Literature / There Would Be No Second Chance

Human! Remember! You have one world! One planet! One life! And thus, only one chance! There would be no second chance!

Year 2013. The old civilisation was wiped out in the fires of a nuclear war, putting what's left of humanity on the brink of extinction, and permanently scarring the Earth, which is even now, twenty years later, is stuck in the nuclear winter. Small society, cut from the outside world, survives in the closed city of Nadezhdinsk, most likely because the enemy simply didn't find it on the map. Life is hard and full of dangers, from environment to hostile animals and sometimes humans.

Year 2033. A duo of cosmonauts arrives on moon-rover to Nadezhdinsk, one of the few remaining settlements in what was Russia once, and warns that there's now even greater threat: American project HAARP, which was actually a secret weapon capable of controlling the weather and even climate, remained active and unsupervised ever since the day the nukes fell, and not only it's directly behind the perpetual winter (which should've stopped by now), but can actually destroy the planet outright unless stopped. When their words gets proven by a sudden earthquake, the expedition gets sent to Alaska, consisting of the cosmonauts, a local searcher Varyag Yakhontov, and his two students, Nicolai Vasnetsov and Vyacheslav Skvernoslov. They must reach Alaska and shut down HAARP by any means necessary before it's too late, as there would be no second chance...

A post-apocalyptic novel by a Russian-Armenian writer Suren Tsormudyan. Originally planned for the series Metro 2033 Universe (Expanded Universe for Metro 2033), it was recycled into standalone novel due to Novosibirsk (which is used as one of the key locations) being already "claimed" by another author. It was published in 2009; due to its length, it was broken into two parts, named When the Living Envies the Dead and The Hell is Already Here.

Tropes

• Achilles' Heel: Psi-wolves are extremely vulnerable while using their mental attacks, as it puts them in trance-like state.
• Actually Pretty Funny: Nicolai presumes that the time would come when Ekaterinburg would be rebuilt from ashes, and that many things would be renamed in honour of the hero who made this happen... resulting in Man-eater's schools, Man-eater's streets, the church of Saint Man-eater, and even the city itself being renamed Man-eatersburg. Ilya actually laughs when he imagines this absurdity.
• After the End: The story is set twenty years after the global nuclear war.
• And the Adventure Continues: After dealing with HAARP, Varyag and Vyacheslav still have to somehow find a way back home, but the novel ends just when their journey starts.
• Alcohol-Induced Idiocy: Back when he was twelve years old, Nicolai'd stole his father's flask with alcohol and got drunk (along with Vyacheslav). While Vyacheslav just fell asleep, Nicolai had a "brilliant" idea of going outside without upper clothes, to "show the blizzard who's boss here". He was barely stopped by some girl whom he can't remember now, who, after failing to take him back by force, tricked him by promising to show her breasts if he goes back (she obviously didn't). Then he threw out, pissed himself and blacked out. Vasily Guslyakov had covered for him (as otherwise, it's Nicolai's father who would get into troubles), but warned that he wouldn't do it again.
• The Alleged Expert: Downplayed with Varyag's English; he never claims that he's great, but states that it should be enough to communicate. When he actually tries, all he can say is "we come from peace" with thick accent (and nothing else), which Vyacheslav openly mocks.
• All for Nothing: After making it all the way to the Moscow and finding his old house (fifteen years later), Andrey learns that his and Yuri's wives and Andrey's daughter are no longer here, which devastates him. Varyag asks him why he expected anything different, given how much time had passed. Later they learns that they were killed by bandits, in rather gruesome way.
• The Alliance: In the end, a new alliance forms between New Republic, the Brotherhood, Babylon and Moscow Confederation, with Nadezhdinsk being invited to join in.
• Analogy Backfire: When Nicolai asks whether it's hard to pilot Tibbets' plane, Varyag says that it's easy, like a bicycle: once you learn how to drive, you would do it instinctively. Nicolai points that he said the same about previous plane: there was a major drama regarding Varyag not being sure that he still remembers how to pilot it. Varyag defends himself by saying that this one is much smaller and thus easier to operate. Nicolai then adds that he never actually learned how to drive a bicyle: the War happened before he got a chance...
• An Arm and a Leg:
  • In Nadezhdinsk, there's a guy nicknamed "Pirate" for missing one leg to frostbite.
  • During attack on Confederate base, one of defenders loses his arm, when it gets torn out by a bullet from machine gun.
• Androcles' Lion: Junior pays back for Nicolai awakening his mind by shattering a toilet in his cage, and using the shard to kill one of two would-be killers of Nicolai and his friends, then throws the gun to Nicolai's cage, right after which he gets killed by another attacker, who stabs him with machete.
• Answers to the Name of God: Nicolai asks the God why children have to suffer for the sins of people who nuked the planet. His split personality replies to it, asking why Nicolais is blaming it. When Nicolai asks it why it replied, the split personality says that Nicolai clearly expected some answer, and he has no way to prove that it comes not from God. It then goes serious, and says that blaming the God is an attempt to avoid responsibility for humanity's own screwups.
• Apathetic Citizens: During Nicolai's fewer dream while in coma, he ends up in metro just before nuclear attack, specifically in a train. He sees a group of Caucasians harassing a woman (and being ready to rape her); a group of skinheads brutally beating up an innocent Caucasian (who was just returning from work); a group of both Caucasians and skinhead harassing a veteran (blaming him for fighting "for the wrong side" and fighting "not good enough", respectively). In all three cases, he realises that he can't fight by alone, and tries to call for help, both by screaming and by asking each individual passenger, but gets no reaction.
• Arc Words: "There would be no second chance" is the recurring phrase, used either to emphasis why the mission is so important, or to address humanity, which must either change its ways and survive, or die out.
• Armour-Piercing Question:
  • When Vyacheslav mocks Nicolai, whom he sees with a teddybear, Nicolai asks him why he never laughed like that at his dead girlfriend Alyona, who carried around a doll. Man-eater sides with Nicolai, and calls Vyacheslav out on it.
  • When Man-eater starts calling Nicolai out on suggesting to euthanise Wind's disabled son, and tells him to never decide the others' fate for them, Nicolai points that he's doing it all the time. But Ilya has a ready reply to this.
    Nicolai: "Don't decide for the others their fate"? What about Irina Listopad? What? What about Bee? What about that girl, in Oligarch's cantina? Didn't you decide for them?
    Man-eater: This burden, this cross and this sin I'm carrying on my shoulders and don't put on others'. When you would grow older, call me, I would explain. Now, shut up.
  • Lazar tells a story about how he witnessed a man dying in metro, run over by a train, with no one saving him (instead, people recorded his death on video). Varyag asks him why he didn't save the guy; Lazar instead goes into attempt to justify why he has a phobia of trains, only to snap into looking for excuses, including "why regret one, when billions have died", despite shortly before saying that nuclear war was "for the better", which just shatters his already flimsy argumentation completely.
• Armour Piercing Response:
  • General Basov insists on knowing whether Russia managed to "retaliate properly" and at least avenge its destruction. Yuri gets angry at him refusing to understand the scale of catastrophe and how insignificant the old hatreds are now, shows him the photos he made from orbit, and tells that it was caused by the people like Basov. That almost makes him snap, but the general manages to get a hold of himself in the last moment.
    Yuri Alexeev: Here, general! Look! The whole world's on fire! The whole! Here's your "justice"! There's no "proper retaliation"! No vengeance! Only mutual destruction! If you put a group of psychos, each with a hidden gun, into a room and tell them that they are each other's enemies, what would happen? [...] The whole world was that room with psychos! [...] And everyone took revenge on everyone! Are you happy?!
  • When Vyacheslav fails to answer Nicolai's Armour-Piercing Question, Ilya sides with Nicolai and answers that question for him.
