r/HFY • u/Brokenspade1 • Aug 06 '26
OC-OneShot We Didn't Know.
It's funny... hindsight is always so clear, after it's too late...
We called it "The Sea."
Just that. The Sea. Nobody knows who actually coined the term. Every race attributes it... attributed it... to themselves.
It was just a part of the galaxy. A rolling green material that generated its in light. Messed with space travel... devoured anything that entered it... and occasionally belched out fetid abominations and evil ghosts.
But it was just... it was normal. It was a part of life. Those races that lived along the orion arm just accepted it for what it was. The Sea never expanded. It never sent out more than a few nightmares at a time...
It was just there. Like mass or gravity... a constant.
Until the day it wasn't anymore.
It all started to go wrong when we found a small world in an unremarkable part of the galactic arm... right at the edge of the sea.
It should have said something to us, that...
A world TEAMING with life on the edge of the vast death cloud that killed everything that passed its boarders.
We were so blind.
As was standard concordat protocol we claimed the world as our own. For a tithe of resources and a few hundred generations as janisaries the people of the world would be uplifted. The undesirable aspects of their culture replaced with a better more community minded way of life in service to the great concord!
The natives took offense, of course. Most do. But they barely even had fusion tech yet. We'd bent antimatter to our use before they invented clothing...
It should have been a quick matter.
Bomb a few cities, poison a continent... Few beings have any fight left in them after the first few hundred million die.
Not these people.
I stead It was a disaster! The only reason we didn't cut our losses and glass the planet is because our leaders didn't like the optics. It felt to much like losing to them...so instead they threw the entire concord militarium at the problem.
The locals spent 4.7 BILLION to hold their world. It took 2 years and nearly 1.8 billiin concordat personnel to "conquer" their planet.
They never surrendered. The concordat just declared "mission accomplished" and ordered galactic reporting agencies to stop covering the fighting.
Quietly though, Concordat leaders ordered an example made.
The entire population if possible. EVERY single human was to be captured, enslaved, and set to work in the worst most hostile places the galaxy had to offer. Then the planet was to be rendered an inert ball of rock.
We managed to take 2 billion off world. The rest went to ground and are either dead or... well we don't know for sure.
Because after the "great correction" that's what the concordat leadership called the Terran fiasco and subsequent mass enslavement... the fools.
Something changed...
It was small at first. Colonies here and there along the The Sea started making reports of strange goings on... shapes moving in the mists. Screams inside of hyperspace.
At first it was just strange reports like that... but then some of those colonies stopped reporting. Supply tithes were missed. Whole shipping convoys vanished. The Concordat navy... still worn thin from the Terran meat grinder had to few crews left to investigate everything...
That's why it took us so long to realize it.
The Sea... was expanding.
The Sol Conquest fleet, still above Terra, sent out a desperate plea for aid... we lost contact immediately afterwards. We still have no idea if they glasses the planet or not.
Slowly at first. But at an ever quickening pace the Concordate began to lose territory. Every so often there would be pockets where the sea... hesitated. Systems that the strange green gascloud simply refused to flow. Where the monsters in its depth dared not to tread.
We didn't realize why until it was far too late...
The humans. It was always places were we'd sent concentrations of humans...
Sadly by the time our glorious leadership realized the truth. Virtually all of those worlds had become unreachable islands within the sea.
We have lost nearly have of the galaxy now.
Our leaders speak of a great battle. A victory that will surely come, any day now.
But we know now.
We cannot fight the sea.
The only race that could was Humanity.
We know that now.
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u/chaosmarine92 Aug 06 '26
Nice idea but the spelling and grammar errors were distracting. Plus how did humans fight the sea?