The world had erupted - no, not the world; the better part of the galaxy had seemingly erupted into chaos. Less than a day before, Kenra had ended a revolt before it began, on one of her idyllic, quiet little baubles. Now, she was hearing alarms and cries for help from half of her realm; both the masses and those not much weaker than her were in varying states of panic or belligerence, all depending on exactly what threats each little piece of her dominion was facing.
Kenra’s domain, a collection of some few thousand star systems, on the outer edge of a galactic arm, far from the core, was under attack. A tiny little blotch of light in the grand scheme of things, it was barely even a blip of colour on a map. Her ascendancy was relatively recent, and with whatever commotion that sparked the galaxy’s descent into madness, the powers around her smelled blood.
Adrift in a dual orbit with a giant, gaseous planet near the centre of her realm, Kenra prepared for war. So much for break time. At the scale everything was happening at, she didn’t have to move quickly, but she had to move now. She grit her teeth, and set herself to collide with the massive ball of gas; a body as titanic as hers needed fuel, and going into battle hungry would likely be even worse than getting to battle late. And so, she charted her course out of the system, through the planet she’d been in a stellar tango with for who knew how long.
The system was rather barren, a cold, smallish star in its centre, and any rocks that might have harboured life were long since torn and blasted by meteorites, courtesy of the gravity of this very planet. Its own moons, once numerous, had dwindled in number over the time Kenra had called this orbit home; she needed sustenance, after all. Itself, the world was a massive, failed star, slightly wider than she was tall, and massive enough to dominate the outer orbits of the system. It was far too small to ever ignite, however; in that, Kenra felt a strange kinship to it. Not so much the failure, but she couldn’t help thinking that if she were, well, more, an invasion on this scale might never have happened. But then, the scale just keeps going up, doesn’t it?
It was no matter, she decided, as she closed in on the world; she’d spent much of her mortal days quarrelling and fighting, and spending her years as a divine quarrelling and fighting would be no different, just… bigger. With her hands stretched out, she dove into the ball of gas, dense clouds roiling beneath her. The impact hearkened back to the first days of any solar system: colossal, and cataclysmic. The gas offered no resistance to the goddess, as she plunged inside, heating up and flashing as primordial ferocity briefly woke the long dead world.
Within the sphere, Kenra felt the heat of it drift past her. Merely hot gas and dust, nothing like the stars which truly burned bright. Long moments passed, her body sinking further into the rapidly deforming planet, until she found it, the core. She caught the little orb of metal in her clutches and made haste to swallow it down; there was little time for her to make a show out of it, and not much of an audience, either. Sustenance secured, she emerged out the other side in another burst of gas. The world had been all but scattered, and as she sucked down some of the atmosphere that had drifted off with her, she thought once about the planet reforming in the coming years. Just once. As she floated through the void towards the closest border, her thoughts turned to battle.
A large, vanguard navy had reached a small border system a handful of days before Kenra had. They'd made haste in wiping out the defenses around their point of entry, before a swarming fleet arrived and began the long haul towards the populated worlds within. Her people fought back fiercely, exacting a heavy toll in bodies and battleships for every orbit crossed. Similar scenes were playing out across Kenra’s realm, but victories would be costly, if they even came.
Kenra didn’t play by those physical rules, and by the time her massive form was in sight, those invading captains in her path wouldn’t even have the time to turn about, before she was upon them. With those people she called 'hers' in retreat and at a distance, she was free to go wild.
Laser fire, torpedoes, kinetic barrages and what felt like nuclear fission bombarded her from all sides; to a woman more used to dealing in planets and small stars, she could hardly feel it. The batteries fell quiet as she lashed out, spinning throughout the navy in a flurry of limbs that looked remarkably like a dance to any eyes familiar with her; the bursts of light and heat against her skin that ended each star ship felt far nicer than their attacks had.
