No wall is impenetrable. Given enough time they will all break. The result may not be what you desired, but any barrier raised can and will eventually give in, if not to entropy, to attack. That was what the thinking behind Chris’ attacks were. Every day, every hour, the Krizian Empire fired their newly acquired beam weapons at the walls that Jason had raised to protect The Free Nation, believing that eventually the power of his ever increasing armaments would overcome the shield the wall emitted and, once through, blow apart wall itself.

Jason wasn’t worried. By his calculations it didn’t matter how strong the beams would become they could never get through the shield. The Free Nation could outpace the development of the Krizian Empire, either by exploiting Debris’ civilization system or by relying on their own skills to make breakthroughs to make their shields stronger. To even pose a chance at overcoming the shield the Krizians would have to increase the periodicity of their attacks, just to overload the first layer. By the time that the second layer was breached the first would be restored. That didn’t mean that Jason was just going to take it easy and assume there was no threat. He continued to push for improvements in every area that he could think of and would be of some use, but there was only so fast they could go. Each new technology and idea introduced needed time to be digested. Every element had to adjust and adapt. It wasn’t like you could just take an idea from Earth culture and plop it into Debris without any modification to make it work. Most of the preliminary infrastructure that was there and needed on Earth simply wasn’t on Debris which made some of the simpler ideas much harder to do to point where it was a near impossibility while the more complex technologies to implement on Earth were so simple that they were overlooked or just felt awkward when they were used to the Humans that knew how to use them.

Things progressed at a quick pace for The Free Nation, but these issues slowed the process by severalfold. Repeatedly, they’d put off implementing an idea that would help them, because they believed it would take quite long time to build and be prepared for that step. Take things like an internet which on Earth required cables laid, satellites to be built, or broadcast stations with line of sight, all of which would take time and resources, planning and manpower that couldn’t be spared for something that would be useful but they could do without. They’d declined to even attempt to develop such a thing until someone pointed out that whatever the Debris seemed to give free access to a technology that required none of that. They just needed some sort of display, data storage device, and network protocol to run on nodes that could be mass produced and carried on a person’s body or placed in their homes. No wires, no towers, no satellites.

On the other hand, simple things that Humans took for granted they’d always have access to or could easily make if they had to just wasn’t that simple to do. The aforementioned cables, for example. On Earth you could light a fire, put a penny in a pot, and wait to get some copper which could be used to make some comper wire. Need an insulator, by some electricians tape and wrap it around. It wasn’t the most elegant of solutions, but it’d work for most things you’d need if you were forced into that situation or were just that cheap. On Debris there wasn’t anywhere to really get metal. There was some, but most of it came from the dispensers as part of something else and you weren’t able to order a lump of whatever metal you wanted so far as anyone had found. So plans were made for laying cables, ditches dug, an adequate amount of the material was found, and then all the devices had to be taken apart, complex chemistry had to be performed, and still you wouldn’t get the type of copper that could be used so easily, and that before considering the need of insulation and that the type of cables Humans had grown accustomed to for their needs were actually pretty highly specific alloys that needed to be mixed in precisely the right amounts which sent the Free Nation’s engineers down the path of building precision tools forgetting that they had no way to measure using Earth standard units ultimately making the project fairly futile. This is the type of thing that Human ideas had repeatedly and in the end, it helped teach the others, but that could be done more efficiently and without the hundreds, if not thousands of man hours that would be wasted in such failed attempts at simple things.

These delays and logistics began to take over the majority of Jason’s time, distracting him from thinking about the strategies that were needed to defeat the monsters at their door. As the years passed and Chris didn’t attack more than the hourly beams, Jason began to believe that he had worried for nothing, that he had created some ultimate defense or Chris really didn’t want the war, but rather just to put an act for his subjects. Jason had forgotten many of the lessons from the novels he had loved to read. He forgot about the persistence of some people. He forgot that Humans who acted like Chris could never leave well enough alone. One day Chris would figure something out, or perhaps one of his lieutenants or descendants. It didn’t matter which, just that the natural order of things called for it to be the case, and Jason was no longer prepared mentally for that day. That day came on a cloudless day when the guards on the wall lazily yawned as they watched the light show they had grown accustomed to.

