Trillionth year in the Terrestrial count.

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A year of respite, a year of good intentions. We had hoped to remember it as the first, eternally happy chapter in the chronicle of the universe; a story that would otherwise still be tossed about by interspecies cosmic conflicts or the collapse of entire ecosystems by artificial hands. Those and other plagues were supposed to be behind everyone by now, locked away in the drawer of bad memories… It was not divine design, nor a chain of providential events, that drew the curtain on those ill-fated millennia: we had the means, and therefore the responsibility, to change things. We did it, but clearly it wasn’t enough… It is as if our reality is condemned to meekly follow the plots woven by the cosmos, except that every thread of that vile tapestry leads straight to ruin. The Invasion of the Myrmekonids is the scourge that, as of today, seizes our hopes and feeds them to oblivion without the slightest remorse.

How it all began is hard to pin down, and of doubtful interest anyway. Whether they slithered out of Satan’s rectum or from some laboratory makes no difference. We only sigh for the return of that peace; stagnant though it was, fake though it bordered on being. However, it's what we had chosen ourselves. In the name of that peace, billions of lives set out to confront the threat, to cement a fragile ideology of the good… They tried to cheat fate, that tormenting one-way street of damnation. The death toll? Billions. The weapons detonated against the enemy? Roughly twice as that, and still we couldn’t so much as scratch the exoskeletons of those titanic, towering beasts, let alone their primal form…

The Megapede.

The first sightings of Megapedes were reported when it was already too late on the tiny planetoid Ehb, located in the remote Cepheid Tangle. The local scientific community did not give due weight to the data concerning the anomaly in the firmament—countless variable stars that had appeared overnight. The military, for their part, were reluctant to draw conclusions; their dogmatic distrust didn’t help. They refused to blame faulty monitoring equipment or weather conditions, as the astronomers and various researchers had done, yet in the end they too fell for the fatal notion that those flashes of light were nothing more than the radioactive remnants of orbital mines detonating naturally at the end of their preset lifespan… Against all expectations, it was the common people—thanks to their primal instinct and unfiltered perception—who first grasped the truth. What had appeared in the sky were eyes. Myriads of eyes, closing in fast. And once that became clear to the entire population, dodging the worst was like trying to dodge the water in a tidal wave. Pathetically futile. When twilight put a full stop to a day that, mere moments earlier, had still seemed ordinary, the clouds turned a rancid green. Massive chitinous humps loomed over the roofs of villages already ablaze, and through the ash-gray pall of smoke writhed a swarm of hairy legs. People were further terrorized by the staggering sight of the segmented colossus simultaneously crushing two bastions under its own weight: Gorda City in the northern hemisphere and Dyna Town in the southern. That was the work of a single specimen; imagine what happened when the rest of the invaders landed on hapless Ehb… Commenting on the absence of that little planet from modern star charts would be rather superfluous.

Unfortunately, that episode was not an isolated incident; it was merely the springboard to a daily occurrence. People are exhausted. Only the children are left who haven’t yet shouldered arms. The animal-rights activists and tree-huggers who once preached pacifism have already done so, and they’ve become shadows of their former selves. Soulless husks who, even if the war were to end, could never get their future back—because they’ve already sold their spirit.

A change is needed… You.

Teach those Megapieces of shit who’s in charge.