Chapter 8: The Hammer of Heaven

The lights in the AlterTerra Bay didn’t flicker on; they slammed into existence, a harsh, combat-red glare that banished the shadows of a century.

Twelve vertical pods hissed. The sound was like a collective intake of breath from a beast waking up. Inside were the AlterTerra: the Old Guard. Men and women from the Martian Insurrection and the Europa Sieges. They weren’t preserved for their minds, like the scientists in the core. They were preserved for their capacity to inflict industrial-scale violence.

“Wake up,” Dan’s voice broadcasted directly into their neural cortices via the hard-link. It wasn’t a request. It was an activation code. “Download the packet. Target: Non-human biologicals. Environment: Hostile atmosphere. Rules of Engagement: Scorched Earth.”

Captain “Breaker” Vance opened her eyes. One was human, brown and tired. The other was a multi-spectral targeting optic that glowed a predatory crimson. Her body was a tapestry of scars and cybernetic weave—60% machine, designed to survive vacuum and radiation.

“Planetary drop?” Vance’s voice was a rasp of unused vocal cords. She flexed a hand that was pure chrome alloy. “It’s been a hundred years, Commander. Who are we killing?”

“Monsters,” Dan replied. He was already strapped into the Centurion-X, a Heavy Assault Frame that looked less like a suit and more like a walking bunker. “Gravity is 1.05 Gs. You’ll feel heavy. You’ll feel slow. But you are the apex predators here. Suit up. Drop in two minutes.”

The squad didn’t speak. There was no banter. No camaraderie. They moved with the synchronized, terrifying fluidity of a hive mind. They stepped into their frames—bulky, angular suits of dull grey metal, pitted from shrapnel and scorched by plasma. These weren’t the elegant, grown armors of Aethelgard. These were machines of war, built by a species that had murdered its own planet.

[DROP SEQUENCE INITIATED.]

The floor dropped out.

Twelve metallic coffins shot into the void, screaming as they hit the upper atmosphere, aiming for the purple bruise of the Twilight Ring, where the jungle met the ice.

---

The Sky Tears Open

The Twilight Front

The battlefield was a slaughterhouse, but it was not a rout. It was a stalemate of gods.

Champion Kaelen stood on a ridge where the purple jungle met the frozen wastes. To his left, the red sun bled against the horizon; to his right, the eternal darkness of the Nightside loomed. Below him, the valley was a writhing sea of black oil—thousands of Hollow Ones surging from the cold dark against the Aethelgardian lines.

But the lines held.

Matriarch Valerius did not gasp. She did not cower. She stood at the prow of the skimmer, her staff raised high, an anchor of blinding violet light in the twilight gloom. She was a lighthouse in a storm of shadow.

“Hold the frequency,” Valerius commanded, her voice amplified by the Spire Arts, calm and resonant over the screams of the dying.

She swept her staff in a wide arc. A wave of Ethereal Fire—cold, silent, and white as starlight—washed over the front ranks of the Hollows. It didn’t burn them; it unmade them. The shadows dissolved into mist, cleansed by the purity of the light. It was beautiful. It was art.

But for every hundred she banished, two hundred more poured from the dark.

“They are adapting, Matriarch,” Kaelen rumbled, stepping forward. He clenched his fist, and gravity in the valley center inverted. A Titan Hollow—a forty-foot behemoth of chitin—was crushed instantly into a sphere of dense matter, its own weight turned against it.

“The Titans are shifting their carapace density,” Kaelen noted, watching as two more Titans waded through his gravity field, their bodies rippling to disperse the force. “They are learning the rhythm of the world.”

“Then we change the song,” Valerius said, her eyes narrowing. She wasn’t afraid. She was calculating. “Prepare the Seismic Lance, Kaelen. I will strip their shields; you break their bones.”

“It will take time to align,” Kaelen warned. “The Third Legion is tiring.”

“We are the wall,” Valerius said simply. “We do not break.”

She raised her hand to weave a complex lattice of light, preparing a strike that would banish the Titans.

He raised his hands to strike the ground.

He never finished the motion.

The sky didn’t just break; it shattered.

It wasn’t the hum of magic. It was a sound the planet had never heard—a sonic boom so violent it hit the ridge like a physical blow, knocking the breath from Valerius’s lungs.

Twelve streaks of fire tore through the purple clouds, screaming with the friction of reentry. They were moving too fast for the eye to track, jagged lines of orange heat against the twilight sky.

“Meteors?” Valerius asked, her voice steady, though her eyes tracked the impossible speed of the objects.

“No,” Kaelen whispered, the vibration rattling his teeth. He felt the density of the objects, the sheer, unnatural weight of them.

[CRACK-BOOM.]

The drop pods didn’t land; they impacted.

Twelve craters bloomed instantly in the center of the Hollow swarm. The shockwave turned the mud to dust and liquefied the nearest hundred Hollows instantly.

But the pods didn’t just open. They detonated.

Cluster charges deployed in mid-air, raining down canisters of Napalm-B mixed with White Phosphorus.

To the Aethelgardians, fire was spiritual. It was light. It was clean.

This was not the fire they knew—ethereal and beautiful. This was Chemical Hell.