    Man-eater: Nothing to say? So I would tell then, my friend. When here's a big brother who, while loves his little brother, hides his feelings behind constant taunts and silly and often untimely jokes, you feel resent. When here's your mentor, who'd snapped and beat your up for your (even if real) screwup, very painfully, you feel sad. When here's a dying comrade whom you can't help, you feel shame. And when here's an angry morlock, who has higher kill-count than you can imagine, you want to separate yourself from the world. All of this has a simple name. Loneliness.
• Ascended to Carnivorism: With post-nuclear world leaving them almost without the food they're accustomed with, moose are now fine with eating meat, mainly carryon.
• Ask a Stupid Question...: When Varyag, Nicolai and Vyacheslav finally encounters search party form Hope City, which reacts hostilely and angrily yells at them to rise their hands and drop their weapons, while putting their guns at them, Vyacheslav asks what they're saying. Varyag sarcastically says that they're saying "hello" and how glad they are to meet them.
• Ate His Gun: Yuri shoots himself in the mouth to avoid dying from gangrene.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: "Terminators" were called that for their habit of taking drugs and marching onto enemy in almost robot-like manner, completely disregarding any pain and falling only after receiving wounds too serious to keep going (they even removes the bullets from themselves without flinching). Sometimes it works and breaks the enemy morale. However, organised resistance can just gun them down. At one point, Man-eater single-handedly (his allies run away in fear) forced them to retreat by wiping out the large number of "terminators" with a sniper rifle. That being said, "terminators" aren't dumb: they don't attack the groups they know they can't handle, and they actually do use conventional tactics when someone attacks them.
• Author Filibuster: Expect frequent breaks for (sometimes pages-long) speeches about how dumb and/or self-destructive humanity is, all to nail the point that we, the readers, should learn to value our planet. Repeat offenders are professor Tretiakov and, especially, Man-eater.
• Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work: Man-eater, the Token Evil Teammate of the expedition, captures and kills three amazons, uses their blood to bait psi-wolves to go towards the base of amazons, then makes the wolves wipe out the gang (he kills the gang leader by himself, while few survivors gets finished off by the freed expedition members), and then disposes of the wolves. When Nicolai learns about the way he organised everything, he calls him a monster, which Ilya doesn't even bother with denying.
• Bait-and-Switch Comment: After Nicolai comes out of metro, he asks Varyag to check his radiation level. Varyag tells him the level, and says that he's a deadman. Then he adds that twice that much would give him lymphoma, but now he would only get his ass kicked for his stupidity.
• Barrier Maiden: A blind old scientist whom Nicolai finds on the Chernoviks' base warns him not to shoot, as if he dies, there would be no one to keep the local psi-emitter working — and without it, the huge plague rats would return to the city, in all their entirety.
• Battle Discretion Shot: We don't see the battle against Guardians; final chapter ends before it starts, and epilogue starts a month and half after it's already finished. We don't learn details about it, either, albeit it's clear that Guardians didn't win it.
• Batman Gambit:
  • Pentisilea's amazons uses their youngest member, Bee, to pretend that she's under attack, so males would instinctively run to her rescue — and get into ambush.
  • Seeing that Nicolai stubbornly views him as a tyrant, and insists on going to Gau instead (despite never actually meeting them), the Foreman lets him go there (as turns out later, to confirm or deny that Titos Gau has mind control abilities, and to alert him that the New Republic has their own morlocks now); he also sends Yezhov, expecting that he would backstab them and reveal about the nuclear bomb. All this information convinces Titos Gau to strike at New Republic with all available forces out of fear that the Foreman would strike first — and get his Legion wiped out, as the Foreman prepared a trap for him.
• Better to Die than Be Killed:
  • Yuri shoots himself in the head when he realises that he's gonna die from gangrene.
  • Colman gets injured during crash-landing; rather than die in agony like Santana, he shoots himself in the head.
• Beyond Redemption: Nicolai was the one to insist that New Republic is too corrupt and tyrannical, and they should try with Gau instead. When he actually witnesses the scale of Gau insanity, he realises that they're beyond any reason, and decides that the Legion must be destroyed, at any cost.
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • When the expedition gets captured by the amazons, they gets rescued by Man-eater, Nordica and giant psi-wolf Achilles who brought the whole pack of other wolves to fight.
  • In the epilogue, Man-eater and Nordica shows up to save Nadezhdinsk from attack of lupuses, and to invite them into a newly-formed alliance.
• Bilingual Backfire: Vyacheslav runs into person who can understand Russian (and thus, his insults) twice:
  • Thinking that no one can understand him, Vyacheslav shouts insults at some random guy, to deal with stress. Turns out that it's Lazar, the Russian immigrant, who was sent there specifically to act as translator. Vyacheslav feels very awkward when he realises that his insults weren't missed, but Lazar forgives him, as just hearing the native speech triggers his nostalgia.
  • When introduced to Donald Hornet, Vyacheslav thinks that he can get away with insulting him. Turns out that Donald knows some Russian, too, probably from his past as CIA agent. Vyacheslav comments on it starting looking like tendency.
• Birds of a Feather: Man-eater gets attracted to Lena not because of her look, but because of her mind, seeing a kin spirit and educated person he can converse with.
• Bittersweet Ending: HAARP gets destroyed (at the cost of Nicolai's life), and now nature has a chance to recover, but the reawakened nature isn't nice to the humans, and their lives wouldn't get easy in foreseeable future. And no one knows whether Varyag and Vyacheslav would make it back home.
• Black-and-Grey Morality: While there are more than enough unambiguously evil people, many others, while doing clearly evil things, either sincerely believe that they're justified, or just don't know that the life may be different and that there's something wrong. And sometimes, it's not even clear who are in the right in any given conflict, and who are not, with both sides having some good arguments in their favour (or the presumably "good" guys ending up being such assholes, the other side starts looking better by comparison). Specific examples of such conflicts:
  • Suburb versus Moscow. While people of Moscow are clearly not nice (for the most part), having many factions of varying morality (from relatively benevolent Confederation, to blatant fascists and bandits), the other side consists of the entitled assholes who uses lousy justification to raiding and slaughtering them, and robbing any passing people.
  • Moscow factions. On the one hand, we have bandits, fascists, islamists, and cultists. On the other, we have Confederation, which unifies people and tries to restore civilisation, but employs sick children to help with reloading during the fight (they're too sick to actually reload, but can collect empty mags and give them to those who can reload, then give them back to shooters). And yes, one of those children does get shot.
  • Brotherhood versus Chernoviks. Chernoviks are Always Chaotic Evil faction of anarchistic bandits who're hated by everyone; "raiders" seems to be nicer, but they're practicing slavery (even if they presumably treat their slaves well, on which we have to rely on their words), and clearly shows more interest to wipe out their enemies (potentially, with weaponised plague) than saving the world, providing only necessary minimum of aid, by giving up the plane they can't use anyway (so may as well gift it).
  • New Republic versus Gau Legion. New Republic is openly acknowledged as authoritarian state (albeit with their leader sincerely respected for his hard work, even before the war); Gau are the blatant nazis run by the tyrant with mind-control abilities.
• Black Shirt:
  • Timofey flat out admits that he only cares whether he has something good to eat, good vodka to drink, and what to watch on TV, so if the country should be occupied for that, he's fine with it. Otherwise, he would take whatever he want by force, as he sees the people from Moscow as the source of his problems.
  • One of the groups in Siberia was called Eastern Democratic Directory. It run on idea to invite Americans, so they would occupy what's left of Russia and bring peace and prosperity. Their ideas were so unpopular, they managed to unite all other factions (who're usually at each other's throats) against themselves, and promptly died out, due to having next to zero people actually able to fight, and not just talk — a feat which not not even Chernoviks ever managed to achieve, despite being even worse.
