as Moloch charged and pushed Moloch away from Uriel.

If Uriel was a giant of white and gold in his armour, this one was a goliath of adamant silver. While Uriel was ensconced deep inside his mech, the new assailant had emerged without helmet, revealing a head encased in thick silver scales. Although donned in a suit of armour that accentuated his physique - displaying with artistic pride the sculpted muscles that this giant possessed, the plates were as white as the sun shining above, But the fierce eyes and thick, plaited dreadlocks told Moloch exactly who this guardian angel was.

The cameras that Moloch had centered on the to-be-executed Uriel then focused on the face of the brilliant and imposing figure. Moloch saw, as did every Son of Hedon, and every cybernetic auxiliary that their father had abandoned them. For a single moment, it seemed that every Son, whether fighting on the ground, cruising the skies in the battlesuits of the Mortem Militum, or riding a Sarshaan paused. And in that single moment, Uriel saw the unrelenting sadism and arrogance in Moloch's almost pitch-black eyes give way to different feelings - fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

Moloch - Father?

Hedon stood up from Moloch's fallen body. Although he didn't move or make any gesture beyond looking directly into Moloch's eyes, this alone gave Moloch his answer.

Uriel saw the maliciously calm and collected Moloch, a being so confident in his power and the supremacy and eventual victory of the Dominatus degenerate into a gibbering mass of panicked protestations.

Moloch - ''You were Medusa's Chosen! You were the progenitor of the Tyranny's most favored legion. You were the Right Hand of the Dominatus! Why?'' Uriel - Because he saw in me a strength his masters lacked.

Uriel had pulled himself out of his pod. Moloch's devastation of the mech had rendered it useless, but the pod had preserved him and Hedon's timely arrival had preserved the container from further violation. As he emerged from it, the amniotic fluid poured out, revealing Uriel's raw form, the scar that Hedon had given him was plain as day - it was not some affectation he had adopted ,but something he was given. Moloch knew, as Hedon did, that only the Dominatus knew the significance of the mark, nothing he had heard about the Worm King could explain why he would carve this on himself, only a Dominatus or someone who knew the mark could have applied it.

The revelations were too much for even a mind as twisted as Moloch's to bare. Surrendering his sentience, he channeled all the power contained by the prisoners's faces into an expression of raw hatred. An amorphous collection of angry scales, limbs, and biomechanical weapons burst from the hole that Uriel's mech-sword had left in the armor. But it became apparent that such was the flood of organic and mechanical material than even the Dominatus-crafted armor created to contain it burst against the blizzard or chaotic flesh and steel. Moloch's wings grew to even more colossal proportions as his lower body burst into a gibbering mass of saws, axes, and swords made of the synthetic bone of the Overseers. Most disturbingly, Moloch's upper body split into a titanic gaping maw of teeth and the screaming heads of prisoners, his ribs having split open and having been overcome by tendrils pulsing with dark energies.

From a hatch in the amniotic fluid, Uriel pulled out a linked set of armour. Heh ad been wearing his body glove while inside the vat and as the armour came down it magnetically moved and attached itself to this outer skin. From another compartment, Uriel drew a sabre and a fusion carbine. Hedon had watched Moloch's horrid transformation, but it only made him disgusted. Gripping the great blades Uriel had kept, he wasted no time and charged for the beast that was his former second in command.

The monster formerly known as Moloch could only claw in a chatoic and crazed manner at its two assailants. There was no reason in its movements, no skill in its rapid and frenzied swings, and no functioning mind behind any of its decisions. Both Uriel and Hedon, so used to fighting skilled duelists, or even monsters with brains, faced little trouble in evading the frantic attacks from the tornado of flesh and bone.

Hedon evaded the uncontrolled flailings of the beast, with cleaves of his swords he sliced appendages, bone axes, bone swords, and the various implements that the screaming monstrosity threw at him. His flesh was seared after Uriel delivered round after round of energised particles into the pulsing flesh. Close shaves with the writing tendrils gave Uriel an opportunity to lacerate the flesh, every cut every hack, every scar would whittle at the beast. No brother of Moloch's interfered. Even among his kin, Moloch was now a monster. What he had surrendered himself to was not something they could support. For all their debauchery, all the sadism and abuse of those they deemed inferior, the Sons of Hedon shared the belief of their genetic relatives that animals and civilsied beings had a clear distinction. And Moloch was slipping past that line into the realms of the animal.

After what seemed to be an eternity of slashing and shooting at the formless and chaotic mass, Moloch's senseless writhing seemed to stop as the the monster collapsed to the floor, unable to move. Moloch's head surfaced to the top of the almost liquid pool of collapsing flesh and bone. With a brief moment of lucidity, he stared outwards with a look of defiance. He was unable to speak, but the steely glare he shot at both Uriel and Hedon told them of a man who was resigned to his fate but unwilling to admit that he was wrong. Hedon stood back as Uriel walked up to the puddle of flesh that was once the interim master of the Sons of Hedon.

Uriel' - Before your fate comes, I wish to ask of you: Are you aware of how the Draconis achieved their supremacy?

Moloch could only try pathetically to find a mouth to speak from in order to deliver an arrogant riposte. But he had sacrificed his ability to speak, a gift reserved for civilized beings in hopes of gaining the raw brute strength of an animal. Uriel could only look as the puddle seemed to vibrate as Moloch pitifully attempted to speak. But alas, it was as hopeless as watching a dog attempt to give a speech.

Uriel - ''Your father understands. Your masters concluded, that the best approach for order is absolute control. That all exist to elevate and serve them. Those that resist or somehow fall short either die, or suffer a painful torture until they capitulate, am I correct?''

Uriel turned to look at Hedon.

Hedon - ''Correct, save for perhaps one subtlety. The Dominatus will torture others not just for punishment, but also just for entertainment.'' Uriel - ''A constant war to keep the lesser species invisible, unheard. The Imperium however, rules by wisdom: Every being has a value, not as a slave or a servant to the holders of power, but as a contributor to a greater whole. It was not fear and expendable labour that built the spires of Araveene or the long memorial-endowed trail of the Paragon's Promenade, The Imperium your masters promised you after this war was built with every being doing their part not because their masters promised the lash as the alternative but because they all wanted to build something great.''

Uriel approached the blob, lowering himself to look sternly into Moloch's eyes.

Uriel- ''That is how the Imperium succeeded: Twenty quadrillion individual elements, working to maintain a galactic machine. With each contributing in their own way. A million ecosystems offering their output because they know that such greatness must be preserved, not by fear the lash or the headsman's axe but by the dream that they are building a brighter future for their descendents. Your masters were so fixated on their own needs and their own self-preservation that those who were not their kind did not matter. They saw the chance to work for them as a reward to bask in.'' Hedon - ''The house of the Dominatus is one predicated on the flimsy columns of fear. Perhaps if we were so great, others would have come willingly and rather than submitting out of fear, would have joined us because of their admiration. Uriel's confidence in his Imperium was such that with all the power he had over me, he gave me a choice.'' Uriel - Just as I decided Hedon's fate as he lay at my mercy, it is only appropriate that your own father should decide on yours.

Moloch shot back a defiant looked that also betrayed his last descent into animal insanity. As the blob tried in vain to move in all directions, Uriel stepped aside as Hedon approached the blob. Hedon flew into the air over Moloch, but to Uriel's surprise did not raise his sword.

Hedon - I'm sorry it had to end this way, my son.

Hedon opened his jaw and began breathing a fire that burnt with such an intensity that it could be seen from all below the citadel's rooftop. While the average Son could breathe fire, Hedon's gift as a second-stage enhancement was something like a plasma flamethrower. The sheer, blinding brilliance of the fire incinerated the writhing Moloch, spreading from his face to the rest of his corrupted and strewn out body. The iridescent light was one that Kyrennus and Uriel could only look in awe at as it completely consumed the body of the former commander of the Sons of Hedon. After some time, all that remained were charred ashes on the rooftop's floor, ashes that were soon scattered by the wind to the rest of Sybaris.

Uriel - ''Fitting, Hedon. That his corrupted body is cleansed by a purifying light.''

Emerging from the smoke of the battle, Kyrennus approached his paragon. With a bow, he opened the compartment in his back and presented the canister of the Ultima Servilis Serum.

Kyrennus - Ultima Servilis, as requested by high command, your majesty. Uriel- ''Prepare it for extraction, it returns to the Imperium. Hedon...these are your children and this was your home. What is to become of it and them, I shall defer to you judgement.''

Hedon was a creature than once relished in the extermination of children and the razing of planets. But now it was his children, and his former home. And in Hedon's eyes, Uriel saw something new - indecisiveness.

Hedon - ''My Paragon, It is my wish to preserve as many of the Sons as possible, but only those who have the will to change. Even at this stage of the war, the Sons still cling onto to the belief that the Dominatus will win. It is impossible for them to see the light until the Dominatus are destroyed. Furthermore, the Sons below will never surrender. It is with a heavy heart that I decree it is necessary to kill them.'' Uriel - ''Under Medusa you were their progenitor. And when this is over, you will be their progenitor again; Wipe the slate of Medusa's stain, and from what is left, build something stronger.'' Hedon - Yes, my Paragon.

...

Kyrennus returned from looking out the camera ports. He looked back at his squad. He was the only survivor from the Andromeda Campaign, and only one of 2 from the start of the Mirus Campaign.He sensed the craft slow down, a sign that they were preparing to open the bay doors in order for a combat jump. As they stalled, Kyrennus looked at his men and spoke.

''The Dominatus rule solely by fear. Their victory relies on us losing hope. We did not lose hope in Andromeda, even when their fleets closed in on Araveene. We did not lose hope at Manticore, even when it seemed their fleets would destroy outs. We will certainly not lose hope here - victory  - victory in this battle means victory in the war.''

''Today we jump to rid the Gigaquadrant of this menance, once and for all. ''

Today we jump because we are the Imperium's ambassadors to the Gigaquadrant.

Today we jump because unlike in Andromeda, the only thing we have to fear, is fear itself.

On fire we fly!

The Belly of the Beast
The citadel Immortal Hatred stood arrogantly over the war-torn hells cape of Demogorgon Prime that the Delpha Coalition of Planets had been assigned to seize. It was the last bastion that the Coalition had to capture before laying siege to Malogenesis, the capital of the Dominatus themselves. Situated in Muspel, the side of Demogorgon Prime that faced the star Demogorgon, the battleground was a scene of sundered earth and screeching lava embraced by the constant roars of thunder and accompanying lashes of lightning. It was permeated by screaming mounds of dead and dying Delpha soldiers, who themselves were strangled by the endless plumes of ash that were the disintegrated remains of their comrades. In the midst of this barren and nightmarish landscape, the towering spires of the citadel stood, cackling evilly at the hastily erected bastions that the DCP had built to encircle the city-fortress. Each laugh was a bolt of Dominatus science that tore into the DCP’s ranks with contemptuous ease.

Warlord Kilnok was a veteran of many a war. Each cell in his glazed eyes had seen more death and destruction than entire civilisations. Before him flashed the legacy of the DCP - with one blink were the titanic clashes of iron that symbolised their conflicts with the Grox. In another were the defiant screams of mortal men against the unstoppable tide of the Xhodocto. Perhaps only his time as a warrior let him process the carnage he saw regularly as a normal man would process the banality of normal life. It was only fitting that the DCP’s greatest commander managed a commanding and calm countenance in face of the ceaseless chaos in front of him. But even one as great as Kilnok, and one as jaded as the head commander of one of the Gigaquadrant’s greatest empires was taken aback by the one-sided massacre he had witnessed.

The dreaded sound of each failure was at times a cacophony and at other times a dead silence. As standard practice, assaults against Dominatus citadels consisted of the full mechanised might of a civilisation. The rumble of tanks, the earth-shattering footsteps of mecha, the hurried stampede of power-armoured infantry, massed artillery barrages, a never-ending tide of strike craft and what orbital bombardment could make it past the shielding of the planet. To all but the most powerful militaries, even a fraction of this force would be enough to intimidate even their most arrogant generals into submission. But to see each attack utterly annihilated without so much as a modicum of visible against its heavy ordnance was an experience that caused even hardened generals to breakdown in the comfort of their private quarters.

In their fights with the Dominatus, the DCP had learned that the most efficient way to seize a bastion was via the use of hyper elite melee troops equipped with personal short-range FTL and utility fog capability. However, after each successive use, the Dominatus constantly counteracted this with modifications to their own sensors. It was a never-ending arms race, but fortunately, one in which the DCP had just gained the upper hand. Kilnok and his most elite troops - Furies, each codenamed for a DCP city that had been destroyed by the Dominatus had just been equipped with the latest versions of these equipment, and had been tasked with taking the bastion. Kilnok however, knew that no matter what the outcome of this battle, that the Dominatus would soon come up with countermeasures against their new toys.

In taking the fortress, Kilnok and his troops first had to close the no-mans-land between themselves and the walls. Then after they scaled the walls, they had to face the full firepower of the Domiantus garrison. Their goal was solely to silence the heavy guns of the Dominatus so that the DCP could bring its specialised seize equipment bear. Furthermore, they were to hold on as much as possible, so as to hold up Dominatus reinforcements while the walls were torn down. To distract Dominatus forces in such a way that their melee forces were kept back, the DCP would send assaults throughout no-man’s-land. The idea was that the Dominatus would be so busy gunning down another hopeless offensive that Kilnok and his men could close the distance and get onto the walls before they had invited any retribution. As there were more walls to guard than Dominatus Overseers, the only Dominatus combatants who could effectively combat the Furies short of the Dominatus themselves, and the Overseers had learned not to split up in fear of being defeated in detail, they remained in the citadel’s spire waiting to respond to a possible breach.

The battle began without any speeches - the ennui of the war had taken its toll on even the most eloquent and inspirational of men. It began with the familiar rampage of the full might of the Coalition. Kilnok and his men waited in their experimental, custom-made assault suits. These suits had been equipped with extremely powerful thrusters that would propel the Furies to the battlements themselves. They would gradually break off in mid flight and leave a trail of utility flog. Finally, they would fire off a series of missiles before ejecting the soldier, who would use his short-range teleporter to enter the frenzy. While these suits had been in production for some time, it was only now that they had been gathered in the numbers needed for them to make a battle-changing difference as opposed to only novel shock. But even in what must have seemed to be one of the Coalition’s most advanced pieces of tactical technology, the Furies could have sworn they were as vulnerable as the bait on the battlefield.

Kilnok waited silently for the go-signal, begrudgingly waiting for it as he forced himself to listen to the screams of the dead and dying on the communication channel. To himself he thought that the Dominatus were laughing, thinking this was just another day. And as the countdown to launch ended, he smirked for the first time in a long time - it was not just another day.

Even for warriors of the Fury’s stature, the impact of the thrusters was one that felt like it was going to rip their bodies apart. Every sensory output was disguised by the utility fog across all mediums, but to the warriors inside, the feeling was that of being ripped in every direction. The Furies readied themselves for combat, trying to meditate as the sound of their rapidly-depleting suits drowned out the slaughter below. Each Fury had been trained in the operation of the suit, and at Kilnok’s order, having surpassed the altitude of the citadel’s walls, activated their payloads. They Dominatus defenders, sadistically cajoling in their unopposed slaughter, were taken aback by the appearance and sudden impact of the DCP’s most advanced miniaturised missiles. So used to feeling invincible, chunks were taken out of whole formations while the battlements shuddered from the impact.

After recovering from the shock of this sudden attack, the wall’s garrison soon found themselves beset by the DCP’s most elite melee fighters. Dominatus synthetics, only some of whom had been given melee weapons, were soundly outclassed by the Furies. The majority, who had been given long-ranged weaponry, were but cattle to a butcher. To the beleaguered DCP assault troops on the plains below, they noticed happily that each new thud was a falling Dominatus synthetic or fortification - today was certainly going to be different. Even when the Dominatus turned their own turrets on the walls, they struck their own forces instead of the DCP’s, who used their teleporters to escape each salvo. Kilnok noticed gleefully that the remaining Dominatus synthetics no longer manned the battlements, but rushed to the heaviest Dominatus turrets to attempt to protect them from the onslaught.

But this glee was short-lived. Kilnok had fought the Dominatus long enough to know that when good things happened, they were either too good to be true, or they did not last. A large contingent of Overseers, namely the Vartekian Subjugators of Cravidor and Grow Steel Reapers led by a Dominatus Sovereign Executor, perhaps one of the single most powerful hand-to-hand combatants in the Gigaquadrant certainly qualified as par for the course. Kilnok split his forces into a contingent that would pursue the Dominatus ultra-heavy turrets and one led by him that would hold the Overseers off.

To the ground troops below, advancing much more freely, the fight above seemed to be not one fought between mortals, but between gods. Each stroke pulverised subsections of the wall, sending them falling down like angry meteors to the hells cape below. Each parry gave off such energy that the angry storm that ranged seemed tame by comparison. The fights between gods of war - DCP Furies and late-war Tyranny Overseers seemed was one that the synthetics of the Dominatus and the DCP’s troopers felt a petrified reverence for. The air was awash with coruscating flashes of light and monstrous screams that seemed to reverberate through the buckling walls of the citadel. Each dead Overseer was a permanent casualty to its legion - with all the Overseer worlds destroyed, they could never be replaced. Each dead Fury was a DCP war hero, perhaps an ultra-soldier or a commander wiped from history, the collective experience of an army being snuffed out from existence.

