The three newly discovered Orbitons were the complete opposite of Helios. Each of them had its own distinctive form, nature and power. Their designs reflected the very forces of creation they commanded.
Montern was a marvel of gravitational mastery. Its armor shimmered in three tones — black, white and gold — every plate etched with fine channels that had once pulsed with gravitational data. It had never been built for brute force, but for finesse. Beneath the narrow gold crest of its helm, its visor could perceive not only terrain but the invisible dance of shifting mass, and its pink optics flickered in rhythm with every distortion around it, calculating orbital vectors in real time. Its slender, reinforced limbs moved with surgical precision, every exposed joint tuned to answer the pull of gravity, so that Montern could anchor itself in midair, turn projectiles aside, or collapse the ground beneath its enemies, and its clawed hands could grasp not only matter but mass itself, making a thing heavier or weightless with a single gesture. Most striking of all was the circular turbine mounted on its back, the Graviton Core, which could generate localized gravity wells. With it, Montern could crush entire battalions beneath amplified force, float freely in defiance of any planet, or turn an enemy's momentum into a devastating counterstrike, and at its highest output it could even conjure brief singularities that tore the geometry of the battlefield apart.
Perciosa, by contrast, embodied elegance and lethality in perfect union. It stood like a blade — sleek, angular, alive with precision. Its white and black armor segmented for both speed and defense, faint orange veins of energy tracing its frame like ancient runes of warning. Beneath its plating a high-energy core breathed like a heart. Its head was sharp and predatory, with a narrow, gleaming visor — the face of a killer forged for clarity. Its long limbs flexed their exposed mechanical tendons like muscle. Along its arms and legs ran blade-like extensions that were not ornaments but weapons built into its frame: sonic-edge systems that could shape and direct vibration. With a single motion, Perciosa could unleash concussive bursts that shattered armor and tore through air and metal alike, or it could silence an entire zone, nullifying sound itself and leaving eerie pockets of absolute quiet in the middle of chaos. The propulsion systems in its legs let it dart and strike with surgical ferocity, gripping the ground like claws before launching it into elegant, deadly arcs across the sky.
The third of the trio, Sirius, was stranger still — a warrior of inertia, a living embodiment of motion and mass. It stood like a sealed titan in dark blue, white and metallic gray, its plating layered with a brutal elegance and marked with scratches, gouges and faded crimson markings like war tattoos, every scar the record of a battle it had survived. A sharp vertical crest rose from its head above a visor that glowed an intense blue, tracking not only its targets but the physics around them — mass, velocity, kinetic flux — so that Sirius did not simply see a battlefield, it read its equations. In its left arm it carried a massive circular shield etched with glowing rings, an Inertia Anchor that could absorb and redirect any force, while its right hand remained an open, empty fist that controlled what could not be seen. Its gift was the manipulation of inertia. It could cancel its own momentum to change direction in an instant, amplify it to strike with catastrophic power, or freeze an enemy in place by anchoring its mass, and it could even rewrite the paths of incoming projectiles or dissolve them in midair. Its broad legs ended in clawed stabilizers that rooted it to the ground during its fastest maneuvers. It was balance made into a machine — immovable and unstoppable in the same breath.
Those three Orbitons gave the Terrian Empire power beyond measure, weapons so devastating that whole worlds fell before them with almost no losses at all. To the Empire, the cost of piloting them no longer mattered. Power was all that counted, and those machines were power itself. The Empire's most brilliant scientist, Molly Orbi, led the study of them, and her genius in deciphering their inner workings laid the foundation for all modern Orbiton engineering. It was in her honor that the machines — the Closts and every model that came after them — were given the name Orbitons. Through her, the Empire entered an age of mechanical divinity.
A century and a half passed before the Empire uncovered the last two ancient Orbitons. Their names were Braken and Altopereh, and they were the last of the gods.
Braken was found buried deep beneath the crust of a dying world, entombed in molten stone and magnetic storms. When it was finally dug out, the Empire found itself looking at something that seemed less like a weapon than a creature out of legend. It stood like a dragon risen from the heart of a reactor, clad in red, white, green and gray armor layered with ceremonial precision, every segment shimmering like scales and every joint reinforced to absorb the recoil of its own destructive force. Its head was unmistakably draconic, sharp and angular, its twin eyes glowing with the furious light of a reactor core, its shoulders spread wide like folded wings. In its right hand it held a massive shield engraved with concentric reactor symbols, a containment device that could absorb ambient radiation and recycle it into pure power, but its true weapon was its left arm, from which poured the energy of suns — nuclear beams, explosive bursts and fission flares that melted alloy and stone alike. Braken's power was the atom itself. It could set off miniature nuclear detonations that sent shockwaves across a battlefield, charge its own armor with radioactive pulses until simply standing near it was a death sentence, and at its most destructive, it could release electromagnetic bursts strong enough to disable whole fleets and leave nothing behind but silence and ruin.
And yet even that monstrous power paled beside the final discovery. Two years after Braken was excavated, the Empire uncovered the last and most dangerous of the ancient Orbitons — Altopereh, the Vanisher. It was not a machine of war. It was extinction given a shape. Altopereh wielded antimatter, a power so far beyond comprehension that at full output it could erase half a galaxy in a single discharge. Its destructive potential defied reason. Its very presence bent the laws of physics around it, and that was how it earned its name: wherever the Vanisher woke up, nothing remained. To pilot it was a death sentence. Its hunger for energy consumed its pilot's very soul and drained the life from him until nothing was left but the machine. Of all six of the ancient Orbitons, Altopereh demanded the heaviest price.
Because of their celestial origins and their godlike power, the six were given a single name: the God Orbitons. They were weapons of unimaginable might that blurred the line between machine and deity, and only the highest-ranking Imperial pilots were ever allowed to touch them. Even among those, few survived the bond. To command a God Orbiton was to wield creation itself — and to pay for it with your own existence.