DRAGONS OF THE LAND OF BLUE
/ PROLOGUE / WAR IN THE LAND
A mere 15 years had passed since Heaven's Fall, and all the Earth was burning once more. Again. Already. It was almost comical, this situation that befell the world of the Terrans, and yet so mercilessly hopeless. It seemed that defeat was all there was left to feel as life came to an end.
The first Landing Castle of the Orbital Knights touched down in the south of the Remnant of the United States of America, directly into the heart of the aged city of New Orleans. One of the few major population centers to have survived Heaven's Fall unscathed, it's luck had run out. The impact that the Landing Castle caused as it bore into the very Earth was enough to murder hundreds of thousands, and the Versian Kataphrakts that emerged from it gunned down any Terran that could be seen fleeing the city.
The vast majority of the weak, scarred American military was swiftly deployed to the site, where they were all duly slain. The combined efforts of the Remnant Army, the Airbone Mecha Corps, the Mechamarine Corps, and the Navy, they all proved fruitless. Not a single Martian Kataphrakt had fallen before the President of the Remnant ordered a full retreat. In a last ditch effort, the American government expended the entirety of its nuclear arsenal in a strike on New Orleans. Again, there was not a single Martian casualty reported.
The second Landing Castle fell down to the Japanese Isles, and another soon followed in Eastern China. The forces of the Far East suffered the same fate as their American counterparts, and the Japanese government swiftly evaporated into nonexistence. The four Landing Castles that fell to the African continent relished in an even quicker victory, while those who had invaded Europe were viciously locked in a bloody, ferocious stalemate.
There were few bastions left where Terrans lived, unscathed and uninvaded. The British Isles had not yet been targeted, and the Martians had been too occupied ravaging Germany to move on to France and Spain. In South America, the Argentine Resistance proved a most fearsome rat scurrying around the Versian force. What was left of Thailand, Indonesia, and Australia had scurried away to countless Pacific islands, where they hid from patrolling Kataphrakts and moved in sporadic, nomadic patterns to avoid detection.
The final Landing Castle of the Orbital Knights deployed, once again, in North America. In the West of the nation of Canada, atop the city of Calgary. The Canadian forces were defeated swiftly, and forced to retreat East. Rendezvousing with the remains of the American military, they fortified and dug into the Great Lakes region, which came to serve as one of the few remaining Terran sanctuaries in the Western Hemisphere.
They collected refugees and rallied what forces they could, but they knew that their stronghold could not hold forever. They planned to eventually abandon the region and make a break to the East, where they would race to the British Isles. Depending on whether or not Europe remained unconquered by that time, they would either make a stand with them or collect the survivors and retreat to United Earth Forces headquarters in the remote Russian tundra.
It is there, in that Sanctuary of the Great Lakes, where this story begins. Among the few collections of fighters left, there remains about half of the men of the 102nd Skymarine Regiment, a special operations force of the United States Army. Formed after Heavens' Fall, it is one of the few fighting forces left in the world that train in traditional infantry combat as well as Kataphrakt usage. This is due to their specialization as a combat force; they are trained to infiltrate and storm Martian Landing Castles. And to destroy them from within.
The date is 6 weeks after the first strike of the Orbital Knights, in the year of 2014 A.D.
This tale starts in the city of Chicago, which the Skymarines have made their fortress.