[This story is inspired by KA Applegate's The Ellimist Chronicles, and takes place in the same universe. This will be made noticable a bit later into the story.
Also inspired by the song "Prince of Darkness" by Megadeth]
By placing a sufficient amount of energy into the system, in the right places, in one day, the entire planet had been thrown into civil war. Leaders rose from nothing to command armies against one another, united under one banner only the day before. The planet split into seven factions, their borders changing with each passing hour. Their hatred for one another was the only energy needed to incite such an act. Millions upon millions of live were lost, and it was predicted that by the end of the day there would be nearly one billion dead. Enormous cities, once stretching across a hundred miles or more, were devastated by never ending air and artillery strikes by opposing factions. Nowhere was safe for anyone, in the six hours that had passed each factions except one had lost their original leader, only to be replaced by another. So much energy. So much power.
Influence watched through a vast amount of visual signals being fed into his mind by his supercomputer, in a slow orbit around the planet. Chaos. Wonderful chaos. For every gunshot, for every city bombed, for every soldier dead, Influence grew stronger, more powerful. He watched with utter satisfaction as one faction’s last city was crushed by the armies of another, and in a desperate attempt began arming their artillery with their untested weapon, the Gravity Shell. It was wonderful to watch miniature black holes crush everything within range to the size of a single cell, leaving huge, perfectly rounded craters in the ground where they impacted. Nobody dared use Nuclear Weapons because each faction was seeking control of the world, and did not want entire chunks of their land radiant. This was most disappointing to Influence.
As the hours passed, two factions fell to the stronger. Ammunition, food, and willing soldiers began to become luxuries, as entire armies began to fight with anything they could from shovels to bows. As the third day of war passed, only three factions remained and had exhausted every possible resource. Each only had a handful of aircraft left, yet all the parachutes and bombs were gone. Artillery crews began loading their guns with rocks and bags of gunpowder. Starvation was in full swing, yet the intense hatred for the other factions kept each fighting. The only way for any given soldier to obtain a weapon was to scavenge it from the battlefields, and the armies, now down to their last million men, began fighting with nothing but their bare fists. A man who found a gun was feared like the wrath of god himself.
At dawn of the seventh day of war, two factions remained and one’s army had all but total control over the other’s last city. The soldiers found that throwing the enemy off the taller buildings was the most effective tactic, and as the day came to a close, the leader of the city’s faction was throw out a window to join his army in death. The population of the world had been reduced in one week from Eight billion to just over nine-hundred thousand. As the single faction stood victorious, its leader died of starvation. Squads of soldiers found the least damaged buildings or caves to live in and tried desperately to survive.
For two months, the squads of soldiers slowly died of starvation and thirst. As the global population hit ten-thousand, the villages of ex-soldiers began to find better methods of scavenging and learned the places to look. As the population dropped to just over one-thousand, these villages had all begun to grow or hunt their own food supply, and the death came to a halt. Occasionally, someone died of disease or a land mine, but for the first time in months people began seeing hope for the future. Hope, more energy. More power. With the vast amounts of energy Influence had collected, he created an entity he named the "Guardian Angel', which in turn harvested the people's happines in exchance for 'Miracles', and they became happy again and were set on the road to reconstruction. In another five-thousand years, the planet would be ripe for another war. Until then, Influence moved on.
[Critisism, Questions, Comments, all welcome. When I get around to it, I will add more. This is NOT the whole story, so don't say it's too short.]