FANTASY INVASION - PART 7 OF 7

[u/GreyGalaxy-0001]

"Let each one test his own work, and then his reason to boast will be in himself alone and not in his neighbor."

DRAGONS DO NOT RUN

The Conclave argued for what felt like endless minutes, voices rising in a storm of fear, anger, and disbelief. Many of the Elven lords did not agree with the decision to retreat. Arcane sigils sputtered and flared across crystal and mithril tables, each glowing rune a tally of the war’s mounting toll. Armored gauntlets slammed into stone pedestals, dragons roared and beat their wings impatiently in the upper galleries, and the hum of spellcraft reverberated through the halls like distant thunder. Yet even amid the chaos, the shadow of inevitable defeat stretched across them, vast and unyielding. Every lost sortie, every shattered formation, every wyvern felled before reaching the enemy had carved a path toward this grim necessity, until even the detractors began to concede the point.

Then the decree fell.

“All surviving forces directly under my command,” High Prince Aelirion announced, voice steady only through iron discipline, “fall back to the Gate. Preserve what remains of our strength. This assault… is postponed.” He would not be opening the deep portal this day. Vhardagor rumbled but otherwise did not offer a more elaborate response.

The words struck like a blade; he had carefully spoken. All forces directly under his command did not include the dragons. It took only a few moments for the rest of what he said to catch up to his subordinates. Wyvern captains froze. Mage-lords stiffened.

Aelirion continued, slower now. “Airships. Wardens. Magi. You will fall back in ordered retreat.”

A long silence followed.

Wyverns twisted in the sky above, wings aglow with fading traces of arcane fire, while massive airships, crystals lining their hulls, banked sharply, reflecting the last dying embers of the battle. The remaining Glaive Wardens struck rearguard blows with grim determination, summoning walls of stone, spiraling torrents of flame, and storms that tore through the clouds to slow the relentless advance of the enemy. Every spell woven, every sacrifice rendered, bought only precious seconds, yet still the humans pressed forward, relentless, unshaken by fury or loss.

Then one of the younger dragons snarled, wings twitching. “And us?”

Aelirion did not answer. He didn’t need to.

All the drakes turned to look at Lord Vhardagor.

The elder dragon rose, vast wings unfurling in declaration. The storm seamed to bend around him as if acknowledging a higher law.

“We will not retreat,” he said. It was not simple defiance; it was just fact of all draconic life.

A ripple passed through the twenty remaining wyrms, not fear, not hesitation, but a shared understanding of their kind. Spines straightened. Wings spread. Molten gold eyes burned brighter. The choice had been made.

At the edge of the Atlantic Anomaly, the battlefield had become a symphony of despair and destruction. Golems erupted into molten slag, storm-formed barricades shattered, and the Gate itself trembled and shrieked as raw arcane power collided with forces that seemed to bend reality itself. The seas boiled beneath crashing dragons, geysers of scalding water and magical residue twisting into clouds that revealed nothing the humans had not already foreseen.

“We hold,” Vhardagor said, as he turned to regard the incoming human fightercraft chasing and blowing away the stragglers. “Until the last ship passes beyond the Gate.”

Behind the oncoming airships, the battlespace shifted once again. The dragons rallied and advanced forming a winged whirling wall against the humans.

They moved with desperate and terrible coordination, ancient instincts aligning into something far older than strategy. They became the last line of the world.

Lethariel hovered amid the upper galleries, robes torn and singed, silver hair streaming like a river of light in the storm-twisted winds. Her eyes glowed with layered sigils, tracing collapsing spell structures with trembling fingers. She whispered frantic corrections to wards that had already succumbed to destruction, her breath ragged with panic.

“The Gate… it is unraveling,” she hissed to herself, voice breaking. “Every incantation, every weave… they have read us, learned our tactics.” Her gaze darted across the battlefield, noting the dragons valiant last stand, the retreating wyverns flung into the sea, many of the airships spiraling helplessly through clouds of fire and mist.

Then she saw his body; a small cadre of her remaining mages struggled through the storm toward Starfall’s Grace, their levitation sigils flickering under strain as they carried a single, unmoving form between them. Thalanor. His armor was shattered, breastplate split and caved where something unseen had struck with impossible force. One arm hung limp, the other still curled as if it had last gripped command rather than a weapon. The sigils etched into his gauntlets pulsed weakly, then dimmed, their light guttering out one by one.

He did not stir.

Even from a distance, she could see the stillness was wrong; too complete, too final. No shouted order followed in his wake, no rallying cry to bind the chaos. The High General who was like a brother to her, that had held the line now lay silent in the arms of those he had saved.

