The Orckish Empire had come in force.
At the far edge of Vulpes, beyond scattered asteroids and drifting nebulae, the Fairies of the Elarisian Dominion concealed themselves within their strange realm. It was here that Emperor Kurikik led his vast armies. His presence was not from afar and he commanded at the front, aboard his own warship, tusks bared, eyes burning with wrath.
The orcs unleashed their fury. Scrap cannons fired without pause, streaking the void with storms of metal and fire. Yet every shell and beam splashed harmlessly against a barrier that shimmered like glass. The Fairy shield absorbed it all. Sparks and fragments scattered across the darkness, but no damage pierced through.
Then the realm itself began to ripple. Like a reflection disturbed upon water, it glitched, trembled, and dissolved. A moment later, it reappeared in another quarter of the battlefield.
"Spread out!" Kurikik barked. His fleet shifted formation, ships growling forward like predators sniffing out prey. They opened fire from every angle, but again the realm wavered and vanished, slipping into nothingness.
A sudden cannon blast ripped into the Orckish right flank. One of his warships was torn apart in an instant, blooming into a fireball of molten steel and charred bodies. Kurikik snarled, driving his own flagship into the ambush zone. By the time he arrived, the enemy was gone again they phased out, retreating into that elusive realm.
The Emperor slammed a fist against his throne-arm. "Cowards! They skitter and hide, striking like vermin." His generals lowered their eyes, but none dared speak.
Ship after ship was lost in this maddening hunt. Yet to Kurikik, retreat was not an option. Pride and necessity bound him. They had no choice but to keep pushing forward, no matter the cost.
The true heart of his frustration lay with the enemy mothership. The Dominion's vessel was no mere ship of metal and hull plates. It was a moving realm. To the eye it stretched five hundred kilometers across, a colossal form gleaming in the dark. But within it lay something far greater an empire compressed into a vessel.
Twenty galaxies existed inside that mothership. Entire star systems, civilizations, and the Dominion's people lived within. They had achieved the impossible: compression on a scale that defied reason. Where others built fleets, the Fairies carried their world upon their backs.
Five gates sealed this miracle, each forged from materials beyond anything Orckish forges could replicate. Were a gate ever destroyed, the galaxies within could unravel in cataclysm, exploding outward in chaos that would scour all nearby stars. To prevent this, the Dominion guarded those gates with their lives. Their mothership was both ark and fortress, designed not for conquest, but survival.
The Dominion had never wished for war. They had built this mobile sanctuary to escape the storms of the cosmos, to shield their people from chaos. But the universe was merciless. The Imperial Vulpes Empire had demanded their submission. The Fairies refused. For their defiance, the foxes unleashed wave after wave of vassal forces, pressing them with relentless campaigns until survival itself became a war.
Now the orcs were the hammer at the foxes' command.
And so the Dominion fought in shadows. They did not face the orcs head-on. They struck, disappeared, and struck again. They stole resources from the galaxy's edges, fueled their realm, and phased into hiding once more. It was not honor that drove them, but desperation.
To Kurikik, this was unforgivable. To his enemies, it was the only way.
Day by day, the battles grew more vicious. Sometimes, to escape the orcs' tightening grip, the Dominion sacrificed hundreds of ships. A clash might cost them one hundred cruisers and five hundred destroyers, burning them as offerings of survival so their mothership's shields would not be overwhelmed.
Within the Dominion's command halls, the toll weighed heavy. The energy shield of their great vessel devoured power with every engagement. To warp the entire mothership through the void required nearly a hundred large magic cores and another hundred large energy cores. Each was precious, forged from resources more rare than suns. Every battle drained them further. Every retreat bled them dry.
And each clash carved a mountain of corpses. Millions perished every time the orcs surged. Soldiers, civilians caught in the wrong quadrant, even Fairy admirals lives were extinguished in fire and silence.
Empress Aur Leaflet felt the burden most keenly. From her throne at the center of the compressed galaxies, she bore the grief of her people. She had not sought power to command fleets, nor glory in battle. Yet now she presided over sacrifice after sacrifice, forced to hurl her children against the relentless fury of the orcs.
"We are cornered," one of her admirals whispered during a council session, the glow of stars shimmering across his tired face. "At this pace, our cores will run dry. Our people cannot endure this bleeding war forever."
Aur's fingers tightened upon the carved armrest of her throne. "Nor can we kneel to Vulpes. Their chains would bind us tighter than any siege. Better to fight and vanish than to surrender our freedom."
So the war continued.
Outside, Kurikik leaned forward on his command chair, glaring at the void where the mothership flickered in and out of existence. His fleet was battered, his warriors bloodied, yet still he drove them forward.
"Break them," he growled. "Bleed them until their realm shatters. I care not how many ships we lose these vermin will learn the price of defiance."
For the orcs, it was pride. For the Fairies, survival.
Between them, millions of lives became ash. Warships burned, shields flared, and the void itself seemed to scream with the fury of the endless clash.
But beneath the rage and desperation, a single truth gnawed at both sides: this war could not last forever. Something had to break the orcs' relentless hammer, or the Dominion's fragile, phasing shield.
And until that moment came, the stars themselves would bear witness to their struggle.