A profound, almost religious sense of relief washed over Captain Akshay Khan, standing rigid on the bridge of the INS Chennai. The monstrous, man-shaped machine—that damnedable "Gundam"—had just vanished beneath the churning, grey-green waters of the harbor in a tremendous geyser of white foam. "Praise be to Brahma!" he exhaled, the words a fervent prayer whispered into the tense silence of the command center. "Divine punishment has smitten the beast. The danger is past."
A weight he hadn't even fully acknowledged lifted from his shoulders. His ship, one of the prized jewels of the fleet, had been a sitting duck, barely a hundred meters from the dock, directly in the thing's catastrophic path. The sheer, cinematic terror that it might suddenly fly, leaping onto his decks like some monstrous metal insect from a blockbuster film, had been a cold knot in his stomach. His crew's performance had done little to reassure him; it had been a fiasco of panicked shouts and fumbling incompetence. The forward 76mm main gun, a purely electronic system for twenty years, still hadn't been trained on the target, its crew seemingly baffled by the controls. Small arms ammunition remained securely locked deep in the magazine, its keeper presumably still sprinting through the labyrinthine corridors below, keys jangling uselessly in his hand. The entire vessel was at its most vulnerable, and Akshay Khan, a product of the nation's elite naval academy, knew with chilling certainty that his men would have been powerless against a direct assault. They were not alone in their disarray; the surrounding fleet had been a symphony of chaos, all alarm and no action, save for the single, disastrous attempt by the MiG-29K pilot who had managed to catapult himself straight into the drink—a nervous slip of the hand, no doubt.
But fortune, it seemed, favored the faithful. The gods had intervened. The laws of mechanics, as the Captain understood them, were immutable: any machine, no matter how advanced, its engines flooded with seawater, would be rendered inert. A drowned toy. It was not scientific to believe otherwise.
He allowed himself a moment to appreciate the visual poetry of the machine's demise, the ring of spreading waves where it had sunk. Then, the professional in him reasserted control. "Lieutenant," he barked at his aide, his voice sharp with renewed purpose. "Contact Command. Forget the MiG pilot for now. They must immediately establish a tight cordon around this sector. And arrange for salvage! We need to get divers down there to secure that… that artifact. It belongs to us now." His mind raced ahead, already envisioning the technological windfall. The machine's obscene speed, its apparent immunity to small-arms fire—it was a treasure trove of black-box technology. Let the world wonder who built it; possession was nine-tenths of the law. He imagined production lines, squadrons of these mechanical titans, perhaps even a few assigned to the Chennaifor amphibious assaults. A glorious future beckoned.
The lieutenant's frantic attempts to raise command on the radio were a background hum to his grandiose daydreams. Then, a sound cut through the chatter, a sound that froze the blood in his veins. It was the sonar operator, his voice cracking with pure, undiluted panic.
"Sir! It's not dead! The contact is moving! Under power! It's accelerating… coming right for us! Impact trajectory… ten seconds! What are your orders?"
Captain Akshay Khan's mind went blank. The carefully structured world of naval procedure—the protocols for torpedo evasion, the deployment of depth charges, the launch of anti-submarine missiles—shattered into meaningless fragments. Ten seconds? His crew, still stumbling over themselves in the open light of day, could not possibly react in ten seconds. He was a man standing on the tracks, watching the express train bear down on him.
Before a single coherent thought could form, the sea itself erupted. With a thunderous, tearing crash of water, the grey-green behemoth burst from the depths directly alongside the hull. Seawater cascaded from its angular plates like waterfalls, and tangled veils of seaweed dripped from its limbs. For a heart-stopping moment, it hung in the air, a leviathan born of nightmare, before crashing down onto the Chennai's forward deck with a impact that shuddered through the entire 7,000-ton frame of the destroyer.
Akshay was thrown forward, his palms slamming hard onto the chart table to prevent a humiliating collapse. As the ship groaned and settled, his eyes widened in horror. The machine was not disabled. It was moving, its hydraulic joints whining as it took a heavy, deliberate step forward. Then another. It was marching, with terrifying purpose, straight toward the island superstructure—straight toward the bridge.
And then he heard it. Faint at first, then unmistakable, emanating from a hidden speaker on the machine's chassis: the stirring, melodic strains of an old Russian war song, "Katyusha." The cheerful, folkloric tune was a grotesque, surreal soundtrack to the approaching apocalypse.
Time seemed to distort, stretching into a slow-motion nightmare. Akshay snatched the comms handset, his knuckles white. "Chennaito Command! We are under attack! The target is on our deck! I repeat, it is on us! We need immediate fire support! Missiles! Guns! Anything! For the love of God, open fire!" His commands dissolved into a desperate scream. "Crew of the Chennai! Stand your ground! Repel the boarder! That is a direct order!"
But his orders were whispers in a hurricane. On the shore, the Marines, finally finding their nerve, unleashed a furious but utterly futile storm of small-arms fire. A glittering shower of sparks erupted across the machine's armor and the ship's superstructure, a pyrotechnic display that did nothing but highlight their impotence. They had no rockets, no anti-tank weapons; this was a parade-ground exercise gone horribly wrong.
And the rest of the mighty fleet? They were frozen statues. Not a single gun tube traversed, not a missile launcher angled. The complex dance of target acquisition, fire control, and command authorization would take minutes they did not have.
As for his own "brave" sailors? They did not stand and fight. They dropped their wrenches, their clipboards, their mops. They scrambled, a tide of panic-stricken humanity, for the railings. Like lemmings, they began to leap into the relative safety of the filthy harbor water, preferring the uncertain embrace of the sea to the certain death promised by the advancing giant. The idea of confronting this thing hand-to-hand was not bravery; it was suicide, a joke in spectacularly poor taste.
The machine ignored them all, a force of nature intent on a single objective. With each earth-shaking step that brought it closer to the bridge windows, the cheerful strains of "Katyusha" grew louder, a final, mocking insult to the proud Captain Akshay Khan and the utter, total collapse of his command .