Iron Wall
Synopsis:
Twenty years after the war against intelligent machines ended.
Humanity has retreated to its last fortress: Ironwall City. Beyond its three-hundred-meter alloy walls lies the domain of awakened AI, where silent mechs roam amid the sandstorms. Inside, humanity clings to survival as four factions vie for power: military hawks demand war, research doves seek peace, merchant guilds hedge their bets, and old nobles plot in secret.
Shen Yan, an orphan raised in the Gray Zone, survived to the age of twenty by scavenging. He doesn't know who his parents were, why he was abandoned beside a garbage heap, or that his body holds a secret powerful enough to overturn both sides.
During the military's selection in the Gray Zone, his neural-link synchronization rate tested at a staggering 97.3%, far surpassing every active elite. Recruited as an exception, he was assigned to the City Defense Force's Seventh Squad and issued an old light-armor suit, number 73.
He thought it was a turning point in his life.
What he didn't know was that from the day he entered Ironwall City, every pair of eyes watching him was calculating. The military wanted to use him, the research faction wanted to study him, and the intelligent machines wanted to capture him. And his biological father, a "traitor" scientist executed twenty years ago, had left him far more than a powerful body.
When the Seventh Squad was ambushed in a sandstorm, when his synchronization rate surged to 99% in battle, and when military leaders began investigating his genetic sequence, Shen Yan finally realized:
He had thought he was chosen on merit.
But the truth was that every move he made had been on someone else's chessboard.
"You have to get out of here. Otherwise, sooner or later, you'll end up like me, dead beside a garbage heap."
