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tribbetherium · 3 years ago

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The Late Glaciocene: 115 million years + 5000 years post-establishment

Cry Havoc, And Let Slip The Hams Of War: The Second Great Harmster World War

It started like any foggy afternoon in the northern kingdoms of Mesoterra. And like any other day, the Decadents went about their daily business: lazily gorging themselves on worldly pleasures and reveling in the bloodsports of the arena, arrogant and confident in their own self-imposed invulnerability that had kept them safe and protected for decades.

But today was not like any prior day.

Their fierce-looking, but mostly ornamental, armed guards, posed upon their stone walls, glimpsed movement in the distance. Large, vague shadows slowly fading in from the mist, making deep, bellowing calls that echoed ever closer.

A herd of emperor rakatusks.

The massive beasts, largest of the hammoths, had never come south before, though the Decadents recognized them from the animals of the fighting pits. But here, they were slowly, but surely, making their way toward the fortified palaces of the Decadents-- but not of their own accord. For they had become the latest tools in the great conquest of the Bruteriders, now united under a single flag, and, not content with merely the fearsome Brutes they had bred, succeeded in adding a powerful new weapon to their arsenal: the biggest land animals ever to walk the planet.

Controlled by rings pierced into their noses, the rakatusks were living engines of destruction. They carried upon their backs mobile archer towers that carried Bruterider warriors armed with crossbows, their sides were flanked with dual bolt throwers and other portable siege engines, and the rakatusks themselves, with four mighty tusks and giant stomping feet, were terrifying additions to the battlefield. Far from the gentle giants that once roamed wild, these creatures were captured in infancy and trained for combat, raised solely for one purpose: mass destruction.

And on the neck of the largest rakatusk, leading the whole legion, sat none other than the dreaded Pi-Pipipupu herself.

Once the Decandents' outer fortresses had been breached, all hope was lost for them. They looked fierce on the outside, but were weak, unskilled, and cowardly on the inside. With their false facade of might shattered before their very eyes it was every Decadent for themselves, fleeing in all directions squealing in terror, while arrows rained down around them, plodding feet stomped behind them, and Bruteriders on their mounts swept through the exposed city, picking off the terrified surviviors of the first siege, while the rakatusks toppled structures and walls, goaded on by their masters. In the confusion the beasts of the fighting pits would break loose from their cages, and the fleeing Decadents would fall prey to starved and frightened predators of all shapes and sizes now running rampant in the city-- including ripperoos who were smart enough to actively seek revenge to the cruel masters who had kept them prisoner.

The Decadents' northernmost palaces had fallen, and the survivors were forced to flee south, but nowhere they went was safe for long as the armies of Pi-Pipipupu continued their onslaught. And soon word would spread that the Decadents, once thought as the mightiest of empires, had fallen, and harmsters around the world would rise up in arms at the news, and at the opportunity to do what they did best.

The Second Great Harmster World War had begun.

All across Arcuterra, Mesoterra and Gestaltia the Bruteriders would press onward as they collided with kingdoms in all directions. Smaller factions were quickly steamrolled over or assimilated, but not even the larger, stronger factions were safe.

One easy victory for their troops was against the Purebloods: the northernmost faction that had stuck to the ancestral ways of the tundra harmster. They had the minor advantage in having had experience with hunting rakatusks, but their primitive, wooden fortresses, built without the aid of the Brutes which they despised, gave them a glaring weakness against the Bruteriders' latest weapons: flamethrowers.

Built from technologies stolen from the Pyromaniacs ages ago, and developed upon by the experiments of the tundra harmsters, these weapons were mounted upon their rakatusks, turning them into living artillery tanks that quickly set the Purebloods' wooden walls and cabin-towns ablaze, forcing them out of hiding where the Bruteriders had laid ambushes. Their shooting spears and sling-rifles, that their ancestors had used to great effect against the matriarch harmsters, now proved little more than pop guns compared to the advanced weapons of the Bruteriders. As their cities fell, the Purebloods had no choice but to retreat, hiding out in small, dense camps in the northern taiga forests where the Bruteriders, the vile hybrids that they were, would not find them.

The Purebloods had thought themselves a master race, viewed themselves the most superior of all harmsterkind, and thus stagnated and bred in false perfection. But they had ignored and avoided the simplest and most vital of facts in the history of evolution: it was not the strongest of the species who survived, but the ones who were most adaptable to change. And those who could not, or refused to, change to suit the ever-shifting environment, or outcompete the ones who did, only had one future to look forward to-- extinction.

