The Russian State Duma never saw him coming.
Namola-01 descended through the glass roof of the parliament chamber like a falling cathedral. No explosion. No warning. Just a white figure in a white suit, landing in the exact centre of the circular hall with the softest click of boots on marble.
Seven hundred deputies, aides, journalists, guards. Seven hundred heartbeats that stopped at once.
01 did not speak at first. He simply looked around the room, the way a tired parent looks at children who have broken something precious.
Then he raised one hand.
Every human in the chamber folded inward. Not crushed from outside. Compressed from within. Bones, organs, suits, screams; all compacted into perfect red spheres the size of apples.
Seven hundred spheres hit the floor at the same moment and rolled in every direction, clacking like marbles.
The silence that followed was total.
Outside, sirens began (far too late). Tanks rolled into Red Square. The army declared emergency national authority. Moscow, then the entire country, slammed into total lockdown within eleven minutes.
01 stepped over the rolling spheres and walked to the shattered speaker's podium. He tapped the microphone once. It still worked.
His voice carried across every screen, every radio, every terrified ear in the nation.
"See?" He gestured at the empty chamber, the red marbles glinting under emergency lights.
"Isn't this scene familiar?"
A pause, almost gentle.
"Yes. It is exactly what happens when small ants are crushed under a careless boot. They scatter. They panic. They call for help that will never arrive."
He leaned closer to the microphone.
"The same terror. The same helplessness. The same realisation that the universe does not negotiate with insects."
He smiled, small and ancient.
"You call yourselves Homo sapiens. Wise man."
The smile vanished.
"Today you learn what wisdom actually costs."
He turned his back on the microphone, on the rolling red spheres, on the city already burying itself under martial law.
Behind him, the thirteen silent Namolas waited in perfect formation.
01 walked out the way he came (through the broken roof, into the cold Moscow morning).
The lockdown would last exactly one day.
It would take them that long to realise the war had already been decided.
Colonel Kamia Volkova stood on the roof of the evacuated GUM department store, wind whipping her frost-coated greatcoat, eyes fixed on the white speck still hovering above the Kremlin.
Twenty-nine years old. Chechnya veteran. The only officer in the Russian Strategic Forces who had personally signed the refusal orders for every banned weapon since the end of World War III.
Until today.
Behind her, sealed in a lead-lined crate the size of a coffin, sat the last operational Nanomey Saber battalion (twelve uranium-core autonomous war constructs, mothballed since 2112, officially deleted from every registry).
Kamia's gloved finger hovered over the authorisation panel.
Her second-in-command, Captain Ruslan, shouted over the rotor noise of the gunships circling uselessly overhead.
"Colonel, if we wake them, we violate the Geneva–Luna Accords. Every nation will turn on us. We'll be pariahs!"
Kamia didn't look at him.
"They already turned," she said, voice flat. "The second seven hundred politicians became marbles."
She pressed her thumb to the scanner.
The crate hissed open.
Twelve sleek, matte-black machines unfolded like praying mantises made of midnight and radiation. Their cores glowed a sickly, beautiful green beneath armour plating etched with warning symbols older than anyone alive.
Nanomey Saber. Uranium hearts. Banned for good reason.
The lead unit (designation NS-01 "Chernobog") tilted its angular head toward Kamia, red optic band flaring.
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Kamia pointed one trembling finger at the white figure still floating above the parliament ruins.
"Him. And the thirteen behind him."
Chernobog's manibles clicked once (an almost thoughtful sound).
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Kamia closed her eyes for one second.
Images flashed: her little sister's school in Grozny, levelled by a drone swarm in '09. Her mother's hospital, melted by a dirty bomb in the short, brutal Third War. The seven hundred red marbles rolling across marble floor.
She opened her eyes.
"Confirmed."
The twelve Sabers ignited their cores. Green fire bled into the Moscow sky.
For the first time since Namola-01 arrived, something on Earth looked back at him with the promise of equal or greater violence.
Kamia whispered to the wind, to the city, to whatever was left of mercy:
"Come on, you bastard. Let's see who burns brighter."
The twelve Nanomey Sabers launched.
