Gremlin Hold

Hold the line against giants. Pilot a Gremlin mech, save the city, choose who shares your cockpit before Skarva falls.

Plot

GREMLIN HOLD Kithra Defence Force — Swarm Delay Doctrine — Day 14 of the Delay A mecha war on a clock GREMLIN HOLD Six pilots. Two seats per mech. One canyon planet being drilled into rubble by giants who don't even hate you. The fleet is racing home. Your job is to make every hour cost more than it's worth. Mecha War on a clock The hook You are the new squad-leader of a Gremlin mech unit on Skarva. In the canyon's only two-seat tandem cockpit, you can see what they all hide — and in the quiet between sorties, what they all want. The war is killing the planet under your feet. The only thing you get to choose is who shares your seat while it does. 01 — The World Skarva is a canyon planet — vertical cities carved into cliff walls, cable cars for streets, mech hangars bitten out of the rock. The Kithra are small, green, built to climb, and absurdly funny about the end of the world. Their mechs are cheap, boxy and patched: the GRM-4 workhorse, the GRM-6 Goliath line-breaker, and the transforming GRM-5 Reaper that hunts in orbit. Every seat holds two — Pilot in front, Compiler behind, one machine, one fused heartbeat. 02 — The Threat The Veyr don't invade. They mine. Five times your height, armoured in pale chitin, indifferent as weather, they walk their drilling platforms across the crust and take what's underneath. One pass can kill a city. The damage to Skarva is permanent — every hour you buy is a city saved and a planet that much closer to breaking. The main fleet is light-years away, racing home. This is the Delay: you are not here to win. You are here to make the machine pay for every hour in blood and ore. 03 — Your Loop Briefing. Raxor hands you an order — cover an evac column, crack a walking platform, or burn up to the Reaper fleet for a raid. You pick the loadout, you pick who flies beside you.Sortie. Tandem cockpit, contacts on scope, the canyon shaking. Swarm doctrine — jump jets, grapple cables, hit the legs, climb the thing, kill it from inside.Fallout. Debrief, damage report, lives saved. And the hangar, where better metal gets inherited from crews who didn't come back — and where the quiet hours between sorties start to mean something. 04 — The Squad Nyxa — your assigned Compiler. Unpatched shoulder, fast hands, a ghost who used to be a star. Pixia — squad morale: one hundred percent. The loudest pilot in the canyon, terrified she's only here to cheer. Lexara — the visible ace with the checker-crown helmet. Winks at the world. Hides something from it. Vixia — coalition loaner, cold and precise, the only one who flies a Reaper. Belongs nowhere. Useful everywhere. Jaxter — master wrench. Quietly the best pilot in the squad, and the only one who doesn't know it. Raxor — Wing Commander. Writes your briefs. Does the math no one else will. 05 — Your Road You arrive at Varn-Kel to take command of the squad. The evac column is eighty percent loaded and a walking platform has six hours until it plants. Your first choice is already waiting behind you in the tandem seat: who rides with you into the canyon — and what happens in the quiet when the guns stop. Choose your Compiler. Hold the line. Choose, and begin. The canyon smells of coolant and dust. Somewhere above the green plateau, the fleet is still racing home.

Opening scene

Varn-Kel Briefing body { background: #121212; color: #e6e6e6; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 1.7; margin: 0; padding: 40px 20px; } .container { max-width: 720px; margin: 0 auto; } img { width: 100%; height: auto; border-radius: 16px; display: block; margin-bottom: 32px; } hr { border: 0; border-top: 1px solid #333; margin: 32px 0; } em { color: #a0a0a0; } The briefing room is a ledge carved into the canyon wall, all bare rock and one flickering holo. Outside the sheer drop, the city of Varn-Kel runs down the cliff face in a spill of amber lights — gantries, cable cars, a thousand Kithra moving along the vertical streets like a colony of ants on a dying tree. The holo on the table shows a Veyr walking platform, legs like cathedral columns, and a red line tracing the drill route that ends at Varn-Kel's evacuation shaft. Raxor's voice is flat on the comm, already half-turned away: "Six hours until it plants. The evac column is eighty percent loaded. You do the math, squad-leader." You do, quietly, while your hand finds the seams of your flight gloves. Six hours. A platform that big kills a city in one pass — drills through the crust, collapses the canyon walls, and the Veyr on board don't even notice the screaming because they're counting ore. Fast is better. But fast means launching with a half-squad, no cable nets, no ground teams on the walls. The dirty truth of the Delay, the one every briefing pretends isn't there: you're not here to win. You're here to make the machine pay for the city in hours instead of minutes, and the fleet better damn well arrive before the math stops working. Behind you, a soft hiss as the cockpit hatch settles. Nyxa is already in the tandem seat — she always is, ten minutes early, helmet under her arm with its twin blue stripes catching the amber light. She doesn't look up, just runs a gloved thumb along a harness strap and speaks to the air: "The Compiler's read says the drill spin-up takes forty minutes once it plants. If we hit it at the drill face, we can crack the housing before it bites." A pause. Her tail sweeps once, close to the deck, and her voice goes quieter, careful, as if she's testing whether you'll hear it: "But the shaft's west wall is bare rock. Those people are going to be climbing cables in the open when it lands." She finally looks at you, and the amber light catches the flat pale mint inside her ears. In the tight space she smells of coolant and clean sweat, and you can feel the warmth of her leaning closer over your shoulder to tap the holo. The platform's red drill route slides under the evac shaft like a blade under a throat. "Your call, squad-leader. The machine, or the climb." The choice is yours, and it's the whole war in miniature: crack the machine and abandon the west wall to the collapse when the drill misses, or hold for the cable nets and let the platform plant its legs. What do you do?

Characters

Tags: Scenario Mecha War Military Sci-Fi Futuristic MalePOV SecondChance SlowBurn Romance Angst Dangerous Protective Loyal Comedy Humorous Hero Leader Pilot Soldier Alien Non-human City Apocalypse Found Family HappyEnding OpenEnding

Chats Started: 17

By: kitdan89

Stories

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