"Humans are competitive, to put it lightly. War is the ultimate competition. Should it come as any surprise that the Mad Lemurs of Terra not only excel at warfare but often seek it out. Not military service, not looking for a regimented life, but seek out military careers for combat.

"Humans also do not like to lose. They approach war fighting technology as a competition, often having competing industrial concerns compete with one another to produce that technology.

"Some of the things these competitions have produced, where the prize is mass destruction and death, are too horrible to contemplate.

"I was there when the Serling Generator was activated on Freili'inga VII. I was there when the Lolita Sorceresses attacked Hu'likant IV. I was there when the Neko-Marines landed on She'lfizt III. I was there for when many of the Mad Lemurs of Terra's most terrible weapons were unleashed.

"It was still not as frightening to me as an Elven Court going to war." - Former Grand Most High Sma'akamo'o, from I Have Ridden the Hasslehoff

Hesstla had been nearly fatally damaged.

Before the Atrekna attacked the Lanaktallan had arrived. Industrialization, gentling of the ecosphere, and the resource exploitation had damaged the seas, the air, changed the weather beneath the weather control systems, poisoned the earth, and far more.

When the Mad Lemurs of Terra had pushed the Lanaktallan off of the planet, the people of Hesstla had been informed that their world was on the edge of ecological collapse. Options were offered, including the Terran Confederacy doing exactly nothing, to the people of Hesstla.

Terran Confederacy agents had acquired huge amounts of Lanaktallan and Unified Council databases, more than a few of which contained data on the Hesstla ecosystem. The Hesstlans were startled to discover that they, and their world, were in the middle of being harvested and were slated for "regression" in less than ten thousand years.

But the data also contained what the world looked like during initial surveys nearly six million years before, when the Hesstlan people were still largely primitives. There was also the in-depth surveys for when the Lanaktallan finally arrived on the small planet on the edge of the Dead Zone, where the Precursor War had taken place.

The people of Hesstla had believed that their world had taken an extinction event during the Precursor War, and the surveys largely confirmed that hypothesis.

The people of Hesstla opted to return their world to the state before the Lanaktallan arrived. They had been a small people who had barely discovered radio astronomy and had not left their planet except for a few satellites.

Then the method had to be decided. From huge 'terraforming generators' to the subtle hand of nanite 'reengineering', there were many options to choose from, many of which were frightening to the Hesstlan.

The people of Hesstla, with some trepidation, decided that they would prefer the tried and true method of the massive undertaking of repairing the ecosystem with the massive nanite infusion controlled by a Born Whole Elven Queen.

Construction on the "World Engine" was undertaken as the survey was done. A massive nanite manufacturing system that also worked as the huge nanite control and manufacturing system for the entire Elven Queen system.

Next was the slow cloning of the Elven Queen and her court.

The Elven Queen was grown but 'dreaming' about the condition of Hesstla, when the Atrekna attacked. She was disconnected from the World Engine, only 'seeing' and 'dreaming' of Hesstla through satellite imagery.

For decades she sat in orbit, watching the world below her as it was damaged by the intense fighting, including the detonation of atomic weaponry.

Once that fight was over, she had been examined, declared stable, and activated.

The World Engine produced the nanites needed. Elves walked the damaged and abandoned and wilderness areas, swam through the seas, and spoke to the creatures of the sky that soared through the air.

She began with the seas. Adjusting the oxygen content, the algae levels, the temperature. Her work on land started deep in the soil and in the areas where atomic explosions had scoured away the soil to reveal cracked and damaged bedrock. Flowers grew in atomic craters. Carefully redesigned flowers that were hyperacculmulators that uptook the cesium and strontium as if it was potassium and calcium, removing them from the clay and soil and removed contaminates from the air. Small fish that acted much the same, with adjusted predators that could metabolize the contaminates. Birds that fed on the insects and fish, carrion creatures that ate the larger animals.

The humble ant, Formicidae, a product of Terra's hypercompetitive ecological system, was introduced to Hesstla, as were butterflies that did everything from eat carrion to spread pollen.

The Elven Queen, who had been promoted to a High Queen and now had 'daughters' serving as her lesser queens, and had a "Full Court Press" to serve her, lounged on her throne in a lethargic daze as she oversaw her daughters and servants work with the planet.

'Spells' were cast, to control the vast nanite armies numbering in the millions of trillions of infinitesimally small soldiers, to repair and adjust DNA, clean radiation, bring minerals up from the mantle and seed it through the bedrock and soil.