A crescendo of explosions delighted Kilnok - while his main force was decimated in the fight against the Overseers, his demolitions force had destroyed all but one of the main towers threatening the DCP’s specialised siege equipment. But assessing the situation again, he found that to his horror, the Dominatus and the majority of his overseers had clustered around the last turret. They formed an impenetrable cordon around it that the Furies couldn’t seem to break. Kilnok took stock of his men and noticed that they had taken severe casualties. Any rational observer saw what had to be done, and a frenzied charge towards the last turret was what followed. Despite the Dominatus’ best attempts, several Furies got through the cordon, with Kilnok giving them the specific instruction to wait for his command to activate the explosives once they were set. Unfortunately, Kilnok himself stood face to face with the nameless Dominatus Sovereign Executor, one who untraditionally it seems, skipped the formalities of gloating before a duel and charged Kilnok. Before the battle, Kilnok had tested his new weaponry against the late Sovereign Executor Talos’ Mortis armor. It seemed that his blades could slice through the armour of the Destroyer of Horatorio with ease - and as Sovereign Executors went into battle so sparingly, Kilnok assumed that his blades would at least be able to penetrate the armour of the Dominatus he faced. Unfortunately, he was wrong.

To his disappointment ,this particular Sovereign Executor was wearing a one-of-a-kind Dominatus-crafted armor that had been created just prior to the destruction of the Archostrategon’s main research Installation. A slash from Kilnok’s blade could only dent the armour while a piercing blow couldn’t even get to the infamously resilient Dominatus flesh. On the other hand, a blow from the Dominatus’ weapon-claw nearly severed his left arm, which was only held together by the timely intervention of DCP nanites. This particular Dominatus was also faster than usual, and could keep up with Kilnok’s hyperspatial antics. The Warlord found that unfortunately, whenever he popped out of hyperspace to strike, there was a parry. Unbeknownst to Kilnok, this particular Sovereign Executor had never been promoted to the rank of Drachon as he showed no particular talent for command, only duelling. While this would have appealed to him had they stood on opposite sides of the battlefield, the fact that he had made such a rank on the sole basis of one-on-one combat made him uneasy. Perhaps his only solace was that a sole Fury had survived to plant the mines and merely waited on his order.

But this development was quickly pushed out of his mind when after another prolonged period of combat, the invincible Dominatus slashed through Kilnok as he jumped out of hyperspace, almost severing is body in half. while in the same motion bringing him to his mouth Thanks to the power of DCP technology however, Kilnok maintained full consciousness and cognitive faculty - enough to notice in full lucidity the fact that the Dominatus was eating him whole and his overheated teleporter still needed time to cool down.

The first sensation he experienced after the complete darkness of the Dominatus’ gaping maw was the crushing sensation as the Dominatus jaw and internal muscles literally squeezed the life out of him. One could almost joke that Kilnok was becoming more slurry than warrior, being only barely held together by overstretched DCP nanites. But a new sensation followed - he seemed to be stuck in a blender of ultra-sharp teeth, one which span him round while synthetic acid tore at his exposed viscera. But the half of Kilnok’s face that remained smirked inside the valley of teeth as he mentally activated his teleporter one last time, and a split second later gave the order to detonate.

The Dominatus could not have known about the trip through hyperspace that his food was carrying him through. He would have been perhaps the first Dominatus to eat a Warlord alive. He was that and more - the first Dominatus to use the DCP’s personal hyperspatial technology. He was also the first Dominatus to test whether his armour could protect its inhabitant from the reactor blast of an ultra-heavy turret. He failed in that test. Fortunately, the armour was strong enough that what remained of Kilnok found himself in a crater on the plains below, barely protected by the charred and fused husk of Dominatus biomass and the last vestiges of arguably the most advanced personal armour system of the war. his mission accomplished, Kilnok entered unconsciousness as his nanites scrambled to stabilise him.

With the last turret destroyed, the DCP brought its specialised siege weaponry to bear, and soon cracked open the Dominatus walls. What followed was a predictable fight in which despite Dominatus resistance, the DCP slowly ground the fortress down to dust. What few Furies remained protected Kilnok’s biomechanical sarcophagus while reinforcements came, and over the course of the battle, Kilnok was exhumed from Dominatus tomb. Upon seeing him, his compatriots were possessed of two emotions - shock at what he had been through, and the implied power of the Dominatus, and also laughter at expecting this result - it seemed the closer Kilnok got to death, the more likely he would be alive. A near death experience for Kilnok was simply a test for whether one knew him or not, for he seemed to dance with the reaper closer and closer merely to taunt it.

Kilnok’s medical chamber was erected in full view of the ruined fortress - his first sight upon opening his one remaining eye was the flag of the Coalition soaring above the citadel’s spire.

Daring, Heroism, and Courage
Perhaps the most intimidating building in Malogenesis other than the Tyrant’s Spire, Apogee, the Dominatus Military Headquarters was abuzz with activity. In it, the Dominatus military junta headed by the formerly disgraced but recently repromoted Archon Wolframicht Stahl received its daily report. The contents of this reports were always bad; the only variation was whether they were avoidably bad or unavoidably bad. The loss of a bunker, bastion, or eventually citadel after it held out for its expected combat lifetime was considered unavoidably bad. The loss of a Dominatus or senior Overseer in an arrogance-addled rampage was considered avoidably bad. Stahl sardonically laughed at the reports of enemy casualties during these unavoidably bad actions : Warlord Klinok - Killed in Action (no confirmation), some EC Overseer knockoffs - Killed in Action (no confirmation), scores of famous ADC war heroes - Killed in Action (no confirmation), famous galactic figure leading a charge - Killed in Action (no confirmation). Of Course the Dominatus list of dead was suitably more detailed : Overseer Template Akemainyu - Killed in Action (confirmation), Sovereign Executor Malefis Wyrex - Killed in Action (confirmation), Overseer Template Oculon - Killed in Action (confirmation).

Each dead Overseer Template meant that even if by some miracle the Tyranny emerged victorious and reconquered its old territories, that in a certain way, that Overseer Legion was sterile. Stahl laughed again when the word sterility came up - he thought it madness that several hundred years ago the so-called Drakodominatus Republic had on its deathbed released a sterility plague just to spite the victorious Drakodomiantus Tyranny. While in front of what remained of the Dominatus General Staff, he was lost in a short trance. Stahl was never an engineer or a scientist - his original assignment upon finishing officer school was to the cavalry. It wasn’t the enhanced biomechanics monstrosities of today that mounted armour and shielding similar to strike craft, but the beautiful offspring of Demogorgon Prime. Perhaps it was a consequence that the Dominatus had risen to power to meteorically, almost like a cancer engineered by a scientist equal parts sadistic and talented that he remembered the times when the flimsy exoskeletons which passed for “powered armour” were considered state of the art, and laser armed bombardment satellites were considered to be war-winning weapons. A Dominatus in powered armour now would be worshipped as a god in those times - it could fly gracefully, was immune to almost everything, and from its fingertips could generate beams of energy that made the beams released by those satellites look like friction burns. During the days of the rifle, a single high caliber shot could dismember an unarmored Drakodominatus. He had grown up in those days and still remembered the feeling of danger and mortality. He couldn’t say the same for those whose first taste of combat was civilising primitives while performing orbital drops in powered armour, much less those who were born Dominatus.

Yet it seemed even some of his generation had gone insane with the power bestowed upon them by providence and their own talents and determination. They acted as if they were in a play in which the lone protagonist fought off the endless hordes by himself and triumphed over the enemy champion. Stahl mused that these idiots were so genre blind that they couldn’t tell tragedy from comedy and protagonist from antagonist. It was perhaps the same idiocy that believe in things like heroism and valour triumphing over the raw weight of an industrialised war machine. In the grand scheme of things, the vast majority of the time, those flashy duels meant shit -and when they did mean something, it was because the armies believed it meant something and seemed to pause to spectate. Acts of heroism and valour were mere expectations and statistical occurrences in a war of extermination between two industrial juggernauts - mere flashpoints to distract future historians from the boring minutiae of casualty reports, production output reports, statistical demography, logistics, technology, development that made up the bulk of this godforsaken war. As a child, no, even now, Stahl would rather read about tomes describing decisive and daring actions, bold heroes locked in duels with their nemeses than a novel about two men choking each other and trying to outlast each other. What would such a novel even look like?

“At the resolution of the story there is no room for both a hero and a villain. One of the two must die and by definition the one remaining is the hero. At the start of the story both characters are fully healthy. Character 1 has a higher initial air capacity than Character 2, and they both choke each other out at the same rate. Character 1 kills Character 2. Character 1 is therefore the hero. The End.”

He found it ironic that as Character 2 so to speak, with barely a breath left, that he was turning to yet more sarcasm instead of thinking about how to choke Character 1. He chuckled again. The time for being reasonable and sane was long past - those hopes ended at Manticore. There was only time for insanity now. He only needed to hold out a bit longer now - Castigon would be done fusing with their last hope soon.

Stahl - Daring, Heroism, and Courage Stahl - Thats an odd way to spell TIAMAT

The Audacity of Hope
The map of Demogorgon Prime as of December 1, 2795 looked very different to the one on October 1, 2795 on which the planetary invasion began. Where before, landing sites were mere landfills for the corpses of first-wave assaults, now that they were out of Dominatus artillery range, the ADC, with all of its industrial might had replaced these mortuaries with massive prefabricated ports and factories. These facilities were the conduit between the military force of the Gigaquadrant and the planet whose species thought it wise to offend them in their entirety. It is no exaggeration to say that each of these facilities received what would have been an army sufficient to besiege a single planet as regularly as a trade port would receive shipments of their most common commodity. Yet inflation was everywhere in this war, and most vividly on Demogorgon Prime : a war hero was merely a statistics, a rare act of brilliance and daring was merely a footnote to the callous clash of civilizations, catastrophic losses that would have before caused a resignation or sacking of senior military staff was merely a fact of the times.

Dominatus exterior bunkers had been either captured or destroyed. Even the Dominatus knew that no matter what, this first line of defence was going to fall to the might of the ADC, but while the bunkers survived as long as the Dominatus needed them so survive, the Dominatus had lost substantially more soldiers keeping them for that time than originally expected. For an army with no reinforcements and no new recruits, this was a nightmare, one exacerbated by the unexpected deaths of many senior figures. The lines of larger bastions had also been for the most part been breached. Where they were not yet captured, Dominatus forces waged a hopeless fight against a ceaseless tide of enemies. But perhaps worst of all was the rate at which the Allies had breached the citadels. The citadels of Demogorgon Prime represented the pinnacle of Dominatus defensive military engineering, and were thought by the Dominatus to be invincible. Unfortunately for them, while they proved themselves utterly impervious to the first attacks, the Allies could adapt their tactics while the Dominatus had to act within the confines of what they already had. The sight of an Allied flag on a Citadel’s spire was one that filled what passed for Tyranny hearts with dread, and on December 1, those Allied flags on Citadels outnumbered Dominatus flags.

Indeed, the Allies had gotten to the point of besieging the walls of Malogenesis itself. While these walls were substantially more durable than even those of the citadels, and armed with fierce automated turrets, the Dominatus did not have the forces to garrison the walls in their entirety. They had to be marshalled at key sections in order to repulse ADC attacks, and every day the ADC attacked more sections of the wall at once. If the fight for the walls a matter of attrition, the Dominatus knew that as with all battles for attrition now, they would lose. And once the walls were breached, it was all over. Of course the time of grim knowledge and reasonable responses was over, but perhaps it is reasonable to say that the only reasonable response the Dominatus had was to place all their faith in their last glimmering hope.

The Good Night
"Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

- Dylan Thomas

With Castigon fully fused to the TIAMAT, the Dominatus forces marked before the battle for the great counter-offensive on land assembled into their attack formations. The Tyranny’s last strike craft, aerial vehicles, tanks,, and mechanised infantry should poised for the last of any kind of Dominatus offensive of the war. They assembled under the cover of utility fog within Malogenesis’ walls before its main gates. They counted amongst their ranks, what remained of the Dominatus Tank Corps, including the surviving feared Ogre Class Heavy Main Battle Tanks, swarms of Mecha and their carriers, massive walkers and even a few Ultra Heavy Vehicles. Indeed, the magnum opus of Dominatus Army technology, the one-of-a-kind Tyrant Class Ultra-Heavy Walker stood to lead one of the sub-offensives. This effort was to be spearheaded by the elite assassination squads of the remaining Cyclops. In other news, the Tyranny had assembled the largest ever concentration of the Dominatus themselves. It was a force designed to strike fear into the hearts of gods, a force made to utterly crush the ADC’s vaster army and impress upon them the futility of fighting the Dominatus. However, this force was virtually all that remained of the mechanised strength of the once Gigaquadrant-threatening Archostrategon.

Once his forces had assembled, Stahl made a speech from his command centre on Apogee. This speech is noteworthy as the last Dominatus speech preceding an offensive, and the last speech in which a Dominatus acknowledged a chance at victory.

"Perhaps history has marked us off as already lost, as mere footnotes in the march of time. Perhaps the cacophonous staccato of constant fighting retreat is the reason for fate’s arrogance. Perhaps in the trenches below our foe count the days while watching out buildings crumble. But I believe that the hubris of fate is justified in all circumstances save one - fate will make an allowance for the Dominatus to not only survive, but conquer all. Remember our anthem. No price too high, no foe too strong, science and strength will vanquish. We have a price to pay, that paid by a mortal upon apotheosis. We gladly give our husks over to a place in eternity. The strong will thrive, and kill the weak, and only we shall remain. For when history is written, it will only remember us, crystallised as the most scintillating of stars standing vigil over an endless empire. For with the TIAMAT above us, we have all but guaranteed our place as those who will remain when all else are gone. With martial might, and brilliant minds, we make gods kneel before us. All that exists, and even more, will be driven before us. Our foes perish crushed by our will, swallowed whole by oblivion. We will prevail, unstoppable, the Tyranny will rule all. TIAMAT! Activate!"

- Wolframicht Stahl

A Week of Decades
"There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen."

- Vladimir Lenin



The TIAMAT had laid inert for the duration the battle, the construct having not yet assumed its physical form, and thus not yes existing as a normal object existed had thus not yet been detected. The DCP remembered the proto-TIAMAT of the War of Hyperspace and had wondered where it had gone and had remembered its fearsome power. They suspected that while it still existed, it was merely a Dominatus fluke that lay derelict in some abandoned part of space. One could have imagined the surprise of the allied fleet commanders when a massive spherical construct with a radius of 1,000,000 kilometres materialised in the system. But before the shock at the ship’s (if it could be called that) size was soon overcome with the disappearance of an entire Apalos Temple Ship. This was soon followed by the appearance of a smaller frigate, and then a cruiser, and then a single strike craft, and then a Junction Planet Fortress. There seemed to be no pattern in the ships destroyed. All that could be surmised was that this Dominatus creation could take a flagship as easily as it could take away a fighter, but could not choose in which order to remove them. Moreover, these ships ha simply disappeared - it was as if their whole mass and the energy contained within merely vanished; it was as the matter of which they were composed did not exist. With horror in their eyes, the ADC realised that the Dominatus’ ultimate weapon was working.

The Allied response was as fierce as it was ultimately useless. There was no sign of damage, even as the cruel entity plucked Allied Ships from existence with the impunity of a tank crushing an ant. Only the discipline of the Allied Fleet and the urgent of the situation gave rise to any kind of coordinated response - the Allies were merely to fire and hold their ground while continuing to ferry troops to the ground. However, even with this steely determination, many amongst the ADC began to feel a familiar emotion, one that they had only once experienced in the early days of the Dominatus War. It was a feeling brought forth by the seeming invincibility of the Dominatus juggernaut - it was despair.

There were no speeches that could lift the hearts of men in the fight that could be made against something that seemed as unstoppable as time. Perhaps the only thing that kept them going was the knowledge that there was nothing else they could do than fight. Everyone knew that the war ended here - either the Dominatus and their machines were all vanquished, or the Dominatus were really so blessed as to obliterate the Gigaquadrant’s army an fleet in a last stand. All they could do is fire into the implacable mass and hope that eventually fate would grant them something anathema to the monster. A commander whose name has been lost to time made the following snide remark as the TIAMAT continued reaping some of the most powerful ships in the Gigaquadrant like a farmer of old reaped grain.

"It seems the Universe itself is trying to write us out of it. I can only hope our troops below are doing somewhat better. Though knowing the Dominatus, and knowing this war, they’re probably getting massacred. The only difference is that we are facing an unknown devil while they face a devil they know. Lucky bastards"

- Anonymous

Unstoppable
"Tonight we make our stand, but when the light breaks over the horizon our ascension is at hand"

- Unknown Dominatus Commander

The Allies could have scarcely imagined that the night of December 1 would commence with their frontline exploding. Indeed the last remaining batteries of Dominatus Ultra-Heavy Desolator Artillery opened fire on the once thought unreachable allied ports/original landing zones. Super-heavy and Heavy Dominatus artillery opened fire on the allied frontlines at the same time while anti-air batteries and what few remaining squadrons of Harbinger Class interceptors remained guarded the skies. Orbital Bombardment would be stymied by the shield, and aerial bombardment would be repulsed by the Tyranny’s fighters. So long as they held, the Dominatus artillery were nigh-invincible.

The initial surprise and raw power of thee angry orchestra of Dominatus artillery both shattered several important ports while cracking open the allied frontline. Scarcely had the earsplitting shattering roar of the building-sized shell firing Desolator’s gatling cannon woken the frontline up than had the full might of the Tyranny been unleashed on the allied armies. The Dominatus had calculated that they had enough aircraft and anti-air to interdict enough of the Allies Close Air support for 3 days. This, combined with the efficiency of the planetary shield meant that for the next 3 days, this battle would solely be a fight between land armies.

