Great Multiversal War
The Great Multiversal War started on 22nd September 2020 and lasted for about forty years. There is no event in the history of the multiverse that's more important than it - it was during that war that the Dark Lords were overthrowned, and the multiverse was seeded with sapient, and not instinctually homicidal life. Defeat of these eldritch abomination is certainly a positive side of the war - but there are also negatives.
While the war has ended almost 3000 years ago, the wounds left by it are still fresh in some parts of the world. Unexploded ordnances are still sometimes dug out, secured from entropy by ancient magic. There are even some autonomous weapons who failed to notice that the war has ended, though thankfully most of those were cleaned up by the Dominion during its Golden Age. Still, every decade or so some superweapon is detonated somewhere, or is unearthed and used as a bargaining chip.
What's more, the legions of the servitors - the defeated servants of the Dark Lords - were never wiped out fully, for by the time they started to spawn from the background magic again, Mankind no longer possessed the will or resources to reshape the Reality to the point needed to eliminate them. As a result, they are still prowling the countryside today, so many years after their defeat (while still following the ancient orders of their Dark Lord).
The war might have ended - but it can still kill you.
The Conflict
Prelude
There was nosignificant 'prelude' to the war, a major contributing factor to the massacres of the first few days. A handful of scientists did noticed some of monitoring devices spread around the world showing nonsensical readings (due to soon-to-arrive foldspaces starting to warp reality around the breach point), but they were still in the process of figuring out what was happening when the war started for real.
Deployment
The war started with hundreds of 'dungeons' (known later as foldspaces) opening throughout the world, each of them immediately unleashing tens of thousands of servitors with orders to kill everything that moved. Due to Dark Lords limited ability to understand Mankind, the attacks were typically concentrated around major population centers, with little concern for (for example) the placement of heavy industry, logistical hubs, military headquarters etc.
It is estimated that no less than half a billion of humans died within the first twenty-four hours of the war, before the national armies managed to at least partially understand what was happening and respond appropriately (with significant part of the casualties caused by traffic jams - people fled the battlefields, thus slowing down the army deployment). Thankfully due to Earth's low mana density, only relatively weak servitors could be deployed, with mundane firearms and artillery (plus nuclear or chemical weaponry in extreme cases) turning out to be relatively successful.
While initial assault was eventually repelled, Dark Lords continued to launch more and more foldspaces, which lasted for approximately fourteen years - after that time Mankind understood magic enough to be able to construct the Reality Protection Array, a reality warping construct apable of preventing foldspaces from 'landing' on Earth. This has rendered Earth safe from attacks, however continuous reality warp on this scale was slowly raising the mana density, forcing the UN to sanction a counterinvasion in order to eliminate Dark Lords before the Earth will get 'magic' enough for them to come (as the Array wouldn't even slow them down).
The Engagement
Once Earth was secured, Mankind began to look outward. First the Vassal Worlds were invaded, their sheer number meaning that Mankind could strike them with relative impunity (Dark Lords typically responded to those attacks too late and not enough in scope). Finally - with the Mankind's fusion of magic and technology reaching its wartime peak - invasion on the Throne Worlds was launched, which led to some truly terrible superweapons being unleashed.
Eventually, however, the Dark Lords were either killed (In one case) or sealed. The war ended in 2060 or 2063 depending on whether you consider the fall of the last Dark Lord (in 2060) to be its end, or is it better to mark the elimination (temporary) of the servitors by the newly emerged System (2063) that has concluded Mankind's mop-up of the remains of the empire of the Dark Lords.
Notable Events
2032 - First Immortals (transhuman warriors with bodies made of magic-enhanced nanomachines, capable of rebuilding themselves if as much as few square centimeters of the body was left intact) are deployed. Their usage as shocktroopers led to sharp drop in casualties of the human armies.
2041 - First Universal Assault Unit is send to the battlefield. Each of those gargantuan super-heavy tanks not only carried enough firepower to level a continent, but was also capable of transuniversal travel through their own foldspaces (making them tanks and landing crafts at once). The stalemate is broken, and the Vassal Worlds' begin to fall one by one.
2056 - ____ is killed, becoming the first and only Dark Lord who was successfully killed. It is achieved by a deployment of ____ - a reality warping and possibly sentient superweapon capable of erasing someone on the conceptual level. The result is the realm of Void. Soon after that, ____ is set upon itself, as the War Council grew terrified of their own invention.
2059 - Dark Lord of Navira is defeated following an apocalyptic battle that saw one million Immortals and one hundred Universal Assault Units square of against him and billions of his servitors. Casualties counted in hundreds of thousands, and fifty UAU's are either destroyed, damaged beyond repair or lost. This is considered to be the only Dark Lord whose defeat place and time is known to the public.
