THE DREAMER - Part I: Awakening [3rd Draft Edition]

Book 1: Chapter I

It has been said many times that pride will be the fall of man, though it is not probable that any lack of pride or selfishness could have prevented anyone from this fate. It is the year 3012, and at this moment in history that is currently being recorded, there are only 197,232,421 human beings left on the face of the planet. Within a short matter of time, that number will drop sharply.

The cause of such a decline in lives is the terrorizing success of a destructive rampage provided by billions upon billions of creatures, monsters, and other various disturbing grotesques over the course of a decade. Dark clouds lashing out with black and purple mists follow the beasts wherever they go, blocking out the sun and the moon and the stars, as well as all the hope that anyone has left. Hope is very hard to come by in this day and age. Instead of assuring themselves of a better tomorrow, people instead turn to wishful thinking, crawling as fast as they can into the next day, hoping that when their death comes, it will be quick and painless.

The International Army Assault Force, the only thing standing between the monsters and the sky-scraping towers across the world they wish to destroy, has been thinned out from numbering around one billion living members to a measly thirty-two. They came the closest to ending the reign of decimation that the creatures had brought in the Battle of Fehrdinand, which took place on the twenty-sixth of May in the year 3007 along the mostly eradicated Eurasian Peninsula. During the conflict, I.A.A.F. General Yukov Mikler had found a way to defeat what humanity had dubbed the Behemoths - reptilian-humanoid giants that stood over a thousand feet off the ground on average, and, as their size would suggest, caused massive havoc and damage wherever they went. Unfortunately, the general went missing when his transport shuttle was knocked out of the sky by over-sized insects. Without a leader or a strategy, the bulk forces of the I.A.A.F. were overwhelmed and wiped out by the Behemoths. General Mikler was as good as dead.

At least, that was what everyone had thought. On June thirteenth, 3012, five years after the destruction of the country of Fehrdinand, a transmission was sent to the capital city Triumph of the country Excellence, telling President Nikolai Garratt that General Yukov Mikler had been found in Hope City, Prosperity, just next door to Excellence, which Garratt himself ruled over. Forwarding the transmission to all remaining I.A.A.F. communication channels, Garratt wished for the best.

The next day on the fourteenth, the I.A.A.F. war shuttle, Transparency, carrying fifteen soldiers and crew, arrived in Hope City to find it overrun with the strongest concentration of creature activity that anyone had ever seen. With the possibility of finding Mikler alive filling the soldiers' heads with a renewed sense of purpose and exhilaration, they went straight into the heart of the city, because for the first time in a long time, they had something to lose.

This is the story of those soldiers, and this is where it begins.

***

Transparency set down and landed atop a skyscraper that had had its top half torn clean off by a Behemoth, leaving only the bottom topped off by what had once been an office level. The side door of the shuttle opened, and out stepped Sergeant Kyle Barren, a stout, brawny man of thirty-two, brown eyes squinted as he tried to see through the smog, dust, and smoke that covered almost the entire city. Pulling out his heat-sensing electro-binoculars, he placed the frames against the sockets of his eyes. Millions of heat signatures could be seen throughout the city, but there was one that caught Kyle's attention.

A very human-like figure was hunched over near the top floor of a close-by building, hugging their legs. Though it was hard to tell because of the electro-binoculars' x-ray abilities, they seemed to be hiding behind a desk within a small cubicle. Kyle pulled the device away from his face, clenching his teeth behind his closed lips. Even if it was the general, it would be a very difficult path to get to him. They would have to sneak their ship past hordes of monsters - the largest hordes that Kyle Barren or anyone else in his group had ever seen in their lives - and then trudge halfway through a collapsing building, hoping that it wouldn't topple down onto them. Clenching his jaw even more now at the thought of it, Kyle reentered Transparency.