The Infinite March.
The March that made the Protectors who they are today.
Before the Infinite March, the Protectors were nobody. After it, the Protectors became the rulers of the Infinite Realms. Everyone else strong enough to challenge them were gone, their every trace washed away by the river of history.
As she stepped into the Arena, Jean found herself looking forward to what she was about to see.
Just like Welch foretold, Jean saw another function, aside from the Simulation Room and the Challenger Tower. Speaking of the Challenger Tower, Jean remembered she never got the chance to explore or take advantage of it. The mission Violet introduced to her came to quickly. She decided to change that before going onto her third mission.
But right now, her eyes were laid on the newest function in the Arena. The Memoriam. She selected it on a panel, and the next thing she knew was standing inside a completely foreign space. She looked around and only saw white light.
A figure solidified in front of her. It was a hologram projection of a human female. The figure immediately introduced herself.
“Welcome, Voyager. I am an Artificial Intelligence designed to help Voyagers explore the Memoriam. You can call me Assistant or any other name you prefer. How may I help you?”
“Give me an index of all the recordings inside the Memoriam.” Jean went straight to the point.
“That is not advised. There are over a million recordings inside the Memoriam. It will be more efficient if you tell me your requirements for the recordings. Just as a reminder, making duplications of the recordings is not permitted.”
Jean nodded, switching her approach. “In that case...show me a battle involving an armada and a faction with a different power structure.” Right now, Jean classified herself as a fleet commander. She wanted to see how fleets would fare against the other types of power in the Infinite Realms.
“Affirmative.”
“Loading recording: the Battle of Trivia.”
“Faction 1: the Balius Dominion. 4,819 fleets, including the Royal Shield Fleet. Total capital vessel count: 20,000. Total combatant: 1 billion.”
“Faction 2: Fifth Battalion, First Company, Third Legion, Protector Corps. Total combatant: 1,000.”
“Loading battle description:”
“The Balius Dominion was a power center in dimension A1930. It was a dictatorship with influence over 800 galaxies. It was classified as a Blue civilization. The Protectors encountered the Balius Dominion during the fifth year of the Infinite March. When the Balius Dominion refused to yield its rights and attacked the Protector ambassadors sent over, the two factions quickly went to war.”
“The Battle of Trivia was the last battle between the Protectors and the Balius Dominion. The battle ended with the capital of the Balius Dominion, along with its entire armada, destroyed. After that point, the remainder of the Balius Dominion surrendered to the Protectors, and the war ended.”
“Playing recording now.”
The next moment, Jean found herself standing in space. In front of her was an armada larger than anything she has seen before. The space was endless, extending into all directions so much that even Jean couldn’t see its full form with the Eyes of the Seeker, but so was the armada. Tens of thousands of ships covered the battlefield. Some were like floating countries. Jean estimated them to be dozens of times the size of her mothership. Others were smaller, but even they were the size of multiple carriers stacked together.
All of these ships had a dark grey theme. This was different than anything Jean has seen before. Every single detail from them screamed beings of a foreign dimension.
Jean turned around. On the other side were 1,000 figures in white armor. Jean could tell they were Protector armors, but they were of a slightly different style than the ones she saw on Welch and Gregor. The Protectors floated in the vacuum of space. Their helmets were sealed and their masks were shut, completely isolating them from the outside world.
Unlike their enemies, the Protectors didn't seem to have a fleet, or even any starfighters.
Assistant came in just in time.
“The Balius Dominion had sufficient firepower to severely damage an opposing fleet. At that time, the Protector Fleet was dominating, but it wasn’t impervious, and it was stretched thin. To minimize the casualties, the Fifth Company was deployed.”
“The Fifth Company emphasized on powers of the mystic front. It is a style completely different to anything the Balius Dominion has seen before. Protector High Command hoped it would catch the Balius Dominion by surprise. That strategy was extremely successful.”
Jean didn't know if there was any conversation between the two fighting groups. Didn't matter. She wasn’t here to learn about diplomacy.
She was here to learn about war.
