While I would have liked to continue watching the videos I had acquired, I decided to put that on hold in favor of getting back to work dealing with the Dread Lords. The sooner they were out of commission, the better, and going by that logic, the less delays I had in dealing with them, the better. So as much as I wanted to watch more of the videos, it was time to get to work ramping up my conflict with them.

Mostly, this meant deliberately sabotaging their supply lines, sabotaging their colonies, mixing up orders, and generally being a thorn in their side. As is, the Dread Lords had colonized only a part of the territory they had conquered, which meant that, once it was time to invade, I could easily crush them with numbers. I was starting to get worried about how long I could screw with their forces before they would start to put up actual, if minor, resistance. See, the planets the Dread Lords had colonized were filled with factories, shipyards, and research centers, of all things. That might seem odd, but it did make sense if you knew the lore - the Dread Lords were well aware that when the universe ends, they will go down with it, so they probably wanted to find a way to abandon ship before that happened or cancel it outright...hmmm, I should probably keep that in mind.

Back on topic - all those research facilities were probably meant to help the Dread Lords either stop the heat death of the universe or jump ship before it happens, but that also meant that they had plenty of facilities to put to work examining any fragments of technology they had gleaned from me, which gave them a decent chance of figuring out how it worked and what it was weak to. I'd stopped them from acquiring any samples to work with, but knowing how Self-Inserts go, I doubted that would last forever. While Melissa would likely leave me be there, her companions might beg to differ, and I wouldn't put it past them to make things difficult for me just to spite her. I didn't think honor among thieves applied here.

While I made quite a bit of effort to weaken the Dread Lords, I wasn't yet ready to try and take their territory. I could give a number of reasons for that, but the chief one was that the Alliance was about to make a move on their territory, and I wanted to let them have a major victory so that moral would not go down the toilet. I'd do as much as I could to weaken the Dread Lords, but I'd leave taking the systems to the Alliance. Once the Alliance had made their move, I'd make mine. Then comes the glorious tech-stealing!

hmm...I wonder what Melissa was doing.

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Turns out she was launching an attack on the Drengin. A large one, too - she was directing invasions on ten different worlds simultaneously. I guess there were perks to being a ROB.

Her forces included armies of strange alien creatures, some flying, some swimming, some just crawling, and some using organic jet propulsion. I'd have been surprised by the last one, but as a fan of Wayne Douglas Barlowe, that wasn't really a surprising sight. Here and there were some mechanical units, namely tanks, jets, ships, artillery, and mechs of all things, but by and large the forces deployed were primarily organic, ranging from beasts no larger to house cats to gigantic monsters the size of buildings -wait, are those slime demons?

...Yep, those are slime demons. Guess I know where she got that one from.

...I really did not want to fight her. Those things were a pain to deal with.

Oddly enough, I noted that several of her units seemed to be analogous in function to some of my units. Spiderlike crawling creatures healed other beasts, just like my stitches, while particularly large fliers released explosive sacs on top of dug out positions, not unlike my wyrm bombers. Part of me felt this was deliberate.

While Melissa's forces were varied, their effectiveness in battle was not. Wherever they fought, they won, with minimal losses at worst. At best, not one of their forces fell. Those who opposed them were lucky if they got off with being beaten into the ground and forced to surrender - one army actually got eaten down to the last man. Granted, that army had used all of their slaves as meat-shields to try and get her to back off, and had killed quite a few even when she had considered backing down, so I think she just wasn't inclined to treat them respectfully in that particular situation. Still, the fury that force displayed was...frightening, to say the least.

I will say that I was impressed by how Melissa chose to lead her forces. When she launched attacks on the Drengin, she lead them personally. She actually had to use a lot of teleportation to lead all ten attacks concurrently, which was very tiring for he, but I will give her credit for not choosing to command the battle form the comfort of a nice chair. Okay, that's not completely true - she lead the initial attack, then set up a forward operating base to run the rest of the fighting from. Seeing as she had organic satellite analogues that worked just as well as a hermes, it wasn't exactly hard to set up a good forward base to command the conflict from.

According to my calculations, if she continued her aggressive conquests against the Drengin, it would take them four months to fall, and that was disregarding my contributions. With those added in, the time frame decreased to three months. I quickly got to work setting up forces to assist her in that endeavor - three months is better than four.

Now all I had to do was beat up the Dread Lords and Korx before that time was up, ideally while finding some way to deal with the Yor.

No problem.

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AN: Read and Review! This is Flameal15k, signing off!