Kromus

A Kromus Qymor Shadow Stalker caste bioform.

Hailing from a collection of systems in the Dragon's Head Nebula, the Kromus are known as ravagers, pirates, and a plague upon the cosmos as their Imperium has spread throughout the Large Magellanic Cloud and overtaken what other races had remained following the First Machine War. While it is widely considered that the Kromus lost the war they had waged against the species inhabiting the Sol-Daiban Galaxy, they in truth merely had rebuilt their forces over the course of nearly two decades under the leadership of their previously presumed dead commander, the strange dragonoid Ridley, and have unleashed themselves again as a force of destruction upon the galaxy.

## History

A violent collective of species that all hold origins in a distant common ancestor, the Kromus have dominated the Dragon's Head Nebula of the Large Magellanic Cloud for millennia, and have taken over much of the dwarf galaxy since the decimation of the Gamilas and other local civilizations. Some theories suggest that the Kromus managed to discover directed faster-than-light interstellar travel at least fifteen hundred years ago, as there is evidence for Kromus use of local jump points for at least thousands of years prior, due to the various species homeworlds in systems hundreds of parsecs separated. Their sudden surge in capability for interstellar technologies is a mystery still, but some recent suppositions suggest that the Chozo may have come across the Kromus at some point, due to the fact that the Kromus have taken to favoring Chozo technologies, in addition to what appears to have been Forerunner design seeds. This rapid jump from a series of tier 3 space age civilizations barely capable of using the natural jump lines to tier 2 with directed higher-spatial travel resulted in a violent upheaval. Tribal factions began turning their new might first on each other, then against their cousin species, and likely would have led to a sectors wide self-genocidal holocaust if not for the arrival of the dragonoid Ridley. As the various Kromus species have somehow conditioned themselves on a neurological level over thousands of years to follow a physically and psychologically strong leader, when the regenerator dragonoid defeated and literally consumed most of the native faction leaders, it forced the tribes to recognize Ridley as a superior leader. Under his leadership, the Kromus set out of the Dragon's Head Nebula and discovered a planet that was rife with Forerunner technologies that were millions of years old, including design seeds that allowed the Kromus to not only upgrade and expand their own existing fleets, but also allowed the construction of a massive dreadnought vessel that Ridley would claim as his own flagship.

While unverified reports of pirates that resemble the Kromus have plagued the Galactic Federation since its formal founding in 2681, it was in 2913 that confirmed assaults from the Kromus were recorded. Even then, the Galactic Federation refused to allow a vote for declaration of war, citing that "random piracy" did not warrant such measures. It wasn’t until the Confederation colony world of Beacon was assaulted with plasma bombs into utter lifelessness by Kromus forces that full scale war was declared by the Confederation in 2947. By that point, the Kromus had been building up their fleets for well over two hundred years, unified under Ridley and the High Command council under his guidance. While initially not seeming to be more powerful than the former Covenant had been in the 2500s, the Kromus Imperium was still a force that proved it was to be feared, and its devastating true power was revealed once the dreadnought that was Ridley's flagship unveiled itself in the devastating Second Battle of McAuliffe and decimated the defensive forces with the aptly named Oblivion Cannon, then proceeded to bombard the planet until the biosphere was burned out beyond any semblance of supporting life. The ***Cunning Death*** would go on in the war to be one of the most feared ships of the time, letting the Confederation fleet breathe easy only when it vanished after the Siege of Krom in 2959 and was assumed finally destroyed.

## Command Structure

There were previously two main components of the upper leadership in the Kromus Imperium, though one only had true power in the event that the other was missing or unavailable to make wide scale decisions. The first is the High Command council, made up of the smarter and more ambitious examples of the Kromus factions, who handle the general command and direction of the species as an engine of war. Learning from the slaughter of the tribal leaders, High Command has curtailed much of their own ambition in order to not repeat that fate. The other component was, until the Siege of Krom in 2959, Ridley himself, reigning over the Kromus by authority of his size and strength, his massacre of the previous tribal leaders, and his frightening intellect. Since his reported death at Krom, it was assumed that High Command, or independent faction warlords, would reign, but the revelation of his cybernetic reconstruction at Tallon IV has put little doubt as to the conflict of command now existing within the main factions.

