The Frontier Fighters are, as of today, on their final legs—if not already fully destroyed—across both Stanton and Pyro. Once a formidable paramilitary force dedicated to purging Pyro of pirates and criminals, they fought for a cause that many Stanton citizens once sympathized with, and even joined. Today they stand as little more than scattered remnants: branded as criminals themselves, cut off from public support, and fighting only for their survival.
This moment offers a rare opportunity to ask the important questions and reflect on them as a whole: Who were the Frontier Fighters? How did they begin? Who joined their cause—and what changed them into what they ultimately became?
Understanding their rise may help us prevent the tragedy, escalation, and bloodshed that unfolded over the past year. But to understand who the Frontier Fighters were, we have to understand why they came into being in the first place.
Pyro: A Difficult Neighbour
Stanton and Pyro are neighbours—whether they want to be or not.
While today Pyro is synonymous with lawlessness, it was not always so. The system was discovered in the 25th century, long before Stanton, and quickly claimed by Pyrotechnic Amalgamated, which developed it into a major industrial and mining hub. For nearly a century it thrived… until mounting costs and an influx of criminal activity pushed the corporation into bankruptcy.
By the late 26th century, Pyro had become what we know it as today: a fractured, gang-dominated frontier. Criminal groups seized abandoned infrastructure and carved out territory. Most notably, the Headhunters rose to prominence in the 27th century, turning Pyro into their base of operations due to its ideal position between the smuggling routes of Vigil and Terra. Importantly, Pyro’s residents—gangs, refugees, and drifters—did not seek war. The system had no political ambitions. It was simply a place where people fled, hid, or ran illicit operations, mostly trying to avoid UEE attention.
This relative isolation would not last.
Stanton: A New and Powerful Neighbour
Stanton was discovered much later, in the 29th century, and unlike Pyro it experienced explosive development. Within a century, megacorporations transformed the system into a major economic powerhouse. What had been empty space became a heavily trafficked industrial artery of the UEE.
Suddenly Pyro was no longer a forgotten fringe system—it was a dangerous bottleneck surrounded by vital economic territory. More Stanton traffic passed through Pyro. Haulers, salvagers, miners, and travellers crossed the border. Gangs took advantage. Citizens were attacked, convoys were stopped, and small raids occurred on both sides. No one really wanted any large scale operation or even a war but what was once a relative peace turned into quite the annoyance. for Gangs in pyro new “economic” possibilities opened up, more place to smuggle from and to but also many more valuable convoys to ambush. For Stanton, Pyro became quite the annoyance, cutting into their economic acitivites.
As time went on the activities continued and some Stanton citizens, devastated by the loss of friends or family to Pyro violence, armed themselves and struck back. These revenge raids were the first sparks of organized civilian retaliatory action. Among those early vigilantes was Madge Hartford, who later founded Citizens for Pyro, now known as Citizens for Prosperity. At the time though she like many others just wanted revenge and believe they could get rid of the criminal infestations in Pyro by simply raiding and killing over and over again.
But Hartford eventually abandoned the idea of “cleansing” Pyro. She realized the violence solved nothing, it just didn´t work and criminals just kept coming back to the settlement she and her friends raided. Instead she pursued the long-term strategy of settling and economically strengthening the system to force out the gangs.
The Frontier Fighters, it is believed, were born from a similar origin—but unlike Hartford, they never changed course. Their goal remained simple and brutal: wipe Pyro clean. Neither Hartford’s organisation nor these early militias gained real traction at the time. Their raids remained small, uncoordinated, and largely ineffective.
Then the galaxy changed.
Xenothreat: The Turning Point
Everything shifted with the arrival of Xenothreat. Unlike Pyro’s gangs, Xenothreat had a political ideology and a structured military command. They saw Pyro as a staging ground ideally placed between Terra and Stanton. Their invasion of Pyro overwhelmed the unorganized Headhunters and established the first disciplined force the system had seen in centuries.
Soon after, they escalated, capturing convoys bound for Terra and, in 2951, launching a full-scale incursion into Stanton with public broadcasts and military-level coordination. For Stanton, this was a shock unlike anything before. Gangs were one thing—Xenothreat was another.
