"Warning!"
The androgynous voice filled the air.
"World Killer detected! ETA, two minutes."
Adam Ryder gasped awake, his mind scrambling for answers.
Where was he? What was he wearing? Where was the voice coming from?
His HUD flashed, and the memories came rushing in.
Seven years ago, the government had found the war hammers. Alien suits that granted powers.
It had been hailed as the beginning of a new era in earth's technology. This was confirmation that there were things out there, but at least, they had access to the same kind of technology.
But even after those seven years, they still hadn't figured out why the alien armor bonded with some and not others.
But the joy of a new technology died pretty fast a year after it was found, when they discovered Abaddon.
The world killer.
The news spread quickly. There was a colossal and monstrous world killing machine created by the now extinct alien race called the Forerunners.
And it was heading straight for earth.
The first wave of soldiers armed with war hammers were sent to Abaddon, and that was when they discovered the bad news.
The world killer was virtually indestructible from the outside. This meant that if they wanted to destroy it and save earth, they had to do so from the inside.
And so began the Black March.
Millions had volunteered in exchange for whatever they could get, prisoners had been sent along, and the soldiers oversaw them.
Adam never dreamed he'd be one of them, until it happened.
The incident.
And now, here he was. Hurtling through the stars, locked inside a glass coffin.
A reinforced drop pod.
A one-way ticket to hell created using Forerunner tech.
Outside, the vacuum of space stretched on forever, dark and silent, but Adam's attention was on what was below him.
Abaddon filled his view like a god's clenched fist.
The world-killer machine was massive. He'd heard it was the size of a sphere, but there was no way to know. All he could see was a neverending flat plane of metal.
'Shit.'
There were no lights or landing ports. Just the smooth metal below with giant circuit board lines that glowed an eerie red.
"ETA, one minute."
Adam's attention was on his war hammer. He was currently wearing the exo suit but it was inactive.
His eyes flicked to the screen on the glass pod, tracking his trajectory.
And that was when the sky caught fire.
Plasma beams began flying through the sky as Abaddon's automated defense cannons activated.
Around him, thousands of glass pods screamed through space like falling stars. And then, the one next to him exploded, hit by a beam.
'Hold together, hold together.' Adam gritted his teeth. Not that it would help. Hope was for people who hadn't seen their sister rebuilt in pieces.
The streaks of light passed his pod, blowing the unlucky ones to nothing.
BOOM!
His pod rocked, the trajectory changing slightly as debris smacked into the glass, sending spiderweb cracks across his field of vision.
"Impact in 30 seconds." The AI in his pod buzzed. "Brace for descent."
Adam's hands were clenched tightly into fists as he tried to calm his thundering heart. The pod's display flashed red around him.
Then suddenly, a beam clipped the side of his coffin.
The world spun. Gravity twisted. For a second, Adam thought he was already dead.
Then Abaddon swallowed him whole.
CRASH!
The pod hit the surface at terminal velocity. The glass rippled, shimmering blue.
A burst of kinetic energy flared beneath the shell, transferring momentum outward into the metal below like a shockwave. Adam was thrown upward inside, floating weightless for a second before smashing back into his seat.
He coughed. Something warm trickled down his forehead.
The glass lid hissed open.
And that was when his war hammer activated.
-Welcome to Abaddon!-
The HUD inside his helmet flared to life, displaying the message.
-Oxygen low. Atmosphere hostile."
A bar indicating how much oxygen the suit had left blinked to life at the corner of his HUD but he ignored it in favor of the message taking up most of the display.
-War Hammer: ONLINE-
-Status: Dormant-
-Primary Ability: LOCKED-
-Activation pending sync-
Adam stumbled out of his coffin, breathing hard. He made sure to keep a grip on the glass, to not be swept off in the zero gravity.
They'd managed to slip past Abaddon's orbital defenses.
-Sync beginning-
-Progress: 1%-
He looked around him to see that others hadn't been as lucky as he was.
Some pods had cracked open like eggshells, their passengers already dead or burning. But most of them had survived the journey.
The surface of Abaddon around them was a nightmare.
There was no ground. No up. No down. Just a smooth, rotating metallic shell beneath their boots and the black abyss above.
"Anchor!" Someone yelled.
With a thought, Adam activated the sequence, slamming the now magnetic boots of his war hammer onto the surface.
His suit locked to the sphere. Others were swept away in zero gravity, spinning off into the dark.
"Soldiers!" The same voice yelled again, the sound buzzing into his helmet. He was probably one of the actual soldiers that had been sent along with them.
"We are the 114th Legion of the Black March! We shall prevail!"
And that was when the drones arrived.
Thousands of metal wasps buzzed through the air towards them, their bodies glowing a sickly green.
Red lights blinked in place of their hulls as barrels emerged from their backs.
"Arm yourselves, soldiers!" The voice yelled again, the sound coming from the internal speakers of his war hammer.
Adam reached behind him, yanking free the long, steel-gray plasma rifle strapped to his back.
"FOR HUMANITY!"
"For humanity." Most of the soldiers echoed the war cry.
Then the firing began.
BRRRRT!
Laser fire stitched across the soldiers.
A woman beside Adam was cut in half mid-scream. Blood sprayed into the air, boiling in the vacuum.
Adam didn't care. He aimed and fired.
The plasma bolt punched through the drone's center, turning it into scrap.
-Progress: 30%-
Another drone dove straight at him. He stepped to the side, his magnetic boots keeping him in place, barely avoiding the shot, and fired again. More scrap fell.
He didn't stop moving.
The sky above them rained fire. More coffins dropped. Some were already torn open mid-descent. Men and women, helpless, burned before even touching down.
-Progress: 65%-
One of the volunteers, just like him, yelled towards Adam. "Where do we go? How are we getting in?"
Adam didn't answer. He couldn't. He didn't know.
"Formation! Hold formation!" A soldier bellowed, waving people into a loose perimeter.
It was chaos.
Adam ducked behind a broken pod, firing from cover. Another drone exploded in a burst of sparks.
"We need to find an entry point!" Someone yelled.
"There isn't one! It's sealed!"
The survivors clustered around wreckage, forming a temporary barricade. Drones circled above them like vultures. They weren't letting up.
One charged towards him. Too close.
He slammed his rifle butt into it, denting the chassis, and kicked it off the shell.
"We can't stay here forever!" Someone shouted.
Then something massive dropped from orbit. A slab of metal with grav anchors slammed into the shell. It bounced, skidded, and flipped over.
"What the hell was that?" Someone nearby growled.
"Dead drop artillery! They're trying to draw out the destroyers!"
The artillary hadn't worked. There was not even a scratch on Abaddon's surface. But that wasn't the purpose of the attack.
"Hold your ground! Focus fire!"
Adam kept firing. His arms ached. His helmet buzzed with alerts. But still he fought.
Then the war hammer system inside his suit pinged.
-Sync completed-
-Primary Ability Activated-
Adam glanced at his HUD to confirm what he already knew.
-Primary Ability: Blink-
His war hammer was finally online.
And that was when their way into Abaddon finally revealed itself.
Holes slid open in the hull and the destroyers began climbing their way out.
The artillery had done its job.
They had their way in.