The descent of massed formations Daemon Class Mecha from Nightmare Class Assault Carrier accompanied by bombardment from these massive hovering platforms utterly pulverised those who thought themselves same in the trenches surrounding Malogenesis. On other fronts, this was a wing of Dominatus, equipped not so much with weapons, but with devices that allowed them to disintegrate both tanks and infantry with equal contemptuous ease while flying at breakneck speeds. Perhaps most terrifyingly, the lone Ultra-Heavy Tyrant Class Walker, standing at the height of the city’s main gate simply blasted its way past entire ADC armies while they struggled to bring down the beast.

The allied reaction was also hamstrung by the synchronized nerve strikes of Cyclops commandoes. Numerous senior allied officers, especially those who were not distinguished warriors were killed along with their command staffs in these infiltrations. Those who remained were confronted with a rapidly deteriorating situation - their logistical line was being severed and their frontline was broken through. When asked about their status, a commander of a fully mechanised combined frontline unit of 100,000 troops merely reply with the number 10,000. A more naive commander would have assumed this meant 10,000 casualties. Anyone left knew that it meant 10,000 survivors. Despite the catastrophic losses suffered, the Allies swiftly moved to consolidate their posterior lines of defence while those in the front stalled for time. It was a time for acts of heroism, but though they happened such acts meant very little in the face of the raw power of the Dominatus.

The fighting retreat was led by the ISF’s overstretched squad’s of gravitic weaponry equipped Paladins who did what they could in taking out the Dominatus’ titanic war machines. But even troops as advanced and powerful as they were forced back by the Dominatus’ use of combined arms and the fact that their presence was needed all over the battlefield. Perhaps it was only their timely intervention that gave this withdrawal characteristics more closely resembling a fighting retreat than a rout. But try as the Allies might, the Dominatus advanced as a cancer or a grey goo did. Unfortunately for the ADC, it seemed that the limiting factor of the Dominatus’ advance was not their resistance, but the speed or lack thereof of the Dominatus’ largest war machines.

The screams from those not fortunate enough to be disintegrated constitute the only variation from the sound of the march of the Dominatus. The Allied commanders on the ground noticed glumly that with each passing moment, the sounds of battle came closer and closer. Each moment it seemed, another army succumbed to the unstoppable power of the wave before them. But they could do nothing else than attempt to hold. It would at least give them something to do than ponder why ship by ship, their fleet was disappearing.

Fixed in the melancholy of what seemed to be a hopeless battle, they could only think of how unfair it was. Had they lost all these men, and come to this forsaken part of the Gigaquadrant, spent all these years in a fight that was draining them dry, just to be obliterated like this?

Hope and Despair
The TIAMAT had an operating ceiling of a day. That is to say, even if it worked, it was meant only to be activated for a period of a day before being deactivated and recharging for a period that ranged from a few weeks to a few months. The Dominatus had thought that the Allies would retreat after seeing the futility of facing the TIAMAT. However, it had now been in operation for 36 hours, and the Allies had shown no such signs of letting up from their fruitless offensive.The Dominatus did not have projections as to how the TIAMAT would function in the next hours - it had performed as planned, working perfectly for its projected ceiling, and yet that was not enough. The ADC, though decimated, was still there. The Dominatus decided had no choice but to continue operation for as long as possible. If the Allies were not going retreat, the TIAMAT needed to stay active enough for it to destroy the entire ADC fleet.

And as such the struggle continued. At T+48, i.e. 48 hours after the battle had commenced, the Allies noticed that the TIAMAT was only half deleting some ships. At T+53, they noticed that the TIAMAT was deleting them at a slower rate. At T+59, they noticed that it was deleting ships at one third the rate it had at the start of the battle. At T+67, they noted that the TIAMAT was losing its components, whatever that meant in this context. For the next 5 hours, they held their ground while bombarding the TIAMAT, and sadly recognised the judging by damage to the exterior of the immense ship, they were doing minimal damage. Little could prepare them for the TIAMAT’s cataclysmic explosion on T+72.

Theorists conjecture that given what they know about the TIAMAT, this catastrophic malfunction was mostly contained by its internal infrastructure. Unfortunately the remaining energy was powerful enough that not only did it utterly annihilate the TIAMAT and a multitude of nearby allied ships, it fried the shields of most every ship in the system as well as multiple subsystems. Unfortunately for the Dominatus, this energy wave didn’t discriminate between friend and foe, severely depleting their planetary shield.

On T+72, the Allies were reeling, holding on to their last lines of defence along their last remaining ports. The Dominatus advance seemed unstoppable. But when the Dominatus stared at the skies after the explosion, they noticed that the empty space was not one they were hoping for. It was not the allied fleet that was absent, it was instead the TIAMAT.

Survive
Once disgraced after the fall of the Katar Sector, Warmaster had gained a modicum of respect back from the General Staff after encouraging the use of Dominatus in formations known as flights. These formations were composed of 3 lances of 3 Dominatus, as well as a single flight leader. He reasoned that a single Dominatus merely constituted a novelty on the battlefield while a flight of 10 - 3 lances and their leader, were a battlefield-changing formation. The effectiveness of this formation had been proven time and time again - the combined mobility of the Dominatus due to their armoured suits as well as their raw power meant that they could as easily breakthrough an enemy’s line, cut them off, and annihilate them. Indeed, during the battle for Demogorgon Prime, Mortrig’s flight of Dominatus had blazed a bloody trail through the retreating armies of the ADC. Besides the already infiltrated Cyclops, the Dominatus were at the forefront of the offensive, focusing merely on punching holes through enemy lines and destroying groups piecemeal them pushing the frontline forward. Having linked up with a squad of Cyclops who had been holding a captured defensive position since the first day of the now 3 day battle, Mortrig congratulated his elite synthetic minions on a job well done. Mechanised forces would soon be following and it was only a matter of time before the ADC forces were fully expunged. Where they were concentrated, what remained of the ADC’s armies were a teeming mass of men and machine looking for the next defensive line to retreat to, and when they were cut off, they were merely tally marks for aggressive Dominatus who bragged about kills. It seemed that the outcome of the land battle was not in question.

However, only the General Staff was privy to the information that the TIAMAT had exceeded its operating ceiling after its first day of operation, and that the Allies had not yet retreated. Despite this, they believed that with the commitment of their forces, there was nothing they could do but continue the attack. Further, the estimated 3 day period during which the Dominatus could contest the airspace enough to prevent a massacre by Allied Close Air Support was over - the remaining Dominatus Harbingers were only barely holding off the Allied forces. Mortrig had only finished congratulating the Cyclops when a massive blast threw even his armoured frame to the ground. Looking up, he saw in disbelief that while the myriad forms of Allied ships were still present, the space occupied by the TIAMAT was gone.

Mortrig could barely process this thought before a massive bolt of energy struck the ground a kilometre or so away from him. That was impossible - the energy shield was what forced the ADC to count on ground artillery, ground assaults and strike craft as opposed to orbital bombardment. Another bolt landed - the shield was obviously breached. Mortrig remembered his the technical details of the Dominatus shield's recovery routine. It would gain full power in a day or so, but during that day, the entire planet was naked.

The General Staff had not yet given orders, obviously not having planned for this occurrence, but the drizzle was turning into a deluge - the sky was falling on the Dominatus. Mortrig was contemplating continuing the offensive, sunk costs and all, before the first sheet of "rain" slammed into Dominatus positions, irrevocably changing his mind.

An Immortal Class Super-Heavy Walker stood 160 meters tall and towered over everything save one-off constructions and Ultra-Heavy vehicles. Arguably capable of taking on whole armies and virtually impervious to anything the ADC had on land save for converted starship grade weaponry, it was an immense expression of Dominatus imperiousness and technical prowess. The sight of one being thrown up in the air due to the mere concussion of a nearby allied barrage followed by that of the broken remains being vaporised by a second salvo impressed upon Mortrig that an offensive was untenable. The Dominatus did not use the word rout to describe anything but their enemy’s frenzied attempts to avoid confrontation. A fighting retreat was out of the question, and only the ADC was ever routed. Instead, the General Staff issued a single word as their order.

Survive.

Look upon my Works, ye Mighty, and Despair
Ozymandias, a 30 meter tall Apex Avatar paused momentarily to survey the battlefield. As an Apex Avatar, he represented the zenith of non-vehicle Dominatus synthetics. Capable of sustained periods of flight and possessing extreme firepower and resilience, Ozmyandias eschewed all weapons aside from his eye beams, using the rest of his modules to amplify the power of these already terrifying weapons. Indeed many amongst the ADC were petrified by the blazing eyes of an angry god before they were disintegrated. An angry god, he jested, that was putting all his power into escaping back to Malogenesis, with vermin chasing no far behind.

Indeed, as he was flying, Ozymandias had a view of the battlefield that must have seemed to an infantry man like omniscience. He remembered that quote he read from a Terran document about the worst thing being the knowledge of everything and the power to do nothing. It seemed appropriate to the current situation. Indeed, his two accompanying Avatar wingmen, Khufu and Imhotep chided him sardonically over their communications channel. Sarcasm seemed to be the way Dominatus deflected the general hopeless of their situation. Unfortunately, as Khufu soon found out, it couldn’t deflect a MIRVed anti-matter warhead launched from an ADC strike craft. His shielding countermeasures and interception equipment were powerful enough to save Khufu from destruction. But unfortunately, his main thrusters were damaged, causing him to plummet to the ground. Even Ozymandias couldn’t bring himself to the snide observation that Khufu was now just an ant for the cruel gods in their starships above. But he didn’t need to speak, like clockwork, a stray bolt from another barrage removed any trace of Khufu’s existence.

What a sight it was - the DCP Palace Ship bearing its full weight down on the sole Tyrant Class Ultra-Heavy Walker, which due to its range, endangered one of the ADC’s makeshift ports. For once it seemed like the Tyrant could resist the massive ship enough for the Dominatus forces beneath to escape. ADC Terrans also mused that sometimes, the moment before it was crushed, an insect looked like it could resist an anvil. Unfortunately for both the Tyrant and the insect, physics was decidedly on the side of the heavier object, and what nominal resistance there was, was forgotten as the massive mech, made in the likeness of a Dominatus, was crushed into a million pieces.

Everywhere there was chaos - what remained of Dominatus formations were making mad dashes for the walls of the city, some were stupidly continuing the attack. Ozymandias jested that it wasn’t that stupid - they were going to die anyway, they were just making an entertaining choice. He continued flying as the ADC continually pummelled Demogorgon Prime, forcing it to vomit up chunks of earth with every blow. Emotion had been an emergent property of the Dominatus programming of synthetics - mostly it manifested itself as either a cold arrogance or an angry range.

This time it manifested itself as despair - cross-referencing his sensors with the Dominatus database of formations, he found that in this first four hours, entire formations had been reduced to 20% combat effectiveness. Moreover, these were the formations previously judged invulnerable - those composed mostly of Super-Heavy vehicles were suffering the most. 20 hours to go. His formation of 3, already reduced to 66% effectiveness due to the death of Khufu, was reduced to 33% effectiveness as a wall of light came from the heavens and bisected Imhotep. The resulting impact from the energy was such that Ozymandias was sent tumbling down. His visual sensors scrambled, Ozymandias had only inertial guidance - fortunately maps told him he was going to land in an as of yet untaken citadel. Ozymandias crash-landed, signalling for friendly forces to assist him. He received no reply.

Once his visual sensors were fully activated, he saw what had happened. The citadel wasn’t captured; it was destroyed by orbital bombardment, just 2 hours ago according to his sensors. There were no walls left, merely craters. He manifested a new emotion - hope. Perhaps the ADC would no longer bombard the citadel. He would just lie in wait while the shields came up again. Then his sensors confirmed a single enemy aircraft - a French Agamemnon VTOL. He saw a single face and prepared to activate his eye-beams. No way a single Parachutiste was going to ruin his day more than it had already. He just needed a moment to activate his beam weapons - all his sensors told him was there was a minuscule emanation of radiation from the Frenchman, a laser perhaps, nothing that could harm him.

The targeting laser couldn’t harm him. But the overkill of a ship’s worth of orbital bombardment weapons certainly could.

And in that split second, Ozymandias learned a new emotion - resignation.

The falling mountain of plasma terminated his emotional development there.

And I Must Scream
The Tyranny’s Chiliarchs were perhaps emblematic of the Tyranny’s combination of scientific and military achievment. While in the pre-Mirus Campaign stages of the Dominatus War, they filled the niche of shock troops within the Tyranny’s vast synthetic hordes, their effectiveness as contrasted to the useless of the far more numerous Myrmidons led to a Dominatus decision to make them the basic unit of the Tyranny’s synthetic legions. While durable and powerful, Chiliarchs were unable to keep pace with the Dominatus and Overseers. To remedy this, the Dominatus supplied offensive Chiliarch units with Horde Class Infantry Fighting Vehicles which ferried them to the frontline and offloaded them while supporting their assault.

Chiliarchs were only given names in the normal sense after distinguishing themselves in battle. This particular Chiliarch, an Assault Variant armed with a disruptor shotgun had earned this distinction, as had most who had survived to Demogorgon Prime. This Chiliarch, nicknamed Steelscream was one of the lucky troops who had found himself a spot in a retreating Horde Class IFV. It had been 16 hours since the shields had gone down, and Steelscream could do nothing but listen to the sounds of carnage as his IFV drove at full speed to Malogenesis. In the confines of the IFV, Steelscream could only hear the pleas for help and recovery on the communications channels. More often than not, these please were followed by the sender’s vital signs disappearing after the sound of a new barrage.

What was worse than the static however, was the silence. He had no idea how many others remained. If he had known, he would have phrased the question as how few remained. It was not only the stars that belonged to the ADC, it was the skies. Steelscream had learnt to differentiate between the brutal screech of enemy close air support and the thunderous procession of a ship’s broadside. It seemed now that those were the only two sounds they heard. He was smart enough to have recognised that he wouldn’t be hearing anymore of the Dominatus Harbinger space superiority craft, but to hear the anti-air get softened this much sent chills through his cybernetic nerves.

The IFV had allowed the troopers inside a glimpse at the carnage around them. To see a crashed Nightmare Class Assault Carrier, the massive, flying star like construct embedded in the ground was bad. To see the formidable Dominatus Daemon mecha try to crawl their way out of the twisted hangars was even worse. But to see even these ruins completely obliterated by what must have been a flotilla’s worth of ground bombardment cannons was cathartic in the worst possible way. Yes, doubts were erased, but all that remained was the knowledge of the hopelessness of the situation.

The still twitching remains of a siege column composed of Warhammer Class Siege Tanks haunted his digital memories. Where before they thundered at enemy fortifications with almost unstoppable might, the only sounds they produced now were gasps and gurgles as their ruined machinery failed to escape the wastelands of Demogorgon Prime. Steelscream couldn’t decide whether a direct hit from a missile was merciful or not. It seemed that the once thought unstoppable Archostrategon was simply a broken animal being euthanised.

Mercy Killing. What a thought. It remained in his consciousness as an unknown force threw the IFV up into the air. Steelscream could feel his mechanical tendons crushed by the impact of the dying vehicle on the ground. It seemed that his compatriots were similarly paralysed, trapped either by their malfunctioning systems or the vehicle’s entrails. One by one they reached the conclusion escape was impossible. One by one they self-terminated using their internal chips. Steelscream activated his own suicide chip only to find out that it had been damaged by the impact. For now, he was trapped in the burning mesh of metal and wire that bound him to the ground.

Steelscream - Please Kill Me, for I have no mouth but I must scream

The Strong and the Weak
24 hours had elapsed and the shield was operational again. In that time, all 3 rings of Malogenesis’ walls had been breached in multiple locations, and every Dominatus bastion and citadel had been flattened and then bombarded against for insurance. In that time, the Allies had destroyed 90% of the Dominatus offensive force and 30% of the city’s garrison. Moreover, they had destroyed every Ultra-Heavy vehicle and Super-Heavy vehicle fielded by the Dominatus on Demogorgon Prime. They had also killed what was calculated as 75% of the Dominatus used in the offensive as well as a sizeable amount of those not included in the offensive. Of the 10% of the offensive force that remained, scarcely two-thirds of it had made it back inside the city gates - the rest were still stranded outside where they were not only hounded by ADC strike craft, but by newly landed ADC armies. Moreover, half of the General Staff had either committed suicide or launched into suicidal assaults. Stahl couldn’t fault them - he had contemplated it himself as well. But along with his two other compatriots who now comprised the entirety of Dominatus High Command, he had masochistically decided to continue coordinating the fight.

He had not paused to think about what he was fighting for. Before, victory was survival. Now, survival was victory. All he could do now was contemplate how to save as many as possible. Ironically, all he could think off now was fight. But perhaps fight meant something else now - his directive now was not to hold the city, but to make sure his forces stayed alive while he figured out a solution to this quandary.

How many invasions had Stahl led? Too many to count. He must have assumed this is what his vanquished foes thought in the days before their subjugation. Culture was never preserved in a war of extermination. Freedom and clemency were mere diversions that distracted new subjects from a life devoid of colour. It only dawned on him then, that the Dominatus were the ones who would be vanquished. There were no more second chances left, no war-ending super weapons just sitting in their stasis. There were no reinforcements and there were no more recruits. There were no more planets and no more cities left after this one. There were no more daring operations, no more stratagems that could turn the course of the war. Their second chance was a daring super weapon that worked as expected. The Dominatus had given their all, and had come up short. Defeat was now a question of when, not a question of if.

It was a Dominatus maxim that the strong do as they can and the weak suffer as they must.

Stahl accepted that all they could do now, was suffer what they must.