In the face of a system-level threat, the UEE Navy deployed a Javelin-class destroyer to Jericho but could not win alone. They relied on the Civilian Defense Force (CDF)—ordinary Stanton citizens who volunteered their ships to defend their homes. For the first time, Stanton united. Miners, merchants, mercenaries, and civilians fought side by side against a common enemy and successfully drove Xenothreat back.
But this victory came with consequences.
A Shift in Public Perception—and the Spark of the Frontier Fighters
The Xenothreat incursion fundamentally changed how Stanton viewed Pyro. What had once been considered “wild space” was now seen as a breeding ground for organized, ideologically driven militarism. Even though Xenothreat, not the Pyro gangs, caused the incursion, the entire system was blamed. Fear and anger surged.
The earlier vigilante groups renewed their efforts with newfound rage—but still failed to gain large-scale support. Media attention and public sentiment instead flowed toward Citizens for Pyro, who advocated structured, peaceful intervention. This was no coincidence either, Madge Hartford pulled a lot of strings and did major investments to use the Xenothread crisis to her own advantage and move the Citizens for Pyro project forward.
And it worked! Citizens for Pyro finally grew into a major organisation. While membership of actual citizen of pyro remained low, the organisation had a large amount of members from Stanton as well as Major funding.
Now whether we can say that Citizens for Pyro were actually successful or not is a different question. What we can say is that they managed to become a major power player in the Pyro system, freeing or settling several outposts across multiple planets and bringing the fight into Pyro rather than Stanton. What is undeniable is that the organisation became successful enough to draw the attention of other troubled systems, which began asking them for help in dealing with their instability or criminal organisations. Hence the Citizens for Pyro rebranding into Citizens for Prosperity.
It is also undeniable that in the years following the Xenothreat attack, no major incursions took place. Whether that was thanks to their settlement projects or Citizens for Prosperity bringing the fight directly into Pyro remains an open question—but at least outwardly, the problem seemed contained. Stanton was once again safer, or at least there were no more large-scale incursions, and the power balance in Pyro had shifted with a new power broker entering the scene.
All of this must have been infuriating for Stanton citizens who wanted revenge—those who had lost loved ones and formed the early raiding parties we now suspect would eventually evolve into the Frontier Fighters. So what did they do?
Enter the Slicers
For a while, it seemed like the Pyro problem had been “solved,” at least from Stanton’s perspective. But out of the blue, in 2955, the Slicers appeared in Stanton and began massively raiding and attacking convoys. At the time this was shocking—not only because of the scale, but also because it made no sense. There was no announcement, no agenda, no manifesto… just large-scale, coordinated pirate attacks appearing out of nowhere.
In retrospect, of course, it all makes perfect sense. We now know that the Slicers were the Frontier Fighters, who had created a fake Pyro gang to enrage the citizens of Stanton and force an all-out war with the gangs of Pyro. That is why the Slicers suddenly appeared and attacked on such a massive scale—something no real pirate gang would ever do. Criminals tend to strike with precision, in smaller disorganised groups, and avoid drawing too much attention. They work in the shadows, not by provoking a system-wide conflict.
One major question in all of this remains: How did the Frontier Fighters fund any of this?
Scraping together enough credits, ships, weapons, and personnel to form the Frontier Fighters—and then stage a huge system-wide attack disguised as the Slicers—is not a cheap or simple affair. Who supported them?
We can say with certainty that a good number of Stanton citizens contributed—but there must have been larger backers as well. Megacorporations? The UEE? Frontier Fighters were often seen in military-grade armour. Whoever supported them must have done so in secret, as the Frontier Fighters emerged out of nowhere with no publicly known funding, while posing as a grassroots movement.
Many of Us Were Complicit…
What is certain is that the Frontier Fighters’ plan worked. The Slicers’ attacks wreaked havoc across Stanton and renewed strong calls to finally “clean up Pyro.” A long phase of supply gathering began, preparing for a full-scale war in the Pyro system.
Two groups stood out the most:
Citizens for Prosperity, working for years to stabilise Pyro—and the newly created Frontier Fighters, seeking revenge and total annihilation.
Resources flowed to both groups in enormous quantities. Many of us undoubtedly contributed to the Frontier Fighters’ efforts, transporting cargo for them and helping them prepare for their grand campaign into Pyro. It all seemed entirely legitimate. Even the Advocacy and CDF recognised the Frontier Fighters as a legitimate actor at the time.