A caravan approached the gates from the Krizian side. It happened from time to time. Travellers coming from the few settlements that had avoided being taken over by the Krizians or whom could travel through their territory without fear of being enslaved by the Krizian overseers. It wasn’t very difficult that traveled on foot as the crops would provide cover for them, especially at night. Each of the plots of land that were being worked were manned by as few as possible with fewer guards to report to even if the travellers were seen and that is if any of the common laborers were broken enough to report the traveller if there was no harm done to their plot which many weren’t. It would cause them more problems to report anything than it would be to just stay silent, pretending that they had seen nothing.

The main gate of the wall woke up and went into action to check on the caravan. They wouldn’t be allowed into the Free Nation without confirmation that they weren’t carrying anything dangerous nor were they known agents of the Krizian Empire. For the guards, everything was going as expected. However, all along the wall people had walked up to the wall, unseen. The shield only activated against beam weapons and large scale physical threats. Small organic creatures like most species found on Debris could walk right past it and up to the physical wall. It was designed that way with idea that one day, maybe, the two civilizations could still become allies and have friendly relationships. Jason didn’t much think there was any threat to the physical wall even if an enemy could get through the shield, after all, the ARMS material was nigh impenetrable by anything other than itself and it would require quite a big weapon or a very persistent enemy to get through a regular wall of the stuff, let alone a several meter thick wall. He wasn’t being arrogant or overconfident in his idea. It was just that, realistically, he simply had too much to take into consideration and think of to consider every possibility, let alone the darker places that mankind has gone in the past to get the job done. Despite everything he had heard of Chris and what he’d tried to do to him, Jason believed that they had to be, at best, exaggerations. There was no way that the guy he’d known back on Earth would sink to those levels, no matter how twisted he’d become in the intervening years. In this Jason underestimated the depths of evil that men unbound buy rules who have a thirst for and derive pleasure from power were would sink. The reality, no one Debris was really ready for the type of person that Chris had become, even the Humans that had read about and known the depravity that their species had wrought upon each other in their history. It was all just history, or displaced some several thousand miles from them, and had no effect on their lives. They could never truly understand or believe it as they had never lived it nor experienced any real aspect of it.

The people by the walls, they came from every species that Jason had met so far on Debris and some he had yet to, had gotten there thanks to the slothfulness of the guards who had long since stopped paying attention to ground troops. Even if they the guards had been looking, the beam artillery was fired at just the right time and duration that it would have blinded the guards to their approach and to see them once the weapon had stopped firing on the shield. No one would take them for a threat if they were to see them, but the guards might have fired on them to attempt to drive them away. It wouldn’t have mattered to them. As if they were controlled by one mind, triggered by an unheard signal bell, each of them dropped to their knees and raised their hands to sky the sky, each speaking the words, “Oh Lord Kriz let me be of service to your will,” and then each ripped their clothing from their body revealing that they were each carrying hundreds of ARMS devices, before throwing their bodies at the wall with the ARMS devices held in front of them seemingly in an attempt to get as many of them as close to the wall as they could.

Across the length of the wall each and every ARMS device that the people had been carrying began to glow brightly as they shook, chattering against each other and the wall. Each of the people holding on glowed, as if they were being made of light for a fraction of an instant and then they were just gone, vaporized by the ARMS devices exploding. Their bodies were of little consequence to the explosions, but it a small bit of it that would escape away from the wall was redirect back towards it, intensifying the blasts by just that small percentage point more. When it was all over, the wall still stood in some places, but every where the bombs had gone off the all life and the walls that shielded it ceased to be. There were some chunks that survived, but it had no support from the rest of the wall, nor were they connected to the ARMS devices that they relied on to regenerate, and so what remained crashed to the ground, kicking up dust in its wake.

Back at the main gate, they looked on horrified at what they had just witnessed. Their horror, however, did not last long. The caravan slaughtered all the surviving guards at the gates. The gates themselves, no longer had a working mechanism to keep them shut. It slowly swung open, inviting the Krizian menace into the Debrisian paradise that was the Free Nation.