The dragon's harem

Chapter 2115: How It Died

As the spirit queens began their work, the orcs’ world was already changing faster than anyone had ever expected. But still, they were years away from the first plant. This planet had been dead for thousands of years, and reviving it was no small task.

The orcs had abused their nature so much that even their spirit queens perished, which was once thought to be an impossible task. They had irradiated, crushed, and stunted even the movements of their tectonic plates to be able to expand their civilisation in a stable world.

Their wind spirit queen died when their air had become too polluted to breathe and too irradiated to support life. She wasn’t as powerful as Zephyr and thus couldn’t even fight back against the slow destruction. The orcs of the past had hunted her as if she were just another beast to be slain, and claimed dominion over the sky. Her name was Arin, the wings of heaven.

The water spirit queen followed shortly as the orcs took to the sea and broke it down into oxygen and hydrogen to breathe and propel their earlier rocket designs. As the oceans reached their limit, Aqua, the fins of the deep, their water spirit queen, stood against them, trying not to end up the same way Arin did, but the orcs still hunted her down for getting in their way, and to them, she was just another monster to be slain.

When Aqua was slain, the remaining two spirit queens had finally gotten enough. Two of their sisters had died, and they even forgot the third one that died eons ago, the plant spirit queen Viana.

The earth spirit queen Elega and the fire spirit queen Everno stood shoulder to shoulder to fight the orcs and put an end to their endless expansion, but they never expected the horrors that awaited them. The orcs drilled the ground, pelted it with holes, and sucked all the fire from the mantle until the volcanoes dried. Their great machines and unmatched understanding of the laws of the world allowed them to bend it backward and break what shouldn’t be broken.

To the orcs at the time, control over nature was their right, not the spirit queens’. The expansion of their empire demanded that all authority rest within the hands of the orcs, so to them, the spirit queens and their ancient laws were nothing but a stone in their shoes, something they eventually managed to get rid of.

The earth spirit queen was killed in battle, slain like any other great beast, but the fire spirit queen was captured and used as a heat source to power their endless steam generators to produce electricity, and she survived in her torturous concrete tomb for over a thousand years before perishing of starvation.

Their god tried to reason with them, but only failure awaited him. Before he could even hope to reach an understanding, the orcs had already set their eyes on the sun to fuel their increasing energy needs. They expanded to other planets, formed a titanic sphere around their sun to harvest its power, but that still wasn’t enough.

For a titanic fusion reactor, the sun was horribly inefficient and poorly designed. They saw using its light as it is as a waste of its potential power, so over countless centuries, they managed to find a way to quickly dismantle it and use its hydrogen in their own smaller reactors, which they spread across the planets they lived on.

There was the problem of gravity, but at this time, they had already found a way to rip space open and bring forth the rifts, and as they understood that gravity is just the bending of the fabric of space, they used that space technology to bend space where the sun was before to perfectly mimic the gravity of the past.

Their god had now had enough of the horrors of his people, and so he came forth at them with rage. The other gods had permitted him sole agency long enough, and if he didn’t put the orcs under control, the gods would come down and erase him and his people.

But it was then that he noticed that he had messed up. He should’ve acted long before they killed the sun. Now, he couldn’t contact the other gods; something had cut this world from the others, and what he first found when he descended to the mortal world was the orcs’ titanic spaceships dragging the cold corpse of the void drakaina that carried their world.

He couldn’t even believe what he was seeing, but then he could clearly smell it. The abominable stench reeking out of the cannons of their space ships, of his people and their endless lust for expansion.

As he berated them for what they had done, the orcs saw him just as another beast to be slain, another thorn in the path of their glory. They had long since surpassed the god in power, and shall not be bound by their outdated rules and regulations. The orcs, after a long battle, even managed to slay their own god.

It won’t be until several thousand years later that they can see the signs of their own mistakes, the crumbling of their civilisation, and the last words of their god finally make sense in their ears. They had overestimated how much their world could support, and were now stuck as they had exhausted every single drop of resources they had.

At first, they modified their own bodies, trying to achieve immortality or at least adapt to survive in their new dying world, but when that all failed, they turned to expanding outward and started invading other worlds for resources, using their rifts to travel faster than light and reach other distant solar systems.

At first, they achieved great victories in their conquest, but eventually they were faced by several powerful worlds that they couldn’t face or defeat. Slowly, it became far harder to sustain themselves, and the orcs ended up stranded between twelve worlds that they were forced to live within.

Arad sighed as he closed the ninth book he had read in a row, and then looked at the orc scientist standing before him. ”I can’t tell if your kind is stupid or smart, but you’re probably best described as drunk on power. You achieved great things and started to believe that there is nothing in the world that can stop you.”

”It would seem so...” The scientist then gave Arad a long stare. ”And... I’ve heard that you aren’t a god, and yet you can call angels at will?”

One of the angels standing by the wall gave the scientist a sharp glare. ”Watch your tongue. Even as a mortal, he had faced more gods than your entire race, and unlike you, he didn’t fall into ruin.” She took a step forward, and the scientist jumped back. ”The former overgod, the one who drove our divine to madness and her end, this man faced head-on, fist to fist. Whatever speck of power you saw from him here was nothing but a drop of what he could achieve.”

”Don’t scare them too much.” Arad stood and walked past the angel, ”I got what I came here for. From what I understand, their entire civilization is spread between twelve worlds and multiple planets and moons, each with its own chain of command. We might’ve started working on one planet, but we still got far more work to do.”

”What do you mean?” One angel asked, and the scientist paled. ”The war isn’t over.” He threw a glance at Arad, ”The moment the orcs on the other planets discover that we got invaded... they’ll probably launch Project Eraser.”

Arad reached toward the books, and from beneath them all, he pulled a strange tablet. ”A great weapon that is located where the sun was supposed to be. It both helps anchor the planets with gravity and acts as a final, total destruction cannon, a beam of light.” He gave the scientist a deathly glare. ”And it’s powered by the heart, stomach, and brain of an ancient, galactic monster that your race managed to slay.”

The angel glared at them, then almost snapped at the scientist. ”The void drakaina that was supposed to protect this world...”

”There are twelve of them... one in each world.” The scientist looked away. ”We hunted them all.”

”That isn’t all.” Arad threw the tablet back on the table. ”Arlo, the one I thought had void draconic bloodline... he is just a super-soldier they made using what they have left from the drakainas.”

”What’s Eraser. How would that weapon work?” As the angel asked, a huge shift was taking place at the centre of the solar system, where a star once burned.

Titanic rings of steel wider than the orbits of planets spun, all fifty of them, as they channelled energy from the long-dead iron core of the star, sparking the magnetic field back to life. The orcs on the other planets had already spotted the change on the planet where Arad landed, and they had decided that they would erase the entire planet to get rid of the threat.