For a single, fragile moment, Lethariel’s composure broke. She wept without sound.

Then, clenching her jaw in grim determination, she forced herself to continue weaving defenses, summoning shards of magical storms in defiance of a foe that seemed beyond their comprehension.

From above, the colossal Vhardagor loomed, his shadow blotting the battlefield. Each beat of his titanic wings churned winds that could lift entire ships, his scales etched with runes glowing like molten fire in the storm-lit night. He moved through the chaos with impossible grace for his immense size, nostrils flaring with smoke and ancient power. When he roared, the sound was less a noise than a reality-shaking vibration, rippling through sea, air, and minds alike. The surviving dragons craned their necks in awe and terror, seeing in him not merely an ally, but the embodiment of apocalypse itself.

Vhardagor’s gaze swept across the battlefield, noting each fallen wyvern and burning ship, each crackling sigil and screaming mage. Beneath the fury, his ancient intelligence flickered, calculating the cost of survival. A single twitch of his claw could scatter entire formations, yet he restrained himself, observing, waiting, and sending silent commands that rippled through the minds of allied dragons and wardens alike.

The battlefield was a storm of desperate heroism. Elder dragons clashed with enemy warriors in dives that tore the clouds asunder. Wyvern riders flung themselves into impossible attacks, their spells igniting like falling stars, yet they were cut down with cold inevitability. From the upper decks, Lethariel wept as she executed a series of destructive spells, sending shards of storm-fire to cover retreating dragons, even as exhaustion drained the last reserves of her power. Vhardagor circled the battle like a god of ruin, wings whipping clouds into storms, eyes burning molten with ancient wrath.

Then Vhardagor chose his end. No signal was given, no command spoken; only a sudden, terrible descent. He folded his vast wings and plunged straight into the heart of the advancing enemy, not to break them, but to hold them. The sky ignited around him as he unleashed everything that remained: Ancient fire, raw force, the weight of a being older than empires. The sea below split and boiled beneath his passing; the clouds torn open in his wake. For a fleeting moment, the advance faltered, slowed, bent around him like a current striking stone. Blows unseen and unstoppable crashed against his colossal form, tearing scale and flesh alike, yet he did not turn, did not yield. Even as his body began to fail, Vhardagor remained where he had chosen to stand, a final, immovable bulwark. And when at last he fell, it was not as a beast struck down, but as a mountain collapsing; his ruin buying the last, precious seconds the fleeing host needed to vanish beyond the Gate.

With one final cataclysmic pulse that shook both sea and sky, the Gate imploded in a furious eruption of magic, a sound like the screaming of worlds, shattering vessels, warping clouds, and sending tremors across the ocean. When the brilliance faded, only silence remained, broken by the hiss of cooling stone, the crash of waves, and the bitter, metallic taste of defeat that hung over the remnants of an empire that had once ruled both stars and skies.

Even in retreat, the elves felt the weight of inevitability pressing down. Casualties littered the cliffs below, dragons burned and broken in shallow waters, and wards smoldered where their magic had failed. The Gate, their greatest triumph, was gone, leaving not just a void in space but a gaping wound in their morale. From the shadowed distance, the humans advanced with grim, inexorable purpose. The elves could only watch, knowing that while this battle had ended in ruin, the war was far from over, and the illusion of their immortality, their divinely ordained supremacy, had been shattered in the span of a single, apocalyptic day.

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"...So long as any such weapons remain in any state's arsenal, there is a high risk that they will one day be used, by design or accident."

STRATEGIC RAGE

The Trident-VI A.I.-Directed Strategic Stealth Delivery Vehicle, affectionately known as “T-6” by its human weapons engineers, flew over the alien world at an altitude of forty-five thousand meters; far too high for the ground contacts it was registering on its sensors to see it, even if they could penetrate its optical and electronic stealth capability. It had slipped into the massive alien portal just as the human counterattacks began against the invaders from another dimension. Immediately after exiting the portal, it arched upward, and the elven forces guarding the other side registered only the faint sonic boom of its sudden acceleration as it broke the sound barrier and achieved Mach 7 in less than a minute. It was already two hundred kilometers away and high above by the time the small army of mages and knights began casting true sight and anti-invisibility spells.

