“Incoming!”

A man suddenly shouted to his comrades. The cause for alarm was simple: a large number of Tor troops were coming upon my position, a small base on the front-lines of the on-going campaign to secure the planet of Plenare.

“To the battlements, men! Tor assault-force closing on our position!”

An officer barked amongst his orders meant for specific individuals. I am amongst the orders meant for specific individuals. My job as of now is to help protect a heavy machine gun nest from the oncoming Tor hordes. I am to use any tactic necessary to defend the nest, and so I aim down my rifle, but instead of spotting the average Tor assault-Trooper with his rifle raised and charging with fellow Tors, I see the horde, but they aren’t charging, nor have guns. They don’t even have armored support, or even their biological ‘exterminator drones’ as we call them, by their side. Instead, their arms are raised high in the air. A couple of the marching Tors were holding poles, with large, white, torn pieces of cloth—human signs for surrender.

Confused, I whisper to the machine-gunner.

“You seeing this?”

“Yeah. Maybe it’s a trick.” The machine-gunner replies.

“Not likely. Usually, when in a situation that they would inevitably lose, the Tors usually commit suicide by rushing our positions while strapped with explosives, or by just shooting themselves. There are no known events that I know of, where the Tors fake surrender in order to get close to us, and then try to kill us.”

That was the end of our conversation, as very soon afterwards, a message came over our comms:

“This is General Pong Caesar of the Sentian dreadnought, Tempest-Bound. I am pleased to announce that the last Tor King-Ship over Plenare has been destroyed—the Tor emperor, currently on the planet and surrounded by you brave men and women, has officially declared surrendered—the war is over!”

The parts of the message beyond “the Tor emperor” was barely heard over our cries of joy. Everyone along the front-line was either too shocked to speak, or too full of joy to contain themselves any longer. Some were firing weapons into the air, especially at the Continuum outpost to the north of our position, of which was lit up like a city with the blue-flashes of all types of guns.
As for I and the machine gun, we both hugged each other in joy. Within weeks, we could finally go home to our loved ones after four years of unimaginably brutal conflict. At the command center, the tables and desks, once clean, were now being rained upon—with champagne fresh from the Continuum empire.

-Anonymous ISFOS Infantryman

The First Tor War, was incredibly deadly. The campaign of Conquest carried out by the Tor's emperor had costed the Continuum tens of millions of innocent people, including soldiers. The ISFOS also suffered major losses, with millions of dead Sentian soldiers in every branch of their armed forces. The Tor casualties were unknown, but popular ideas speculate that they number in the billions, making the Tor-side having the costliest consequences.

Despite the war ending, the allies of which formed a strong bond with the ISFOS, the Continuum empire, would not settle down yet. As local forces were being depleted for the war-effort, the ability to subdue piracy and rebellion became increasingly difficult. The situation would worsen when the locals of the Fringe, seeing an opportunity, sparked an open rebellion against the core-worlds of the Continuum Empires.

The emperor, requesting assistance from the ISFOS, would not receive a reply not in the form of words, but rather in the form of carrier-fleets jumping out of interstellar travel, and settling in orbit around the core-worlds—this entire process happening in less than an hour. The ISFOS, seeing their Continuum allies as fellow Sentians rather than a separate race, wasted no time in assisting the people in which the ISFOS saw as their brethren, who fought alongside them.

The fleets would battle the Fringe and their commandeered Continuum vessels alone until the full deployment of the Seraph Class Dreadnought, in which the ISFOS would leave the Continuum to keep a stalemate.

In the meantime, while the Continuum and rebels held each other in a deadly gridlock, the ISFOS, with the approval of both Sentian and Continuum leaders, initiated a massive campaign to out-flank the rebels and assault them from behind.

As of now, the battles still rage on within the Continuum-rebel gridlock, as the ISFOS mobilizes its forces.