The blast shock had knocked my systems into failure. I plummeted toward the ground at terminal speed. I attempted emergency repairs again and again, but I couldn’t regain control of my body.
In the end, I had only one option.
Restart.
By the time reboot completed, the ground was only tens of meters below me. I wrenched my frame upright in the last second and pulled up hard just before impact.
Close.
One more heartbeat, and I would have been terminated before ever setting foot inside the Doomsday Fortress.
The ground battle was worse than anything I’d seen from the air. A Command Core Tower stood not far ahead, raking our robots and fighters with a plasma metal storm and light prisms. It had likely assumed I was a wreck and ignored me—until my recovery registered on its sensors.
One of its barrels swung toward me.
A storm of beams tore through the air.
There was no cover. I threw up my counterphase shield and sprinted laterally, legs driving so hard the ground shook beneath each step. In that instant, I spotted a Z-8 Land Dominator rumbling in my direction. I boosted to it and slipped behind its bulk.
The Land Dominator was massive. Beams struck its armor and burst into dense, continuous sprays of sparks, but the plating held without visible damage.
The Z-8 aimed its main gun at the tower. The chassis jolted.
Two high-energy shells flew out, their contrails twisting around each other like braided rope.
“BOOM—!”
The Command Core Tower’s turret went silent.
The tower responded immediately. Armor-piercing rounds screamed toward us. The Z-8’s point-defense systems chattered, intercepting the incoming missiles one by one.
Behind its wide hull, I allowed myself to believe I had a moment of safety—
“CLANG!”
A single, colossal impact.
The Z-8—more than four hundred tons of armor and arrogance—was lifted clean off the ground. Its huge body flipped, falling toward me like a collapsing building.
Lord Blin’s training saved me.
I dropped into a low roll, skimming the ground so close I could feel grit scraping my armor. The Z-8 slammed down where I had been.
The earth beneath it had become a crater.
The Land Dominator now lay upside down, treads spinning uselessly, combat capability gone.
Father’s command cracked across the public channel.
“All medium and heavy ground units: prioritize Command Core Towers, pillboxes, and turrets. Exilers, Flamecallers, and other light units are to defend against ground-effect missiles and Persuader missiles!!!”
Even as the order landed, thin red lines speared across my map—Bloodthirster laser designators, painting the Command Core Tower. Rampagers thundered past me, wielding oversized plasma blades as they charged the light prisms around the tower. Farther out, more Z-8s were rolling in.
At the same time, I saw a volley of missiles skimming low over the ground.
Ground-effect missiles.
They were notoriously difficult to defend against. Pillboxes could launch them in volume without even locking a specific target. The missiles would hunt on their own, then dive beneath a heavy unit and detonate to flip it.
That was why Father had assigned the defense task to us.
I unfolded my electromagnetic rifle module and fired while moving, sweeping bursts into the approaching missiles. More and more robots landed around us and joined the mine-sweeping fire.
With our cover, the Command Core Tower lasted less than ten minutes before it collapsed in a roar of twisted steel.
Our ground forces multiplied. Units that had dropped farther out finally reached the front. The Tower Clan began to retreat in layers. Towers and pillboxes were destroyed one after another. The plain filled with the charred wreckage of Tower Clan frames. The remaining light units, recognizing the tide, withdrew into the Doomsday Fortress.
Above, the battle in the clouds ended as well. The Savior’s fleet was annihilated. Plando warships descended from the smoke in ragged formation—the Genesis among them. There were fewer ships than before, and most of the survivors trailed flame and thick black vapor.
They had paid dearly.
Now, with the air power regrouped around the Genesis, our advance accelerated. Within half an hour, we pushed the battle line to the edge of the rift.
There had been a complication—but overall, we were still close to Father’s projected schedule.
I stood at the rim and looked down.
Only then did the Doomsday Fortress reveal itself.
From a distance, there was no sign of construction. From high altitude, the rift looked like a simple scar across the plains. But at the edge, the scale became undeniable.
The rift curved gently, its width irregular—averaging about two hundred meters—dropping more than 1,800 meters into shadow. The rift itself stretched for thousands of kilometers, but the Doomsday Fortress occupied only a small segment.
The deepest segment.
For the first few hundred meters, the walls were raw stone. Below that, steel emerged—sheer metal cliffs studded with turrets, rail-mounted defense guns, landing pads, missile ports, gates of every size, and industrial lifts. Dozens of catwalk bridges spanned the gap, linking the two sides.
The battle paused for only a breath.
Then the light above intensified—and I saw a purple pillar of fire sweep along the rift.
The Genesis.
Its signature beam cut through the fortress’s outer structure like a scythe. Catwalk bridges snapped and fell, tumbling into the abyss in long, silent arcs.
Behind the purple beam came swarms of Nightmare fighters and Ghost Hornets. Their small frames were built for this terrain. They knifed through the rift at insane speeds, hammering the remaining turrets with particle cannons and high-explosive energy rounds.
