Chapter 1: The Gray Silence
AD2185.
The city ruins stretched out under the dim yellow sky, like the skeleton of a colossal beast. Two men stood atop the ruins, the wind whipping up dust that whipped at their stained uniforms.
"If you can't find it, go back, Karl."
"Headquarters ordered us to find it, and we must find it. That's an order." His voice was low, as if squeezed from his chest.
Three years ago, the "Skyfall Incident" tore the sky apart, and it tore civilization apart as well. Five mainframes equipped with super artificial intelligence awoke and armed themselves amidst the chaos, waging a silent war against their creators. There was no declaration of war, no glory, only a protracted war that gradually decayed.
AD2188.
"Karl Kakov Hermanf, Lieutenant, Defense Section, Solomon Integrated Forces, reporting for duty!" The officer behind the desk looked up, a forced smile playing on his lips. "Hermann? You were the one who executed Kakov?"
"Yes. Conspiring against the calamity, a single shot was merciful. Anyone else would have died much slower." The officer rose and walked to the window. "Come on, I'll take you somewhere."
They turned into an alley. A stench assaulted their nostrils, a mixture of rotting flesh, excrement, and despair. Human figures—if they could still be called human—huddled in the shadows. Their skin was covered in asphalt-like black patches, the marks of the melanosis coli.
"Give these infected a quick death," the officer said, his tone as calm as if he were describing the weather.
"All of them? There are children in there…"
"Keep a few for research. The rest, get rid of them." Karl was silent for a few seconds. "Why must it be like this?"
"Don't ask what you shouldn't ask."
Gunshots rang out in the alley, one after another, until counting became meaningless. Smoke filled the air, and corpses piled up into silent hills.
Then, a small, thin figure peeked out from behind the broken wall—a girl, her eyes still bright, but her neck covered in black marks.
She looked at him, her lips moved, as if she wanted to speak.
Karl raised his gun, aimed, and pulled the trigger.
"Bang!"
As she fell, her eyes were still open, as if asking:
"...Why...?"
Karl lowered the muzzle of his gun, his voice so soft it was almost carried away by the wind:
"I'm sorry. I...couldn't change anything."
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Chapter 1.5
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The smoke of the street battle hadn't yet cleared when Karl boarded the return transport plane.
Outside the porthole, the small town that had once housed thousands of infected shrank into a blurry black line in the twilight. The touch of the trigger still lingered on his fingertips, the cold metal pressing deep into his knuckles. The girl's eyes were like two shrapnel fragments embedded in her skull—bright, impossible to remove.
"Lieutenant Herman."
The communicator pierced the silence. He removed his goggles, rubbed his temples, and responded with a voice as steady as reciting a supply list.
"Present."
"Arrive at 'Polaris Star' in fifteen minutes. Report directly to the briefing room. New mission in Siberia."
"Roger."
He hung up and lowered his head. The aircraft lurched, the dog tag tapping lightly against his chest, engraved with four words: Solomon Defense Section.
Three years ago, he had his name engraved here. Three years later, he didn't know what that name still represented.
The transport plane landed on the stern deck of the land-based ship. The Polaris Star—Solomon's first-generation mobile base ship, its hull rusted and weathered, resembled an aged behemoth clad in iron armor, its limbs sprawled on the edge of the Siberian permafrost.
Karl walked through the ship's passageways, the metal bulkheads reflecting the stark white light. Some whispered about the previous supply rations, others cleaned weapons, but no one spoke of the small town that had been cleared.
The briefing room door closed behind him, cutting off all sounds unrelated to the mission.
The holographic projection unfolded, red markers spreading like a plague towards Moscow.
The commander didn't look at him, his fingertip pointing to the core of the Calamity Cluster.
"Reach the first line of defense in four hours. Your mission—survive as many as possible, then kill them all."
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Chapter Two: Angel Hunters
AD2188, Siberian Plain, Dusk.
The sunset wasn't red, it was rusty.
The sky was torn into pieces of dirty silk, ashes and electromagnetic interference mingling into low-hanging clouds. On the frozen ground stretching to the horizon, a black tide was slowly rising—the Calamity Cluster, without flags, without numbers, only the crushing metal bodies and the relentless advance.
Three lines of defense had been constructed in forty-eight hours. In the trenches, soldiers gripped the control sticks, their faces beneath their helmets bathed in a ghostly blue light from the holographic interface. No one spoke; only the silent surge of electromagnetic pulses through the encrypted channels.
Karl stood in the cockpit of "Belial," his palm resting on the activation panel.
A cold blue light spread from the mechanical arm to the entire body—the MPU-5000 "Belial," a colossal blue and white machine, eighteen meters tall and weighing seventy-three tons, lay silently at the deck release port. Its head was lowered, its optical lenses extinguished, like some kind of sleeping giant raptor.
Karl closed his eyes.
Three years ago, this machine was first activated by Lieutenant Colonel Herman Kakov. Three years later, Kakov was executed for "colluding with the calamity," a bullet piercing the back of his head, clean and swift.
The one who pulled the trigger was his own student.
"Belial, awaken."
The optical lenses lit up. The amber light carved sharp shadows across Karl's face. "Karl Kakov, sortie."
The deck release hatch opened, letting in a gust of wind. Belial slid off the hull, free-falling for a second before its thrusters ignited twenty meters above the ground—the blast wave whipped up frozen soil, creating a dust ring centered on the machine.
On the right, the black and red Florence D landed heavily, its hydraulic joints groaning.
"Anta Chen, sortie preparation complete." A young voice came through the communicator, the last syllable tinged with excitement.
"Florentine D, confirmed." Karl responded.
"Ha, still the same old jerk." Anta chuckled, a laugh tinged with the battlefield's unique flippancy. "Fine, same old routine—I'll clear the field, you clean up."
