With the most recent invasion and genocide attempt by the Angels having failed miserably, the forces of Arcadia now had room to breathe. However, what they did not know was how long they had to relax and take count of the damages. The entire ‘south’ side of the Solaris system was defenseless, and the five main asteroid fortresses were in absolutely terrible shape.
More patrols had to be sent to cover the gap in the defense network, which meant that the massive numbers of Mobile Suit Golems and Mobile Armor Golems had to be spread thinner than one might think. The various varieties ‘Zero Cost’ MSGs and MAGs each numbered roughly a billion strong, but even that many could not fully cover so vast a distance without there being cosmically small gaps in the impromptu defenses. Sure, the distance was truly massive for a normal person, but cosmically speaking it was tiny. This did not mean that the gaps themselves were either too large or too small, but it did mean that there were places where momentary breaches in the perimeter could be exploited.
Thankfully, no group managed to even enter the Solaris System for the next few weeks, which gave Arcadia just enough time to verify that a few Hyperlanes extended from their homelands into the Angelus Holy Union’s space. Another thing that the Oculus-class spy ships managed to uncover was that the Holy Union was waging an all-out war of annihilation against the United Galactic Nations. Entire systems were already glassed, and their populations were either dead or had fled deeper into the systems still held by the UGN.
The Holy Union was seemingly on an unstoppable warpath, with the leadership of the UGN being either incapable of mounting an adequate defense or simply too busy with nonessential matters. Thankfully, the systems that had been purged by the AHU were undefended, with the victors having left the area after their job was done. They did, however, leave behind devices on the surface of those glassed worlds that seemed to be altering the planets on a fundamental level.
They were xenoforming the worlds back into something habitable for their kind. It would be a world that was seemingly tailor-made for life to flourish, a world perfect for any and all kinds of life. It was a pity that these perfect worlds would be occupied by such terrible people after they were done being transformed.
The first of their xenoforming projects seemed to still have a few years to go before it was complete, and the fleets of AHU ships were getting farther and farther away from their own home territory. The farther they got, the worse their supply lines became and the more damage each ship sustained. All of this gave Arkhan and Asharia an idea.
Why wait for another assault when they could simply take the fight to the foe?
Asharia had been right about Arkhan being able to fuse a simple Hyperdrive to his Mobile Armor Golems, and they had made significant progress in producing a much better Hyperdrive for actual ships. While the hostile systems would not allow Arkhan’s abilities to have his creations directly exit the ‘Hangar’ into enemy space, a few transports with Hyperdrives could disgorge hundreds of MSGs in their human-sized form, only to have them go into ‘real mode’ shortly thereafter. It would be a calculated risk to send some MAGs ahead of the rest of the counter-invasion force, but if they managed to even sow a small amount of chaos behind enemy lines it would be worth it.
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The obvious choice was to send newer, more powerful Mobile Armor Golems, but one of the older ones had a distinct advantage over some of the others. The ‘Big Rang’ was a Bigro mounted atop a thing ‘neck’ that connected it to a special attachment. In the Gundam UC timeline, this attachment was used to resupply the Oggo Mobile Pod, the Zeon version of the Ball. With Arkhan’s powers, however, it became a slow-moving mobile outlet for Oggos to exit the Hangar and immediately enter combat, even in a hostile zone.
While Oggos were not nearly as powerful as something like a Zaku II Kai, they were right now the only unit that could immediately enter combat in a hostile area without having boarded a ship first. The Big Rangs were, therefor, a good choice to send in first; they would enter the Angel-controlled space, proceed to let a metric fuck ton of Oggos in and then it and the Oggo Doom-Stack would cause absolute havoc until either they were forced to retreat or Arcadia sent its main force. By accompanying the Big Rangs with other Mobile Armor Golems, they could seriously fuck with the Angels and do so with relative impunity, at least that was the theory.
Arcadia had been given a bloody nose by the Angels as they had destroyed a decent portion of the System Defense Grid. Now was the time for The Arcadian Solar Commonwealth (soon to be the Arcadian Galactic Commonwealth) to pay back the injury a hundred thousand times over.
…
Fire rained from the sky on the main world of the Skrylx System. The UGN had promised that it would defend the system to the last person, only for the entire garrison and defense fleet to cut and run merely a few days before the Angelus Holy Union arrived. Whether it was coincidence or not was not something that anyone debated, because while correlation does not imply causation there were too many coincidences to amount it to random chance.
The cities were burning as beams of energy turned entire parts of the world into a sea of flame, with the Angels’ ships were just above the cities themselves. They hung just inside the very atmosphere of their enemy’s world and they fired with impunity. There were no military assets left on the world as they had all been taken by the UGN as they fled. Even the rich and powerful had just up and left, leaving factories, powerplants and farms to deal with the crisis; their workers were left to die as the elites fled in pleasure yachts.
All hope seemed lost as they had no way of dealing with the apocalypse that was befalling them. In a final act of desperation, the populace that had long become fully atheist offered prayers to whatever supernatural power that would listen. Even as the world burned, they sought one last final hope.
And their prayers were seemingly answered.
The Holy Union’s fleet stopped firing and the armada rose beyond the skies and sped out of the System and into Hyperspace. Something or someone had heard their desperate cries for salvation, and they had been saved from oblivion. They were unaware that dozens of other systems also watched in awe and surprise as the AHU seemingly gave up on destroying them and ran away with its tail between its legs. It would not be for another few years that the Galaxy would know that those who were saved that day were rescued by a battle that took place on the very edge of AHU space.
Those that survived the apocalypses that had befallen them were split down the middle. Some went back to their atheism while for others the fact that the Holy Union had fled when they prayed to whatever deity or demon would listen was a sign of the existence of such beings. New cults sprouted from the ruined cities and it would not be until the Galaxy knew about Arcadia’s stunning victory over the Holy Union that the myriad deities and devils that were now being worshiped gave way for the new faith. What would come from this would be the two dominant religions that would constantly engage in ‘friendly’ debates over which was right.
The Church of Arkhan would eventually and inadvertently create The Church of the Two Gods.