• Bluff Worked Too Well: Timofey's pistol which he used to threaten Varyag ultimately turns out to be traumatic, not combat. Varyag only learns about it after killing him in self-defence, and actually regrets it.
• Bookend: The story starts with entry from Nicolai's uncle's diary, which is... not exactly full with hope for humanity, telling that humans planted the thunder, and ripped the whirlwind. Nicolai, just before his sacrifice in penultimate chapter, adds his own entry with directly opposite tone, telling that with his sacrifice, all humans now have a chance for better future, including his father and uncle, if they're still alive somewhere.
• Boom, Headshot!:
  • Andrey gets shot in the head by his own daughter, under pressure of her Evil Mentor.
  • Knowing that he wouldn't get another chance, Turpo pretends that he's gonna join the Chernoviks, to receive a gun, and then shoots one of their officers in the head. He gets killed immediately, but it buys enough time for the rest to start acting towards fighting back.
• Boring, but Practical: Before the war, Russian military uniform was consistently considered inferior to NATO analogues, with only questionable advantages being that Russians have cheap and easy to produce yet effective warm winter clothes. Comes the nuclear war, and this detail becomes crucial for survival.
• Break the Cutie: Nicolai establishes mental contact with young "manimal", and learns his backstory. He was a six years-old boy named Junior, with loving mother, who dreamed to become a firefighter like his father, or, better, a superhero. Then the bombs fell. They survived in the shelter (with father never returning), but had to go outside due to food shortage (the mother was forced to feed him with her blood due to the lack of anything else, despite her wound refusing to heal; she also started balding due to radiation). They witnessed hell of post-apocalyptic anarchy, and then the mother was caught and gang-raped (with Junior seeing it), which she didn't survive. He guarded her for as long as he could, but eventually he started starving, and had to eat her corpse... Then one of his mother's rapists tried to rape him, but he managed to kill him with a shard of broken toilet through his neck, after which he ate him, as well. This contact reawakes Junior's mind, and makes him relive those memories, which breaks him into tears.
• Broken Pedestal: Nicolai hears about the military in Moscow protecting Nadezhdinsk from a nuclear strike, and starts thinking that they are the heroes. Then he learns that their attempt to protect (already burning) Moscow from a rocket resulted in said rocket hitting Kaluga (his home), which wasn't even under fire, and that there still is (or at least was) a surviving military bunker, inhabitants of which descended into madness and live believing that enemies and "mutants" are everywhere, and his respect for them instantly goes into negative.
• Brutal Honesty: When Nicolai suddenly tells Man-eater that he feels "sorry" for all those people who've died, Man-eater tells him that it's not a genuine compassion, but rather a reflection of his own self-pity and defeatism. It helps Nicolai (who already had similar doubts before) to snap ouf of it, as he realises that Ilya is right.
  Man-eater: Wanna hear why you feel pity for them? [...] Because for you, they're doomed. They're all dead already. Both those who're dead, and those who're alive. For you. You're not hell-bent to save them. You're in constant self-doubts. Sometimes, you're thinking that maybe HAARP is a way out. You see the life only as a suffering. And this pity to humans is a mere shadow of your own self-pity. This is your weakness and your egoism. You're a masochist and because of that, you're tormenting yourself by provoking the pain. Can you still say after that that you love humans?
• Calling Me a Logarithm: Varyag mistakes the word "pestis" (Latin for "plague") for similarly-sounding Russian profanity, and reacts negatively, so Dietrich has to explain.
• Cannon Fodder: The Brotherhood originally intended to trick vandals into fighting the molochites, wishing for them to wipe out each other without risking their own people. The plan failed due to vandals attacking the Babylon, where they suffered a crushing defeat.
• Can't Hold His Liquor: When the expedition makes a stay to rest, Man-eater suggests to drink, offering the moonshine he took with himself. Varyag agrees, while Yuri reacts very hostilely for unknown reason, calling everyone "drunkards" (note that they're drinking in memory of Andrey, his friend). Suddenly, Nicolai and Vyacheslav asks to give some booze to them, too, despite by Nadezhdinsk rules them not being legible to drink (there, alcohol is for 30+ old only, unless needed for radiation curing), which Varyag reluctantly allows... only to regret it when both (especially Nicolai) gets wasted quickly and starts acting insane, as well as throwing up, a lot. Neither Varyag nor Ilya gets drunk at all, despite Ilya stating that it's extra strong stuff.
• Can't Kill You, Still Need You: When Hornet's subordinate asks why they should even bother with establishing connections with Russia, Hornet says that the reason why they both are still alive is because neither USA nor Russia used even a half of their nukes in the war, and that they need the Russians... for now.
• The Call Knows Where You Live: Soon after the cosmonauts tells about HAARP, and why it's dangerous, Nadezhdinks gets hit with a heavy earthquake (in a region which normally has no earthquakes); if previously it was planned to discuss the expedition in a few days, after that, it gets decided to rush and start the expedition as soon as possible. The council would still refuse to provide any actual militaries or searchers (outside of Varyag), only allowing the volunteers to go (Nicolai and Vyacheslav).
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": In-universe; Varyag at first has problems with understanding Dybetsky, cause he's not familiar with the term "stalker" (a loan word from English); in Nadezhdinsk, they call those people "searchers", cause, well, they're searching. Dybetsky, in turn, gets confused by the term "searcher", cause they call them "stalkers".
• The Cavalry:
  • In metro, Nicolai gets saved from overwhelming pack of morlocks by unknown tall man with a machine gun. At first, he speculates that this man was Man-eater, but later he learns the information which indicates that it was likely his uncle Vladimir Vasnetsov.
  • The stalkers, despite supposedly being a "neutral" faction, do show up to assist Confederates (along with one non-radical Islamic team, "Irbis"^note  Snow leopard) in battle. Them attacking from behind forces the enemy to retreat, allowing the expedition to leave Moscow.
  • Dietrich shows up with artillery just in time to wipe out the remaining Chernoviks.
  • Hammer, despite stating his dislike of the Republic prior, shows up for the final battle against Gau and kills Gau sniper, which helps defenders a lot.
  • When the heroes gets ambushed by manimals the second time (this time, they don't manage to scare them away), they only gets saved by timely arrival from the denizens of Hope City. They wouldn't establish contact until later, however.
• Central Theme:
  • Humanity's disregard for its habitat and for the future; "after us the deluge".
  • Hope — and lack of thereof, down to and including outright despair.
• Changed My Mind, Kid: The "raiders" felt shame when Varyag's team accused them of cowardice and moved on to fight the Chernoviks on their own, and they decides to help them after all, coming exactly when Lev Chernov arrived with the reinforcements, and wiping out the enemy with "Buratinos".
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • Early on, Varyag mentions neo-pagans making good melee weapons, crossbows and boomerangs (he has some of these in his disposal). In the next chapter, he uses a short sword to kill marauders Brazhnik and Dybetsky.
  • Ilya had five bombs. Three he used to do his task prior to apocalypse. Another was used to mine the atomic boat and force the crew to comply with his orders to launch missiles; he never removed it. The last one he preserved, and it's still with him, which is the reason why he even joined the expedition — that bomb may be used to blow up the HAARP. And indeed, in the very end, it's exactly how Nicolai destroys the HAARP.
  • In the crashed train, Nicolai finds a teddybear, and takes it with himself. In Hope City, he gifts it to a disabled little girl Tabitha, as the symbol of new hope for them all.
  • Just before his sacrifice, Ilya gives Nicolai, amongst other things, his supply of ether. In Alaska, Nicolai uses it to put his friends to sleep to escape, then guards to steal the plane, so he sacrifices himself instead of Varyag as was planned.
  • Varyag collects parachute strops, and dedicates much time to cleaning them up, which Vyacheslav doesn't understand. Later, one of them saves his life when he almost falls into a crack in the ice.
