Start here // The setting
One system. Three powers. No closing time.
Humanity didn't arrive at the Nexus system. It washed up there, two million survivors out of eight billion, carried fifty years through a tear in space by the same corporations that now point guns at each other across it.
The crossing
A door that only opened once
When Earth became uninhabitable in 2147, there was no plan and no fleet, only the corporations that happened to own enough ships, and the discovery of the Nexus Rift: a spatial anomaly that led somewhere survivable, if you could endure the fifty-year passage. Three hundred vessels went in carrying the last of the species. Two million people came out the far side into a new system, and the door stayed open behind them, active and unstable, watched ever since by everyone and trusted by no one.
Nobody has tried the return journey. The monitoring crews who share the long shifts at the Rift, rivals everywhere else, tend to agree on that much.
Who came through
Three corporations, three philosophies
The Exodus didn’t unify humanity. It sorted it. By the time the fleet arrived, three power blocs had hardened into the factions that define the system today, each one a different answer to the question of how frightened people should be organised.
Zhou Heavy Industries answered with structure: bind the workers, run the foundries, treat survival as an engineering problem. The Borealis Collective answered with merit: hoard the knowledge, grow the food, let results decide who leads. Red Mountain Territories answered with defiance: dig the rock, owe nobody, and shoot anyone who calls you an asset. They have been arguing the point with mechs ever since.
The places
A map drawn in real estate
Power in the Nexus system is geography. Station Harmony, once the lead Exodus ship, the Heavenly Mandate, is now ZHI’s two-million-soul industrial heart, where the gap between the clean A-Block air and the failing D-Block recyclers tells you everything about how the corporation works. At the system’s L4 point, the Borealis Collective’s Meridian Station floats its white research towers and biodomes, beautiful and ruthless, its sealed Archives holding secrets even BC won’t open. Out in the cold, Cluster Seven, seven asteroids lashed together with cable and stubbornness, is where Red Mountain proved a frontier could become a home.
Between them lie the Borderlands: treaty-mandated buffer zones where no regular military may go, and where every proxy war goes instead.
The technology
The link that runs the mechs, and ruins the pilots
None of this works without the neural link: the brain-machine interface that lets a pilot wear a mech like a second body. Dr. Elena Vasquez built it during the Exodus to fly ships too complex for human hands. It worked brilliantly. It also kills the people who use it, slowly, as the interface degrades the brain it’s wired into. Every pilot in the arena knows the clock is running. Most decide the fight is worth it anyway.
That is the world. Three powers who need each other and can’t forgive each other, fighting an endless war with machines piloted by people running out of time, and a door at the edge of the system that nobody dares to open. The fight is already on. The only question the arena asks is whose side you take.