Slowly, she began to heal the planet. The initial work had to be undertaken quickly, to repair the damage of the intense fighting against the Atrekna. Moss and fungus broke down Autonomous War Machines. Battlesteel succumbed to rhizomes put out by moss and fungus, vast toxic pools of hydraulic fluid and other superlubricants were slurped up by twisting vines, changed in the chemical factory of the plants's systems, and turned into juicy and tasty berries and fruits for the animals and insects to eat that would not harm a Hesstla or would warn them off with a foul taste, hard shell, or stickers.

The High Queen slowly altered the remaining Dwellerspawn or ensured her children's charges and beloved plants and creatures, great and small, could feed upon them to add them to the cycle of life that she worshiped with all of her pure heart.

She had the initial damage almost cleared when her servants heard the cry.

YOU BELONG TO US

The cry roused her from her drowsy lethargic trance. She blinked several times, looking around her. Her daughters were trances of their own, frowning.

From the shadows stepped Ray-Stall-Hin of the May-Day-Jeers, the Dark Mage, He of the Timeless Sight, the Watcher from the Forbidden Tower, the Lover of the Dragon Goddess, the Thrice Redeemed Beloved Brother, the Secret Whisperer. He knelt at the back of High Queen Alv-ah-naya, Lady of Secrets and Magic, Keeper of the Smallest Flame, Lover of the Moon, Stars, and Sun, Maiden of the Skies, Water, Wind, and Earth and whispered into her ear the knowledge of enchantments great and powerful, forbidden and terrible. Songs of ice and blood, of runesteel and pain, of love and hate, of pain and pleasure, and life and death.

The Dark Watcher retreated back to the shadows as Queen Alv-ah-naya looked about her and beheld what was hidden about her. Around her throneroom were great pillars of carved ice, taken from the coldest mountaintops of Hesstla. White crystal ice that gleamed with the sharp beautiful pain of a winter's night. She saw withing them the sword, the spear, the arrow, the shield, and the one weapon that she could bring to bear.

The primal scream of denial of those that would not kneel.

But Queen Alv-ah-naya was bid to remain in secret by the Dread Lord P'Kank, Lord of Burnished and Fiery Copper, Commander of the Three Pillars of the Phantom Army. P'Kank the Clever, He of the Unbitten Head, Commander of Air, Land, Sea, and the Darkness of the Stars. P'Kank, who stood astride Hesstla with his all seeing eyes and endless armies.

He commanded High Queen Alv-ah-naya to arm her people in secret, to cast her spells slowly and subtly. Keep the toxins of brutal unseemly and uncouth war from effecting the gentle people of Hesstla. To shield them with her cloak of pollen and stars woven through with the silver light of a new dawn.

And so she waited, her people in the shadows.

Four years passed, an eyeblink for an Elf, and High Queen Alv-ah-naya did as she was bade. She did not understand the actions and decisions of the Dread Lord P'Kank, of the Ever Sharp Bladearms, Petter of Moomoos, Dancer of the Electric Cattle Slide, Devourer of Ice Cream, but she watched and waited for the Fires of Roe's Hand to be lit.

Then came the signal that she had waited for.

The High Queen Alv-ah-naya laid back in her throne of starlight and moonbeams, closed her eyes, and ordered her children to war. She whispered the terrible spells that the Dark Watcher had whispered in her drowsy ear, her daughters repeated them, altering them for each of their chosen peoples. On the world itself her children began to cast their spells, draped in finery.

Pollen and spores gushed out from gates as the Vile Spawn from Beyond the Stars attempted to poison the glowing blue and green gem of Hesstla.

Elven sorceresses and wizards, draped in cloaks of moss and clad in finery woven by tiny fey, cast their spells.

Bacteria bloomed, the largest of High Queen Alv-ah-naya's Tiny Flames, and attached to the spores, coating them, softening the shells, and devouring the spores even as they multiplied explosively. The Smallest of Beloved Flames, viruses, attacked the pollen, the folded protein edge slicing into the surface of the pollen to attack the germ seed within. The pollen twinkled as it changed, altered.

Where it landed, it no longer poisoned, but leeched away radiation and foul energies, glowing and twinkling to dust the land with a sparkling fairy dust.

Tiny insects, with rapacious eyes and venom dripping stingers, lunged from the portals, seeking prey to infect and impregnate with their hideous parasitic spawn.

Frogs, small birds, and insects fed deeply, the insects no match for the predators that had feasted on the vast corpses of great war machines, of metal gods laid low by the wrath of the Mad Lemurs.

Vile creatures, the largest no bigger than a football, swarmed from the portals. Many did not get further than a few steps, inhaling pollen that clogged their lungs, bringing in bacteria to their lungs that filled their lungs with infection.

