The Tri-form: Last Line
Copyright© 2025 by THodge
Chapter 1: Tri-Form
The year is 3099 A.D., and humanity is a shadow of what it once was.
It’s been centuries since the Gel’Bourn first appeared — drifting out of the void like stray embers from a dying star. At first, there were only a few. Strange, translucent things that shimmered like liquid glass. We didn’t even have a name for them then.
But they multiplied.
And multiplied.
Until their numbers swallowed ours.
I’m getting ahead of myself.
My name is Christian Hunter — though no one calls me that anymore.
To the few friends I still have, I’m Drake.
Battle‑mech pilot.
Front‑liner.
One of the last stubborn idiots still willing to climb into a steel coffin and fight for a world that barely remembers what peace felt like.
If you want to understand how we got here...
If you want to know why the sky burns red over every city that’s still standing...
Then we need to start at the beginning.
And trust me — the beginning wasn’t pretty.
SECTION 1 — THE DISCOVERY (Year 3000)
Third‑person, reflective + narrative blend, freshman‑literary tone
In the year 3000, humanity was already running out of places to hide from its own mistakes. Earth wasn’t dead, not exactly, but it felt like a tired old machine that had been pushed too hard for too long. The oceans were lower, the forests thinner, and the sky carried a permanent haze that made sunsets look bruised. People had gotten used to it, the way people always do, but everyone knew the truth: the planet couldn’t keep up anymore.
So humanity did what it always does when it runs out of room.
It went looking for more.
Mining colonies spread across the Moon and Mars, and then farther out, into the asteroid belt. The work was dangerous, but the pay was good, and the alternative was staying on Earth and hoping the next heat wave didn’t take out your city’s power grid. Most people didn’t think twice about the risks. They just signed the contracts and went.
That’s how the survey crew of the Prospector’s Light ended up drifting near a nameless rock on the edge of the belt, scanning for anything worth hauling home. They weren’t expecting to find anything special. Most asteroids were just metal and dust, leftovers from a solar system that never finished building itself.
But this one was different.
It wasn’t the size or the shape that caught their attention. It was the way their instruments reacted — like the asteroid was humming, even though there was no sound. The scanners flickered. The readings jumped. And buried halfway inside the rock was something smooth and perfectly round, like a silver marble the size of a basketball.
At first, they thought it was some kind of metal deposit. Maybe platinum. Maybe something new. But when they cut it free, the sphere didn’t behave like metal at all. It flexed slightly under pressure, like thick gel, but it also reflected light like polished chrome. No one had ever seen anything like it.
They brought it aboard because that’s what survey crews do. You find something weird, you bring it back, and you let the scientists figure out whether it’s valuable or dangerous. Most of the time, it’s neither.
This time, it was both.
The sphere didn’t move. It didn’t glow. It didn’t react to heat or cold or radiation. It just sat there in the containment chamber like a piece of art someone forgot to finish. The crew joked about it. They called it “the silver egg” and took bets on whether it was alien or just some freak mineral formation.
Nobody expected it to speak.
Three days after they returned to Earth, every computer in the research facility flickered at the same time. Screens went black, then white, then filled with lines of code that no one had typed. Security doors opened and closed in rapid pulses, like the building was breathing. Alarms triggered without sound. Even devices that weren’t connected to the network reacted — tablets, watches, anything with a processor.
The scientists panicked. They thought it was a cyberattack. They thought someone had hacked the entire facility. But then the message appeared.
Not in English.
Not in any known language.
Just a simple system alert that auto‑translated itself across every device:
MORE WILL COME
The words stayed on the screens for exactly ten seconds.
Then everything went back to normal.
The sphere didn’t move.
It didn’t glow.
It didn’t react.
It just sat there, silent and perfect, like it hadn’t just hijacked every computer in the building.
The scientists argued for hours about what to do. Some wanted to destroy it. Others wanted to study it. The military wanted to classify it. The government wanted to hide it. Nobody agreed on anything except one thing:
Whatever the sphere was, it wasn’t from Earth.
They labeled it U.E.O. — Unidentified Extraterrestrial Object — because that was the safest, most official‑sounding name they could come up with. It made the whole thing feel manageable, like it was just another sample to catalog.
But the people who had been in the room when the message appeared knew better. They had seen the way the lights flickered. They had felt the air change. They had watched their machines obey something that wasn’t human.
And deep down, they all understood the same thing:
The warning wasn’t a threat.
It was a promise.
More would come.
And humanity wasn’t ready.
SECTION 2 — THE SECOND WAVE
For a while, nothing happened.
After the first U.E.O. delivered its message, the world held its breath. Scientists ran every test they could think of. Governments argued behind closed doors. The military tightened security around the research facility, but they didn’t know what they were guarding against. The sphere didn’t move again. It didn’t send another message. It didn’t even vibrate.