All of a sudden, the entire Balius armada opened fire. Jean quickly discovered that unlike the Voyagers or her Starcraft fleets, the armada of this world didn't use energy weapons. Instead, they used rail guns. These weapons used a powerful magnetic field to propel giant balls of alloy, each with a radius of dozens of meters. With massive kinetic energy and placed in a situation with no air resistance, these rounds could fly endlessly until they run into something.
They might not be as flashy as energy weapons, but they weren’t any less deadly. In fact, energy blasts might see their thermal energy lost during flight, but railgun rounds...that’s a totally different story.
A literal hail of alloy rounds dashed at the dots of white.
Jean gave a silent order, and immediately she found herself standing right beside the Protectors. She could see from their perspective of the hail of metal coming their way. Instincts told Jean if it was her with her Voyager armors, she wouldn’t survive the first blast.
The Protectors didn't try to tank the hits. Instead, they quickly formed a hundred squads. Ten Protectors each. One Protector in each group held his hand up and generated a portal in front of them. Within half a second, the portals of all one hundred Protectors merged together and formed a circular layer of void between them and the rail gun rounds.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Half a second later, all the rounds slammed into the void, and disappeared.
But it wasn’t over. Jean’s eyebrows rose as she transported herself to right in front of the Balius armada. There, out of nowhere, tens of thousands of railguns ammos suddenly appeared. This time, they were flying at the Balius ships.
The Balius ships obviously didn't expect this. Jean watched as hundreds of ships tried to take defensive measures, but the attack was so abrupt. All the ammos were not only returned, but in the portal, they also collided with each other randomly, so what the Balius ships were facing was a wave of feral spheres capable of crushing an armored vehicle travelling at a ridiculous speed.
The rounds rained down on the first line of ships. These ships didn't try to tank the shots either as protoss plasma shields would try to do. Instead, they had something like a magnetic shield. Jean could sense an invisible energy that was pulling the rounds to the side, forcing them into orbit around the capital ships, essentially eliminating their threat.
Unfortunately, there were too many rounds. Over thirty ships were reduced to floating wreckages as the sheer number of shots overwhelmed whatever force field generator it was under.
But it was merely a small blow to the Balius armada. Thirty ships were nothing to a fleet of 20,000. The rest were about to unload another wave when they suddenly realized their enemies were gone. The 1,000 Protectors could no longer be detected on their scanners.
But Jean saw something. Constantly, in the space in front of the Balius armada, Protectors were appearing before disappearing into another portal. The same Protectors that redirected the magnetized shots were now acting as a mean of transportation.
“Space Smiths. They are Protectors who emphasize on studying and manipulating the art of space.”
The Protectors were fast. The Balius fleet and the Protectors were tens of thousands of miles apart, but by the time the Balius fleet realized what happened, the Protectors were just one more portal away from their foes.
The last wave of teleportation brought the Protectors right inside the Balius vessels.
Jean moved inside one of the breached vessels to observe. Her form passed through the layers of armor.
This vessel was visited by one of the ten-Protector hit squads. They happened to land in the hangar. As soon as they were in, figures sealed in grey armor stormed out toward them. That was when Jean realized the Balius Dominion might not be an empire of mankind, considering all the figures were nearly three meters tall.
“Balius infantry. Their physical strength is irrelevant in the battle. They are armed with personal force fields and rail guns. CAS: 80.”
The Balius infantry charged toward the Protectors fearlessly. Their fingers on the trigger, ready to fire. One of the Protectors stepped forward. She raised a hand, and a silver sword suddenly came out of nowhere. It chopped through the Balius infantry with incredible speed. Jean noticed the sword was delayed whenever it came close to an infantry, but the delay only lasted for a fraction of a second. Whatever force field these infantry had didn't stand a chance.
Not a single shot was fired.
As the first defenders died on their post, seven of the ten Protectors departed from the group and went all across the ship, exterminating everyone in their way. Among the three Protectors left, one was the Space Smith. Another was a psychic. The third figure...Jean felt something strange from that figure. It was as if her instincts were telling her to stay as far away from the figure as possible, but...she quickly threw that irrational thought aside.