More
The ADC did not consider the Junction an enemy, but only the most foolish amongst them considered them friends. The Junction consumed its own planets and fought its own battles. Civilisations of the ADC did not eat planets. Forces of nature did. If the eviscerated remains of Dominatus planets were any sign, the Junction were a force of nature - a fact of the universe. Ground combat was a nicety they only indulged in when there was potential for biological assimilation. In any case, Junction were among the first to advance to the broken walls of Malogenesis. Their only opposition was a single Dominatus,, the first and last member of the Amaranthine Guard. Even during a time when Dominatus lives fetched an egregious premium, the Ares Initiative had taken 100 volunteers and injected them with the Terminus serum. All had died save one, and that one, Meshuggah Metallicus, was reduced to a near feral state. Despite this, he grew monstrously in size and strength, dwarfing Dominatus in stature and power in the same way that Dominatus dwarfed the before them. Meshuggah was fused to his armour and kept in stasis. His controllers decided that faced with the prospect of the Junction entering Malogenesis, now was as good a time as ever to unleash him.

On the cratered arena formed by mass orbital bombardment, Meshuggah engaged his former brethren. A single blow from Meshuggah was so powerful that he could quite literally punch a Junction Dominatus to death. watched as Meshuggah literally beat his Dominatus to a pulp. One could have thought that in the countless aeons he had existed, that any sentiment resembling surprise had been purged from his consciousness. But perhaps the most perceptive of observers could detect that his countenance had changed just the slightest bit. Silver Death represented megalomania incarnate - his sole purpose in his endless life was the acquisition of new power, or as he put it, assimilation. And in the prospect of assimilation, Silver Death gave a cold, emotionless stare.

Without fanfare, he materialised into the makeshift coliseum. No words were exchanged between the god-like being whose blink had seen empires fall, whose gestures had seen galaxies collapse, and the feral animal in front of him. Their duel was that between a hunter and his ultimate trophy. Despite his almost timeless nature, Silver Death processed events so quickly that time barely seemed to crawl for him. But each perfectly placed blow, placed at impossible speeds, barely delayed the onslaught of the Dominatus monstrosity. Meshuggah was less a biped and more a barely contained mountain of moving nerve and muscle that bore down on the foe before him. Sensors from observers could only see the impacts from the fight, and compared it to a struggle between the cold void of oblivion and the fiery temper of a dying star.

The utility fog that was Silver Death admitted that perhaps in terms of raw, brute force Meshuggah was better than the Junction's machines. But this was not admitted begrudgingly, for indeed each display of Meshuggah’s power caused waves of psychic commands to flood his mind - commands from his directive. So what if Meshuggah could overpower even a Mind-King? Each of his past foes that had been able to do so had been merely assimilated. The wider Meshuggah’s advantage over the Junction's forces grew, the more power the Junction would eventually gather for themselves. After what seemed an eternity of a storm of nerves, metal and muscle chaotically lashing out in anarchy, Meshuggah eventually stood over Silver Death.

Silver Death however, had not lost, if anything, Meshuggah had gifted him with a break from the ennui of a near-eternal existence. And with that thought, out of nowhere, a literal flood of synths erupted to entomb Meshuggah. Try as he might, there was no escape from the ever-growing cocoon. Each rebellious strand of biomass was quickly covered by the endless flood of synths. Each punch simply expended energy and weakened Meshuggah’s position. Eventually, even a being as powerful as Meshuggah was enervated by the mountainous sarcophagus covering him. It was in that moment, that Silver Death embedded himself to the cocoon, and in a gradual process, assimilated Meshuggah.

To him, this was the sole point of the war. He had gathered every secret the Dominatus had regarding biological enhancement. There was no more they could give him. There was no more to be gained here. The search for more power had begun anew. The satiety he gained from this assimilation was replaced by the ever gnawing hunger that possessed him. He could only think of one thing.

More.

The Road to Victory
The Drakodominatus could have been conquered before they left Mirus.

Too late.

The cancer of the Tyranny could have been excised decades ago.

Too late.

The Tyranny could have been crippled at the start of the slave revolt.

Too late.

Too many times, thought Master Admiral Tul had the ULE been too late. He was a vocal proponent of the Tyranny’s conquest and an even more vociferous opponent of the uneasy peace and finally the non-aggression pact with them. His voice was only heard when cold, hard, and obvious facts made clear that his argument, that if the Tyranny was allowed to live, it would conquer all, and extermination was the only remedy to that insidious disease.

It was the ULE that backstabbed the Dominatus during the Battle of Manticore. They were the kingmakers who decided the outcome of the deadlocked stalemate. In Tul’s mind, they were the reason that they were fighting on Demogorgon Prime rather than the Gigaquadrant’s capitals. They had withstood the retribution of the Dominatus in the ghastly but short-lived nightmare of the Lanat campaign and had poured their considerable industrial and military energies into the completion of a task that should have been completed long before.

The road Bitfrost led directly from the now shattered northernmost gatehouse of Malogenesis’ outermost wall to the Tyrant’s palace itself. A kilometre wide, it was constantly illuminated by suspended balls of plasma and watched by statues of the Dominatus and the Drakodominatus before them. It passed under gargantuan arches, namely the Arch of the Dominatus, the Arch of Rebirth, and the Arch of Unification. Tul would make sure that those lights were snuffed out, those statues pulled down, and those arches shattered.

A veritable swarm of F-0 Marmoks with accompanying cyber troopers served as the blunt instrument of the ULE’s power. Interspersed in this formation were massive Heavy Assault Crawlers and elements of the Ironbacks. Each stomping foot, each new tread was a direct statement of the Tralor’s determination to reclaim their spot as Mirus’ rulers. It was an advance temporarily stopped by the appearance of a Tyranny ambush. The onslaught beyond the walls had destroyed the entirety of Dominatus Super-Heavy and Ultra-Heavy vehicle corps, but it seemed that enough vehicles of other types had escaped to mount a stubborn defence.

Oppressor Class Heavy Tank Destroyers belted out antimatter warhead tipped bolts of metal at relativistic speeds, ripping through the oncoming armoured formation. Meanwhile, Dominatus Devastator Variant Widowmaker Tetrapods MLRS fired off their deadly payload at the oncoming troopers. The resulting avalanche of explosions would have stopped a lesser assault in its tracks, but the Lanats were familiar with adversity. It merely meant that the fight was something that history would remember. And so amidst the oncoming barrage, the Trailer advanced.

Tul was aware that these Dominatus vehicles outranged his own, but was at peace with himself. As per protocol, destroyed vehicles were simply bulldozed out of the way and dead troops were marched over. Steadily, and not slowly, the gap was closed, and the Dominatus began to feel the full firepower of the Tralor. While the Oppressor's strong frontal armour could survive hits from the Lanats, their accompanying infantry and MLRS escorts couldn’t. The Dominatus, outnumbered and gradually overpowered needed were forced to fall back.

And fall back they did, into the waiting claws of infiltrated Falconers who had planted anti-tank mines on the retreat route of the Dominatus. The Dominatus were trapped in a crossfire as Falconer anti-tank units made quick work of the Oppressors by aiming at their rear armour. Dominatus synthetic infantry and even overseers were slaughtered in the abattoir of the kill zone the Lanats had set up. After a brief but intense firefight, the Lanats continued paving the road, not with their own wrecks and bodies as before, but with those of the Dominatus.

Tul looked at the Arch of the Dominatus, emblazoned with murals and paintings of the supposed masters of not just Mirus, but the Gigaquadrant. He nodded and simply gave the order for his troops to erase it from history.

And with that command, the gargantuan arch was turned into a pile of molten slag.

The Tralor had taken heavy casualties, but if nothing else, they were known for their resilience. There was nothing out of the ordinary here, it was merely another step on the road to victory. And so the march continued.

A Change of Perspective
Almost impossibly, Warmaster had survived the 24 hour slaughter. The 9 other Dominatus in his wing had all been killed of course, but he had survived, and not only that, he had assembled a task force of what few units survived in his sector and had not yet made it to the wall. He took stock of his command and cross-referenced it with the Dominatus military database. His unit, if it could be called that, was a composite of what was once 23 separate forces. In general, these forces had sustained a 95% casualty rate from the time of the TIAMAT’s destruction to the time they had regrouped. Mortrig noted that in many places, Allied forces had indeed outpaced his own, and had read reports that in many sectors, the Allies had already entered Malogenesis.

The Warmaster didn’t think about the overall direction of the war, as that was a matter for the General Staff. Stahl had not issued any new directives, and levitating over a ruined section of the walls, Mortrig knew why there was nothing more to say - Malogenesis was burning. In every which way he looked, twisted black and gold spires illuminated the sky like funeral pyres. The towering structures retched and screamed as they crumbled, the suspended balls of plasma which illuminated Bitfrost were slowly gasping their last breaths, and the sounds of the firefights grew more distant, a sign that only meant whatever was left of the garrison was being ground to dust.

Mortrig wondered if there was a second TIAMAT or a backup plan before realising there wasn’t. If there had been an opportunity in the last 96 hours to change the outcome of the war, it had already passed. The taste of battle now left an acrid taste in his mouth - there was nothing left to fight for now since there was no hope of victory. But perhaps he just needed a new definition of victory, and survival fit the bill. He didn’t know what the endgame was, but certainly drawing attention to his makeshift combat group was as asinine and suicidal action. They would fight if they needed as there was no indication the ADC would give any quarter, but they would never attack first, not unless combat was guaranteed, and offence was the best defence.

And it is with this in mind, that a Dominatus commander formerly renowned for his aggressiveness ordered the units under his command not to attack the endless procession of Allies streaming through the gate, but infiltrate the city through one of the myriad sections of destroyed wall and hide and survive till … Well Mortrig didn’t know when it would end, but in his mind a death tomorrow was preferable to a death today, and a death the week after preferable to that.

Death Rattles


Commodore and his ATR military attache John Williams surveyed the carnage around them. In his mind, Monoud imagined what Olympon, Malogenesis’ outermost district’s central square must have looked like before all this fighting. He could only see reflections of its past in the blown up chunks of what was once the purest black marble. Often, when he stepped over a corpse or wreck, whether belonging to his former allies or to the Dominatus, when he looked at the ground below to identify if the fallen was friend or foe, that the corpse was often framed by crisscrossing lines of platinum and gold, diamonds and sapphires and all manner of precious metals and gems that would have been judged by a pre-replicator society to be of aesthetic value. But his mind was fixed solely in the fight around him - the gems only reflected the brutal conflict above, and the marble only served as a square-wide crypt to commemorate those who had fallen.

R1 Main Armoured Attack Transports, R9 Main Bipedal Walkers, and CR10 Infantry Support Vehicles advanced alongside Terran tanks and infantry while AU-15 Attack Transports and AU-28 Attack Gunships covered their advance. It was a rare sight to see the war machines of the ATR and the Cyrannian Republic in their fully horrifying glory, and an even rarer sight to see them joined as one. But even a juggernaut such as this was having a hard time cracking the Dominatus defence lines in the square. In fact, they were pinned in position by a combat group of Legacy Class Heavy Walkers. These 60 meter tall monstrosities were arguably the largest Dominatus war machines remaining given the destruction of all the Dominatus’ super-heavy and ultra-heavy vehicles in the slaughter outside the walls. But still, these walkers stood as angry sentinels over the battlefield, blasting their foes with arm mounted thermonuclear ballistic cannons on the left, and arm mounted gatling super lasers on the right.

Monoud looked in horror as he saw even the R1s gutted like mere animals by the seemingly impervious Legacies. A direct hit from an Legacy meant that all that remained of a walker was the liquefied goo that was both metal and the remains of the crews. How many had he known, lectured in the military academies, given medals too? How many had made it this far from Plazith only to be killed by the final, insane death rattles of a fallen empire? But ever the professional, Monoud stopped this pathos after a split second, took in the battlefield in another, and set about giving orders after.

Monoud - This is Commodore Monoud to all troops. We can’t make a dent in those damned Legacies and our bombers can’t get close enough without being shot out by all these batteries of Widowmakers. Get close to them, grab them by the buckle, and destroy that AA! Its our only chance!

The Dominatus were used to situations such as this, and as such had fortified every Widowmaker battery with synthetic troops, vehicles, and what Overseers could be marshalled in the square. Monoud deviseda daredevil stratagem by embarking his most elite assault troops upon landing AU-15s. Monoud knew more than anyone else that flying them at their normal altitude was suicide, but flying them at ground level, while insane in most circumstances, was the only reasonable alternative. Flying in at 600 kilometres per hour, they rapidly closed with the Dominatus. The Dominatus barely had time to react, and while the barrage of bolts and shells decimated the initial waves, the Allies succeeded in landing their troops right on top of the Dominatus positions.

The brutal close combat was one that no one in either the Cyrannian or Terran force relished, but was infinitely preferable to the Sisyphean task of dealing with Domiantus heavy walkers at range. Hyper-advanced swords and bayonets clashed while long-range ordnance was fired at point blank range. Falling AU-15s and AU-18s careened into Dominatus vehicles in dying kamikaze attacks while the ferocious combat continued to rage on. Explosions saw men on both sides fly like ragdolls if they were intact, and broken urns full of ashes if they were not. Monoud, covered in blood and the black ooze of Dominatus synthetics had destroyed a Widowmaker before being thrown back by the concussive force of an energy wave gun. It gradually dawned on him that this meant there was a detachment of Mortalitas Overseers, the Praetorians of Azuris attached to this Dominatus unit. Barely recovering, he saw that his foe was of the Praetor Class, second only to Azuris himself in raw power. Monoud was a competent combatant, but fighting an Overseer Praetor at this stage of the war was considered tantamount to suicide for all but the Gigaquadrant’s most famed super soldiers and war heroes. Monoud did not want to find out if he qualified as one or was merely a borderline case.

Monoud ordered his forces to resume the attack on the Widowmakers while shooting at the giant 8 meter tall Mortalitas. He watched in terror as the monstrosity swatted aside his men, sometimes by the pair like they were mere insects. Yet more horrifying was that each individual impact often pulverised those men, if the gelatinised puddles of armour and flesh at their impact sites gave any clue to his power. It was then, not a surprise that the monster advanced through a hail of fire as it unsheathed its energy cutlass. And in a split second, it had accelerated and was running straight at him. Monoud barely had time to parry as the impact threw him flying back. Shaking his head, he charged back at the bioengineered monstrosity.

He fought as hard as he could, but every blow he threw barely seemed to dent the Mortalitas’ armour while even his most masterful parries sent shockwaves through his bones. It was only a natural consequence therefore, that eventually, with a forceful overhead cleave, the Praetor broke Monoud’s sword in half, sending him to the floor. As he prepared his final strike, the he saw the Imperator stagger - he had just been shot by heavy anti-overseer ordnance, and with the rapidity of the next blast, Monoud knew that it was his attache John Williams, in his powered armour, who was saving him from an ignominious end. But John Williams was a ranged specialist, and though the Praetor's shields had been fried, he still had the faculty to throw his cutlass at the Terran, cleaving him vertically in half, tearing through the powered armour like it didn’t exist.

The brief respite had allowed Monoud sometime to communicate to his forces, and it seemed that they had succeeded in destroying the AA batteries. Only then did he register that the Dominatus’ creation had callously murdered his close Terran friend and confidante. But he felt powerless, only being able to blast off his pistol at the seemingly unstoppable Mortalitas. It seemed that the Praetor was only a few steps from him when with his last charge, he saw the Imperator explode. He wondered what had happened, looking at his pistol, till he looked overhead to see an AU-18 firing its entire suite of weapons at the pile of ashes that was once the Imperator.

Turning his head, he looked around as bombers overtook the clear airspace and destroyed the Tyranny’s Legacy Class Walkers. The cost was great, but victory was just around the corner. He dusted himself off and went back to the bloody business of war, and by the end of the day, the Cyrannian Republic’s flags and those of their Terran allies flew together over Olympon.

The Serpent’s Night
The Phantoms of had distinguished themselves in many ways - as desert fighters, subterranean masters, crack anti-tank units amongst other accolades. Most often deployed against the AGC, Draconis crewmen often prayed to Drakon upon hearing the signature unburrowing sound of the phantoms. Most of the time, these prayers went unanswered. When the unburrowing sound was loud, it meant the Phantoms were coming from beneath the tank, and there was merely a tornado of massive kukris that left the vehicle a mess of viscera and twisted metal. When the sound was softer, it was punctuated by a single cacophonous noise, which was then followed by the gnashing sound of a tank’s armour being penetrated and its crewmen or internal circuitry being turned into an amorphous goop.

Other Overseers revelled in frontal assaults. In Pathogis’ mind, other Overseers were ssstupid. The lightning attacks of the Phantoms were as traumatic as they were not just because of the damage they inflicted but because they disappeared as quickly as they came, making retribution impossible. Pathogis took some sadistic pleasure in knowing that children’s nursery rhymes often referenced his exploits.

Rock-a-bye, baby, in the tree top When the earth breaks the serpent shows up Whips out his blades and then he stands tall Then Pathogis will consume you all - Infamous Dominatus War Era Nursery Rhyme

Pathogis deeply enjoyed taunting synthetic generals and “fellow” overseers about the superiority of his creed. He took even deeper pleasure in knowing that the favour the Dominatus granted him meant that he could gloat all he wanted without any fear of retribution, and when that retribution came, it merely gave him an excuse to showcase his physical dominance. Pathogis couldn’t decide whether he liked more - adding insult to injury, or injury to insult.