Even their greatest ships were little more than bugs to her, and the most they could elicit from the goddess was a giggle; as she spun about, her foot went through what must have been the command ship’s entourage. Her big toe hit their mothership, a beast capable of flattening a country were it to simply land, and dashed it like so much dust.
She couldn’t remember the name of the space that had sent this particular force, and she didn’t care to anymore; they’d found themselves on a none too short list of systems that she’d be more than happy paying a visit, once this had all blown over. Given their showing here, they wouldn’t put up too much of a fight.
Really, it had been force of habit that brought Kenra to this front. As the goddess swatted another fleet of thousands, another crew of millions, down like clumps of ash, she thought herself foolish; while it might be fun for her, playing with the militaries of entire civilisations like the toys they often were to her, there were impending threats far more significant than these gnats.
Even as the cheers of billions reached her thoughts, she was telling the generals and leaders of nearby systems to ready themselves for these foes on their own; most would relish the chance, and those that didn’t, well, they needed the practice.
Without more than an indulgent grin towards the planet closest to her, Kenra sped off towards a foe warranting far more attention. An invasion force was all she’d heard when she first planned her defence, though a markedly large one. She had planned to leave it to one of her seconds like the rest of these paltry navies, but as battles raged on and thoughts reached hers, she was forced to change plans. The maniacs had brought their entire planetary neighbourhood, star and all.
Perspective changes one’s perception of things. For the inhabitants of the two now neighbouring star systems, the sky got brighter and several strange new stars, or planets, took up the night sky; for Kenra, hurtling down from above the two systems, it was a scene of a bizarre, celestial broadside.
Two orange suns hung apart from each other, their planets and belts orbiting in parallel. One was hers, the rocks and dust, planets and moons all making up an intricate dance that the goddess was quite fond of; she’d left it untouched for a reason. The invaders’ worlds, in comparison, were a brutish panorama, every object in a simple, artificial orbit around their dying star. The whole thing had been designed for war.
Kenra was racing to place herself between the two. Defensive artillery and the lights of other fire flashed through the blackness back at their assailants, but the locals were stemming a flood with a bucket. Entire planets had been hollowed out and filled with ships, railguns powered by the atmospheres of giants, and… the starlight was being focused into some sort of cannon. She had to give credit; it had been a small eternity since she last felt genuinely outnumbered, and the sinking uncertainty of the fight to come was fought back with a sneer.
She was bigger than them, vastly so. Her body was megalithic to the point that even their largest weapons, leeching the blood of entire worlds, were as rifles and cannons to her; dangerous to a behemothic brute, but she was no brute. Lunging into battle, the goddess went towards her foe with sun-like fire encasing her, flaring from her fingers and running inward. She raised her arms in a fighting stance from ages past, channelling the flames of a thousand worl—they’d fired an asteroid belt at her.
The entire orbiting belt seemed to unbuckle, hundreds of little rockets activating at a time as the millions of rocks that made it up suddenly began speeding towards her; whoever was in control of this ‘fleet’ was no fool, and wouldn’t waste ships and laser fire against an enemy who was… quite clearly far above that sort of thing. A level of apprehension had taken them, which was hard to avoid when a woman’s body appeared off in space, visible from so far off. They had come to steal a star, however; they couldn’t very well let some self-proclaimed goddess stop them here.
Kenra was stalled in place, arms held before her eyes in a hurried protection of her vision; asteroids made impact all across her body, and as the tiny rocks erupted over her, she crept forward like she were forcing her way through a hailstorm. Grimacing, she peeked through and saw that the barrage was only about to get worse, with the asteroids coming around the star having even more time to speed up, and catching up with the rocks in front.
With a twist on some invisible floor, Kenra spun about and lunged to her side with a great burst of flame; much of the debris heading her way was incinerated, and the rest was moving too quickly to track her at any reasonable pace. They’d have to settle for turning about, or for crashing into some barren, if pretty, planets behind her.