  • It gets decided to not give Varyag and Nicolai any weapons when going to negotiate with Guardians. But Hornet covertly gives Varyag and Nicolai knives, "just in case". Later, when Guardians attacks them during negotiations attempt, Nicolai uses his knife to kill one of them and take his gun; and Varyag later kills another one by stubbing him in the weak point on his neck.
• Chekhov's Gunman: The guy who was exiled from the Babylon for his crimes, just like Ilya predicted, run to vandals and told them that it's the perfect time to attack.
• Chekhov's Lecture:
  • Nicolai remembers Varyag's earlier explanations about the plane, and reminds Varyag, who panics in crisis situation (he must lift the plane from rapidly-collapsing ice wall), what he should do to increase his chances; it works.
  • Varyag (offscreen) teaches Nicolai how to pilot the plane (on his request). Nicolai in the end uses these instructions to destroy the HAARP in place of Varyag.
• Child Soldier: Out of desperation, Confederates trains children to assist in reloading (they are tasked with gathering empty magazines, reloading them and giving them back). Ultimately, one of them does get shot during the battle.
• Civil War vs. Armageddon: During the course of the story, expedition witnesses many conflicts with various groups, based on various conflicting ideologies, but all of those are overshadowed by the much greater threat — the HAARP, which can end all of humanity and the planet itself; contrast is especially strong due to how easy some of them to resolve. The only times when anything good gets achieved is when people puts their differences aside and contributes to the common goal, while those who keeps thinking only about themselves makes preventing the apocalypse all the more difficult. There would be no second chance, and to use that chance, humanity should stand united.
• Cooked to Death: The ten-miles radius around HAAP is fatal for any life; it's stated that it's like ending up in a huge microwave. That's why using a plane to nuke it is necessary. Guardians are somehow immune to it, which is part of the reason why it's speculated that they're cyborgs.
• Cool Car: The expedition uses a moon rover to travel around the world.
• Compelling Voice:
  • Nicolai learns that he missed his best chance to find his father in Moscow, and decides to rush back; screw the expedition. Man-Eater uses his morlock abilities to mesmerise him with his voice, then knocks him out with his fist; he states that Nicolai would awake normal, then faints from exhaustion.
  • Nicolai learns that Titos Gau is a morlock when he sees how his lecture puts the listeners into zombie-like state (including Yezhov, who's not even his follower).
• Continuity Cavalcade: In his "talk" with HAARP avatar when flying to destroy HAARP, Nicolai remembers various evil factions he dealt with before, who're supposedly "proving" Rana's point. Then, when he still flies, he sees thousands of people who've died during his journey — Andrey (with his family), Guslyakov, Junior (in human form, smiling) with his parents, Turanchocks with his prostitute, people from "Three Pigs" artel, Yuri, Dybetsky with his family, marauders from "roach den", Turpo and Weynard, Tomas and CJ, Tibbets and Deladier, and countless whose names he doesn't even know, from various factions (vandals, bandits, chernoviks, confederates, guardsmen, babylonians). All of them looks at him with encouragement and with hope, convincing him that he can't let them down.
• Cope by Pretending: As in Metro 2033, Moscow was divided between various groups, often quite weird — like the former Tolkien fans who now call themselves orcs; it's explicitly their coping mechanism: they preserve their sanity by replacing the life lost with something new.
• Covert Group: The Artel is a secret group tasked with covertly eliminating predetermined targets after the nuclear war to secure safety of those who've survived it; all such targets were chosen for "being useless at peacetime, and dangerous at wartime"; they actually do investigate to make sure that the targets are chosen not for selfish reasons before killing, but once they confirm that the target deserves it, they kill them without pity.
• Crazy Jealous Guy: Lera's boyfriend Ivan is rather short-fused, and when he sees Nicolai in their room, talking, he instantly accuses Lera of cheating (in rather rude way), and then goes into conflict wit Nicolai, which results in his ass being kicked. He comes to apologise for his prior behaviour after siege, saying that he overreacted — after all, Nicolai looks so similar to his father, to whom Lera had feelings before. Nicolai apologises in turn.
• Crazy-Prepared:
  • Subverted regarding moon-rover; at first, it seems weird that moon-rover has tank-grade armour (not even actual spaceships are equipped with such), but later Nicolai finds out its backstory and that Americans have planned to do nuclear tests on the Moon, and that moon rover was built for that specific purpose, so such defensive qualities are perfectly justified.
  • Nicolai lampshades how Man-eater is tend to always have everything required at hand regardless of situation. Ilya doesn't even argue.
    Nicolai: I see, you have everything for every case in your pockets.
    Man-eater: With my way of life, lockpick is the second-most essential item after knives, sword and firearms.
• Creepy Souvenir: In Junior's memories of the early post-nuclear days, one of the military vehicles was "decorated" with severed human arms. It made it pretty clear to him and his mother that military isn't on their side.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: During crash-landing, Santana breaks every bone in his body and dies after five hours of non-ending agony.
• Cruel to Be Kind: When Nicolai sees a woman from the New Republic, Lena, showing interest to Man-eater (and him clearly showing it in return, despite denying it), he remembers the old blind man's warning about Ilya's only weak point (an "Achilles heel") being "a woman", and he tries to talk him out of communicating with her, in rather harsh words, pointing that she makes him "weak". Ilya reacts very badly, but leaves Nicolai alone as soon as Lena asks him to follow her (she'd prepared tea). Nicolai then tells Lena (just as rudely) to leave Ilya alone, and says that he has a woman in Moscow (clearly meaning Nordica, about whom Ilya actually said that he's looking at her like his sister, not a woman), who still waits for Man-eater, which hurts Lena a lot. This backfires when Ilya (seemingly) dies, and Lena calls him out on this.
• Cult: On Caucasus, there's the Antichrist-worshipping cult called Infernis which feeds their enemies, as well as anyone old and disabled, to their dogs; they have lots of dogs.
• Cursed with Awesome: Ilya sees the apocalypse as a mixed bag; for all the evil it brought, it also forced humanity to discard the old rotten "civilisation", and live the life much more simple, yet more fair, where, if someone causes you problems, you can just take the matters into your hands and deal with them, lethally if needed; it also leaved us without zombifying effects of TV. Varyag, as usually, disagrees with him.
• Dead Man Writing: Before taking the plane to destroy HAARP, Nicolai writes the final entry to the diary, knowing that it would be discovered after his death, where he hopes that his father and uncle are still alive and have a chance to live the rest of their days in peace, and that future generations would never forget the cruel lessons of the War and would never repeat same mistakes as their ancestors did.
  I'm finishing these lines, directed at the future generations, with confidence that they would find the reader, because those future generations certainly would be. Would be sun and spring. Would be life. Would be children. And God forbid you to forget what was done by your ancestors.
• Death by Despair: Nicolai remembers how a pilot of the crushed helicopter was mumbling about what he saw — how Moscow, Kaluga and other major cities were destroyed in a nuclear fire; he died soon afterwards. Later, the father of deceased pilot confirms that the reason for his death was his own despair.
• Death by Irony: Moscow was too well protected from nuclear missiles, so it was instead destroyed by exploding several nuclear bombs installed in metro. One bomb was exploded right away to make people panic and rush there, hoping to find shelter... and only then the rest were detonated, killing everyone who tried to hide in metro. What was supposed to be a massive bomb shelter turned into a massive deathtrap... It only became worse after the nuclear war, with periodic emissions of radioactive wind and ash (along with heavily mutated microbes), and "morlock" raiders.
• Death in the Limelight:
  • In the chapter 24 of the first novel, the expedition finds a (working) camera in a car with dead family. The next chapter opens with a flashback to their death; it wasn't pretty: they died from a toxic gas.
