Emergence Day
E-Day is the instant Sera’s long, brutal human history gets interrupted by something worse: a war that does not want your land - it wants your species gone. The Locust did not arrive at the borders. They came up through the floor.
E-Day: The day the ground turned hostile
Emergence Day is remembered as a military date, but it lands like an atrocity. After decades of the Pendulum Wars, people on Sera had just tasted the first quiet breath of peace.
Then the Locust Horde punched through the world in coordinated strikes, not as a single invasion front, but as hundreds of sudden ruptures. Emergence holes tore open streets, courtyards, basements, and infrastructure, turning familiar city grids into kill zones with no warning and no safe direction to run.
The first hours matter because they reveal the Locust advantage. Surprise was only the first layer. Their approach erased the COG’s expected playbook of chokepoints and defensive lines. If your command bunker can be reached from below, then rank and planning become fragile ideas.
If reinforcements cannot travel safely through streets, then even rescue becomes a trap. E-Day was a systems failure for civilization, communications, transportation, governance, and morale, all collapsing in parallel.
And the psychology of it cuts deeper than tactics. Humans had already proven they could do terrible things to each other over fuel and territory. E-Day introduces a different dread: the sense that the planet itself has been hollowed, that you were living on a crust that somebody else can open like a hatch.
Why it happened: The Locust were not a myth, they were a consequence
In Gears lore, the Locust are frightening partly because they feel engineered, like a nightmare built with human tools. The expanded story threads through hidden facilities, unethical medical research, and the long shadow cast by Imulsion.
Deep underground, experiments meant to solve a human crisis created something that could not be contained. Children harmed by Imulsion exposure were studied, altered, and pushed beyond any moral boundary that could be defended in daylight.
That lineage matters because it reframes the Locust War as blowback. The Locust did not simply appear because the universe wanted monsters. They exist because Sera’s leaders believed desperation granted permission. Over time, this produces the early grotesqueries, then the Hollow’s organized society, then a queen, Myrrah, who becomes both ruler and signal amplifier for a species built out of human error.
There is also the pressure that turns hostility into invasion. The Hollow is not stable. Lambency spreads, mutating life and pushing the Locust toward a choice that feels like evacuation with teeth. When the underground becomes unlivable, the surface becomes the prize, and E-Day becomes the moment that decision is acted out everywhere at once.
Timeline of escalation: From human wars to the Locust War
| Era | Event | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Circa 85 B.E. | The Coalition of Ordered Governments forms. | A global power structure solidifies around resources, unity, and doctrine, creating the machinery that will later fight the Locust—and the rigidity that will later crush its own people. |
| Pendulum Wars | A multi-decade civilizational conflict erupts over Imulsion control. | Sera becomes militarized by default. Entire generations grow up with war as the normal climate, setting the tone for how quickly the COG embraces harsh measures once E-Day arrives. |
| End of Pendulum Wars | The Hammer of Dawn shifts the balance and forces an uneasy peace. | Victory comes with a cost, and it teaches the COG a dangerous lesson: that extreme weapons can substitute for political solutions. That mindset returns in uglier form during the Locust War. |
| 0 A.E. | Emergence Day: The Locust strike planet-wide. | Civilization fractures in a single day. The war’s opening move kills on a scale that makes every later decision feel like triage, not strategy. |
| Early years A.E. | COG retreats, reorganizes, and hardens into survival rule. | The COG’s identity shifts from government to fortress. Laws become leverage. Citizens become assets, or liabilities, depending on whether they can be protected or controlled. |
| Mid-war years | The Hammer of Dawn is used in catastrophic scorched-earth strikes. | The COG chooses to deny the Locust the surface by burning its own world. It is a strategic move with a moral crater, and it permanently stains the idea of “order.” |
| 14 A.E. | The first Gears of War begins; the Lightmass plan takes shape. | This is the pivot from defense to a risky offensive plan: map the Hollow, strike where the Locust live, and hope the blow is decisive enough to buy humanity a future. |
Note: B.E. refers to Before Emergence; A.E. refers to After Emergence—a shorthand used to measure how thoroughly E-Day reset history.
The formation of the COG: Order as a weapon, and a cage
The COG does not start as a villainous institution; it starts as an answer. Imulsion changes everything, energy becomes the axis of power, and nations that want stability bind themselves into a coalition that can police scarcity. That coalition grows into a cultural machine with its own scripture, its own rituals, and its own language of duty.
The Octus Canon gives the COG a moral posture, and it also gives it rhetorical armor, because when duty is sacred, dissent can be labeled heresy.
The Pendulum Wars then lock in the COG’s habits. War bureaucracy becomes daily life. Innovation becomes militarized. The public learns to accept sacrifice speeches as weather. When E-Day arrives, the COG already knows how to mobilize, how to ration, how to draft, how to disappear people into uniform. It does not need to invent authoritarian reflexes; it simply turns the dial harder.
This is why the COG era reads like a tragedy of competence.
They can build, they can command, they can fight. They can also convince themselves that whatever they do is justified by survival, even when those choices shred the very humanity they claim to protect.
The Fenix family: Genius, punishment, and the cost of loyalty
The Fenix name sits at the intersection of the COG’s best instincts and its worst impulses. Adam Fenix is the scientist the system leans on when it needs breakthroughs, and then hides when those breakthroughs become morally radioactive. His work is bound up in the era of superweapons and desperate solutions, and the expanded lore paints him as a man who knows too much, too early, and pays for it in isolation.
Marcus Fenix inherits that burden in a different shape. Where Adam’s battlefield is the lab, Marcus’ is the ruined street, and his defining wound is not only physical, it is institutional. His story is about what happens when loyalty to a person collides with loyalty to a chain of command. He makes a choice to try to save his father, and the COG’s response is swift and absolute: court-martial, prison, erasure from the clean story the government wants to tell about itself.
Marcus is not built as a spotless hero.
He is the kind of soldier a dying government hates until it needs him again. He is stubborn, blunt, and hard to pacify, but he is also exactly what the post-E-Day world demands: a survivor who can keep moving through horror without romanticizing it.
The first Gears of War: A mission made out of desperation
The first game begins fourteen years after E-Day, when the war has worn the planet down to a few stubborn pockets of resistance. The COG is still standing, but it is standing in the way an old building stands after a fire, held up by beams you do not fully trust. This is the era of last plans and ugly bargains, where every operation feels like it was approved because there were no better options left.
That is why the opening is so focused on Marcus’ release. The COG pulls him out of prison not because it has forgiven him, but because it cannot afford to waste trained killers. Dom Santiago, the emotional spine of the early series, is the one who brings him back into the fight, restoring their bond and reminding you that in this universe, friendship is often the last remaining form of civilization.
Delta Squad’s objective is deceptively technical: use a resonator to map the Locust tunnel network, then deploy the Lightmass Bomb into the Hollow to cripple the enemy from within.
Underneath that objective is a more honest truth. Humanity is trying to hit the dark underworld that birthed E-Day, not just to win, but to take back the sense that the ground belongs to the living again.
Looking back to the beginning: Gears of War: E-Day
A new game, Gears of War: E-Day, is set to return to the moment everything broke, framing Emergence Day and its immediate consequences as the core story.
It is positioned to revisit the first shockwave of the Locust invasion, the first frantic COG responses, and the personal ground-zero experiences that hardened soldiers like Marcus and Dom into the figures you meet later, when the war has already turned the world into ash and steel.
