Note: This is only the first chapter, which sets the context and describes the world I will tell the rest of the story in. There is no action here as of yet; but there will be in subsequent chapters.
It had been several decades since the Creatures had first appeared on Earth.
Their arrival was sudden, as swift as it was overwhelming. Emerging from giant, swirling portals too strategically placed all over the world to have been coincidental, they swept into Earth's populations, killing, capturing, and expanding their controlled territories. Their deceptively primitive technologies, infused with otherworldly magic and powers, proved to be a match for, and sometimes even outclassing the weaponry of Earth's militaries.
Countries formed alliances. National feuds were shunted into the background and forgotten as the people of Earth banded together, casting away all grudges and prejudices as they struggled to defend their planet against the Creatures' relentless onslaught. Almost half of the planet had been overrun by the time the combined military might and technology of Earth could develop strategies potent enough only to just contain the Creatures' advance, and the deuce continues to rage over the years.
The Creatures did not come unprepared. They must have had been watching Earth for a long time before choosing the right moment to invade. Changes in the environment, from subtle to striking and attributable only to the Creatures' unnatural intervention, had manifested themselves since their arrival. They must have known that even with their supernatural abilities, the Earth's high-tech military would possibly prove to be more than a match for them. That advantage had to be stolen first, to ensure an unchecked advance. And ever since the Creatures' arrival, all digital technology and nearly all electrical technology and machinery either refused to function, or did so with severely reduced functionality, as if a planet-wide electromagnetic field had been laid over the Earth's atmosphere. The Earth was forced back to the Steam and Industrial Age, relying on purely mechanical means to live and fight. Thankfully, vehicles and firearms still functioned normally, but the loss of Earth's technological edge had inflicted severe impairments to its military capabilities.
Almost all of Earth's men had sacrificed themselves in the clashes with the Creatures at the start of the war, managing to inflict severe losses on the Creatures' armies. Yet they kept coming, and the proportion of men eventually grew so dangerously small that girls and women had to take up arms in defense of the planet, with the precious few men who were left now kept out of life-threatening combat as much as possible to preserve the human race's reproductive abilities, making the vast majority of the Earth's fighting forces female. Inevitably, due to the weaker physical capabilities of human females as compared to men, large numbers of female soldiers are lost on a daily basis in battle with the Creatures all over the world.
Yet this, it seemed, was all a part of the Creatures' plans, as they had identified and use human females as a source of sustenance and reproduction, turning girls and women into a heavily used resource for them. Hence, forcing the human race to use females in the military brought them out of protection, and easily available for the Creatures to capture and use. And the fact that large numbers of female soldiers die in battle regularly was rectified by yet another of the Creatures' interventions; ever since their arrival, the probability of a female baby being born is now a shocking 90% as compared to that of a male baby, and the gestation period for a female baby has been drastically shortened to five, instead of nine months, causing the birth rate of girls to strongly spike.
The loss of the use of advanced technology renders Earth's scientists unable to study and explain this disturbing phenomenon, but it is undeniably the work of the Creatures, as it works perfectly in their favor; the low combat capability of the human females allows them to be easily killed or captured, although the large numbers of girls being born ensures that they are always easily replaced, and the human military is never wanting for recruits – in many cases there are in fact too many. It is also undeniably far from coincidence that the Creatures have analyzed human beings' perception of attractiveness, as all of the girls who are born grow to be extremely attractive and beautiful, in an obvious attempt at encouraging human reproduction to produce more girls for the Creatures' usage. The small number of male babies being born ensures that humans continue having the ability to reproduce, while never having enough men to risk in combat.
Such is the plight of the human military that the life expectancy of the standard female soldier is no more than a mere twenty-two years. Both genders begin schooling at the age of four, and military knowledge is introduced into their curriculum when they are twelve. All girls are then enlisted into the military at the age of fourteen, and are trained for two years before being sent out on their first missions. Boys are given a choice of whether to enlist or not, although most do, and are typically trained for leadership and strategic roles. Teenage pregnancies are common, and girls who turn pregnant gain some leave from military duty while they carry their babies. Nevertheless, most of the girls will be killed or otherwise captured in battle before their twentieth birthday; for a girl to survive beyond twenty-five is exceedingly rare.
The primary weapon utilized by the human armies is the Libretto Mk-II carbine, a fairly lightweight, semi-automatic, musket-shaped rifle with a magazine that holds seventeen rounds. Accurate and reliable, it requires little maintenance and is easy to carry around, making it suitable for females. Grenades are also employed, and are typically fragmentation grenades - smoke grenades were initially used in an attempt to cover escapes or confound the Creatures' aim, but it was quickly discovered that smoke was completely ineffectual in marring the senses of the Creatures. Close-combat squads carry a steel sword and a pistol, while sniper squads carry a modified, scoped but heavier version of the Libretto called the Libretto Javelin, with much longer range and a higher caliber.
The brand of warfare used by the Creatures has also been something the human militaries could never adapt fully to. Over the years of fighting each other, humans have become accustomed to fighting with and against firearms, and being heavily reliant on technology. Now, robbed of those capabilities and faced with an opponent using a completely different genre of weaponry, along with the unique powers they possess, the humans are more than once left at a loss of how to combat their adversary. The Creatures' weapons are extremely unconventional, and obviously perfectly adapted to fighting human females.
There appear to be a large variety of different types of Creatures, with no particularly dominant Creature type. No form of leadership or direction seems to exist when the Creatures engage the humans in combat; all the Creatures have abilities fairly specific to their role, and all of them appear to know exactly what to do and how to best utilize their weapons and powers. And new types of Creatures seem to appear fairly regularly, each as deadly as the last.
