Through the Distant Universe

I moved further and further towards the city. Gradually, I left behind what could be described as the suburbs – silent wastelands, strewn with rusty wreckage of ships and anomalous formations whose appearance distorted the very concept of familiar geometry. The metallic screech of my augmented leg echoed in the dead silence, emphasizing my solitude in this hell. The air grew heavier, carrying the scent of decay, congealed blood, and something caustic, chemical, reminiscent of the stench of burnt microchips and charred flesh.

I entered from the outskirts, where surviving, but black with soot and time, two-story houses clustered along shattered streets. Their windows, like empty eye sockets, stared at me with lifeless reproach, and gaping holes in their roofs revealed only twisted rafters and remnants of former comfort. Here and there, from under the debris, remnants of faded wallpaper were visible, once bright with delicate floral patterns or funny children's prints, but now – dull, dusty testaments to extinguished lives. I imagined the families who lived here: the morning laughter of children echoing from open windows, neighbors arguing over a low fence, the aromas of dinner cooking, everyday worries and small joys, mercilessly cut short. I saw overturned flowerpots with withered plants on what were once tidy verandas, and tattered remnants of clotheslines hanging from peeling railings. These were people's homes, not just walls.

To my left and right loomed the mangled skeletons of factories – industrial enterprises that once hummed with life, producing perhaps peaceful goods, or maybe even military products. Now they resembled the skeletons of gigantic monsters, their steel bones twisted outward, gnawed by an unknown force whose touch turned metal into pliable clay. Huge, melted cranes were frozen in unnatural poses, as if trying to lift something unliftable, something that broke them, or perhaps desperately pointing to the sky from where doom came. The doors of loading bays and administrative buildings were welded shut from the inside with crude metal sheets or barricaded with heavy machinery, while the production cranes and loaders themselves were slammed at full speed into the wrecks of enemy vehicles or giant robots. The poor souls fought with everything they had, using every tool, every means, to make a last stand.

Frozen conveyor belts, resembling giant snakes, hung from tilted beams, their mechanisms permanently stalled. Tanks, pierced through by monstrous shells, leaked viscous, black mazut, which solidified on the ground in bizarre, gleaming patterns, like the petrified blood of the planet. Every breach in the factory walls revealed destroyed equipment, twisted control panels, broken machinery, rusted solid. Here, obviously, people tried to resist, retooling factories for military purposes, transforming peaceful tools into weapons of a final battle, but to no avail.

The streets were choked. Not just with trash, but with monumental barricades of wrecked cars, building debris, and twisted metal. It was clear that people had desperately tried to stop what was coming, to block the path, to buy themselves a little time. On every corner, behind every concrete block, one could see the remnants of their desperate defense, frozen in its last gasp. I passed the remains of a powerful defensive position – a pile of crumpled armored vehicles, pierced through by something tremendously powerful that left melted, ragged edges. There were tanks – heavily armored "Leviathans" with their turrets torn open, their cannons sticking out at unnatural angles, as if reproaching the sky. APCs, their sides breached and hatches forever jammed. Self-propelled units, their tracks or anti-gravs frozen in the mud, their launchers aimed at nothing. All of it was simply torn apart, their steel plating like paper, ripped inside out, revealing mangled interiors, stained with dried, dark brown blood. Defensive lines, ripped from the earth, trenches filled with crumbled soil, debris, and dead bodies, like graves hastily dug.

And amidst this chaos, this monumental testament to futile resistance, they lay – enormous, torn-apart mechs. Their steel shells were turned inside out, revealing intricate networks of wires and servomotors, and their once formidable weapons were frozen in a mute reproach, their barrels bent as if under the weight of an invisible, unbearable burden. Their cockpits were shattered, flattened as if a giant fist had crushed them in an instant, and if one looked closely, one could discern the gruesome remains of pilots inside – bones fused with metal, recalling the horror of their last moments. They fell. All fell. Even giants, forged for war, things that I and other 21st-century humans could only dream of, were annihilated without any difficulty, like toys in the hands of a colossus.

Among the debris, beneath a layer of ash ingrained into every pore, I saw them. Dead bodies. Not just skeletons, not piles of decayed bones, but desiccated mummies, their silhouettes preserving the shape of their last, dying breath, as if they had been instantly mummified, leaving behind grim monuments to tragedy.

Here was a soldier, frozen in a heroic but futile pose, clutching a long-discharged rifle in his hands, his fingers clamped to the stock as if trying to carry the weapon with him into the afterlife. His face, turned towards the sky, was distorted by a grimace of pain and rage, as if he had stared into the eyes of his doom, into the face of what killed him, until his last moment. His camouflage blended with the color of the ash, becoming grey and unremarkable, but I could still make out the emblem of his unit – an eagle breaking chains. A meaningless symbol in this graveyard.

This was not like natural death, like a slow fading, a quiet ebb. There were no signs of decomposition in the usual sense, only a gruesome, almost surreal preservation, like a sarcastic memory of tragedy, etched forever. Their flesh had withered, transforming into something like parchment stretched over bones, but their facial features, their eyes, every wrinkle – all preserved the imprint of instantaneous, monstrous agony. They were frozen in their final moments, and their faces were silent, blood-curdling witnesses to what had transpired.

I saw these frozen scenes of ordinary life, cut short in a single instant. By a doorway, as if dropped in a hurry, lay an open book, its pages yellowed with time, but in the dim light, the title was legible: "Tales for the Little Ones." Inside, on the pages, were naive, bright drawings, now covered with a layer of dust, but still discernible: a smiling sun, a house with a chimney, laughing children. Nearby – an overturned chair, and on its seat – a small, porcelain cup, without a single crack, as if it had just been placed there and its owner had stepped away for a moment. Further on, on the shattered cobblestones, fragments of earthenware were visible, mixed with solidified, dried food remnants – a last meal, never eaten. Here was someone's grocery bag, its contents – a few shriveled, dried fruits and bread turned to stone – spilled onto the dirty pavement, and nearby – a broken pencil and a child's drawing of a sun and a family, done with an unsteady but so lively hand. They were simply going about their day, living their lives, and their world ended. In a single moment.

A deep melancholia and an unbearable sense of frozen time pressed upon me from all sides, seeping under my armor and into the deepest recesses of my consciousness. Every step in this dead city, where once ordinary human lives flowed, was a step over a collective, silent grave. I did not smell blood or fresh death – only a heavy, deathly stench that was the very breath of this place, its curse. The contrast between the vibrant past, whose echoes I saw in every frozen object, in every imprint of life, and the dead present, which was palpable in every speck of dust and every breath, was painful, soul-wrenching.

I was a living ghost among ghosts, the last witness to their lives and their deaths. Those who did this, they came not to conquer, but to exterminate. They erased not only lives but also the very memory of them, leaving behind only this gruesome museum of tragedy, this silent reproach. They left no chance, neither for life nor even for a normal death. They were inhumane, for their goal was not conquest, but complete, total annihilation. And I was the sole witness to their work, yet I felt that this was far from the end. My journey was just beginning; I felt that this city was just the first, blood-chilling prelude to what awaited me.