Into the Breach
Some things never changed. Helen Ceres watched the horizon swallow the sun with the same carelessness it did every day, blind and deaf to metakind's puny struggles. In the absence of the sun, New Endurance's lights shone defiant. For hundreds of years, longer than anyone still alive could remember, the city had been an adamantine bastion. No Kaiju had ever breached its outer wall, not to mention its inner one. There had been a few close calls over the centuries, but not a single alien monstrosity had managed to set foot on New Endurance soil. It was a fact the city's Homeguard pilots wore with pride and that filled the civilian population with a sense of security. And it wasn't going to change on Helen's watch. On a normal night, the streetlamps and lit up windows would enshroud the city in a luminous corona , to be seen all the way to the Carpathians in the west. Tonight, three days into the evacuation, the upper ring lay mostly dark. About ha...