This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/SciFiTime on 2025-05-12 18:29:58+00:00.

I thought I knew what war was. The kind of war we, the Kalrex, have waged across the stars. I have led our forces through countless campaigns, seen entire civilizations crumble beneath our might. We are masters of tactics and conquest, an unstoppable force of nature. But nothing, absolutely nothing, could prepare me for the humans.

I had heard the rumors, of course. The stories of their… ferocity, their ability to adapt, to fight back in ways that made no sense. I thought they were exaggerations. Wild tales spun by soldiers who had too much time to think between battles. But when we found them, when we finally encountered humanity in the far reaches of the galaxy, I realized just how badly I had underestimated them.

We, the Kalrex, had been hunting them for years, thinking them to be a primitive species unworthy of our attention. It wasn’t until we captured a few of their kind that we learned the truth. They were not as weak as we believed. They didn’t bend to fear. They didn’t break when we thought they should. In fact, their willingness to fight made no sense. A warrior who knows he’s outmatched, yet charges forward without hesitation, without doubt? That’s a mind I cannot comprehend.

I still remember the first time I truly understood the nature of their strength.

We’d landed on a small, uninhabited moon, the perfect place to test our new weapon, the “Containment Pods.” These devices were meant to subdue and break any sentient species with minimal effort. When we captured the first human soldier, I was certain it would be no different than any other species we had subjugated. We would imprison him, extract what we needed, and move on. That was the plan.

We tossed him into the containment chamber. The humans weren’t fighters by appearance. He was small compared to our warriors, frail even. His uniform was worn, covered in dirt and stains, nothing like the polished, elite armor of my troops. I expected him to crumble. To beg for mercy.

Instead, he laughed.

A low, guttural laugh, filled with mockery.

And then, he spoke. “You think you’ve got me?”

We’d tried everything. We starved him, exposed him to harsh conditions, forced him to endure pain. Nothing broke him. Every time he was pushed to the edge, he’d look up and smile, smile. I’d never seen anything like it. The other Kalrex warriors grew confused. And that’s when I first realized we had made a mistake. We weren’t dealing with prey. We were dealing with something else entirely.

But it wasn’t just that. It was the way he fought when they attacked. The first real combat we had with them came not in the form of a well-planned assault, but in a series of ambushes. They had no respect for tactical planning. They fought without fear, without hesitation. There was no strategy, no finesse. They simply attacked.

When they breached our perimeter, I was leading a small unit of our elite soldiers. I had expected us to outmaneuver them, to crush their resistance. But instead, we were ambushed. Outnumbered. And surrounded.

I remember thinking to myself, “This is it. This is the end.”

And that’s when I saw it, the one thing that completely shattered my understanding of warfare.

A human soldier, covered in blood and grime, charged directly at me. His weapon was crude, a mismatched thing cobbled together from various materials. Yet he moved with a sense of purpose that made me pause for a fraction of a second. He was fast, faster than I had anticipated. He threw himself into the fray, weaving between our soldiers as if he were a shadow.

I ordered my men to engage. They fired. We fired. But it didn’t matter. The human soldier didn’t stop. He kept coming. I saw one of my own fall before me, a Kalrex warrior twice his size, his body crumpling under the sheer force of the human’s attack.

And then, it happened.

The human reached me, and in that instant, everything slowed down. I had thought myself prepared for anything, but when his weapon struck, I felt something I had never felt before, fear.

I blocked the strike, but it wasn’t the weapon I feared. It was the rage behind it. There was nothing, nothing normal in his attack. It was pure, unrestrained aggression. And that was when I knew. The humans didn’t fight like any other species I had ever faced. They didn’t fight for victory. They fought for the fight itself.

The combat was chaotic. A blur of motion, violence, and death. My warriors had always been trained for precision, for control. We didn’t fight like this. And that’s what made them dangerous. The humans didn’t care about precision. They didn’t care about control. They didn’t care about the rules of war. They only cared about winning. And they would do whatever it took to survive, to kill, even if it meant throwing themselves into certain death.

