Log #143

The plant lady is apparently a plant goddess, which is actually one of the less interesting things I learned from her, if she an be trusted, and she probably can be, she’s been living in my garden for a few years now and hasn't really done anything suspicious, anyways if she is to be believed I am A. no longer in my original reality, B. raising the son of yet another deity, who has an hatred for all things divine despite being a deity himself, and C. on the shit list of the evil gods for hiding the plant god and the other gods kid, which is fair, if anything I’m okay with being on the dark gods list, it gives me moral high ground by default.

Oh yeah and magic is real but less significant than you would think, almost noone still uses it and those who do tend to end up either killed by or working for said dark goods, space faring races are everywhere and most probably work for the dark gods and therefore want me dead, or just like killing things in general and want me dead for no real reason, my planet is apparently alive and can fight off the dark gods, which is why I survived my trip to hell in the first place, and no there isn't a way for me to go back to my dimension so I don't have to deal with all this, or at least she didn't know of one, I hold out hope that I can leave and make this whole place not my problem.

But since I live here for now, it kinda is.

After reaching my threshold for new information I left her to whatever she was doing in the hydroponics bay and went to help organize the repairs and to coordinate getting satellites back up now that we aren't in hell and the dark gods wont eat them.

I used to have plans in the works to send out autonomous drones to build mining facilities in the asteroid belt that used to be near Navius. This system's asteroid belt is both larger and closer, and those same ship designs will work. So to space we go, or at least the minds will, making a ship that can have people in it is much harder than one that only needs to hold robots, they don't care about life support, food, or heating.

Palisade had been spending his time rebuilding some of the more destroyed sections of the main base, thankfully not by hand though, just directing large swaths of drones. Still he didn't really need to do that and I called him over to help me design our space stuff, the designs were 2 years old, that was very out of date, and he probably had new and helpful insight.

Log #144

Space elf goddess lady turned into a tree, so now I will call her tree lady. Besides there now being a tree in the hydroponic bay and not a 15 ft tall elf lady, not much has changed. She just said something about communicating with her children. Which meant she needed to be a tree, I once again have accepted knowing nothing.

I told the kid that his real dad was probably going to get him at some point, he didn't seem to care overmuch, still his help designing the spacecraft meant we got the first models into space within a week, and they are already constructing more of themselves, all the craft now are still sub ftl but that still means they can cross between Navius and the belt in less than half an hour.

I am going to let the drones propagate for awhile before sending them to build static defenses around Navius and once the planet has a decent coverage I'll set them to building larger combat focused ships, If a force is coming that wants me dead I'd like to have a wall of guns to greet them with.

Well an additional wall in space, there are plenty of those down here.

The recovery on the surface is still ongoing but it's going well, the bugs have already recovered and it's only the less essential outposts that need fixing on our side, that does mean that open warfare has begun again though.

The new bug variants are a pain to deal with, but the factory grew stronger to, so it's basically just a back and forth again, elf lady said they were attacking anything unnatural, and that even if I didn't produce any pollution I would still get attacks, just by less of them, either she did lie or less of them is more than before we entered hell.

Still the new vehicle variants are up to the task and Palisade has been having the time of his life organizing attacks on bug hives, he's better at planning attacks to take down hives than Balistraia at this point, even if he can't compare to her large scale battlefield control, though this makes them an utterly terrifying team.

Log #148

Labyrinthine has out-done themselves, the new ships are gorgeous, each around 1 kilometer and lined with larger variants of terrestrial guns, and enough fighter drones to act as a second layer of shielding.

I only have a dozen patrolling the system but each is a work of art and uses the most advanced tech we have, we still don't have ftl and are therefore stuck in the system but that'll only last till the first invaders come, then I can just steal their designs.

The orbital defense and stations have been installed, and have been playing a significant role in pushing back the bugs, though it didn't take the bugs long to develop a defense against large metal spikes from the sky. Magnet bugs, they just deflect or draw the weapons off target, and they are getting scarily good with their aim, one even managed to destroy a command tank by pushing a falling projectile into it.

Still Balistraia and Palisade are holding their ground, it's kinda surreal to watch a 6 meter tall man fighting a 70 meter tall bug, and then having the man win.

Tree lady is in fact still a tree. No new info on that front.

Log #150

Space orcs are a thing, and I hate them, currently their ‘ships’ and engaged with my space fleet, they can’t actually damage my ships through their shields, and the boarding pods they sent don't actually have anywhere to board to, even if they somehow ignored my shields and got through the armored hull, somehow. The ships are metal all the way through, though a few of the things are in the cargo bays just breaking things, the cargo bays have no air and they have no space suits.

