The Gunner’s Road: Five Territories Between Here and Steel City

The first territory and the richest, a mining and manufacturing town that forged weapons for every other city on the map. It had the deepest seam, the best smiths and the least interest in politics, which is exactly why it was first.

The Legion did not burn it. It took the foundry and put it to work, and Lock & Load has been producing for the war ever since — the same furnaces, the same ore, the same workers, pointed the other way. It is the only territory on the road where the machinery is still in perfect working order, and that is the horror of it.

CRIMSON holds it. He was the Legion’s quartermaster before he was a commander, and he has never lost a shipment. He fights in the red dust of the foundry floor and he fights like a machine that has been told to work faster.

The second territory, and the one that used to be pleasant. Groves and farmland, a coal seam underneath, and a population that mostly grew things. It was not strategically important and it was not wealthy, which is why the Legion used it as a dump.

The waste went into the soil. The trees took it and did not die — they went sour instead, and so did everything growing around them. The whole wood is wrong now, and the Legion does not garrison it so much as avoid it.

BLIGHT walks it. He was the Legion’s chemist, and whatever he mixed into the ground is in him too. He is the first commander who is genuinely unpleasant to look at, and he is the first one who makes the campaign feel like it has teeth.

The third territory and the only one that could feed a population that was not standing in a field. Every ration the Legion eats comes out of here, which makes it the single most important building on the map after the tower itself.

It still runs. The ovens are at a temperature that would kill an ordinary soldier and the production line has not stopped in years, because the commander who owns the recipe is standing on it.

GLACIER keeps the ovens running. She has not left the floor in years and her blood runs cold enough to frost the glass. This is the map where the difficulty noticeably steps up, and the commander is the reason.

The fourth territory, and the only one that was never really a city. Beyond the last outpost the land is rubble, craters and a sky the colour of a bruise — a frontier that nobody wanted and nobody bothered to name properly.

The Legion posted a watch here to look at the horizon, and something out there looked back. It has not been the same since, and neither has anyone stationed here.

VOID does not speak and does not stop coming. He is the hardest fight in the campaign before the tower, and he is the reason people write in about map four.

The fifth territory and the end of the road. The first foundry city, the biggest, and the one every other city was copied from. It never fell to the Legion because it never had to — GOLIATH built it and ran it before there was a Legion to run.

Everything the Legion does answers to the tower in the middle of it, and GOLIATH is in the tower. He is the largest thing the Legion has ever made and the only one of them that has never been beaten.

There is no sixth territory. Whatever happens in the tower is the end of the run, one way or the other.