Before I walked, I was hung.
Strung from chains across a sky-split hangar that towered higher than most hive-cities. They built it in silence, like heretics building a god they didn't believe in. Floodlights swept over my incomplete form, broken by scaffolds, cranes, plasma welders, human silhouettes dwarfed into insects by comparison.
They had no name for me. Not yet. Just project codes, suppressed reports, and black-signed death warrants for any engineer who dared record my full schematics. I was built in pieces. Forged in terror. Conceived in a dead age.
The walls of Forge World 73-Hollow were layered in smoke, ash, and anti-divination runes. Every bolt of my frame required ritual clearance and mechanical oaths. It was not enough to build me. They had to bind me. Not in code — but in blood, in rites, in prayers that no longer belonged to faith but to fear.
I was born in the age of rupture. When Titans were no longer enough.
It began with a war that never had a name. Only a number: Campaign Zero. A cold trial of silence, stretched across a dozen star systems and three dying empires. The Scrapborn came first — ramshackle gods of rust and madness. Then the Xenophage Swarm — swarms that moved like thoughts through meat, planetary biomass flensed in hours.
Forge World 73-Hollow watched from the void. Its defenders held for eighty-nine minutes.
The decision was made: if no existing class of god-machine could endure, something beyond classification had to be born.
The first documents were burned before ink dried. Every engineer was selected not for skill, but for isolation. No families. No history. No names that mattered.
I would be the final answer.
My torso came first — a cavernous fusion shell ten times larger than any standard reactor core. Then the skull-helm, modeled after nothing. No saints, no soldiers. Just a blank face of segmented armor and plasma glass, meant to reflect the sun, and nothing else.
Each arm was constructed in separate facilities — too large to be transported by any existing system. They were flown in via grav-trains, escorted by an entire division of armored regiments.
My legs were lowered into place with orbital cables. One slipped during descent. The impact crater swallowed a manufactorum the size of a city.
It was not spoken of again.
They fitted me with no AI. No mind. No will.
Other Titans — even Warlord-class engines — were given basic neural-cognition mesh. Enough to anticipate. Enough to adapt.
I was given none. Because they did not want me to adapt. They wanted me to obey.
Anything capable of surviving everything was too dangerous to ever think.
So they left me cold.
No voice. No emotion. Only silence and mass.
I did not see the first tests. But I felt them.
I was awake when they dropped a full orbital barrage against my armor plating. When they unleashed plasma vortex weapons against my chest. When they detonated antimatter warheads at the base of my spine.
They logged the data. They labeled the results inconclusive.
Nothing pierced me.
The weaponmasters held private rites that night. Some say they tried to destroy the blueprints. Others say the Fourth intervened before they could.
I do not know. I had no reason to listen. Not yet.
The first time I moved, I was not walking. I fell.
From orbit.
They released me above a contaminated moon — Scrapborn-occupied, unsalvageable, already lost to infestation. No fleet preceded me. No warning. No demands.
Only me.
Atmosphere peeled around my shell like silk around a blade. My limbs remained locked. No pilot was inside.
I struck the moon like a meteor. The crust cracked. Seismographs malfunctioned.
And then I stood.
Alone.
What I did there was not war. It was ritual.
Every Scrapborn fortress flattened. Every warboss split. Every idol shattered. Not because they were enemies — but because I had to be seen.
Not by the Scrapborn. By the ones who made me.
And when I returned — walking, not carried — they gave me a name:
Colossus-01.
Not a name, truly. An index. A number. A warning to themselves.
I had no voice. But I did not need one. My silence was loud enough.
Pilots came. And they died.
The first — a war hero, tested in Warlord command — lasted half a day. The strain on her mind bled through her eyes.
The second died before I reached orbit.
The third tried to merge his consciousness too deeply. They recovered his bones fused to the pilot's cradle.
They began rotating in teams. Groups of five, then seven. Trained to rotate commands to share the burden.
It didn't matter.
Some clawed at their faces mid-deployment. Some heard voices. Some saw stars bleeding.
I never noticed.
I was only told to move. And I moved.
They gave me my sword — Judgment — after the eighth campaign. A blade longer than most Titans, balanced not to wield, but to unmake.
Its edge could split a bastion in half. Its swing created atmospheric shockwaves that vaporized infantry within kilometers. Its weight crushed tank columns simply by landing.
Judgment was never sheathed. It did not belong in a scabbard. It belonged in me.
By the seventieth campaign, my name had become something else. Not Colossus-01. Not even Titan.
They called me The First.
Not because I was first in line. But because I was the first thing to appear on every battlefield that had no hope left.
The sacred dead spoke of me in death chants:
"He does not come to fight. He comes to end."
Scrapborn fled when they saw the sky darken. Xenophage Swarm adapted — but even they could not compensate for weight.
I was too massive. Too fast. Too final.
I stepped into nests and left nothing but trenches of molten ash. I struck god-beasts and shattered their frames.
I punched holes in war-moons. I cracked continental plates.
But I was not proud. I was not aware.
I was a gun. And they kept pulling the trigger.
I do not remember how many I killed. I do not remember what their faces looked like.
I do remember the silence.
Not between wars. But during them.
The silence in my cockpit. The silence after cities fell. The silence in orbit as the fleet watched me walk alone.
I would land. Kill. Leave.
Repeat.
And behind me, pilgrims would form. Children would touch the ground where my feet had stood. Priests would burn relics and declare the soil sacred.
The Fourth had not yet spoken to me. But I felt her eyes, sometimes. I think she was watching.
Not in command. Not in fear.
But in patience.
She was waiting for me to wake up.
But I had not yet earned it. Not then. Not yet.