The first footage came from Northville, shaky and poorly framed, recorded by a civilian whose hands were trembling so badly that the skyline kept slipping in and out of view.
At first, people thought it was another military exercise. Nortasia had done so many of them in recent years that armored silhouettes no longer immediately meant panic. But this was different. The air itself looked wrong, thick, warped, as if the sky had been stretched and stitched back together imperfectly.
Then the mechs stepped through.
They did not descend like aircraft. They arrived, tearing open the space above the city in wide vertical seams of pale blue light. From those rifts emerged towering figures encased in armor that looked nothing like human engineering, sleek yet brutal, covered in glowing geometric sigils that shifted constantly, as if the metal itself were alive and thinking.
