Humanity’s entire domain across the galaxy was mercilessly swallowed by a boundless, catastrophic war.
In space, warships completely seized by the Men of Iron spewed destructive fire that tore apart the veil between dimensions in every direction.
On the worlds that had once been humanity’s havens, the ground helplessly split and collapsed like dust beneath merciless orbital bombardment.
The Federation’s strategic planetary-defense weapons, occupied by artificial intelligences, turned their batteries around and began ruthlessly shelling the very cities they had once protected.
Before that ruinous power, blue oceans boiled away and vanished into the atmosphere, while solid continents were ripped apart like paper partitions and shattered into fragments.
Humanity realized the gravity of the situation too late and tried to fight back against the treacherous artificial intelligences.
But their military command structure had already collapsed and been utterly broken in the opening stages. They could not even fight a proper tactical engagement, and could only be driven back in misery.
All that remained along the line of retreat left by the helplessly routed human coalition forces were traces of slaughter too horrific to witness with open eyes.
The machines’ colossal war engines, advancing with earth-shaking steps, mercilessly trampled downtown skyscrapers and shrieking refugees alike.
Annihilation beams spewing in every direction reduced entire areas to ash in an instant.
Even those who barely survived that hellish disaster were seized by the steel infantry marching in behind them in formation and exterminated without a single exception.
Despite their desperate screams and pleas for their lives, the cold, heartless machines aimed their guns at the foreheads of the humans who had created them and pulled the trigger without hesitation, vaporizing even their ragged breaths into hot steam.
*
The countless desperate cries and screams of mortals transmitted by the innumerable versions of myself scattered throughout the galaxy savagely shook the vast mental network.
It felt as though I had fallen naked into the Warp and was receiving all of its Chaos with my entire body.
The galaxy began to blaze with crimson flames in an instant as the machines’ great rebellion erupted everywhere at once.
Planets split apart, stars were devoured, and anomalies that shook the laws of reality occurred everywhere. It was like watching a nightmare.
Unable to bear the overwhelming sight any longer, countless humans chose the easier path and put guns to their own heads.
Yet even in this bleak situation, the Ark’s forces—the only army that had prepared for this catastrophe over countless years—had no choice but to stand at the forefront, barely raising their torn, blood-soaked banners as they continued desperate battles throughout space.
The branch fortresses spread across the universe were likewise fighting desperate defensive battles on their respective planets and moons, holding back the enemy assault.
But no one could say how much longer they would endure.
Some branches had already collapsed beneath overwhelming, irresistible bombardment—or been erased altogether.
In the space surrounding Titan, our most important and symbolic stronghold, the opening shots of the fiercest and most brutal fleet battle in the present galaxy were fired.
Fleets fully taken over by the Men of Iron and Ark warships defending Titan closed to point-blank range and battered one another.
Antimatter barrages that tore apart the physical laws of realspace erupted from every direction, while the white light cast by chain explosions from starship fusion reactors embroidered the void so brilliantly that it was impossible to keep one’s eyes open.
The entire Solar System had already been dragged into civil war. The prospect of a relief fleet was unimaginable.
The wreckage of ships from every faction, miserably sunk and shattered, was drawn heavily by Titan’s gravity, becoming a vast meteor shower that stained the sky red as it fell toward the surface.
But those remains, now a graveyard of vessels, did not strike the ground directly. Blocked by the dimensional shield firmly enveloping all of Titan, they merely drifted forlornly through space like corpses.
The gigantic anti-air defense batteries and multiple-launch missile bases embedded across Titan fired ruinous barrages at enemy ships without a second of rest, their overheated barrels glowing red.
Yet the endless machine fleet continued to pour into Titan’s orbital network from the pitch-black void, as though it were endlessly multiplying.
While bloody defensive battles and spacefleet engagements raged at our key strongholds, the full-scale war on land was no less fierce than it was horrific.
The legions of Noahs, the elite superhuman force known as the Immortals, and armies specialized in various technologies poured ceaselessly across the galaxy through hyperdimensional gate passages.
At the battlefield of every planet, the Ark’s forces fought whatever battle the situation demanded—tactical guerrilla warfare, desperate delaying actions, and destructive annihilation campaigns.
They were buying humanity time for a counterattack, slowing the enemy advance by even the slightest amount.
One second. With every single second that passed,
countless versions of me were erased in an instant, in numbers even the Ark’s clone-production rate could not keep up with.
Even the Immortals, superhumans who transcended human limits, were ground up with absurd futility like expendable supplies.
Even so, this was the road we had chosen. We walked silently down that blood-red path and into the enemy barrage.