It just sat there, silent and patient, like it had all the time in the world.
People eventually got tired of waiting. The news never heard about the incident. The public went on with their lives. Earth kept struggling with its resource shortages, and the colonies kept digging deeper into the asteroid belt. The U.E.O. became a classified curiosity — something important, but not urgent.
Then the second wave arrived.
It started with a single alert from a deep‑space telescope stationed near Neptune. The telescope wasn’t designed to detect life or alien ships. It was meant to track debris and monitor gravitational shifts. But on a quiet morning shift, the system flagged something unusual: a cluster of objects moving in perfect formation.
At first, the operators thought it was a glitch. Space debris didn’t fly in formation. Asteroids didn’t travel in synchronized patterns. But the readings were consistent. The objects were small, smooth, and reflective — just like the first sphere.
There weren’t dozens of them.
There were hundreds.
By the time the military got involved, the cluster had already accelerated. The objects weren’t drifting. They were traveling with purpose, cutting through the solar system like a school of metallic fish. Every hour, they grew closer.
The governments of Earth tried to keep it quiet, but secrets don’t last long when the sky starts changing.
People all over the world began noticing strange streaks of light at night — thin silver trails that moved too fast and too straight to be meteors. Amateur astronomers posted blurry videos online. Conspiracy theorists claimed aliens were coming. Most people laughed it off.
They stopped laughing when the first one hit.
It didn’t crash like a meteor. It didn’t explode. It simply landed, folding itself into a shape that looked almost humanoid, except its body rippled like liquid metal trying to remember how bones worked. It stood in the middle of a street in New Mumbai, surrounded by stunned civilians who didn’t know whether to run or take pictures.
Someone got close.
Someone touched it.
The creature reacted instantly.
Its arm reshaped into a blade, smooth and sharp as glass. It moved faster than anything human, slicing through the air with a sound like tearing silk. People screamed. Cars swerved. The creature didn’t chase anyone — it just stood there, its body shifting and reforming like it was studying the world around it.
More landed across the city.
Then across the continent.
Then across the planet.
The military responded, but bullets passed through the creatures like punching holes in water. Explosions scattered them, but the pieces simply crawled back together. Fire made them glow brighter. Electricity made them angry.
The world watched in horror as the first city fell.
News networks scrambled to report what was happening. They didn’t know what to call the creatures. “Metallic anomalies.” “Liquid invaders.” “Unknown hostiles.” None of the names stuck.
It was a journalist from a small independent outlet who finally gave them the name that would spread across the world.
She described the creatures as “gel‑like beings born from the void.”
Her headline read:
THE GEL BOURN HAVE ARRIVED
The name caught on instantly.
People needed something to call the monsters that were tearing their cities apart.
And the Gel’Bourn kept coming.
Within a month, Earth lost control of three major population centers. Within a year, entire regions were abandoned. The colonies tried to help, but they were too far away and too few in number. Humanity wasn’t just losing the war — it wasn’t even fighting one yet. It was just running.
Governments collapsed. Borders dissolved. The world shrank into scattered pockets of survivors trying to hold on to whatever they could.
And through it all, the Gel’Bourn multiplied.
They didn’t reproduce. They didn’t build. They didn’t communicate. They simply converted whatever they touched — metal, concrete, vehicles, weapons — into more of themselves. Every battle made them stronger. Every city they consumed became a new nest.
Humanity had no answer.
Not yet.
But somewhere, in the ruins of old nations and the ashes of fallen cities, the first ideas for a new kind of weapon began to form — something fast, adaptable, and capable of fighting the Gel’Bourn on their own terms.
Something that could shift forms as quickly as the enemy.
Something that could survive where tanks and aircraft couldn’t.
Something that would become the foundation of the Mech Defense Unit.
But that part of the story hadn’t begun yet.
For now, Earth was still falling...
SECTION 3 — THE LONG WAR (300 Years)
Before the war became a war, before the Gel’Bourn were feared and hated and hunted across continents, there was a brief moment — so brief that most history books don’t even mention it — when coexistence might have been possible.
It’s strange to think about now, after everything that happened, but the truth is simple:
the Gel’Bourn didn’t attack first.
When the second wave arrived and the first humanoid forms unfolded themselves on Earth’s streets, they didn’t immediately strike. They stood still, their bodies shifting in slow, curious ripples, like they were trying to understand the world they had landed in. They didn’t speak, but their movements weren’t aggressive. They didn’t chase anyone. They didn’t destroy anything unless they were provoked.
But humans are humans.
And humans fear what they don’t understand.
People screamed. People ran. People threw things. Someone fired a gun — maybe out of panic, maybe out of instinct — and the bullet passed through the creature like it was slicing water. The Gel’Bourn reacted, not out of malice, but out of something closer to self‑defense. Their bodies hardened. Their limbs reshaped. And the first casualty fell.
