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Emergence Day
August 20, 2026 at 03:15 AM
Created page describing the in-fiction event: the peacetime setting, the eruption, the escalation and how the game frames it
Emergence Day is the event the game is named for: the day the Locust Horde first breaks through the surface of Sera. Gears of War: E-Day is set fourteen years before the original game in the series and covers the opening of that invasion. This page describes the event as it appears in this game. What the campaign does with it structurally is a separate topic.
The invasion lands on a planet that has just stopped fighting. Sera has declared peace for the first time in almost eighty years after the end of the Pendulum Wars, a conflict that consumed generations. Soldiers are coming home with no war to return to, and the city of Kalona is in the middle of an armistice memorial.
The peace is visible everywhere in the environment art. Victory celebrations, peace time discounts in shop windows, veteran centres and recruiting centres are scattered across the city, which is the only look anyone gets at pre-invasion Sera. The game does not spend hours in peacetime; it shows the echoes of what is about to be lost.
Emergence Day is a planet-wide catastrophe. The entire surface of Sera breaks open at once. The game shows one city of it, on the reasoning that at global scale the human cost stops registering.
The first phase is chaos rather than combat. Tremors are reported across the city, the road opens and Wretches pour out. Civilians abandon cars and run. Four Gears in plain clothes turn and run the other way, which is where Bravo Squad comes from.
The invasion arrives in stages, and the game deliberately reveals the enemy in the order the characters work it out.
Stage | What appears | What it means to the characters |
|---|---|---|
First wave | Feral Wretches, unarmoured, malnourished and in enormous numbers | This reads as an animal attack. The design fiction is that they were caged, starved and released like attack dogs. |
Second wave | Drones without weapons, screaming and charging | Bigger, more deliberate, still recognisably monsters. |
Third wave | Armed Drones that take cover, use tactics and speak | The turn. These are not animals; they have commanders, structure and language. |
Later | Elite Drones, Boomers, Seeders, Reavers and creatures from the Hollow | A full army with heavy units, air support and things nobody has a name for. |
The full roster and each unit's behaviour is on Enemies, and the faction itself on Locust Horde.
Nobody on Sera has a vocabulary for any of this. The squad nicknames the creatures on the fly as they meet them, and the nicknames stick, which is where the names used for the rest of the series come from.
E-holes are the signature image of the day and a working mechanic. Locust can surface anywhere, so the front line has no fixed shape. Two kinds appear: systemic holes that open during a fight and can be shut with a frag grenade, and spectacle holes that tear open, dump enemies into the space, collapse parts of buildings and flood the area with smoke.
Red light pours out of every one of them. Red was committed as the E-hole colour during pre-production and is deliberately avoided elsewhere in the game, so red always reads as either an E-hole or as danger. At larger scale, sinkholes pull down vehicles and whole buildings.
The people of the city are part of the event rather than set dressing. They react, adapt and break down in real time. Early on you cannot save everyone on a single street: you might shoot a couple of Wretches off people while others are being killed beside you. Later in the campaign you can encounter groups of civilians organising to fight back.
This page records what this game shows and states about Emergence Day. Wider material about the war that follows belongs to later entries in the series and is deliberately left out.
