Republic Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
As the Sword had laid the One Sith and their Empire low, the Shadows of the past began to stir. Once thought beaten through the efforts of the many, the insidious Vanguard - bereft of their beloved Leader - had slowly risen from the ashes of their myriad defeats and begun marshaling what remained of their forces on the fringe worlds of the Federation. They were preparing for the end, either their own or that of the Alliance.
Today, as the red sun rises, One would finally find their place among the stars.
“Warmaster,” The word hung heavily in the silence as it slithered past Furion Kade’s thinly pressed lips. Beyond the high-crested glasteel windows, the radiance of distant stars hung in sickly folds of ionic gas and near-invisible fields of dust. Clad in the ebony battle plate of the Imperial Legions, and enthroned upon his basalt throne, the Master of the Vanguard gazed into the darkness of the strategium, seemingly waiting for an answer. “This title,” He whispered, allowing the armor joints of his pauldrons to purr menacingly as he rolled them with casual grace. “It weighs heavily upon my shoulders.” Furion, Kade. Father, Son. Enemy and Friend. All were lost beneath the burden he now bore, rendered insignificant by that one - important - word. Withdrawing his gaze from the shadows, he turned his fiery gaze towards the blackened iron arms of his command throne. His topaz-flecked eyes danced across the length of the arms, only to fall upon the glittering bronzed hilt of the sheathed sword at his throne’s side. The bejeweled surface of the scabbard was the half the length of an average man, easily eclipsed in the palms of a mighty iron-clad giant. Yet, beneath its immaculate surface lay the forged malice of dreams long forgotten. Silvered steel, honed to a killing point. It bore the name, Stormfury, and was tempered into a Gladius from the heart of a fallen star. He had accepted it from the Lord and Master of the Vanguard, before that man had met his untimely end, leaving him with the sole command of what remained of their combined forces. The ghost of a smile curled upon his lips, as obsidian clad fingers touched the eagle-headed pommel. “The Master never spoke of what it meant, only the boundaries of authority that I dare not cross.” The smile began to fade, as his mind filled with the lingering echoes of the distant past. “A dangerous word to leave unquantified.” As the ashen revenants of an era long denied to him roused themselves from the darkest recesses of his mind, Furion’s lips began to curl into a wolfish snarl. “Perhaps, he sought for me to learn of its meaning. Perhaps, he couldn’t care what such a title meant, as long as it freed him from the burden of command. Perhaps,” He paused, flicking his gaze once more to the canvas of infinite night that lay before him. “Perhaps, he did not know what it meant for his dreams of an Imperium Reborn.”
Furion roused his resting arm from the throne and held it aloft in the broken silence before him. A pillar of holographic light filled the cavernous chamber, bathing his surroundings in the soothing hues of crimson and gold. The silhouettes of men and women materialized in the flickering projection, shouting for allies that would never come, twisting in agony as one by one they were laid low, dying when the relentless advance of the enemy marched atop their still smoking corpses. Their wordless pleas and horrified screams looping over and over, as the thunderous cracks of plasmatic weapons discharged into the cavernous silence. He knows now; Furion said to himself as he nodded in affirmation to his thoughts, as the reflective light of the hololithic display flowed across the liquid bronze of his eyes. “The fire was lit,” He said as the display shifted and changed, morphing from one massacre to the next. “And all that was is cast into the wind.” Furion smiled as the image changed to that of his greatest foe, the one whom he never faced in battle but had heard of through the stories labeled across her many triumphs. “We are committed, you and I,” The armored figure said, stalking forwards to grasp the projected cheek of the disfigured Hapan. “The last dregs of the Vanguard, the tempestuous might of your beloved Federation. We are all bound together in this circle of blood.” His pearlescent teeth glittered darkly as his gauntleted fingers drifted ever closer to the woman’s projected neck. “Your Alliance will fall by my hand!” His armor clicked and whispered, as the sharpened points of his fingers had clenched into a taloned fist. “And in its ashes, shall rise the true Imperium. One not clouded by the machinations of the Sith or those embraced by Chaos’ seductive kiss.”
