Xin Montreal First Invasion

New Montreal's first incursion is the earlier Antithesis attack that Leah recalls while discussing her experience in the later fighting. Its decisive importance lies in the contrast it establishes: the first incursion was a sudden local threat faced with improvised protection, whereas Leah's later campaigns place her inside organized, technologically overwhelming combat. The memory also anchors the incursion in civilian responsibility, since Leah was caring for children when the attack began.

Circumstances and Setting

New Montreal's first incursion began roughly three months before Leah recounted it. At the time, she was taking part in an excursion outside the city, in an area patrolled by private military companies. The group consisted of Leah, three children, their caretaker, and no larger defensive force. They were eating dinner around a campfire when the ordinary rhythm of the outing was interrupted by the Antithesis assault.

Leah did not initially recognize the scale of what had begun. She had just risen from the campfire and was about to walk to the outhouse when five Antithesis Threes surprised the group. The attack therefore arrived not as a declared battle but as an intrusion into a vulnerable domestic scene: children, food, darkness, and a moment of routine all became conditions of emergency at once.

The wider setting was New Montreal, later identified with the megacity and its surrounding suburban districts. Elsewhere, Antithesis activity appears through reproductive and nest-centered processes: black-plated Threes can be expelled in large numbers, while greenish-pink fruit-blisters flower into further Threes and into Model Ones resembling artificial pigeons. The first incursion consequently belongs to a threat capable of expanding beyond a single encounter, even though Leah's memory begins with only five attackers.

The Attack and Improvised Defense

The immediate defensive response depended on terrain rather than specialized equipment. The group had camped beside a very tall tree with many branches, and the children and the other adult climbed into it when the five Threes appeared. The tree supplied temporary elevation and separation, but Leah understood that it could not provide a permanent solution.

Her reasoning was practical and grim. She expected the Threes either to gnaw through the tree or to remain until a Four arrived and climbed after the survivors. She also inferred that the Antithesis shared information somehow, treating their persistence and coordination as evidence that one encounter could quickly attract a more dangerous continuation of the attack. The tree therefore changed the group's immediate chances without removing the underlying danger.

The episode reveals that the incursion's violence was not limited to direct pursuit. Antithesis behavior elsewhere is organized around scent, food, reproduction, and collective judgment. In the subterranean region beneath Saint-Eustache in New Montreal, an Antithesis creature follows food trails back to its home-place, passes newly hatched young, and joins other creatures in killing one that smells sick or badly grown. The same broad enemy thus appears through both human emergency and nonhuman social logic: the incursion threatens civilians, while the Antithesis itself operates through nest loyalty, pheromonal signaling, and collective action.

Leah's Recollection and Combat Growth

Leah later described the first incursion as a measure of how much her capabilities had changed. She said that she had fought only a little during New Montreal's first incursion, killing a few dozen units altogether. By contrast, in the later battle she had killed as many in a few hours as the earlier effort had taken days to accomplish. The comparison converts the incursion from background history into a benchmark for her development.

That contrast is sharpened by the later weapons available to the defenders. Smart-fire missiles can maneuver around a lure rather than accidentally destroying it, and their magnetic launch systems are designed to penetrate wing membranes without causing dangerous harm before the motors ignite at a safe distance. Such technology belongs to a mature combat system, not to the improvised tree defense of the first incursion. Leah's recollection consequently marks a movement from survival through terrain and instinct toward coordinated warfare supported by specialized equipment.

The earlier attack also establishes Leah's protective role. She was not fighting solely for personal survival; she was responsible for a group containing three children and their caretaker. Her first task was to recognize the limits of concealment and keep vulnerable people alive while the Antithesis maintained pressure. This responsibility connects the incursion to Leah's later pattern of combining combat with care rather than treating the two as separate obligations.

Consequences and Narrative Significance

The first incursion left New Montreal as a place where civilian life could be interrupted without warning, even outside the city proper and near areas supposedly covered by patrols. Its memory explains why later encounters are interpreted through questions of scale, preparedness, and the speed at which Antithesis forces can accumulate. A handful of Threes is enough to reveal the inadequacy of ordinary safety; a larger force makes that inadequacy impossible to ignore.

The event also provides a human counterpoint to the other military structures surrounding the conflict. In the headquarters of Söldnerklan Feuerschwarz in suburban Nürnbergs Mähre, soldiers are produced through beatings, harassment, and systematic cruelty, with boys being broken into vengeful and sadistic animals rather than rebuilt as disciplined protectors. Against that institutionalized militarization, Leah's first defense is communal and improvised: a campfire group, a tree, quick judgment, and the obligation to protect children. The incursion thus helps distinguish defense as care from violence organized as domination.

Finally, the remembered attack functions as a temporal hinge. It is recalled from a later battle in which Leah can compare the person she was with the fighter she has become. The first incursion remains dangerous because it began in helplessness, but its retrospective force comes from the reversal: Leah no longer measures herself by whether she can endure five Threes. She measures the present by how rapidly she can destroy them, and by how effectively her weapons and judgment can protect others from the expanding Antithesis threat.