But not all the factions were pushovers in the face of the Bruteriders' invasion. As the Bruterider forces began to expand south of Gestaltia, they would run into one of the settlements of the second-largest faction: the ship-sailing Squeakwegs.

The Squeakwegs would put up much more of a fight than the Decadents and the Purebloods could. They were just as advanced as the Bruteriders were, and evenly matched them in numbers and weaponry. And their harpoons found great use, as did their skill in bringing down large animals-- albeit this time, on land rather than the sea.

With enough harpoon strikes even the toughest of rakatusks were eventually felled, as did with their tripwires woven of saberleaf, that cut into the legs of the rakatusks that, deployed right, toppled the plodding behemoths. Once a rakatusk lost ots balance it was physics that finished the job: the bigger they were, the harder they fell, and if they happened to pitch forward then it was twenty tons of solid muscle and bone landing on their face, which usually pulverized their skulls upon impact just from the sheer force of just falling over.

The Bruteriders would retaliate with their own surprise attacks: thousands upon thousands of Hound Brutes that they had bred in tremendous numbers to be unleashed upon their foes like a tidal wave of snapping teeth. Expendable, abundant, and blindly loyal to their trainers, the Hound Brutes were deployed en masse to weaken the Squeakwegs' defenses, before the armed riders on the Steed Brutes came as a second wave to target the worn-down opposition.

But the Squeakwegs were resourceful and could take advantage of a situation to turn favors around in the heat of battle. They had lived off the sea, and built their societies upon it. As such, each rakatusk felled meant a mountain of resources to them. Every loss on the Bruteriders side was a gain for them, carving new harpoons out of rakatusk ivory, stealing dropped Bruterider weaponry, and sustaining themselves with hides and flesh from fallen Brutes and rakatusks. They were the complete opposite of the Purebloods, who had refused to change. As those who made a living out of the fickle and eternally-changing seas, the Squeakwegs were ever-adaptable: and the first major resistance the forces of Pi-pipipupu would face on their vicious quest.

Indeed, the Squeakwegs were on a mission of conquest of their own, for their ability to sail the ocean on massive fleets had allowed them to settle on different continents. Though they steered clear from the southern continents for their rough seas and inhospitable climate, they would spread across the equator by ship. The settlement on southern Gestaltia that had clashed with the Bruteriders was but one colony of theirs, as two others stood in southern Mesoterra and southwest Arcuterra.

The Mesoterran Squeakwegs would arrive at a time when the local Decadents were at their weakest: the siege of Pi-pipipupu's rakatusks had driven them further south, unable to resist the coming of an empire genuinely threatening unlike their own, which had been all bark, and no bite. Their southward retreat would take them out of the frying pan and into the fire-- they would run into the Squeakwegs, who were just as eager as the Bruteriders to give the hedonistic, cowardly aristocrats a taste of true military might. With harpoons, lances, and bombs made from flammable blubber oil, the Squeakwegs would finish the job the Bruteriders had started, and soon the Decadents, softened by illusions of their own percieved impenetrability, would be finally stamped out by those who truly knew how to fight.

The Arcuterran Squeakwegs, on the contrary, would struggle with another occupant of their original homeland: the metal-smelting Rockcookers who now spread well across the central desert and mountainous regions of Arcuterra where minerals were abundant to mine. While the Squeakwegs specialized on flexibility and resourcefulness and the Bruteriders focused on sheer offensive might, the Rockcookers held up on durability and inventiveness: rather than simply taking advantage of whatever situation they found themselves in, they found ways to actively swing the odds to their favor, with strategies planned in advance, and weapons, armor and tools that allowed them to last longer in battle from new materials like iron and glass that they forged themselves to make better material mediums. They did not merely take and use what they found in the world around them: they made their own.

In the midst of the mayhem, as five of the major factions clashed against each other in a battle royale of the ages, the sixth would be drawn out in the darkness of night by the scent of fresh blood spilled: the vicious, primitive, monstrous Frazettas, who were once an empire themselves, who like the others sought to make themselves the greatest army of all, by commiting unspeakable acts to their prisoners and Brutes to partake of their genes and make themselves stronger, fiercer, larger than ever before. And they succeeded too well, for their might came at a price.

