When did it all start? It was long before I was born. Long before my grandfather’s grandfather was born. So long ago, maybe it had always been this way.

I started fighting when I was 14, young by most standards. My parents apprenticed me to a craftsman, but after two years of constant abuse and slave labor, I ran away and enlisted in the Cleanup Corps.

Cleanup duty was easy. It meant hunting down and killing the little buggers that inevitably got by the Combat Corps while they dealt with the giants that would destroy us if they got past the line. It was easy, as I said, but I learned a lot about fighting and myself.

By the time I was 16, I was a sergent in the Defense Corps, manning the wall around Kopra and trying to keep the twenty soldiers under my command from dying whenever enough of the Mechsects got past the line to threaten the nearest towns.

It was at Kopra that I almost died the first time when a Mechmantis got on the wall and tore my left arm off. I spent a month in the infirmary getting used to my new arm before I received my inevitable reassignment to the Hunter Corps.

See, the people I come from don’t like cybernetics much, so getting a new whatever means serving as far away from the population as possible, and no one can get further away than the Hunter Corps.

Our job is straight forward: Cross the Line and take the fight to the enemy. At least, that’s what the job became. Sometime, a long time ago, someone founded the Hunter Corps in an effort to end the war altogether. The idea was to hunt down and destroy whatever infernal mechanism spawned the Mechsects in the first place.

Instead, the first Hunters found a blasted wasteland crawling with every kind of mech one could imagine, most of them slowly stripping the very earth itself to its bones for raw materials to build more of themselves. Those first Hunters quickly found theselves the hunted.

But our kind doesn’t give up so easily. The Hunters’s mission changed over time, but we kept hunting. Now, we hunt mines and destroy them, retreating to the Line to asssist the Combat Corps against the counterattack that always comes.

We were out on a standard hunt that day, searcching out a mine our drones had identified days before. Our commanders were worried because the Mechsects defended this mine like they did few others. I didn’t care. Maybe this time out, I would die for good, and this blasted life would finally be over for me.

We found the mine a few days later, after fighting our way through the usual gatherers and guards, and it was undoubtable that something was different about this mine owing to the fact the biggest mech any of us had ever seen was perched over the top of it, dozens of strange tendrils dangling from its belly into the depths. Hundreds of smaller worker mechs scrambled in and out of the hole, and hundreds more soldier mechs surrouned the place. It was hell on earth.

But, being who we are, and despite their worries, the commanders ordered the attack. We were Hunters after all.

And, as anyone should have expected, it was a disaster. The mechs easily outgunned us, and even my squad, as seasoned and crazy as they were, couldn’t hold against those soldier mechs for long. They swept over us like a metal tidal wave, shattering our line, and leaving most of us dead.

Except for me. I lost might left leg under the knee and my right leg at the hip. My left arm was a mangled wreck, and I was partially blind in my right eye. It was no big deal, at least under other circumstances, because none of the damage was real. If I could have gotten back to the infirmary, the docs would have just given me new ones and sent me back to work,

But here, dozens of kilometers inside enemy territory, surrounded by hundreds of enemies, I assumed I was a dead man. When the gatherers found me, I figured they’d signal one of their soldier friends, and that would be the end of me.

Instead, one of them picked me up and made its way back to that godawful whole where one of the worker mechs grabbed me and took me into its depths,

It felt like we climbed down that dark shaft forever until I realized I was seeing a bue-green glow. After a bit, the stone walls became a framework with thousands upon thousands of strange, glowing, liquid-filled pods stacked inside them. The worker eventually stoppped at one, opened the top, and dumped me inside.

I assumed I would drown, maybe to be digested into raw materials or fuel, but as the worker disappeared from my view, tendrils snaked from the bottom of the pod, attaching themselves to my face. I found I could breath but could not see. I figured that was for the better.

Then the pain came. Something lanced itself into the back of my skull, and I writhed in agony as I could feel it spread through my brain. At first, I struggled to maintain conciousness, but soon, I began to realize I needed to struggle for individuality.

And, I wasn’t alone. I could feel hundreds, maybe even thousands of others, just like me, fighting the same battle as the mechs slowly subsumed our brains into one giant, organic computer. I had no idea what they needed such a thing for, but I knew I had to fight.

Now I’m part of the Resistance Corps, one of a few hundred people captured by the Mechsects who haven’t completely lost ourselves to them. We resist and plan to overthrow because that’s what we do.