In the time it took her to leap out and advance once more, she saw that some of the world guns were aimed her way; those would hurt quite a bit if they landed their shots. As she crossed the outermost orbits, laser fire lit up the space around her nonetheless. Whether a panicked commander opening against orders, or a decision to drop their entire arsenal on her, didn’t matter; the conventional weapons were a light show at best, compared to the cannons tracking her advance, and she didn’t fancy any new holes to nurse after the battle.
The planet furthest from the star was within reach, Kenra set on silencing the stellar arsenal one weapon at a time. She swiped towards it, bringing her open hand down above the world like she was spiking a tennis ball, but before she made contact, it simply disintegrated. The entire orb had been converted and hollowed out into a massive hive of ships, so the only things collected by her hand were a spindly, planet wide framework, and the few billion ships that hadn’t cleared in time. It erupted into flames and debris as her palm simply flattened it, but it was paltry satisfaction. Even worse, the billions of billions of ships unleashed were making beelines for her eyes, her ears and her more ‘sensitive’ places.
They were flies at worst, but as the irritating tingling of massed fire made itself known to her, she realised the danger she was in; the whole battery of planets had aimed and fired while she took care of the carrier world. Pellets of slag the size of continents missed her by a relative hairs breadth, each wiping out thousands of those harassing ships as they passed her. They must have been drones, not that it helped, there were far too many.
She couldn’t afford to play yet, or even focus on the swarm for that matter. With another flare, she made quick time towards the closest of the guns; billions of the drones were melted down around her, but the sheer number of them was barely scratched. She raised her hand to throw some imaginary dart, and a core’s worth of heat coalesced around her fingertips before she slung it forward, right as the guns fired once more.
It was luck - though she’d never admit it - that had saved her from having a useless arm at best; her magmatic ‘dart’ and the planetary pellet met midway, and if not for the sheer force of her own throw, the shot would likely have sailed clean through her. Instead, het dart, knocked slightly off course by the collision, punched through the side of the gun, and past that through the planet it was built into. The entire rock began to cave in around the gaping hole, as the glowing blood of the planet spilled out behind it.
The other two shots soared ineffectually behind her; the giant moving towards one of the planetary emplacements wasn’t on her foes’ minds in the slightest. That left her with four… five weapons left to deal with: two guns, a belt, a carrier, and whatever awful contraption they’d wrapped around their star. The stinging returned as… six things left to deal with.
Her path to the broken world cannon continued, evading fire all the way, before with another swipe she carved her fingers through one hemisphere. Were the planet not already devastated, this would have ended it, as fingers larger than continents hacked out a chunk of molten rock the size of a large moon. Or a golf ball. With her next throw, another world all but detonated, and Kenra let out a gasp she’d been keeping in since she arrived. With but a single cannon left to evade, she even took a moment to watch the lightshow.
She still wasn’t sure if these worlds were populated or not. For all she’d yet seen, the entire set-up might well have been on autopilot. It didn’t matter, she supposed, as her short-lived missile liquefied her targeted planet, but she was never one to toss up a chance to show off. A handful of asteroids stung her back as they finally made their loop back, and as the last gun disappeared around the other side of the star, she decided to swat some flies.
With her undivided attention, the swarm fell fast. Arcs of flame like solar flares flooded the space about her, and large numbers or no, a paltry hundred ton bomber stood no chance against her heat. She spun about before throwing her hands out wide and spiralling about; the far-reaching flares reduced the fleet to effectively nil. She was on a roll.
Turning her gaze on the final, and still yet dormant carrier orb, the fire titaness brought her hands together, and the flames lashed out in two mirrored streams towards it. The ships began their launch, but for naught, as mere moments later, the entire thing was inundated in a primordial fire from either side. The fleet was left little more than a lattice of charred and soldered drones, all fixed in place to the frames or each other, and Kenra moved on towards the celestial centrepiece, her eyes glowing bright like the star she thought to ‘liberate’.
