Chapter 5 Learning From A Test

  By now, our species had been to many inhabitable planets and even conquered intelligent life from time to time. You had started to leave old worlds as you expanded, in an attempt to avoid spreading out too thin and having your own solar systems declare independence or wage war.

  Instead Dominians did their best to stay organized and collected as the empire moved like nomads across the universe. Earth was but a relic of the past and only a few Dominians cared to learn about it.

  Around 290 thousand years after the great extinction your species would stumble upon something strange. It wasn’t a planet or a moon, it was a ship floating in space. The entire thing looked dead and hollow and you couldn’t detect any signs of life. Once boarding the ship it didn’t look much better. The hallways were empty, but not destroyed. You were able to bring the ginormous object down to a nearby colony of yours but even your scientists were unable to figure out its origin. But one thing was certain. Whatever species it was that manned this ship before, was substantially more advanced than the Dominians.

  A few more generations passed as your most highly acclaimed scientists tried meticulously to reverse engineer it but with little success.

  While the Dominian scientists were able to decipher pieces of the ship's strange language, they doubted it could serve any use in actual communication with the species. Eventually you came to the conclusion that even if there existed a threat somewhere, they would probably never even be detected by it, nevertheless attacked. But oh how wrong you were.

  The Ti-Fe

  While the Dominian species had become incredibly advanced, large parts of their day to day life including wars were still carried out purley by biological force. It was a species who worshiped the flesh and found any modifications to it disgusting.

  But when they stumbled upon the Ti-Fe, their look on machines was put to the test.

  The Ti-Fe was a mechanical species that had a similar but different look on their bodies. While the Dominians wanted absolute biological perfection through selective breeding and training programs the Ti-Fe would reach that goal through another path.

  By infusing their flesh and bones with metals and machines, the Ti-Fe had become walking factories worth of technology. They thought just like the Dominians, that if your body wasn’t enough to deal with a problem, then that problem wasn’t meant to be solved.

  It has been speculated that their species was on the verge of achieving a sort of immortality by gradually replacing destroyed body parts with machinery.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Due to the sudden attack it is unknown why the Ti-Fe decided to wage war against the Dominians. Some speculate that they believed we attacked their ship but the real reason will remain unknown.

  The Dominian colony of Oacius. That was where the Ti-Fi’s first attack was positioned. Hundreds of ships entered the atmosphere as the small military fit population of 25 000 Dominians prepared for battle. It should be noted that the entire colony’s population also consisted of 25 000 Dominians, leaving no person unprepared for the battle to come.

  On paper the Ti-Fe may have had better individual durability and strength but due to being largely made up of metal, they were unable to recover, nevertheless regenerate tissue like the Dominians could.

  For thousands of years the Dominians had been able to capitalize on enemy fatigue, pain and fear but when facing an enemy that didn’t experience any of that, their usual shock strategies became less effective. The Ti-Fi’s shapes and forms varied from individual as each one could construct themselves to best fit each specimen.

  Oacius wasn’t the only Dominian colony the Ti-Fe attacked however. Entire solar systems could be put under invasion as they became a problem to the entire Dominian species.

  In intergalactic wars, the assailant always holds the edge since they knew where the defenders were, but the defenders didn’t know where the attackers were. Even if all of the Ti-Fe’s invasion attempts were fought off, it would be impossible for the Dominians to finish the war without having to spend generations searching for the Ti-Fe’s home system.

  Over 3000 of the Dominian’s solar systems were invaded and a little less than 500 were made completely uninhabitable as the Ti-Fe used a myriad of highly advanced weapons such as Dyson Beams or meteor manipulation.

  By the end of the war both sides had become so desperate for victory that hand to hand space combat wasn’t unusual.

  It could take months for the Dominians to simply leave a planet's orbit after so much of their technology had been destroyed. This often led the Dominians resorting to hijacking the spacecraft of the Ti-Fe by jumping from ship to ship aided by their water propulsion organs.

  The Ti-Fe were strong on their own but in truth there were only a few hundred thousand of them. Due to their low numbers, the Ti-Fe preferred long range combat while the Dominians were more adapted to battling face to face.

  In fact, the Dominians were so far ahead in their mele approach that a band of only 10 Dominians aided by graphene and nanotube shields could build up enough speed to crash straight through a Ti-Fe ship.

  But eventually the Ti-Fe would fall, like all of them. It could take up to a Dominian generation to repair just one injured soldier which was an incredibly short amount of time for the Ti-Fe, but a devastating amount of time in war.

  Their numbers would dwindle to 300 000 thousand, then 100 000, then 50 000

  to 10 000 and eventually total depletion.

  The Dominians had also taken large losses however. Their pre-war population was estimated to be around 1.3 trillion. With the war leaving them with as little as 65 billion specimens left. It wasn’t the first time that humanity had been knocked down. Only 340 thousand years ago they had endured before, and they would endure again. But now they were far stronger and organized. And they survived.

  “In the battle of flesh against machines, it was the flesh that came victorious since they could endure for longer”.