Zero to Peak: Ascension Online

At Plymouth City, the sky was a grim tableau, a mixture of swirling crimson and thick, oily black. Soot from countless fires and the violent aftershocks from detonated plasma vessels had choked the skyline, casting a permanent, hellish twilight over the metropolis below.

Plymouth City was an expansive urban sprawl, formed by the coalition of twenty large satellite cities that had grown and merged over time. The invasion had taken this hub by surprise, just as it had the rest of Section 1. Fortunately, the military effort here was strong enough to defend the city and prevent a catastrophic loss of life and property. The vast majority of the city's infrastructure remained intact, for now.

Many people who had fled for their lives from the surrounding settlements in the Hero Zone had sought refuge in Plymouth City. The aliens had been thorough, blocking the primary routes that led to the border control points and preventing a mass escape from the region. Up to this moment, neither the Section 2 government nor the Liberation Force had attempted to send an intervention to fight the crisis. Section 1 was on its own.

A massive, blue, translucent dome stood over the entirety of Plymouth City. This dome was not a product of a technological marvel, but a feat of immense magical power, erected by the combined efforts of special character mages.

A total of two hundred Bulwark mages had raised and now sustained the dome's presence. This incredible magical feat was fuelled by the finite mana in their personal reserves. To circumvent this limitation, a 'Father Aether' mage worked tirelessly to replenish the Bulwark mages' power, ensuring they never ran out of mana. The Bulwark mages could be seen standing at the peaks of various high-rise buildings across the expanse of the Plymouth metropolis. It was a stressful, draining task to hold up the dome shield under the constant, heavy assaults from a group of fifteen massive alien battleships, each one like the vessel that had attacked Zone Alpha's residential district. These Bulwark mages were all ranked Gold Transcendent and were all soldiers under the official military.

The battle raging outside the dome was a heated, chaotic affair. About two thousand ten-metre-tall mecha-droids battled against the divisions of alien soldiers. Some droids could be seen grappling onto the massive battleships themselves, battling aliens on their hulls or trying to drill a breach into the thick armour. Others made desperate efforts to crash the battleships entirely.

Outside, at the foot of the dome, four unseen Droid-smith special characters were pumping out new mecha-droids from their quickly established factories. The Droid-smiths were ranked Awakened Transcendent, which explained the ridiculous pace at which the droids were being manufactured and deployed straight into the fight.

A Gold Transcendent-ranked alien cockily approached one of the factories. It met no security measures on its way to the front of the structures. It cast its power; a swirling vortex of energy appeared, threatening to swallow everything before it.

However, the factories did not budge. Instead, the ground a few centimetres ahead of the alien split open, and a humongous mecha-droid, towering at a height of twenty metres, climbed out of the ground.

The alien laughed, a grating, arrogant sound. It thought that this new droid was like the others already in the battle. The other droids were being piloted by regular soldiers, and the attack power they packed was at the Bronze rank. A few of them packed power higher than that, but only because their pilots, who were powered soldiers, had used their own abilities to elevate the droids' attack force.

The humongous droid that had emerged from the ground had a three-barrel cannon mounted on each of its lower arms. It aimed the cannon on its right arm at the alien and unleashed an unforgiving round. The blast devastated the alien's entire form, carving a wide deep crater into the ground. The creature was instantly vaporised; nothing was left, not even a tiny fleck of its bone.

The humongous droid pressed forward towards the battlefield. The robot's façade was a form of pure menace. Its head was a perfect sphere with a single horizontal visor that gleamed with a terrifying red light. Its trunk, painted a flat ash-grey, featured visible gears, bolts, and thick cable wiring, expressing the crude, function-over-form design that the manufacturers had adopted in making this killing machine. Its pair of arms and legs were as crude as its trunk, lacking any of the refined sectioning. As if its listed features were not frightening enough, the manufacturers had made this robot to be piloted by an artificial intelligence that was strictly tailored for battle. As the menacing battle droid pressed forward, another three identical units climbed out of the same fissure in the ground.

"I'll be damned," Ivan exclaimed as he watched the four killing machines march out from the fissure.

"Those metal heads must be ranked Awakened Transcendent," Raina voiced her deductions. "This is just me speaking based on experience, but if it's based on the power my mind felt when that beast unleashed its cannon, that attack is ranked Pillar of Calamity."

"Do you have any idea who could be piloting that?" Lupita asked, her grasp on her rifle tightening in apprehension.

"I don't know," Raina answered, her thoughts unable to pin a finger on anyone she knew in the military. "But the crude design doesn't look like it was tailored for a human to control it."

Ivan wanted to sit and watch this mecha-droid versus aliens showdown. This seemed like the absolute sci-fi movie that he would normally sit down and enjoy. Unfortunately, the situation did not allow for one to simply observe.

Looking closely at the battle, nothing seemed to be changing for the human side. The ground troops that had been employed were being rapidly diminished with every passing dozen seconds. The aliens made light work of them. The simple but brutally effective tactic the aliens employed was to swarm upon a single mecha-droid, tearing it apart with a hundred different attacks from all sides. Some brave pilots, seeing their imminent death, would activate the instant self-destruct programme. The sequence spontaneously caused their droid to detonate in a heavy explosion that dealt lethal damage to anything within a thirty-metre radius, taking a chunk of the enemy with them in a final, defiant act.

Raina, Ivan, and Lupita seemed to be lacking the courage to charge into the fray. Raina had assumed that the place would be more open and less crowded; if it had been, she would have already gone searching for the governor to give him a piece of her mind. This chaotic, all-consuming warzone was not what she had anticipated, and charging in felt like suicide. The sheer scale of the conflict was demoralising, a meat grinder that chewed up soldiers and machines alike. For a moment, they just stood there, watching the carnage, feeling small and powerless against the tide.