Charlotte
I was worried about what had happened a few months earlier.
Fifteen colony worlds in total had lost all communication and contact.
We sent an exploration fleet to check on them, but barely two weeks later we lost track of that fleet as well.
Samuel, whom I thought of as a brother, decided to go to the affected systems personally to see for himself what had happened.
He set out with a fleet of a thousand ships and hundreds of legions of Men of Iron and Titans, a force more than enough to conquer entire planets with relative ease.
Over the following weeks, as he and Lunaria traveled farther from Erde-Tyrene, they kept in constant contact to report on the state of the worlds.
Every last one of them had been destroyed: their orbits had become graveyards of ships, and their cities, battlefields.
Hundreds of thousands of Men of Iron and Titans lay in pieces, but they also found the bodies of unknown creatures.
Their appearance was unnatural and terrifying: long, thin limbs ending in sharp claws capable of tearing apart any enemy; skin of a dark brown or grayish hue; an enormous jaw; and countless eyes, completely black and utterly devoid of mercy.
We named these beings the Krull.
We sent samples to Erde for study: the species was completely unknown to the Federation’s records.
It wasn’t until a month later, while exploring the tenth world, that Samuel managed to face them one-on-one.
They were weak against our weapons, but they fielded different classes of units that posed a real threat: some fired lasers capable of bringing down a Knight, while the largest stood up to seventy meters tall and had enough power to destroy ships in orbit.
On top of that, they were overwhelmingly numerous and hostile to every form of life.
They were the ones who had wiped out the colonists.
Samuel decided to eradicate them, considering them a plague, and led a campaign of extermination and liberation across those worlds, although we still didn’t know how they had gotten there, since not a single fleet or ship was found that could explain it.
During that time he came across survivors who told him what they had lived through; they were transferred to Krios, the planet dedicated to scientific and medical research, to recover.
News of the loss of the fifteen colonies spread to every corner of the Confederacy, and the authorities of every colony world demanded answers.
A council was convened at which all of Samuel’s findings on the Krull threat were shared, along with the measures being taken to guarantee the Confederacy’s security.
That left me deeply worried; my patience was running out, and the lack of news led me to consider preparing a second fleet for a rescue.
But a week later, a single ship arrived at Requiem: it was Lunaria’s, and she had come back alone.
I asked her where Samuel was, and what she told me was alarming.
He had given the following orders: reinforce every world, prepare them for an invasion, and deploy the Twilight Sword.
I hadn’t expected the threat to be of that magnitude.
I ordered every world to ready its armies and fleets for defense.
A month later, in the eastern sector—the Arkonia, Kaelinor, Taff and Evati systems—the first signs appeared of an unknown fleet launching a massive invasion.
Their ships were a grotesque blend of the organic and the metallic.
Our defense fleets engaged and destroyed a good number of the enemy ships, but some managed to break through the blockade and crashed into the planets, unleashing entire hordes of Krull.
When the planetary defense forces began the battle to keep those creatures away from the cities, we deployed Men of Iron and soldiers, along with mechanized jump units nine to twelve meters tall, as well as Titans that opened fire with their turbolaser cannons and plasma destructors, reducing thousands of those creatures to dust.
Men of Iron and Titans holding back the Krull hordes.
But we also suffered casualties at the hands of gigantic creatures, between twenty-one and seventy meters tall, that fired lasers from their eyes and did serious damage to our Titans.
One of the Krull giants, charging a laser blast from its eyes.
In the days that followed, new invasions were reported on other worlds, marking the start of what would come to be called my first war.
We kept casualties to a minimum thanks to our generals’ sound strategy and our clear technological superiority; winning was only a matter of time.
But if that had been all, there would never have been any need to deploy the Twilight Sword.
Only a very small group of people even knew it existed: it was a forty-five-kilometer ship, designed entirely for war, capable of shattering a planet with a single shot from its main cannon and of deploying entire legions of Men of Iron.
It was Erde-Tyrene’s ace up its sleeve.
Only three had ever been built, and two of them were sent to reinforce Samuel.
As the days went by, I noticed something strange: the only reinforcements being sent to his position were artificial intelligences.
His orders had been clear: this campaign would be fought exclusively by AIs.
I felt, with every fiber of my being, that something was wrong—that the real battle wasn’t against those creatures, but had something to do with Samuel himself.
She only asked me to trust him.
Lunaria believed it was better that I not know yet.
I kept receiving his battle reports, and the situation was critical: the race that had invaded the neighboring planets wasn’t a thinking species, but a slave species engineered by another race—one that was, this time, incredibly advanced and hostile.
For my part, I had to deal with the laser-class Krull, which were still wreaking havoc on our Titans.
Void shields protected them from the shots, but they drained with every sustained hit, and the Titans’ limited mobility made them easy targets.
So Lunaria, together with a team of engineers, set about developing a new mechanized unit, more mobile and agile.
She had a design in mind that she considered especially promising: the AC mechs from Armored Core 6.
The first prototypes were very encouraging.
Prototype mechanized unit inspired by the ACs of Armored Core.
Samuel — Thorvos System
I was aboard the Twilight Sword, at the head of a great fleet, ready to fight the final battle that would decide the fate of the entire sector.
I still couldn’t quite understand how, or why, these beings were here, so far from their place of origin, near the Halo Stars.
The battles we fought were apocalyptic.
They were terrifyingly strong and their weapons were horrifying; they had hundreds of enslaved soldiers, neurally controlled, whom they used as cannon fodder against our own guns.
After suffering heavy losses, the enemy finally responded by sending in its elite forces, and their power was absurd.
According to the reports, their strength was comparable to a Custodian’s, and that was no exaggeration: I saw with my own eyes one of those creatures devour ten Men of Iron soldiers in a matter of seconds.
It took a point-blank plasma shot, or a weapon with massive stopping power, to bring them down.
After months of what I can only describe as our own goddamn Vietnam, where every victory felt like hell, we finally managed to push them back to their last base in the sector.
Seven thousand ships and the two Twilight Swords were preparing to face the Rangdan fleet and its artificial battle moon, which were furiously defending a portal that was charging up—almost certainly to bring in reinforcements.
That was something we could not allow under any circumstances.
The Rangdan artificial battle moon, guarding the portal.