After that, coexistence became impossible.
Fear spreads faster than truth.
Faster than reason.
Faster than hope.
Within hours, the world had decided the Gel’Bourn were hostile invaders. Governments issued emergency broadcasts. Military forces mobilized. Civilians barricaded themselves in their homes. And the Gel’Bourn, who had no concept of borders or diplomacy or human panic, responded the only way their strange biology allowed:
They adapted.
Every attack taught them something new.
Every weapon forced them to evolve.
Every attempt at containment only made them stronger.
What might have been a misunderstanding turned into a global catastrophe.
And once the first cities fell, there was no going back.
The First Century — Collapse
The first hundred years of the conflict weren’t really a war. They were a slow, grinding collapse. Humanity tried everything — bullets, bombs, lasers, sonic weapons — but nothing worked for long. The Gel’Bourn didn’t just survive damage; they learned from it. Every failed attack became a lesson they absorbed into their shifting bodies.
Cities that had stood for centuries fell in days.
Nations dissolved.
Borders vanished.
People fled inland, upward, outward — anywhere the Gel’Bourn weren’t. The colonies on Mars and the Moon became overcrowded refuges. The asteroid belt turned into a lifeline for resources. Earth became a patchwork of fortified zones surrounded by wastelands where the Gel’Bourn roamed freely.
Some historians call this era “The Great Retreat.”
Others call it “The First Dimming.”
Most people just call it “the beginning of the end.”
The Second Century — Resistance
By the second century, humanity had stopped pretending it could win with conventional weapons. The Gel’Bourn were too adaptable, too fluid, too alien. So scientists and engineers began experimenting with new ideas — energy fields, plasma nets, nanotech disruptors — anything that might slow the creatures down.
Most of these inventions failed.
Some worked briefly.
A few bought enough time for evacuations.
But nothing changed the overall direction of the war.
Earth kept shrinking.
The Gel’Bourn kept growing.
And humanity kept searching for something — anything — that could turn the tide.
The Third Century — Desperation and Discovery
By the year 3290, humanity was cornered. Only a handful of fortified megacities remained. The colonies were stretched thin. The Gel’Bourn had learned to infiltrate almost every known structure and weapon system.
It was during this era of desperation that a new idea emerged — not from a general or a politician, but from a small group of engineers who had spent their entire lives studying the Gel’Bourn’s fluid‑metal bodies.
They realized something no one else had:
The Gel’Bourn weren’t unbeatable.
They were predictable.
Not in their behavior — that was still alien — but in their physics. Their bodies shifted according to patterns, rules, and energy flows that could be mapped, countered, and even exploited.
If humanity could build something that changed forms as quickly as the Gel’Bourn...
If it could move like them, adapt like them, fight like them...
Then maybe, for the first time in centuries, humans could stand a chance.
The idea was simple.
The execution was impossible.
But impossible was all humanity had left.
And so the first prototypes were built — small, clumsy machines that could shift between two forms. Then three. Then more. They weren’t perfect, but they were fast. They were flexible. They were the first machines that could keep up with the Gel’Bourn in close combat.
They were the ancestors of the modern Tri‑Form mechs.
And their creation marked the beginning of something Earth hadn’t felt in a very long time:
Hope.
SECTION 4 — THE BIRTH OF THE MECH DEFENSE UNIT
The first prototypes weren’t impressive.
In fact, they were kind of embarrassing.
The engineers who built them joked that they looked like “metal toddlers learning to walk,” and honestly, that wasn’t far off. The early machines were small, clunky, and prone to falling over if someone sneezed too close to them. Their transformation sequences jammed half the time, and their power cores overheated if they ran for more than twenty minutes.
But they were the first machines in three centuries that could do something humanity desperately needed:
They could change.
Not as fluidly as the Gel’Bourn, not even close, but enough to matter. Enough to dodge. Enough to adapt. Enough to survive.
And survival was the only currency Earth had left.
The team behind the prototypes called their project the Tri‑Form Initiative, because the machines could shift between three modes: humanoid, ground vehicle, and aerial. The idea was simple — if the Gel’Bourn could attack from any angle, humans needed machines that could defend from any angle.
The first successful test happened in a half‑collapsed hangar outside the ruins of Old Tokyo. A small crowd of engineers, soldiers, and exhausted civilians gathered to watch the demonstration. Most of them didn’t expect much. They’d seen too many “miracle weapons” fail.
But when the prototype — a squat, boxy machine barely eight feet tall — shifted from its humanoid stance into a compact armored vehicle, then into a stubby jet‑form that hovered for a full ten seconds before landing, something changed in the air.
People didn’t cheer.
They didn’t clap.
They just stared.
Because for the first time in generations, they saw something that wasn’t falling apart.
