Second Zerg Invasion of the United Rim & End of the Blarg Civil War
| Second Zerg Invasion of the United Rim End of the Blarg Civil War | |
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| Video | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDBason2B_w |
| Date | 316 CE - 318 CE |
| Location | Alpha Quadrant |
| Outcome | United Rim & Allies Victory against the Zerg Blarg Horde Victory against the Blarg Republic/Kingdom |
| Major Battles | |
| Combatants | |
| Faction #1 | United Rim & Allies |
| Faction #2 | Zerg Forces |
| Faction #3 | Blarg Republicans |
| Faction #4 | Blarg Monarchists |
| Faction #5 | Pisura Expedition |
| Faction #6 | Pisura27 Sickness |
After the (first) Zerg Invasion of the United Rim, the Zerg Collective fairly quickly recovered from the damages it endured, allowing it to send Zerg Leviathans to send down spores to launch infestations on Deltost and Kelt while also wrecking some space infrastructure, necessitating largescale extermination, quarantine, and evacuation efforts as Zerg 'zombie hybrids' and Zerg Infestors (which were polymorphs) , which all appeared to be quite coordinated according to HAWK's observations. Over the coming months the raids in Terrian and Chimaeran space continued, prompting the two to fight back against the Zerg which 'upset them'. Zerg Infestations gradually began to overwhelm Deltost and Kelt, leading to to all remaining people from the planetary surfaces being evacuated onto ships that were moved onto the outskirts of each system as ships flew in to bombard the infected regions, leading to largescale chaos as Zerg Mutalisks and Zerg Corruptors harassed the 'exterminators'. HAWK abducted some samples of infected Terrians, uncovering that they were essentially experiencing locked in syndrome while being puppeteered by the Zerg.
After some time, the Zerg launched a second full-scale invasion of the United Rim thru Vula once more, soon being joined by the Zerg infestations in Kelt and Deltost before launching an attack into Protoss Space near Zhakul. Meanwhile, the Blarg Kingdom began to see success in the Blarg Civil War against the Blarg Republic, prompting the Order of Ganymede to launch an expedition onto the Blarg world of 'Pisura' near the border, occupying the planet for a few weeks before declaring its objectives complete and evacuating. The Blarg Kingdom moved to reclaim the planet, but failed as an unknown 'primal' force of Blargs seemingly had occupied the planet and begun spreading thru seized ships. The CSIS provided the Blargs with all the information they had about the OOG, but the Kingdom claimed that this wasn't the OOG as they had already left, this was something else. The OOG apologised about the 'accidental leak' from Biozone-1 onto Pisura by one of its soldiers, claiming such projects would be relocated to Biozone-5 to avoid such incidents. Meanwhile in the east, the Terrians launched a counterattack against the Zerg with some success until the Zerg managed to reinforce the front, though the Protoss used this redirection to push the Zerg away from Zhakul. Despite the Zerg counterattacks, the Terrians managed to at least secure Kelt from the invaders. To the west once more, the Blarg Kingdom and Blarg Republic signed peace to collaborate against the 'horde', utilising a superweapon known as the 'Turbulence Storm' left behind near Oueste-Glar by the Sollurian Empire to contain the Horde, knocking out the power of a majority of the spacecrafts used by the Blarg Horde, preventing their further expansion westwards at the cost of destroying the weapon. The OOG claimed that it would resume communications after it had completed an antidote to the outbreak, before cutting off communications to a worried CSIS and Accord, now fearful that the OOG was developing bioweapons.
HAWK decided to study the sickness that seemed to afflict the Blargs, studying it directly and implanting it into a couple Zerg on Sorona to see what would happen, leading to the afflicted individuals entering a 15-minute-long comatose state before waking up disconnected from the Zergs' hivemind and attempting to forcibly infect other individuals, though they were euthanised before they could get very far. As the Zerg adapted to the sickness under the oversight of a Zerg named Abathur, it stopped being capable of properly assimilated them and appeared to work more like rabies, with a strange absess of liquid in their respiratory systems that didn't behave how it should, seemingly reanimating dead bodies under its control. Abathur synthesized a personal antidote as he observed the infected, leading to one of them lunging at him and biting him, seeping the fluid inside. Abathur tried to cut out the fluid, but it didn't behave like a liquid and remained inside, suggesting that instead of being a normal fluid this was an organism designed to hijack other beings, slowly overriding Abathur as his mind went blurry and his lungs began to struggle, prompting him to mentally contact The Overmind and warn it of the 'organism' capable of reanimating dead Zerg and how it was now afflicting him, which the Overmind was thankful for and promised to birth a new clone of Abathur. Abathur closed his eyes and ceased to be as a new incarnation of him was born elsewhere while the sickness briefly claimed what remained of his former body before being destroyed by acid, with his new body quickly getting to work on developing an antidote. With the fear of the Blarg Horde and the sickness infesting it spreading, the Zerg advance in the war stalled, with only minor Zerg advancements in Protoss & Terrian space (such as the fall of Vula to the Zerg) occurring for some time.