It was in that moment, amidst the chaos, that I finally understood the true nature of the humans. They were not just another species to be conquered. They were something else, something that, if left unchecked, could shatter everything we had worked for.

As I stood there, facing this human soldier, I realized just how badly I had miscalculated. Our strength, our strategy, our technology, none of it mattered. The human had something far more dangerous: an endless will to fight.

I barely survived the encounter. When I was pulled back to safety, bloodied and battered, I could hear the laughter of the humans echoing in the distance.

We had underestimated them.

And now, we were paying the price.

That was the first encounter, the first taste of what humanity could bring to the table. Since then, I have learned to respect them, even fear them. They may not be as advanced as we are. Their technology might not rival ours. But the one thing they have that we will never understand is their endless hunger for war.

And that hunger, I fear, may one day be our undoing.

After the first encounter, I thought I had learned the lesson. I thought that I understood the humans, at least enough to strategize against them. But I was wrong. They are unpredictable, and their capacity for violence is beyond anything I’ve ever encountered. You can’t fight them with tactics, not the way we know tactics. Their combat style is a chaos that is both alien and terrifying. You think you have them cornered, you think you’ve figured them out, but they will surprise you. They always do.

After the ambush, we decided to regroup and adapt. Our forces retreated to a nearby system, and we recalibrated our approach. This time, we were ready. We would hunt them down, methodically, using our superior numbers and firepower. We would isolate them, break their lines, and crush them piece by piece.

I remember the day we launched our counteroffensive. We deployed our forces onto the battlefield. The human base was situated on a rocky terrain, perfect for a full-scale assault. Their numbers were small, just a few hundred scattered across the surface. It would be a quick victory, or so we thought.

We hit them hard from the skies, sending our dropships in first, followed by our ground forces. We expected them to scatter, to break under the weight of our onslaught. What we didn’t expect was how they responded. The human soldiers, wearing little more than makeshift armor and using simple firearms, stood their ground and fought.

They didn’t retreat, they didn’t flee. They fought. With everything they had.

I led the charge, pushing forward with my troops, but as we advanced, I saw something I didn’t expect. A human, just a single soldier, stood in our path. His weapon was nothing compared to the high-powered energy weapons we wielded. It was an old-fashioned firearm, primitive by our standards. But he didn’t hesitate. He fired on our front lines with deadly accuracy. The first few of my soldiers went down, hit in vital areas before they could even react.

It was a reminder of how dangerous they were, how resourceful.

We moved forward, but it wasn’t long before the battlefield turned into a nightmare. The humans used their environment to their advantage, setting up traps, ambushes, anything they could to slow us down. They fought with a brutality that we were not accustomed to. Every soldier was a threat, even the ones who seemed the most outmatched. I saw one of my best warriors, a Kalrex commander known for his strategic brilliance, stumble into a human trap, a pit lined with sharp spikes, designed to catch the unsuspecting. He was impaled in seconds. The human soldiers didn’t even pause. They simply shot him dead as he tried to free himself.

That’s when I realized how we had misjudged them. Humans don’t think like us. They don’t follow the same rules of war. For them, survival is the only rule, and they’ll do anything to ensure they survive. There’s no honor, no strategy, no holding back. Only killing.

I had always thought we, the Kalrex, were the apex of warriors. We had always been the ones to impose our will upon others. But humanity? They didn’t care about the rules. They fought because they enjoyed it. They didn’t see war as a means to an end. For them, war was a way of life. And it was terrifying.

As the day wore on, I found myself struggling to keep up. My soldiers were being picked off one by one, not by superior firepower or tactics, but by the sheer will and recklessness of the humans. They would throw themselves into the fray, knowing full well they were outmatched, but they fought with such rage that we couldn’t keep up. They didn’…

Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/1kl01oc/i_was_there_when_humans_attacked_and_i_survived/