They saw something that worked.
Word spread fast.
Faster than the engineers expected.
Faster than the military could control.
Within months, every surviving nation sent what resources they had left to the Tri‑Form Initiative. Factories were rebuilt. Old shipyards were repurposed. Entire cities were evacuated just to free up power grids for mech production.
It wasn’t enough to turn the tide.
Not yet.
But it was enough to slow the fall.
The first mech pilots were volunteers — people who had lost everything and had nothing left to fear. They trained in underground bunkers, learning how to control machines that were equal parts weapon and puzzle. The controls were complicated, the transformations unpredictable, and the risk of cockpit malfunction was high.
But the pilots didn’t care.
They wanted to fight.
They wanted to protect what was left.
They wanted to matter.
The first real battle involving a Tri‑Form mech happened in the ruins of Lagos. A Gel’Bourn swarm had breached the city’s outer defenses, and the remaining soldiers were preparing for a last stand. The mech — a prototype designated TF‑01 — arrived with a single pilot and a support crew that barely knew how to maintain it.
The battle lasted six hours.
The mech lasted five.
But in those five hours, TF‑01 did something no human weapon had done in centuries:
It killed a Gel’Bourn.
Not scattered it.
Not slowed it.
Not delayed it.
Killed it.
The creature’s body collapsed into inert metallic sludge, unable to reform. Scientists later discovered that the mech’s swords — forged from a rare alloy found only in deep‑space mining sites — disrupted the Gel’Bourn’s internal structure in a way nothing else had.
It wasn’t a perfect solution.
It wasn’t even a reliable one.
But it was a start.
And a start was enough.
Within a decade, the Tri‑Form Initiative evolved into something larger, more organized, more desperate:
The Mech Defense Unit.
A global force.
A last line of defense.
A symbol of humanity’s refusal to disappear quietly.
The mechs improved.
The pilots improved.
The battles grew fiercer.
And somewhere in the middle of all that — in the training halls, in the hangars, in the cities that still dared to stand — a new generation was born. A generation that had never known a world without the Gel’Bourn. A generation raised on stories of the first prototypes, the first victories, the first sparks of hope.
A generation that would produce pilots like Christian Hunter.
But that part of the story was still waiting.
For now, the world was rebuilding itself around the machines that had become its lifeline — and preparing for the pilots who would one day define its future.
SECTION 5 — TRAINING HALL: THE NEW GENERATION
The Mech Defense Unit didn’t look like much from the outside.
Most of its facilities were built inside old military bases, half‑collapsed stadiums, or underground bunkers that had survived the early waves of the Gel’Bourn. The training hall in Fort Meridian was no exception — a massive, echoing chamber carved into the bones of an abandoned aerospace factory.
The walls were patched with mismatched metal plates.
The lights flickered in a way that suggested the wiring was older than most of the recruits.
And the air smelled faintly of oil, ozone, and the nervous sweat of people who knew they were training for a job with a very short life expectancy.
But to the young pilots standing inside it, the hall felt like the center of the world.
There were five of them in this cohort — five recruits who had survived the written exams, the physical trials, the psychological screenings, and the endless simulations. Five who had made it far enough to stand in the presence of the machines they hoped to one day command.
At the front of the group stood Christian Hunter.
He was twenty‑five, tall, and built like someone who had spent most of his life lifting things heavier than himself. His blonde hair was cut high and tight, the kind of military style that didn’t leave room for vanity. Tattoos ran down his left arm — tribal lines, old unit patches, symbols of places he’d been and people he’d lost. A dragon stretched across his back, inked in dark, sweeping strokes that curled over his shoulder blades like wings waiting to unfold.
Christian didn’t talk much.
He didn’t need to.
People noticed him anyway.
To his right stood Rico Alvarez, early twenties, Puerto Rican, with a slight dad‑bod build that somehow didn’t slow him down. He had short black hair, a neat goatee, and a relaxed posture that made him look like he’d wandered into the wrong room — until you saw the sharp focus in his eyes. Rico wasn’t loud, but he was steady, and steady mattered.
Next to Rico was Carina Doyle, in her early thirties, a natural redhead who dyed her hair blonde but didn’t bother hiding the roots. She was cute in a soft, approachable way, but her expression carried a quiet seriousness that suggested she’d lived through more than she talked about. Carina had a calmness that settled the air around her, like she’d learned long ago how to breathe through chaos.
On Christian’s left stood John Mercer, the oldest of the group at around thirty‑eight. He was tall — just over six feet — with the kind of build that said he worked out regularly but didn’t obsess over it. His long brown hair was tied back in a ponytail, giving him a rugged, almost old‑world soldier look. John carried himself with a quiet confidence, like a man who had already survived several endings and wasn’t afraid of another beginning.
And finally, standing slightly apart from the others, was Alice Kincaid.
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