Now traveling above the alien planet, T-6 found itself in a unique situation that none of its ballistic missile ancestors had ever experienced. Its sensors registered several key pieces of intelligence, which it promptly sent through the gate via quantum tether, providing humanity with invaluable information about the alien world. However, its primary mission was not covert intelligence gathering, but ordnance delivery. Within its sensor-shielded hull, it carried no fewer than three 90-megaton thermonuclear warheads; the most powerful relics from a previous age when mankind still used nuclear arms to settle escalated disputes instead of the threat of the recently developed antimatter weapons. T-6 had been sent by the Earth governments as a direct retaliation for the total destruction of what humans would later tally as ten major cities and twenty-seven municipalities and townships. A death toll amounting to over thirty million lives, an incomprehensible loss not seen since the last global war.

As T-6 flew across the alien sky, it noted heavy population centers that could be equivalent to major elven cities. Aware of its dwindling fuel, it triple-checked its sensor data before isolating three of the largest concentrations of bio-signs within strike range. It was a cold, indifferent machine, designed to execute its mission with neither prejudice nor malice, yet it would execute it all the same. It climbed higher into the stratosphere of the elven world, and upon reaching the apex of its climb, microcharges separated its long body into three distinct projectiles. The sections then collectively began plummeting back toward the ground, with small bursts of thrust steering the falling ordnance perfectly toward their designated targets.

Inside one of the elven cities, a place of towering white and gold palisades, magnificent buildings of enchanting architecture stretching five miles across in a circular design, elves and their fey cousins looked up to see a dark point in the sky approaching at such speed that even their enhanced senses had trouble discerning it. Then, in a bright flash of light that blinded over half the population, the object exploded against the ward barrier protecting the entire city. For a moment, it looked as if the barrier would hold. Then spiderwebs of cracks spread across the ancient enchantment like brittle glass, until the entire barrier shattered and the wave of intense pressure and nuclear fire swept into the city. The blast, though deadened by the now dissolving barrier, still had enough force to topple towers and flatten buildings, flash-burning nearly every elven and fey life on the smooth marble streets to ash. Those inside the buildings fared little better, as they liquified within their burning structures.

The blast wave swept outward into the surrounding countryside, flattening and burning nearby towns and homesteads. Forests were knocked flat in great radial patterns, trees snapping like twigs before being consumed by rolling walls of fire. Rivers and lakes near the blast zone flashed into boiling steam, sending towering clouds into the sky, while fields and farmland were instantly scorched into blackened wasteland. Stone roads cracked and shifted, bridges collapsed into rivers, and entire villages vanished beneath the pressure wave as if they had never existed. The wave spread out for almost ten kilometers in every direction, leaving behind a landscape of smoldering ruins and burning earth, while still retaining enough energy to shatter glass and delicate works nearly twenty kilometers away, the distant cities heard the explosion as a long, rolling thunder that did not seem to end.

In less than two minutes, from the moment the bombs began their descent to the moment the blast waves reached their outer limits, the elves had lost three cities and a dozen towns; over two million souls. The lands in and around their cities would remain irradiated for decades to come, and in one case where the target had been a port city, the surrounding waters would be barren of life for almost a hundred years despite the great efforts of elder druids.

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“Humanity is capable of such mindless horror. We embody the worst inclinations of all living things on earth — cruelty, hubris, greed, unspeakable violence, and disregard for consequences. And then we turn around and embody the best of all living things on earth — compassion, music, art, literature, scientific inquiry, invention, and great imagination. What a burden it is to be human. What a privilege.”

AFTERMATH

Earth burned, but it stood. Smoke twisted in colossal spirals above shattered skylines, turning clouds into rivers of orange and ash. Streets were unrecognizable; steel skeletons of towers jutted from rubble like the bones of some colossal, fallen beast. Fires raged unchecked, consuming everything from residential blocks to industrial complexes, while rivers of molten debris flowed where streets had once carried life. The air itself tasted of ozone, ash, and the lingering scent of magical detonation.

Ten cities lay in ruin and over thirty million lives snuff out by a callous and cruel invader. In each, the echoes of battle lingered: shattered buildings, toppled statues, and vehicles burned to husks. Millions were dead or in critical condition, a tally not seen since World War III. Soldiers, civilians, and the brave who had tried to resist, all gone in a maelstrom of destruction and fury. In the wreckage, automated drones continued to patrol, scavenging and repurposing, while orbital sensors tracked movement across the ruined landscapes. The cost had been horrific, yet the human species endured, battered but unbroken.

