"Get the children inside!" Sereen roared her command at the other Scrappers around her, the amateurs who'd frozen in fear and terror when their allies started dying and their houses started blowing up. Tsk, damn greenhorns. If death and explosions were all it took to make them freeze, then they shouldn't have signed up to be Scrappers. Around her, the city of Culva burned, many of its citizens dead or dying, with what few survivors there were fleeing into the Deep Vaults, where the Iron Men slept, waiting to be roused or some other shit, because the tin cans weren't waking up any time soon.

"Oy!" She walked up to one of the frozen Scrappers and bonked the two young men over their heads, nearly sending both of them sprawling into the ground. But, Sereen had only applied enough strength to wake them from whatever trance they'd gotten into. Her strength was controlled, focused, and disciplined, just as her father taught her. Because if she followed her mother's teachings, then the two idiots would be unconscious. "Wake up and follow orders! Get those people inside, you dumb little shits!"

The young Scrapper's eyes widened and Sereen saw the blankness in his thoughts filling with her command. He nodded and rushed towards the nearby civilians, who were also frozen in fear, cowering behind a bunch of walls, people who've never seen violence their whole lives. Fair enough. They weren't Scrappers and death was not expected of them.

The ground shook as one of the alien ships fell from the sky in a blaze of ruin and crashed into the... the local library, igniting the whole building, before exploding in a shower of fire and debris.

Ah, man, she liked that place. It had all the books she liked... which was just one, an ancient cookbook from the 2nd Millennium, otherwise known as the Primitive Era of Humanity, written by a Joshuwa Wiseman. The food was good, though. She should've just borrowed it when she had the chance. Right next to the library was her favorite cafe. Sereen hoped the fire didn't spread to it or, at the very least, it wasn't turned to rubble. Seeing her only source of good recaff and pastries burned to the ground might just send her over the edge, honestly.

The thought made her snort. She really took after her mother, huh? She shared her love of food. Dad would've chuckled at the thought.

A squad of slave soldiers appeared over the corner of the street they were on, the lumbering wretches forced to squeeze into a very narrow gap to try and get to them. Their weapons, Sereen noted earlier, didn't work properly when exposed to extreme temperatures, such as all the fires that raged around them; or, specifically, their targeting mechanism failed to work properly. Thus, when around large flames, the slave soldiers were forced to engage in melee, which worked in her favor.

Still, she'd be overwhelmed eventually, especially since Sereen was pretty sure that there were only very few Scrappers left to fight and the civilian militia were probably all dead by then. Once the remaining non-combatants entered the Deep Vaults, she was gonna have to follow them inside. The slave soldiers were thinning out, but the Rangdan still retained aerial superiority, despite a few of their ships crashing into the ground, courtesy of the anti-air defenses all over Culva, ancient machines that – as the stories said – would one day reawaken when the people had need of them. All of that meant the aliens were still kind of free to bomb them to smithereens from the air.

The one thing that sort of kept them from total aerial dominance were the anti-air guns that fired volley after volley of armor-piercing plasma bolts, forcing the Rangdan Vessels to avoid several locations or risk destruction.

As a child, Sereen thought that ancient machines and guardian automatons were little more than stories, placed in the same fictional world as world-conquering aliens from distant planets. But now, she was living in that fiction and Sereen wasn't sure how she was supposed to feel about it.

She knew she'd die in battle at some point, but she death can have her when it earned her.

Sereen raised her weapon and fired it in the middle of the growing horde of slave-soldiers, decimating dozens of them in an instant, a flash of vivid green accompanying the emerald lightning that spewed from the edge of the barrel, supercharging and silencing the very air around her as it surged across open space in an instant. And then, an explosion that annihilated just about everything that was caught in its radius.

Sereen grinned.

At the very least, the Scrappers' Guild had declared a State of War before everything went to hall and authorized the use of Weapons of War. The rifle in her hand, for instance, could reduce just about anything into a pile of gray dust with just a single shot. They called it a Gauss Rifle, which was apparently a design that, at one point, was only usable by the Iron Men, before a bunch of scientists figured out how to make it work for humans. Supposedly, the original version used to fry people with about hundreds of cancerous tumors each time they pulled the trigger, a weapon designed only for machines in mind. And now, she wielded the only other model of it.

Her eyes widened. And Sereen rolled to the side as a great shadow blurred overhead, a bladed hand swiping right where her head had been. It was fast, she noted immediately as she stood up, turned and took aim – much faster than her. An alien ghost moved in the darkness, its silhouette o It was only the scream of her instincts that saved her sorry ass right then and there. This definitely wasn't a slave soldier. She turned to the other survivors and the very few Scrappers that stood by them, the amateurs who followed her orders. "It's a Rangdan Warrior!"

Too late.

Of the two Scrappers with her, one died immediately, a boy who was no older than twenty, his head torn to ribbons as the Rangdan Warrior moved at blinding speeds. The other one screamed and blindly fired his weapon, unleashing scores of explosive plasma bolts that tore apart and melted just about anything caught in its deadly flash of blue fire. The slave soldiers around or close to them died in droves, but the Rangdan Warrior, Sereen noted to her dawning horror, was far too fast to be caught by the plasma bolts. She gritted her teeth. Her father once spoke to her, at length, on how to deal with opponents who were much faster and more nimble than herself.

