When I was a kid, whenever I'd feel small or lonely I'd look up at the stars. Wondered if there was life up there. There was.

It was tough. There were casualties. Lots of good men and women losing their lives, but we won. We pushed them off our planet. We ripped their secrets from their cold dead hands and turned their inventions back against them. They told us it had been a test. Turned out we were better than they'd expected.

And we weren't going to get complacent. We weren't going to assume just because we'd won we were safe. We dusted ourselves off, repaired and rebuilt and readied ourselves for anything that might follow. We looked up at the skies cautiously now, knowing what was out there, what might come again. We were looking in the wrong direction.

When alien life entered our world again it was from deep beneath the Pacific Ocean. A fissure between two tectonic plates. A portal between dimensions. The Breach. I was fifteen when the first Kaiju made land in San Francisco.

Ever since the invasion ended, all the new technology that had sprung up from it had been put away. Elerium was finite now, and the world didn't need weapons like that anymore. We thought. By the time tanks, jets and missiles took it down six days and thirty-five miles later three cities were destroyed and we understood that we needed them again. We shouldn't have hesitated.

Tens of thousands of lives were lost. Cities that had only just recovered were now in ruins once more. We mourned our dead, memorialised the attack and planned for the next one. The appearances made by giant monsters are not a coincidence, and weren't going to be so foolish enough as to think otherwise.

Only six months later, the second attack hit Manila. We were ready. Fusion Ball launchers and Plasma Beams put it down quickly, although not quietly. Two attacks is a pattern. By the time the third one hit Cabo XCOM was already being reinstated, just when everyone thought they'd finally be settling into a well-deserved retirement from fighting the extraterrestrial.

And then the fourth. If it hadn't already been obvious to everyone, this proved it. This was just the beginning. This was a planned, calculated assault. This was deliberate. And while we were stopping them now, we all knew that we couldn't rest on our laurels forever.

We couldn't keep relying on the old weapons of an old war. Old weapons we were running out of. Old weapons we couldn't replace. Every Fusion Ball fired, every flight taken in an Avenger or a Firestorm was one less, with no way of ever getting it back. No-one was stupid enough to think the attacks would just stop. We needed a new weapon, for a new war.

The world came together just like it had done before, pooling its resources and throwing aside old rivalries once more for the sake of the greater good. To fight monsters, we would create monsters of our own. The Jaeger program was born. Hunters made for a very specific kind of prey.

We tore apart the Kaiju just as we'd torn apart the invaders who came before them. We learnt what made them tick. We learnt how they were made, and we took that knowledge for ourselves. Slowly, tentatively, we built our own. Working under pressure was nothing new to us, and our confidence was enough to overcome and push through what mistakes and missteps we made.

It didn't take us long to finish the first. Our new weapon, our own monster. It worked too. More crude than the craft-mounted weapons, less practical. But still effective. And always improving. Refinements, iterations on iterations. It never pays to stand still, this we knew.

But defence is not enough. Defence won't make the attacks stop. The Breach remains open to them and closed to us. Whoever – whatever – is making and sending these living weapons to our world is beyond our reach. For now. Now we have the weapons to fight the new war, we are working on the way to end it. Every day brings it a little closer. Each fresh attack, each upgraded Kaiju, only serves to remind us of what we need to do.

We won't be stopped. They'll find out. We're the ones who push back.