It pained Ross to think that he had allowed himself into such a position. His mind was in the clouds the moment he signed the document. Instead of concentrating on what was in front of him, he looked far into a future that would never exist. And now he lived through the punishment every waking moment.

His first assignment was with the Codebreakers, a sub-group of field operatives working on breaking myriad of encryption schemes. The encryption method for the quantum communication system was too complex for them to break and even his own knowledge of the system would not have been enough without critical hardware that only the research divisions were equipped with.

It made no sense that they would stuff him away like this. They could have forced him to do the work he signed on for. No, this wasn't because of the contract he signed. He was on the threshold of the front lines. He would see the death and destruction wrought by war. They were slowly pushing him into combat, ever so slowly. Why? What was the goal?

Maybe there wasn't any. Maybe all that happened was a piece of paper,worded poorly and drafted by someone who had only ever spoken with a Sir prefacing anything said. The cold disinterest in any kind of fairness had caught him in its uncaring grasp, to wait to be discharged or killed in combat.

His first taste of war was on a convoy that he was given assurances would be far away from any combat. Of course, there was no assurances that this was a true statement. When the green flares of light came crashing down with thunderous blasts he knew what was the truth. The mortars had destroyed the first transport and the last one, sandwiching everyone into a narrow path with bramble and trees lining the road making off roading difficult.

He took his rifle and jumped into a ditch with the hope that lying still with his head down would save him from death. That wasn't what saved him. It was the corpse of the driver lying on top of him that saved him. When the marauders had left , after a few parting shots into whoever survived, he was left alone soaked in a pool of blood.

It took him two days to get back to base. They looked him over, checked him psychologically and determined he wasn't broken enough to be discharged. A dark figure was with the doctors who didn't say a single word until he was the last one left in the examination room when the doctors left.

"How does it feel? Do you think you made the right choice when you backed out of the job you signed up for? You can still come back. Your colleagues will never know you were working for us, they won't know that you helped us break their quantum encryption. Obviously I can't force you to..." the dark figure said. His hood had concealed everything but his mouth. And he spoke with a slight grin on his face, knowing he had backed Ross into a corner. Ross considered it. He was reaching the breaking point; he could feel the cracks forming in his psyche. "No" ,Ross finally mustered.

They had assumed that he wouldn't survive , that he would be ejected and that his professional career would be over when they surreptitiously leaked documents about his involvement in domestic spying.

He survived. Even with the men and women who surrounded him dying one by one. He continued. The Void Walkers found him soon after and gave him a choice. Work for them and his contractual obligations would be rescinded. He could have stayed a grunt, risking his life on the frontlines. But it was a way out of the constant cycle of death. He never thought he would end up under a kilometer of ice, surrounded by shadows that hid horrors. What was that saying? Out of the frying pan and onto the bullet train to Hell?

When Karin and Ross heard Ryuki scream through the radio they rushed to the closest cover, which happened to be at the base of a heavy artillery biped. "They're coming through the wall!" Barry yelled back. On infrared , the walls turned into hot blisters , popping off into dozens of tiny squirming bugs. they crawled up the walls and onto the roof , making a slow push towards the center of the room. The others dashed to defensible positions, picking up whatever weapons they could and prepared for what could be their last fighting moments of life.

Ryuki began firing off his autocannons and machine guns in bursts. The tracers raced across the room before exploding on the walls in a fiery splash of shrapnel. A squealing hiss sounded out through the armory . It was the sound of bugs cooking in their carapaces.

Barry and Wasp hid , huddled around the armored leg of a multiped tank. The ruckus battle had drowned out his inner thoughts and scrambled his situational awareness. It seemed to him that the entire world was crashing down on him. He didn't know where to shoot or even what to shoot at.

Wasp fell into a comatose state, whispering to himself as he held tightly to the rifle as if it was a lifeline in a torrential monsoon. Barry was too distracted to concentrate on being afraid. When clicking steps approached their position, Barry relied on years of ingrained instinct. He peeked out from behind cover to see a weird mass of biomechanical parts welded together into an ant-like body. Two huge arms stretched out from the thorax with serrated clamps for hands , like a weaponized crab. Its head was bulging and pulsating but its eyes zoomed and scoped like a lens aperture . Its head tilted and swayed erratically like motors in its neck had become old and rusty , the gears undoubtedly grinding away into nothingness.

