“This is a nightmare…”
The weekly cabinet meeting had a dark shadow cast over it. The arrival of and subsequent attacks by the extragalactic invaders had caught everyone off guard and even now dozens of colony worlds were being destroyed or had been destroyed as their own colonists called down the apocalyptic fury that was the ‘Doomsday Sanction’ upon themselves rather than allow the ravenous swarm to feed freely on them. The weapons used against the invaders were only partially able to make a dent. The invaders’ regenerative factor was so great that no matter how much firepower was leveled against them they would just heal it up in a matter of minutes, hours at most.
The only defensive options against this massive super predator was to either hit it with so much power in a single attack that it could not heal fast enough (see the Doomsday Sanction) or to use extreme numbers to grind the monsters’ supply of resources to it limit, thus preventing them from having enough to use to heal itself. The choice was between repeated scorched earth and Soviet-style mass assaults, neither of which were ideal. It was morbidly ironic that the edge that Arcadia had used over its foes had now been used against it. The enemy, like Arcadia, had seemingly infinite numbers of bodies to throw at a problem until it went away, which made people realize just how stupidly overpowered their ruler’s abilities were.
Arcadia was now effectively facing a nation that used the same methods of warfare as itself, but with the difference being that the enemy used purely organic beings to fight rather than the mix of organic and inorganic ones that Arcadia used.
“I suppose we could ask you to bring in more troops and ships to help in the fight, but would that be enough?”
Arkhan held his head in his hand as he rested his elbow on the armrest of the chair that he sat in.
“Believe me when I say that I am summoning ever more of my creations with each passing hour. As the reports come in and more planets are attacked, I am summoning more and more ships and Golems to fight on the ever-widening front line. However, I am only one man, and while my abilities certainly are broken, I can’t be expected to hold back the invasion alone. I may have at least ten trillion different individual Golems at my disposal right now, but the more I bring into being the harder it gets for me to keep my own mind separate from the Gestalt. If I bring in too many more, I doubt the ‘me’ that is sitting here will exist much longer. If I keep pouring more forces into existence, the ‘me’ that I am will eventually be fully subsumed by the massive networked intelligence that I created…”
“A dire and dangerous thing to be sure…”
“Indeed.” Arkhan replied with a groan. “With the enemy fielding more and more bodies, I can only assume that either they are capable of extremely rapid reproduction or that they have yet to fully commit to this war. I have a bad feeling that it is the latter, though. I doubt that what we are facing is anything more than the tip of the iceberg. Something deep inside me tells me that the worst is yet to come. I want every planet and every system to tighten security and increase patrols. We already have lost eight individual systems to this swarm; I will not have us lose any more with the same level of terrifying ease.”
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The cabinet stirred at their ruler’s words.
“You think that the invaders have more on the way to join them?”
Arkhan nodded.
“There is not a doubt in my mind that what we face now will only increase in intensity and danger as time progresses. We must be vigilant and expect that our foe will only increase its threat level in the long run. Even if they don’t, I think it would pay to grossly overestimate their capabilities. If they prove to be unable to meet those high expectations, then we can be grateful, but if they do meet those dark prospects then we will have, hopefully, prepared a countermeasure against them.”
The cabinet buzzed with concern while Arkhan watched and listened through both his eyes and ears and those of his creations. While the Asteroid Blitzkrieg that was the Doomsday Sanction had indeed knocked the wind out of the invaders’ sails, they were quickly recovering from that blow. In fact, some of the destroyed worlds were being consumed once again, even as Arcadia threw billions of Mobile Suit Golems, Mobile Armor Golems and summoned warships at them.
“If this is how things will be from now on, us fighting a steep uphill battle against a ravenous and nigh unstoppable horde of monsters, perhaps we should accelerate the ‘Gryps Program’?”
The words ‘Gryps Program’ sent shivers down everyone’s spines. During the battle against the Angelus Holy Union that took place in their Arcadia’s home system, a Colony Laser had been used to great effect. In a single shot it had wiped out nearly half of the AHU’s warships and heavily damaged the AHU’s flagship. After that stunning victory, there had been a concerted effort by some in the military to not only weaponize more space colonies but also to greatly increase their firepower using the tech they had pillaged from the AHU’s remains.
The ‘Gryps Program’ called for hundreds of now obsolete cylindrical space colonies to be remade as weapons of war and armed with a single fuck-all massive superweapon that could be used to obliterate a single target or an entire fleet with absurd levels of directed energy. The energy weapon salvaged from the AHU flagship have been reverse-engineered and was ready to be produced and fitted into the mothballed colonies, but the power output from such a weapon would have been so great that it could have cracked a planet’s crust.
With that in mind, along with the absurd range of the weapon, the project was canceled. Arkhan already had a doomsday weapon or two at the time, and he was not about to give his opposition any more ammunition to use against him. The galactic community already had despised him, and he did not feel the need to give them another reason to do so.
Was that short sighted? Probably. But now the need for a superweapon capable of dealing terrible damage against the enemy was rather high. Arkhan took a deep breath and looked around the room. It did not look like anyone else had any good ideas beyond simply using the tried and true methods that were now being less and less effective.
“Then I suppose it is time to embrace a bit of the infamous Tarkin Doctrine and mass produce superweapons worthy of making us a potential enemy of the galaxy. Let us start building them and hope we can make enough of them in time.”