The hulking figure gestured again, and more cones of holographic light flickered into being, painted the darkness of the chamber with a sickly ruby radiance. Turning into images with blind faces, some screamed with words, blood, or smoldering embers spilling forth from their yawning mouths, while others had droned on in their lifeless, monotonous voices.
“... They’ve broken through…”
“The Sanctuary Pipeline is the Key…”
“... A Serpent strikes, whilst the Lion sleeps…”
“Omega has failed…”
“... is lost…”
Furion inclined his head, listening as these voices spoke of dreams long dead, and futures unrealized. “All is blood,” the Warmaster whispered, “The howls of change.” He paused, allowing the shrieks of his bound Knights of Ren to wash over his senses. “Anarchy is this Era’s King. We fall apart, and everything the Master has strived so hard for will spill from our fingers - spinning into oblivion.”
“... Despite everything, She lives!”
As more and more cones of golden crimson life bloom into being, Furion turns from the display before him and watches as the hollow chamber fills with dancing lights, flaunting hundreds of messages from every corner of his imagined Empire.
“...An entire Battlegroup interdicted near Fondor?”
“The Enemy was waiting for us?...”
“Belsavis was supposed to burn in silence so that our war could be won without the Alliance knowing. Astarii’s life should’ve been taken, leaving her broken corpse at my feet after Bpfassh.” His tone became more menacing, emanating with the sound of an avalanche rumbling within his armored breast. “Still, failures come tumbling one over the other.” Furion’s anger rose, pouring into his veins like freshly spewn magma from an erupting volcano. “It never ends.” He tried to stem the tide, to force himself to calm, but as he opened the gateway to the pressing tidal wave of emotion - it engulfed the entirety of his being. His taloned fingers slashed outwards, snatching one of the floating projectors within his grasp. Without even blinking, he crushed the stunted droid, scattering it’s broken remains atop the polished obsidian deck.
Sighing heavily, as the simple act of destruction had closed the floodgates surrounding his raging heart, Furion turned his attention to the undulating tide of flickering images. With a splayed gesture of his dust flecked fingers, the throng of conal projections vanished, allowing the silence to blanket the cavernous chamber once more, as the shadows returned to take their rightful place by his side. The Warmaster slowly shook his head, as his molten bronze eyes re-focused upon the throne. It was there, upon its basalt edges, he had seen the ghostly impression of the man that had commanded the entirety of the Vanguard. The hooded figure beckoned that Kade step closer, as he always did during their formative years. Ignoring the urge to relive the glory days, Furion stood his ground, grasping the edge of his scaled cloak to purge his bladed fingers of the droid’s ashen debris. “You would say I listen too much to the paths yet to unfold, that a war fought solely within the shadows was doomed to failure.” He shrugged. “Perhaps you would be right. The Knights of Ren do not see all, and their blindness places the dagger at their own back.” Furion chuckled, as the ghostly figure leaned further into the throne that it had once called it’s own. “Heh, the Sith would not have made such an error. Strange, is it not? That those I had once wished to stand beside me, now stand against me - whilst those that I command, are weak and flawed.” Dropping his gaze from the ghostly figure, and looking into the depthless surface of his armored palm - Furion continued with his sorrowful monologue. “I am a Master of Broken Men.”
Slowly, the Warmaster began to circle the command dais, the sound of his mechanized steps echoing into the blanketed silence. “Which such creatures, I must carve out our future.” His pacing had carried him around the basalt throne thrice before he stopped - reaching out into the dimly lit chamber and fanned his fingers around the hilt of his named Gladius. With an almost menacing ease, he lifted the sheathed sword from it’s resting place, permitting the thin luminescence from the glasteel viewports to dance across the worn metallic scabbard, catching every notch and battle scar. “One battle. A dozen. One Hundred! To bring about a new era. All the certainties of the past torn down. All the beliefs that made them turned to smoldering ashes. War on every front, stretched across the relentless strides of time, until none could know when or where the final blow would be struck.” Withdrawing the blade from its iron scabbard, the sound of embedded whetstones honing the edges as it made its ascent screeching in the silence, Furion cast the bejeweled casing aside and held the Gladius before him. “The Storm rises, only so that the Thunderbolt may fall.” He looked once more to the throne again, shaking his head sadly. His arm relaxed, and the fibrous bundles of artificial muscles lowered the point of Stormfury to the shimmering deck. His eyes shifted, looking past the throne towards the rack that lay beyond. A row of polished skulls dipped in bronze, glared back at him. The hairline fractures that marked their passing were brought to the fore by the molten metallic glaze.
