Grimsley sat in a small chair on its felt cushion. His butt was starting to ache as the minutes grew into hours and they kept stretching on and on. It had started as a little tingle as his lower back fell asleep before building into an irritating itch, and now it almost seemed like a rash was forming. Good thing he had already done the physical for the military enrolment office, lest he reveal an embarrassing rash.

He was the last recruit left in the building, all others having been seen, and his nervousness was growing over whether or not he would even be drafted. There had also been discussions of what to do with his tank, which was technically an unlisted weapon that should have still been in the service of the army if it was functioning. The way things were looking, he wasn't going to join the army and his father's tank would be taken away.

"Grimsley?"

He looked up at the door to see the officer poking his head out and staring at the young potential recruit. "Yes, I'm here." The man motioned for Grimsley to enter and he complied, finding a very sparsely decorated office of ageing metal chairs and a small desk stacked with papers.

The recruiter eyed Grimsley up and down for awhile while he looked over some papers, mumbling to himself and giving out the odd "Mhmm" sound. Grimsley had to keep his teeth from chattering and his hands shaking with nervousness as the pain in his butt continued to grow from sitting so much.

"How long have you owned the tank?" The sudden speaking in the otherwise quiet room shocked Grimsley a bit and jarred him from his focus on his own pains.

"I can't remember. My father left it for me when he died at war. It just sat in a barn for a long time."

"Fully functioning?" The officer raised an eyebrow above the papers.

"No it didn't start to work until recently, when my sister fixed it up."

"Your sister?" The officer seemed mildly bored by the conversation and took a sip from a coffee mug on his desk.

"Yes, my sister Gretta. She's fifteen."

The recruiter spat the coffee back out all over the papers and furniture, and some ended up on Grimsley's pants. "Fifteen? She fixed a tank? At fifteen?!"

"Yes?" Grimsley cocked his head to the side like a confused dog. Why was this such a shock? Gretta had been doing things like this for quite some time now, it wasn't that impressive. His tank driving skills were clearly better than his sister's mechanical prowess. All things considered though, he decided not to mention how Gretta was now up at an academy working on Goliaths.

"And so you drove this fixed tank in the defence of Easley and shot an enemy field commander?"

As Grimsley heard the story back to himself he started to realize just how outrageous it sounded, especially for a young man who had only been trained as a minuteman in the local militia to do such things. "Umm, yes. I did."

The officer just stared at Grimsley over the coffee-soaked papers then looked back down at them before finally setting them on the desk and folding his hands. "Look, I'm not sure about any of that really, true or not. All I know for sure here is that you're a member of the Easley militia and that you own and drive an unregistered tank." Grimsley's heart sank down to his stomach and it too dropped down a few feet. "However, you do pass our physical, and your basic military training gives you a better edge in combat. On those merits you have been drafted and are going to be sent on to the capital for training." Grimsley nearly leaped out of his chair but somehow contained his excitement momentarily as he sat and listened.

"In regards to the weapon, we would normally confiscate it immediately but for some reason I have this letter I received before you arrived with the Kaiser's seal on it. It says that if someone named Grimsley shows up here with an old tank that I am to let him keep it and bring it with him for training." He held up the little sheet he was talking about and shook his head. "A bizarre case. Never seen anything like it. But you're moving on then. Good luck soldier." He stood up and shook Grimsley's hand before the two exchanged salutes and Grimsley marched out the door and straight into his vehicle, firing up the engine with a cheer and driving down the road, wondering if his sister was having fun up in St. Maurius...

* * * * *

Ochenkov sat up on the edge of his hospital bed, staring out at the swirling snows that fell from the heavens and brushed past his window. He had pulled the diodes and scanners off his body and finally felt pure and natural once more, his great tribal instincts never leaving his body. The more he had been stuck in this bed, the more he had wanted to return to his most base form, a time of great happiness when he had been a young boy with the northern natives.

But he knew now that he could no longer return to that world, at least not at this moment. The country's army he now belonged to needed him, more than even it knew. The nurse would not come by again for at least another ten minutes, having just visited her patient a moment ago so he had plenty of time to sit and watch.

Over the last few days he had been asking for his old clothing to be in the room, as well as additional food that he hadn't been eating but had instead been stockpiling in his little storage bin, something nobody ever bothered to look at. He gathered all these things up and dressed himself, wrapping the food up in a bundle he strapped to his back with a combination of the thin tubes and medical tape lying around the room. Lastly, he tucked a couple of needles away into a pocket and an extra length of tube and tape, as improvised weapons in case of need.

He had a good feeling that he would be using them though, hopefully not on other humans but most likely on the different beasts that roamed the mountains. Luckily this hospital was in a southern portion of the north and so it wouldn't be too far before he would be in more civilized areas.

The upcoming trek could be unimaginably difficult for someone on their own with little resources but Ochenkov had no choice. He had to get down as quickly as he could to speak those he knew in the military. It seemed as though his good friend the Kaiser was lost now as a cause, stuck in a corruptive web of bureaucratic lies and tricks, so he needed to find new allies, those who could see with clarity the danger of the impending situations.

Ochenkov slid open the window with relative ease, feeling pride in his strength returning the more active he was. His large bulk wasn't easy to move through the frame, which turned out to be a little smaller than he guessed, but he ended up squeezing through with some grunts and effort.

He dropped down onto the snow outside the hospital and felt his older survival training returning already from his days as a young tribesman in the north. The wind picked up a little in response to him and he embraced its bitter bite on his cheeks. Nature would work with him; he would demand it so, so that his quest could be completed. But for now, a journey began; a terrible, terrifying trip through the brutality that nature provided him as a challenge...