The genes bred into the Brutes by their earlier slavemasters selected for lower intelligence: and the Frazettas would end up taking this too, becoming too feral and savage to even manage advanced society until they fell into barbarism. They, as primal freaks of nature, proceeded to roam the wilds and feast upon the flesh of their fellow harmsters as cannibalistic predators that skulked in darkness, driven away by the advanced weapons of their still-thinking kin and prey, subsisting mostly on nighttime raids and on the abundant feral Brutes.

But now they were far too busy fighting each other to notice the Frazettas slowly encroaching into their territories from all directions, taking advantage of their distracted state to fill their ravenous bellies with more easy food than ever before. The Frazettas, now primitive, joined the war not for conquest, or glory, or ideology. They, in their reduced minds, still barely self-aware and sophont but now devoid of higher abstract concepts like beliefs and society, entered the global melee with only one reward in sight: fresh meat, and lots of it.

And none would be so dreaded as one distinctive albino Frazetta who terrorized the fragmented Purebloods who had been driven away from their land by Pi-Pipipupu's forces. Known to the refugees in hushed whispers as "Berry-Eyes Snow Clump", he was the worst nightmare of the Purebloods made incarnate. He was not only among the wretched hybrids, but of that one faction whose monstrous mutation into gruesome beasts was the Purebloods' fears come true, and he was, even further, born with a genetic imperfection that was culled among the Purebloods' young and would have doomed any creature with a lack of camouflage and sensitivity to sunlight, but survived nonetheless as a nocturnal hunter who vanished into the white snow of the Arcuterran tundra and taiga. He was a freak among the freaks among the freaks, and was treated by the Purebloods nearly like some kind of supernatural abomination-- a title that he lived up to with a body count numbering in the hundreds, and a rank as a pack leader by his sheer size and ferocity, one usually reserved to a generally-larger Frazetta female.

But the Frazettas, even as they chomped and ripped and slaughtered their way through the fringes of the warring armies, were no match for superior minds. They would migrate eastward in search of food, but would eventually run into the Rockcookers: a group known for resilence and invention, and were among the most scientifically inclined of the harmsters, even if they, in true harmster fashion, used their knowledge for violent means. They too would find the towering, five-foot cannibals on their doorstep, and would suffer significant losses from their war against the bloodthirsty giants of the icy north for a few weeks-- but quickly, the tides would turn.

The Rockcookers, even with the dual pressure of clashing with the Bruteriders during the day and fending off the Frazettas at night, would nonetheless come up with strategies to combat the new menace. They were active schemers and plotters always analyzing and observing their enemies and terrain as opposed to simply throwing as much force at the opposition as the Bruteriders did, or scrounging for scraps and improvising on the fly like the Squeakwegs. They planned ahead, and soon learned to exploit a weakness in the Frazettas that all harmsters possessed: short forelimbs.

To smaller, more civilized harmsters, this was of little consequence, as the use of polearms and ranged weapons, as well as agility, negated this physical flaw. But to a lumbering hulking goliath like the Frazettas, limited to crude clubs at best, this was a blatant opening for the Rockcookers to attack: through strategy and teamwork they could distract them and clamber up the backs of their necks, where their short arms could not reach, and easily piercing the weak point where their skull met their spine to kill them instantly, with especially-made sturdy lances, far less risky and more efficient than the other factions' typical strategy of dealing with a Frazetta-- throw everything at it until it eventually goes down.

This resilience and tactical analysis would give the Rockcookers an upper hand in holding out in the war, even as the Squeakwegs from the south added to their woes as a third faction pressing at the Rockcookers' ranges. Their strategy would allow them to endure, to adapt and overcome, and even, in the north, put an end to the monstrous reign of Berry-Eyes Snow Clump, whose pack had cleaned up the fragmented remains of the Purebloods' empire, but were just as vulnerable to their newly-discovered weakness than any other Frazettas.

This strategy of planning ahead would eventually be crucial in turning the tides of battle against the ever-growing forces of Pi-pipipupu and the Bruteriders, as their development of heavy artillery, explosives, and calculation, would allow them to counter the Bruteriders' one strong claim to power: the weaponized rakatusks. Other factions had fallen flat with barely a resistance to a massive herd of the tremendous grazers turned siege-engines, and even the Squeakwegs, who were skilled at hunting megafauna and offered the first real resistance, had to resort to persistence and plenty of sacrificial trade-offs just to fell one of the powerful creatures.