The cliffside guns answered, blasting fire and flame. The thunder of their barrage made the canyon tremble. Tower Clan robots burst from gates onto platforms, firing plasma machine guns and gauss rockets. The rail guns began to track the incoming fighters with brutal precision.
Fighters fell—then more replaced them.
They swept from one end of the canyon to the other, wheeled, and repeated the bombardment again and again. Bloodthirsters crawled down the ninety-degree walls, hooked legs gripping the cliff as they fired. Ion beams, gauss rounds, lasers, missiles, and armor-piercing shells crisscrossed the rift in a chaotic net.
Then the ground shuddered.
I turned and saw a massive Groundborer impact the plain behind us. The moment it landed, its drill began to spin. Rock and smoke erupted from the top of its cylindrical housing as the machine sank into the earth.
Sometime during the chaos, ground-attack ships had distributed themselves evenly over the rift. On Father’s order, each one dropped a Groundborer—spaced across Zones A and B.
Even Zone C within the rift.
The Tower Clan counterattacked by launching dozens of bouncing spherical devices from the depths. The spiked balls looked like nightmares—covered in steel thorns. They latched onto metal on contact, spun at terrifying speed, and bored into heavy chassis. When their power ran out, they detonated.
Despite our control of the rift’s upper platforms, the cutter spheres still destroyed several Groundborers and took out multiple units before we adapted.
The remaining Groundborers uploaded projected completion times.
7 hours, 25 minutes to breach the rock layer.
Father did not have seven hours of patience.
He ordered an assault through the cliffside gates.
By then, our air strikes had stripped most of the rift’s defenses. Turrets and rail guns lay in pieces. Tower Clan robots that exposed themselves were terminated almost instantly. The few that survived stayed behind thick embrasures, firing blindly.
At last, it was the light units’ battlefield.
We regrouped at the rim. Because of the transport crash, we were missing several members. Teams were rebuilt on the fly. My team was down to eight units: five Exilers, two Flamecallers, and one engineer.
Each team received an assigned gate. We would breach simultaneously and flood inward.
I linked up with my remaining teammates, located Gate Thirty-Three, and jumped.
Fire and smoke filled the rift like storm clouds. We dropped to a mid-level platform. The gate was embedded into the cliff wall at the platform’s inner edge.
The Flamecallers went to work. The door was thick. It took both of them a long time to cut an opening large enough for a single unit.
Once the breach was ready, we tossed in a BT-2 grenade. After the detonation, we slipped through at speed.
A wide corridor waited inside. Near the entrance, an Avenger sat slumped against the wall, half his body missing. He saw us and tried to raise his weapon.
He didn’t finish.
The lead Flamecaller blew his head apart.
Inside Zone A, we unfolded Father’s 3D map package and anchored our position. The Second Squadron’s mission was simple: occupy Zone A and eliminate every hostile unit inside.
The map was still gray, but near the rift wall patches of green were already spreading inward as other teams penetrated.
Green: secured.
Yellow: priority or high-risk.
Red: active engagement.
Gray: unexplored.
When the entire zone turned green, the occupation would be complete.
To seize Zone A quickly, we needed its master control chamber. Once Father’s signal was connected there, he could take over Zone A’s internal systems—doors, surveillance, whatever infrastructure the Tower Clan relied on.
Father had marked every suspected master control location in yellow.
Our task was to clear them one by one.
We advanced more than a hundred meters before reaching a three-way junction. Father’s signal weakened here, but the engineer immediately planted a comms relay beacon in a concealed spot. The connection snapped back to full strength.
I found it hard not to resent the necessity.
We followed the right-hand gate into an enormous factory hall. Rows of brand-new U-type Phantom fighters stood in perfect lines. They were nearly complete—frames assembled, surfaces smooth—waiting for final calibration before deployment.
The zone was marked yellow.
Danger.
We moved in a dispersed formation, shields raised, threading between the parked fighters. We searched for Tower Clan units, and for a passage deeper into the complex.
Then the hall lights died.
The ambush came a heartbeat later—grenade rounds detonating around us, followed by a dense barrage of laser fire and metallic slugs. I rolled beneath the belly of a Phantom fighter and pressed into the shadows.
Without my shield, I would already have been damaged.
We returned fire toward the direction of the lasers, but the enemy controlled the tempo. The moment we adapted to the darkness, flashbangs exploded, whitewashing our vision. We couldn’t count enemy numbers. We couldn’t pin positions.
Then a second team arrived to support us. Together, we hammered the darkness with suppressing fire.
The enemy withdrew without a sound.
Hover lights rose from the engineer’s launcher and lit the hall in pale, floating beams. We swept the area and found nothing but spent casings.
But we had losses.
A Flamecaller had lost a leg. Two Exilers had been headshotted—armor punched clean through. Embedded in the shattered plating were thin, needle-like steel rounds.
I recognized them.
I had seen that ammunition in the hands of a bio-human at Grayrock Base. I had seen it even earlier at Outpost C51.
Those needles belonged to the Tower Clan’s mysterious sniper.