He pulled up the Generals Power menu. With his left hand, he held down . With his right, he typed the forbidden incantation on the numpad: 9-9-9-9-9 .
"Viper Actual… what the hell is your force composition?"
He dragged a blueprint for a over the map. Then twenty. Then two hundred. He placed Aurora bombers like tiles on a floor. He built Patriot batteries in a solid wall from horizon to horizon.
Above the battlefield, the sky turned white. He pulled up the Generals Power menu
He tried to close the console. It wouldn't close. He tried to de-select the Generals Power menu. It was welded open. The numbers were still climbing. He was no longer a general. He was a runaway process.
General Malcolm "Tao" Granger of the US Army’s elite Laser Division was losing.
"Command," Granger said, his voice quiet. "Cancel the fuel air bomb. I'm going to take the city." "Viper Actual… what the hell is your force composition
It was cheating. It was dishonorable. It would get him court-martialed and his service record shredded.
It wasn't a tactic. It was a glitch in the very fabric of the command interface—a holdover from the war’s earliest, most unstable patch. To activate it, you had to type a sequence into the debug console while holding down the "Generals Power" key in a specific, illogical rhythm.
Fourteen orbital ion cannons—not one—fired simultaneously. They didn't strike the GLA army. They erased the entire grid square. The mushroom clouds weren't nuclear, but the roar was. The ground didn't shake; it sublimated into glass. Every single GLA unit, from the nearest technical to the farthest scud launcher, was atomized in a cascade of silent, beautiful light. He placed Aurora bombers like tiles on a floor
He smiled, then, as the screen froze, as the frame rate dropped to zero, as the final, infinite particle beam fired straight up into the heavens out of sheer lack of targets.
Then he remembered the dusty, unauthorized folder on his battlefield tablet. The one the Pentagon denied existed. The one the younger officers whispered about during late-night sims:
For a moment, nothing happened. The GLA horde advanced, cackling over open comms. Then his Particle Cannon uplink—the destroyed one—began to hum. Its dish realigned itself, welding cracks vanishing in a shimmer of blue light.
"Protocol 7? That's system purge. That will wipe the entire theater command network. Including us."
Granger lowered his hand. His eardrums were ringing. His screen was a whiteout.