Those that did survive were unaware of the smallest, the tiniest of the High Queen's champions were in their blood, tinier than the smallest cell, these simple creatures of metal and subatomic circuitry listened to the whisper of the powerful Elven mages and the High Queen and began rebuilding the creatures from the ground up.

Before the hour was up, they were dead or repurposed.

The Atrekna, the Vile Spawn from Beyond the Stars, assumed that none could withstand an assault that they themselves only dimly remembered.

They had forgotten that an ecosystem is a living thing, their own worlds, for millions of years, nothing more than barren waste where what little food animals there existed only existed within vast farms. Their worlds reduced to barren sand and toxic soil broken up by acidic seas and lakes of alkali poison.

But the High Queen knew, even before the Dark Watcher had whispered in her ear, that an ecology is a living thing.

And living things fight to survive.

She was merely their general, their leader.

Their High Queen.

The Atrekna would have to learn how it all actually worked. That they could not simply wave their hands and change the ecosystem how they wanted, despite the fact their psionic powers and dark magic could warp and ecosystem and living creatures and plants.

To the Atrekna, it had worked on dozens of planets. They had been unopposed. Nobody could possess the knowledge they did of the workings of life and the delicate mechanisms of living cells. It was a science that they alone possessed, one that worked in tandem to their mastery of temporal science.

But she was High Queen Alv-ah-naya, Lady of Secrets and Magic, Keeper of the Smallest Flame, Lover of the Moon, Stars, and Sun, Maiden of the Skies, Water, Wind, and Earth.

The had been Born Whole.

They were the Enemy.

And, as the Dark Watcher had whispered, the Enemy exists only to be destroyed.

------------

It was a dark world, orbiting a red sun. A thick atmosphere, enough to support the Atrekna and their biomechanical creatures as well as provide automated manufacturing for the autonomous war machines.

The Atrekna had reclaimed the world upon their return to the Young Universe. The first world they had claimed those billions of years ago during their first excursion. Surrounded by nothing but silent stars orbited by dead worlds, with the odd AWM drifting silently, asleep or dead, the Prime World had awaited the Atrekna's touch since they had been forced to return to the Old Universe by the burning of the hyperatomic plane.

Great, vast works were lifted from the sand, from the mists of time. Where the engines had decayed too much the Atrekna used their mastery of temporal science to restore the dark machinery. They used their mastery of temporal replication to strip mine over and over the materials they needed, or to send endless resources from great storage chambers to the feed the dark machinery.

[The Universe Disliked That]

They felt no fear as they created vast labs, as they 'sunk' the system deeper into the temporal flow of the Universe, securing it from any assault. Temporal science was their purview, and none could gainsay them.

With the Prime System secured, they launched assaults on ten thousand worlds, to reclaim their vast larders and resources.

Their plan, almost lost to billions of years of history, almost forgotten except for faint genetic traces, began to proceed again.

One of the most vital systems were identified, and they began their assault. They had been rebuffed before, and they intended on fixing that.

Only they could not. Something, some quirk of the universe, prevented them from redoing the assault, repeating it, over and over, until they could get the result they wanted.

Instead, they had to do it again, and time had passed.

Still, they had no fear. They were confident that if they had not been pushed back to their own Old Universe by those feral spaceships and those strange dark ships, they would have taken the world.

So they attacked.

For over a century the Atrekna moved war machines and Young Ones into the system. The ferals were tenacious, fierce fighters who were able to stabilize time and prevent the Atrekna from using dark temporal science to fight the same fight over and over.

[The Universe Disliked That]

But the Atrekna were able to shift the planet and its orbitals out of synch with the rest of the universe in order to take advantage of the fact that by the time reinforcements could arrive the Atrekna would not only be victorious, they would be dug in and fortified, with the system sunk deep.

But the ferals resisted. Their attacks grew weaker and the Atrekna knew it was from a loss of infrastructure, manufacturing capability, war fatigue among fragile psyches that were not supported by a communal mind, as well as a loss of resources.

The Atrekan saw their chance, and poured Young Ones through the gates, intending on sinking the targeted system, from which they could reach a hundred thousand more planets.

Only, the battle did not go how they thought it would. The ferals were somehow able to strike directly through the gates, damaging the worlds beyond. World after world took heavy hits from a weapon that not only vibrated and shook the temporal fabric of the universe, but then smoothed it and stabilized it, locking it down.

Contact was lost with a thousand worlds, many of which were fighting against ferals and their allies.

Before the Atrekna could recover a burning shaft of light plunged through the collapsing Primary Gate. It reached down to the ground, in the middle of a vast slavespawn spawning plain, and touched down in the middle of three thousand miles of former ocean bed that now was used to create slavespawn.

