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Captain Hazalk marched through the halls of The Emperor’s Will, his plasma rifle cradled in his upper arms, its once reassuring weight now feeling meaningless compared to the weapons his human escorts carried. He eyed them with the experienced gaze of a veteran, and everything he saw impressed him. They were light, compact, and simple to use, which completely belied just how utterly devastating the ‘primitive’ weapons were.

That was the thing that had surprised Hazalk the most about the humans. They supposedly came from a pre-spaceflight society, but their ground tactics and weapons met, and in some respects surpassed, the best that the Krin Empire had to offer. That’s not to say that what the emperor brought here today equaled his full might during the height of his power, but if what Alexander said was true, the humans didn’t exactly bring their best toys to the field, either… Hazalk thought to himself uneasily. I think maybe we took a wrong turn when we salvaged that downed starship during the third epoch...

He looked back down at the rifle in his hands, its bulky, flashy appearance a gaudy counterpoint to the weapons carried by those around him. The last time a krin soldier had used powder-based weapons was when flintlock muskets were being used by Calivar-Thranii to conquer the known world, he thought to himself as he tried to imagine what a krin-made kinetic rifle might look like. How much more would we have found about that line of tech if that Kelmian starship hadn’t crash-landed into the Ilivan army? Would the Empire have risen to power at all? What else did we miss on our foolish quest for dominion?

https://www.fimfiction.net/story/325354/44/what-i-am/chapter-xliv