An old man shot up from his seat, heart clenching tight.
His instincts screamed — something was coming.
Something ominous.
Arthur's footsteps hammered the steel floor, quick, measured, each step sharp with rising anxiety.
Alarm bells blared in his mind.
He could feel it — a gaze, invisible yet suffocating, brimming with malice, starving to rip them apart.
Without hesitation, he raced toward the summit of the Roosevelt Fortress, ascending the four-kilometer colossus with mechanical urgency.
He reached the peak.
His eyes scanned the endless horizon — nothing.
No heat signatures. No energy traces. No movement.
But the feeling lingered.
Heavy.
Vile.
An unseen hunger pressing down on them, as if the world itself had set its jaws on their throats, waiting for the first misstep.
Something was out there.
It wanted them dead — melted down to it's nourishment.
Arthur moved on instinct alone.
"Sound the alarms! All hands on deck, now!"
His voice cut through the comms, crisp and absolute, and the soldiers answered without hesitation.
Spells ignited at their feet, launching them into synchronized bursts of speed.
Trails of afterimages and distorted mirages danced across the mobile fortress — blurs of color and light that should have collided, but didn't.
Each unit scattered outward with precision so sharp it seemed choreographed, every movement calculated to avoid entanglement even at breakneck speeds.
For a breath, it looked almost beautiful.
Then the world broke.
The system sensors blinked out.
A flicker, a heartbeat where nothing registered.
In the next instant, a harsh wave of static crackled through every earpiece, drowning out commands, flooding the channels with a screech that stabbed through the soldiers' heads.
The ground began to shudder.
Then it quaked.
From beyond the veil of horizon and smoke, a mountainous form lumbered into view.
With each step, it cracked the earth into molten fissures, magma and ore bleeding from its footprints.
Heat rolled off its body in shimmering waves, turning sand into glass, turning vegetation into choking ash.
It was a living anatomy of destruction — a patchwork creature of magma, jagged quartz, and raw ore stitched together by incomprehensible forces.
It stood over five kilometers tall.
And its face— its face was a horror of its own.
Warped, sagging, and disfigured. It wore a grotesque imitation of a man's features.
High above the scorched plain, the titan's warped head tilted slightly and a single crystal eye opened.
It gleamed with an iridescent crimson glow, swirling in layered hues like oil over blood.
Its senses stretched far beyond anything natural.
It did not merely see or hear — it devoured information.
Every sound vibration, every flicker of movement, every subtle shift in temperature across the battlefield registered within it.
It was a living nexus of awareness, rivaling the precision of myriads of machines.
At first, it had no hands. Only stunted, formless arms hung by its sides.
Then, before their eyes, stone and ore writhed, twisting and shaping.
A palm bloomed grotesquely from the stone, fingers unfurling like molten branches. With unnatural slowness, it raised one crude hand to its face.
Screeching — long, raking motions dragged razor-tipped nails across its previously smooth, marble-like mask.
At first, thin scars appeared — shallow trails marring the surface.
Then the trails deepened, gouging trenches into the flesh-like stone, splitting and cracking as if tearing apart face of man it mocked.
Until finally — the face ruptured.
A massive chasm split down the center, stone and magma peeling back like the splitting of a wound.
From that gaping maw, rows upon rows of jagged, uneven teeth unfurled — stalactite-like, grinding and gnashing against each other in spasmodic hunger.
Each tooth gleamed wetly, an uneven forest of razors born from the bones of the earth itself.
Then it laughed.
A sound that wasn't just noise, but a cacophony a cackling, mind-breaking laughter that churned the very air, that dug into the spine and shook something primal in every soul that heard it.
[ALERT!]
[Abnormal Energy Fluctuation Detected!]
[Anomaly Detected: Titan - Sentinel Class]
The sensors screamed in warning — but they were already too late.
The titan sentinel had bypassed them, its grotesque form striding into full view before a single sensor could sound a proper alarm.
Arthur didn't wait.
He didn't stand frozen mesmerized by the nightmare show unfolding.
Without hesitation, he strode into the heart of the Roosevelt Fortress — the command cockpit, the place where flesh gave way to purpose.
The aging circuits hummed to life as they recognized him, ancient mechanisms locking into his frame.
His bodyonce flesh, now steel — fused seamlessly with the machine.
Each latch that clamped shut against him, each metallic click that echoed through the chamber, was more than a mechanical process.
Each one was a vow.
"To drive away the horrors. That is your purpose."
"Grandpa! Tell me another story! Just one more."
The latches finished sealing. The four century machine roared awake beneath him.
The moment Arthur connected to the machine, the noise hit him — a thousand minds locking into sync inside his skull.
Voices, pulses, commands — observer mages stationed across the Roosevelt Fortress, each one monitoring corners, seams, blindspots Arthur couldn't afford to miss.
It wasn't chatter.
It was pure, surgical feed — temperature shifts, magicule fluctuations, structural stress reports.
Everything hammered into his senses like a second heartbeat. A fortress run by a thousand hands — and one will.
Arthur planted his feet like a runner bracing for the gunshot.
The world slowed. The Fortress groaned, metal plates shivering, as energy boiled through its joints.
Boom!
With a detonation of force, the Roosevelt Fortress exploded forward — a five-kilometer titan surging into motion.
Twin blades tore free from the fortress's flanks, unsheathing with the grinding roar of ancient engines.
Each sword was a monster unto itself — forged to cleave mountains, not men.
The blades were carved with deep, brutal grooves, and from those grooves, a searing blade-aura bled into the air.
A radiant heat that warped the atmosphere around it, setting even the light trembling.
"Men! Brace for impact!"
Cracks, gouges and trenches enlarged as a colossal fist flew into the fortress.