"Well ,aint that just my fraking luck" he said before kicking Wasp out of his delirium. "Do you smell that?" Barry asked him. Smoke wafted through the bay ,mixed in with the scent of burning wreckage and fuel. "That, that's victory" he yelled out before holding down the trigger as he sprayed down the ant-crab. Blue flames erupted from his mag-rifle as the rounds flew out at a high multiple of the speed of sound. Each bullet exploded on the carapace hide of the bug, cracking it open like a egg and spilling its guts all over the riveted steel ground.

Wasp was still on edge, the battle sending shockwaves up his spine and the repeated concussive blasts keeping him on his ass. He covered his ears , to protect what little hearing he had left. His eyes raced looking for something useful, anything to keep his head from exploding. He looked up to see the open pilot-deck of the mech they sat under. His scrambled thoughts merged into one consistent idea. Jump in. Death was waiting for his decision.

He grabbed hold of the ladder rungs that lined the leg of the mech and pulled himself up as quickly as his tired body let him. He bounded up onto the side torso but one hand had slipped off the torso ladder leaving him hanging. He wedged his feet into the elbow of the mech and pushed himself back up into the pilots deck. Before he could even take a seat , the bay closed in around him ,sealing him inside. Lights on the console began to blink slowly and screens began to flicker on. Holographic displays with munition counters, radar and suit status popped into view, following his gaze as he looked over the familiar controls.

He didn't realize that the authorization check had been completed and he had been cleared to take control. It would have been a startling realization to know that something so old would respond to him. There was too many contacts blinking in front of him ,distracting him from the tiny portrait at the base of his seat with an image of what looked to be an wrinkled and grey version of himself casting a dour look back at him.

He took control , testing out the arm manipulators , pressing down on the foot rudders to advance a step that squashed a creeping xeno. When the force of the foot knocked Barry off his feet, he let loose a string of colorful Irish swears, some dating back thousands of years , as if his lineage had decided to use his mouth to voice their incredible disdain for whoever knocked them on their asses.

"What the hell!" he yelled out as the dormant mech burst into action with a swing fist that crushed a small horde of beasts under its reinforced steel knuckles. The floor began to shake when Barry could hear Ryuki yelling through his headset. He couldn't understand the rapid,jittery voice that erupted from his ear piece and had no way of knowing that above him a vast metallic shockwave was slowly ripping open the roof.

Wasp could feel the rattling through the thickened hide of his mech and switched to thermal vision to scan the room for the source. A temporary blindness swept over him when he cast his sight towards the roof. The white hot roof was melting away with a bloody red blot expanding out the epicenter of the heat map.

A set of legs pierced through the softened roof , covered in bulging,pulsating veins and polyps. It was unmistakably the armored legs of a supermassive multipede walker, a landstrider , the ultimate weapons platform. Through the gaping hole, its head slowly emerged, covered in compound eyes unlike those of a spider.

Wasp lost control of himself , firing off all his guns at the roof with little effect as the massive body began to disgorge. The crab-like bugs that swarmed around him continued to advance towards him while Barry desperately attempted to get Wasp's attention.

Barry's desperation overtook his rampant sarcasm as he could feel the swarm closing in on him. No jokes, no quips . There was nothing in him but an intense fear of being torn to pieces, or worse, a slow drawn out death as his body is consumed by picky eaters. He snapped the rifle in his hand towards Wasps mech and aimed for the head. A burst of fire flashed into the plasteel visor that protected the head cameras.

Wasp eyes strained from watching the flashes of gunfire directed at him. The pain jostled him from his delusional state enough to make him realize that he had left Barry outside in his haste to find safety. He switched to his ground facing cameras to see Barry huddled up against his mech with his head in his hands.

He flicked his wrist to open up the pilot deck and unfurled a rope ladder down. The counterweights on the ladder smacked Barry on his back , sending a stinging pain through his neck , prompting another string of Irish he realized that the ladder was what hit him, he slung his rifle over his shoulder and began to frantically climb the swinging lifeline.

Barry crawled onto the floor of the pilot deck, huffing and sweating profusely , waiting for the bay to close up. "You damn stupid idiot!" he yelled. "Do not do that again!" he said as he gulped down fresh air.

"Barry, Ryuki is saying that we need to regroup, that giant spider mech is wrecking the place. He says the floor won't be able to hold all this extra weight" Wasp spoke with exasperation in his voice. "What about the others?" Barry asked while still gasping for breath with his back to the ground.

Wasp nodded his head. He only knew as much as Barry. There was no indication, not a single radio message from the other teams. For all they knew, there were only the three of them. Wasp continued to fend off against the smaller biomechanical crabspiders with only bursts of his weapons in the hope of conserving ammunition. The mech paced slowly back towards Ryuki's position while the shadow of the giant cast down on them.