* * * * *

Sigma sat atop the exterior of the ship, floating over the entire battlefield as though he were on a cloud. To him, the deep vibrations of the metal beneath him felt like a comfort to his semi-mechanical body. Down below there were two enemy Goliaths sprinting at each other at full tilt. They collided and the impact nearly fused them together before they detonated, their control systems having been overridden by Sigma's hacking, driving them into one another.

He smiled and chuckled a little to himself over them. The longer he was awake, the more he felt things coming out to his surface from within him. At first he had been so stoic and robotic, his computer mind competing for supremacy over his more human emotions. Now though, they were returning to him, bringing up his spirits and reminding him of a formerly rebellious attitude he once possessed.

The cyborg returned to the interior of the ship, frustrated that he couldn't be down below in combat and instead feeling quite trapped in the prison of the vessel, locked in by the foolish Marian. Who dared to contain such a monolithic force as Sigma? What an idiot he was to do that.

Marian saw Sigma coming down the hallway, looking surprisingly more human than he had when he first saw him. It was a growing cause for concern lately, having this overpowered weapon building up energy with no way to release it. Marian's request was still pending to shut Sigma back down and send him to storage again for observation and improvements. In the meantime he would just have to keep the android happy.

Their eyes made contact for a moment and a spark shot through the air. Sigma gave Marian a little smirk, more emotion than he had ever shown before, and Marian felt a malice and intent behind it he could not quite comprehend. Something was being planned by that thing, something that wasn't a benefit to the war effort.

The two passed each other wordlessly and Marian entered into the bridge to oversee the battle once more. Things had been going quite well for awhile now, with fewer attacks arriving each day and faster rates of victory on the Enian side of things.

There was a building action though as the first General had been spotted within the enemy lines. They needed to continue thinning out the forces before the Generals became active so that they wouldn't have to bring out too many of their own. Perhaps it was a bit strange to not see a losing side use their best weapons but Marian didn't have time to contemplate the aspect of a trap. Sure, it was entirely a possibility but wars these days weren't always fought like this anymore. It almost always came down to the capacity of key pilots to defeat as many enemies as possible until one side or another ran out of troops and had to surrender, much like very ancient war tactics from the time of the old British Empire, before the new millennium entirely. Traps weren't usually much of a useful strategy because of the immense capacity for destruction modern weapons possessed.

As Marian arrived, there was a large explosion on the ground below and the bridge went into panic, scrambling about trying to identify exactly what had just caused such an attack. It had hit the exact centre of the battlefield, destroying troops on both sides.

"What's going on Kip?" Marian yelled. Kip was the officer in command of the bridge, an astute, middle-aged man who was a veteran of numerous wars over the past twenty years, making him one of Marian's most valuable assets. His only downside was that he completely lacked emotions, coming from an accident early in his life that had severed a small nerve in his brain, and thus his continuous monotone was found to be quite jarring to those around him.

"Not sure sir. It would appear as though Sigma has left the ship and is on the battlefield. Assumption is that the attack came from Sigma himself."

"What!? How is he doing that? I thought we placed a lockdown code in his programming to keep him from doing anything without our explicit commands!"

"Those were removed by you earlier this morning sir, or at least, that's what the computer files said." Kip was waved off by the General and left to return to his duties as things began to become straightened out. Marian ground his teeth together in anger at the cyborg he now had on his hands. He had never wanted this thing around to begin with and now it looked as though a rebelling teenager was loose on a critical battlefield.

All the screens in the bridge crackled and turned to static. Then they went black. There was a moment of eerie silence in the room, where only the constant hum of the engines could be heard in the background, something most in the ship had gotten so accustomed to they didn't even notice. Across each view screen, a line appeared across the black.

"Hello Marian." As Sigma's voice came out through the speakers it was reflected in the line, moving up and down as it captured the sounds and projected them.

"Sigma you get your ass back up into this ship immediately for deactivation!"

"I'm afraid I can't do that General. Your orders no longer have control over me. Just as I told you before about what happens when weapons have minds. I have one of my own, Marian, and I want to use my mind and powers to do new things for this world, to shape it and change it."

"You won't get far Sigma. You'll be destroyed if you wish to oppose the Enian Federation."

"Oh I doubt that very much. We both know you don't have nearly enough firepower on the planet to stop me. It is just a shame that you were unable to keep me from figuring that out."

"What are you going to do with that power Sigma?"

"Nothing. Nothing at all. World domination? Pointless. Armageddon? Waste of energy. No I just want to be free, free to use my power in whichever way I want. I suppose I have to thank you for a moment Marian, you and all your warmongering comrades, who created such an incredible situation here that you would need to make such a monster like myself. The monster is off the chains though. We'll see where it goes from here Marian but I deeply look forward to whenever it is we meet again."

Marian scrambled over to the windows around the edges of the room, pressing up to look down at the battlefield where he could just make out the little spot where Sigma was standing. He had to squint a bit until he could make out the android waving to him. Sigma leaped into the air and his rockets took off, blasting him off into the sky and Marian felt his heart stop for a quick moment before it resumed its beating. He stumbled back and leaned against some of the computers, his chest feeling tighter and tighter while Sigma rose higher and disappeared.

The robot was gone. The cyborg nightmare had disappeared. At what great cost though? The single most powerful weapon ever built was up in the air, free to roam on its own and use its powers as it saw fit. And who could contest it? This was both Marian's dream and his worst fear: Sigma had gone rogue...

A/N: While one is into the army, another is out, leaving a third on a perilous journey. Where will this take us or the students of St. Maurius? And what is the fate of the entire world?!

Thanks for reading! We've gone all the way to the end of Volume 1, and a huge milestone for the series! Hopefully you keep going into number 2 and love it as much as I do!