But it didn’t stop there. Once the fighting began, we once again assisted the Frontier Fighters—flying into Pyro and attacking gangs there… and even attacking both the Headhunters and Citizens for Prosperity. The latter, to remind you, were mostly composed of Stanton citizens working to settle and improve Pyro.
From that point on, it should have been obvious that the Frontier Fighters were no normal movement.
Attacking pirates in Pyro was one thing—but why go after Citizens for Prosperity as well?
Did their revenge-fuelled hatred go so far that they turned on fellow Stantonites simply because they chose a different approach? Was jealousy involved? Jealous that Citizens for Prosperity became the leading organisation after the Xenothreat incursions—and perhaps even had some success?
The Downfall of the Frontier Fighters
The battles in Pyro were bloody, and chaos was total. Everyone fought everyone. There was no united front to address the real problems in Pyro; instead, the system became a battleground of conflicting ideologies.
Everything changed when both the Headhunters and Citizens for Prosperity uncovered the truth: the Frontier Fighters were behind the Slicers attacks.
This revelation was a major turning point—and a shock to many Stanton citizens, many of whom had supported or even fought for the Frontier Fighters. Suddenly, people questioned their allegiance—and felt remorse.
The rest is history. The Frontier Fighters were declared a criminal organisation and targeted by both the Headhunters and Citizens for Prosperity, who nearly destroyed them. But by some miracle they survived and managed to rebuild. Around that time they stole a brand-new Polaris during the Invictus celebrations, and their leader Amelia Boyd began gaining traction in mainstream media.
Boyd herself emerged from nowhere. We know virtually nothing about her background, but she rose to lead the Frontier Fighters and became their public face.
The rest of the story you already know: we gathered to fight and eliminate the remaining Frontier Fighters in both Stanton and Pyro—through large intelligence-gathering operations, precise strikes on medical facilities and convoys, and finally through their last stand across both systems.
A Wrong Cause to Fight For
The Frontier Fighters are defeated—along with them the constant bloodshed and skirmishes we endured over the past year between Pyro and Stanton. Born from the loss of revenue, cargo, or—worse—loved ones, and from fears of an unstable system filled with gangs and pirates, all of it twisted into a passionate hatred toward anyone coming from Pyro or even remotely associated with it.
I’m sure many of us heard the pleas and final cries of numerous Frontier Fighters over comms while fighting them—calling into the void, unable to understand why we were fighting them, insisting that all they wanted was to protect us, to make Stanton safer, to end piracy, gangs, and violence in Pyro. One can argue there are several ways to approach the problems in Pyro, but plain violence—slaughtering anyone simply living in that system—is certainly not the answer. Yes, these movements often begin with grief, loss, or fear… but they cannot be allowed to turn into the pure hatred and destruction we saw here. It almost seems as if many of these people had fallen into a kind of cult, centered around Amelia Boyd and the goal of eliminating all “evil” they believed threatened them from Pyro.
I’m sure many of you read the datapads we recovered during early intelligence gathering—so many messages were from ordinary people just trying to survive, to live, to do their best. They were simple citizens caught up in the fight, led to believe in something wrong, their grief and fears exploited to fuel a conflict that never needed to happen.
So what can we do to prevent something like this from happening again?
On a larger scale, organizations like the Advocacy and the CDF must made more accountable and be far more careful about who they support in critical conflicts. It was a serious error in judgment to treat a group pursuing total violence—like the Frontier Fighters—as a legitimate option, let alone provide them the infrastructure to start an entire war. Eventually the Advocacy recognized its mistake and branded them a threat, but by then it was already too late.
More transparency is needed as well. We still do not know how the Frontier Fighters secured their financing in the first place—who gave them the means to become such a powerful force? Someone must have fueled their hatred to such a large scale.
And on a smaller, more personal scale, we must look after those experiencing grief, fear, or loss. Don’t leave them alone and allow their feelings to fester into hatred. We must be there for those who cannot help themselves; otherwise, they will continue to be pulled in by people who promise quick and simple relief but only cause more harm. We need real solutions—not more violence. It may be the more difficult way but it is the right way.
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