“Perhaps, that was why I was chosen.” He whispered, letting his words dance with the ghostly echoes of those that he had slain just days before. Then, his bronzed eyes hardened into focus, staring at the lifeless sockets of the skull that mounted the center of the display, like the gaze of some unforgiving sovereign. Even reduced to flesh-spare bones and glossy enamel, the Skull seemed to radiance a mocking aura of defiance. “That is what it means, Brother,” Furion said, tightening his grasp over the textured hilt of his blade. “That’s why I was chosen to lead, to bear the title of Warmaster.” Pointing the tip of his blade towards the remains of his fallen comrade, the hulking figure smiled darkly. “That is why I live, and you mount my mantle. For I have the strength, to do what must be done…”
It was then that he turned from his grisly altar, peering out into the infinite ocean of bespeckled night. A shadow loomed just out of sight, announcing its presence to the man shrouded in steel. It was the first of many that had gathered to his flailing banner and should victory be claimed this day; it would not be the last.
Furion turned towards the distant door, scant seconds after the metallic shell had parted. Bathed in the light from the command deck, a Soldier stood with his arm raised in salute. Without waiting to be addressed, knowing the import of the words that spilled forth from his mouth, the Imperial Officer addressed his Warmaster with a tremulous voice.
“The Alliance sir,” He sputtered. “They come!”
With a booming laughter filling the chamber, he turned away from the Officer and dismissed him with a casual wave of his bladed fingers.
“Let them,” The Warmaster said, making a meal of his words. “Let them taste the Fury of my Last Command.”
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Objective One: His Last Command.Denied the counsel of his enigmatic leader, Furion Kade, a former Grand Moff within the One Sith Empire and now the Master of the Vanguard has begun mustering his forces in the skies above Bomis Koori IV. Anchored in high orbit, hundreds of sleek Imperial-grey warships await their Lord and Master's command, setting out into the darkness of the empyrean to finally crush the upstart Federation at its source, and slaughter the Scions of Skywalker - ultimately closing the last chapter in that benighted epoch. Stop them at any cost, for if they succeed and destroy all that the Alliance has worked so hard to build - the Only peace we shall ever know is that of the grave…
Objective Two: Copper Sun.
The world of Noe’ha’on was steeped in infamy, for those that called this jungle planet their home were renowned across the galaxy for a culture of slavery. As the Federation’s military had begun to move into the multiple sectors compromising that segment of the universe, though who bore the quill - rather than the sword - would find themselves battling against everything that the Alliance stood against. How would they act when this species had stood the test of time, against all that sought to change their wicked insectoid ways? Would the quill turn once more into the sword, or would this world find itself on the cusp of a cultural revolution?
Objective Three: The Coin of Many Faces.
Kriselist. Eight centuries ago during the apex of the Galactic Civil War, the Galactic Empire had seen fit to teach the rebellious inhabitants a lesson which they would never forget. Dozens of stark white wedges within the clouded skies would bombard the world, glassing much of its surface and turning a majority of the insurgent population to nothing more than ashen echoes. Despite the devastation wrought by their would-be oppressors, the Rebellion survived. As they clambered from the ruins, they were embraced by the loving arms of the Rebel Alliance and slowly rebuilt over the course of that galaxy-spanning conflict. Now, mirroring the events of the past, the Vanguard - rogue elements of the One Sith and the First Order - have scorched the earth with the fury of their warships, leaving the Phoenician world much like it was then. Will the Federation and their beloved allies follow in their ancestor's path, and help the citizens of Kriselist rebuild?
Objective Four: Down the Darkened Path I Wander.
There are many worlds within this segment of space, and many stories yet untold. Settle yourself down by the fire, and tell us all a mighty tale.
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