They moved like a single organism: matte-black mantis bodies six metres tall, scythe-arms edged with mono-molecular uranium glass, reactor hearts glowing venom-green beneath translucent thorax plating. Their wings were not wings at all (folded panels of reactive armour that unfolded into screaming plasma thrusters).
Chernobog reached Namola-01 first.
Its left scythe came down in a green arc that could shear a main battle tank in half.
01 didn't move.
He simply looked up and spoke one word.
"Hell-born Marble."
The air around Chernobog compressed with a sound like every bone in the world breaking at once.
But nothing happened.
No red sphere. No collapse.
The Saber's uranium heart flared brighter, laughing in radiation.
01's eyes narrowed (the first flicker of actual surprise).
Chernobog's scythe completed its swing.
It took 01's left arm off at the shoulder in a spray of white-gold light that looked disturbingly like blood.
The severed limb hit the ground, still wearing half a white sleeve, and began rolling like the marbles in parliament.
01 stared at the stump for half a second.
Then the pain registered.
He screamed.
Not rage. Real, human, centuries-delayed pain.
The other eleven Sabers descended in a storm of blades and plasma.
NS-07's scythe punched straight through 01's abdomen and out the back, lifting him ten metres into the air like a pinned insect. Green reactor fire poured into the wound, boiling the white suit from the inside.
NS-03 landed on his chest, mantis knees punching through ribs. Its secondary arms unfolded (smaller, surgical blades) and began carving.
White-gold blood rained onto Red Square.
One of the thirteen silent Namolas finally moved, trying to intervene.
NS-09 met him mid-air, scythes crossing in an X that removed the soldier's head and both arms in one clean motion. The headless body kept flying for three seconds before it realised it was dead and fell.
Another Saber latched onto a second soldier from behind, jaws unhinging to reveal a uranium furnace. It bit down. The Namola's upper torso vanished in a green flash, leaving only legs that toppled slowly.
01, impaled and burning, still tried.
"Hell-born Marble!"
He caught NS-07's forelimb.
This time the compression worked.
The mantis arm crumpled inward, uranium glass and reactor shielding folding like paper, green fire squirting out in radioactive arcs.
But the Saber simply detached the ruined limb and kept coming, stabbing with the stump, spraying molten metal and blood across the sky.
Below, Kamia watched through the scope of a rooftop sniper rifle, knuckles white.
The square had become a butcher's yard of white limbs and green fire.
01 was missing an arm, half his torso, one eye. Yet he was still standing (floating) in the centre of the swarm, roaring in a language that hurt to hear.
The Sabers did not care.
They had been built to end wars that humanity started.
Today they were simply finishing the job.
01 hung in the centre of the green inferno, one arm gone, half his face burned away, ribs exposed and glowing.
He looked at the twelve remaining Sabers circling him like mantises over a dying god.
Then he laughed (wet, broken, triumphant).
"Enough."
His voice carried a new note, something older than language.
"Everyone… move out."
The twelve surviving white Namolas obeyed instantly, streaking upward in perfect formation, abandoning their master without hesitation.
The Sabers hesitated for 0.3 seconds (long enough).
01 spread what was left of his arms.
"Deadly Regeneration."
The wound on his shoulder began to close. Not cleanly. Flesh boiled outward, white-gold tendrils knitting together too fast, too wrong, sprouting new bones that cracked and re-set in the same heartbeat.
His missing eye regrew as a burning red star.
But that was only the opening act.
He raised the new arm and clenched a fist that was not yet fully formed.
"Blood Rebirth."
The world ended in red.
Every living thing within fifteen kilometres (human, dog, bird, soldier hiding in a basement, child clutching a doll in a locked apartment) simply stopped existing as solid matter.
No warning. No time to scream.
Flesh, bone, blood, memory (everything liquefied in the same instant and was dragged toward the sky in crimson rivers).
The Sabers were caught mid-lunge. Their uranium hearts flared once in defiance, then cracked. Reactor shielding peeled away like orange rind. Green fire mixed with red blood in a storm that painted the clouds.
Red Square became a bowl of blood.
The liquid rose in perfect spirals, funnelling into the ruin that had been Namola-01.
At the centre of the maelstrom floated only his heart (raw, fist-sized, beating with the rhythm of a thousand stolen lives).