2041 - First Universal Assault Unit is send to the battlefield. Each of those gargantuan super-heavy tanks not only carried enough firepower to level a continent, but was also capable of transuniversal travel through their own foldspaces (making them tanks and landing crafts at once). The stalemate is broken, and the Vassal Worlds' begin to fall one by one.
2056 - ____ is killed, becoming the first and only Dark Lord who was successfully killed. It is achieved by a deployment of ____ - a reality warping and possibly sentient superweapon capable of erasing someone on the conceptual level. The result is the realm of Void. Soon after that, ____ is set upon itself, as the War Council grew terrified of their own invention.
2059 - Dark Lord of Navira is defeated following an apocalyptic battle that saw one million Immortals and one hundred Universal Assault Units square of against him and billions of his servitors. Casualties counted in hundreds of thousands, and fifty UAU's are either destroyed, damaged beyond repair or lost. This is considered to be the only Dark Lord whose defeat place and time is known to the public.
Outcome
The Dark Lords were slain or sealed, paving the way for the United Nations to become the Multiversal Dominion of Mankind. The 'sealed' part also allowed Mankind to create the System, reforging the magic itself to better fit its goals. What's most important, Mankind simply didn't die out - although the trauma of the war run deep, and it took more than a century for that particular wound to (mostly) heal.
Historical Significance
Technological Advancement
Mankind has managed to quickly bridge the gap between them and the Dark Lords mostly due to computers - something that the Dark Lords overlooked entirely during their preparation for the conquest. While Mankind couldn't even hope of reaching the sheer power level of the Dark Lords, it managed to beat them (to an almost ridiculous degree) in terms of mana control. By the time the United Nations began to deploy UAU's and Immortals, they could (by using extremely fast computers to make precise calculations in the realtime) achieve the same results as the servitors while using less than tenth of their mana consumption.
Soon enough magic-enhanced nanomachines were used to construct computers with their size counted in hundreds of square miles, capable of controlling flow of magic to the point where they were capable of warping Reality - creating foldspaces, or 'telling' the military equipment or resources to just start existing. A few years later, such abilities could be used by computers that could fit in the UAU's chassis. And all of that while the Mankind's knowledge of science (together with the ability to circumnavigate its limits through magic) was used to produce more and more terrible weapons of destruction.
A few examples of things developed by the UN during the war:
Reality Protection Array - A network of few thousand reality-warping supercomputers linked together, projecting a form of spatial oversight over Earth and its immediate surroundings. For as long as RPA was active, Mankind could repel incoming foldspaces simply be denying them the ability to manifest. The same couldn't be said about 'leaving' foldspaces, as the RPA could make minuscule and shortlived holes to let them go through. Immortals - Humans given another body, composed entirely of nanomachines. Immortals could (in a heartbeat) switch from one body to another, with a 'civilian' suddenly turning into superhuman warrior capable of slaying thousand of servitors with their bare hands (and even more with their weapons). Slaying them was extremely hard, as unless their combat body was completely annihilated (to the point where their 'natural' body could no long be hosted by it in its own micro-foldspace), they would simply regenerate given time. In practice, a single finger spared was enough for an Immortal to regenerate. Universal Assault Units - A combination of a multiversal landing crafts and super heavy tanks. About three hundred meters long (and two hundred high), capable of generating foldspace around itself (as 'shields', 'camouflage' or multiversal jump measure - although in the two former cases it couldn't attack from under the foldshield, and couldn't move). They were also bigger on the inside, capable of carrying a full division of Immortals or regular infantry. They came in several classes, for example: Armageddon-Class UAU, considered to be a self-propelled artillery unit. Lacked a turret, and instead had fifty missile silos build into the top part of the chassis. Every silo could launch a missile (with maximum range of 200km) every five seconds. Typically the missiles carried tactical nuclear warheads (or something much more... creative). A single Armageddon-class UAU could saturate the battlefield in thousands of missiles within minutes - but due to limited usefulness of such conventional weaponry against most powerful servitors, they were used mostly for preliminary bombardments to decimate the regular enemy troopers. Retribution-class UAU, used throughout the war but mostly replaced by the Punishment-class by the end of it. Retribution UAU carried a magnetic accelerator in their turret, capable of firing solid rounds of immense firepower - when fired towards solid ground, the resulting damage was comparable to subterrenean detonation of a nuclear warhead. Thankfully, its firepower could be set to a significantly lower level, preventing it from acidentally damaging a Vassal Worlds with every fire. Punishment-Class UAU, considered to be the gold standard during the last days of the War. Each of them possessed a turret armed with graser - a laser equivalent using gamma rays, that's many times stronger than normal laser - capable of melting a hole through a mountain the size of Mount Everest with each salvo. Without magic, a graser on that level would have promptly melted the tank itself. [REDACTED] - Mankind's Dark Lord-killing superweapon, some sentient entity capable of devouring or annihilating concepts. It was used to kill a single Dark Lord, resulting in their Throne World ceasing to exist on the cellular level, while altering Mankind's memories concerning it and its servants (if you saw on of its servitors kill someone, you remembered the death, but only saw an empty void when the servitor should be). It was considered to be a step too far, even for the UN, resulting in the weapon being promptly turned against itself, and getting erased on a conceptual level as well.