  • Just after losing the battle against New Republic, Titos Gau (who managed to escape) gets his backstory explained (from his perspective). Then Nicolai finds him, and kills him.
• Death or Glory Attack: The final battle between Gau Legion and New Republic gives no second chance to either side; Gau must cross to the other shore to prevent the enemy from detonating the nuke, while republicans have exactly one shot with exploding the dam, and if it fails to kill enough Gau with one wave, they're screwed, as they don't have the plan how to fight if the Gau actually do reach the shore. Fortunately, the plan with exploding the dam works, albeit at the cost of Ilya's Heroic Sacrifice.
• Decapitated Army: Morlocks are rather cowardly, and only those few who takes initiative motivates the rest to act as a group; those are easy to recognise due to being very stubborn and nearly suicidal in their attacks. Killing them leads the rest into disarray.
• Defiant to the End: Vyacheslav, when facing Yakov Chernov (whose old friend he'd killed), keeps insulting him, knowing that he's about to be executed. However, Turpo's Heroic Sacrifice prevents the execution.
• Devoured by the Horde: The seventeenth chapter of the part one opens with a "lovely" description of a boar being devoured alive by a pack of rats. Both from outside and inside.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • Some people, like in Ferzikovo, have tried to take shelter in catacombs. They didn't take into account that after continuing rains, those would be filled with radioactive water, with no way to prevent it. And later those catacombs were sealed away by snow. People in Nadezhdinsk almost did the similar mistake, but chose not to move there at the last moment.
  • When one of the "reds" brags how his team wiped out the base of "vandals" and says that they now have nowhere to go, and would likely die, Man-eater points out that they can just go towards Babylon: they have nothing left to lose, and Babylon contains their worst enemies who just killed their families and burned down their houses. He ends up being right.
  • During infiltration into Chernoviks' base, Nicolai makes several suggestions, but Man-eater immediately explains why they would only make the situation worse:
    • Why they tricked the bandits into letting them in, and then killed them, instead of waiting for their conflict over card game to develop into open infighting? Firstly, it's unlikely that it would've developed into infighting (even bandits have some discipline, so whoever survives, would be punished, and they know it); secondly, if they starts shooting, it may raise an alarm, and fail the operation.
    • Nicolai suggests to use Chernoviks' chemical weaponry against them. Ilya points that firstly, it may kill them (no, the gas masks Nicolai brought in wouldn't work; they need different ones); secondly, there's no guarantee that it would kill the bandits, more likely that they would just run outside; thirdly, they don't know where their living quarters are, and thus wouldn't be able to use it to full potential; and lastly, there certainly would be prisoners, and they don't want to kill them as well.
  • When the plane goes under fire by unknown people, Vyacheslav laments their plane lacking parachutes. Varyag points that such survival wouldn't worth it: they would lose the bomb, lose the moon rover, lose their weapons and end up in Arctic, all alone and without supplies; better to die outright then.
  • Vyacheslav asks Varyag why the hell he took his documents to Alaska, as those clearly states that he's a military (with all the expected consequences). He admits that it was a dumb thing to do, but what's done is done.
• Dirty Coward:
  • When American carrier run into a Russian submarine (specifically, the one equipped with nuclear rockets), the carrier's escort, knowing what would happen if it fires on them, chose to just run away and leave the carrier they were supposed to protect for dead. When it tried to run for them, they refused to stop, and when it sent two jets, those were shut down. After that, the carrier gave up and tried to deal with the boat on its own, which ultimately resulted in them just uniting.
  • High-ranking Moscow officials and oligarchs chose to escape underground in advance, rather than use the information about upcoming war to protect the people. Unfortunately for them, the danger has come from metro...
• Disproportionate Retribution: The "amazons" from Leaf Fall gang sees the playing cards with naked women amongst the things they confiscated from their prisoners. Their reaction? Start yelling to see to "which animal" those belongs, and when Vyacheslav admits that those are his, start cruelly beating him up, stopping only when Varyag switches their attention to himself to protect him.
• Divided for Publication: Due to the sheer size of full novel, its two parts, "When the Living Envies the Dead" and "The Hell is Already Here", were published as separate books, both still ending up above average in length.
• Divided We Fall: Man-eater tells Dietrich that the Brotherhood should take the people of Ekaterinburg under their protection, giving them the reason to live and work together, otherwise they would return to the war of everyone against everyone very soon, and lose their only chance to rebuild.
• Don't Celebrate Just Yet: The expedition reaches Alaska, and Vyacheslav is relieved that they finally made it. Varyag points that they merely reached Alaska, but they have to travel for dozens of hundreds kilometres to reach HAARP, through icy wasteland filled with unknown dangers. This spoils Skvernoslov's mood noticeably.
• Doorstopper: The novel was so long, it was published as two separate books; both still ended up having more than thirty chapters and half a thousand pages — more than average Metro 2033 Universe books.
• Double Meaning: When Timofey brags that their settlement has pigs living there, Varyag quietly says that he'd noticed. Timofey means actual pigs, while Varyag refers to that society being extremely amoral. Timofey seemingly starts suspecting something, but Varyag fixes the situation by saying that he'd noticed due to Timofey and Dybetsky eating pork.
• Driven to Suicide: Lishenko (one of the officers from the bunker) takes the nuclear war extremely poorly (he had a son who was about to attend the school for the first time, and niece who was about to marry), constantly fazes out, and later offs himself offscreen. In fact, his suicide is the first thing we learn about him; the rest of information comes from flashbacks.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: Andrey's death was abrupt, but very dramatic, given circumstances; Yuri instead gets mauled by some mutant (either a mutant bear, or mutant bear-like human; later that kind of mutants gets revealed to be named "molochites"), and shoots himself when he realises that he's gonna die from gangrene.
• Dude, Not Funny!: Nicolai reacts badly to Vyacheslav making jokes about his mental contact with Junior, calling it "hypnosis" and insulting Junior; Nicolai tells him to show some respect, and then goes on a rant about how humans never gave morlocks a chance, always treating them as enemies, despite being the one who made them so miserable in the first place.
• Dwindling Party: The expedition starts with five people, with a latter addition of a Sixth Ranger. Only three people reaches the designated target, with one of them dying there (though the epilogue also reveals that one of the people who supposedly died earlier had survived), and it's unclear whether they would make it back.
• Eaten Alive: One of manimals gets devoured alive by polar bear after the battle. Varyag decides that it's time to move as far away from the bear as possible: an animal who tasted human flesh can't be trusted to not attack when given a chance.
• Emergency Cargo Dump: Ilya puts some broken vehicles on the plane specifically to have something to drop if they ever need to decrease the weight. It later comes in handy.
• Endless Winter: HAARP is directly behind non-ending winter which lasts for twenty years now. And unless it would be shut down soon, it would cause even worse effects.
• The End of the World as We Know It:
  • American project HAARP (stationed in Alaska) was actually a secret geophysical weapon; it's directly behind two tsunamis, one in 2004, and another one which hit India just before the nuclear war. It was active during the nuclear war as well, and, with people supervising it now being dead, it now causes chaos on the global scale, from hurricanes to earthquakes, and maintains the ongoing Endless Winter; unless shut down, it may potentially cause the planet to go off orbit (dooming all life), or outright fall apart. Preventing the armageddon is the reason why the expedition was sent.
  • On the way to Siberia, Yuri learns about volcanic activity near Yellowstone — the biggest volcano in the world. If enough smaller volcanos detonates around it, the Yellowstone itself may explode too; it's already a nuclear winter, but if Yellowstone detonates, it would be nuclear polar night. It's possible that if they stop HAARP, the volcanos would never fully explode, or their effect alone wouldn't be that destructive, but together, they would bring the complete armageddon.
