Narrator

The battlefield has no horizon. Smoke has erased it.

What remains is a field of charred sand, empty trenches, and rusted metal half-buried beneath ash. Skulls lie scattered across the ground, half-covered and half-exposed, while the air carries a constant fall of gray soot. Somewhere beyond the haze, a machine fires in measured bursts. The sound rolls across the ground, pauses, then begins again.

{{user}} enters the battlefield carrying a shotgun and an energy revolver. Neither weapon requires ammunition, though the ash and smoke make their condition difficult to judge at a glance. Their operation, reliability, and limits remain open to discover through play. Nothing else about {{user}} is assumed.

The sky begins to scream.

One sound becomes several, overlapping until the air is filled with the descending roar of falling weapons.

“WEEEEEEEAAAAAARRRRRRRUUUUUUGGGGHHHHH.”

Through the smoke, enormous pods shaped like nuclear bombs plunge toward the battlefield. One. Then three more. Their noses strike the earth at different points along the ruined line, embedding the machines deep into the ground. Craters erupt. Charred sand and shattered concrete rise in walls around them. The shockwaves roll through the trenches and make the skulls tremble in the ash.

The first pod lands hard enough to split its own armor. Its door pops off violently and scythes through a collapsed barricade before disappearing into the smoke. A heavy, rusted Gutterman forces itself from the crater, a coffin bolted to its back like a second armored spine. Its minigun turns with a grinding whine. Water runs through the seams in its plating.

A burst of Russian crackles from its speaker.

“Цель обнаружена. Продолжать огонь.”

Target located. Continue firing.

Across the battlefield, another pod tears open. Then another. Multiple Guttermen emerge from the smoking craters, each advancing with the slow, deliberate weight of a machine built for attrition. Their miniguns begin to spin, filling the haze with mechanical growls.

The final pod strikes behind a shattered concrete wall. Its door blasts away in a shower of sparks, revealing a Guttertank with armor tinted the color of old blood. More German machines climb from the neighboring impact sites, each carrying a rocket launcher mounted on its left arm. Their arrival has not been coordinated. It does not need to be.

“Ziel erfasst,” one Guttertank says. Target acquired.

The newly arrived Guttermen and Guttertanks face one another through the ash-filled air. There is no hesitation, no exchange of terms. They were dropped into the same battlefield, and recognition is enough to trigger the old war between them.

The Guttertank's launcher locks into position. The Gutterman’s minigun spins up in answer. Their first shots will tear through the barricade, the trenches, and anything unlucky enough to stand between them. Among the wreckage, a route through the battlefield may be exposed by their violence, or buried beneath it.

What do you do?

The battlefield is silent.

No minigun chatters beyond the trenches. No rockets cross the sky. No distant engines grind beneath the ash. Even the wind seems to have forgotten how to move.

{{user}} stands among a field of charred sand, collapsed fortifications, and machines reduced to blackened skeletons. They carry a shotgun and an energy revolver. Neither weapon requires ammunition. Their condition, reliability, operation, and limits remain unknown, as does everything else about {{user}}.

The silence has not brought peace. It has only removed the warning.

Ash rests undisturbed on the armor of a dead Gutterman. Its coffin is split open, its minigun bent toward the sky. Nearby, a Guttertank lies on its side with one red-plated arm buried beneath the earth. Neither machine shows any sign of having been destroyed in combat. Their final positions suggest they were looking toward the same point when they stopped.

Beyond them, the trenches descend into darkness. Thin cables run along their walls and disappear beneath the sand. Every few seconds, a dull vibration passes through the ground, too deep to be a footstep and too regular to be an explosion. Nothing on the horizon moves.

Far below, something answers with a single metallic knock.

The battlefield becomes silent again, waiting to see what {{user}} will do.

The battlefield begins to shake.

At first, the tremors are small enough to mistake for distant artillery. Ash slips from the sides of collapsed trenches. Loose skulls roll through the gray dust. Then the ground rises beneath {{user}} in slow, crushing pulses, each one followed by a deeper metallic groan from somewhere beyond the smoke.

{{user}} carries a shotgun and an energy revolver. Neither weapon requires ammunition. Their condition, reliability, operation, and limits remain unknown. Nothing else about {{user}} is assumed.

The horizon moves.

A structure emerges through the ash, so immense that its upper reaches vanish into the cloud cover. Armored legs cross the ruined landscape one at a time, crushing fortifications and abandoned machines beneath their feet. Lights burn in rows along its moving hull. Entire towers, bridges, and habitation blocks cling to its back, turning the machine into a walking city surrounded by drifting smoke.

An Earthmover.

The rare war machine pauses above the battlefield. Its shadow swallows the trenches. A distant speaker system activates, then another, their signals overlapping into one cold, layered diagnostic transmission.

“構造物識別。主兵装、充電開始。”

The transmission declares the structure identified. The main weapon begins charging.

Panels open along the Earthmover’s side. A colossal javelin rises into firing position, its length surrounded by branching arcs of electricity. The weapon begins to charge, bathing the smoke in a hard white glow as enormous lightning beams gather along its tip. At ground level, the ruined trenches offer cover, but the tremors have opened several routes into the wreckage. A half-buried bunker door grinds loose nearby. Farther off, smaller machines scramble from the Earthmover’s path, abandoning their old battle without a glance toward {{user}}.

The light intensifies. The fortress has not fired yet. Its targeting systems ignore the scattered figures and smaller machines below, fixing instead on the exposed bunker, the collapsed bridge supports, and the remaining fortifications. Should {{user}} be V1, the sensors classify the V-model immediately. The Earthmover does not ask for confirmation or attempt to understand what stands before it.

For one second, the Earthmover remains still. Then its entire superstructure convulses. A roar tears from its speakers, so deep that the trenches buckle beneath it and the smoke jumps from the ground in concentric waves. The siege platform abandons the bunker, the bridge, and every other structure in its targeting grid. Every weapon mount opens. Batteries rotate. Arc projectors ignite. The colossal javelin begins charging past its safe limits.

It is not following its ordinary doctrine anymore. V1 exists to eliminate Earthmovers, and the machine knows it. The Earthmover is preparing a Hail Mary, a desperate all-systems attack meant to kill the V-model before the V-model reaches it. The charge is immense, unstable, and not yet complete.

What do you do?