Zero Hour.

They don’t understand Zero Hour . They think it means midnight. The turn of the clock. The final assault.

I peer through the cracked scope of my rifle. Down the autobahn, a convoy of US Paladins sits dormant. They’re too clean. Too quiet. They’ve activated the Zero Hour ability: are inbound. I can hear the supersonic hum three minutes before they arrive. Stealth bombers that fly so fast they outrun their own sound.

In the first hour, you build your refinery. In the second, you spam your units. By the third, you realize your superweapon is just a timer until the other guy’s superweapon goes off. But after that? After the silos are empty and the generals are dead?

I watched a Chinese Battlemaster tank run out of fuel yesterday. The driver got out. A child threw a Molotov. The tank is now a tomb. I watched a US Comanche helicopter hover too low, thinking its stealth was perfect. We hit it with a Stinger missile made from a drainage pipe and a car battery.