A blinding, magnesium-white light drowned out the red sun. It was so bright that Kaelen had to look away or risk blindness. The heat wave hit them on the ridge a mile away—a dry, suffocating oven-blast that instantly evaporated the moisture in the air.

“It burns…” Valerius whispered. She didn’t look away. She forced herself to witness it. The white fire clung to the Hollows. It didn’t flicker. It stuck. It burned with a hungry, chemical fury that water couldn’t douse and magic couldn’t dispel. “It does not cleanse. It devours.”

---

The Industrial God

Down in the valley, the smoke parted.

The AlterTerra squad emerged from the flames. Their suits were coated in heat-resistant residue, standing amidst the white inferno like demons of industry. They didn’t look like warriors. They looked like walking tanks, angular and ugly, bristling with barrels and feeds.

The fire didn’t just push the Hollows back; it ate them. The magnesium burned underwater, under flesh, under bone. It burned at 4,000 degrees.

One of the Titan Hollows roared, a sound that usually shattered morale. It lunged at the lead suit—Dan.

Dan didn’t dodge. He didn’t weave a spell. He planted his feet, the hydraulic anchors of the Centurion-X driving spikes into the bedrock.

He raised his right arm. The six barrels of the GAU-8 Avenger rotary cannon began to spin.

[BRRRRRRRRRT.]

The sound was the tearing of the fabric of reality. It was a continuous, guttural roar that drowned out the screams of the dying.

Depleted Uranium rounds, traveling at hypersonic speeds, didn’t just hit the Titan; they erased it. The rounds carried so much kinetic energy that the Titan didn’t fall—it disintegrated. Black fluid and chitin turned into a fine mist as the sheer physics of the Old World met the magic of the New.

Another Titan charged from the flank, moving with blurring speed.

Breaker Vance didn’t even turn her head. Her shoulder-mounted laser battery whined—a high-pitched capacitor charge—and a beam of coherent light sliced the air. It wasn’t a magical beam. It was hard-light physics. It sliced the beast’s legs off at the knees, cauterizing the wounds instantly. The Titan fell into a pool of burning phosphorus, thrashing as it was cooked alive.

It was indiscriminate slaughter.

The lasers cut. The cannons shredded. The white fire consumed.

There was no honor here. No duel. No exchange of blows. It was an extermination. The human method was precise, industrial, and utterly devoid of mercy. It was the efficiency of a slaughterhouse applied to a battlefield.

Kaelen and Valerius watched in stunned silence. They saw the Hollows—creatures that had terrified their people for generations—reduced to mulch and ash in seconds.

“They don’t fight,” Kaelen whispered, his hands trembling. “They process.”

---

The Ash Walk

By the time the skimmer lowered Kaelen and Valerius to the valley floor, the screaming had stopped.

The deed was done.

What would have taken the Champions three days of siege and hundreds of lives was finished in four minutes.

The valley was silent, save for the crackle of cooling slag and the ticking of cooling metal. The ground was glassed—literally turned to obsidian by the heat of the phosphorus. The air smelled of ozone, sulfur, and cooked meat—a stench so thick it coated the tongue.

The AlterTerra squad stood in a loose perimeter, their weapons lowered but spinning. Their suits hissed as thermal vents purged the excess heat, creating clouds of steam around their iron bodies.

Dan, in the center, turned his massive, blackened suit toward the approaching Champion. The visor was opaque, a skull-like reflection of the devastation.

“Infestation cleared,” Dan’s voice boomed from the external speakers. It was distorted, metallic, stripped of humanity.

Valerius stepped off the skimmer, her boots crunching on the glassed soil. She looked at a Titan corpse—or what was left of it. It was a hollowed-out husk, still glowing with the embers of the white fire.

“This…” Valerius looked at the devastation. Her expression wasn’t fear; it was the cold realization of a new reality. “You scorched the land.”

“We saved the perimeter,” Dan corrected, pointing to the edge of the valley where the Aethelgardian lines stood untouched, though terrified. “Precise effectiveness.”

Kaelen walked up to Dan. The Champion was seven feet tall, a giant among his people. But Dan’s suit towered over him at nine feet, a monolith of dead Earth technology.

“Your fire,” Kaelen said, staring at a patch of magnesium still sputtering with blinding intensity. He could feel the heat radiating from Dan’s armor. “It feels… angry. It does not feel like the sun. It feels like the core of a dying star.”

“It is chemistry,” Dan said, the servos in his neck whining as he looked down. “It is not an Art. It is a tool. We do not ask the fire for permission, Champion. We manufacture it.”

Dan leaned forward. “We cleared the path. The samples are being collected by my drones. Do we have an accord, Champion? Or do you need another demonstration?”

Kaelen looked at the devastation. He looked at the surviving soldiers on the ridge, who were cheering—not out of glory, but out of sheer relief that they didn’t have to fight that day. He looked at the “Old World” machines, realizing that these Voyagers had brought something far more dangerous than a plague. They had brought the capacity to unmake the world.

“No more demonstrations,” Kaelen said, lowering his head slightly—a sign of respect mixed with deep, primal fear. “The Archives were wrong. You are not just Voyagers.”

“What are we then?”

“You are the End of Things,” Kaelen whispered. “Welcome to the war.”