The enemy learns of another world and they come through. In truth, they don’t realize they come to a world that has abolished war.
When they come, with their arrows and their spells, they are met with rifles and gunfire, machine guns that cut them down like wheat. Soldiers rush about in camouflage and armor; better to protect against shrapnel and shock than projectiles, for a grunt may be killed a thousand kilometers from the enemy. Their rifles kill at a thousand paces without any exertion, and the soldiers can summon vicious demons more powerful than anything a mage can; mortars and artillery. For they are the soldiers of a world that abolished war.
When the enemy comes with magic and fire, armored juggernauts are deployed against them, a machine of mobile firepower and protection. Its utility lies not only in its armor, but in its ability to transport heavy firepower over significant distances at a respectable speed. A grunt can carry a bazooka, but an internal combustion engine can carry so much more. If scaled down, and can match the strength of the larger weapon, the smaller device can just as easily be scaled up. And why not? The beast is vulnerable, but so is anything in the world that abolished war.
When the enemy comes with air power, with beasts of the sky or even machines of the sky, they are met with all those who sprang from a Serbian soldier and a cold October day in France decades before; mighty guns spit fire with a buzzing roar, and great spears that hiss into the sky on a lance of light. Triple-A and SAMs, a century of finely-tuned abolishment of war from that young Serbian. All the while, jet turbines dominate the sky, those descendants of that October day, using their own missiles and mighty guns. Their power is unthinking, mechanical and bizarre; a flick of the switch opens a panel that charges a cannon that spins into action and lets loose a hail of explosive ordnance. Its rate of fire and size of its magazine are computer controlled, never to be relinquished to something as simple as human hands.
When the enemy brings their greatest spells and hordes of beasts, this world of peace, of order and abolished war will unleash all this and more. The greatest guns rain down fire through a relay of coordinates, ancient math and ancient science correcting the latest in hardware with a laser system that can put a shell on a dime from twenty kilometers away. Not all such weapons are so accurate, but on a planet that has abolished war, accuracy is in the eye of the beholder.
When the enemy comes with their best weapons, and in such force they can challenge even this world, here come the missiles. Short range ballistic missiles, standoff cruise missiles, ICBMs, SLBMs, a litany of codes, phrases, and numbers. They can rain down fire, madness, and an absurd thoughtless weapon altogether inhuman. They are launched on columns of superheated air, reactive forces on turbofans and rocket motors, weapons built for the end of all things they themselves could bring. They come with fire, they come with bomblets, they come with death and plague, all for the low low price of a million dollars and the potential end of the world. They come from submarines, ships and planes, from silos and mobile launchers, each a species with their own dialects and numbers.
One wonders why a magic enemy invades this world of peace. Perhaps it is greed, perhaps it is foolishness, perhaps a misunderstanding. Perhaps they don’t realize how violent a world of peace can truly be.
For it was another Serbian youth, who had failed in his quest to kill an old man, who ignited the powder keg that would create this world of peace. Does peace mean the end of war? Perhaps. Or perhaps peace means that war is unthinkable, but remains altogether possible.
Those from more primitive worlds might be seen as foolish. Those from worlds of chaos and destruction might be misinformed. But were they truly aware of this violent world’s peace, would it matter? Would they consider leaving the humans alone, to leave the chaos of this world in favor of an easier target?
In 1928, the world attempted to abolish war. It was viewed as foolish, viewed as naive, yet it can be argued that war has changed. The nature of war remains the same, but casus belli has become something altogether different. What would once produce a great response is now seen as political ‘chicken’.
Perhaps it is a sign that humans are growing up. Through clever ways to kill, we have found that we need greater reason to do so. Something greater than a king’s lies.