Taipei was on fire. The city's outskirts had already been shelled relentlessly, streets reduced to rubble, bridges collapsed under artillery barrages, and refugees clogged the highways, desperate to flee the encroaching enemy. Nathaniel Kane, barely twenty-nine, arrived with a sense of doom pressing on his chest like a vice. He had not wanted this assignment, had begged to be reassigned, had even drafted multiple letters of resignation in the weeks leading up to his departure. But none of it mattered. The Alliance needed a figurehead. They needed him.
He stepped off the transport into the chaos, helmet askew, face streaked with soot and exhaustion. Around him, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese officers scrambled to form defensive lines, their voices overlapping, shouting in multiple languages. Kane tried to make sense of the maps, the satellite images, the reports streaming in every few minutes, and immediately, panic took hold. The enemy's numbers were staggering. Their combined fleets of armored transports, hovercraft, and mechanized infantry were moving faster than anyone had predicted. Taipei would fall unless something insane happened—and Kane, of course, was the one in charge.
He gathered the commanders in a ruined government plaza, littered with debris and shattered windows. Soldiers crouched behind overturned vehicles, drones buzzed overhead, and civilians scurried to the shadows. Kane looked at the tactical hologram projected on the cracked concrete and let out a long, exasperated sigh.
"Here's what we're going to do," he said, knowing full well he had no plan. "We're going to split our forces across three main corridors. Half of you will fall back to the north bridges, the rest will stay in the city center. Every armored vehicle left in the open, I want moving in zigzags, back and forth, so the enemy can't get a bead. And… I want the civilians evacuated through the southern highway, yes, through the underpass I know is partially collapsed. It's stupid. It's insane. It's probably a death trap. But do it anyway."
The Korean liaison officer, Captain Park, gaped. "Sir… if we follow this… half of our troops—half the civilians—will be exposed to artillery and ambushes. It's reckless."
Kane's hands shook. He rubbed the back of his neck. "I know. I don't care. We don't have a choice. If we hunker down, we die. If we scatter, maybe some of us live. Just… make it happen."
Japanese Colonel Tanaka leaned in, studying the map. "General, this is… unorthodox. Even chaotic. The bridges… the underpass… You're asking for…"
"Desperation," Kane muttered. "Exactly."
Orders went out. Troops shuffled into positions that made no sense on paper. Armored convoys zigzagged through narrow streets, dodging rubble, sending drones and spotters to create phantom patterns for the enemy. Civilians were funneled into crumbling highways that should have been death traps. Kane wandered from checkpoint to checkpoint, watching as soldiers whispered and doubted, wondering if their young general had finally lost it.
The first enemy wave hit almost immediately. Kane ducked behind a collapsed wall, gripping his rifle despite knowing he'd never fire it. Explosions shook the plaza. Tanks barreled down streets that were theoretically blocked by rubble. Artillery shells screamed overhead. And yet—by some cruel twist of fate—the chaos worked.
The zigzagging armored columns drew the enemy fire into chokepoints that engineers had marked as potential collapse zones. Bridges the enemy thought impassable held just long enough to funnel their advance. The "dangerous underpass" collapsed on only a few vehicles, slowing the enemy so drastically that evacuation succeeded far beyond what Kane had dared hope. Civilians made it out of the city in twice the numbers he'd predicted. Enemy infantry, diverted by the confusing patterns of retreat and engagement, ran straight into drone strikes and defensive fire, decimated before reaching the inner city.
By midday, Taipei had been saved—not by Kane's strategy, which was chaos, fear, and guesswork—but by the way the battlefield seemed to bend around him. Soldiers began to murmur among themselves, calling him brilliant, speaking in hushed tones about his "vision" and "genius." Kane, for his part, collapsed against a wall, muttering to himself over and over:
"I… I didn't… I was just… trying to—"
A young Taiwanese officer approached him, face streaked with sweat and soot. "General Kane… your orders—they saved everyone. Hundreds of lives. Tens of thousands of civilians. You—"
"I didn't mean to," Kane said, shaking his head. "I was trying to get us killed. I wanted to… to fail. I wanted this to end. I didn't want anyone to die under my command… I—"
"You saved them," the officer said firmly. "That's what matters."
Kane's chest tightened. He knew the truth. Every step he'd taken, every command he'd shouted in panic, had been an attempt to fail, to end the war sooner, to remove himself from this role of savior. And yet the universe—or fate—had other plans. No matter how hard he tried, no matter how desperately he wanted defeat, the Iron Alliance prospered under his "reckless" orders.
As night fell over Taipei, the city still smoldering but intact, Kane walked through the streets, his boots crunching over broken glass. Soldiers saluted him wherever he passed, civilians clung to his side, and across the river of rubble and ruin, enemy forces were stalled, confused, and retreating. Kane didn't feel victorious. He felt trapped, a puppet being cheered on for moves he never intended to make.
He whispered to the dark sky above, tired, broken, and still terrified:
"I'm trying to lose… and somehow, you keep making me win."
And somewhere, hidden in the chaos of battle, the world began to solidify the myth: Nathaniel Kane, twenty-nine years old, the Coin Toss General, a man who could not fail, even when he begged for it.