But once the Rockcookers figured out how to build powerful incendiary weapons and launch them with maximum accuracy, the rakatusks, even armed with a squad of archers, flamethrowers or bolt launchers, could barely even get close. They, with their ability to tear down walls and seriously damage defensive infrastructure, were priority targets in the siege: and were aimed at first from a distance to deny the Bruteriders a chance at even breaking in. A well-placed strike directly at a rakatusk's head instantly reduced the mighty beast's powerful skull into flying chunks of flaming flesh and shrapnel of bone and tusks, that managed to cause significant damage to the other nearby troops as well, and for the rakatusks that bore fuel tanks for flamethrowers, they were ticking time bombs, as their payload exploded when struck by artillery, decimating the rakatusk, its riders, and nearby troops in a powerful blast enough to even bisect the rakatusk if its load was big enough.

The Bruteriders had not prepared for this. Their strategy was tried and true, to use the rakatusks to break into defenses and let their riders and Hound Brutes swarm into openings with sheer numbers. They had relied so much on offensive force with very little strategy, and now this one sole tactic was falling apart faster than the craniums of their rakatusks, for they had only counted on several hundred of them, as nigh-invulnerable machines of devastation, and now they were quickly being picked apart with no easy means to replenish their forces, as taming and training the rakatusks was a long and difficult process, and there were not many of the megafaunal herbivores left. Their entire plan had hinged on the idea that virtually nothing could stop a rakatusk, until there suddenly was something that can.

And it was in this last-ditch battle against the Rockcookers that the dreaded Pi-pipipupu, The Scourge-Tail, The Hooded Death and Bane of Wombs, would finally be felled in battle, as she, in all her glory, would have her great rakatusk mount struck down in one such battle with the Rockcookers and their raining fireballs from above, arrogantly charging into battle like she always had in all of her prior conquests. In the resulting explosion, her one remaining good eye would be pierced by shrapnel, and her leg would be fractured and impaled upon hitting the ground: a dooming injury for a harmster.

Pi-pipipupu had many grevious wounds before, but not to this extent. Now left completely blind, crippled, and unable to stand up or walk, her legendary fame, her unstoppable might, her legendary conquests, now meant nothing to the survivors of the Rockcooker battle. To them, she was now just another of the weak, another of the wounded, another burden to their legions that could no longer lead them. And despite the desperate shrieks in protest of the legendary commander, defiant to the end, struggling to rise in her personal darkness in spite of the pain, the rest of her legions would abandon their fallen leader, turning tail, disappearing into the distance, and leaving the broken warlord to the mercy of the chernadogs that roamed Arcuterra's grasslands.

Chernadogs, unlike harmsters, were not cruel by nature. They were merely instinctive animals that did not intentionally revel in pain and suffering, and sought only to keep themselves alive, and provide for their families and their hungry offspring.

But still, they did not hesitate to partake of fresh, defensless meat--even if it was still living.

With the loss of their leader the Bruteriders would fall apart once more into disarray, and split apart into several infighting groups as the higher commanders of the immense legion struggled to fill the power vaccuum. And while it seemed at first that the Rockcookers had won the war, the disjointed, decapitated armies of the Bruteriders would briefly prove more deadly than ever, with their uncoordinated, haphazard, random attacks taking a toll on the tactical faction who analyzed strategies with such precision now having to deal with pattern-less attacks with scarcely enough time to prepare. The Rockcookers were technically victors, but at a massive cost, and even with their inventions, weapons, and ingenuity, would be left in disrepair with them having underestimated the death throes of a dying army.

In the end, nobody truly won a war no more than they could win a hurricane. The aftermath of the Second Great Harmster World War was a somber one, as millions of corpses lay decaying on the battlefield, casting the stench of dead rodent for miles and miles on end. To the harmsters, this was a monumental loss and a blow to their arrogance. To the rest of the creatures that inhabited this world, however, it was a boon: scavengers by the millions, such as ratbats, zingos and bumbaas would gather in great numbers to feast on the bounty that lay strewn about in quantities more vast than nature could ever provide.

The harmsters had been victims of their own hubris: they had seen themselves as the pinnacle of evolution, and that the world was theirs to use as they saw fit.

But in the end, they would find themselves at the mercy of another species descended from the hamster: a species far more derived, and far more removed from their basal ancestry, than anything else that had ever evolved on the planet.

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#speculative evolution #speculative biology #spec evo #speculative zoology #hamster's paradise

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