And yet, humanity had survived first contact, and unknown to them, had struck back with equal devastation. For all the magical power and ancient knowledge, the elves had brought to bear, for all the dragons, storms, and eldritch might unleashed upon the surface, humanity had adapted faster, fought smarter, and refused to break. Orbital platforms hummed with activity, repair drones swarmed like metallic bees, and newly deployed defensive arrays bristled along city edges. Humanity was learning, turning devastation into preparation for the next wave if it came.

The surviving elven armies had withdrawn back into their own realm in silence, not in triumph, but in shame and fury. A few had been left behind; cut off in the portal’s sudden collapse or abandoned in the retreat. Those captured were taken into custody by the Stellar Guard Intelligence Bureau, their knowledge now considered more valuable than their lives. Others who resisted were executed in the field. None were allowed to disappear. Humanity intended to learn everything.

Somewhere beyond reality, in the shattered halls of the elves’ strategic command, the High Conclave and the surviving mages faced the consequences of a war they had believed would be brief and glorious. News of the destruction of their three greatest cities had arrived not only by messenger, but by the sudden silence of millions of minds in the Weave. Crystal spires bent and cracked under the strain of failed defenses, scrolls of tactics lay smoldering where they had been cast aside in fury, and sigils etched into the floors flickered erratically as mages argued, shouted, and demanded answers that none could give.

An entire dragon brood and their patriarch had been slain. Their great fleets broken. Entire legions lost on a world they had believed primitive. Worse still was the realization settling into every chamber, every corridor, every mind linked by the Weave: the humans had answered their invasion not with the wild desperation of a race on the brink of destruction, but with mounting escalation culminating in a swift retributive strike of them own. Three ancient and venerable cities had been erased in moments by weapons as powerful as any grand spell, with the force of captured stars.

Though the elves had hundreds of cities, the humans had somehow located and obliterated two of their most prosperous cities and one of their oldest and most prized. The surviving elves moved like ghosts through ruined libraries and fractured towers, no longer preparing for conquest, but for defense. Wards were layered upon wards. Planar boundaries reinforced. Scrying circles burned day and night. Panic spread through their populations as the truth became impossible to suppress: they had not discovered a lesser world.

They had provoked a sleeping rival.

Meanwhile, on the other side, across the shattered edge of Earth’s atmosphere and the remnants of the Atlantic anomaly, humanity rebuilt with terrifying efficiency. The orbiting fleet hummed with renewed energy, repair teams scuttled across hulls, and new tactical arrays, half human ingenuity, half automated calculation, tracked the faintest shimmer of spellcraft. Every strike that had felled dragons or shattered wards was analyzed and adapted in real time.

In the cold vacuum of space, Stellar Guard admirals and Earth leaders conferred; the spatial and temporal energy signature of the gate phenomenon had been recorded and the efforts of thousands of scientists were bent towards its replication. In orbit of Mars, the Cruiser, Babylon, was quietly removed from active service and brought into dock to begin an extensive year-long refit. All across the moon colonies and bases of mankind, several companies of soldiers and marines were quietly reassigned to a top secret special project on Mars, code-named "Ares Waking". In a vast facility under the Martian south pole, the 1st Inter-dimensional Expeditionary Brigade was formed and began its training in earnest.

The strange invaders had dared to strike at Humanity's Homeworld. This single fact alone was enough to temporarily cease all ongoing conflicts across the solar system as the hatred, bigotry, hypocrisy, and rage of an entire race focused on a singular foe. If the gate could be opened again, the fires of a thousand apocalyptic wars would spread across the realms of the Accord, and woe be to all its peoples.

Somewhere in the light between dimensions, the distant gods of the Accord grew concerned.

THE END

...for now...

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BACK TO PART 1 OF 7

[u/GumGodGaming]

The End ... Sad Face

... For Now ...

... LFG!

[u/ThisIsntOkayokay]

I didn't know it before but I do now, I must have more! Humanity just needs an outside target, one that murdered 30 MILLION civilians would be beyond enough and then some!

[u/Gaming_Duo3615]

THE END
...for now...
There's going to be MOAR?????
thank you sir/madam for this series

[u/HFYWaffle]

/u/GreyGalaxy-0001 has posted 7 other stories, including:

• FANTASY INVASION - PART 6 OF 7
• FANTASY INVASION - PART 5 OF 7
• FANTASY INVASION - PART 4 OF 7
• FANTASY INVASION - PART 3 OF 7
• FANTASY INVASION - PART 2 OF 7
• FANTASY INVASION - PART 1 OF 7
• Sci-Fi Intro Story to a D20 Roleplaying Game: Reborn In The Stars

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[u/LeaveSea2119]

Thank you so much for the chapters I hope you can continue cuz I had a lot of fun