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Neither side really understood the history books they collected from their opponent during those first decades of peace. Humans read Union's best scholarship, and believed what they said: the wars fought before the formation of the intergalactic federation were brutal. They always ended within a year because neither side could sustain their losses.

On the other side, Union researchers believed that human wars were exaggerated. The Hundred Years War was already known to be a combination of several shorter periods of warfare, and the only sensible explanation was that humans counted hostile relations as part of the duration of war, even if there was not open violence.

In the end, both groups were shocked.The war between them looked exactly the same as all their internal battles.

The first year, Union rarely ever lost a battle. Humanity was slaughtered by superior weapons, incapable of keeping up with the sheer productive power of a multi-galaxy war machine, and beaten further and further back.

The second year Union saw defections begin. It was a novel problem for their military - wars never lasted long enough for soldiers to quit. Fringe protests began, though Union's political leaders kept control of the populace.

By the fifth year, entire garrisons began going AWOL, unable to stomach the killings. Humanity, by best estimates, had lost a full one percent of their total population, but their military hadn't shrunk at all. The protests were more frequent and larger. Politicians calling for peace were being propelled into positions of authority.

After a full decade of war, humanity had lost nearly five percent of its total population, but it was actually Union's army that was smaller. Even state-friendly media was no longer supporting the war.

In year eleven, humanity made a breakthrough in their efforts to reverse engineer Union technology. The continued losses and growing fear of eradication drove more and more humans to join their military. The Human Federation started winning.

After 12 years of war, Union tried to surrender. The war effort was difficult to sustain even when victory seemed all but certain. Humanity ignored the request for treaty.

After 39 years of war, more than the total duration of all galactic wars in a millenia of Union history, only a handful of planets remained under their control. Only now had protests begun to spring up inside the Human Federation, but the average human simply ignored the footage of death. It was hardly different from the thousands of years of war that came before First Contact, and this time the enemies didn't resemble humanity at all.

As the end of Union civilization neared, one Union human ethnographer discovered a text describing early human hunting patterns. When faced with animals too large and too strong to fight, with hide too difficult to pierce, humans had developed a previously unknown strategy. They exhausted their prey. Day and night, they walked after their target. Never letting it sleep, or eat, or drink, or play, or think, humans just walked. It was nearly as difficult for the hunters, who could hardly rest themselves, who had no guarantee of victory. The first humans to try it did not even have a reasonable expectation of victory. But on they walked, until one side or the other collapsed, dead from exhaustion.

Their paper was read by nearly every Union citizen left alive. For the first time they understood what "war" was to humans. It was nothing more, and nothing less, than an endurance test.

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Submitted by ManetherenRises on Wed, Apr 12, 2023 to /r/WritingPrompts/

The prompt

Humans have always been endurance hunters. We can endure untold physical, psychological, and emotional trauma. Being so unexceptional, we are mocked by the intergalactic community until war shows how terrifying it is to simply... endure.