"You can't see where they are. You can't even properly react to them. So, what do you do?" Her father asked, once, in a sparring session many years ago.

Combat was one of the few things she learned from her mysterious adoptive father, one of the few things he was better at then her mother. She hadn't known the answer then, making random guesses as a clueless child usually did. She was a fast-learner, he often said, and that she'd, one day, grow into a powerful warrior. If only he could see her now. Sereen grinned as she raised her weapon and waited. "You have only one option: you target their destination. Pre-initiative. Focus. Use all your abilities to predict where they're going and why. Match the speed of your attack with the speed at which they move if you can; in that manner, they'll never be out of reach."

Sereen turned her rifle to the amateur Scrapper and fired, unleashing the emerald lightning bolt of her Gauss Rifle right into the seemingly empty space behind him. And then, not a moment, later, a shadow appeared behind him, a shadow that was quickly struck down when half of its body disappeared into motes of burning dust, flesh and bone and armor reduced to little more than particles, which then dissipated into the night air. What remained of the creature fell to the ground, now missing everything from the waist down. Humanoid, Sereen noted immediately, but most definitely not human.

The young Scrapper, whose life she saved, never noticed.

"Oy!" She called out to the panicking young man. He did not respond. Instead, the boy continued firing his weapon at anything and everything that he perceived to be a threat, knocking and burning down several buildings and structures in the process, which – Sereen admitted – would've been a fun time if it wasn't for the fact that they were surrounded by enemies on all sides and she had to save as many idiots as she can before she ventured into the Deep Vaults. The Scrapper turned to her, his eyes blank, like a machine, just waiting for orders because its seemed as though his brain had stopped working properly and was now relying entirely on her for simply input.

Damn amateurs.

"Hurry up and get inside you idiot!" She pointed at the entrance to the Deep Vaults, which – even now – was shielded by a shimmering emerald field that allowed only humans inside. Unfortunately, that also meant that the human slave-solders could walk right in, but they were few, compared to the alien slaves. Sereen still felt queasy about killing her own kind, she'd readily admit. There wasn't even any time to acknowledge the fact that these people might've come from some far off planet that used to be ruled by humans, no time to sit down and ponder the fact that there were other people out there, among the stars. But, she supposed, not having that luxury was definitely a lot better than dying.

The Scrapper nodded frantically and ran right in, even bumping into and through the other survivors that they were supposed to be protecting. Ah, no matter. Sereen ran towards the corpse of the Rangdan. And her eyes widened. Despite all the damage it sustained, the damn thing was still moving, its fingers and arms still twitching and the stump of its torso was growing something, she noted. Was it trying to grow back its legs?

Sereen gritted her teeth. Tsk. She knew way too little about this enemy. She wanted to know where they came from, why they decided to attack them, and what was the best way to kill them.

Unfortunately, she couldn't examine it further as another horde of slave soldiers appeared – much larger than the last. And so, to rid herself of a potential enemy, Sereen raised her Gauss Rifle and fired a single shot right into the creature's head, erasing just about everything from its chest and up. If it came back from that, then it probably deserved to, because then what the hell would be the damn point of fighting an enemy that didn't know when to die?

So, hopefully, the alien stayed dead.

Sereen turned and fired once into the horde, the emerald lightning annihilating dozens of them into mounds of white ash. The flames kept them from firing back, but she couldn't rely on that little trick indefinitely. She glanced around her and found that every single soul that could be saved, alongside whoever was left on their side, had already made their way into the Deep Vaults. That was good. It cleared her conscience. Sereen had done everything she could to save as many people as possible. She walked backwards, quick, but steady steps, and fired another shot into the horde.

The city burned around her, the buildings crumbling into dust. Damn near everything she knew about this place was going up in smoke. Sereen grinned as she fired yet another bolt of emerald lightning into the horde. This wasn't a victory. The Rangdan were winning. But the Scrappers sure as hell made the damn aliens pay for every inch of ground they gained. Everyone fought with all they had, even to their deaths. She'd call it a victorious defeat if there was such a thing. An old clock tolled. Midnight, Sereen realized. It was midnight. And that meant it was only a matter of time before the Iron Men started marching from their blackened tombs.

The ground shook, reverberating with loud and thunderous thrums. Sereen grinned. "Oh, you assholes are in trouble now!"

Before she could step into the shimmering emerald field that covered the entrance to the Deep Vaults, however, a Rangdan Warrior appeared right beside her. Sereen's senses screamed, but she moved far too slow to fully-avoid the certain death that came for her. She grunted in searing pain as a blade of dull gray metal sliced right through her left arm, cutting off the limb in an instant. Sereen fell to the ground, her stump bleeding heavily. Her eyes widened. She couldn't use the rifle with just one hand. Gritting her teeth, she grabbed a grenade and held it up. "See ya in hell, loser."

Right before she pressed the detonator, however, the Rangdan Warrior's torso, its entire upper body, erupted into fine mist as a surging lightning bolt of baleful emerald energies tore right through it. Sighing, Sereen fell back. A metallic footstep echoed beside her and she caught a glimpse of a dark gray boot. And, when she looked up, a dull, metallic skeletal face stared back at her.

"Hey... you must be an iron man, right?"