For five days, I let them retake the north.

  For five days, I watched their armies spread, marching outward like a tide of steel and silence—hunting and killing their own discarded clones. No mercy was given, not even for the most loyal.

  I saw it all through a hundred thousand eyes.

  Clones, bound to obedience by control chips, gunned down by cold machines and cheaper replacements, they were unfeeling and unrelenting. Loyalty didn’t matter to their former masters. It never had.

  In those same five days, the tunnels I had claimed and expanded so long ago, my arteries beneath the surface were shattered. Meteor strikes hammered the south, reducing what I had built to dust and debris.

  My second home, crushed beneath the weight of Grithan power.

  But I had been listening.

  My allies and agents monitored their communications. I heard all their words. They were calm, certain, and smug. They believed I had been broken. That my forces in the south were too scattered to resist. That the war was already over.

  That certainty would be their undoing.

  Yes, I had lost the tunnels. The south was scorched and broken. But what they destroyed was nothing compared to what I still held. Their focus was narrow. Their eyes were too fixed on immediate victory.

  That was the plan.

  The implant timer ticked down in my vision, its glow consuming everything else as it passed the five-minute mark. The key to victory is never overwhelming force—it’s misdirection.

  Unpredictability.

  Deception.

  For weeks before their invasion I kept their attention locked onto my fleets, feinting, drifting, circling the moon like aimless predators. Dust clouds and debris trails masked the truth. And still, their commanders couldn’t decipher the chaos. They thought I was panicking.

  Meanwhile, I was stripping the south clean. Every ounce of biomass harvested, every surviving biomorph repurposed. Large-scale expansion all over the moon created outposts and bases in the east and west, away from the eyes of their scanners.

  Losses were inevitable. Scattered bases were vaporized when the meteors struck—thousands of drones obliterated in moments—but the damage was done. My forces were dispersed, spread like seeds across Phaedra.

  And then the timer reached zero.

  In that instant, hundreds of detonations ignited across the north.

  Nuclear charges. Plasma warheads. Infernos tearing through logistics hubs, mines, and old staging points. I had buried them long ago, waiting. Now they burned.

  Fire, light, radiation—an alchemy of destruction. In mere seconds, their organized forces descended into chaos. Screaming comms. Panicked retreat orders. Command structures buckling under the weight of sudden, calculated violence.

  Thousands of clones were obliterated in radioactive fire, their forms shredded by high-velocity debris that tore through the air like shrapnel storms. Shockwaves followed, ripping across the battlefield, pulverizing anything in their path.

  Those who couldn’t find shelter were caught in the blast—armour rupturing, seals breaking, air hissing into the void. Limbs flailed, bodies twisted, and one by one, they were dragged into the cold, silent embrace of death.

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  And while their survivors scrambled confused, machines still functional and clones too stubborn to die charged blindly into my waiting forces. My drones met them head-on. Blood and steel clashed on Phaedra’s scarred landscape for supremacy.

  Then my ships moved.

  Abandoning their defensive lines in the south, they surged forward. Missile silos hidden across the eastern and western craters launched in sync—hundreds of thousands of warheads streaking across the void, intercepting the enemy missile counter-attack.

  The final battle for Phaedra had begun.

  Hexapods unleashed distant salvos, plasma blasts raining across the battlefield. Striders surged forward, firing into the oncoming tide of metal, aiming for the weakest positions in their formations as return fire lit up the field.

  Above, the void burned bright with missile detonations—swarms of Mosquito fighters engaged in a brutal air campaign, outnumbered five to one. It was a deadly dance of near-misses and last-second manoeuvres, chaos incarnate, as both sides hunted and tore through each other.

  My drones fell—some broken, others vaporized—but they took many with them.

  Assault and heavy-combat variants pushed through the smoke and wreckage, following waves of suicide drones that had led the charge, detonating deep within enemy ranks of steel and clone flesh alike. They didn’t yield. Neither did I.

  Every damaged drone would fight to the last spark. Clone soldiers fought with the same desperation, gasping their final breaths in the shattered remains of their war machines and armour.

  Their fleet’s relentless missile barrages and orbital strikes kept the pressure high, forcing me to adapt, to manoeuvre constantly, doing everything I could to limit the loss of my forces, second by brutal second.

  One of us would be buried here.

  The other would survive.

  ———

  Ridge 41 rose like a jagged tooth from the cracked ash plains of the northwest quadrant. Jagged trenches lined its southern slope, reinforced with an unnatural dark resin. The trench system had become a kill zone, a blood-soaked monument to desperation and defiance.

  Inside the command dugout, dust pulsed in the air as the ground trembled beneath heavy impacts.

  “CT-2041, reporting—front lines engaged.”

  “CT-1769—left flank’s slipping. We need reinforcement or a crater-sized coffin.”