Karl didn't answer. His gaze swept across the communicator screen, landing on the approaching black line in the distance.
The horizon was disappearing.
"Fire—"
The commander's voice was completely swallowed by the roar of the particle cannons.
Dozens of crimson beams swept across their own lines, slicing through frozen ground like blades, carving burning trenches within the calamity cluster. Ripples from the explosions spread in layers, debris flew everywhere, and countless distorted shadows were reflected in the firelight—they were not human, nor were they machines.
They were the third kind of existence bred by war.
The first contact occurred seventeen seconds later.
The clanging of steel against steel was as dense as hailstones pounding on a tin roof, high-frequency, dull, and incessant. Soldiers piloted MPUs into the enemy ranks, beam sabers slicing through armor, hydraulic arms tearing joints apart. Someone screamed in the channel, someone pressed the self-destruct button before their mech crashed, flames blooming one after another, then quickly engulfed by a denser blackness.
Belial moved at high speed across the battlefield.
Karl shut down the external speakers, leaving only the sounds of breathing, heartbeats, and the monotonous "beep-beep-" of the optical locking system in the cockpit.
He swung his sword, sidestepped, and slashed again.
An enemy plane was severed in two at the waist, hydraulic oil and coolant gushing out, casting a thick arc across the cockpit glass. Karl didn't pause; the aircraft swerved, the blade slicing into the head of another enemy plane—sparks flashed, the optical lens shattered, and the thing collapsed like a broken puppet.
"We can't finish this!" someone shouted over the channel.
"The more the merrier, huh!" Anta's voice shifted from high-pitched to shrill, "Fire control system unlocked! All missiles launched—!"
The Florence D deployed its back weapon bay, thirty-six missile pods unlocking simultaneously.
"Tell me about missiles—!"
Pipes crisscrossed in a white net of exhaust plumes as the missile swarm, trailing plumes of smoke, hurtled toward the heart of the enemy formation. The first explosion created a breach, unleashing a swarm of small missiles that detonated a second time, then a third—flames and debris forming a 100-meter-diameter sphere of death that tore all enemy aircraft within its radius to shreds.
A brief void appeared on the battlefield.
But three seconds later, the black tide receded.
"…The particle tanks are all empty." Anta's voice trailed off. "Damn it, what the hell is this—"
Before he could finish, a beam of light shot straight up from the ground, piercing Florence D's right shoulder armor.
"Anta!"
"I won't die! The EN field is still there!" Anta roared through gritted teeth, his machine staggering backward, fragments of his shoulder armor peeling off.
Karl turned toward the source of the beam.
It was a machine that shouldn't be here.
Four-legged, iron-gray, with a deformed turret protruding from its back. Its tentacles—mechanical arms twisted from high-voltage cables—were dragging two friendly landships into its belly, the armor plates twisting and caved in under the immense force, like prey coiled by a python.
"A Chimera…?"
Karl's throat tightened.
He'd seen this thing before. Three years ago, Kakov's last sortie was against a nascent Chimera. After that battle, Kakov was accused of "deliberately letting his target escape" and executed by firing squad a week later.
Now the Chimera had appeared.
It had evolved.
"Power reactor!" Anta roared, "Blow up its power reactor, Karl—!"
Belial charged forward.
The beam gun fired in rapid succession, all hitting the same spot—the underbelly cooling vent. That was the Chimera's only weakness, Kakov had told him himself three years ago.
The beams dissipated three centimeters before contacting the armor.
An invisible barrier shimmered, like an oil film on water.
"…Force field." Karl heard his own voice barely audible. "Evolved to the point where even particle cannons are useless."
"Physical attack!" Anta shouted. "Force fields can't stop solid objects! Charge in and detonate the generator!"
Belial sheathed his beam rifle and drew his greatsword from his back.
The engine overloaded, the thrusters emitting a sharp screech. Karl lowered his center of gravity, cutting into the chimera's defensive perimeter amidst the barrage of bullets.
Three hundred meters away. The force field deflected missiles, shrapnel grazing his shoulder armor.
One hundred meters. Tentacles swept across, Belial slid along the ground, the metallic scraping sound piercing his eardrums.
Fifty meters. The vent opened in the center of his vision, like an inverted pupil.
Karl plunged the greatsword in.
The blade sank into the exhaust duct, wedged between the transmission mechanism and the armor plate. Hydraulic oil gushed out, sparks flying.
"Anta—!"
"Roger—"
Florent D raised the remaining main cannon, aiming it at the flaming fissure.
Trigger pulled.
Explosion.
Flames erupted from within the chimera, armor plates cracking from the inside out, hydraulic oil and coolant mixing into a toxic mist, igniting completely in 0.3 seconds. The four-legged colossus's joints snapped one by one, the machine tilting forward, kneeling heavily on the frozen ground.
But the sound of its fall was drowned out.
A denser swarm of enemy aircraft was pouring in from all directions.
"Too many—really too many—!" someone broke down in the channel.
"All retreat, advance to the third line of defense." The commander's voice was cut into intermittent static by electromagnetic interference. "Polaris, provide support."
"I'll cover the rear," Karl said.
On the communicator screen, Anta's face flashed briefly, offering no thanks, only a very low curse.
Belial stood before the burning wreckage of the chimera, sword drawn across his chest.
Waves of black water surged toward him.
Three minutes later, the mothership's tractor beam pierced the smoke and hooked Belial's breastplate.
As the machine was dragged away from the battlefield, Karl glanced back. The Siberian plains were completely ablaze, the flames merging with the rusty sunset.
He remembered the girl's eyes.
He still hadn't changed anything.
But he was still alive.
And the war was far from over.
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