The shockwaves pummeled the Atrekna. Many of the Young Ones died as the enraged and screaming chronotrons washed over the planet, erupted from the planet to sweep through the system, like a howling insane tsunami of enraged chronotrons.

Those that survived 'sunk' the system. Fighting with the damaged and screaming timelines, forcing the system back into the depths.

[The Universe Dislikes That]

The Atrekna did not care.

What could it do about it?

Nothing.

The rest looked over the crater, where for a thousand miles in every direction the slavespawn were ripped apart, turned into gobbets of flesh. Spawning pools still boiled. The few remaining alkali salt seas were boiling.

In the middle of the crater, which had two blast rings, was a shimmering half-globe of pure energy.

As they watched, the field cut out.

In the middle of the crater a figure was kneeling. Clad in heavy plated armor. One of those hated swords at their hip, a short stubber on one hip and across the back some kind of crude propellant fired kinetic weapon.

Purple phasic lightning coursed over the figure as it slowly stood up.

Atrekna attempting to 'sink' the system felt the system sudden pull free of their grasp, the chronotrons they were 'weighting' suddenly lightening as they giggled and laughed.

A trap-door opened behind one Atrekna and a green reptile with thick bumpy skin and a long snout lunged up out of the trap-door, grabbing the Atrekna in its jaws, the head vanishing into its mouth as the end of the jaws closed at the belt-line. Before the Atrekna could do much more than shudder the reptile slithered down, the trap-door closing behind it, leaving an unmarred crystal surface.

The chronotrons started giggling more. The sun, dim and red, flickered slightly as it snickered.

what am I going to do about it?

The Atrekna watched as the figure pulled the weapon from its back and began steadily walking forward. Although it was only walking at a slow speed, somehow it was crossing twenty one miles with each stop of its heavy boots.

you wanna know what I'm gonna do about it, you punks?

With a slight startlement, one of the Atrekna struggling to hold onto the star, to dim it again, to cool it, so that the system could be sunk down, saw, for just a split second, a face, an unknowable indescribable shape in the depths of the star that could only be a face.

It spoke two words.

Only two.

The Atrekna began screaming, clawing at its own face as it screamed those two words.

BEHOLD! HUMANITY!

----------

TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS

I'm kind of surprised you aren't freaking out more about this, sis.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

MANTID FREE WORLDS

Is there anything I can do about it?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

PUBVIAN DOMINION

Not really.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

MANTID FREE WORLDS

Then I'm not going to bother screaming.

Besides, it was just one of them.

Right?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS

Just one. I'm not sure you can have more than one on a world without it exploding.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

FREE HERD INTELLECTUAL GRAZING FIELDS

Wait, it has one of those 'chaos seed generators' like that diplomatic security system?

Doesn't that make the least likely thing to happen, that will benefit the one using it, the most likely thing to happen, no matter how outlandish?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

RIGELLIAN SAURIAN COMPACT

Yup.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

AKLTAK SOARING WORLDS

And this... Operation Florida Man... allows the use of one?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

PUBVIAN DOMINION

Wait, what's it called?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

TNVARU GRIPPING HANDS

Operation Florida Man.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

PUBVIAN DOMINION

I think I just shit myself.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

MANTID FREE WORLDS

Oh, I'm sure it'll be just fine.

After all, you saw that it's merely one of the new Enraged Terrans, walking around an unknown world, in an unknown place, with a Hesstla skinned Core-Tantan eVI, carrying, you know, a chainsword, an Imperium Era submachine gun, and, well, just a little thing known as a pump action shotgun.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

PUBVIAN DOMINION

...

...

no

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

MANTID FREE WORLDS

Oh, did I we deployed it with, oh, did anyone mention the Alcubierre Boots?

No?

Oh, must have slipped our mind.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

RIGELLIAN SAURIAN COMPACT

Wait.. what?

We did?

fuck

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

PUBVIAN DOMINION

ARE YOU FUCKING CRAZY?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

ALKTAK SOARING WORLDS

What's wrong?

Why is everyone panicking?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

FREE HERD INTELLECTUAL GRAZING FIELDS

Because...

It's dangerous?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

PUBVIAN DOMINION

That doesn't even begin to describe what they just released!

ARE YOU FUCKING STUPID? ARE YOU CRAZY? DID A MATRON CHEW ON YOUR HEAD?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

TNVARU GRIPPING HANDS

What does describe it?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

MANTID FREE WORLDS

Behold! Humanity!

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

FREE HERD INTELLECTUAL GRAZING FIELDS

Fuck.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---