I have given up on knowing anything

Small groups of ships managed to avoid my orbital defense and crash into the planet, and these things are stupid, just charging defensive lines with no battle plan, No one even likes fighting them because they don't put up a fight, they just run in and die or get eaten by the bugs.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

I haven't managed to take a ship intact yet, and I am not hopeful I will manage it, these things seem to explode no matter how you shoot them or the shots do nothing, There isn't an inbetween.

The bugs seem to hate the orks more than me, which actually makes them a net positive for getting some bugs to stop attacking me, and the orks seem to enjoy fighting the bugs more than they like getting gunned down by fixed defenses.

So besides the space front, which I’m winning, the orks are largely just content to ignore me in favor of the bugs. This means I have actually begun to expand again, the bugs aren't focused on me and therefore I can take more land, even if I don't really need it anymore.

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Balistraria was currently fighting on 673 different fronts, most of these were minor battle with less than a thousand total troops, but the space front was not a minor battle, while there were only 18 true units under her control, each was essentially a factory in itself, and as such each of the minds were present in each of the units, Labyrinthine to handle repairs on the complex systems, Byzantine to resupply and produce ammunition and drones using the on-ship fabricators, bulwark handling the finer work on the point defense and controlling the ships shielding.

Meanwhile Balistraria herself had to control the massive swarms of interceptor drones, drive the massive ships, and use ship to ship weaponry, and she had to do this for each of the ships, this would have made for an enjoyable fight, controlling more units than she ever had before to fight off a brand new enemy, but this fight was just annoying.

This enemy didn't have anything unique, it was just an inferior version of their own ships, the bugs had massive swarms of bugs and adaptations tailor made to fight her, the creatures from the other dimension, or “daemons” had odd “magics” and absurd strength, not to mention both these foes were unending.

And while the orks would send swarms of their own to fight Balistraria, they did so with little success or planning, half of the enemies would die too their own allies or equipment, and the few fighters that managed to survive their own incompetence would fire blindly towards her drones, barely managing to hit anything before she had cut them to shreds with a few volleys of return fire.

And with Bulwark controlling the point defense the ships were in no danger from the enemies missiles or boarding pods, the few that made it through were just blown up or ejected from the ships they landed on, the only tunnels inside the ships were sized for drones, and most of the green things were much too large to use them, and the smaller variants died when the tunnels were filled with fire, drones didn't burn anyway.

One would think the ship to ship fights would be more difficult, it was something Balistraria had no experience in after all, and she was outnumber ten to one, if someone thought that they were probably forgetting the massive array of orbital defenses, Though balistraia was unsure she’d even need them, dodging the orks fire was a matter of simplicity and her return fire would cut swaths through the smaller ships, the only true problem was the shielding on the larger ork ships, it deflected lasers, plasma, and slugs, but for some odd reason it did nothing against missiles.

Balistraria was fighting the largest battle of her life, but it was against the weakest things she had ever fought, with there flimsy ships, suicidal tactics and terrible aim these orks were no true threat.

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Bulwark was coordinating the defense of 4578 separate outposts, an orbital defense array, the point defense of a space fleet, and the shields of that same fleet, this was the first true test the new forces had faced, A live fight against the new foes they would be facing in this universe.

Bulwark had already noted numerous flaws in the planets defenses, 18 ships was not enough to secure an entire plants space, much less a system, the orbital defenses could do nothing against an enemy on the other side of the planet, meaning that the majority of the defensive array couldn't be brought into play against a single force, the orbital defense didn't have enough interceptor drones to make up for the lack of ship coveraged either, meaning smaller and more nimble ships could slip past the array.

This meant that Bulwark was letting enemies through the defenses unharmed, and while the orbital fabricators were building more interceptors Bulwark needed several orders of magnitude more in order to effectively defend the planet below.

The defense grid was currently composed of numerous stations powered by a nuclear reactor, each station having a drone bay and internal fabricator, along with numerous point defense weapons, missile pods, and a large laser cannon; there were thousands of these in orbit, but there hadn't been enough time to construct enough.

Bulwark was already drafting plans to install orbital minefields around the planet to cover the gaps in the defense grids coverage, the stations were sufficient for any large ships approaching and having a minefield to kill un-cautious enemies and slow the cautious ones long enough for the interceptors to reach them would mitigate the problem in the short term.

Still according to current estimates it would take years to build a satisfactory planetary defense grid, if one would ever be satisfactory.

The ships were less flawed, but still imperfect, the rear of the ship, were the thrusters were had insufficient point defense and the current layout of guns could be improved to allow more guns a greater field of fire, there was a lack of true ship killer weaponry on the ships, but that wasn't currently a problem, their enemies ships were fragile enough to be taken down by up scaled missiles or lasers.

Still one of their own ships would have trouble killing another, the shielding was tougher than the weaponry the ships had available and it would take hours to whittle down a shield of equal strength to their own.

Still the current defense, while un satisfactory, was in fact capable of holding off the bulk of the enemies forces, and the ground effort was more than sufficient to handle the rest.