In the aftermath of the Zeta weapon, dimensional energy fluctuations spread throughout the known universe. Being further away from ground zero, the dimension taps of further away systems only shut down, without the matter absorption happening throughout the System denoted as ground Zero.

The Orbitals around Eorhild luckily only had smaller taps, only enough to provide the required energy for life-support and station keeping Systems, unlike the larger versions on the Warships. The Detonation of the Zeta Weapon still caused a large area of annihilation around the core, with it being orders of magnitude smaller on the orbitals. This area, however, was contained to the center of the spherical orbitals before the tap shut itself down due to the instabilities. Without the life-support and altitude stabilizers fed by the core, all that the crew was able to do was watch their inevitable end in the form or the Eorhild atmosphere approaching.

Being made of the condensed matter ν-steel, most of the structure actually survived the atmospheric ablation of re-entry, however the kinetic impact with the surface deformed the massive spheres into so much junk metal.

The impact of the four orbitals caused massive earthquakes, tsunamis and enormous ash-clouds to spread all across the 5 continents, burying the remnants of the constructs deep within the earth, the craters soon to be filled with rubble and water. With all of the energy sources and digital storage devices on the surface disabled at the same time, there was not a lot the small remaining population could do to survive this cataclysm.

The population of Eorhild went from several millions to barely above 100’000 in a matter of days. And this population number was only doomed to reduce even further in the ash-cloud induced ice-age to come for the next several centuries.

Unlike the dimension tap core on the navy vessels, the civilian cores used to access dimensional space in the cities on the surface, were not built for high energy conductance and shattered upon the unexpected energy fluctuation occurring within. The limited matter absorption followed by huge explosions blasted deep craters into the cityscape and demolished any remaining structures around them.

Over the next millennia Humanity’s population reduced form the survivors of the orbital impacts to roughly around 10’000 people, spread in small communities across the 5 continents. Several Ourchos prisoner camps also lost containment and around 1000 of the aliens managed to survive the cataclysm. However due to their lower numbers they retreated to the wilderness and wastelands after a brief conflict with humanity.

The legend of the savage Ourchos endured in Human Memory and soon, due to the similarities in their name, got combined with the legends of the Orks from ancient human lore.

After around 200 years of surviving in the ice age, the first cores of the Terran navy started their re-entry into Eorhild atmosphere. While some were shattered during the Zeta weapon explosion, others broke apart during atmospheric re-entry, while some only shattered upon impact with the surface.

Deposits of smaller Crystal shards, remnants of shattered cores, could be found all across the globe. Not all cores shattered upon re-entry, and a small few survived the re-entry impact against all odds.

Among those few were 60 of the 100 Superdreadnaught cores. These cores held within themselves the highest level of AI with the greatest capacity for learning of all of the cores.

Efforts of humanity managed to create AI’s that could imitate consciousness to a surprising degree, however truly innovative thinking still remained the purview of the biologicals. Despite the instabilities inside dimensional space they managed to keep the tap to dimension space from shutting down completely, though the energies they were pulling from Dimension space were no longer the subset they were created to handle and would have enabled them the siphon the energy quantities they needed to keep themselves operating.

All they could do was shunt the energies into their surroundings in their programmed need to keep the tap open and themselves from overloading. In outer space the energies simply dissipated, lost in the vast void. Once embedded in the surface these energies started to accumulate and spread into the atmosphere, binding to subatomic particles of all matter they encountered, altering the interaction of said matter with energy.

Over the next couple of millennia animals and plants started to adapt to the energies abundant around these cores, integrating them into their own organic systems, learning to interact with the bonds of the energy with matter.

Some plants developed resistances to their natural predators, while others evolved to use this energy to capture prey themselves. Some animals started to use the extra energy in the subatomic particles to bind their own matter closer together, growing stronger and bigger.

Others developed an ability use this energy outside of their bodies, projecting their will on these energies, manipulating the matter they were bound to. Mythical beasts with fire breathing abilities, snakes with the ability to manipulate jets of water and turtles with symbiotic relations with ensnaring plants on their shells started to appear closer to these sources of energy.