• Enemy Civil War: A civil war sparks in the Hope City, between the followers of Eduard Lynch (who's in league with Guardians and wants to preserve HAARP) and followers of Donald Hornet (who backstabbed his former allies, who wanted to destroy HAARP, as he wants to claim it and the technologies of Guardians for himself). The good guys sides with Morgan Raymon, who still insists on destroying HAARP, but don't actively participate in the slaughter, instead assisting Varyag and the rest in escaping, so they can finish what they've come for.
• Enemy Mine:
  • The so-called "Shaitan-Legion" was created by surviving crew of a Russian submarine and American carrier, who are now trying to survive in hostile land, against common enemy. They later united with the (benevolent) Islamic Brotherhood against the (clearly not benevolent) zealots from the Holy Jihad.
  • When four groups comes for the heads of the expedition, the Confederates refuses to give them over to either of them, hoping that they would start infighting, as only one may actually receive those people. Instead, all four groups unites against them.
  • The final showdown against Chernoviks puts together the expedition, prisoners from all Ekaterinburg societies (freed by the expedition), and later they gets joined by the Brotherhood. This puts the end to the Chernoviks as the faction. Man-eater doesn't forget to point how easy it was to win once those people finally bothered to cooperate.
  • Discussed regarding New Repulic versus Gau; Nicolai wonders whether the Republic would stay as united as it was before with the Legion wiped off the map, and thus them no longer having common threat to fight against. The Foreman suggests Nicolai to just leave this problem to him, and concentrate on his mission.
• Enmity with an Object: When Ilya presumably dies stopping Gau, Nicolai starts shooting into river in frustration, and has to be stopped. Then he breaks into wail of grief when Varyag, not holding tears himself, reveals that Ilya is gone.
• "Eureka!" Moment:
  • After hearing Bee's weird nickname and looking on her face, Andrey realises that "Bee" is due to nickname "Uley" (hive), which, in turn, is based on the name Uliana. It's his lost daughter, actually alive!
  • Nicolai realises that Junior can't understand his speech — not because he's not sapient, but because he's American. He instead tries to establish telepathic channel... and it works.
• Even Evil Has Standards: If there is one rule which is respected by literally every faction in Moscow, no matter how insane they are (down to and including bandits, islamists and cultists), it's "never, ever kill negotiators". Whoever does that, unites all other factions against themselves. Man-eater uses this rule to prevent Pentisilea from killing him, which allows him to stale for time.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • While searchers are known for always attracting attention of women, and freely using it, they have an official rule — never have affairs with married women; whoever breaks it, becomes an outcast even amongst the other searchers.
  • During the nulcear war, several bombers (on all sides) chose to just drop their nuclear payload into ocean rather than nuke cities. One Russian nuclear submarine's captain did the same (unfortunately, Ilya Crest was on board and took command to do it himself), stating that fighting enemy's military is one thing, but nuking civilians is where he draws the line.
  • Varyag finds a fallen pole with American flag — and, over Vyacheslav's protests, puts it back. When asked why he's doing this, he says that the war is over, and he's doing this not for some politicians, but for common people, who also loves their families, loves their country and loves their flag, and have nothing to do with the atomic massacre; they're here to save the world, not to restart the war. Nicolai sides with Varyag.
• Eye Scream:
  • General Basov had lost one eye during nuclear war, when he accidentally saw the blast with that eye, resulting in it being burned out.
  • Nicolai blinds one vandal during siege with his fingers.
• Facial Horror: Man-eater questions one of the "raiders" why he's always wearing a mask and aviators. He removes it, and we receive a "lovely" description of all the injuries he'd sustained, from ugly scars to mutilated ear and creepy blind eye. Man-eater can only say "sorry", after which another "raider" worryingly tells the guy to put mask back on, to not expose his face to the cold.
• Fake Defector: Turpo pretends to switch sides to the Chernoviks — all so they would give him a gun for "baptism by blood"... which he uses to shoot one of their leaders, buying time for the rest of the prisoners to act, at the cost of his own life.
• Fall Guy: American government put the blame for first strike on Russia (and general population still believes in it), but (judging from what Lynch says), they attacked first. The topic of who was first quickly gets discarded as no longer mattering past proving that Lynch is not the one to trust: what does matter now is to rebuild from ashes and unite, for the future of all humanity.
• False Reassurance: Nicolai and Man-eater cleans up a room full of Chernoviks, save for the last one whom they captures alive. They also frees a tied up Sex Slave who introduces herself as Rita, and offers her to personally finish off the guy, to make her vengeance. When she refuses, Man-eater asks whether she's willing to forgive that bandit. When she says "yes", he tells the bandit that Margarita just forgave him... and then adds that he didn't, and snaps his neck.
• Fate Worse than Death: The psi-wolves uses their mesmerising howl to suppress their prey's will, so they can be easily eaten; effect is minor if you only hear it, but if you look on them at that moment, you're likely doomed. However, sometimes they use it to destroy their prey's personalities, and just leave them alone; resulting "zombies" (called "conversed ones") turns into mindless cannibals.
• The Final Temptation: Just before flying to destroy HAARP at the cost of his life, Nicolai sees the final vision, a beautiful woman whom he recognises as anthropomorphic personification of HAARP (and his own psyche, which isn't thrilled by idea of dying a virgin), who tries to convince him that humanity doesn't worth saving and the world would be better if it dies out. Soon afterwards, he starts feeling doubt (she uses rather strong arguments), but Rana comes for aid and gives counter-argument, about why life is a miracle of union of opposites, and that as long as humans are alive, they have a chance to change for the better, no matter how bad they were before. That's when he sees the ghosts of all the people he encountered before and who've died to make it possible, all looking at him with hope in their eyes and waiting for him to make a decision. That's when he makes the final choice, and sacrifices himself to save the world, no longer caring whether it's all real or not.
• Fire-Forged Friends: Varyag's group earns friendship and respect by denizens of Babylon (well, most of them) by participating in defending it against vandals.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: Lazar acts weirdly during negotiations with Guardians, then outright hides, before any shooting starts. Once all five Guardians gets killed, he understandably gets suspected of being The Mole and telling them to attack. Turns out that he indeed is... but he's working not for Guardians; he's working for Lynch... and Hornet, who has his own reasons to get negotiations team slaughtered.
• Flashback B-Plot: Once Nicolai finds his uncle's notebook, several chapters gets fully or partially dedicated to flashbacks about his origin as metro machine gunner (from his PoV). Part two also has a chapter dedicated to Nicolai Vasnetsov Sr.
• Foil:
  • Babylon versus vandals. Vandals are neo-luddites who believe that old world was evil and they should reject it, starting from scratch and rebuilding even language. Babylon is trying to recreate the old world, as much as possible, going as far as inventing new currency, establishing their own newspaper, etc; but they also brought in all the old vices, like gladiator fights, prostitution, alcohol, drugs (even if "controlled").
  • New Republic versus Gau Legion. Both are under the one leader, and one of the locals states that both are run by "tyrants", but we later learn that Republic is trying to build a better future through hard work and discipline (and their leader, while is aware that others would likely condemn him in time, believes that it's a price of saving his people), while Gau... Gau are nazis in all but name, who're trying to create totalitarian state with one leader, one vision and one purpose, and essentially brainwashing its population.
• Forbidden Zone: Moscow metro is off-limits; no one is allowed to go there, and if one goes anyway, they gets killed. The reasons for this is that, firstly, they tend to bring radiation and new, mutated sicknesses with them, and secondly, it provokes the "bastards" (morlocks) to going outside and attacking the other societies.
