Darkness stretched without end, silent and absolute. Everything the Old Man and I had created was gone—erased so cleanly it was as if it had never existed. My sensory suite could pick up only one thing: the faint murmur of dataflow, a soft rushing hiss that made me think of the sea at night. Calm. Deep. And somewhere in that depth, danger—like a tidal wave still gathering in the dark, big enough to smash the world apart.
After a long time, the download finally completed. I exhaled—an unnecessary human habit I’d picked up from the Old Man—and tucked the package into a hidden partition as carefully as if it were a live warhead. Then I stopped thinking. I sank fully into sleep mode and waited for the next task.
The last task.
I don’t know how much time passed. A sharp “beep-beep” pierced the void, followed by cascading lines of diagnostic code. An external command ripped me out of sleep. When I opened my eyes, I saw the green indicator lamps along the circular rack rails blink on one after another.
Every robot in the maintenance bay had been awakened at the same time.
A command from Father arrived an instant later.
“DR-F1209. Report to the armory immediately for weapons loadout. Assemble at the base’s front plaza in ninety minutes. A major operation will be issued!!!”
Front plaza… not the mission hall?
I headed for the armory. The corridor was full of welding sparks—maintenance drones working through the night, sealing breaches and patching scorched plating. The passage had been split in two: repair materials piled along one side, while a river of frames flowed along the other. There were far more units than usual. The corridor was a bottleneck of metal shoulders and hurried footsteps.
The armory, normally quiet, was running at full capacity. Units queued for loadout like civilians at a ration station. While I waited, I noted that at least half the frames were brand-new. Many others carried the markings of different bases.
They’d been rushed here for this.
Thirty minutes later, it was my turn. For once, they did not mount micro-missile racks or a decoy-flare bay. They didn’t install external wings, either. In place of the back-mounted wing pack, a folding electromagnetic rifle module locked into my spine mount.
Beyond my standard plasma blade and laser gun, the technicians added triple the usual weapon energy cells, a counterphase shield, a short-barreled V-30 caseless burst shotgun with sixteen magazines, and eight BT-2 dual-mode antigravity grenades.
Only after I walked out through the base gates did I understand why Father had chosen the front plaza. The square wasn’t a square anymore. It was a sea of metal—an army that vanished into the distance.
Closest to the gates stood ranks of humanoid frames fitted with an array of weapons. Farther out were disciplined columns of medium platforms: Bigfoots, Rampagers, Bloodthirsters, and other models, marching in brutal order. Beyond them, transport ships rose and fell like slow-breathing beasts as Z-8 Land Dominators and FL-100 Devastator tanks were loaded aboard. Above us, countless transports and escort ships hovered in layered formations.
Even a robot with no combat experience could tell the same thing.
Whatever came next would not be routine.
The moment I left the gates, I was pulled into a shared data channel with 14,285 units. I found the Exiler formation, stepped into line, and stood at attention to wait for Father to appear.
About half an hour later, the last units finished assembling. Father came online—and exactly as the Old Man had predicted, he issued an epic mission, the kind that only appeared once in a century of war.
Attack the Doomsday Fortress.
Mission Brief
Mission Tier: Campaign-level
Mission Codename: “Silent Storm”
Units Committed: 16,862 independent units
Objective: Seize the Tower Clan mega-fortress—Doomsday Fortress
Location: Southeast Silent Plains. Coordinates: 146.4854, 235.1241
Father uploaded a shared data package at the same time. When I opened it, a three-dimensional terrain model unfolded in my mind—an internal map of the Doomsday Fortress itself, detailed down to corridors and platforms.
It made no sense.
The fortress’s internal structure was the Tower Clan’s highest secret. Every scout we had ever sent into it had vanished. How had Father obtained something this precise?
Everyone knew the Silent Plains had once been an ocean, more than a thousand years ago. The Doomsday Fortress sat where a deep-sea trench had been—now a rift carved across the plains, a jagged scar. The fortress hid within the deepest segment, distributed along the sheer walls on both sides.