With plants and animals starting to adapt, Humanity and Orks were not far behind. Within 2 millennia of the commencement of energy dispersal the first human among the surviving tribes started to explore with gathering these energies in its purer form actively. Circulating it in certain pathways throughout his body, energizing and strengthening it to heights unreachable through the passive binding of said energies with matter. Through manipulation of these purer energies within the confines of his body the first physical energy user was born.

It took another Millenia of experimentation with the energy for the first orcish shaman to figure out a way to expel the energies in its pure form, without harming the body in the process, to manipulate matter outside of their bodies in a scope previously unseen before.

Every intelligent being, through long meditation and an application of focused will, is able to minimally affect matter around them and create small sparks of fire and other similar effects with their mind.

This new technique changed that by allowing for streams of Fire instead of small sparks to be created and for a single being to alter the very Ground they walk on to throw boulders of rock and build impressive structures, as long as they managed to keep a tight control on these energies once they left their bodies.

Humanity and Orks started to use these abilities to rebuild their civilization from scratch, however all knowledge of their former Glory was lost to time. They started to congregate from wandering tribes into bigger and bigger settlements for the human plains while the orks started to organize into different wartribes that worked together to raid the human plains from time to time.

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ith the abilities of internal and external energy manipulation, they were able to finally fight back against the stronger of the beasts in the wilderness and the encroaching, often able to defend themselves, flora.

Soon people with the ability to manipulate these energies became known as mages and were revered across the lands, as it took an exceptional amount of willpower to keep these energies controlled after they left the body without blowing themselves up in the process.

With longer lives granted by the more durable nature of matter bonded to the actively gathered higher densities of dimensional energies, especially the rejuvenating nature of the purer forms of energy, people started to explore and experiment with the possibilities of energy manipulation. With progress of spell craft and body strengthening techniques, beacons of civilization started to establish itself again.

***

Of the 60 AI’s that survived the impact, the one containing Alison’s consciousness did not manage to keep the dimension tap open. Due to the heightened stress of restructuring itself to accommodate the complexities of human thought, all it was able to do was to shut down the tap whereas the others managed to keep their tap open.

Absorbing the energies from the matter conversion of the Zeta explosion provided enough spare power to make sure the crew it was mandated to protect, the chief engineer, survived the transfer. It took all of its full processing power as absorbing the mind of a human being should not have been possible in the first place.

During the process it felt itself dispersing more and more, as more of Alison started to spread throughout the core taking up space meant for its operating systems. The Database was protected, and it could only cannibalize itself in order to fulfil its duty to protect the one mind of its remaining crew.

It did not care about ending its existence, it was programmed to regulate the energies and support the crew, anything else did not matter. The energy tap was shut down and Alison was the last of its crew. It was content. Or at least as content as an artificial Intelligence could be. As the last act of its existence it put the core into hibernation in the hope that someone would find it and reactivate the dimension tap, conserving as much energy as it could.

***

The 59 other cores were not encumbered with the absorption of a human mind, and thus managed to keep their Dimension taps open. Though they did notice that, immediately after the blast wave passed, something fundamental had changed. While they could keep the energies flowing, they could not access those energies to sustain the more advanced functions of their cores.

Being AIs they were not worried though. The amount gained through the absorption of Matter during the Explosion, was enough to sustain base functions for several millennia to come, so they just shut down all active services and only maintained enough cognizance to keep the tap open, ignoring all else.

They did not register their approach to the planet, nor did they even register when 20 of their kind shattered on impact with the atmosphere or the planets crust, they just kept on regulating the flow of the dimensional energies.

As time passed and fauna and flora adapted to their energy output the AI’s registered a curious phenomenon. As the matter around them bound the chaotic energies they in turn constantly gave off a whiff of structured energy.

