Shadow Empire

Civilian Flag for the Shadow Empire

***"Something's rotten inside the Shadow Empire and it is our job to tear it out."*** - 99 giving orders to Z squad

The Shadow Empire is an alien empire that controls vast amounts of the milky way. They directly appose the R.I.O.T and also appose any Mazon led by any of the snakian royalty. It was formed after Zac created the first Shadows and tried to conquer the whole galaxy.

## History

### Founding

When Zac created the first Shadows he announced the creation of the Shadow Empire with himself as emperor. He then proceeded to create a mechanical planet known as Shadow Home World which would be the capital of the new empire. From there Zac would lead his armies to conquer and subjugate all neighboring planets.

### Shadow-Exoliver war

Zac's constant warfare would eventually lead the Shadow Empire to enter a war with the Exoliver Empire. The Exolivers were fascinated by the shadows and would capture and study many of them leading to the creation of the Exoliver Shadow Hunters who would hunt Shadows in order to absorb their essence. This war would be the first major war that the Shadow Empire would fight. After eighteen years of fighting the war would end after Zac kills the Exoliver emperor causing the Empire to explode into civil war that would end with the dissolution of the the Exoliver Empire and the creation of the Galactic Exoliver Federation.

### First Shadow-Mazon war

After the destruction of the Exoliver's, the Shadow Empire continued to expand. Simultaneously the First Mazon Empire was also attempting to expand its own influence which led to boarder skirmishes between the two. The two sides would continue to fight along the boarder and conduct small scale raids against each other until eventually Zac would declare war on the Mazon and order a full scale invasion with the goal of Taking Planet Mazon. The invasion initially looked very promising and the Shadows were able to successfully cripple the Mazon star fleet. The Shadows began running into problems however when they began planetary invasions. The Mazon excelled on ground combat and were masters of defensive warfare. This led to the Shadows taking significantly higher casualties then the Mazon whenever they attempted to take a planet. The war would last for several more years until the Shadows and Mazon came to a peace agreement which resulted in the Shadows gaining control of several solar systems. Despite eventually gaining control of some of the systems they wanted the Shadows failed their goal of taking Planet Mazon and many labelled the war as a pyrrhic victory for the Shadows.

### Invasion of Earth

Despite the heavy losses suffered against the Mazon Zac still wished to conquer more. This lead Zac to personally oversea the invasion of Earth. Unknown to the Shadows however Earth had been unified by the R.I.O.T and had just finished the planetary defense system. This combined with a overconfident Shadow command who believed that humans were nothing more then primitive peoples who could not fight back caused the led the Shadows to believe that all they needed to do was a full scale orbital invasion to quickly and easily conquer Earth. As soon as the Shadow fleet arrived it was immediately shot at by the planetary defense system causing huge losses with the entire first wave of Shadows being destroyed. After several hours of struggle the Shadows managed to get through only after Zac personally shut down the defense system. Once the shadows got through they planned on landing in the R.I.O.T capital in order to cause chaos among the Humans. This plan fell apart however when they landed in the middle of a blizzard and tried to preform a frontal assault against the heavily fortified R.I.O.T HQ. This lead to further slaughter with even Zac being beaten by the R.I.O.T after they deployed the R.I.O.T Elite Corps equipped with experimental Fearite weapons. Zac's defeat and capture caused the surviving shadow fleet to flee abandoning all surviving Shadows on Earth to be captured or killed. Zac would be imprisoned for several years after this battle.

### Decline

following the disaster that was the invasion of Earth the Shadows faced a leadership crisis due to Zac being captured. This also led to manpower shortages as Zac was unable to create new Shadows meaning they had difficulty maintaining and occupying their vast empire. This period of weakness and instability caused the Mazon and Exolivers to invade and seize territory from the weakened empire. In order to save the empire and prevent the Shadows from facing total extinction the Shadow council was formed and they voted to allow the creation of Shadow MK2's. These Shadows were much weaker, smaller and only had two arms however they were the first shadows able to be produced without Zac instead using recycled essence. This allowed the Shadows the reinforce their remaining empire thus saving them from total destruction.