The massive, two-meter tall Walkers, sturdy creatures resembling muscular, orange skinned men, yet with no visible genitals or facial features, with strange pockmarks all over their bodies and a featureless face. Their skin is so tough that regular rifle bullets fail to cause significant injury, and it takes over ten rounds to merely slow a Walker down, and another ten to permanently put it down. Although they typically move relatively slowly, they can put on sudden spurts of speed that can keep up with military trucks, and their arms and legs are strong enough to rip a girl's body apart with their bare hands, or kick a truck onto its side with no apparent effort. Usually seen advancing in a line of unstoppable muscle, the Walkers are likely the meat shields of the Creatures' armies.
In stark contrast to the Walkers are the Goblins, little green-skinned humanoid creatures with pointed ears and grinning faces which heavily resemble the goblins of human folklore. Almost always armed with bows, Goblins are fleet of foot and extremely cunning, employing different strategies from guerilla tactics to sheer volume of fire in combat. Though not as durable or strong as the Walkers, Goblins are far more dangerous at range; their accuracy is extremely precise, and they seem to have an uncanny ability to predict where a target is about to move. The arrows they fire are small, and incapable of being lethal on their own, yet they are coated in a poison that has an unusual and deadly effect; on a male target, it acts simply as a fast-acting toxin, but on a girl, the poison will cause her to instantly go into a massive, convulsing orgasm. Her body becomes tremendously sensitive, with the very movement of her clothes against her skin causing her unbearable arousal. The extremely intense orgasm continues over several seconds as any sexual ecstasy rapidly turns to extreme pain, and eventually the girl's body and heart succumb to the massive over-exertion and she dies.
While the Walkers and Goblins employ more direct forms of attack, the Hunters are silent, subtle, but no less deadly. Of all the Creatures, it is the Hunters which most resemble humans; they are tall, humanoid and blue-skinned, with clean limbs and a lean but not overly muscled body, although like the Walkers, they possess no facial features or genitals. Their bodies appear to glow with a faint blue light, although this casts no illumination to the surrounding area, and faint blue mist appears to rise off them. Hunters seem to radiate an aura - which some soldiers say is related to the mist they produce - which causes all girls in the vicinity to become extremely sexually aroused. The closer the Hunter is to the girls, the more aroused they become, and the more their minds are taken over by the arousal, until logical thought is eliminated. They will begin to masturbate and take off their clothes, especially if the Hunter is in their sight. This effect also causes the girls to experience a strong sexual attraction to the Hunter, which, coupled with their arousal, makes them approach the Hunter with a desperate desire for sex, something which the Hunters willingly grant; penises grow out of the Hunters' groins, which the Hunters use along with their hands to pleasure and eventually have sex with the girls. The mind-washed girls can only helplessly answer to their bodies' sexual desires, with both their pleasure and arousal mounting. A girl entranced by a Hunter will meet her demise in one of two ways; the Hunter will either kill her in mid-orgasm with his own muscled hands or with an over-orgasm effect similar to that inflicted by the Goblin's arrows, or he will impregnate her and leave her exhausted, twitching body on the ground, where the birth of the infant Creature from inside the girl will kill her.
The Progenitors undoubtedly form an integral part of the Creatures' armies and combat strategy, as they characterize most how the Creatures use the girls - or at least, the ways which have been seen by humans thus far. Resembling a small white blob about the size of a large dog, the Progenitor can turn into a liquid form at will, allowing it to flow into the ground, vanishing without trace. While in its usual, semi-solid state, the Progenitor can extend tentacles out of its main body to entangle and ensnare a girl. These tentacles produce an extremely potent aphrodisiac on contact, and girls who are seized experience extreme sexual arousal. The Progenitor will then spread the girl's legs, pull off any underwear they are wearing and proceed to penetrate and rape them, extending its tentacles deep into the girls' wombs, impregnating them with its eggs. There seem to be no limit to the number of tentacles one Progenitor can generate, and it is unknown where they derive this extra body mass with which to produce tentacles from, but they have been reported to be able to ensnare and rape at least eight girls at once. After impregnation, the Progenitor will release the girls' bodies to the ground and itself vanish, while the girls themselves will either be already dead from the exertions or too exhausted to move; either way, the eggs implanted by the Progenitor will hatch and develop within the moist confines of the girls' bodies within hours, and then tear their way out, inevitably killing any girl who survives the initial rape.
Many more Creature types exist, and more surface as the years go by. The battles continue to rage, and some speculate that the Creatures are in fact deliberately keeping it this way, that they could overrun the Earth easily if they wanted to, but are content with the continuous exploitation of the humans on this planet and are simply toying with us. Considering the ease with which they kill the girls who fight them, that could be a very real possibility, but they do not appear to be acting on that particular advantage anywhere in the near future.
In the midst of the battles, one brave reporter attempts to document all the information ever gathered and that can be gathered in this war. A young man of twenty-five, exceptionally intelligent, perceptive, and trained in the martial arts, sets out on a personal mission to work with humanity's armies to discover the true nature of the Creatures, and to tell the stories of the defenders of the human race from deep within the rage and chaos of war. Stories which, given the brutally expendable nature of the human soldiers, are often simply lost to the whims of battle. What follows are but some of those many stories.
**Chapter 1 - End**
Thank you for reading the first chapter of my novel. I am already halfway through writing the second, so if you like my story's concept, please do check back again within the week; I will have the next chapter(s) up shortly.