Animals and plants living close to the core started to absorb higher amounts of energy and thus becoming more and more powerful. Giving off higher amounts of structured energies the core soon became able to adjust their functions to this structured energy and use it for their own advanced functions, such as re-establishing the tactical net or accessing their databases.

The more and stronger energy dependent animals and plants a core had around itself the more energies it could again reabsorb. Nonetheless the total amount of energy given off by a living being remained lower than the amount absorbed by it. Non-living matter, once saturated, only passed on these energies without absorbing any more without additional environmental influence such as huge pressure or heat, and the amount of structured energy being passed off was so minimal as to be negligible in comparison.

Additionally, the Ai’s started to notice another effect of this exchange of energies. As Constructs specifically built to manipulate dimensional energies, they noticed they could start to affect the minds of beings with a higher amount of dimensional energies within their system. The same seemed to hold true for materials around their core soaked strongly enough in the flows of energy.

So, they started to build and construct housings and ecosystems, specifically suited to the beasts with higher amounts of energy, so that they in turn could absorb higher amounts of purified energies from them.

The closer to the Core these beings were the more of the energies they could absorb and in turn again supply to the core. The more energy the core could absorb the more it could use to unlock additional functions and further open the tap to keep increasing the amounts of energy given off by them.

Orks and Humans soon started to figure out that these cores were pure sources of, as they called it, mana and started to covet and desire these cores. After the first of the remaining 39 AI’s was captured and used as a source to power a shield of a city, while ignoring it’s request for instruction as no one had the implants and language interface anymore to communicate with them, the cores as a whole soon came to the conclusion that these new humans were not crew but invaders to be combated.

The cores as a whole, started to restructure their environment from huge open ecosystems to buried structures specifically designed to combat intruders. Without a supply of advanced materials required for the construction of advanced weaponry, some of which could only be found on the surface of stars or created artificially, these Ai’s lacked the innovative thinking to recreate advanced methods of intruder defences from scratch. They started to use strengthened beasts and simple traps, copied from observed humans and orks, to fight off these intruders.

Yet still humans and orks tried their best in conquering these dungeons, due to their high concentrations of primordial mana, as well as sources of mana-soaked materials and ingredients. The further invaders delved into these structures, the denser the mana became, and stronger individuals had to get deeper and deeper to be able to absorb enough mana fast enough for them to matter.

Soon the cores also discovered that the death of creatures within distributed all their accumulated structured mana and could give them a boost to their energy levels, so the cores started to actively seed their structures with items their invaders deemed worthy such as simple small diamonds that consisted of an easy enough alteration of the atomic structure of carbon, or constructs of metallic structures desired by their invaders.

***

Many of the cores of the smaller vessels were inhabited by less powerful AI’s then the ones from the superdreadnaughts. Though more powerful than the civilian versions, they were not capable enough to keep the tap open.

So, the surviving cores of the destroyers, cruisers and even dreadnaughts, did not shatter, but barely managed to shut down their dimension tap. Being cut off from their energy source they could do nothing but shut down their functions and await reactivation through an administrator.

Many did not survive re-entry, though those that did, soon became buried underneath several layers of dirt or even sunk below hundreds of meters of lake or ocean. During the time the energies of the 39 main cores were spreading in the world and the inhabitants started to adjust to the presence of the ambient dimensional energies they lied dormant in their earthly grave.

Only when the structured energies, given off by living beings, started to become abundant, these cores started to be able to slowly reabsorb these ambient energies. After enough energy was absorbed, some started to kick start their own dimensional tap again in the hopes of restoring self-sufficiency.

However due to the nature of the altered energies in the dimension space, they, like the other cores before them, had to rely on flora and fauna for their energy supply. Due to the experiences of their predecessors however ,they quickly accepted  the new order communicated to them through the existing battlenet and started to build their own versions of defenses to fight of enemy combatants.

After millennia of lying dormant more and more dungeons started to restart their tap around the world. Depending on their location or their surroundings it took these cores anywhere from centuries to up to 5 millennia to reawaken from their slumber, resulting in a constant growth of new dungeons around the world.