Pathogis only really cared about the fate of the Tyranny so long as it gave him and his creed the opportunity to exercise their frightful talents. The needless patriotism of the others was so sssilly, and Pathogis as well as his children made no effort to hide their boredom with the countless speeches given by their supposed colleagues. This trait stood him well in the nightmare that was the battle for Malogenesis. Others were fretting about how to survive, and what the plan was to win. Pathogis merely enjoyed what was the ultimate hunting ground, and an environment conducive to the further needling of his beleaguered comrades. In truth, he thanked fate for giving him paradise so early. Pathogis found equal pleasure in both killing ADC troops as well as ripping into his allies for their failures.

"Sssilly sssynthetic, you really ssscrewed up this time"

- Pathogis to a Synthetic General

"Hey Ssstupid, I didn’t know ssserving the Tyrant meant sssenseless sssacrifice"

- Pathogis to an Overseer Praetor

"You sssmell like failure, I can’t decide whether its incompetencccce or maliccce"

- Pathogis to an Overseer Praetor of another legion

Pathogis had grown bored with the ssslaughter inside the city. How many tanks had he destroyed, how many squads had he massacred? How many allied soldiers lay awake at night wondering when the next Phantom attack was going to happen? That had been entertaining for a while, but hearing “[Insert Deity] protect us from the Phantoms while we rest” eventually became stale to his ears. He and his Phantoms needed a challenge.

When a servant of the Tyranny, either Overseer or Synthetic had earned enough favour, they were often bestowed with the most outlandish of gifts. Most common amongst these were Dominatus crafted-equipment, enlargements of command among other things. Pathogis had asked for nothing more than the ability to do battle with his legion wherever he saw fit. And Pathogis realised there would never be a better time to take advantage of this privilege than now. What remained of Military Intelligence had reported the presence of mass field hospitals near the landing zones wherein ADC troops were triaged before being taken to hospital ships. The hospitals themselves were lightly guarded, as they were so far behind enemy lines that the only major forces nearby were the recently landed troops, who were always put on fast transit to Malogenesis itself.

Pathogis gave it a moment of consideration. It was certainly a sssuicide mission. But, he reasoned in the long run, we’re all dead. Loyal to his Dominatus masters, he left the majority of the Phantoms under his second in command in the city to continue the fight, but he gathered his most bloodthirsty and sadistic volunteers for a final mission. Pathogis didn’t like either listening to or making speeches, so he simply told his followers that they were going to ssscare a lot of people, and that was enough to inspire them.

The Phantoms had single-use special burrowing suits for long-range infiltration missions, and used them to infiltrate the ADC frontline. The sensors picked up some tremors, but on a planet like Demogorgon Prime, these were par for the course. By the next night, Pathogis and his volunteers had all tunnelled their way to the ground beneath the field hospitals. What followed immediately was one of the single most one-sided slaughters of the war.

The emergency ward of a Draconis field hospital saw skilled robots and medics put together grievous injuries. Nearly bisected Draconis, only held together by Morphis, those with ripped off wings, and those whose bones had been pulverised all waited before they were treated or brought up to a hospital ship. They had fought the long fight, but they were done. The Dominatus were losing and they had been permanently rotated to the back. It was just a matter of waiting before they could go home. Or so they thought, as they noticed a small rumbling beneath the surface. Most thought it just another earthquake, but the victims of mass-lacerations, barely bags of flesh and ligaments held together by Morphis knew that their nightmares had come to haunt reality.

The blaze of kukris splattered the walls with blood and flesh. Men healing in bio-tanks were eviscerated, the liquefied remains of their organs seeping out with the healing fluid. The paralysed could only watch in horror as they saw their fellow soldiers ripped apart limb from limb by monsters that even infantry-supported armoured divisions dread facing. The screams sent the Allies into action even faster than their alarm system could. The gurgling and chopping and screeching and begging filled the communications lines in the most placid sector of the battlefield. Perhaps the most unmissable sound however, was Pathogis' laughter. The serpentine chuckles greyed hairs and sent chills through bones as they were mixed with the sounds of the most wanton slaughter.

The Allied response was swift, but not swift enough to save the veritable mountain of wounded who had been killed in these wanton acts of sadism. Allied Command had already marked off those areas attacked as lost, their inhabitants already dead. A land-based response was unneeded, only aerial bombardment would suffice. The Allies apologised to the wounded as they carpet bombed those areas the Phantoms had attacked. Even the Phantoms, caught up in the wanton slaughter, were not quite fast enough to react, and many were incinerated. Pathogis, revelling in the frenzied massacre and the fear he inspired, was mortally wounded by multiple direct hit from a rapid series of allied bombing runs.

But Pathogis knew better than to grant the Allies the relief of knowing he was dead. With all his remaining might, he buried himself far underground. He died laughing, with a smile on his face, having caused the single greatest massacre of his career, and for the first time in a long time, the jaded serpent was satiated by the misery he had caused. Dying, he mused that in the minds of the Allies, he was still alive. It seemed that the countless soldiers scarred by either experience with the Phantoms or knowledge of them, who waked up in the dead of night to nightmares of the Serpent Legion were given no respite. Without confirmation of his death, the Great Serpent and his Phantoms would continue to haunt them.

The Last Ride
T+6 Hours from TIAMAT activation

Ahrat Timureza of the Storm Strikers listened dejectedly to the reports of the battle around them. In the distance, the Ahrat could hear the sounds of the Tyranny’s Super-Heavy and Ultra-Vehicles not so much fighting, as two equally matched combatants would fight, but moving through entire enemy formations, as a bulldozer would move through wreckage. ADC protocol had established 2 general ways of dealing with those abominations - massive aerial bombardment or massive orbital bombardment. Timureza had found before, through personal experience, that fast moving troops on skim bikes and grav-packs were sometimes able to plant explosives on the weak points of these monsters provided they got close enough. And so, the Ahrat marshalled his Storm Strikers into a desperate charge, hoping to alleviate the stress of the unstoppable Dominatus machines in the sector. At once, countless skim-bikes were activated, their roars resounding throughout the battlefield, and at the Ahrat’s behest, they charged.

History will never know whether the Ahrat’s forces could have applied their techniques to the Dominatus formations. Planting explosives in this manner had only worked against isolated super-heavy and ultra-heavy vehicles, not entire formations. Conversely, the Storm Strikers had never been assembled in their entirety for a single attack. In the chaos, Timureza could never have known that such a large charge had drawn the attention of Overseer Template Pestilon Nephillheim. In the last stages of the Great Tyranny War, Pestilon and his most trusted lieutenants had been gifted by the Dominatus with biologically engineered and mechanically enhanced abominations resembling in every characteristic the dragons of ancient Terran lore. These black-winged monsters blotted out the skies while breathing plasma down upon those unlucky enough for them to see. These creatures were rarely deployed, given how common ADC air dominance had become in the late stages of the war, but now of course, the airspace was contested.

It at first was the flapping of wings that drowned out the growl of the engines, and then it was the curtains of purple fire that seemed to descend from the heavens. The fire was never followed by screams - but when Timureza looked around, he saw that even the most powerful antigrav-vehicles of his Creed had between twisted into sculptures of fused metal and incinerated flesh, and that many of his bikers were only recognisable as piles of ash on the ground. Timureza thought of options, but only saw one. His main weapon, the Spear of Vengeance, was a plasma lance that could be both used in melee, or potentially thrown. Timureza looked for the biggest of the dragons, and threw with all his might. Had the lance impacted anywhere, the monster would probably just have absorbed it, but luck was on Timureza’s side, as he impaled the beast in one of its eyes. Entering at such a soft spot, the one-of-a-kind plasma lance burrowed its way into the monster’s body, forcing it from the air and onto the ground, thrashing as it fell from the heavens.

What was less lucky was the dragon’s rider leaping from the fallen beast and onto the battlefield below. Timureza’s entire section of the charge focused fire on the monster as it plummeted to the ground below, continuing fire even as it cratered into the plains. The other two wings would continue to the Tyranny’s vehicles, but the centre would make sure the rider was dead. It was only when Timureza saw a figure move through the firestorm, almost unimpeded, that he felt a tinge of fear. Though he had felled one of the Horsemen’s rarest mounts, he had also driven their template to the ground. The Ahrat grimaced, knowing from reports that the ultra-rare Dominatus crafted armour the figure probably wore was impervious to everything but orbital bombardment or a carpet bombing from a carrier’s worth of bombers.

It seemed that with each glance of the purple orbs that constituted Pestilon’s eyes, entire squadrons were thrown screaming into the air. The Ahrat never learned if this was essence or simply more extremely advanced custom Dominatus technology, but his response was the same. Kill Pestilon. Charging towards the implacable juggernaut, he drew his saber while yelling the Stormstrikers’ battle cry. But it seemed that the Dominatus monster had no time for such gallantry, slamming his mace-flail into the ground and causing such a shockwave that even Timureza was thrown into the air. Rapidly recovering from the miniature earthquake, Timureza charged the monster that was dual-wielding a titanic mace-flail and a greatsword with the ease of one wielding twin daggers.

Timureza was a strong warrior, and as an Ahrat had faced down numerous senior Overseers in his days and won. But a Template, on open ground, in one-on-one melee combat - that was a fight in which Timureza needed to rely on luck, opportunities, or the mere arrogance of his opponent. Pestilon struck first, swinging his sword with unnatural speed, and Timureza’s parry almost shattered Timureza’s own sabre. Staggered, he was only saved from another strike by the timely arrival of two of his most senior officers. Still on the ground, he watched helplessly as in one callous swing of his flail, Pestilon pulverised the two into a mix of fleshy pulp and broken bone. He saw as the mixed powder of armour, flesh, and bone hit the floor and was possessed of nothing but rage. Gathering all of his strength into one final attack, Timureza leapt into the air and surprised the Sindar-Human hybrid, driving his sabre directly into the back armour of the Template.

He was dismayed at the result however. Timureza had made only a dent in the armour, and couldn’t even see the flesh of the Dominatus monster. This dismay turned into terror as he saw the Template’s head turn 180 degrees to face him without moving his body. The glowing purple eyes stared into his soul and immobilised him in place. Timureza scraped as he felt himself flayed layer by layer and melded to Pestilon’s armour, In the end, only his still-screaming and still-moving face remained the legacy of his life, twitching and screaming on Pestilon’s armour.

Timureza’s fellow Storm Strikers could only watch helplessly as the Overseer sprinted towards Dominatus lines, not knowing he had given targeting orders for a Dominatus Super-Heavy artillery battery. Within the hour, the Stormstrikers were no more.

The Present Day

A lone god walked the streets of this sector of Malogenesis. There had once been an armoured column here, then Pestilon has appeared. There were now only the sounds of burning and screaming. Only the appearance of a single challenger brought a new sound to the frenzy - that of ancient Terran classical music. Pestilon’s companion AI could only register that its lyrics had something to do with “rocking you”, whatever that meant. It was none other than, the insane human mercenary who had found his way to the nightmare of Malogenesis in order to honour his Ugandalorian allies.

This was one of the few times when those around could tell that Phase-Hunter was completely serious. There was no one in the Gigaquadrant he hated more than Pestilon. True, Phase-Hunter had lost horribly to the Template during their first meeting on a nameless world at the time of the Dominatus slave revolt, but that was not the reason for the hatred. Yes, the only reason he yet lived was that Pestilon had been unaware of Phase’s regenerative abilities at the time, but Phase had brushed that aside, too. However, since he learned that the insignificant human still lived against all odds, Pestilon had butchered many of Phase-Hunters close friends or heroes. It aggravated Phase-Hunter even more that Pestilon knew these men and women as nothing but statistics and trophies. Many of the screaming faces on Pestilon’s armour, and there were many, were those of men Phase had sparred with, trained with, bantered with, disturbed, and bonded with. No matter how much he had tried to catch up, Phase-Hunter had always failed. And Pestilon had taken notice of the human's obsessive behavior, always taunting, always killing, always hurting. This had to end. Now.

Twin katanas unsheathed, he charged the lone Overseer Template. Propelled by nothing other than his destructive will made manifest, the initial impact actually stopped Pestilon dead in his tracks. Salivating in an insane berserk rage, Phase-Hunter unleashed a whirlwind of attacks on the Overseer, and at the end of his first onslaught, had landed a flurry of strikes on the Dominatus armour, a series of strikes unfortunately, that had barely translated to scratches. When the Overseer replied to his surprise with a massive swing of his sword, he struck with such force the Phrase-Hunter’s katanas were sent flying into the air. In fact, the force of the impact forced Phase-Hunter himself into the air, desperately firing his techno-uzis at the seemingly unstoppable Sindar-Human abomination. He looked desperately on as Pestilon simply disintegrated the bullets in mid-air using his eyes.

Only his armour prevented Phase-Hunter from being turned to mush upon landing, but no sooner had he come to his senses than had the Overseer had stood over him and dropped his mace and flail, instead grasping his longsword with both hands before driving it down.

Phase-Hunter - Suck It!

And using a one-time manoeuvre even he considered insane, one that would fully drain his ghost-phasing module, Phase-Hunter manipulated his phasing abilities and teleportation abilities to such an extend that the monster’s sword pierced his chest armour, almost as if it was paper - and entered a portal, exiting at the stomach area of the Overseer. The sheer momentum and force that Pestilon had meant for Phase-Hunter was then applied to himself. Grating against the armour, the sword sheared through it and came out the other way before, having fully embedded itself in Pestilon. The shock and the impact forced Pestilon to his knees as Phase-Hunter squirmed out. Phase-Hunter, insane as always, came up with the idea of placing bombs at the chains connecting the mace and the flail. The explosion split the weapon. Phase-Hunter gathered all his strength and carried the mace to Pestilon’s exposed back before spotting the dent that Timureza had made. Phase-Hunter drove himself and his suit into overdrive, using ever ounce of rage available to him in a single blow before bringing the mace down on the dent.

Phase-Hunter - This is for every one you killed, you pony-fallacious bastard!

The resulting impact, combined with the embedded sword, cracked open the back plate of Pestilon’s armour, leaving his blackened and synthetically engineered flesh completely exposed. With no energy left, Phase-Hunter fell on the ground besides Pestilon, barely conscious.

Pestilon - ''...Fool. Did you think you could kill me?'' Phase-Hunter - ''...No. B-But they can.''

The ravaged human pointed out at what seemed to be an unending stream of Mendel, Federation and Vanarine ground troops. Perhaps had he been fully intact, Pestilon could have taken them on. But immobilised and exposed, he was merely an extremely durable piñata. Phase-Hunter watched gleefully as the completely unenhanced troops tore into the horribly enhanced Template en masse, and before passing out from the exertion, began playing a song on his speakers.

Phase-Hunter - We are the Champions!

And so, to the sounds of his favourite band, Phase-Hunter learned that even Overseer Templates could scream.

Erasing History
Relicus, Maloagenesis’ main museum stood as a testament to the arrogance of the Dominatus. Beyond housing the taxidermied bodies of many of the Tyranny’s numerous enemies, their captured flags and symbols, and life-sized recreations of the climaxes of famous battles, it housed life-sized recreations of the Tyranny’s most delusional fantasies. In the cavernous belly of the gargantuan of black marble and gold lay the Tyranny’s visions of victory. And so, a titanic battle between the AGC and the Tyranny raged on in the Tyranny’s mad vision of how history should be.

The AGC’s men were wholly consumed by a primal and dark rage. The Night of the Serpent had seen many of their wounded brothers-in-arms murdered in cold blood by the Phantoms, and for all they knew, there was probably going to be a second attack. Cold professionalism was supplanted by an unsatisfiable desire not just to capture Demogorgon Prime, but to wipe it from memory.

The Dominatus had dreamed of not just defeating the Draconis, but desecrating their legacy. They aimed to reduce statues to rubble, to erase their cultural legacy, to eviscerate their works of art, and obliterate their consciousness as a civilisation. It was not merely sufficient to subjugate them, the entire idea that their enemies had accomplished anything of note had to be torn down and replaced by the cultural oblivion. But the Dominatus were not strong enough to do this - what damage they did served more to compel those still standing to uphold the legacy of their ancestors and erase that of the Dominatus.

The unending march through a palace that solely honoured the Dominatus memory was one of footsteps and fire. The fire twisted once proud Dominatus statues into amorphous, contorted, agonised forms that seemed to beg for mercy killing, a far cry from the supposed masters of the universe.The footsteps of the AGC, be they those of marines, the treads of tanks, or the staggering impacts of Draconis mecha pulverised what rubble remained into dust. Perhaps something could have been pieced together from the individual rocks that fell and the twisted snakes of molten metal, but the Draconis made sure that only ash remained.

The angry leviathan, one of steel motivated by a most visceral and atavistic hatred inexorably marched through what scant resistance there was. Relicus was considered by the Dominatus to be military indefensible, but some Dominatus thought the importance of preserving their museum outweighed the futility of resistance. Valiantly they resisted the unstoppable advance, and just as valiantly were they crushed.

This was not a battle of tactics or stratagems, it was merely one of the blunt application of force, and in this matter the AGC clearly had the upper hand. And when an angry force met the fragile dioramas and artworks of the Tyranny, it consumed then wholly. The arrogant life-size model of a section of Alcanti being taken over the Dominatus shattered under the treads of Draconis tanks. It may have been life-sized, but the crystals from which it was composed were as fragile as glass, and could not hope to last in the pressure of battle. Even more incensed by the arrogance of the Dominatus, the Draconis advance turned perhaps even more bloodthirsty.

