Chapter 4 Relearning The Art Of War

  War. It was by no means foreign to your species, in fact it was something that had plagued humanity for thousands of years.

  You ritualized it and saw it as a holy act all the way through your interplanetary age. It became such a sacred occurrence that early nations did not allow themselves to utilize anything more than lightly armed foot soldiers during times of war.

  But despite your many self induced limitations, your kind did become expert hand to hand combatants which would soon come to prove vital.

  234 thousand years after the nukes, the first contact with intelligent life was made. The Gni, a tall lizard-like humanoid. You were presumably inspecting their planet’s ecosystem to prepare it for colonization. It’s unknown how your first interaction went down but we can suspect that it didn’t go as planned.

  Due to their world’s weak gravity, the Gni had become freakishly tall and slender. They possessed large colourful frills on their neck. Looking at them was like looking at one of the planet's native trees and was likely an intentionally adapted camouflage.

  The Gni was a warrior species and not very friendly and according to your records we presume that they struck first. It was a primitive but organized civilization that likely thought humanity was some sort of demon.

  And considering what you would unleash upon them, they might have had a good reason to. Humanity’s strength, durability and physical endurance had admittedly stagnated in space despite the government's attempts to stop evolution through rigorous training and gravity therapy. But they were still strong enough for only 120 000 lightly armored humans, to wipe out the entire Gni population of 14.4 million within a few decades. Considering the planet’s weak atmosphere, the Gni never had to evolve more strength than needed to move around and perform basic tasks. So when facing a species whose planet’s gravity would crush even the strongest Gni and that had been at war with itself for longer than they knew how to speak, it didn’t take long for them to go into extinction.

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  It must be imagined as a terrifying sight seeing 5 short, unarmored beings capable of levitating in your atmosphere due to small holes in their skin able to shoot out enough water to fly coupled with an unseen amount of strength and durability.

  During the first few months of the war, the Gni were able to repel humanity with a combination of ambushes and swarm tactics. But most of humanity’s losses were not inflicted by casualties, but by exhaustion. Your muscles were adapted to the high levels of oxygen that earth possessed or the colonies that mirrored it. The world that the Gni inhabited however had an atmosphere as thin as their gravity, and operating for longer than a few minutes could exhaust a human to the point of passing out.

  It took humanity over 2 years to adopt oxygen masks. Many soldiers did see it as a sign of weakness but still preferred an aided victory rather than a shameful defeat. The human troops had to on average eliminate over 100 Gni each to make up for the huge gap in numbers.

  But at last when all was said and done, you would come out as the victors.

  It had been clear that you had evolved past your ancestor’s technology and now you had also surpassed their resilience and strength. You had come so far ahead of your old selves that you weren’t human anymore. You had evolved past that, into a new species.

  You were now Dominians.

  “As their success went to their head, they separated themselves from humanity, and adopted godhood”.