The taste of copper flooded my mouth as another shell detonated fifty meters to my left. The Third Null Field Crisis had entered its final phase, and I could feel the weight of seven stars on my shoulders—each one representing a million souls under my command, most of them now feeding the frozen earth of Kepler-442b.
My name is Vladimir Makarov. I was born in the winter of 2157 in the Siberian Defense Complex, raised on gunpowder and glory, molded by the Directorate of Extraterrestrial Warfare into something that barely qualified as human anymore. Forty-three years of service. Forty-three years of watching planets burn.
The rail-gun barrage had been going on for six hours straight. The technomantic insurgents—those reality-warping bastards who thought they could rewrite the laws of physics with their quantum sorcery—had finally cornered the last of the Terran Defense Forces here in the Crimson Wastes. My tactical display showed the brutal truth: 847 soldiers remaining from an initial force of 50,000. The numbers blinked red in my peripheral vision, each digit a grave marker.
"General!" Sergeant Chen's voice crackled through my comm implant, barely audible over the thunder of incoming artillery. "Enemy mech-walkers approaching from the northeast. Estimate thirty seconds until they breach our perimeter."
I adjusted my grip on the Monarch-class plasma rifle, its weight comforting in my hands. The weapon had been my companion through the Vega Incident, the Proxima Siege, and a dozen other conflicts that history would remember as footnotes to humanity's extinction. The rifle's quantum-core hummed with barely contained energy, ready to deliver death at light speed.
"All units, this is Makarov," I spoke into my comm, my voice carrying the authority of countless victories and defeats. "We've danced this dance before. Fire discipline. Make every shot count. And remember—we're not just fighting for Terra anymore. We're fighting for the idea that humanity deserves to exist."
The ground beneath my feet trembled as the enemy walkers approached. Each footstep was a seismic event, a reminder that we were facing machines the size of skyscrapers, piloted by beings who had transcended the need for flesh decades ago. The technomancers had uploaded their consciousness into quantum matrices, becoming something between god and virus.
But they could still die. I'd proven that on Europa, when I put a hypervelocity round through the central processing unit of their war-saint. The key was finding the human element buried beneath all that digital ascension. Fear, pride, anger—these emotions left traces in their quantum signatures, weaknesses that could be exploited.
The first walker crested the ridge, its form a grotesque marriage of organic curves and mechanical precision. Sensor arrays that looked like crystalline eyes swept the battlefield, searching for targets. Its main cannon began to swivel toward our position, and I knew we had perhaps three seconds before it turned this crater into a glass parking lot.
I squeezed the trigger.
The plasma bolt struck the walker's left optical cluster, sending arcs of electricity cascading down its frame. The pilot's scream echoed across the battlefield—not through speakers, but directly into our minds, a psychic shriek of pain and rage that made several of my men collapse.
"Target's wounded but still mobile," I called out, chambering another round. "Concentrate fire on the damaged section."
The next few minutes became a blur of violence and precision. My soldiers—what remained of them—fought with the desperate fury of cornered animals. Plasma bolts, rail-gun slugs, and experimental quantum torpedoes lit up the morning sky in a deadly light show. Three walkers fell, their pilots' death-screams adding to the psychic static that filled the air.
But for every one we destroyed, two more took its place. The enemy had numbers, resources, and time. We had only our training, our weapons, and our refusal to surrender.
"General, we're down to our last power cells," Chen reported. His voice was steady, professional, but I could hear the underlying fear. We'd served together for fifteen years. He'd been there at the Battle of Titan's Gate, when we held the line against impossible odds. He'd earned the right to be afraid.
"Then we make them count," I replied, switching my rifle to maximum output. The weapon would only fire three more times before the quantum core destabilized, but each shot would carry enough energy to level a city block.
The largest walker—a cathedral-sized monstrosity that the enemy called a God-Frame—began its approach. Its pilot was someone I recognized: Cardinal Vex, the architect of the Lunar Genocide, the monster who had turned our children into quantum batteries. If there was a single being in the universe that deserved to die by my hand, it was him.
I stood up from behind my cover, fully exposed to enemy fire. My enhanced nervous system processed the incoming projectiles, calculating trajectories and timing with inhuman precision. A plasma bolt missed my head by millimeters. A rail-gun slug punched through the air where I'd been standing a microsecond earlier.
The God-Frame's cannon was charging for another shot. I could see the energy building in its barrel, reality itself bending around the weapon's muzzle. When it fired, there would be nothing left of this position but subatomic particles and regret.
I raised my rifle and looked through the scope. At this distance, I could see into the God-Frame's pilot chamber, where Cardinal Vex's consciousness existed as a swirling galaxy of malevolent light. The targeting computer painted a perfect firing solution on my retina.
"This is for Luna," I whispered, and pulled the trigger.
The plasma bolt struck true, piercing the God-Frame's armor and finding its way to the pilot's quantum matrix. Vex's scream shattered windows across three continents. The massive walker swayed, its systems failing as its pilot's consciousness unraveled.
Then the God-Frame's cannon fired.
The world became light and heat and noise. I felt my body disintegrating at the molecular level, my consciousness scattering like sparks from a bonfire. But even as I died, I heard something impossible—a melody, faint but unmistakable, drifting through the chaos.
It was the opening riff of "Master of Puppets," played on what sounded like a music box.
And then there was nothing.