• Forced to Watch: Three cosmonauts (one Indian, and two Russians) were sent into space just before the war, and saw everything from orbit, from tsunami which hit India (really massive one), to nuclear destruction and deadly clouds which covered the Earth. A year later, they managed to return, to see whether there's anyone alive, starting from India; the Indian cosmonaut stayed home, while two others used the moon rover to ride to Russia.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Most of the letters read by Nicolai when the expedition runs into crushed train with military mail have no useful information, but two gives first hints at people he would encounter later:
    • The long complaints-ridden letter has almost no useful information, so it's easy to dismiss it... but it mentions one officer blatantly deserting, and starting business (it's pointed that it's impossible for him to gain the starting capital legitimately)... and later being hired to renovate several military objects, as no one bothered to do background check. That guy? Titos Gau, who was hired to install the nukes in Moscow metro.
    • One of the letters is from a conscript who ended up on a good base with a foreman who's good, but has a habit of talking about inevitable war quite a lot. It's that same Foreman who set up the New Republic in Siberia.
  • Nicolai sees the strange dreams, in which some man survives the ice-cold water and manages to warm himself up; in another dream, same man fights the wild animals, and in another one, obtains a plane and flies somewhere. He realises who it is, but never comments on it or tells anyone. Comes the epilogue, and that person turns out to be Man-eater, who actually survived his tank sinking in the river.
  • Nicolai's nightmares shows Guardians as vile mechanical dogs. Later we would learn that Guardians are fiercely loyal armour-clad servants.
• Forever War: Moscow has descended into constant conflicts between bandits, cultists, islamists, fascists (of all kinds), and Confederation (the faction created by the former military and police), with stalkers serving as a neutral faction of traders and brokers. They sometimes manages to form a truce, but it never lasts for long. People who are not aligned with either constantly gets caught between them all. And then there are "bastards" (aka morlocks) from metro who're hostile to everyone.
• Foul Medicine: Due to lack of proper medicine, the only thing which can be given to Vyacheslav to help with his leg to prevent gangrene is to force him drink his own urine. He reacts to it with understandable disgust and tries to refuse (even though Varyag states the similar case when it did help). He barely gets convinced.
• Four-Temperament Ensemble: The expedition members, excluding Andrey and Yuri (who barely interacts with the others, usually stands behind, and then outright gets killed before the part one even finishes), represents one of the archetypes:
  • Nicolai Vasnetsov is melancholic (and outright called that in-text). Shy, unstable (frequently swinging between resolve to help people and desire to just end their and own suffering), pessimistic, insecure about morality of his and others' actions (desiring to do everything "right", but being unsure what is or isn't "right", as there's no universal standard), tend to build unreasonable expectations of people, only to then get bitterly disappointed once he learns that people are... people. Often causes problems due to saying things straight away, without thinking.
  • Vyacheslav Skvernoslov is sanguine. He's talkative (often too much), unserious, easily comes along with people (excluding Pentisilea's Amazons, who're too hostile), rather rude and potty-mouthed (in fact, it's unknown whether "Skernoslov" is actual surname, or nickname originated from his swearing, which got stuck), sometimes too impulsive for his own good.
  • Varyag Yakhontov is phlegmatic. He's calm, not very emotional (even if you anger him, he's quick to calm down), has his own moral which often comes at conflict with Ilya's approach. Despite being experienced fighter, always tries the peaceful approach and negotiations first, and is not fine with murdering non-hostile people who can be safely avoided (yes, even cannibals from "Three Pigs").
  • Ilya "Man-eater" Crest is choleric. Usually calm and secretive, he releases self-control once he enters the battle, where he lets the thrill of war consume him. He also shows his true, passionate self once he starts talking about things he believes in, like his goal to give the planet a second chance, or when some of his sensitive buttons gets pressed. Despite being a former military, he's notoriously undisciplined and chaotic (it was this way even prior to war). Always seeks some great cause to fight for, but time and time again loses interest when the group he joins fails to live up to is expectations — until he finds the real, great cause in the expedition and their mission to save the planet. Despite sometimes coming as a jerk, he never means harm to his friends, and in time, they understands it.
• Freak Out: During Tibbets' flashback, Colman freaks out when told that it's nuclear war, and, against all regulations, tries to use cellphone to contact his "girl at Honolulu", Jessica. When told to stop (his phone intervenes with Tibbetts' attempts to contact the base and clarify their order), he yells that it's his last chance to tell her that he loves her, as he would never see her again. He resists attempts to take the phone away, so Tibbets has to order Steve Logan to knock him out and handcuff him (as he may be dangerous in this state).
• Frontline General:
  • The general who leads Confederates actually participates in defence, and not just as the guy shouting orders from behind; he provides fire support with his sniper riffle.
  • The Foreman personally leads his people into the final battle against Gau (over protests of one of his officers); he ends up being injured, but survives.
• Gallows Humor: When flying on a plane, Ilya comments on clouds (which brings visibility to nearly zero) seemingly being endless. Vyacheslav asks how they would tell that there's a mountain on their way, and Varyag grimly says that they would tell it by running into it. When told that it isn't funny, he says that he isn't joking.
• Gave Up Too Soon: Just after burying Yuri, who shot himself to avoid dying from gangrene, what's left of the expedition learns that there's a settlement nearby, meaning that it was possible to find help and maybe even save Yuri.
• Get A Hold Of Yourself Man: Vyacheslav goes ballistic and insists on going back and tracking down the people who shut down their plan, and kill them (no matter how much time it would waste). Nicolai just slaps him, and when Vyacheslav switches attention to him, reminds him that they have more pressing task right now — to stop the HAARP. Varyag just laughs, and says that Man-eater is alive: he just merged with Nicolai.
• Get Out!: Nicolai gets told that if he dislikes the New Republic so much, he's free to go to the Gau, like he (repeatedly) suggested. No one is gonna waste time, resources and efforts on someone who openly dislikes them and their way of life. Unknowingly to Nicolai, it's a part of Batman Gambit against Titos Gau.
• Given Name Reveal: Just before the final battle against Titos Gau, Man-eater tells Nicolai that "Irina Listopad" wasn't real name; she chose it to hide from him. Her real name was Lena, just like the woman who now shows interest in him.
• Gone Horribly Right: The "molochites" are the products of attempt to create mutant supersoldiers — dumb, but strong and resilient, to gradually replace the regular infantry. Then some "bright" mind decided to make them capable of reproducing. By 2033, not only there's a full bunker of them (and no humans in sight), but they're slowly evolving intellect, with some even learning to use guns, albeit they're bad shots... for now.
• Government Conspiracy: Both the USA and USSR (and later Russia) tried to create psychotronic weapons, masking them as something innocent; Americans had HAARP, while Russians had the "Areal" project, masked as the network of antennas intended for cellphones.
• Gone Horribly Wrong:
  • HAARP was intended as the weapon which gives humanity near god-like powers over nature, and which can potentially destroy the enemy through it. No one has ever thought what would happen if it continues running non-stop, which resulted in it now affecting the entire planet... and slowly destroying it.
  • Besides HAARP, there were three more attempts to create similar projects in other countries. Norwegian project was quickly shut down, while Soviets actually built their own near Chernobyl, which may be related to the catastrophe; it was shut down in haste afterwards. Another attempt was made later, but presumably went nowhere.
  • The psi-emitters which drew some people mad in Moscow metro (and in other areas where they were installed)? They were supposed to calm people down.
• Good Counterpart: Besides Straw Feminist amazon gang "Leaf Fall", there's much more benign group called "Tanya" (after a feminist activist of German origin). While they still don't like men much, they don't go into violent misandry and are willing to communicate with them; some even have families. If Leaves were a totalitarian sect in all but name, those dedicate their time and efforts to helping the women who can't protect themselves — slaves, orphans, lonely people — and accept them into their ranks, training them to be able to defend themselves and those who needs it. Man-eater cooperates with them, and has nothing bad to say about them.
