During the course of history, mankind has survived the harshest of conditions and survived the largest wars it has seen to date. As a personal ideal, I believe that humans were made to build and destroy, made in such a fashion that they would build something and then destroy what they have built. It has always been a steady leap or breakthrough forward in technology or structure, and then a man made war would throw that into the ground. There has always seemed to be this steady flow of events where humans would keep themselves in a limbo of balance, never building to enormous or frightening levels but at the same time never destroying themselves into dust.
Humans, what interesting people and species, right? That is all beside the point, but keep that in mind because humanity sometimes doesn’t know when to stop and when to go. The beginning and then the end of the Pendulum Wars is an event that every living man and woman to date remembers and dreads to this day. A near century long war was able to deplete humanity of it’s energy, it’s technology, it’s population. This is just another example of where humans build up, and then beat themselves around like we did in the Pendulum Wars.
I’ll stop blabbering about my views on humans and all that cynical and negative thinking I have seemed to adapt while i have been sitting in my secure, nice and dandy office at Azura for all these long years, watching as the remnant of humanity held onto it’s last strings and strength to survive the locust horde.
So let’s look at the facts that lead up to the Locust Wars. The dreaded Pendulum Wars. What even was that? The Pendulum Wars was a long, long, long war between the Coalition of Ordered Government ( COG ), and the Union of Independent Republics ( UIR ) in a fight for power, dominance, and most importantly,
resources.
Sorry, but I have to emphasize on that last point, and let me explain why.
Before the Pendulum Wars, Sera as we knew it was plunged into a millennium long time known as the Age of Armageddon. During this period humanity was on it’s last crutches and last breaths of life, as life as we knew it as humans was on the brink of destruction. War was rampant, quality of life plummeted down, and resources were largely sparce. It was a horrible time that plagues the existence of man. However, humanity survived by rejecting the ideals of war, and it began an Era of Silence which propelled humanity back up. Culture, technology, quality of life, population, and everything else skyrocketed up and everything was healing, repairing, and starting to look for the better. War seemed impossible, peace was a thing, and the human race thrived. But it thrived a bit too much.
Eventually, the Era of Silence came to a complete standstill as everyone realized that they couldn’t continue on because energy and fuel was becoming so expensive and non existent they they risked crashing the worldwide economy and collapsing into a second age of armageddon. Luckily, they found a new source of energy and fuel,
Imulsion
.
Imulsion, yeah, i’m sure that word rings a reaaal loud and clear bell in your head. It’s the main reason why the Pendulum Wars happened, why the Locust emerged to the surface, and why the lambent formed. Yeah, imulsion is the reason why humanity nearly got destroyed all over again. What seemed like the cheap and effective solution to an energy crisis, would eventually transform and become the reason for why humans went to war with each other. It’s kind of ironic really, we thought that Imulsion was the solution to all of our problems, but it became the near solution to our demise.
Moving on, Imulsion was the number 1 reason for why the Pendulum Wars even happened in the first place. An extremely large desperate need for energy and fuel caused the human population to fight over the new resource, and eventually the two superpowers, the COG and the UIR, formed as competitors for the resource. All that peace and recovery that the Era of Silence brought, was all dashed away with war and pain. Now doesn’t that sound familiar? Yeah, I think it does.
Many atrocities took place during the Pendulum Wars, and it was also the period when humans as a species showed their worst and darkest side to the rest of the world. Thousands, no, MILLIONS of people were killed during the wars, and a lot of them died in gruesome states. A fight for resources and power quickly took on a new shade of things, a shade where things got personal and the scars of battle sunk in so hard into the two sides that when a battle or skirmish was won, those who were captured as prisoners wished that they were captured dead rather than alive.
Thousands of both COG and UIR soldiers were captured and killed either through series of torture sessions, or were abused in concentration, imulsion, or any other type of military enforced camps. The COG had it’s methods of dealing with prisoners, and so did the UIR. These did not show the good side of humanity, this did not show everything that we have all worked so hard to overshadow during the Era of Silence. Everything seemed to fade away and the long forgotten feral and savage nature of humanity emerged from within.
The war was mainly a stalemate however, for large periods of times the UIR and the COG would be at a standstill and fighting was minimal as they would devise and more prepare their next moves and catch their breath. At one point, the UIR was winning, at another the COG was, and it was just a large game of tug of war where no side really won unless something large, something substantial came up to resolve the seeming less never ending period of war and despair. The long nature of the war was just a large catalyst for scar wounds and memories to sink in and create battle hardened, grudge heavy veterans that would create an unstable society and civilization in the future, if humanity pulled through it that is.
