The Unmaker

The Great Mutant Beetle, Mammot, is the earthquake that never subsides. With every step the bones of weak men rattle and the hearts of strong men waver. The dead beneath its talons bloom to life once more, parasitized into joining the Swarm, human or beast or bug alike. When it rises from the horizon and crosses the Boundless Glacier, light is drained from the sky and the blizzard that follows chills the lands to below zero—and of the Seven Great Mutants, Mammot is only ranked the fourth strongest beneath the Swarm Queen, the Black Witch, and the Devil Maw. Even if it is a lumbering titan so large it cannot speak the tongue of man, Mammot is undoubtedly the god of the Rampaging Hinterland Front; it is the name that strikes fear into where fear cannot be should man wishes to lead an honourable life.

Year One, Mammot appeared on the far eastern front, bringing with it a Swarm numbering two hundred million. The Shoreguards were useless. A rampage tore down our flimsy walls, a tide devoured, swallowed our soldiers alive, and just as Mammot was about to step foot on our continent, it turned around and left.

The reason was inexplicable. The will of a bug cannot be comprehended. But the wails, the ailing plights, the icy stench of frozen corpses and children screaming in the blustery cold—in the aftermath of Mammot’s first recorded appearance, two hundred thousand were dead and a hundred thousand more marooned in the land of eternal winter, fated to starve and die a lonely, insignificant death.

One of the children survived and travelled inland.

He had seen Mammot’s striding form up close. He had stood in its shadow, he had braved the rampage of its Swarm. He had survived—and at the age of twelve, a mere two years after Mammot’s appearance and disappearance, fearlessness led him to the position of Pionier in the Rampaging Hinterland Front’s then-standing military. There, he raged for a machine to be constructed, something so vast and gargantuan it can not only stave off an earthquake, but fight it; his ideas were not taken seriously by any of the Pioniers at the time, and he was summarily executed at the age of sixteen for disobeying orders during a Swarm invasion. His crime: consorting with the very bugs he had been ordered to slay to turn himself into a mindless blob of flesh-metal.

His successor was another sixteen-year-old who had stood in Mammot’s shadow, and he carried on his precursor’s research.

Year Eight. Mammot reappeared over the horizon. It stopped just short of entering the continent once more, but the then-standing military was annihilated, the great steel wall torn down. There were five survivors: the successor of the Mad Pionier and his closest confidants, who had hid themselves in the shell of a giant suit of Swarmsteel armour.

Year Ten. Mammot reappeared over the horizon. It sent only its Swarm forward this time, but in two years the successor had rounded up all the anchor towns in the east and rallied a defence. The Swarm broke through, still, and millions perished, but just as many were torn to shreds on the Swarm’s side. Elated, the successor took to mass dismantling the corpses of their slain enemies; he died at the age of twenty from overload strain, from attempting to equip too many Swarmsteel at once.

Year Fifteen. The fourth successor created the first ‘legs’ of the titan. She was assassinated in her sleep by forces from the Mori Masif Front for engaging in dark research. Year Eighteen. The sixth successor created the ‘wings’ of the titan. He was crushed to death by his own creation in an unfortunate factory incident. Year Twenty-Three. The ninth successor created the ‘horns’ of the titan. It took him three whole years just to figure out how to attach it to the rest of the chassis, but determined, in the end, that it will not be steel or silver that will join Swarmsteel together; it is the strong spirit of man that will hold their greatest weapon together.

From the ninth successor onwards, every last one of his successor’s corpses were fused to the chassis so they could continue serving humanity after death.

Year Forty-Four. Mammot reappeared over the horizon. It had been over three decades since its last appearance, and weak men had hoped it had simply died off somewhere beyond the continent, perhaps in a power struggle between other Great Mutants, but that was evidently not the case. It had won the struggle. It had become twice as big, a hundred times more menacing; and the Swarm it had brought with it numbered four hundred million, but a rough estimate. The chaos of that year could not be understated.

Year Forty-Four, the twenty-fifth successor was lowered into the core of the chassis. The seams were welded, the bolts were locked in place. Hydraulic pistons the size of buildings hiss and hum as they adjusted the machine’s giant limbs. Platforms and gantries are lowered, a thousand Pioniers race from the wall as the engines begin to roar. Springs groan. Servos plates whine. An avalanche of snow slides off the rough carapace, moonlight eaten by the intricate patterns etched into the steel. Twenty-four fearless men and women before him were bled into the walls of the machine. The twenty-fifth listens to their bellows for revenge, and he closes his eyes—he does not open them again.

The chains are severed. Mammot advances two steps, three steps, quaking the earth. The eternal blizzard fogs the eastern shoreline in cutting winds and veils of snow, but tonight, before it even stepped onto the glacier, Mammot halted in its fourth step.

Two thousand metres away, on the other end of the glacier, there is fog.

There is fear, there is death.

There is darkness.

And then there was light, from a hundred diamond spotlights firing forth from the wall, casting a sharp shadowy silhouette of the three-horned titan that stood before it—and Mammot speaks for the first time, its voice carving new ravines across the glacier.

“You… are… human?”

Those were the first and last recorded words of Mammot, the Great Mutant Beetle.

It has never spoken since.

Year Forty-Four, humanity successfully created a Swarmsteel titan to fight the earthquake—and we call our god, forged from the blood of a million souls, the Wall of the Rampaging Hinterland Front.

‘Gigantitania’ is its sacred name.

And bugs are no longer gods, for there is no longer any man who worships them as such.

… That year, the Rampaging Hinterland Front claimed its first true victory against Mammot, and the Swarm was repelled.

We, the Pioniers of De Balla, will hold the front.

- Excerpt from ‘De Balla: Origins’, Chapter One