  “CT-8882, my team’s out of rail slugs—switching to coils. Tearing through armour slower than I like.”

  A rain of ash drifted from the sky, illuminated in flashes of orbital detonations—missiles fired from both sides detonating in high orbit, their lights spreading eerie halos across the black horizon. Each burst threw sharp silhouettes across the hillside.

  And from above, the enemy came.

  Black-armoured clones surged from the cratered landscape below, riding on the backs of half-wrecked armoured vehicles, they were followed by a tide of tracked drones.

  Their guns moved in perfect sync, unleashing a stream of orange tracer fire that lit up the ridgeline in a constant barrage of suppressing fire.

  The advancing clones didn’t flinch or hesitate—they charged forward with unbroken momentum.

  Inside the dugout, a single BCU stood upright. Its six eyes focused on the battlefield as it relayed orders to the rest of its networked kin.

  CT-2980 turned to it. “Relay to your cluster—enemy armoured column approaching from crater ridge. Ninety-five tracked drones, three modified hauliers, and six armoured vehicles.”

  The Trumek’s voice was smooth and eerily calm. “Transmitting. Units from Ridge 41 to intercept. Reinforcement paths rerouted.”

  Outside, CT-3027 pulled the spent battery off his rifle and hissed through his teeth. “They brought hauliers to this crater-forsaken pile of dust. Hydrarchs must be desperate.”

  “Or confident,” replied CT-1103, perched behind an antiarmour rail mount, its barrel radiating heat glowing faintly orange. “Big mistake.”

  In the distance, larger modified hauliers crested the ridge. Their massive side legs stabbed into the rock to stabilize. Mounted cannons at the back rose glowing white, then fired.

  BOOM.

  The forward bunker and the surrounding area evaporated in fire and crushed resin. Eight rogue clones inside—gone instantly.

  CT-2041 ducked. “Front’s collapsing! Second trench, now!”

  “Hold!” shouted CT-0999. “BCUs are redirecting fire support!”

  The hill’s rear lit up as half a dozen BCU suicide drones launched from recess platforms buried in the rock. They darted through the ash clouds like knives, twisting midair to slam into enemy armour.

  The explosions rocked the slope—bits and pieces of drones showered the landscape, and a crawler flipped on its back, spilling black-armoured bodies into the dust like insects.

  CT-8882 screamed into comms. “Direct hit! An estimated fifty drones and all hauliers were destroyed! Pushing forward!”

  They surged up over the lip of the trench clones and BCU, stepping into the hell storm—missiles still streaking in high orbit, casting surreal shadows over the battlefield.

  Then came the enemy clones and drones dozens, then more. The landscape lit as both sides exchanged fire BCUs and drones advanced on each other without cover, without fear.

  “CT-2100! Right side—flanking!”

  “I see them!” CT-3027 fired, dropping two before a rail bolt slammed into his arm. He screamed, then snarled. “Still firing!”

  CT-1103’s weapon hissed as it overheated. “Push them back, or we don’t get to rebuild the line.”

  Suddenly, above them, a hundred shadows obscured the light. A wave of suicide BCU soared overhead, diving into the enemy lines at full speed, detonating with a burst of plasma that briefly turned night into day.

  They could hear the enemy clone line roar up on open comms—not in fear, but fury.

  “CT-2140! Up the slope, now!”

  They scrambled through the chaos—shells pounding the dirt, metal screaming against metal. Clone against clone. The rogue clones fought like animals—disciplined, vicious, their rifles barking in tight bursts, sidearms out when ammo ran dry, blades out when all else failed.

  Bodies fell around them—friends and enemies indistinguishable under smoke and ash.

  “Trumek! We need a path!” CT-2980 shouted.

  “Path provided. Reinforcements on route to push through.”

  The trench’s rear wall split open as a second cluster of BCUs arrived—four-limbed, heavily plated. They began deploying, providing suppressing fire along the ridge, their plasma weapons locking on.

  Within moments, the slope lit up with plasma fire. Loyalist clones fell in bursts of blood and sparks as they were pushed back.

  CT-0999 clutched a detonator. “Time to clear the last of 'em.”

  He pressed it.

  BOOM.

  Charges buried beneath the ridge’s far side exploded, crumpling rock and crawler both—trapping the last of the loyalist armour beneath it.

  Silence followed.

  Only ash falling now.

  Smoke. Blood. And stillness.

  The rogue clones leaned against the trench walls, gasping, checking ammo, dragging the wounded back.

  CT-1103 looked at the BCU, wiping soot and dust from his visor. “Tell me that was the last wave.”

  Trumek replied without emotion. “For the next thirty minutes.”

  CT-2980 sat down, gun resting across his lap. “We’ll hold Ridge 41… until there is no Ridge 41.”