It was as if the sea itself was set ablaze...

Caelus looked on in fear through the few remaining active cameras inside his Jaeger's Conn-pod at the sight that was happening before him as multiple of humanity's greatest weapons were being turned into scrap metal in front of his very eyes by the claws of a great beast. It was the largest Kaiju that he had ever seen, nearly twice the size of his own Jaeger and clearly many times as strong, evidenced by the fact that it now had its barbed tail straight through the Conn-pod of the Stellarborne Riptide, with the once mighty Pride of Fontaine going limp and sinking into the depths of the ocean below.

And the worst part... was that Caelus couldn't do anything about it. No matter how he tried to move, his own metal behemoth simply would not move. Not with the damage it had sustained and especially with the fact that his sister was... no he didn't even want to think about it. Maybe she was alive... maybe there was still hope to fight back against that monster.

"Stelle" Caelus pleaded, looking towards his hopefully unconscious sister by his side "Are you there? Wake up... please"

No response graced him, with the only thing keeping him company being the discordant radio chatter of his allies. And unfortunately for the young man... each voice was slowly going dark.

[Bzzt... This is Firefull Flyshine... taking extreme damage... We can't-]

[This is Star of... fire... integrity... 3-]

[Aegis Admire... ammunition... low... melee combat-]

One by one, Caelus was forced to suffer as he heard the voices of the friends he had been with for the past two years drown in a cacophony of explosions and tearing metal, never to be seen again. It was if the foul beast that had brought him to its knees did so on purpose, leaving him crippled just to make him suffer as it slowly killed off everyone he ever held dear.

And in the chaos... Caelus was forced to recall the names of those who had fallen.

Stelle

Furina

Aether

Firefly

Mantis

Bronya

Seele

Mast

Anchor

…Helm

All of them lost to the waves forever, never to be seen again

And in this moment of utter despair and hopelessness, for the first time in a long while, Caelus broke down crying.

After all... he was scared

He was now alone

And he didn't know what to do

Starlit Shatterdome: Tales of a Long War

Prologue Chapter: A Taste of Ragnarok

Back in the day... I used to want to be an astronomer. To study the stars was my dream as a child, and to hop on a spaceship and to enter the vicinity of another world was one of my wildest dreams. I was convinced that out there in the vast unforgiving cosmos there as life... and I was determined to be the first to find it. I studied hard, garnered a thirst for knowledge and was diligent in my studies.

And then... in the middle of high school, someone beat me to the punch in discovery of extraterrestrial life. In fact, an entire city beat me to the punch. Problem was... that extraterrestrial life was far from the friendly grey aliens that I had envisioned as a kid.

I was a teenager when the first Kaiju made landfall in the port city of Saint Freyja and in a matter of days, the crown jewel of the Kingdom of Jarilo was wiped out by a terrifying beast of unimaginable proportions. Tanks, jets, heavy artillery and the like were sent to stop it... but to no avail. The only option that the Jarilan military had was to level the place with an atomic weapon. While tens of thousands were dead and many more ended up injured... we licked our wounds, built memorials and tried to move on.

That was until a second of these Kaiju made a landfall, this time at the Ark Administration's trade port Oured. Then a third, hitting the Azur Lane naval base at Portsmouth.

Eventually... we learned that this wasn't going to stop. That the entirety of human civilization was under attack by some unknown force. And so in the first time in human history... we came together against a common enemy.

Nations that considered each other rivals tossed away their differences for the sake of beating back this common enemy, presenting a unified front against the invaders, all while individual people contributed their many talents to the war effort at large. The entire international community pooled together its resources, hoping to develop a new weapon that would match these invaders pound for pound without the need for atomic weapons.

Eventually... the world's greatest minds came up with an idea. That to fight monsters... we needed to create monsters of our own. And thus, the Jaeger program was born.

There were setbacks at first. We found out that the neural load to interface with such a large machine was far too much for a single pilot. As a solution, we implemented a two pilot system, with left hemisphere and right hemisphere pilot control. Once we got the first Jaegers into the field... we showed the world that we could fight back. And while its too early to say for sure if were winning or not... there's one thing that I can attest to for sure.

That we will not go down gentle into this goodnight

-Memoirs of Weiss Schwarzschild, Jaeger Program Engineering Team

…

Calibrating date and time...

March 7th 2030

One Thousand and Ninety Five Days until Operation Gotterdammerung

So... this is a very experimental style of fanfiction in the same vein as Top Gacha. A mega crossover between multiple different gacha game universes, but this time instead of Ace Combat we have Pacific Rim and Jaegers. I've been wanting to write military fiction and mechs for a while, and while I was going to write something ala Honor Harrington in order to quench that thirst, it would just be an OC fest and by that point I should just write an original novel.

So... instead I just decided to cram a few gacha game characters and OCs into a shatterdome and force them to interact for reasons mostly pertaining to "I think it would be funny if they interacted". As for why I decided to show the results of Operation Gotterdammerung in a prologue chapter, its because while the results of Operation Gotterdammerung might have made for a great plot twist, it makes an even better way to build suspense.

Reviews fuel me as is the usual. Reviews for the review god. Or comments for the comment god, depending on where you're reading this from because this will probably end up on Ao3.