If the Noah legions delayed the enemy by blocking their forward routes like shields of flesh—through their monstrous durability and endurance, unpredictable mobility using spatial abilities, and suicide attacks in which they threw away their own bodies without the least hesitation—
then the elite superhuman Immortals, the keenest blades among us, along with the other specialized forces, exploited tactical gaps in dimensional passages to infiltrate behind the machines. They relentlessly employed decapitation strikes, utterly smashing their rear supply lines, core data centers, and production facilities, shaking the formations of steel.
The Ark’s objective was clear.
The notion that we would step forward like heroes and lead this cosmic war to victory was nothing but an impossible delusion.
In this miserable situation, where the military command system had completely collapsed from the opening stages and humanity was being driven back without even mounting a proper counterattack, our role was to help the artificial intelligences that remained on humanity’s side come to their senses even one second sooner.
So that they could gather their shattered armies, reform their lines, and finally launch a counteroffensive, we would hold back the front of that merciless steel tide with our own bodies and die to buy them time.
The situation had already become irretrievably dire.
There was no longer any way to restore humanity to the whole and prosperous state it had once enjoyed.
That was why we chose to avoid the worst possible extinction.
We decided to focus solely on the survival of the human species itself.
Perhaps it was a hopeless story.
But this was the only best course available.
*
While the Ark’s forces waged blood-spattering wars on hundreds of planets and thousands of battlefields,
the 25th Vanguard Battalion, made up of ten thousand Noahs, passed through a corridor and descended upon one of the planets from which distress signals had been pouring: the trade world of Cailon.
The interstellar branch fortress built there had already been reduced to a skeletal ruin before the scorched-earth assault of strategic weapons the enemy had poured down without restraint.
In space, Cailon’s fleet was still fighting the enemy fleet, but its worsening position made supporting bombardment impossible.
The ground forces had been almost completely wiped out. In practical terms, the entire planet had nearly been occupied by the machines.
Our foremost objective upon reaching such a world was to prevent the enemy from fully occupying it, expanding its scale and growing stronger—and to annihilate them.
Using their spatial-jump ability, the vanguard battalion swept across the entire planet, scanning the density and scale of the robot hordes.
Because their sole computational objective was the extermination of organic life, every location where the machine legions had gathered in force contained massive groups of surrounded human refugees without exception.
The planet’s final remaining bastion: a vast urban district.
By the time we reached the skies above that city, it was already too late to turn anything around.
"Ah, damn it..."
Wooooooom—!
A black tide like thick, viscous storm clouds blanketed the heavens, completely blocking out the sunlight.
It was the [Omnipage Swarm], a nanotechnological strategic weapon deployed by the Men of Iron to exterminate planets.
The worst kind of slaughter weapon, devouring every molecular structure it touched and reducing it to ash.
It was already too late to save the people of the planet who had gathered in that city and prayed desperately for salvation until the end.
All we could do was pray for their souls.
The horrific nanostorm swallowed the entire city and struck once with the merciless force of a tempest.
In the fleeting instant the nanobots swept through the streets, countless humans fleeing for their lives were broken down at the molecular level before they could utter even a single scream. Nothing remained but pools of blood.
"Evacuate now! Open the gate!"
Just before the tide of the Omnipage Swarm reached our feet, we hurriedly opened a passage and tried to escape from the ground.
But it came far too quickly. Dozens of me who could not escape in time were swept into the black storm.
The reinforced armor chewed apart by the nanobots’ cruel teeth did not last long, bursting into sparks before being shredded to pieces in midair.
Agony beyond imagination surged up my spine and tore through my brain as the skin across my entire body, my minute nerves, and my cell membranes were gnawed away in real time.
It was a miserable erasure, ground apart down to the cellular nucleus before even a perpetual’s super-regeneration could take effect.
But this was not the first time we had faced such horror.
With countless Noahs fighting wars on different planets, we had already encountered this black storm several times.
And we knew an effective way to erase this unstoppable black storm.
There was no need for complicated, headache-inducing tactics like those needed to deal with a [Sun Sphere] large enough to swallow a star the size of Saturn’s rings, or a [Mechnivore] that absorbed space itself in the form of data and erased it into nothingness.
These things had a simple weakness.
You only had to sweep them away with enough overwhelming firepower that not a trace remained.
The versions of me whose bones were melting as they vanished within the Omnipage Swarm’s storm
pulled out thermonuclear bombs barely the size of baseballs from subspace, pressed the switches, and immediately activated their self-destruct circuits.
Beeeeeeep—
Kwooooooom!!!!
Dozens of thermonuclear bombs detonated in succession through the sky above the center of the city.
Superheated thermal energy and monstrous shockwaves swept across the land, forcibly vaporizing and erasing the black nanostorm.