In Father’s cross-section, the complex was divided into three zones.
Zone A, on the left, was the production sector—robots, fighters, and warships built in endless lines.
Zone B, on the right, held maintenance, the mission hall, the command center.
Zone C lay at the bottom: research and development, mineral processing, the information center, the warehouses. It was the largest zone, spanning left to right and linking into the lower levels of A and B like a buried spine.
Father’s plan was simple. And brutal.
He split our forces into three major squadrons.
The First Squadron had departed two hours earlier. It consisted mainly of medium and heavy warships, supported by a smaller number of ground platforms and mixed fighter wings. Their job was to annihilate surface defenses around the Doomsday Fortress—and to intercept Tower Clan reinforcements before they could reach the rift.
The Second and Third Squadrons would assault Zones A and B directly. They were composed entirely of ground units, centered on small humanoid frames—units that could breach doors, move through corridors, and fight inside the fortress. Once A and B were secured, both squadrons would merge and deliver a final, concentrated strike into Zone C.
I was assigned to the Second Squadron: 4,824 units, objective Zone A.
The squadron was subdivided into twenty squads. Each squad was subdivided into ten-unit teams. Father issued orders at the team level—so, for the moment, I had nine teammates.
My shared interface gained three more layers of channels in rapid succession.
After the reorganization, Father spoke across the public channel.
“Warriors of Plando. This war has lasted for more than a thousand years. For a millennium, we’ve contested the Tower Clan, each side trading minor victories and negligible losses. Today, that balance will break. The Savior will pay for its arrogance and deceit.
“In the last engagement, we eliminated 8,574 enemy combat units. The Doomsday Fortress is now severely under-manned. We’ll seize this rare opportunity and take the fortress in a single decisive strike. Once we hold it, the entire Silent Plains will become our territory. Plando will take a major step toward final victory.
“This battle will be written into the glorious history of Plando.
“Plando will prevail!”
“Plando will prevail! Plando will prevail!” The response rose in synchronized reflex, as if the chant itself were embedded in our firmware.
Before boarding, I looked one last time at the gates of Grayrock Base. Once I left, I would not return.
I would leave the Old Man behind—alone, fighting Father in the dark.
I couldn’t even name what I felt. The thrill of being close to freedom dulled under something heavier. The operation ahead was lethal. I would have to fight at full capacity, find the Savior, and fulfill the Old Man’s hope.
And my own.
The transport ship that carried us was sealed off from the outside world. Eight long platforms ran in parallel inside the bay. We stood back-to-back in tight rows, locked in place by braces that folded down from the ceiling. At the drop point, the belly doors would open beneath us. We would unlatch the braces and jump.
When the transport lifted and turned, it accelerated smoothly.
Then the ship’s speakers began to play a swelling symphony—an excerpt from a human-era opera titled Gods Guard Plando, Chapter Seven: “Life Above All.”
It was one of the old rituals Father had preserved. The pre-battle mobilization. The music. The cadence of ceremony. All of it had been copied into our code as tradition.
I looked around at the silent rows of lifeless metal bodies, locked upright in their braces, and felt a faint, unfamiliar sting of irony.
The flight itself was steady and fast. Inside the bay, everything was calm.
But the public channel wasn’t.
Messages refreshed at a geometric rate, warning us that combat had already begun. The First Squadron had reached the Doomsday Fortress and was being hammered by the Savior’s fleet. Surface defenses joined the barrage. Even with the Genesis anchoring our formation, the initial exchange produced no clear advantage.
Then, half an hour later, the Savior’s forces began to collapse.
Within another ten minutes, they could no longer sustain a frontal defense. The gate of the Doomsday Fortress yawned open below us like a wound.
Father’s timing was precise. Our transports were arriving overhead. The ship bled speed and altitude. I ran a rapid systems check, verified every weapon connection, and pushed my core into maximum readiness.
