The sun never truly rose on Day Three.
The sky was a haze of smoke, burning cities, and drifting alien debris.
Three days, that was all it had taken for Earth to become a battlefield from horizon to horizon.
Underground, the United Nations war bunker.
Exhausted officers leaned over screens, shouting reports through hoarse voices.
But amidst the chaos, one thing remained constant.
The red zones on the map kept growing.
General Reyes slammed a palm against the table.
"Three days," he growled. "And these things have taken twenty-three major cities."
General Okoye shook his head, his uniform smeared with dust and blood from personally helping hold Lagos the night before.
"And still no orbital strikes," he said. "Everything they do is ground-based. That rule still holds. If it is a rule."
The Secretary-General wiped her eyes.
She had slept maybe twenty minutes in two days.
"What if we're wrong?" she whispered. "What if orbital bombardment is simply… not deployed yet?"
Reyes muttered, "Then we lose everything instantly."
A silence fell over the room.
A Japanese analyst broke it with a trembling voice.
"New data from the European Space Agency suggests a massive object moving behind the dark side of the moon."
The room froze.
Reyes swallowed. "Fleet?"
The analyst nodded. "We're calling it a mass cluster. Probably the main invasion force."
General Sharma whispered, "They're waiting. They're giving their scouts time to soften the planet."
"And we're still struggling against the scouts," an American admiral added. "If the main force lands…"
He didn't finish.
No one needed him to.
United States – "Operation Boulder Break"
A coordinated strike launched across Colorado and the Midwest.
Human tanks rolled down ruined highways, dust clouds rising behind them.
Anti-aircraft batteries fired nonstop, knocking alien flyers out of the sky.
National Guard, army reserves, even SWAT teams fought side-by-side.
The aliens responded with brutal efficiency.
A column of exo-soldiers smashed through Boulder's north line, crushing APCs like cans.
American artillery rained down hellfire leveling entire blocks just to slow them.
Reyes watched the feed, whispering, "We're destroying our own land just to hold it."
Europe was a mess of battles.
France burned.
Italy fortified its mountains.
Germany and Poland ran joint armored divisions like it was WWII reborn.
But Warsaw…
Warsaw was a nightmare.
After losing it on Day One, humans fought tooth and bone to retake even a single district.
A Polish commander barked into the radio, "We need reinforcements! They're pushing through the riverfront!"
A German tank battalion roared across a collapsed bridge, firing at point-blank range.
Streets turned into trenches.
Sewers became routes for ambushes.
Bodies were everywhere alien and human alike.
Dirty, desperate, savage.
Europe was in hell.
China's mobilization was monstrous millions drafted, thousands of armored vehicles, drones, railguns, everything thrown at the enemy.
But the aliens adapted fast.
Their drones learned to jam Chinese communications.
Their infantry began using building interiors to avoid railgun fire.
Their flyers looped under radar nets.
Still, China held.
Along a 100-mile defensive line north of Guangzhou already being called The Second Great Wall hundreds of thousands of soldiers dug in.
Commanders yelled
"Hold the barricades!"
"Rotate the wounded! KEEP FIRING!"
"Don't let them breach the line!"
It was a storm.
A wall of bodies.
A line of iron.
And it barely held.
The Lagos-Port Harcourt corridor had become a brutal choke point.
African Union forces Nigerians, Kenyans, Ghanaian, South African soldiers fought block by block, ambushing alien patrols with IEDs, molotovs, stolen alien gear.
A reporter hiding behind debris whispered into a camera,
"We fight with whatever we have knives, rocks, anger and somehow, we're holding this road."
The footage showed a teenager throwing a grenade into a crashed alien troop carrier before sprinting away, screaming.
War did not get cleaner.
It got dirtier.
And humans matched it.
The meeting resumed.
Everyone looked ten years older.
Reyes pointed at the map.
"This isn't just war. It's erosion. They wear us down, inch by inch, until we break."
General Sharma slammed down a folder.
"Then we don't let them fight clean. We hit them everywhere. Every sector. Every alley. Every rooftop."
General Okoye nodded. "Guerrilla war. Urban traps. Ambushes. Make this planet a nightmare to walk on."
President Alvarez added, "Use the terrain. If they think like machines, we force them to fight like men."
Reyes growled, "What about their learning curve? They adapt every hour."
A scientist cleared his throat. "Based on intercepted signals… they aren't fully autonomous. They follow patterns. If we can find the command nodes..."
"Then we cut off the head," Okoye finished.
The Secretary-General leaned forward.
"We need time. Time to train. Time to build. Time to understand them."
"But time is the one thing they're not giving us," Reyes said.
A map flickered, showing seven more alien landings in the last hour.
"We must hold the planet for at least ten days," he said grimly.
"When their main force arrives… we need more than armies."
He looked around the room.
"We need monsters of our own."
No one understood his meaning.
Not yet.
Manila
Filipino soldiers fought alongside fishermen armed with spears.
Molotov cocktails lit up alien armor.
Snipers took shots from church towers.
A drone was taken down by a group of teenagers throwing rocks from a rooftop.
Dirty.
Chaotic.
Human.
Mexican and American special forces coordinated a perfect trap.
A column of alien exo-soldiers marched down a narrow old-town street.
Doors opened.
Rooftops lit up.
Explosives detonated.
Dozens of aliens were shredded.
A colonel whispered, "This is how we fight. With rage. With cunning. With everything we are."
An alien carrier landed in the outskirts.
KDF elite units swarmed it under darkness.
They planted charges beneath its engines.
The explosion could be seen miles away.
It was one of humanity's first clean victories.
But cost hundreds of lives.
Back in the command room, Reyes spoke quietly.
"We are buying inches with lives."
The Secretary-General stood.
"Then we keep buying. Because if we stop… the world stops."
Everyone bowed their heads.
The war was evolving.
Becoming intelligent.
Becoming personal.
Becoming survival in its most brutal form.
And somewhere, far above Earth…
behind the moon…
the main force watched and waited.
The real war had not begun.
Not yet.