In the year 2020, the large scale asteroid dubbed "Antares" passed within extremely close distance to the planet. As it traversed, fragments of the asteroid were sheared off by contact with the edges of the planet's gravitational field. Caught firmly, these fragments descended towards the planet's surface. Most of the fragments burnt up in the atmosphere and disintegrated.

A few of the largest fragments, whole sections of the asteroid's outer edges, survived entry into the atmosphere and rained down upon the surface in a display that lit up the sky. These pieces made landfall scattered across almost every continent in the world, landing mostly in remote and uninhabited areas. Subsequent investigations of the impact sites yielded no irregularities or anything of concern and thus the events were quickly forgotten.

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5 years later, in the year 2025, disaster struck the world from the very impact sites long forgotten. Swarms of unknown creatures, ranging in height from 5 metres to 75 metres, began appearing from within the regions surrounding the impact sites. Within three months, large swathes of land had been laid waste to on the continents of Ceres, Leasath and Comona.

Hastily organized joint military forces, the remnants of national militaries along with foreign expeditionary forces, were able to temporarily blunt the creatures advances but came at a great cost in lives. The precious time, bought with the blood of many, enabled the evacuation of scores of men, women and children from the affected continents.

By the time the last remnants were evacuated and the volunteer rearguard defensive lines fell to the hive two years later, three entire continents had fallen. More than twenty nations were effectively erased from the world map and 600 million people killed.

By sheer quirks of fate or luck, the continents of Verusa and Fuscum were spared similarly grim fates. The continent of Fuscum had no significant fragments of asteroid land within it's bounds and thus only suffered minor attacks by small groups of creatures which had survived the impact and subsequent sinking of their fragments.

Verusa, on the other hand, suffered several outbreaks that resulted in the deaths of approximately twenty thousand people. These losses were sustained when several rural towns were overrun during the outbreaks. These outbreaks were quickly eradicated when military forces, mobilized from nearby training areas, were able to arrive and engage the creatures.
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The United Liberation Front, an alliance to co-ordinate the fight against the creatures dubbed the Hive Agglomeration, was formed in the second year of the war by the nations of the Verusan continent along with those governments-in-exile that had been evacuated to the continent. The Fuscum continental nations, forming an alliance themselves, refused all offered invitations to join the ULF alliance and declared they would only protect their territory itself. Fuscum, however, does fund and arm governments-in-exile that fight alone, for various reasons, which is a major source of contention and friction between the Fuscum alliance and the ULF nations.

25 years on from the first attacks, only a small few coastal areas on each continent are still held by human forces, all of which are areas where the creatures cannot use their overwhelming numbers or their habit of tunneling underground to breach the safe zones.