## Biology

The Kromus themselves are an oddly evolved collective of species. They seem to be a combination of reptilian, insectoid, and crustacean racial traits and biological makeup, and are divided along developmental lines influenced by the planets claimed by the different species as ‘home worlds'. Despite the common genetic ancestor held by the various races, however, each one shows evidence of a further reaching habitation of their source planets and divergence of evolution far more than a mere two to three millennia, something that baffles Federation scientists. These divergent evolutions are also accelerated by an acquired habit of artificially altering themselves with appropriated biotech to create new physical traits, which each tribe-clan claimed were the superior course for their respective species.

The first racial genotype, known as Kromun for their formerly maintained homeworld of Krom, are built for combat and brute command, as their natural and artificially induced evolutions show. Towering over nine feet tall and broad built, the average soldier caste Kromun has upper limbs that end with an elongated pincer claw on one arm that opens up to reveal an organic biolaser node for ranged attack, and a tri-finger hand at the opposite wrist that allows for more precision based task and close quarters combat. Their heads are covered in exoskeletal plates with two sets of glowing yellow refractive eyes inside of withdrawn sockets, while a pair of large outer mandible jaws frame the inner sets of insectoid mandibles that mark their mouths. Like all Kromus species, Kromun are digitigrade bipedals, and have been observed to be capable of sustained running speeds up to fifty-seven to sixty kilometers an hour.

The second most prolific genotype, and the most well known offshoot, is the Urtraghans, called such for the planet Urtraghus they claimed as their species homeworld. They possess eight eyes instead of the Kromun four, with a row of four on either side of their sloping, fishlike heads. Their mouths are upturned and lined with long, needle-like teeth, as are the lower mandibles, giving the Urtraghians a superficial resemblance to the Sangheili. Unlike the Kromun genotype soldier caste, Urtraghian combat bioforms have hands and talons on both upper limbs instead of a pincer claw on one, allowing them more precise usage and manipulation of firearms and tools.

The third known genotype, the Qymor, exhibit more reptilian traits, with three-fingered claws similar to the Urtraghan Kromus, digitigrade legs and segmented feet. Their angular heads have sharp-toothed, snarling jaws and a singular pair of yellow eyes that seemed to be perpetually ablaze. Additionally, the Qymor typically have grey-purple flesh, with green, bristle-lined plating partially covering their bodies.

Fourth of the known genotypes is the Fro’my’xin. They show the general common physical traits with the Kromus species, such as digitigrade leg structure, elongated digits on each hand, and insectoid outer mandibles, with a more humanoid head, single set of eyes, and blade-like structures growing from their shoulders similar to the Qymor subgroup. Curiously, the exoskeleton of the Fro'my'xin do not always develop completely to cover the body, on occasion leaving back tissue exposed in several areas as well as what appears to be a beating heart at times.

The last observed species genotype is the Batta. Exhibiting the pincer claws of the Kromun species on both wrists, the soldier Batta are more crustacean in appearance, with digitigrade legs and heavy shell plating over their bodies. Most are a blue to blueish-black coloration, and like the Qymor and Fro'my'xin, the Batta have a single pair of glowing yellow eyes. Their mouths resemble a rostrum beak similar to cephalopods, while raised spine-quills run down their back plates. Unlike the Kromun species, however, the beam emitters stored in their pincers are not organic and require external power sources due to being cybernetic implants. It is unclear as to the nature of this strange divergence in offensive natural weaponry, as the Kromun are perhaps the only variant with biological beam emitters.

A common biological trait between all five species is self-insemination, as there is no known biological gender separation of a male or female in the Kromus. Whether this is due to their evolution or a result of thousands of years of self-alteration is unknown, but a single birthing Kromus is capable of laying up to two dozen eggs in a single birth cycle, which tend to run every six to eight Krom based months, or about twice a Terran orbital cycle. In addition, maturation rate of the Kromus is perhaps even faster than the Unggoy, aging to physical lethal maturity within one to two standard years. As a result, it is likely such birthing rates are the results of Kromus genetic experimentation to increase their numbers once they had begun spreading out in their home galaxy. The ratio of birthing capable Kromus to those that do not bear eggs seems proportionate to local population needs, which would normally seem to keep the species from totally overwhelming the supporting local resources, but has seemed to grow to near infestation levels in the interstellar scale. At current projections, as of 2979, there is a calculated lower estimate of three to five trillion Kromus of the five primary species and their own offshoots within the Sol-Daiban galaxy, and an unknown number within their home galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud.