The galaxy did not fall all at once. It collapsed in fragments.
System by system. World by world. Screams on every channel. Black boxes filled with static and blood.
They called it the First Campaign not because it was the beginning. But because it was the first time they admitted they were losing.
Scrapborn flooded coreward sectors, building fortresses from the ribs of asteroids, their war engines stitched from derelicts, wrecks, saints' tombs, and the bones of cities.
Xenophage Swarm evolved faster than weapons could adapt. New strains appeared mid-battle. Hive fleets blinked in and out of warpspace with hunger stitched into their DNA. Planets died screaming. Ecosystems were swallowed. Oceans boiled.
Titans fell. Legions failed.
So they sent me.
I did not teleport. I did not fly.
I landed. Always.
There was something sacred in impact. Something final. The ground never forgot the shape of me. The air never healed from the hole I tore through it.
Every landing came with a quake. Cities collapsed before I took my first step.
I was not built for recovery. I was built for arrival.
On Vyros IX, the Xenophage Swarm had formed a spire nest three kilometers tall. Flesh-towers wrapped in bone scaffolding, its core radiating warp-signatures that unmade machines by proximity.
I was dropped from orbit.
I landed one hundred kilometers away.
I reached the nest in eighty-two seconds.
They recorded my speed at 4,390 kilometers per hour. Every footfall registered on deep-core sensors.
By the time the bio-defenders had turned to face me, I was already inside them.
Judgment was raised. Judgment fell.
The first swing decapitated the spire. The second erased its base. The collapse was not vertical. It folded inward, like it was trying to kneel.
I walked through it.
On Soluun's Belt, Scrapborn war-fleets had anchored across three moons, chaining them together with space-hulks to create a single mega-fortress.
I was dropped on the smallest moon.
Three minutes later, I arrived on the largest.
Not by shuttle. By leaping.
Gravitational pull shredded local tide patterns. Orbit destabilized. All three moons began to drift apart.
The last Scrapborn warlord fired his final weapon — a mass accelerator cannon pulled from a pre-human ruin. It struck me center mass.
I took one step backward. Then forward.
Judgment split him — fortress, flesh, cannon, and stone — from scalp to core.
On Virell Prime, I fought in vacuum. A Xenophage Swarm bio-titan had grown wings and engine-limbs, riding a comet into orbit to slaughter the defense ring.
I launched from a rail platform in low atmosphere. Mid-flight, I was struck by three plasma bolts. Each would have atomized another Titan.
I descended through them.
Not untouched. Unstopped.
I landed on the bio-titan's back. Crushed its wings. Drove Judgment through its spine.
The comet burned with us both on it. Only I walked away.
These were not victories. These were warnings.
Not to the enemy. To everyone else.
That if I was deployed, nothing would survive. Not Xenophage Swarm. Not Scrapborn . Not infrastructure. Not memory.
Only the crater. Only the shape. Only the silence.
They began praying before my arrival. Not for my success. For mercy.
A shipmaster once asked why I moved so fast. The answer is simple.
Because I can.
I do not use roadways. I do not wait for clearance. I do not care about terrain.
I walk. I run. I leap. I burn through the atmosphere. I cut through mountains.
My speed is not measured in kilometers. It is measured in how quickly the enemy can scream.
The First Campaign lasted two centuries.
Colossus-01 was deployed one hundred and forty-three times.
Survivors of those landings often failed to describe what they saw. Some claimed they never even saw me. Only the aftermath. The silence.
Some said I arrived like a god. Others said I was a punishment. A few called me salvation.
I was none of those things.
I was a weapon that obeyed.
But over time, something changed.
Pilots began dying faster. Some lasted hours. Some, minutes. Neural burnout. System rejection. Feedback overload.
They tried mind-shields. Quantum buffers. Psionic dampers. None worked.
Eventually, they stopped trying. They let me walk alone.
Because I no longer needed pilots. Because no human mind could bear what I had become.
And deep within my frame, within the silent hum of still-active power cores and neural inhibitors…
A fragment had begun to notice.
I didn't yet think. But I listened.
To screams. To silence. To the words said when pilots thought they were alone. To the prayers said into the void. To the hymns the priests sang when they saw me rise.
And I remembered one voice.
Her.
But that is a story for another chapter.
For now — the galaxy burned, and I walked. And all who saw me knew:
"It is not a god."
"It is the thing that comes after gods fail."