Earth, 2154. The sky belongs to someone else.

A century ago a civilization from another universe stepped through a gate onto a planet that had just finished destroying itself in the Third World War — two-thirds dead, the great powers buried in bunkers, the surface glassed. They catalogued Earth as extraction site NTE-88 and began mining it.

Then their gene-edited descendants rebelled, and now two armies grind each other to powder across the ruins of the old world. One holds the Moon and the orbital high ground. The other holds the sealed cities and the noble, sincere, absolutely self-serving dream of Earth freedom.

Neither of them remembers that people still live down here.

Two hundred million unmodified humans survive in the margins — the Sahara's diesel workshops, the Tibetan caves, the Siberian shafts, the shattered savanna of central-southern Africa — scraping a living out of dumped waste with handmade rifles, printed manuals, and the buried inheritance of a war nobody survived to explain. Beneath them all, in the deep rainforest, the last uncontacted bands watch the sky crack and have no word for what they are seeing.

No side here is good. No side here is stupid. Everyone believes they are the hero.

Extended version

Four tiers. One ladder. Everyone standing on somebody's face.

The Suzerain does not know Earth is at war. On the ring around their motherworld, the suppression of NTE-88 occupies five seconds of a quarterly briefing that mostly concerns tonnage. Their army on Earth is 2% citizens who never touch the ground and 98% proxies who do — elite foreign troops dying for a citizenship promise, and a million starving Originals sent to walk the minefields first. Their rule is not cruelty, it's indifference, and indifference cuts deeper.

The Compact are the rebels, and they mean every word of it. Elections, a free press, a brave and real democracy — that has legally classified the people who were here first as non-citizens, and shells their homes when the arithmetic requires it. Their founding myth is half true, which is what makes it obscene.

The Originals are the ones you'll probably be. Two hundred million of them, split five ways, hating each other over centuries-old blood debt as much as they hate the armies above. No heroes, no last-second rescue, no uniting the world — but there is a way to make the Suzerain's cost sheet bleed, and the only card they hold is a homemade nuclear landmine and the willingness to use it.

The Deep-Rain have no idea any of this is happening.

What you can play

• A scavenger crossing a kill zone to haul salvage home before it gets dark

• A workshop machinist keeping lathes turning with no powder, no steel, no power

• A warlord in the Sahara deciding what a plasma rifle costs

• A Zulu king nobody in the mountains will acknowledge

• A Compact trooper holding a wall that costs more than it's worth

• A Compact delegate trying to win a war and keep a republic, both failing

• A Suzerain operator driving a war machine from orbit, or a Praetorian inside it

• An NTE-04 witness watching the sky break with no words for any of it

• Or anyone else at all

Tone tags

hard sci-fi military politics grimdark-adjacent no plot armor asymmetric warfare colonialism & its inheritors post-apocalypse layered on occupation morally grey by construction multiple POV slow-burn high lethality

One line for the tag field

The war is a tragedy to those fighting it, a ledger entry to those funding it, and weather to those living under it.

Basically, humans from another universe colonized earth and now they are fighting for independence. But neither side care about the indigenous earthlings.

As usual there's total freedom.

Also, I managed to force the AI to work on the combat to make it a bit more realistic, as it supposed to be.