The invaders that built these weapons had truly mastered their system, titanic metal loops running around the burning star, all meeting up and linked together at a planet-sized pyramid pointed directly at her own worlds. The metallic rings circled the fireball in concentric patterns, star stuff being drawn up and channelled along them towards the peak. Kenra’s focus faltered, the panic of billions flittering into her mind before she regained her composure an instant later; whatever these invaders were planning, it would cut off part of her network, and that would sting her more than any number of bombs and rockets.
The orange suns of the two systems dwarfed her, stars being among the only things that really could anymore. The pair weren’t even particularly large, as far as stars went, but while the titaness could dive into a gas giant and come out the other side mere instants after disappearing from view, the star before her appeared more as a large, spherical pond of deep, burning plasma. It looked oh so easy to get lost in.
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Stars - Kenra was rather apprehensive about the things: so chock full of heat and energy, both things that the goddess used in spades. They were quite alike her in that regard, and hardly a rotation went by without her eying one thoughtfully, imagining all that force right there for the taking. In fact, she’d almost gone for it during her first few days of divinity, what now felt as ages ago, but her slightest hesitation confirmed her faintest suspicion; that the sky held stars near uncountable -right there for the picking, it seemed- wasn’t from a lack of things to harvest them. The beings were there, nearly as plentiful as the stars they watched, just waiting for the lights to start blinking out.
The nature of what these ‘harvesters’ actually were was not apparent to her; whether their lurking in the distance was that of custodians guarding their collection, or of a pack of ravenous consumers, all waiting for another to make the first move before pouncing, she didn’t know. In any case, they seemed more than happy for the ‘minnows’ around the stars to do whatever they like, so long as it remained beneath their attention. Consuming a star would certainly catch it.
It was a rather harrowing realisation, to say the least, as faint echoes through the void reached her ears; stellar dances of aeons past, the throes of naïve new godlings finding out what becomes of an upstart. It brought more security than one might’ve thought, however. The myriad forces out on the edge of knowing seemed more than happy to leave her, and anyone or thing else, alone. As long as she didn’t make a meal of a sun and invite herself onto their stage, things seemed almost as normal. As normal as things could be when a civilisation was ready to throw their system whole at you, anyway.
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Whatever she was going to try, it couldn’t involve even touching the star; Kenra didn’t trust herself not to get carried away if she started siphoning it off, no matter how noble the intention. One didn’t outgrow all but the largest of planets by practicing restraint.
Plasmatic power shimmered along the stellar installation’s rings, world-dwarfing arcs of light in flux across world-dwarfing beams of metal, culminating in a roiling vortex pulsing above its apex; the fuel of nuclear fusion, enough energy to last one of the most magnificent of celestial objects burning for aeons, was being channelled up - soon to be out - in a matter of moments.
Two options presented themselves to her: Kenra could stay in place, rooted in the space between their star and hers, and stop the beam. She didn’t think she’d quite manage to reflect the brunt of it, a star is a star, so the only choice there would be to absorb the bulk of it, which didn’t bear thinking about. Her other choice was to avoid the ray in its entirety, and leave her empire to it. That bore even less. Without a decision being made, the rings aligned.
Kenra didn’t think for several moments, she hardly even felt, for that matter. A primal scream out into the void, and all she had left to muster was thrown into one grand gout, right into the pinnacle before her.
The flames joined the plasma with all the tumult of a wildfire meeting a dry forest, magnified uncountably. However the mechanism was meant to work, it very likely wasn’t by turning red while the outer rings begun to freely rotate further. The orange star-stuff beneath turned a very angry shade of red, as the unstoppably explosive force of its siphoning was suddenly stopped. It was as if the whole sun had gone volcanic, the built up power at its point burst forth with a jet of plasma wider than Kenra was tall. Shortly after, the small, K-type star - destined for a long, mild life spent carefully heating a small family of planets, briefly growing old and giant, before finally, quietly, fading to cinders - went supernova.
TBC