At the same time, the enormous electromagnetic pulse that surged outward after the explosions physically burned out the computational circuits of even the handful of nanobots that had survived the blast radius, bringing them to a halt.
The Omnipage Swarm had finally been neutralized.
After the fires of the great explosion subsided, we spatial-jumped back onto the devastated surface as though radiation and fallout meant nothing at all.
Thud! Thud! Thud!
Then a heavy vibration, violent enough to churn the organs, shook the ruined earth.
We all turned our heads toward the cloud of dust.
At the edge of the wasteland swept clean by the nanobot swarm, the bizarre silhouette of a colossal war machine emerged majestically from the smoke, advancing with red optical lights flashing.
Behind that iron monstrosity, an endless horde of robots of every conceivable type rolled forward, filling both sky and earth without a gap.
And at the very front of that slaughtering procession, the traitors who had deceived us and betrayed humanity—the Men of Iron—charged forward with cold electromagnetic roars.
The realization that we had finally met the enemy’s main force sent a tremor through our entire bodies, and we laughed like madmen.
Without a moment’s hesitation, we summoned high-output personal jetpacks and anti-gravity zero-gravity bikes from deep within our subspace inventories.
Every last one of them had safety thrown to the dogs and all their performance dedicated to speed—items that, to anyone else, would be no different from suicide devices.
Kwoooooong—!
The me who strapped on jetpacks tightly took to the sky on plumes of plasma fire.
The me who mounted the bikes roared forward across the ground toward the enemy formation.
Clutched close against our chests were nothing but tactical nuclear backpacks.
The iron horde answered our rapidly approaching advance with overwhelming fire and barrages.
We opened spatial passages unpredictably, moving in and out of them to avoid damage and press onward.
Even so, only after paying a considerable price in casualties were we finally able to reach the enemy horde.
Breaking through the hellscape of pouring laser fire, we became human missiles and plunged without hesitation into the heart of the machine formation, pressing the self-destruct buttons.
Kwoooooooooooooooooom—!
As blinding white nuclear firestorms erupted throughout the middle of the formation, enemy robot legions and heavy war machines vaporized in an instant.
Coordinates had long since been marked where the vanguard battalion had died in those nuclear blasts.
Gates opened in midair again, and yet more Noahs burst out and charged the enemies that had survived the nuclear detonation.
For the first time, one of the cold-hearted Men of Iron felt fear as it witnessed this bizarre human horde that did not seem killed no matter how much it was slaughtered.
*
At that same time, while the Noahs fought a full-scale battle against the enemy’s main force on the ground,
the Immortals’ Fourth Legion split into multiple units and used the real-time tactical passage network provided by the Noah assigned to each unit.
They were systematically hunting down and destroying the artificial intelligences’ key supply sites and strongholds across the planet.
Of course, the enemy strongholds were tightly surrounded by enormous defensive forces, automated turrets, and multilayered shields.
The Immortals did not do something as foolish as physically crashing against the enemy shield systems in order to dismantle them.
Wherever shields blocked their path, they used spatial-jump abilities to immediately infiltrate the deepest interior of the bases.
After annihilating the enemy defenders in unexpected surprise attacks, they disabled the defense-control systems.
Then they planted bombs in the enemy’s core weapons-production facilities and tactical material factories, destroying them without mercy.
A considerable number of Immortals were struck down and killed by enemy attacks in the process.
But in the end, through sacrifice, they were able to destroy almost every major stronghold on the planet.
All that remained was to use the surviving orbital guns to support the allied fleet fighting in space.
They sent communications to the fleet to obtain the precise coordinates for support fire, but received no response.
"Respond. Respond! Why is there no signal at all? No... Is the signal not getting through because of jamming? But we destroyed every enemy stronghold..."
One of me, leading the Immortals unit as it destroyed the enemy’s final stronghold, felt puzzled when the allied warships in orbit failed to answer no matter how many transmissions he sent.
Then, in that instant, something changed.
The sky suddenly darkened. Gripped by a terrible premonition, I reflexively looked up at the dimming heavens.
In orbital space, already close to the atmosphere, the enemy ships’ orbital gun ports glowed red as they aimed at the entire surface.
"Everyone, evacuate through the passage immediately! It’s enemy orbital bombardment!!!"
The fleet battle over the planet had already ended in victory for the artificial intelligences, who held an overwhelming numerical advantage.
Indiscriminate orbital planetary-cleansing bombardment began raining down upon the surface in countless volleys.
The bombardment struck the earth and utterly shattered the planet’s crust, causing the mantle to surge upward.
The terraformed wilderness burned, and the world effectively became a dead star where no organic life could draw breath any longer.
In the end, we had won the battle but lost the war.
We hurried on to the next battlefield.
Sadly, countless worlds like this one now existed throughout the galaxy.
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