The Last Sentinel

The wind gently swept through the rusted mech suits, piling more dust on them as it went. Burying them deeper and deeper in no man’s land. The old battlefield was scattered with dead bodies now eroded only to skeletons as far as the eye could see.

Nothing remained that could be recognized of how the world was. All that remained was the ground itself and those that had died on it. Soldiers. Soldiers who fought in mech suits. The soldier’s last defiant stand against nature that they should not fade away. That they shall stand guard and defend the last city.

The smallest of those being almost as big as two people standing on one another’s shoulders. The biggest stood six people on each other’s shoulders tall but these titans have long since not walked the earth.

Not since the former collapse of the nations that fought each other. Well, formerly at least now I was all that was left on the losing side of the war.

The war had lasted many years and in some ways, it still hadn’t ended but those politicians fought each other with such malice with their words and sent young men like me to die for them. Those politicians ironically died long before their people did.

When we were whittled down to nothing more than a single city. The counting of years was stopped. The preservation of most traditions died with the nations.

I try not to remember why we fought. Looking back the fighting was so pointless another argument between politicians that no nothing of struggle. They were the ones who told us how to live. They were also the ones who told us how to die and why.

It never made sense to me. I was younger then. Back when I had more energy to fight. When I had more energy for hope.

It’s true we survive with our single city, not that I would call it that it’s nothing more than a dozen or so buildings each that stood about four floors high.

Once the fighting started it was intense but it was nothing like what was to come. Old friends would find old friends. For what just because they lived under a different banner. Eventually, we accepted that this was the way it was.

The fighting would escalate over time and become more… obscure once the ground became untenable for traditional vehicles like tanks. It had become so whole-ridden and uneven that it became impossible for them to navigate as fast as our leaders and generals wanted.

That’s when people from the infantry division were transferred to a new branch of the military. We were skeptical and curious about what our leaders were planning for our imitate victory.

I was one of those men. I was expecting drills and some sort of new gun or perhaps some sort of tactic that needed to be trained away from the frontlines. What happened was something from pure fantasy.

One of my buddies was the first to test the mech suits. He was the first I lost to the war ironically enough as far from the front as you could get as a soldier.

When I asked what went wrong the technicians said something about a malfunction. I was angry I couldn’t believe I had lost one of my friends to a ‘malfunction’ but I kept quiet because our leaders had told us this would surely bring us victory.

Eventually, they had produced a working prototype with minimal casualties. I was called to test it. It worked. This was the beginning of the end of life as we knew it.

Our advantage was evident from when the now newly coined mechanized infantry division was deployed. We advanced on their frontlines faster than they could fortify the next line of defense.

That lasted only for a time later they had created their own mechs. How they knew how I have no idea but theirs was much more advanced and not as analog as our mechs.

We lost more men in that initial wave of attacks than the entire war without the mechs, to the surprise of many they started recruiting women in the thousands to fight alongside us. That only prolonged the end.

The enemy didn’t stop with making the standard bipedal mech suits we operated they started making mech suits that required more pilots, bigger mech suits, and more mobile mech suits right before the collapse of both nations they made mech suits based on animals.

The most terrifying of these was the arachnid model. Extremely mobile, heavily armored, and with multiple hardpoints for weapons to be mounted. They tore us apart, that’s when I started to see through the lies of our so-called glorious leaders.

They didn’t care about us as much as they cared about their power, their glory. They only wanted for themselves. At the expense of us. All of us. Sure there were exceptions but that didn’t matter in the end.

All that mattered is we were at war. There were no other countries. There was no support for either of us. In the end, our nations turned into two dogs fighting over the last dry bone.

I guess you tend to think this way when all the people you know get punched full of holes right next to you. I would never forget the sound of high-velocity metal piercing through our armored mechs like we were piloting paper mechs.

I couldn’t forget how my lasts friends imploded from high-caliber fragmentation rounds or how one of the mechs limbs would be ripped off along with theirs. The most excruciatingly painful way to die was when they started to deploy their sonic weapons. Not even the men and women were safe inside the heavily fortified bunkers positions.

These new weapons would tear off the armor of the bunkers. Hopefully, by then you ran outside if not. Well, then you be blasted with high-frequency waves until your lungs, arteries, or brain popped like a balloon.

It wasn’t pretty. I saw it with my own eyes with probably the last person I would call a friend. Her scream was… hauntingly scary. So I did what I had to do, I killed her before I did. I could see her eyes begging me to kill her through the cockpit camera.

I was glad I could help someone in this ugly war. At least this way she wouldn’t suffer or be taken prisoner to be tortured.

We had one moment of pride before the fall of our nations. When our mechs were retrofitted for close combat with faster movement systems and better ‘hand to hand’ combat and finally something that made me feel that they could atone for their sins was our flamethrower systems on our mechs.

I cooked out more than my fair share of soldiers from the arachnid mechs. We couldn’t pierce their armor but we could burn them from the inside out. These mechs had some or other technical name but we called them “The Reapers.”

Now…now I am the last soldier from our once-great nation. Who knows how many of them remain but I will not allow them to take our final city. It will stand.