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Beyond War:
Advanced Warfighters

The term Advanced Warfighter is synonymous with soldier or warrior, in the lexican of space faring species.

The term represents the role and abilities of a non-terrestrial warfighter, like those who represent the last survivors of the oldest species. It also encompasses those terrestrial soldiers who have obtained access to the advanced technology of The War, including weapons and tactics that alter the balance of power on the conventional battlefield.

The ability to comprehend many of these abilities is simply beyond terrestrial species, as their concept of violence and war revolve around direct action and conventional war based on applied artificial intelligence and pandimensional technologies with folding of space and time, similar to how primitive nations could not comprehend air war.

While terrestrial species are familiar with swords, arrows, bullets and bombs, including fission and fusion reactions common in primitive tribal conflict - the technology does not exist to preserve a record of stellar or intergalactic conflict which are readily available to many advanced warfighters through instant access and quantum enabled computer augmentation and records. The ability to rip apart space and slam a planet into a noodle in the first shot, leave anything we practice today as conflict little more than children playing with sticks.

An advanced warfighter may, for example, deploy biological weapons to engineer the native and hostile species in the same degree of effort that an ordinary soldier would light a cigarette. With a breath, striking down 99% of a population. Or turning them into call girls. As the mood takes them.

An advacned warfighter may walk through solid rock and enter a room via a shadow before suffocating the lights and nullifying all sound as it strikes at a speed limited more by the destructive concussion wave each motion generates than the speed of gravity or mass slowing other warfighters. If you aren't dismembered by the advanced warfighter in a single blow, it is employing restraint - perhaps automatically - through a procedural compensation system that can be disabled at a moment's notice to counter superhuman threats.

Even if you destroy the body, such as a direct nuclear detonation on the target of the humanoid warfighter, the creature need only create a new one to occupy and continue its attack in fractions of a second - emerging from the fire clad in skin that can resist direct impact with the core of a supernova and move through space faster than any terrestrial ship, forming weapons and armor up to that of planetary bodies in mass.

Landfall

When even one of these creatures make landfall, it is an extinction event for all life in that planet. One of these beings could wipe out the dinosaurs, within minutes of setting foot on the ground. Conventional armies and fleets are no better suited than civilian populations in an intercontinental nuclear exchange to offer resistance.

That two of these legendary soldiers ever meet, or worse - millions - raising the bodies of the dead to stand a line of battle against each other and act as their eyes and ears across a planetary or interstellar battlefield, is enough to terrify most terrestrial populations into absolute fugue and suppression of all knowledge of their existence.

The War

The War was one such conflict, in which they were born - and made - and the abilities they possess remain the stuff of legends and myth for many terrestrial worlds. Their names are known as Gods, whom the native populations worship and serve with a reverence that modern populations dismiss as fantasy after just a few Centuries following their visitation.

Their ability to become indistinguishable from the native population, limit their power, and integrate into the public are so extensive that most civilizations believe they have actually never existed at all. In fact, they rely on this denial in primitive cultures and natural species reproductive lifecycle to settle into the worlds they occupy, often doing so then only by proxy the peacekeeping, power management, and resource organization of the true power behind the governments and movements of a planetary or interstellar group.

Awareness

Civilizations who become aware of these creatures, their influence, and their ability often quickly engage them in a vain effort to learn more than their resident warfighter is willing to disclose; and some have been wiped out completely simply for asking or admitting they were aware of their inferior role and unable to deny its reality for future generations.

Ordinary terrestrial populations rely on collective effort to achieve industrial capacity, and thus do not understand nor can admit the extensive resources of a single Advanced Warfighter in context to their planetary and national military and industrial efforts.

Some Advanced Warfighters ability to deploy extensions of itself made in the image of local life and machines, or to assume control over the living and the dead to carry out work too mundane or dangerous for the warfighter himself, and these abilities range from simple use of organic material and artificial automatons, to vast factories and refineries made deep inside a planet, who pour forth armies of weapons, ships, and creatures to overwhelm entire planetary populations - consuming the civilizations and native life with precision and selfless devotion that simple machines cannot match.

Entire planets are converted into war machines solely to support the industrial scale of conflict, fortification, and deep space engagement. Torn from their orbits and launched into the void, like starships, or used like artillery to bombard other planets.

The scale of war is simply beyond the comprehension of a terrestrial species, whose mind ceases to admit a purpose whereby the whole world they live on and every single body in its solar system are mere munitions to Advanced Warfighters.

If they did, conflict with such an adversary surely would be paramount to suicide.

Children of the Void - Tools of the Gods

However, not every weapon made by the Advanced Warfighters is sentient or aware of the scope of abilities in their maker, just like a terrestrial species. And so war among natural species and the tools and utilities of Advanced Warfighter industries often spark "little conflicts" that consume a world for a few thousand years, until the need for those resources declines sufficiently to decommission the utility or artificial fabrication - allowing natural species to wipe out the remaining stragglers.

This may end the utilitarian tools - especially odd biological life with a reproductive cycle - made by the Advanced Warfighter. But it would be no different than claiming a victory over an enemy army that simply occupied a place and then went home at the end of their mission. That many Advanced Warfighters stay and observe the people, even aid them, in cleaning up their network of unused and discarded arms, is a factor most populations never become aware of until they begin to develop advanced warfighter technology of their own, like quantum computing.