If it wasn’t for the ashes, it would have been a perfect spring day. The sirens had been going off every other hour for days but that day, it was silent. I watched as people came out of their houses just to sit in the street and wait. They knew what came next, what had been on the news for the past year. It was finally time for mercy to take hold.
When it all started, most people assumed it was some kind of invasion or maybe an ancient creature that had been woken up by resource exploitation. They weren’t completely wrong in a way. These creatures, better known as Kaiju, or “strange beast”, took the world apart over the better part of 15 years. The Rift, a wormhole that spewed these creatures out, was the stuff of nightmares. No one to enter ever emerged and all the missiles and bombs that humanity threw at it did nothing at all. At first there seemed to be a pattern to the events but as time went on, the events came at varying times until it seemed absolutely random. When there was a pattern, humanity stood a chance.
Using the best technology that was widely available, a kind of perimeter was formed around the Rift, a roughly circular ring of the biggest guns ever built. This ring, though broken several times, held for a straight 6 years before it shattered. The age of the category 1 Kaiju was over and it was time for the category 2 Kaiju to enter the ring. The speed and resilience of this new breed was such that the ring was broken every single time one would come through. The world governments knew that if the Category 2 Kaiju followed the same pattern as the Category 1s, they would eventually see two, and then three of them come through simultaneously until finally a quadruple event would occur followed by the release of a category 3.
Pooling all of humanity’s resources in order to fund two programs which would last until the final days was their only choice. The two programs that won funding out of the hundred or so that existed, were the Jaeger program and the Fortress Initiative. The Jaeger program, built combat suits and trained pilots to use them. These massive machines were initially armed with the recycled guns from the ring but as the years rolled on and they were forced to fight more and more suicidal missions, the experienced Jaeger pilots were equipped with custom weapons and more personalized armor. A pilot along with his/her AI companion could work in tangent to fight the Kaiju. It wasn’t until the Jaegers got more complex that it was necessary for pilots to receive cybernetic implants in order to interface with the machines. While the Jaeger was the more publicized of the two programs, most of the true victories humanity managed to score, were the result of the Fortress Initiative. Jaegers required long repair times and expensive replacement parts while the FI, or Fortress Initiative, used advanced ballistics and extremely large guns in order to bring down Kaiju. The FI constructed massive flying and floating gun platforms that mounted weapons so powerful, the first built platforms managed to hold their own all the way up to the Category 4 Kaiju. While they were massive, and powerful the fortresses took a long time to move any great distance and so, they usually didn’t move very far, unlike Jaegers that could be shipped or carried fairly rapidly across long distance.

Humanity felt like it could win, they had the Jaegers and they had the fortresses, they believed they stood a winning chance. They were wrong. When the category quadruple event took place, something happened to the rift, it seemed to almost rip open and spew forth a horde of smaller Kaiju. Most only stood at 10 – 20 feet tall while a normal Kaiju could stand up to 300 feet tall. Unlike regular Kaiju, these were much harder to track and, while easier to kill, much harder to find. Like Kaiju, they came in all shapes and sizes but most were aquatic in nature. While the Fortress Initiative held its own against this new threat, the Jaeger program had some setbacks. The smaller Kaiju simply had the numbers against the Jaegers and while very few pilots managed to be overrun, it was enough to make the program shift its focus. It was decided that in addition to creating the massive Jaegers and upgrading them to effectively fight the Category 3 and eventually Category 4 Kaiju, they would need to create a force that could fight the smaller Kaiju. At first, tanks and infantry held their own well enough to not require any kind of help but the smaller Kaiju also adapted a lot faster than their big cousins. Turtle Kaiju and types of Kaiju that could move silently began to rip infantry and tanks apart. As large Kaiju were now coming through on a monthly basis, even more resources were poured out in a last ditch effort to create the winning punch. The Jaeger program began constructing Jaegers of all sizes in order to combat the new threat while the Fortress Initiative fed their resources into two new projects, the Kinetic Impact Driver system and the Home Among The Stars program.

The Kinetic Impact Driver system was an immense gun that used magnetics to fire a solid slug at incredible high velocities. The first prototypes were mounted on more disposable ships and used to huge effect, and later iterations during the Category 4 phase of the Kaiju assault, were used as the primary weapon systems on both Jaegers and Fortresses. Certain railguns were built to be so large and so powerful they had to be stationary. Mounting these weapons on mountains proved to be the most effective means and by the end 8 of these installations were built. These guns were so powerful that they were capable of killing a large Kaiju in only a few shots. The Home Among The Stars program took survival in another route, rather than fight the Kaiju, it was believed that humanity’s future lied in leaving Earth for good. Many space stations and colony ships began construction but due to a lack of time, most were never completed.

By the time the first Category 4 double event took place, humanity had expended most of its arsenal of nuclear weapons. It seemed that every human left was a soldier, a medic or an engineer and everyone was fighting for their lives every single day. After the second Category 4 double event, the Rift changed somewhat. It seemed to everyone that it was a bucket of water and it was down to the last drops. These last drops flooded the Earth. Those few people who managed to catch a glimpse of the Destroyers described them as unshaped masses of flesh and as the stuff of nightmares. After the 4 Destroyers fell out of the Rift, it closed to good. Three minutes and three million human lives later, the 4 Destroyers were dead. In the last valiant effort of the Fortress Initiative, an incomplete colony ship loaded with 3 million passengers, fell like a hammer from the heavens and shook the Earth to the very core. The impact of the ship managed to destroy the destroyers and most of the Kaiju who had come through with them. Humanity should have never left their jaw open. From the ruined corpses of the destroyers rose the titans. If someone had cared to put them on a scale compared to the other Kaiju, they would have been rated at Category 7. A total of twelve rose out of the bodies and within a year, humanity had only killed one and had lost nearly all of its ability to resist.

23 years have passed since the destroyers rose to end humanity. The last of humanity is scattered to the winds in small colonies and living in the ruins of the old world. Very few places are still available to humans to settle and any settlement over a hundred people draws the attention of the children of the Category 7s. These children are roughly Category 1s and Category 2s. These children spawn the smaller Kaiju on a regular basis while the Category 7s only create a Category 1 or 2 every few months.