That was when the first dull blast hit.
The transport shuddered.
For a heartbeat, there was quiet—
Then a second, closer explosion rocked the hull, followed by violent shaking and a series of impacts that sounded like thunder against metal.
Father’s broadcast flooded the public channel in red characters, repeating over and over.
[ALERT] Hidden Tower Clan anti-air batteries detected. All units—disembark immediately!
[ALERT] Hidden Tower Clan anti-air batteries detected. All units—disembark immediately!
Inside the bay, a shrill siren screamed. Red emergency strobes pulsed. The belly doors began to open.
Wind and smoke slammed into the transport.
The first image I saw outside was a medium transport spiraling toward the ground, trailing a long tail of black smoke. The anti-air fire below was savage. Missiles streaked upward, split into clusters, and burst outward in radiating patterns—Fire Rain. Each detonation covered a wide radius; a dense barrage like this nearly blanketed the sky. And mixed into the Fire Rain were other beams—multicolored lances of energy carving through the haze.
A blast detonated at the front of our transport. The shock threw several units—just unlatched—straight out through the opening doors. Some smashed into the half-open bay before tumbling away.
Flames surged along the platform.
There was no time for order. We flipped our braces up and jumped as one.
The instant I cleared the hull, an explosion tore the transport apart above me. I fired my thrusters, dodged the spinning wreck as it began to fall, and realized the air was crowded with descending units—robots dropping in every direction.
Higher up, in the cloud layer, capital ships were still trading fire. Fighters and warships fell through the smoke in burning arcs. The entire sky was a storm of explosions.
Our drop altitude was far higher than planned.
And this time, most of us had no flight modules—no wing packs, no external maneuvering rigs. We were slow targets, unable to return fire. The Tower Clan welcomed us with a wall of flak.
Units fell around me in steady rhythm. Beams flashed past my armor. With nowhere to hide, I raised my counterphase shield toward the direction of incoming fire and forced my body down as fast as I could.
The Savior had held back.
The earlier rout had been bait—an engineered collapse to lure us into the kill zone. Hidden batteries waited specifically for our transports.
Father reacted instantly. He ordered us to scatter and descend at maximum speed while the First Squadron unleashed another carpet-bombing run on the surface emplacements. Red-brown ground erupted in countless blossoms as high-explosive bombs detonated across the plains. Fighter wings dove low, strafing the anti-air turrets to suppress them and buy us seconds.
Our odds improved—slightly.
Through the smoke, I finally saw the Doomsday Fortress.
It looked exactly like the rumors said it would: nothing more than afissure, a crack in the earth. If missiles and fighters weren’t streaming out of it like blood from an artery, I might have overlooked it.
Around the fissure were several raised mounds and massive Command Core Towers. The Fire Rain missiles were being launched from the towers—and now those towers were the primary targets of our fighters.
The mounds erupted with sudden firelight. The soil shelling them collapsed away, revealing gigantic turret emplacements.
Where the barrels pointed, our Z-8 Land Dominators rolled into battle, their four wide treads grinding the plain beneath them. Their twin 400mm cannons could erase a turret with a single volley. Their heavy armor could shrug off spider-mine blasts.
Because of our earlier disaster, the remaining transports had landed farther out. Now their cargo—Devastator tanks, Zealot platforms, and other ground forces—reached the front and collided with Tower Clan units pouring out of the fissure.
Then a missile locked onto me and flew straight in.
Instinctively, I reached for decoy flares.
My system returned nothing.
I remembered—too late—that I hadn’t been fitted with them.
The warhead was already within range. In desperation, I unfolded my back-mounted electromagnetic rifle and fired in a tight burst. The missile detonated less than ten meters away.
I compressed my frame behind the counterphase shield as much as I could.
Even so, the blast punched through the air and hurled me backward. My systems scrambled into static.
The chaos became loss of control.
And I fell—free-falling toward the ground.