divine predecessors
Wow! I agree with DalekTek790 and disagree with Aleck.
I see what DT790 was on about when he said “fallen”. We don’t know who started the war between the insects and the humans, only that the humans committed genocide of an entire race and perhaps enslaved them or somehow incorparated insects into bio-machinery. Remember the ships of the Brunnen G? HDS was surprised to see them.. “an insect.. interesting” or sumthing like that.
Look at it from HDS’s POV:
What if insects had wiped out the entire human race? Would a sole surviving human be justified to try and turn the insects on themselves? And HDS’s whole point is that humans are eager to destroy each other. I mean he somehow convinced people to follow him and turn on each others and themselves, so the humans had to be somewhat willing at least in the very begining.
And Mantrid was just a Bio-vizier, but the Mantrid that tried to destroy the universe was part of his human essence combined with the essence of HDS, transferred into an unfeeling machine and with the onslaught of Mantrid drones assimilating every particle of the universe into it’s collective of Matrid drones, a much more serious threat than the Divine Order ever was.
I also tend to agree with religious implications of the Divine Order as opposed to patterning them more after Darth Vader or things like that.