the year is 2147. Rain, thick and acidic, lashed against the plasteel viewport of Izaki's cramped observation post. Below, the lights of Aethelburg, Sector Twelve's vibrant and rebellious heart, glittered defiantly against the oppressive grey sky of the Dominion. Izaki wasn't supposed to be here. His official station was miles away, buried deep within the sterile data corridors of Sector Nine's administrative block. But Aethelburg was a subject of his extracurricular studies. Aethelburg, with its whispers of true autonomy, its artists, its forbidden histories.
He adjusted the worn, illegally modified sensor array. Its feed was a chaotic dance of energy signatures and encrypted chatter. For weeks, he'd been tracking an anomaly, a subtle distortion in the city's energy grid that mirrored readings he'd once seen in a heavily redacted file from the Dominion's Old War archives. That file had earned him a formal reprimand and a permanent shadow of suspicion.
Tonight, the anomaly was screaming.
A low hum vibrated through the ferroconcrete structure of his hideout, a sound felt more in the bones than heard with the ears. The lights of Aethelburg flickered, once, twice. Then, they began to dim, not like a power outage, but as if a colossal shroud was being drawn over them. Izaki's breath hitched. On his main monitor, the energy readings went haywire, spiking into impossible figures before flatlining.
"What in the void…?" he whispered, leaning closer, his reflection a pale ghost against the dying city.
It wasn't just the lights. The physical outline of the city, its towering arcologies and sprawling marketplaces, began to shimmer. Structures wavered like a heat haze on asphalt. The effect was subtle at first, then rapidly intensified. Buildings didn't crumble or explode; they faded. The distinct, chaotic symphony of a million lives fell silent, replaced by the mournful sigh of the wind and the relentless drumming of the rain.
Izaki's hands clenched. He toggled every sensor, rerouted auxiliary power, but the results were the same. Aethelburg, a city of three million souls, was dissolving into the night. No explosions, no screams transmitted over the communications, just a chilling, silent erasure. Within minutes, where a vibrant metropolis had stood, there was only the rain swept, barren earth, indistinguishable from the miles of desolate buffer zones the Dominion maintained around its sanctioned mega sectors. The city's unique energy signature, its digital footprint, its very presence in the geo spatial network, all gone. Wiped clean.
Panic, cold and sharp, clawed at Izaki's throat. This wasn't conventional warfare. This was something else, something monstrous. The Dominion, in its quest for absolute control, had deployed a weapon capable of making cities, and everyone in them, simply cease to exist.
His troubled past, the shadows that clung to his every waking moment, suddenly felt insignificant in the face of this new horror. The memory of his parents, dissidents who had vanished in a similar, albeit less spectacular, fashion years ago, resurfaced with a fresh, agonizing clarity. This was the power he was up against. This was the silence Marshal and The Dominion could command.
He saved the sensor logs, his fingers moving with a desperate precision. The data was fragmented, corrupted by the event itself, but it was proof. Proof of the unspeakable.
Aethelburg was gone. And Izaki knew, with a certainty that chilled him to the core, that The Dominion wouldn't stop there. This was a message. And a warning. He had to get this information out. He had to find Emma and Yohan. Survival was no longer enough; it was time to fight back, before they were all just memories, erased by a silent, unseen hand.