So what did the craft human race come up with this time? The
Hammer of Dawn.
Oh yeah, that thing. The weapon that would end the Pendulum Wars once and for all and then would be used again to nearly destroy everything on the surface. Devised, thought up, and created by the UIR, it’s blueprints were stolen and captured by the COG during the infamous battle of Aspho Fields. The acquirement of the Hammer was the key to ending the war and opening a new door for us humans. It’s structure and design was finalized by the COG, and then it was deployed to sink a UIR fleet, causing the UIR to surrender and finally end the Pendulum Wars.
The end of the Pendulum Wars was a gracious time where mankind got the opportunity to catch its breath and finally cover up it’s wounds. Parades rolled through the streets of the COG, a new “era” began to take form where peace was to be attempted to be established once again. Humanity seemed to be at that last, crucial step of stepping up and savoring peace, finally hoping to escape war, pain, and repair the thousands of years of damage and war. But the reality is, a happy ending isn’t something that comes lightly, and before the COG was able to stop and repair, everything went down the toilet.
What happened? The Locust happened. E-Day happened. Seemingly, the beginning of the end.
Emergence Day
, the day when everything, including hope, morale, nearly everything was flushed straight down the toilet. The day when a new intelligent species called Locust emerged directly from beneath their feet and began slaughtering all of mankind. A relentless, subterrestrial, two legged species popped up, armed with weapons, bombs, and armor that matched the humans in term of technology, and emerged all across Sera. They showed up in cities, in fields, on islands, in the ocean, in military bases, camps, everywhere. Nobody was prepared, and nobody deserved to be put through it.
Let me expand on what happened on E-Day a bit. On E-Day, the locust emerged in all the major and capital cities of all the nations and countries on sera, catching all of humanity with their pants down. In just the first week after E-Day,
billions
of people were slaughtered with seeming ease. Even a week after their appearance, the COG and the UIR were still scrambling to figure out what was happening and in this crucial time frame, everyone in charge was killed.
The locust, in short explanation, were some of the ugliest, most terrifying abominations that have ever walked the surface of Sera. They were subterrestrial species that were capable of tunneling through the planet’s bedrock and pop up anywhere that they wished on the planet. In appearance, they were biologically very similar to that of a human. They walked on two legs, they had two arms, they had a head, and they were intelligent. Though their masses weren’t all that smart, they had a hive and horde mentality that formed the backbone of their culture, a cult like devotion to a supreme leader, called the Queen. Physically, the locust were superior to that of an average man, both in speed and strength, but lacked the mental power to outsmart us.
They also possessed a whole arsenal of subspecies of their kind that varied from small little dog like creatures they called wretches, to colossal creatures such as the Corpsers and the Brumaks. They were quick, versatile, powerful, and weren’t restrained by the need for fuel and manmade objects. On paper, they looked much more superior to us and every day I question myself how Prescott and Hoffman shoveled through them for as long as they did, but I think what we had over them is intelligence, determination, and most of all, the will to survive.
Back to E-Day and the appearance of the locust, in an unfortunate series of events, some of the most battle hardened, experienced, and strongest military personnel were killed in the first week, as well as some of the smartest and successful scientists, engineers, doctors, and politicians alive were all killed in the initial onslaught of the Locust Horde. In the first week, humanity lost billions from its population, lost almost half of it’s intellectual and physical manpower, and was fragmented until cities and nations became cut off from each other. With no sign of mercy or intent to offer peace from the Locust, the remaining human races seemed to be doomed against a foe that caught them off guard and now outnumbered them exponentially.
Nobody knew what to do, and quick thinking seemed awfully critical if the human race was to survive. The leaders of the COG estimated that their weakened military was only capable of holding off the Locust for a couple of months, and this was barely even a year after E-Day. The COG struggled to stay in the fight and save as many lives as possible, but the locust had numbers over them, and as hard as they fought, not enough soldiers backed the COG military and the fact their new foe could tunnel anywhere they wished meant that almost all of their battle tactics were obsolete in this new war.
In an act of desperation, the leaders of the COG, and me, came up with the plan to incinerate the surface of sera and stop the locust invasion long enough to build a defense and come up with a long term solution to the problem at hand. Me, Hoffman, and Prescott agreed to go with Adam Fenix’s plan that would deploy the whole Hammer of Dawn network to destroy the surface of the planet, and in the process incinerate millions of our own lifes.
