As the war between the Arcadian Galactic Commonwealth and the extragalactic invaders dragged on, Arcadia began to finally stem the tide. It was not at all easy to meet the invaders ship for ship, but Arkhan had by this point long since given up and accepted that only by churning out thousands of summoned ships per day and having them quickly outfitted with a decent autopiloting system could he hold back the ever increasing numbers of the meaty abominations. While the summoned ships were smaller than the invaders’ organic ones, the sheer volume that was being sent was enough to seal the breach and halt the incursions into Arcadia’s territory.

However, this was having a detrimental effect on the leader of Arcadia. The mental toll of bringing thousands of ships into existence each day was starting to wear on him, and the fact that the invaders’ numbers were not truly decreasing was just another thing that made him feel that this was all nothing but an exercise in futility. He had indeed tried to call upon his wife to use some of her absurdly overpowered abilities to push the incursion out of the galaxy for good, but she was having none of that. She, unlike Arkhan himself, fully believed that Arcadia could persevere without her ‘Deus ex Machina’ status being added to the forces of her nation.

Perhaps it was because she could see the future, or perhaps it was due to something else, but she vehemently refused to do anything that could tip the balance into Arcadia’s favor on her own. But there was a compromise.

While Asharia herself would not use her impossibly cheat-filled strength to win the day, she would do something else. She, for the first time in history, personally boarded the only other Adeptus Deorum-class Flagship that existed, the one specifically made for her. Her personal warship, the Orochi Tiamat, took up the charge of leading from the front while the arguably more important person that was her husband stayed in the Solaris System and did his duty.

Whether it was by sheer luck or by providence (or perhaps Asharia had lied and was using her power to manipulate things), the combined fleets under her command managed to push the invaders back time and again. Arcadia’s edge against the invaders grew, but when the combined fleet entered one of the systems taken by the invaders, they beheld a terrible sight.

…

It had been only a short two months since the Pendragon system had been lost to the extragalactic nightmare, and while the binary star system’s four planets and seven moons had not been suited for terraforming or colonization of any kind, they had served as useful mining sites for uncommon minerals. When the invaders had set their sights on the Pendragon System, all within it had packed up and fled, leaving only the planets, moons and stars behind as they had dismantled and taken everything that they brought there themselves. It had only been two months since the invaders triggered the ‘Doomsday Sanction’ in the system and called down the rapidly depleting Asteroid Bombs on every planet and moon there, but it seemed that such a thing was not nearly enough to prevent what had transpired.

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The fleet and all within (save for Asharia herself) were horrified at what they saw. The planets were nearly gone, the invaders had actually converted the raw mass of the planets and that of the moons into more organic warships to send at the rest of the galaxy. In two fucking months the horrors from beyond the stars had nearly devoured every planet, reducing them in size to that of small moons that bordered on large asteroids, to say nothing of the fact that all seven of the moons had been completely consumed.

This was the true face of the enemy they were facing. This was not a conquest, but a harvest. These things were not here to stay, they were here to devour everything and everyone like a supermassive swarm of locusts, leaving nothing but orphaned stars in the process. At least, that was what they thought until they saw that the monstrous abominations were also trying to consume the binary stars as well.

Asharia wasted no time in gawking at the masses of pulsating flesh and immediately punched in a command on her console. As soon as she issued the command, the flagship sent out a psychic pulse through the system which caused the feeding invaders to stop and try to take on the Arcadian fleet.

By engaging in several autopsies on the few invaders they managed to capture either alive or mostly intact, the best and brightest of Arcadia’s science guys (and girls) had managed to create a device they called ‘The Bug Beacon’. It was a device that, when activated, sent out a signal that the invaders recognized as something so hostile that it had to be eradicated, even at the cost of abandoning the buffet it had come to partake in. Every bioform within the entire system it was used in would drop everything and try to rush the beacon in an attempt to snuff out the signal’s source, but like any good device of its kind it was not just used for aggroing the invaders out of their feast.

The ’Bug Beacon’ continued to pulse out its signal, all while Asharia had it loaded into one of her ship’s hypervelocity guns. As the swarm drew closer, the gun angled off to one side and fired off the beacon into the vast expanse at a seemingly random position. But, like any living Deus ex Machina worth their salt, Asharia had planned ahead. With her ability to see everything in the entire universe, she had known exactly where and when everything needed to be in order to pull her plan off with nary a hitch.

The beacon flew off towards what should have been deep space, but the timely arrival of a Free Galaxy Resistance scout ship stopped the beacon-bullet in its tracks. The round wedged itself inside the scout ship and shut off every major system in the vehicle after lodging itself into the engine, leaving the ship to be surrounded and attacked by a metric fuck-ton of swarming monstrosities.

As if right on cue, a Colony Gun dropped in a decent distance away and after the crew saw what was in front of it began the firing sequence before erasing the entire horde of invading monsters in a single brilliant flash of destructive light.

Asharia watched from the comfort of her chair, her horned head resting comfortably on her scaled, claw-like hand. A smile passed over her lips as the light of the Colony Gun faded away and revealed that her plan had been perfectly executed.

As she ordered her fleet to prepare for the next engagement in the next system, she chuckled to herself and looked out into the sea of stars. With but a single sentence, she expressed her satisfaction in her own abilities and that of her husband’s nation.

“I love it when a plan comes together.”