Forum:Battle of Verses

"Ohohoho, this is gonna be some REAL fun!"

- Enzok, Hand of Viznoor

The Battle of Verses was a massive and extremely destructive system-wide conflict fought between the Solar Coalition and various unaffiliated factions against the hostile alien species of the Fallen Worlds universe (an original Destiny-inspired verse created by User:Vothriks, the Lost).

Prelude: The Mysterious Rift
"Danger is looming on our horizon...I just know it."

- Dorvok, the Lightblade

The catastrophic invasion all started after a massive spatial rift of unknown origin opened on the edge of the solar system, just beyond Nessus. This rift would go unnoticed for some time, before eventually being detected by the Vex, Red Legion remnants and Fallen occupying the aforementioned centaur. All three factions sent scouting parties to investigate what could be lying beyond the anomaly, but none ever reported back.

Eventually, the feeds on Nessus went abuzz with the chatter of the rift, and word would quickly spread across the system. When news of the portal reached the Last City, several fireteams were sent to investigate the portal, but of course like all those before them that crossed through, none returned.

Fear and suspicion quickly gripped the Destiny system as speculation went wild about what could be on the other side of the anomaly. Numerous attempts were made to somehow trace the origins of the anomaly, but all were unsuccessful. Due to the fact that every party who tried to cross through the rift mysteriously vanished, some thought that there could be a hostile invasion force on the other side and made preparations to defend themselves should that be the case. This fear would only grow as it was reported that the rift began to widen.

The Looming Threat
Due to the disappearances of all their scouting parties and the sudden activity of the anomaly, the Cabal began quickly amassing an attack force to be sent through it as it began expanding at an alarming rate. Meanwhile the Fallen made preparations to flee from Nessus, and the Vex ran calculations and prepared for the worst to come. A transmission was intercepted from beyond the portal by the Tower, although heavily garbled, the Vanguard was able to determine that someone from beyond the rift was trying to warn them.

Unbeknownst to most parties, a single vessel flew out from beyond the portal into the Destiny universe, and made it all the way to Earth before crashing into the Isle of the Lost. Meanwhile some of the City’s strongest Guardians, such as The Guardian, Proteus and AJ's Host, looked into the Red Legion invasion force heading through the other side of the anomaly.

However, upon arriving, the team would discover that the fleet had already been intercepted and was under attack by an unknown threat. They boarded the flagship of the Cabal fleet and came face-to-face with the unidentified hostile aliens that were assaulting the Cabal and raiding their ships. They managed to repel the enemies and kill their commander, forcing them to retreat back through the rift. However before they did the hostiles had managed to steal a majority of the Cabal technology on the ships.

Scavenger Raids
In the following days, the aliens who attacked the Cabal, now identified as the Scavengers, breached the rift and invaded the system en masse, with raiding parties landing on all of the major planets and moons in the system, as well as a growing presence in the Tangled Shore. These Scavengers would begin engaging Fallen, Cabal, Hive and Vex, stealing large amounts of resources and technology from them with each strike and leaving them crippled.

Countless Guardians were deployed to repel the assaults, but no matter how many of their forces and commanders were killed, the threat of the Scavengers continued to persist, and seemed to only grow stronger. Scavengers would later be sighted beginning to use weapons and technology from the various factions they plundered in battle.

The Scavengers began to breach into multiple major enemy fortifications across the system, such as the Pyramidion on Io, the various Vex structures on Nessus, the Citadel on Venus, Firebase Hades, and many more, as well as various Golden Age structures and ruins scattered throughout the system. The invaders quickly took root and secured footholds in their new territories, and were resilient enough to withstand countless strikes from opposing forces and maintain a constant presence, however unwelcome.

The arrival of the Scavengers would quickly throw the system into chaos and disarray as their disruptive activities continued. Various rival factions, or ‘clans’ of Scavengers had deepened their hold into the system, constructing bases and settlements to conduct their operations from. By the time the Solar Coalition responded to the threat, they were everywhere.

Parties of Scavengers had also been reported breaching the Hellmouth and establishing a tight foothold, so much that the local Hive faced difficulties in ridding them. They also began to root their way deeper into the Tangled Shore, engaging the Scorn and claiming major territory for themselves. They had even been sighted operating in the Dreaming City and the Dreadnaught.

The Guardian would eventually be called in to investigate the Scavengers’ activity in the Hellmouth, and would discover the Scavengers that had of course set up shop there, who had dug deeper into the stronghold and even made it all the way into The Stills in a brazen move to raid the very bottom of the Hellmouth, before the Guardian, with the aid of the Taken commanded by Vothriks, interrupted said attempt and forced the Scavengers to retreat back up to the surface, after sustaining many casualties, leaving them to be dealt with by the agitated Hidden Swarm and Vothriks’ Taken.

Meanwhile, the Last City had engaged a particularly large platoon of Scavengers that had holed themselves within the Twilight Gap. They engaged their commander, Grabnog, the Greedy Claw, but the Scavengers would unleash one of their newest designs; a gigantic war mech cobbled together from stolen Cabal and Fallen technology, The Mayhem Machine. After a heavy struggle with this robot, it retreated along with the Scavenger forces it accompanied, thus warding them off from the Tower...for now.