Everyone possible was ushered into the Jacinto Plateau in a course of three days before the Hammer of Dawn would be officially deployed on all of Seta. Why? Because it was one of the only places on Sera where the locust was incapable of digging into, giving the COG an area where it could fortify and finally take a stand, do something that it was good at doing and finally dig into a position so it could stop running, turn around, and return the middle finger to the Locust Horde. But to even stand a chance of doing it, we had to use the hammer to slow down the locust invasion so we could catch our breath, so we could prepare, to recover. We needed to destroy as many of them at the cost of a majority of our population.
Thing is, sacrifice for the better of survival and success isn’t an unknown turf to the COG or the UIR, but this was on such a grand scale that it hit the victims of the hammer really hard. Regardless if the Hammer gave humanity a second chance, it totally fragmented the human society to the point where what remained of organize and civilized order was pitted against the angry survivors of the Hammer strike, now known as the Stranded, in a large emotional and physical battle.
After the Hammer Strikes, the fight stabilized as the locust was setback a whole step back and their invasion impeded, and as the humans finally regained their wits to set up a worthy defense against their new foe. For a whole 15 years, the two sides fought to the end and clashed.
Even with their odds improved, the human race struggled to hang in and survive this large battle that nobody believed was winnable. By the 10th year of the war, the human capital, Ephyra, was overrun by the locust. By the 15th year, almost every single human stronghold and city was either destroyed or overrun except for Jacinto, the last human stronghold. At this point, we were all completely cornered, with nowhere to run, nowhere to go to, and no way to stop the locust army. We were on the last, real breaths before the collapse of the human order, something that would signal the end of the human era and beginning of the locust era.
You would think that at this point, we were all screwed and we should’ve given up on whatever hope we had left, surrender to these feral beasts and stop the pain and suffering that we have all suffered through all these years. But the ambition and the will of survival that the human race possessed is adamant even in the odds of completely annihilation.
And so, began the change of the tide of the war.
In 15 AE, humanity was pitted into the most desperate and gruesome position it has ever been dumped to in the history of Sera. Something about being cornered, something about being pressured, and something about the situation gave that spark of ideas that allowed us to take a step forward instead of a step back. The first thing that popped into mind was an operation called the Lightmass Offensive. The utilization of the human weapons of mass destruction.
The operation itself was effective, devised by Colonel Hoffman, and it caused the mass extinction of the Kryll, as well as the collapse of the outer hollows for the locust. It stopped the locust harder in their tracks than they have ever been before, even when they were hit by the Hammer of Dawn strikes. The war ended for a couple of weeks right there, and a slimmer of hope creeped into the minds of the people, hoping it was all over.
But it wasn’t. The Locust came back with vengeance and they were stronger than ever. The locust invasion bursted into the frontlines of the human stronghold and the war resumed in even stronger and higher proportions, causing us to pull back even more until we were starting to measure territory not by cities, but by the blocks in the city of Jacinto.
Even then, we came up with another idea, even more ballsy and daring than the Lightmass Offensive, and that was Operation Hollowstorm, a plan where we tried to take what was left of the human army into the home of the locust and destroy their operation of command. However, regardless if it was failing or succeeding, the plan was modified half way after being started when the works of the supposedly deceased Adam Fenix revealed that the locust empire could be completely destroyed by sinking Jacinto itself.
Yes, the solution to the war was to destroy the last human stronghold and risk going stranded. It was a trade off, where we would give up our stronghold for the locust stronghold, and this plan did go through. Eventually, the remnants of the COG survived on the sole shoulders of what remained of it’s navy and civilian fleets while the locust drowned in the sinkage.
So where do I come into this? Where does the great General Salaman Bardry come into this conflict? Well I don’t. Just like thousands of other people, I fell into a shameful depression that caused me to give up on hope, give up on the war, and succeed to either suicide or desertion. I couldn’t live with myself for pulling the trigger with the hammer of dawn, so I was relocated to Azura, which is a secret human stronghold for the wealthy and smart.
Look, Sera isn’t for cowards and weaklings like myself anymore, it needs smart people like Adam, determined people like Hoffman, leaders like Prescott, and heroes that will sculpt the future of tomorrow.
These wars were not forged by a couple of smartasses in the backlines, they weren’t carried on the sole shoulders of the leaders, no, they were forged and won by the soldiers in the frontlines and the heroes who fought the war. There are hundreds of stories to be told by bold and brave heroes, and all of them deserve a grand memoir than me. I am just a senile old man who now just asks to be allowed to give his best wishes for the future.
I am writing this without knowing the outcome of the war. I am writing this fully unaware if the human race survived, or if the return of the locust marked the end of it’s remnant. While I know my days are numbered, I can only hope to wonder, who won?