The 'Blarg Horde' officially 'organized' itself into a cohesive entity, a network of gradually emerging and coalescing hivemind-like structures composed of zombified infected, though this wasn't 'formed enough' to really do anything yet. The Zerg demanded to know why HAWK had infected them, to which HAWK stated that it could 'take them back' if it wanted, which the Zerg insisted that they wanted. Abathur released another antidote designed to destroy nerve-endings into the sealed chamber containing the infected, though it appeared ineffective as they kept aimlessly wandering around in a trance-like state. Abathur believed that he could cure it with a 'counter-disease' and delayed the withdrawal, dispersing the counterpathogen to kill all much of the disease in them as it could, though 'curing' appeared to be impossible as the disease was essentially puppeteering corpses without a 'normal state' to go back to, leading to the infected gradually reanimating after the counterpathogen had run its course. HAWK arrived to extract the infected, with a HAWK craft hovering above and unleashing a swarm of black objects which shred through everything (aside from Zerg drones) in their path, completely enclosing the room containing the infected and pulling it upwards thru a tractorbeam towards the craft, where it was taken inside into a shielded compartment once it made contact with the underside of the ship, allowing the black objects to re-enter as the ship warped out of the system.
HAWK began its analysis of the infected, placing them in a sealed chamber in the Containment System, providing them with water vapour, organic matter, and metal, which they didn't react to, so HAWK mimiced the atmospheric composition of Sorona and introduced light, which they didn't react to due to not sensing any infectables, as the only lifeforms they could access were bacteria which they weren't interested in. HAWK thus deployed a 'bio test subject', a large quadrupedal organism with very basic locomotion and environmental awareness skills via chemical receptors which it was being guided with, all together resembling a 'dog-like' creature without any of the distinctions dogs would usually have, as bio test subjects were incredibly basic organisms bred exclusively. The infected remained inert for a short time before pouncing and biting the organism to infect it, so HAWK decided to send in robots into the chamber to see its reaction, which it ignored, so a flying bat-like organism was sent in which the infected targeted and assimilated. HAWK then decided to try testing how they responded to different environments and temperatures, but not much else conclusive was found.
After years of fighting, the Zerg kept trying to up the pressure in the Zhakul area, forcing the Protoss to retreat closer and closer to Zhakul and mass their forces in the region, distracting the Protoss enough to greatly threaten their other opponents which prompted the CSIS to join the war against the Zerg. Meanwhile, the Zerg managed to assimilate a Human with Human Psiosis, causing it feelings of hoping for salvation and fear from a vision. Thousands of Anti-Zerg ships (mainly Protoss) launched an attack into Zerg Space in a sudden ambush which forced the Zerg to halt its attacks, while HAWK initiated a series of 'battle simulations' in order to try to predict how engagements and the war at large would go, which appeared to lean towards the Zerg due to their vast numerical superiority leading to the CSIS/Protoss attack to appear as a suicide mission, though this didn't take into account that the CSIS had a 'incredibly powerful artifact' without knowing what it'd do when used. The Neuvum Combine attempted to help the fight by sending in its own ships to glass planets from all angles with Vyalumin Lasers, with limited effectiveness. CSIS and Protoss forces quickly reached the volcanic planet Char, capital of the Zerg Collective, where they began immediate (even if quite haphazard and often botched) landings near The Overmind, freaking it out. The invasion force managed to consolidate and take out most Zerg air defences placed on infested orbital platforms created by whoever had previously owned the planet. Ground forces began flooding the networks of tunnels created by Nydus Worms to allow the Zerg to move around with lava, disrupting their logistics enough for the invaders to advance towards the main hive cluster, though the resistance was too great and they were pushed back to the point of nearly being wiped out until all of the sudden a Protoss carrier appeared under the command of a High Templar which used his connection to the Khala and the ship's core to turn the entire craft into a bomb, driving the ship into the Overmind itself to kill it in a massive explosion which disorganized the entire Zerg Collective into chaos, forcing the Zerg to flee back into their own territory as they were effectively eliminated as a threat in one fell swoop, allowing the CSIS (Who went back to the Jupiter standoff) and Protoss to withdraw safely even if the Neuvum Combine couldn't retake its old worlds.
