Inferus

The Inferus was one of the three harbingers of the end of the Ancient civilization, and perhaps the greatest ecological threat the galaxy has ever faced.

Modus Operandi
The Inferus, though possessed of a central intelligence, does not plan or strategize attacks. They attack in swarms, overwhelming the target and commandeering defenses. No two Inferus forms resemble one another, they are so twisted and mutated by the pathogen. When attacking life forms, they will attempt to disable and infect by force. On occasion the target is simply killed and their biomass assimilated into larger Inferus forms to promote growth. These forms will also kill any incompatible life forms to neutralize them as potential threats.

Once infected, an individual eventually succumbs to the Inferus infection converting his cells, and his mind joins the Inferus hive mind. The processing power of the Inferus hive mind is unknown, but not very great. The information stored in a converted individual's brain joins the pool, making it an efficient method of data gathering. Inferus forms are possessed of the ability to pilot starcraft, but have difficultly making use of weapons and instead electing to destroy their own ships to take out enemies.

Origins
For years, nobody knew where the Inferus had come from before the First Inferus Outbreak. It was eventually discovered that a discouraged Ancient scientist had gone insane during the wars with the Tabbaroth and willingly entered the Genesis Engine to convert his diseased body into a flowing mass of carnivorous flesh that grew with every victim it consumed. Exposure to Shun'Tabbarkot's influence caused rapid mutation and the Inferus plague began to take form.

History
The First Inferus Outbreak occurred shortly after the war with the Tabbaroth. The invasion of the galaxy took the Ancients by surprise and the mysterious nature of their enemy baffled them. The Inferus devastated whole worlds and in an act of desperation, the Ancients sacrificed genetically modified Ho Grath to try and evolve the Inferus in a peaceful direction. However, this only resulted in the extinction of the Ho Grath species, and the creation of the dreaded meat trees that haunted the galaxy for millions of years after. Eventually, the Ancients scourged all worlds in the path of the thing and erected heavy quarantine around infected worlds, realizing they were unable to otherwise defeat the Inferus. This became known as the Red Quarantine Zone, a forbidden area to travel. The failure to annihilate the Inferus, along with the sacrifice of a species the Ancients had sworn to protect, marked the beginning of the end for the once powerful shepherds of the galaxy.

The Second Inferus Outbreak took place after Zykezx's Conquest. This time, the Inferus overwhelmed the forces quarantining them and began to spread again, this time with more intelligence behind their movements. The most infamous account of this is the log of Kindred Shade which details his experiences in the first 100 days of the Second Outbreak (although the log is not without its errors). The Inferus wiped out the remaining colony worlds of the Drezdak and the Searoshire, bringing an an end to many of the past races that Zykezx had already crippled. The Inferus also managed to win the defection of a Warden Artificial Intelligence meant to interrogate a captured form capable of communication. In the end, the Inferus were only pushed back by the Ancients with the aid of Keldronians, Elder Race and Tabbaroth.

The Red Quarantine Zone was sterilized by decades long-campaign of pathogenic irrigation bombs, use of the S'cha-ckl'ueu Arc and killer robots deposited on the planet's surface and instructed to destroy and burn any organic tissue. This campaign effectively destroyed dozens of once habitable worlds.

In the Ancients' war with the Elder Race, neither side was foolish enough to use their Inferus samples as biological weapons. But both experimented with the contagion. The Ancients used modified Inferus strains to infect Elder captives and the results produced creatures of extended longevity such as Vates or the Inferrectus.

Millions of years later, Inferus sample caches were being opened as the Ancients' heirs, humanity, came forth with the technology to uncover the artifacts left behind. The Inferus nearly broke out of a subterranean containment unit but they were sealed once again by the actions of Guardian Danyg and his crew. Again on a planet that was actually Station 03, the Inferus was released by the native population, which it quickly decimated. To prevent it traveling off-world, Danyg activated the dormant Ancient killer robots which sterilized the surface of the planet.

After Monitor Warden 031mw sacrifices himself to teleport Danyg off-world, Danyg finds himself on Shun'Tabbarkot's world and inadvertently awakens the Tabbaroth. Through a series of unfortunate events, the Tabbaroth attack the sentient races of the galaxy. Danyg and his crew attempt to stop them, crashing a Tabbaroth cruiser onto Station 02, releasing the Inferus again. As the Inferus and Tabbaroth slowly take over the galaxy, Danyg has no choice but to summon The Other. During this ritual, the Inferus and Tabbaroth massacre each other. When the Other is awoken, he undoes all of these events, essentially making the Third Inferus Outbreak never have happened.

In the Disrupted Timeline, the Inferus present a major threat throughout the entire story, and eventually force humanity's evacuation to Formin until Wrane and Lucien wipe out the pestilence once and for all.