In the late stages of the war, a Dominatus’ power came mostly from the synthesis of his armour and his innate physical strength. Left naked, a Domiantus was not a god of war, but in the age of hyper-advanced warfare, a mere novelty. Those crashed Dominatus unfortunate to have their armour immobilised and cracked found themselves dragged out screaming by Draconis mechs made specifically to deal with them. Oftentimes, the crashed Dominatus were younglings, eagerly pressed into action by necessity and though brave, amateurish in their handling of the armour and wholly unprepared for the realities of Gigaquadrantic war. Confronted with their foes in a vulnerable state, it was often the case that a Draconis mechanised pilot, driven mad with rage, would literally stomp or punch the immobilised Dominatus, whether immobilised by his malfunctioning suit or the Draconis’ comrades till there was nothing more than bloodied pulp where there was once the supposed “master race”.

And so, driven mad with vengeance, the Draconis at the front used all their considerable power to indulge in a brutality they had before denied themselves. Victory was not to be measured just by land taken and enemies killed, it was to be measured in shattered memories, liquefied remains, and banshee-like screams.

In this regard, the end of the battle saw the Draconis more victorious than they could have imagined.

The Hunter and the Hunted
By some miracle, Squadron Leader Grim Reaper had survived the massacre outside the walls. By an even greater miracle, 4 other members of Death Squadron had survived - Lance Leader Lucifer, Lance Leader Ares, Phobos, and Baal. And by such insane luck, Grim Reaper thought that they were surely destined for something bad, they had so far survived the endless grind of city fighting. Death Squadron was the most famous and successful of all squadrons in the Tyranny; it was one of the few squadrons compose entirely of aces, and among these ace squadrons was unquestionably the most elite. And now Death Squadron, having accrued over 9,000 vehicle kills throughout the course of the war, found themselves low on ammunition and antimatter for its power plant. According to their tactical maps, the squadron needed to break through a French position in order to reach the nearest supply depot. In this late stage of the war, with the French development of anti-Ogre tactics after suffering an initial series of crushing defeats at their hands, this would be a problem, but in city fights, even those as spacious as Dominatus ones, it was magnified by the possibility that of ambushes coming from every which direction.

Grim Reaper saw that their only chance lay in speed - lose French ground forces and disperse into the ruins of the city before Mirages could find them. Mirages, he grimaced were the phobia of every Ogre pilot, especially Phobos. The Ogres had run dangerously low on anti-ATGM countermeasures, having used up the majority of their reactive armour and nanite ablative armour in the numerous fights they had gone through thus far, having only their point defence lasers to defeat missiles, and beyond that, only their armour and shielding. However, Grim Reaper reasoned, everyday they went without resupply, their chances of survival went down, and thus the only way to maximise their expected lifetimes was break through. Surely Stahl had a plan, and all they had to do was live to see it.

In the dead of night, they began their advance, using their last dark matter stealth module to get into firing range for enemy positions. The night was broken by an initial barrage of high-explosive antimatter fire at enemy positions, and sponson mounted MHD fire at enemy armour. In the midst of this, they fired at the enemy combat VTOLs with their Harpy AA Missile Array and quad-laser auto cannons. Advancing at full speed, they continued firing indiscriminately while also letting loose the last of their ATGM Quark-Gluon Plasma warheads. While in early battles, the initial onslaught that this display of sheer firepower caused had shocked the French into near paralysis, their surviving foes now swung into action, firing off ATGMs and Armour Piercing Rounds at the Ogres. This onslaught of missiles was impossible even for the sophisticated point-defence systems of the Ogres to deal with, and promptly, both Baal and Lucifer were destroyed. It was only by sheer luck that Lucifer, Phobos, and Grim Reaper had survived, only for Lucifer to be disabled by the combined barrage of an entire Ulysse C-41 squadron. The next barraged finished him off.

But Grim Reaper and Phobos had managed to break the line, each firing off their assault cannons and plasma throwers to fully blunt a way through. By the most incredible luck, they had escaped unscathed through the fire, having turned the full firepower of their weaponry to destroy supporting sections of fallen buildings so as to block their way. They thought themselves home free, till they heard the unmistakable sound of an approaching Mirage. The two tanks split, and Grim Reaper noticed that Phobos, the “least-experienced” of Death Squadron, was not being followed. It was to his horror then, that Grim Reaper noticed the Mirage was following him. Mentally, he cursed himself for ordering the cosmetic bot to draw a giant white skull on his top.

This wasn’t the first time Grim Reaper had been chased by a Mirage. He had evaded a Mirage sortie a total of 3 times, a record amongst Ogre pilots, and one considered even more impressive than his kill count. His jammer sub-AI was working overtime trying to alter the course of the Mirage’s seeker system, and Grim Reaper breathed a sigh of relief when the jammer sent the missile flying into another building. For a split second, the tank ace of tank aces thought himself lucky, till he realised the ensuing explosion and shockwave had disabled his engine. Impossible he thought, he was so far away from the initial blast that… Suddenly it dawned on him that this wasn’t just a.

It was a Mirage Roi Dominant, and he was immobilised. Mirage Roi Dominants had two-high yield tactical warheads. No Ogre had ever survive a chase by a Mirage Roi Dominant.

Grim Reaper was no exception.

Search and Destroy
Those who had served the Dominatus well were rewarded. To say that had served them well was an understatement. His creed, Grox Overseers formally known as the Steel Reapers, had positioned themselves as masters of the grinding and dull quagmire of siege warfare. As a reward for his services, 01 was transferred to a new titanic, centipede-like shell that, at a length of several hundred meters, was as large as the Dominatus’ Ultra-Heavy vehicles. It not only had the characteristics of these immense war machines in size, but also armour, armament, and variety of weaponry carried. 01, formerly confined to a humanoid form considered only giant by Gigaquadrantic standards, had become a machine-god.

In the mess of burning towers and mountains of rubble that was Malogenesis, 01 had left only a trail of death and destruction in his wake. He was near invulnerable to airstrikes due to the mass of AA weaponry he carried, impervious to orbital bombardment due to the shield, and utterly invincible to conventional ground forces. Found in a sector that the DCP was responsible for, his presence had singlehandedly halted the Coalition’s advance. But the Coalition had known of 01’s capabilities ever since he acquired them in the late stages of the Mirus Campaign, and by the time of the battle for Malogenesis, had grown so jaded to the Dominatus’ newest tricks that not an iota of terror found its way into their minds.

01 was a problem like everything else, and would be dealt with accordingly.

Of course, 01 couldn’t have known any of this and started the day, having found himself an armoured battlegroup to consume. This was routine of course - no matter how many vehicles he destroyed, the Coalition always sent him fresh meat. Just the way he liked it. Skittering across falling buildings and mountains of rubble, he chewed through Canister Tanks, Raptor Walkers, and Stabilizer Class Heavy Combat Platforms like an industrial laser through butter. 01 had grown bored - he was limited to fighting in the city against the same foe he had fought for so long, and with no variation. He needed something new, something fresh, and the sight of what seemed to be a levitating DCP regent fit the bill.

01 charged towards the regent as the regent’s personal force opened up all manner of utility fog to distract 01. 01 had developed countermeasures for such occurrences and responded with his own jammers. The resulting environment was one whose sheer complexity and insanity destroyed men’s minds. The corrupted utility fog presented a whirling vortex of chaos were all but the most advanced machines were unable to process the vicissitudes of desecrated fog. But 01 was such a machine, one who thrived in the geometric anarchy around him. Perhaps in the maelstrom he squirmed through the jagged fractal sky while leaping from infinitely cracked mirrors to impossible shapes. None of this could be real to the DCP troopers, but while the decaying fog played tricks on the mind, the searing instant pain of being eviscerated by the tangential impact of the mechanical monster was undeniably real.

When the utility fog had cleared, only the regent remained, surrounded by the gargantuan mechanical centipede and what had used to be his personal bodyguard. The regent chose wisely to evade 01, using teleportation, anti-gravity, and his own boosters to run side-ways across the buildings in an effort to shake the unstoppable juggernaut behind him. Unfortunately for the regent, 01’s sheer size and power belied an almost impossible speed. The regent looked hopelessly as 01 kept up with him. The chase continued till the regent was almost completely exhausted, having found the tallest building in the vicinity and forcing himself to ascend it via its outside walls.

The skittering machine followed him, twirling itself on the buildings facade, its endless carpet of legs easily sticking to the utterly massive spire. The regent ran, but 01 followed. The regent was but a man, 01 was a machine-god. The outcome was never in question, and at the pinnacle of the spire, 01 cornered the regent. Regents were the rarest of DCP commanders, save for perhaps the Warlords themselves, and even a being as jaded by war as 01 still relished their taste. Pinned down, and his personal FTL jammed, the regent stared in horror as 01’s mechanical proboscis gradually extended itself and opened up into an endless array of implements that got close and closer.

But then he smiled.

Regent - I’m just the bait.

Ultra-Heavy vehicles, and beings armoured similarly like 01, could only be taken out by aerial bombardment or orbital bombardment. Of course, the DCP had reasoned that orbital bombardment didn’t have to be orbital. The rare Surface to Space Artillery was ostensibly produced to damage starships from the surface of a planet. They had conjectured such weapon, especially when used in batteries, could be used to defeat Dominatus Ultra-Heavy Vehicles. They never got the chance to find out however, as during the Tyranny’s brief 3 day counteroffensive, infiltrated Cyclops Special Operations Forces, wings of Dominatus, and squadrons of Mecha and Avatars had quickly liquidated lightly defended Surface to Space Artillery batteries before they could fire a shot in anger.

Fortunately for the DCP however, 01 presented the perfect opportunity for their use, as several batteries of Surface to Space Artillery, parked in an immense plaza aimed their guns at the highest tower in the vicinity and blasted the robotic centipede on top of it. Historians will never know how many shots were needed to kill 01. All that is known is that the sustained impact of several batteries of heavy pulse weapons firing at maximum frequency for as long as their weapons could hold out broke 01 into a thousand different pieces. Perhaps all that is known about the effectiveness of his armour is that it weathered the initial impacts first barrage well enough for the regent to escape.

Only the regent could give a damage assessment once the firing had stopped.

Regent - ''01 Sighted. 01 Engaged. 01 Destroyed.''

Efficiency
Scans from the past week had shown Malogenesis’ Mausoleum, Mortem to be a titanic monument to Dominatus creativity. Images had shown the monolithic colossus as a wonder that if constructed by another civilisation would have perhaps inspired a form of artistic reverence.

None of that mattered however, Mortem was devoid of Dominatus Anti-Air, and scouts had shown it to be garrisoned by all kinds of infantry and vehicle to whom fliers were impervious. Perhaps it was telling that Dominatus AA was in such short supply that there were large garrisons who simply didn’t possess any form of resistance against allied strike craft.

What followed was a sustained period of bombing that reduced the towering edifices of the Dominatus’ monument to their dead, to a pile of rubble. But even piles of rubble still held vermin. And vermin called for cleanup.

Some in the Gigaquadrant held the somewhat misconceived notion that Fordan military tradition was an endlessly baroque tangle of customs and rules designed to produce honourable fighters with that as the sole end in mind. But perhaps a more accurate assessment would have been that the Fordan rulebook had but one line - Efficiency was the only thing that mattered. The distinction between light casualties and heavy casualties was an embellishment to a more important demarcation - necessary and unnecessary. The composition of formations was determined simply by theoretical reasoning and empirical evidence. Idiosyncrasy and Iconoclasm were things for other militaries - the Fordanta simply followed the most efficient path towards a certain goal.

In Andromeda, efficiency initially meant logistics strikes and command and control strikes. This application of the Fordan military had stymied the Dominatus advance both by cutting the supply and communications lines of fleets, and by forcing the Dominatus to spend more of its precious few elite troops on garrisons across its overextended territories. This merely gave the Fordanta an opportunity to defeat these scattered forces in detail, further hamstringing the already precarious Dominatus war effort. One can never take away the fact that the larger states of the AGC sustained the brunt of the fighting and the casualties, but if not for the Fordanta strikes, at very least, the attrition may have very well exsanguinated the Andromedans.

In Mirus, efficiency meant leading orbital assaults and engaging elite Tyranny troops. While Dominatus planetary shielding often meant that comprehensive and total orbital bombardment was impossible, the sheer speed at which Fordanta were inserted meant that Dominatus defenses were breached far more quickly than would have otherwise been possible. Indeed, these assaults were often abattoirs for both sides, but at least these bloodbaths made the insertion of future waves far more productive and safe. Fordanta military ingenuity had been such that new Dominatus inventions or formations never had catastrophic effects on their own men. Combined batteries of Titans could destroy anything short of Dominatus super-heavy tanks, and the ease at which the Fordanta integrated themselves into Allied Combined Arms formations meant that when the already formidable Fordans were supported by the full might of allied airpower.

It was a military tradition that meant even the most intractable problems were made as manageable as possible. The Overseers of the late Mirus Campaign, with their experience, second-stage enhancements and much improved equipment were so powerful that even the previously confident Fordanta were at first stunned (as much as they could be) by their enemy’s raw power. But this gave way to thinking and experimentation, and that gave way to solutions. Berserkers were used to draw these bioengineered demigods away from the main force, and concentrated longe-range firepower would obliterate them. When forced to engage them in a melee, Knights had developed group tactics for ganging up on these monsters and defeating them one by one. They practiced these exhaustively, and when the time came, they found themselves amongst the exceedingly rare allied forces who could hold the line against the Dominatus’ prized creations without support.

Efficiency now was simply cleaning out the Tyranny’s forces in the rubble with the minimum of casualties. The Fordanta were chosen for their prowess in close combat, but most of the time, this was not needed. The Fordanta had paid more than the bloody price of membership in the ADC - no matter how efficient their tactics, frontline combat with the Dominatus’ prize units resulted in very heavy casualties, and when the Tyranny’s Military Intelligence began an almost unstoppable series of assassinations led by their newly formed Cyclops Group, it was the Fordanta who volunteered their troops as bodyguards and counter-espionage agents. As of the current battle, the Fordanta had gained unlimited access to the whole machinery of the Allied forces.

The time of heavy casualties and decimated legions was over. Fordanta clean-up groups were composed of Hunters on overwatch, batteries of Titans guarded by Knights, Phantoms flying overhead and warriors scouting forwards. More than this, they had been given the privilege of constant aerial overwatch by a veritable flotilla of allied aerial gunships and strike-craft. When they identified Tyranny stragglers from afar, they merely designated a target, and watched it blown up from the skies. And in the rare cases in which the Tyranny’s few survivors managed to strike at the centre of their formation, the Fordanta systematically annihilated them, applying superior numbers, superior firepower, and superior tactics.

In the end, their main enemy in the clean-up process was tediousness, not the vermin crawling through the rubble,

And to the natural biological war machines for whom military efficiency was the prize goal, tediousness was not so bad.

The Sound of Silence
Only a single question floated through Caltiene's and Frioa’s minds.

Are we finally here?

The two TIAF officers had been captured early in the Dominatus Bunsen Campaign, and had been tortured into divulging important TIAF military secrets. Following this torture, they were simply left conscious and immobile, force-fed vital nutrients but otherwise abandoned and left to rot. They slowly went insane, the distinction between day and night, light and darkness disappearing in their broken minds. It seemed to have gone on for an eternity till they had been found by shapes they vaguely recognised as not those of the Tyranny. Atrophied, delusional, and broken in every manner, it took several months of mental surgery and therapy to make them functional. It would have taken longer, had their minds not been given clarity by an all-consuming anger that gave them a laser-like focus on the destruction of the Tyranny.

While being treated, they had heard conversations that seemed too horrid to be true. Mantel IV had only begun reconstruction and re-terraforming - its surface had been turned to toxic ooze by Dominatus bioweapons and its infrastructure destroyed by ghastly battle. Even trapped in their imaginations, they could see clearly the ghastly nightmare of combat - schoolchildren tortured to death en masse in bids to get partisans to reveal secrets, the use of combat harvesters on innocent civilians who were thrown into their cavernous interiors by long metallic tentacles. When they heard that bio drones often had a likeness to people they once knew, it was a revelation that forced them into tears, first of despair, then of anger. Thymius had almost been starved to death. When they watched the videos of emaciated children eating their pets, and parents cutting off their limbs to feed their offspring, the conflagration of raw rage had been crystallised into a single, focused, determined, and implacable desire to defeat those who had done this.

The Levisala, for all their double-dealing, could wait till the end of the war. The enemy of my enemy is my friend as the saying went, and the Levisala's betrayal of the Dominatus allowed for the Tybusens to regain offensive footing and push the Dominatus Back. All that mattered now, was that the Dominatus were reduced to cosmic dust. In general, the TIAF’s involvement had been in support roles. The Tybusens were perhaps a species not individually suited to the rigours of land warfare, with only their elite and officers being given powered armour suits that allowed them to compete on the hellish battlefields of Mirus. But individual lack of physical strength meant very little from the bridge of a starship, wherein an orbital bombardment battery built by a weak race was oftentimes as strong as one built by a more physically developed one.

And so, whenever the planetary shield of a Dominatus world was destroyed, it was often TIAF ships that led the bombardment, delivering unerringly precise and effective strikes at key targets and saturating entire worlds with fire as was needed.

Indeed, when the TIAMAT had fallen, it was TIAF ships and TIAF officers who led target acquisition, selection and often gave general firing solutions. Caltiene and Frioa had smiled as they directed the one sided slaughter from above, watching as much of the once though invincible Dominatus military was quite literally buried under falling skies. The bombardment had been overpowering and merciless in equal measure. They watched in glee as entire Dominatus armoured formations were either disintegrated, thrown into the atmosphere by the force of impact, or crushed by vomited chunks of the Dominatus’ own homeworld. They cheered as Demogorgon Prime’s various biomes were made one and the same - giant pools of slag and ashen corpses. Whatever had been visited on Mantel IV would be visited on Demogorgon Prime tenfold, and it seemed like the rest of the Allies could not have agreed more with the magnitude of punishment.

Even in the ensuing battle for Malogenesis, the Tybusens had lent their support as artillery coordinators. It was not uncommon to see a Tybusen attached to a Draconis A-59 Shatterpounder or even the rare DCP Surface to Space Artillery. This was a practised skill, and it was with the vast Tybusen expertise in this subject, that the Allies were able to demolish large sections of the city and what remained of the garrison so quickly.

Thus it was, as the two Tybusens stood observing Orpheum, a massive Dominatus building housing some kind of contraption that sang and played the Dominatus anthem over and over again. The sound had flooded the city despite the Allies best attempts to drown it out with the sounds of war, but it had not worked. But here they stood, at one of the last symbols of the Tyranny that had so offended the Gigaquadrant that its disparate factions had banded together to destroy it. They laughed as the automaton spat out obviously false lines.

O Tyranny, great and mighty, house of the Dominatus. Our power grows, and consumes all, iron and flesh expanding. With strength and steel, through fire and ice, pay any price to prevail. No price too high, no foe too strong, science and strength will vanquish.

For the Tyrant, we will conquer, no limit to our power. Dominatus, and delivered, and metal children go forth. In times of joy, and times of pain, we struggle towards our goal. The strong will thrive, and kill the weak and only we shall remain.

With martial might, and brilliant minds, we make gods kneel before us All that exists, and even more, will be driven before us. Our foes perish, crushed by our will, swallowed whole by oblivion. We will prevail, unstoppable, the Tyranny will rule all!

They both shook their heads at the delusions of the lyrics. They were obviously written in a different place, in a different time, when a different future seemed more likely.

Caltiene - ''I can't stand it anymore. Make it go away.'' Frioa - ''All sector artillery batteries, coordinates have been sent to your targeting computers. Commence fire''

And so after what seemed to be a never-ending barrage, the anthem ceased. There was now only the sound of silence.

Silent Night, Holy Night
Polyphemus was perhaps the most infamous sniper in the whole Tyranny’s Cyclops corps. How many ADC VIPs had he killed before Demogorgon Prime? Polyphemus’ internal algorithms ran an extensive lookup of his databases, but in the emergent emotions that swirled in the minds of the Dominatus’ longer lived AIs, he reasoned that it didn’t really matter. A time when that mattered seemed so far away. His synthetic mind temporarily wandered off to happier times, and given the state of events, any time before certainly qualified. How wonderful it was during the TIAMAT-based Dominatus counteroffensive, where as an infiltrated Cyclops, all he worried about was whether his SCyRSLHTX Hypermatter Sniper Rifle needed a new ammunition clip or not. There were so many targets then, all running away, all in anarchy, as the Dominatus came towards them. It was a turkey shoot.

And this battle of Malogenesis’ was no longer a battle, it was a turkey shoot. Not even regarding the tsunami of Allied forces who seemed to flood into the city each day, there were so many allied strike-craft that it seemed individual squads would call upon their own personal bombers. Polyphemus had heard that some of the Dominatus that remained began duelling others in an effort to steal what rare AA vehicles remained for their forces. Where once the entire city had barked into the skies, creating an almost-impenetrable kill-zone, the vast majority of stationary AA had been destroyed, and what few remained were depleted each day.

It seemed that even the forces with AA had a new unreachable enemy to think about - the Allies had massed enough artillery in the city that many of its units now had full access to earth shattering batteries of big guns. Polyphemus wondered if all that was left for them to do was decide whether the wrecked Dominatus forces they stepped over had been destroyed by either long-range artillery or bombers. The Allies rarely saw the need for actual combat now, and only when the Tyranny’s forces grabbed them by the belt was the leviathan actually forced to engage any of its muscles. Indeed, their main problem was finding the Dominatus and their minions to kill.

From the top of the spire he had chosen as a vantage point for the night, Polyphemus observed what remained of the city the Dominatus had planned to inhabit after their conquest of the Gigaquadrant. Where there were once tall proud towers that reach to the heavens, what remained was if not just rubble, then their twisted, anguished, and bent corpses. Where there were once proud highways and boulevards lay subdued snakes of marble tread upon by the unending march of ADC armies. ADC march was unceasing - no matter how far he extended his scope, what had once been the Tyranny’s roads were clogged by a glut of ADC troopers and vehicles ceaseless moving forwards. How it contrasted to the scattered, ragtag bands of the former Archostrategon, more of whom made every effort to avoid battle. Perhaps he thought, the needlessly brave had died already. Most who were left were survivalists more concerned with getting to the next day than confronting ADC forces.

And what of the sounds he could hear! The streaks of missiles launched by the never-ending swarm of ADC strike craft that circled overhead. Before they had been so frequent, but now, they were substantially rare. Polyphemus sighed - all it meant was that the ADC was running out of visible targets. The few firefights he heard now all ended in the same way. A ceaseless barrage of artillery, including the fearsome DCP Surface to Space Artillery, whose blasts were strong enough that the path the projectile followed ionised the air in their wake, creating pressure waves as destructive as those from nuclear detonations. The mass unleashing of missiles from following squadrons meant that when the land arm of the ADC juggernaut finally arrived, more often than not, their job was simply tallying up the damage and only sometimes, liquidating what few survivors there were.

But he had seen those sights on previous nights. Now, there seemed to be something new - fliers came in not bringing bombs but what seemed to be trees in pre-fabricated environmental containers as well as pre-fabricated habitation units wherein ADC troops could step out of their hazmat suits. Zooming closer, he saw that many, of different species had come together to sing in front of the lit-up trees, their speakers amplifying the sounds and propagating them throughout the city. Where once the Dominatus anthem had sounded over and over without end, at least giving the Dominatus forces some inspiration, now there was only the hope-crushing sounds of countless souls singing. Even perched upon his tower, the downtrodden sniper could hear the chorus of perhaps the most popular Allied carols. It seemed odd to him that an army as heterogeneous as that of the ADC would have a common cultural and musical tradition.

They didn’t, they were merely united in their hatred of the Dominatus.

Silent Night Holy Night Kill them all Thus make it right Kill all lurking Mother and child Dommies screaming, death far much too mild Pay for what you have done Pay for what you have done

Stahl’s Wager


December 25, 2795

December 24, 2795 had seen the Tyrant’s Spire, or Demogorgon Rex, the tallest building in the city, been destroyed by the fanatical Dominatus inside, who found the prospect of an Allied Flag raised on it to be worse than death, and before the Allies who had encircled it could launch their assault, had planet stealthed hyper matter explosives in the base of the tower. When a week of fighting had eventually forced the last of its garrison to the spire’s rooftop, they detonated the explosives in a bid to deny the Allies the image of a flag planted on the tower. Now all that was left was a burnt crater that had taken out the adjoining blocks of the city.

Archon had watched the detonations from the command room of Apogee. The last remaining building of its size, the massive fortress-pyramid lay in the same district as the Tyrant’s Spire and was protected by defences similar to those of the Citadels outside, except more powerful and more resilient. Apogee had served as a rallying point for those lucky Tyranny forces that had been able to retreat there in order to resupply. Apogee contained its own factories, its own stores of supplies, and was like a Citadel, a self-contained fortress-city that could withstand even an ADC siege for months. Stahl looked outside to see the gargantuan ADC force that was besieging the last symbol of Dominatus might. He wasn’t concerned about that - the garrison and the headquarter’s defences had repulsed each titanic assault with contemptuous ease. However, Stahl knew as well as anyone else that whether the ADC would eventually break through was a question of if, not when. The Supreme Commander of the Dominatus merely pondered as he looked at the carnage around him. He had known what had to be done intellectually the day the TIAMAT was blown up. But even for a man who prided himself on pragmatism and lightning-quick decision making, it had taken him till now to fully process the immediate course of action.

Historians would forever debate whether Stahl ranked deserved a seat in the Gigaquadrant’s pantheon of military geniuses. His detractors believed that even disregarding the failure of his Milky Way Campaign, Manticore Campaign, Terminus Campaign, and the fighting retreat of the Dominatus culminating in the Battle of Demogorgon Prime, he simply didn’t qualify as he had not revolutionised warfare by introduction of seismic changes in military organisation or brilliance stratagems. By these two damning crimes of failure and a lack of original thought, he simply didn’t deserve to sit amongst the Gigaquadrant’s greatest commanders. Of course when archival files and future analyses informed the discussion, an initially controversial and frequently criticised school of thought was born. This school of thought believed the best metric on which to judge Stahl was how he performed given the tools at his disposal, and believed that given the later revealed facts that Stahl’s Tyranny was not so much an absolute dictatorship as a self-cannibalising hydra, that Stahl had done the best that could be hoped for in an impossible situation. They argued that had it not been for his leadership, the Milky Way Campaign would have ended in failure without even doing serious damage to the DCP, and that the Mirus Campaign would never have seen the near annihilation of the entire Allied Force, as had happened during Stahl’s campaigns not once, but twice. Indeed this school of thought believed that Stahl had coordinated the maelstrom of the Tyranny’s myriad of competing and ceaseless arrogant brilliant savants as best as could be hoped for against a seemingly unstoppable enemy that he almost annihilated twice.

But the Archon of that day had something else on his mind. The judgement of the future could wait. Right now, his mind flashed to the past.

April 2795

Stahl had started the Mirus Campaign with the twin titles of Archon and Acting Tyrant. Not only did he coordinate the entire Dominatus warplan, but also their productive capacity and research efforts. Now he was simply a Drachon, a mere member of the General Staff rather than its head. More than that, he had been relieved of command while his former colleagues looked for a new task for him. How had he fallen so far? Stahl had hedged his entire reputation on the December 2794 Battle of Manticore. The Tyranny's eventual defeat in this battle had not only decimated the Tyranny's navy, it had destroyed the confidence that the General Staff and the rest of the Tyranny had placed in him.

He had used what little influence he had in leading the campaigns that followed the de-facto ceasefire period of January 2795. But he had lost the ability to dictate the productive and scientific capacity of the Tyranny. He had only the military to work with in the February Campaign to defeat the Allies before they received reinforcements through the intergalactic void. And in the March 2795 Battle of the Terminus, he had failed to decisively defeat the enemy. The arrival of the intergalactic relief force meant that from that point onwards, the Tyranny was solely on the defensive. The backlash had been complete - the former mastermind between the Milky Way Campaign, the Manticore Campaign, and the Terminus Campaign was now without a single army or fleet to command during a time in which the Tyranny lost an army, fleet, or planet everyday. He heard only rumours of the insanity that had overtaken Dominatus command - most shocking of all of them the restarting of the TIAMAT project. Oh well, if there was one good thing to be gleaned from this limbo, it was that for the first time in a century, he had leisure time.

Abyss, Stahl's first destination, was created to house the prisoners captured by the Tyranny during the Manticore Campaign for use as bargaining chips after the assumed Dominatus victory. It was composed of a pair of stations - Abyss I for the rank and file, and Abyss II for VIPs. It was in a special cell here, that French Marshal had languished ever since he was captured in early December 2794. The cell was massive and sterile - here Chartier was neither abused nor pampered. Everyday he was provided nutrient paste, water, and nothing else. His only form of recreation lay in exercises of the mind and analysis of his sole bodyguard, a 10 meter tall Dominatus spider-mech given a special nonlethal loadout. It appeared that as he had killed a 2 Human Overseers when they captured his ship, the Dominatus had decided to pull out all stops on in preventing a potential escape.

Humans were clearly not designed for prolonged periods of isolation and captivity. The creature Stahl encountered did not live up to his reputation. Curled up, atrophied, dirty, unshaven, depressed, sleepless, here was supposedly one of the finest specimens humanity had to offer (why else would they have promoted him to so high a position within their armed forced?) brought low not by the malice, but the indifference of his environment. "Humans are social animals," they said. They needed coaxing. They needed comfort and encouragement. They needed constant reinforcement. They needed to be secure within themselves before they could act to secure themselves without. To deprive a human of these things had a similar effect of depriving him of oxygen. But where his contemporaries saw in the slow-motion asphyxiation of Lucian Chartier and other like him only biological and psychological weakness, Stahl had begun to see differently. The Dominatus had fallen into the habit of measuring civilisations by the characteristics and potential of individual specimens. By all measures––intelligence, stamina, strength, size––humans were not even suitable for chattel slavery. Yet here they were, the soon-to-be masters of the situation, masters of beings far superior than themselves.

Lucian did not know where he was. Well, he was in a cell. That was the obvious. Perfect square. 10 meters by 10 meters, he had counted. Self-cleaning. Stainless steel. Icy-cold to the touch. Maddeningly uncomfortable. But he did not now where he was. He had a few ideas, having been briefed on the Dominatus POW practices. The analysts had had code names for the facilities they had discovered, but they were so far within Dominatus-controlled space that there was no effective use for the intel. That meant no rescue was likely, Lucian held no illusions. He had no anxieties either. Relieved of the responsibilities of command, he could now rightly claim that he had done his duty. In the French system, no officer was irreplaceable, and he had every confidence that a capable, astute, and cautious young officer would rise to take the place that had just been vacated by his capture. The war would go on. Such was the virtue of a bureaucratic hydra, that when the heads were lopped off, the algorithms and protocols would produce more.

The food was pitiable. Hunger had forced him to swallow the nutrient paste they handed him. But more and more, they took his tray back untouched. As he lay there curled up the corners of his cell, his will and appetite slowly left him. Unsparing fluorescents shone white light blindingly into the four corners of the cage at all times, such that it was impossible for Lucian's body to know whether it was day or night anymore. He slept erratically, poorly, and often, drifting in and out of feverish dreams which displaced him from the slow horror he was experiencing to the horror he had just left. The war, at once the most isolating and human experience one could be subjected to. They travelled in sardine cans in perfect formation for ages, followed strict protocol, were governed by invented distinctions of rank, responsibility, and function. In combat, all order broke down. All distinctions degraded over time save for one: either they would swim together, or sink together. Bonds formed under such pressure, of trust, of camaraderie, of friendship, of love, Lucian knew, would not be found anywhere else. Veterans of '95 would return to society broken men, not because they desperately wanted to escape the war, but because they would always desperately want to go back.

Jolted from the haze of such a nightmare, Lucian awoke to find himself staring up at a towering Dominatus Alpha. 12 meters tall, in full ceremonial armor, staring down at him. Instinct caused Lucian to recoil, to retreat in a shuffle to the back corner of his cell. Having reached it, and with nowhere left to retreat to, he stared. When he realized what had just happened, the Marshal of France cursed himself. No matter how hard he tried, there was no dignity to be had in this situation. Could he salvage his pride by marshalling everything he had against that premise? Or was he just torturing himself by not accepting it?

Stahl - ''Go To Hell. Praetor Famine of the Horsemen of Destiny reported those were your last words. Moreover, he reported that when his synthetic auxiliaries had taken stock of the ship, they had found what interrogation of the quartermaster later revealed to be a "vintage Château Latour". When we asked him what it was for, he replied that it was to be drunk "after planning the French Flag on the Tyrant's Spire". Famine also reported that you killed two of his lieutenants with carefully place shots from this pistol. I must ask human, why is it that you think any of this to be possible? And why is it that reality seems to support your delusions?''

Stahl dropped the pistol, empty of its ammunition, to the floor while waiting for Chartier's answer.

The Marshal looked up at his interrogator with a bemused expression. He could feel the stench of weeks of clinging to him. The only measure he had of the time was the length of his hair, which now framed his early and drooped down in a jungle of a beard. The clanging of metal against metal drew a wince from him as the pistol's acrobatic arc ended at his feet. He stared at the weapon for a moment, but the hope seemed to fade from his eyes as he realised that it was probably empty. Chartier, the planner, the engineering student-turned naval officer, the "wonder boy" who won if not through brilliance, then through data and efficiency, was without the will or the patience to engage in polemics.

Lucian - ''I don't see the problem. Both of us think we're right. We fight it out, a victor emerges. That's what war is. It's not rocket science.''

Stahl - ''The first question was rhetorical, and the second question was literal. There is a difference between an ant thinking is the right side of history in fighting a boot, and an ant whose conviction is vindicated.''

Lucian - ''Then maybe you might benefit from reconsidering your premise, he spat bitterly with a vaguely professorial attitude and propped himself up more firmly against the wall, because the sooner you realize that the situation no longer conforms to your metaphor––if it ever did––the sooner you'll come to grips with what's happening. And the sooner we can all pack up and go home.''

Stahl's laugh filled the room. It seemed as if relief of command did have its perks. Freed of command, he took the arguably treasonous step of being open with his prisoner.

Stahl - ''Your files from military intelligence all agree that you have a reputation as a "wonder boy". A subordinate in the Orion Spur lost a fleet to you. The first loss of a Gargantua to an Orion League force was ascribed to your strike fleet. Not so much a battle but a strangulation. Well wonder boy, the date is April 2, 2795. Here's a question. Why would the Dominatus Archon be touring a prison station in the middle of a war?''

Lucian - You're lost, clearly.

He relished knowing the date. Even the smallest amount of certainty, the slightest bit of information, was valuable. He rushed to capture it and commit it to memory before it slipped away. April 2, 2795...

Stahl filed in an order to synthesise some real food and water for Lucian. The old warrior felt that his enemy understood him more than his insane Dominatus colleagues. And as to professionalism, well the Dominatus needed a miracle to win now, not professionalism. Whereas another Dominatus would have deposited the food directly on the ground, Stahl ordered a synthesised table and chair made to human ergonomic standards.

