It had been a week since the landing of the Emperor’s Creations and the Northern Newlanders. The Romans may have been losing, but ever since the Newlanders deployed that new Titan, the sky had never been blue again.

The ridge between Imperial Asia and Roman Europa was shattering, the border of the Russian Empire and Roman Empire turned cloudy and broken. Fields of dead marines and bursting piles of corrosive substances. The mud heating up to a steaming piles of blood and puss, the heat even enough to melt the Kevlar and skin right of your bones. The air so thick and fumed that removing your gas mask meant immediate death.

Quintis laid in his battle tent, the hard concrete ground and pieces of rubble stabbing his back. He had not gotten sleep in months, and the constant quakes and blasts of gunfire, screams, and energy weapons didn’t help.

The frontlines no longer existed, he had watched them slowly fall away as the tide of steaming mud and bile engulfed his friends. The Newlanders continued fighting without loss of moral, their specialized titans slaughtering everything. But the Romans had began to regret such fighting, they had grown weary of the Newlanders as their machines walked and fired. They blamed the Newlanders for the death of the planet, but Quintis knew it was all of them to blame, but he still didn’t love the Newlanders nor favour them.

It had been so long since he last smelt fresh air, the recycled air from the smoke and steam had lost their putrid smell long ago, but some part of him still knows that this isn’t right. That perfect oxygen had been lost long ago, and now all they seemed to remember is a broken imagination of what used to be.

The waiting game of the war had begun, Quintis had seen so many die and now, he didn’t even know if he wanted to go home, or stop fighting. Life seemed too fragile and useless to go on without a gun-in-hand and a dying Mongolian in front of you. But he also had no one to go home to, he watched his surviving colleagues hold photos or pray to gods that had long ago left, and it made him realized that the others had people they needed, or needed them, and soon, those people would be left without that unknown marine who was now told to run into the frontlines of the enemy.