The psychic acted as a guide for the killing team as he guided the seven Protectors to track down every single Balius on the ship. To them, the locating part was ninety percent of the work. As soon as the Balius were located, their high-tech weapons were useless against the Protectors. In fact, among the 2,039 Balius Jean saw slaughtered, not a single one of them had the chance to fire their weapon.
Weapons were good, but they needed a decent user to function. The Protectors beat their opponents in terms of speed, strength, and reflexes so much that before the Balius’s eyes could deliver the image of the Protectors to the brains, the blades or the fireballs of the Protectors have already cut the Balius into a million pieces or melted the entire body.
In the hangar, a three story tall walker suddenly made a step forward. One of the Balius infantry managed to climb into the pilot’s seat of the once dormant machine, and now it was mobilizing the weapon of war. Unfortunately, he only got so far. A Protector glanced at his direction, and Jean heard a light pop. When she looked at the cockpit again, it was already stained green.
She could only assume green was the color of blood for the Balius.
In just moments, the ten Protectors were back together, and the entire ship was cleansed. The Space Smith opened a portal, but the Protectors weren’t ready to leave just it.
The third figure, the one who made Jean feel something she has never felt before, slowly reached her right hand out into the open. The next second, a pitch black lance appeared in her grip.
She tapped the tip of the lance on the ground.
The next second, Jean watched as a cloud of smoke appeared from all over the ship. They howled and growled, as if they were beasts seeking blood. Jean tilted her head. This was something she has never seen before. She watched quietly as all the smoke converged around the third Protector. They twisted and turned, as if trying to break free, but the third Protector didn't budge an inch. Eventually, all the smoke were sucked into the black lance.
For some reason, Jean felt chills down her spine.
She turned to Assistant as the Protector hit team moved onto another Balius ship, leaving the ghost ship they were on moments ago to its own destiny.
“What was that?”
“That Protector was a Grim Reapress, a female Grim Reaper.”
“Grim Reaper?” Jean knew about reapers in common sense, but not in the Protector sense. “As in incarnations of Death?”
She noticed that as she was talking with the Assistant, the recording froze. All the battle and death around her came to a sharp stop.
“That is incorrect. To understand Grim Reapers, you must understand Death. Death represents the inevitable end to all things. Rocks can crumble. Stars can collapse. All things must die. All things...except the Protectors.”
“In most dimensions, Death is merely a concept. It is a law, just like the law of conservation of energy or the law of universal gravitation. The Protectors can destroy the dimensions, but they can’t manipulate such laws in those dimensions.”
“That changed four years after the Infinite March, when one of the Death in a dimension developed sentience. The Grand Protector personally subdued Death and made a pact with it. In exchange for mercy, the Grand Protector demanded that Death hand out some of its power to selected members of the Protector Corps.”
“Thus came the Grim Reapers.”
“Grim Reapers and Reapresses are beings capable of using the Power of Death. It gives them abilities that are terrifying on the field of battle. A powerful Reaper can kill an army in a single touch. Reapers target the souls directly. No amount of armor or technology can stop them. They are feared on the battlefield by both friends and enemies.”
“But be warned, this power comes with a great price. Reapers represent Death, and Death is the enemy to all life. The dead cannot have feelings. They can’t eat. They can’t sleep. The more you use the Power of Death, the less you are like a member of the living.”
“When the Grand Protector discovered this trend, she made the Reaper recruitment completely voluntary. When Reapers and Reapresses felt burdened by this power, she saw to it that Death completely retrieve its influences from those Protectors. As the Infinite March went on and the Protector Corps had better ways to strive for power, the Reapers gradually disappeared.”
“But if you find this power tempting, there are still Reaper upgrades in the SSS. Be warned, the transition will be difficult, even life-threatening. One wrong move and the Power of Death will erase your soul. When the Protector Reapers were created, both the Grand Protector herself and Death personally made sure they survived. In cases without their aid, only a fraction survived the transition.”
“As a Voyager, you will get no aid at all.”
Jean nodded slowly.
Grim Reapress...