Drovalis Invasion
"This is a plague the likes of which no man has seen before. We must act now, or it shall consume all that we know!"

- Viznoor, the Black

As the Scavengers’ presence in the system remained strong, a new threat would emerge through the rift: the Drovalis, a hive-minded swarm of plant/fungus spores that would spread across surfaces in the form of a fleshy moss, which, if left unchecked, would grow into a virulent infestation of unfathomable proportions, from whole ecosystems of hostile creatures and biomachines would emerge.

The Drovalis first made its presence known on Pluto, where upon arriving on their massive bioships, completely wiped out the Red Legion and Scavenger forces that made their home there, and overran the dwarf planet and its moons in a matter of days, transforming them into massive hives covered in organic biomass. However a good number of the Cabal and Scavengers weren’t actually killed; rather, their bodies were invaded by the Drovalis’ spores, mutating them and transforming them into zombie-like monsters under the will of the hive mind.

From there on out the Drovalis had begun to spread at an alarmingly fast rate, as it had already overtaken most of Neptune’s moons by the time the Guardians were sent to investigate this new threat, however whenever they threatened it, they were overwhelmed by swarms of spores and monsters, and were infected into monsters themselves.

The situation would only escalate even further as the Drovalis would then send hundreds of meteor-like seeder pods into the inner system, which landed on Mars, Earth, Moon, Venus and Mercury, quickly spreading the Drovalis infection upon impact. The Solar Coalition immediately responded to the threat they posed, and managed to eliminate the corruption that spread across the four planets before it could truly take root, but the assaults would only persist. The enemy races of Destiny would suffer tremendous casualties at the hands of the Drovalis with vast majorities of them succumbing to the spores and transforming into mutants.

Meanwhile the plague would only continue to spread, sending massive carrier ships to Io and Titan and deploying forces there to infect both of the moons. Parvus-4 noted that the Drovalis creatures operating on Titan appeared to have adapted specifically to thrive in its methane conditions. Massive Drovalis sea creatures were also reported to have been sighted on the oceanic moon, and they had also begun to infest the Solarium, driving the Hive out while infecting those that remained.

On Io, the Drovalis had invaded the Pyramidion, and was met with retaliation from the Scavengers and Vex occupying it. Despite their heavily resistance however, most of them would too be infected, the Vex even despite their mechanical nature as the Drovalis’ hive mind influence allowed it to take over technology. The infestation then began to turn the Pyramidion’s defense systems against the remaining Scavengers and Vex to quickly wipe them out, however the Young Wolf, along with several other powerful Guardians and allies of the City, responded to the Drovalis’ presence on Io. There, they managed to infiltrate the infected Vex structure and eliminate the source of the infection that originally allowed the Drovalis to manipulate the Pyramidion’s systems: the Festering Chord. However, this victory would not last, as it would soon be apparent that the hive still maintained a tight hold on Io even despite the destruction of the Chord, apparently remaining completely unchanged by the loss of their assumed commander. But in reality, the Chord merely aided in the Drovalis’ efforts and was not a true leader, for the Drovalis are all coordinated by a hive mind and thus do not require true commanders of any sort.

Growing increasingly concerned of the massive threat the Drovalis posed to the entire system and their ability to easily infect even the reality-warping Vex, the Taken Kell Vothriks worked with Viznoor and the Stygian Brood to develop a means of which to truly fight and repel the infestation.

As this happened, the Drovalis spread its efforts to Nessus, bombarding its surface with seeder pods in order to infect everything in sight. In response to the Solar Coalition’s repeated strikes against it, the Hive Mind coordinated the Drovalis’ efforts to spawn several powerful monsters to release all across the system, capable of facing multiple Guardians along with whole armies of lesser enemies. These ferocious creatures would allow the Drovalis to spread more quickly and efficiently while they kept their enemies occupied. They also set their sights on the Dreadnaught, sending a fleet of ships to board and infect the derelict vessel, breeding a gigantic creature to achieve this. The monster burrowed deep into the very bowels of the Dreadnaught and already began to release spores to infest it from the inside out while hordes of smaller creatures repeatedly assaulted Vothriks’ Taken and the Stygian Brood, who had moved into the Dreadnaught as of the Shadowkeeper Apocalypse. With the combined efforts of the entire Solar Coalition however, this monster would be slain and the spread of the Drovalis slowed significantly as many of them were destroyed as well.

Several weeks later, a Drovalis carrier vessel appeared over Mercury as they invaded the Infinite Forest en masse, infecting it and causing the simulation engine to go haywire. Drovalis-mutated simulations of powerful enemies ran rampant across the Forest as the Vex within battled the swarms. Hundreds of Guardians and their Coalition allies were sent in to suppress the threat before it could spiral even further out of control, but no matter how many simulations were destroyed, only more appeared. Finally, the Coalition had identified the source of the problem: an infected Axis Mind named Ladon which the Drovalis were using to gain control of the forest. Operations were immediately underway to eliminate the target, but by then Ladon had created hundreds of copies of itself that spread all throughout the Infinite Forest, forcing repeated strikes to be carried out to exterminate every single replica.

Eventually, the beasts made by the Drovalis to resist the Guardians would be destroyed and the infestation repelled back to beyond the Reef, but despite this it would yet continue to remain a persistent threat.