Unmaker Weapon

Unmakers are weapons created by Shardbearers for the purpose of wiping out self-replicating swarms.

Description
Unmaker weapons are shapeshifting devices that change to suit their wielder's needs. The most common forms that these devices take are levitating ranged weapons. Melee and handheld forms are less commonly used, but have found niches in certain mercenary circles. Unmaker Weapons are to a degree sentient and intelligent, in that much of their power requires some degree of data processing to be effective. Unmakers work via building a physical and metaphysical profile of the classes of entities that are slain with it, until a profile is sufficiently complete that it releases a pulse; this pulse works on a universal scale, and wipes out any entity fitting the built profile. Such devices that have seen a great deal of use are sought after as a result, with their wielders also being paid a high commission to undertake missions.

These weapons are a restricted item, requiring a license to own and a host of regulations to their use. Currently manufactured Unmakers have in-built limitations that prevent weapon use until certain conditions are met and they have the correct authorisation. As such, a black market exists for Unmakers built without their restrictions on the frontier and in the criminal underworld of the Weave.

The primary targets of Unmakers tend to be self-replicating swarms, with the designs of the first devices being made to specifically combat them. Widely distributed swarms capable of travelling to adjacent universes or through the Void are especially difficult to wipe out and almost impossible to contain. Technology that is able to do so largely exist as superweapons and other large scale devices. Most superweapons working on a universal or multiversal scale tend to be fairly obvious in form and function while being expensive to manufacture. Unmakers were thus designed to be an efficient method of eliminating these foes in a more discrete manner.

History
Unmakers first came into being after the First Aeon War, during the post-war cleanup of the numerous self-replicating swarms. Due to the difficulty fo destroying the swarms conventionally, a mass producible means of clearing them was needed. The Shardbearers whom took upon this task eventually developed the first Unmakers. After the first demonstrations of their use, the weapons were approved for mass manufacture. Armies armed with these devices eventually cleared the Weave of all the swarms of weapons that had plagued it. After this cleanup was done, most of these weapons were turned in, with their wielders being richly compensated. Some disappeared into the criminal underworld of the Weave, and a few found themselves in the hands of factions outside the Weave.