Stahl - ''How relieving it is that 4 and a half months of imprisonment haven't broken your sense of humor. I've never had the inclination to find out how much Allied Intelligence knew about my personal life. But tell me, what do you think my track was in Officer School?''

Lucian masked his confusion with suspicion as a table, chair, and real food were brought in. He didn't move from his corner, and tried not to look. Emaciated as he was, he was not hungry and did not want to be. Stahl had all of the power in this situation, and no matter how genuinely the Dominatus wanted it, no honest conversation could occur. Humor, biting sarcasm, curtness, these were the defenses of a man who found himself at the mercy of knowledge, capacity, and capability greater than that he had available to him.

Lucian - Underwater basketweaving, evidently.

Stahl sighed as his software assistant informed him of the nature of the vintage Terran reference. A personality conducive to easy boredom, a familiarity with authority over the Tyranny's military, and lots of spare time were not a good combination. It seemed as if a more traditional approach was needed to bring him the stimulation he needed.

Stahl - ''I'm sure you've been briefed about Dominatus Prisoner of War practices. I'm sure you know the most common way of breaking a commander is through the torture or threat of torture of those under him.''

Stahl paused to let Lucian process this, waiting for the Frenchman to reply before continuing his thoughts.

Lucian's eyes flashed fire.

Lucian - ''And I am sure you're familiar with the psychology of torture. As a tool of military intelligence, it's worse than useless.''

Stahl smiled a toothy smile, allowing Lucian to see the entirety of the Dominatus' maw.

Stahl - ''Who said anything about military intelligence? 'm sure you know the fate of that French commander, the supposedly "Indomptable" Louis Passereau was it, whom one of your subordinates found insane and marooned on some planet during the Milky Way campaign. I hear that they had to torture 60% of his captured subordinates before he broke. I doubt the remainder were tortured for reasons of military intelligence. So here are my terms - I will ask you questions and attempt to converse. If I am satisfied with your answer, one of your crew members will be given an expanded and comfortable cell. If I am not, that crew member will be tortured to death in front of you. Oh, and sarcasm stopped being satisfying one sentence ago.''

Internally, Stahl was annoyed that it had come to this this, but if the velvet glove was not going to give him what he needed, an iron fist would.

The French Marshal looked up at him with hatred welling in his eyes, one arm gripping the other weakly. There was something else in his gaze: the collectedness of a man conscious of his power, and determined to exercise it with judiciousness and precision. There was silence between them for a moment.

Stahl nodded and kept up his end of the bargain. An appearing hologram showed one of Lucian's midshipmen being roused from slumber in a sterilised cell so tight that he could barely move. and being taken out by mechanical tendrils. The haggard man was hastily transferred to a cell made for a larger creature and fitted with a few amenities to allow the man a modicum of sanity.

Stahl - ''It is better to be Feared than Loved, if one cannot be both. Didn't one of your statesmen say that?''

Lucian - ''He was Italian, not French. But yes.''

Stahl smiled. If he was staying on Abyss for the day, he would at least have some stimulation.

Stahl - ''Why is it, that it seems that your fleet can't be beheaded? It seems rather odd that your war machine is so free of various ... iconoclasts? You have your heroes, but they seem but facades for the automaton propping them up.''

Lucian - ''Banking on good military leaders is a risk. Would you rather your capabilities be consistent, reliable, diffuse, and there when you need them, or variable and vulnerable to decapitation? A strong organization limits the ability of our leaders to screw things up. It also protects our republic.''

Stahl grimaced noticeably and perceptibly. Cross-referencing it with his base of knowledge, he was so disturbed that for a split second, when Lucian gazed into his eyes, he saw Stahl's disappointment.

It was indeed Tyranny policy to promote individual genius and to fasten upon such leaders, both military and scientific its previously almost-unlimited resources. But the genius of one campaign was the dunce of another. The scientific philosophy behind a novel invention in a time of peace was an idiot who wasted resources in a time of war. And the barking heads danced on and on, screaming at the Tyrant for funding and support, barking at each other when rival agencies got support. Stahl sometimes thought himself a genius, though could a reputation for genius be solidified on a base of mere almost-wins? He had had his shot at supreme authority, and excuses aside, he had failed. Consistency he spat. Only in the Tyranny would the ability to coordinate the whirlwind of insane arrogance that constituted each organisation be considered genius of the first order.

Stahl - You live in an empire that can succeed without regard for luck.

Dejected but satisfied, Stahl ordered the transfer of several more additional prisoners to better cells.

Lucian watched as the prisoners were transferred, nodding with apprehension and a twinge of satisfaction. He seemed to relax a little in his corner.

Stahl - ''Did anyone in your government or military ever consider surrender? Even in the early stages of the war? How did they cope with what must have seemed inevitable?''

Lucian - ''I'm not privy to those conversations, but you need to remember that we've been winning for two years now. Had you been pushing us back, had your military superiority translated into tangible gains which would have ground down our ability to fight, that would have been another story. As it stands, our fighting strength has been steadily increasing. Yours has been decreasing faster than you can replenish it. Now, we're on your turf, while not a single Dominatus has set foot on French soil. This is a foreign war for us. Why would we surrender, either before the decisive battle is fought or now that we're winning?''

Stahl nodded dejectedly again, signalling the transfer of more prisoners. Stahl was feeling his melancholy overtake him, and mustered together one last question.

Stahl - ''Hypothetically, say you do end up invading Demogorgon Prime, and it does look like your victory is all but assured. If you were a Dominatus, would you sue for peace, or fight till the end? Or is any approximation of peace out of the question?''

Here Lucian hardened, but rather than going as far as his feelings might take him he answered the question as posed.

Lucian - ''Peace is out of the question. Only unconditional surrender can save you.''

Stahl - You mean utter submission?

Lucian - ''Dissolution. The Tyranny as it is now has lost the right to exist.''

It was only then that Stahl fully grasped, with complete clarity what anything short of a Tyranny victory meant.

Stahl - I have a wager Lucian, would you care to hear it?

Lucian - Shoot.

Stahl - ''I'll free you on one condition. If you get to Demogorgon Prime, in either death or "unconditional surrender", I'll give you back your wine. But, you have to promise me that you'll accept a book detailing the history of the Tyranny once you get there. Deal?''

Lucian stared at him for a moment, uncomprehending. It's not that he was surprised. It was outlandish on so many levels it did not even register.

Stahl - I'll free you if you keep the history of the Tyranny in the event of your victory.

Lucian - Alright, I'll take it.

Stahl extended a hand.

Stahl - To seeing you in either Paris or Demogorgon Prime.

The Marshal of France gripped one of Stahl’s fingers and used it to pull himself up. He was dead serious.

Lucian - ''You will never see Paris. I mean it, that will never happen. What about my crew?''

Stahl - Better cells for all of them.

Stahl neglected to mention that there weren't very many left

Lucian - ''Would you arrange for them to see each other? Isolation does us little good.''

Stahl - That can be arranged for.

Lucian looked at him curiously, his strained and haggard features softening, betraying an exhaustion of a hundred years. What possible military purpose could this sudden gallantry serve? He dared not ask, lest Stahl change his mind.

Lucian - ''I'll remember this. When the situation is reversed.''

Et Tu, Brute?
For the most major actions, only the Tyrant or Acting Tyrant could decide the course of action with absolute authority. In all other cases, the Dominatus General Staff needed a majority vote in favour of the course of action, with the Archon and Supreme Admiral’s votes both required to push an act through. In the most critical cases, it required a unanimous decision. Stahl darkly joked to himself now that only 3 remained, himself, his close friend, the extremely technically competent and honour-bound Drachon Indomitus Rex, and the bloodthirsty and nearly insane Drachon Dis Brutalis. Of the 2, Stahl rarely, if ever disagreed with Rex about anything - It seemed Rex was his right-hand man, someone whom Stahl handed the finer tactical details of various critical operations, and someone who more often than not, pulled miracles out of thin air. Not enough miracles, Stahl thought as he grimaced again. And Brutalis was well, the most brutal of the General Staff, perhaps possessed of the same bloodlust as the late. Brutalis’ policy was simply to attack, attack, and attack, with bloodshed thought of as a more important metric of success than victory. It was no wonder that he had chosen to patronise the Berserkers of Bruteigon, though it was a wonder that he wasn’t dead. Stahl had summoned Brutalis to the command room from the frontlines of the defenses, and as a formality, he had broached the subject of ending the conflict with the bloodthirsty god of war, and had received the expected response. Following Brutalis’ predictable vociferous accusations that Stahl was a traitor to all Dominatus, Stahl challenged Brutalis to a duel for command. Honor dictated that if Brutalis accepted and Stahl won, he would agree to Stahl’s dictates in the vote that followed. If Stahl lost however, the opposite case would be true. Brutalis gladly accepted - he had risen to the position of Drachon in spite of his lack of tactical acumen - he was simply the physically strongest Dominatus left standing, he had no problem accepting the challenge. Brutalis had by himself, destroyed entire ADC armies at close-range, had boarded ADC ships and literally gutted them from the inside, and had virtually run out of varieties of Allied war hero or champion to kill. Stahl on the other hand, had not participated in direct combat since before the start of the conflict. Brutalis thus so no problem in Stahl’s proposition.

These duels took place not in Dominatus armour, but in special suits designed to mimic the limitations of the bodies they had previously occupied. It incorporated such things as relative speed and relative strength among others, giving the duelists the same comparative advantages they had possessed as Dominatus, only in Drakodominatus bodies. They were to fight merely with their unarmed, using the martial arts developed in the days before they strode the Gigaquadrant as biologically engineered gods. The two assumed pugilistic stances in the custom-made arena, before Stahl nodded.

The Tyranny had developed special units to kill Dominatus. This was made necessary by the Junction’s use of assimilated Dominatus as line-breakers. During the Borealis Campaign, stopgap solutions such as using the Dominatus themselves to combat them or merely bombarding them from long-range with Super-Heavy vehicles worked but still the Tyranny looked for more efficient solutions. The upgrades the Tyranny had received in the Mirus Campaign had made it such that the elite of the increasingly more powerful Overseers could take them head on, but one proposed solution that Stahl took greatly to in the late stages of the campaign were the deployment of specialised Anti-Dominatus Task Forces named Purifiers outfitted solely for the purpose of dealing with these abominations. They were to be taken from the ranks of Military Intelligence Cyclop’s and supplemented with drastically upgraded 15 meter tall Apex Daemon Mecha. In return for the support of the creation of such units, Stahl was given the privilege of making any modification he wanted. He chose a secret programming routine in their AI that made them personally loyal to him. Though even rarer than the Cyclops, they were judged very effective at their sole task of defeating Junction Dominatus. With the sudden disappearance of the Junction after the assimilation of Meshuggah Metallicus, Stahl had called the remaining squad of these units to Apogee where they had arrived fully intact.

These troops were could reliably and effectively deal with armoured Junction Dominatus in the context of head-on combat. Against an unarmored Dominatus, even the strongest one left standing, whom they had also taken by surprise, there was no way for them to fail. Brutalis could only get off a look of shock as he heard the weapons fire off. The pile of goop on the floor moments later could only sizzle at the ignominious death Stahl had dealt him. Yet even Stahl didn’t have the time to acknowledge the mess on the floor, merely motioning for sanitation bots to remove it. Stahl was a man of pragmatism, and such things as ending the senseless conflict in the hope of preserving something was not a matter that he would dare consider leaving up to luck. Stahl put his armour back on and summoned Drachon Rex. Stahl considered himself an excellent judge of character, of individual motives and desires, and this had allowed him to navigate the barely-coordinated mess of a Tyranny without a Tyrant. Fully confident in his ability to assess people, especially his closest friends, he predicted with absolute certainty that his long-time friend would agree to his plans. It is with that in mind that upon Rex’s arrival, he eagerly brought up the subject.

Rex - No. Surrender is out of the question.

Stahl paused, staring dumbfounded and uncomprehending at Rex. He didn’t need to speak for Rex to rebut the argument he saw in Stahl’s eyes.

Rex - ''The war is lost, everyone knows that. And the punishment for defeat, whether in surrender or extermination is the same - extinction. All your hope of the Allies allowing us to keep some kind of legacy is misguided and farcical. So what if they do? History will remember the Tyranny as an empire that upon its knees, was reduced to begging its superiors. I for one, will not die in chains cast by our inferiors. All we have left is our dignity, and if you seek to give that away in hopes of mercy, you will have to fight me. Perhaps the Archon worthy of making the decision will be able to beat me without the use of his Purifiers.''

Stahl looked at the floor shaking his head. There was no talking the Drachon out of this. Stahl surmised Rex knew that he had no way of making sure the Purifiers weren’t going to be used, but his pragmatism was overtaken by the sentiments of the friendship the two shared, or at least had shared. The very least Stahl could grant Rex was a fair duel. Stahl had never analysed Rex as an enemy, and hoped that the Dominatus’ greatest and most inventive tactician had spent more time thinking with his brain than fighting with his fists.

They donned their armour and assumed the stances. Fights of such a manner were never resolved quickly, and never resolved without much pain. The superiority the Dominatus took for granted in melee fights with even the ADC’s best vanished in contests between themselves. Indeed, the creation of duel armour was driven by the need to expedite such contests as fights between unarmored Dominatus had often taken so long that they actually detracted from Tyranny’s efforts. Indeed, fight in which the combatants effectively inhabited their old Drakodominatus bodies, were much quicker … and much more painful.

Stahl struck first, feeling the unfamiliar sensation that he could only call the feeling of exertion as he threw a punch at Rex. Rex’s dodge and counter punch to Stahl’s gut gave Stahl a feeling that he had long since forgotten - pain. Staggered, Stahl tried a different approach, letting Rex throw the first blows and only responding with defensive moves. He reasoned that in these shells, Rex would eventually fatigue, and then Stahl could beat him with minimal pain and effort on both their parts. Ducking, parrying, and weaving around, Stahl moved while seeking to expend as much of Rex’s energy as possible, succeeding before grappling the Drachon and throwing him to the ground.

Having mounted Rex, Stahl again found himself by all manner of feelings - muscular exhaustion and a lack of breath. He could only have imagined how his former friend felt. Pulling himself together, he began beating down Rex with hammer fists, aiming to literally punch him into unconsciousness, which was the only time when the duel would end. Stahl prided himself on the extraordinary calm and composure upon which he wielded his power and conducted war, but the emotional armageddon of having to literally beat his last good friend into submission caused the titan of war to break down, crack by crack as he bore down with all his might onto his enemies last, desperate attempt to block them.

Stahl - ''Just give up! This is for the Tyranny! This is the only way we are not erased from history! Think! Everything I’ve done has been for the Tyranny! Why do you think I killed Medusa!''

It was only then, in a temporary moment of lucidity, did the grief and rage stricken Archon remember that he had not informed Rex of the conspiracy. It was merely between him and the former Supreme Admiral. But he couldn’t take back words. The fire was already lit.

Rex - Traitor!

Before Stahl could justify his actions, the grounded Drachon had left his defensive stance to attempt to attack the Archon pinning him to the floor. It wasn’t just punches, it was screaming, biting, and kicking. And even in his disadvantaged position, the Drachon’s rage had fuelled his attack well enough that he almost threw a bruised Stahl off of him. But before he was thrown off, he managed to throw a strong elbow down onto Rex’s head. And then, while the Drachon was dazed, Stahl began choking him with both hands. Stahl would have spoken, but even his Dominatus body’s vocal cords remembered the chaotic muscular contractions of sobbing. If tears could have run down the Archon’s masked face, they would have, as he saw consciousness escape the constrained Drachon’s body breath by breath. After what seemed to be an eternity of torture, the Drachon, gurgling and retching passed out, and the duel ended, Stahl the victory.

With the duel ended, the special armour peeled itself off and, with their capacities no longer inhibited, the sensations of pain and exhaustion fled from both combatants. In silence both men, armoured up and headed to the command room. On their way, Stahl tried to make amends with the Drachon, who was honour-bound to agree to his decision.

Stahl - Well, my friend, I hope you’ve changed your mind.

The Drachon stopped walking.

Rex - I will not oppose your plan, but I will not support it.

In Stahl’s mind, this was impossible, a unanimous vote required both of them. Before he could bring the point up, Rex had unsheathed his sword, and as Stahl turned around, Rex stabbed himself in the stomach. The ear-splitting crack of a Drachon’s personal sword crashing through the same Drachon’s personal armour seemed to shake the entire headquarters. The wound itself was not fatal - the Dominatus’ legendary ability to regenerate even the most grievous wounds in combat was amongst the most dreaded of their talents. But this regenerative ability required the will to live, and the will to fight. Rex had lost those.

Rex - ''Stahl, as the sole remaining member of the General Staff, every decision you make will be a unanimous one. I hope you are right, but as a favour for an old friend, please help me end this.''

Stahl begged and pleaded his old friend to remove the massive, embedded sword and regenerate, only for Rex to sadly shake his head.

Stahl - ''You’ve got to live! Everyone else is dead! You’re all I have left!''

Stahl unsheathed the sword from Rex’s stomach only to see the Dominatus’ internals pool out on the floor.

Rex - ''Its too late for any of that Stahl, the die is cast. Now please, help an old friend.''

Stahl paused, realising that Rex was going to die anyways, and if he didn’t assist Rex, the Drachon’s suicide would last the entire day, as he was slowly exsanguinated. and the same convulsions he had experienced while choking his friend reappeared. Shaking, he unsheathed his sword and held it above the Drachon's head.

Stahl - Indomitus.

Rex - Wolframicht.

And with one fell swoop, Stahl beheaded Rex. There were no screams left, no sobs. There was merely silence as Stahl knelt at the body of his dead friend.