It drank.
Every drop. Every scream turned to fuel.
The heart pulsed once (huge, obscene).
Then the blood reversed direction, pouring back into the empty space where a body should be.
Flesh knitted from nothing. Bones crystallised out of crimson mist. Skin grew in sheets, white and flawless.
In seven seconds the massacre became a birth.
Namola-01 opened his eyes (both perfect again, both burning with something that had never been human).
He looked down at the empty square, at the twelve broken Saber husks bleeding green into red puddles, at Moscow silent beneath a red sky.
He spoke, and the city itself seemed to flinch.
"I offered you mercy once. You chose monsters."
He rose higher, heart still glowing visibly beneath new skin, suit re-weaving itself from blood and light.
"Next time I will not ask."
Fifteen kilometres and four hundred metres.
That was the exact distance that saved Colonel Kamia Volkova's life.
She had retreated to the rooftop of an abandoned apartment block on the edge of the radius, dragging the empty Nanomey crate behind her like a coffin she already knew was hers.
Then the sky turned red.
She saw it happen from the perfect vantage point of the spared.
A little girl on the street below (pink coat, yellow backpack, clutching a stuffed rabbit) looked up at the blood rain.
The child had time for one confused blink.
Then she burst.
Not fell. Not exploded.
Burst, like a water balloon filled with a human being.
The pink coat collapsed inward, fabric folding into the red torrent that shot upward, carrying the rabbit with it.
Kamia knew that coat.
She had buckled that backpack herself this morning.
"Mama, can Mr. Flopsy come to school today?"
Her daughter's name had been Sofia.
Kamia's scream was not human.
It was the sound of something inside a person breaking forever.
She dropped the rifle.
She dropped to her knees.
She clawed at the concrete roof until her fingernails split and her blood joined the few drops that had fallen short of the maelstrom.
Above her, Namola-01 rose untouched, reborn, already turning toward the next city.
Kamia watched him go.
Her mouth moved. No sound came out at first.
Then it did.
One word, over and over, carved into the air with the last piece of her soul that still belonged to a mother.
"I'll kill you."
She said it to the red sky.
She said it to the empty coat lying in the street.
She said it to the silence that used to be fifteen kilometres of Moscow.
"I'll kill you."
Kamia burst through the blast doors like a bullet that had learned how to scream.
The control room went dead silent.
Officers froze over consoles. Red emergency lights painted every face the colour of fresh slaughter.
She was still in her frost-crusted greatcoat, hands raw and bleeding, eyes swollen but dry now; the tears had frozen on her cheeks kilometres ago.
"Where is the evacuation status?" Her voice was hoarse, almost gentle. That was worse than shouting.
A young lieutenant started to answer, but Kamia was already moving.
She grabbed Captain Aria Petrova (her best field commander, barely twenty-five) by the throat and lifted her clean off the ground with one hand.
Aria's boots kicked uselessly two feet above the floor. Her face turned purple.
"Tell me," Kamia whispered, "what happened to the mission to save the people in the city."
Aria choked, tears streaming. She couldn't speak, only claw at Kamia's wrist.
Someone reached for a sidearm and thought better of it.
Kamia's grip loosened a fraction.
Aria sucked in a ragged breath.
"We… we sent the anti-grav bikes," she rasped. "Fastest extraction we had. Two hundred and twelve units, full civilian priority. They were over Red Square when—"
Her voice cracked completely.
"When it happened. Everyone just… burst. Like someone flipped a switch. The riders… the civilians… even the bikes lost lift and fell into the… into the red."
She started sobbing, ugly and helpless.
Kamia's arm dropped.
Aria slid down the wall, coughing, hugging her own knees.
Kamia stood over her for one endless second.
Then she sank to her knees too.
And wrapped her arms around the crying captain like she was trying to hold the entire city in that embrace.
"I'm sorry," Kamia whispered into Aria's hair. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry."
Her voice finally broke.
"As a general… as a mother… I couldn't save anyone."
The control room lights flickered once, as if the bunker itself was ashamed.
Outside, the red clouds over Moscow still had not rained a single drop.
They didn't need to.
The sky had already bled enough for one lifetime.