Reality Protection Array - A network of few thousand reality-warping supercomputers linked together, projecting a form of spatial oversight over Earth and its immediate surroundings. For as long as RPA was active, Mankind could repel incoming foldspaces simply be denying them the ability to manifest. The same couldn't be said about 'leaving' foldspaces, as the RPA could make minuscule and shortlived holes to let them go through. Immortals - Humans given another body, composed entirely of nanomachines. Immortals could (in a heartbeat) switch from one body to another, with a 'civilian' suddenly turning into superhuman warrior capable of slaying thousand of servitors with their bare hands (and even more with their weapons). Slaying them was extremely hard, as unless their combat body was completely annihilated (to the point where their 'natural' body could no long be hosted by it in its own micro-foldspace), they would simply regenerate given time. In practice, a single finger spared was enough for an Immortal to regenerate. Universal Assault Units - A combination of a multiversal landing crafts and super heavy tanks. About three hundred meters long (and two hundred high), capable of generating foldspace around itself (as 'shields', 'camouflage' or multiversal jump measure - although in the two former cases it couldn't attack from under the foldshield, and couldn't move). They were also bigger on the inside, capable of carrying a full division of Immortals or regular infantry. They came in several classes, for example: Armageddon-Class UAU, considered to be a self-propelled artillery unit. Lacked a turret, and instead had fifty missile silos build into the top part of the chassis. Every silo could launch a missile (with maximum range of 200km) every five seconds. Typically the missiles carried tactical nuclear warheads (or something much more... creative). A single Armageddon-class UAU could saturate the battlefield in thousands of missiles within minutes - but due to limited usefulness of such conventional weaponry against most powerful servitors, they were used mostly for preliminary bombardments to decimate the regular enemy troopers. Retribution-class UAU, used throughout the war but mostly replaced by the Punishment-class by the end of it. Retribution UAU carried a magnetic accelerator in their turret, capable of firing solid rounds of immense firepower - when fired towards solid ground, the resulting damage was comparable to subterrenean detonation of a nuclear warhead. Thankfully, its firepower could be set to a significantly lower level, preventing it from acidentally damaging a Vassal Worlds with every fire. Punishment-Class UAU, considered to be the gold standard during the last days of the War. Each of them possessed a turret armed with graser - a laser equivalent using gamma rays, that's many times stronger than normal laser - capable of melting a hole through a mountain the size of Mount Everest with each salvo. Without magic, a graser on that level would have promptly melted the tank itself. [REDACTED] - Mankind's Dark Lord-killing superweapon, some sentient entity capable of devouring or annihilating concepts. It was used to kill a single Dark Lord, resulting in their Throne World ceasing to exist on the cellular level, while altering Mankind's memories concerning it and its servants (if you saw on of its servitors kill someone, you remembered the death, but only saw an empty void when the servitor should be). It was considered to be a step too far, even for the UN, resulting in the weapon being promptly turned against itself, and getting erased on a conceptual level as well.
Start Date
22.09.2020
Ending Date
2060-2063
Conflict Result
Decisive Victory of the United Nations
Belligerents
United Nations of Earth
Dark Lords
Strength
Approx. one billion soldiers and volunteers (although typically less than 1/5 of that at the same time).
Three to five million Immortals (data inconclusive).
1000+ Universal Assault Units.
350 000+ tanks of various pre-UAU classes.
Unknown number of other hardware.
Numerous autonomous weapons (including combat robots, nanomachine swarms, etc.) and unknown number of superweapons (in a world where nuclear weaponry started being considered a conventional weaponry).
Unknown number of servitors, estimated on around one hundred billion at the start of the hostilities. However only a fraction of that invaded Earth, and when the assault was repelled, the size of the territory they had to secure meant that the numbers were only slightly tilted in the Dark Lords' favour.
The exact power level of the servitors varied, with the strongest needing firepower capable of levelling mountains to even scratch them.
Dark Lords themselves, with their power level unknown and data about battles classified. At least one of them is said to have destroyed fifty Universal Assault Units on their own before being put down.
Casualties
Approx. five billion inhabitants of Earth, including no less than three hundred million soldiers and volunteers.
Approx. 735 Universal Assault Units.
Unknown number of smaller hardware.
Total eradication of the servitors for a period of about three centuries (and with the strongest ones not showing up again to this day).
Dark Lords either killed or imprisoned by the System.
Objectives
Defense of Earth during the early stage, crushing the Dark Lords' dominion during the Vassal Worlds Campaign, and finally elimination of the Dark Lords themselves during the Throne Worlds Campaign.
Conquest of Earth and extermination of human race.
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