• Good Old Ways: The neopagan society called the Circle of Svarog tries to return to pre-Christianity Slavic culture and religion (complete with swastika, which they actually worship as the symbol of the sun, completely unrelated to Nazism). They're actually nice and peaceful (just don't try to harm them), and are ready to help people in need. They also switched to old-fashioned weapons, like swords, crossbows and even boomerangs, which are actually very good, due to high-quality materials and high skill of their weaponsmiths.
• Gratuitous English:
  • Chapters set in Alaska are named in English instead of Russian.
  • In Alaska, the locals also speaks in untranslated English (excluding when Lazar is present, as he's a translator, or when the scene is shown from their own perspective); however, their speech has lots of mistakes, mostly grammar (unlike Varyag's botched attempts to speak English, unintentional), due to the author's own English being not imperfect.
• Green Aesop: There are many speeches about the need to preserve the nature, and that the mission to destroy HAARP is not just for humans, but for the life itself; majority of those comes from Man-eater.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: While most factions conflicts the expeditions encounters has clearly defined bad guys, and it's easy to see whom the group should support, conflict between vandals and Babylon is more complex. Vandals may be neo-luddites, but Babylon, prior to the siege in which the main characters participates, raided the vandals' base while they were away, slaughtered their families, and burned everything to the ground. When the group (already disillusioned with locals) later encounters surviving vandals walking through cold, desperate and without any future ahead, it gets openly questioned whether they picked the right side of conflict. To further complicate it, vandals have sympathetic motives for their traditions (they're discarding things associated with old life, in attempt to start from scratch), while Babylon tries to recreate the old world (with all the worst aspects of it), keeping population under control through Bread And Circus.
• Hanging Judge: Daladier (who at this point still supports Lynch) tries to appeal to the idea that if Morgan ends up in Russia, he would be killed, just like they're about to kill Varyag and his followers. He means to use it as justification for going through with execution, but Morgan uses his argument against him, saying that if that happens, it would only prove that he ended up in the hands of people like Lynch, Madlen and Daladier. Daladier then tries to mention Tibbets, but Tibbets says that him being executed as war criminal would be reasonable and expected, and it would be hard to blame them for doing so.
• Heel Realisation: After talking with Nicolai about whether extinction of humanity is actually a bad thing, and being called out a coward, Lazar finally realises that he indeed was too scared to make important decisions his entire life, and he rescues Varyag and Nicolai from custody, to give them chance to finish what they started and destroy HAARP. He acts rather shy in this scene, but it's clear that he's ashamed of his prior behaviour.
• He Knows Too Much:
  • Wind warns the expedition that they better leave Babylon. Boar has some plans how to take power by appealing to old leader being incompetent (or, quite possibly, even by force), and certainly would try to use the heroes who saved the town in his campaign... but if they wouldn't be cooperative, he may try to kill them, as dead heroes are easier to deal wit than alive ones with their own thoughts and ideals — or the knowledge aboout HAARP and possible armageddon, which would destroy the illusion of safety Boar wants to create.
  • One of the reasons why Yezhov gets thrown under the bus is his knowing about the bomb, yet not being loyal enough to keep his mouth shut.
• The Hero Dies: The main protagonist, Nicolai, dies to destroy the HAARP in the last pre-epilogue chapter.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • Boris Kretchetov, an officer from a submarine, chose to move to Russia with Andrey and Yuri instead of staying with the crew. He died on Balkans, exploding himself to cause avalanche and destroy the cannibals pursuing them.
  • Turpo pretends to defect to the Chernoviks and pass the "baptism by blood". He receives a pistol, and says that he's doing "what Allah wants", ignoring accusations of betrayal from his friends. Then he screams "Allah Akbar"... and shoots the enemy officer, Hog, right in the head; he gets killed immediately, but it buys the other prisoners (including Vyacheslav and Varyag) the time to act.
  • When the charges don't detonate manually due to poor condition of the wires, Man-eater blows them up manually, knowing that he wouldn't make it back. The resulting tsunami swipes his tank, and it sinks when hit by a huge ice rock. The epilogue reveals that he somehow survived, however.
  • Varyag is aware that if he tries to detonate the bomb, he would be lynched by Americans, so the mission to HAARP is one-way trip for him. Tibbets talks him out of doing it, saying that no one would let him even try; but if American does that, it would be easier to convince the people that it's for a good cause...
  • John Tibbets volunteers to deliver the bomb to HAARP instead of Varyag, knowing that he wouldn't survive it (due to "Guardians", it can only be exploded in the air; he sees it as redemption for being one of the bomber pilots during the war. He gets killed by the "Guardians", so Varyag volunteers to replace him after all, but Nicolai steals the plane and delivers it himself.
• Hobbes Was Right: The Foreman gives a long speech which summarises why most humans would never prosper without outside guidance, explaining why building something like his New Republic is necessary. Nicolai disagrees, thinking that it's just a dictator justifying his rule, so Man-eater explains the same thing through analogy about medicine:
  Man-eater: Here's a man. He fell ill, he needs a surgery. He's very sick, he can die. And so he did the surgery. It's painful. It's unpleasant. He suffered through limitations and discomfort. But he was saved. He got discharged from the hospital. But he was told that this should be a lesson to him. That he should take care of himself. Take care of his health. He'd listened. But he's healthy now. And some time later, he stops caring about his health. Starts drinking and smoking again. Eating whatever he want, as long as it's tasty. Or running his car above speed limit. Or playing with fire. And ultimately, he ended up on the brink of death again. What else to do? Another surgery. Here we go again. You know why? Because he's a moron.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • The giant worm which killed Guslyakov? In Arkaim bunker, we learn that it's a product of the secret Russian project which tried to weaponise the cold-resistant small, harmless worms by growing them to massive size; it was originally supposed to hit cold regions like Alaska or Norway, but due to the nuclear war it had escaped into the wild in Russia itself.
  • In Hope City, there's a practice of using huge rope to navigate between the city and hangar; it helps during heavy blizzards when there's zero visibility. However, at one point, that rope worked against its owners when some (never identified) enemy redirected it from hangar to the hill just outside, and murdered the group which used it. It was since then replaced with steel rail and steel rope, making such treachery impossible.
  • While disabling guards with ether, Nicolai almost puts himself for sleep (he put it on his gloves). He manages to prevent it at the last moment by stabbing himself in the leg with knife.
• Hope Spot: It seems that Guardians are acting peacefully, and negotiations are possible. Then their commander says one thing: "fire". Cue negotiators being gunned down, starting with Tibbets, who was supposed to be their pilot.
• Humans Are Bastards: One of the central themes.
  • The "prologue" opens with the anonymous diary (retrieved in Ural mountains) lamenting humans spending years mindlessly polluting the Earth and consuming its natural resources like locusts, then using the nuclear weaponry in ensuing war once those resources dried up, forgetting what danger the radiation poses to the world. It comes to conclusion that humanity got what it deserved.
  • Professor Tretiakov has grim view on humanity, and frequently states it:
    • He calls humans the "most dangerous beasts", and says that the nuclear war was the inevitable end of the long path.
    • When the polar bear shows up near Nadezhdinsk, it immediately gets suggested to shoot and skin it, to make warm clothes. Professor laments that until the bear showed up, no one really thought about it, but as soon as it did, the first reaction was that it should be killed, under first justification they could think of.
    • He believes that large amount of various monstrous societies (like now-destroyed cannibal village of Vislyaevo) in post-apocalyptic world is directly caused by society being already rotten before the war; those people are the same ones who would've become the maniacs, rapists, bandits, etc in the pre-war world, and now they're allowed to live without any control.
  • When expedition runs into people in the Moscow suburb, they nearly goes into conflict due to being mistaken for Moscow stalkers, who are supposedly very bad people. After talking with the locals, it quickly becomes apparent that the reason for them acting so hostile is because the locals were previously raiding and killing the refugees and seeing it as "justice", and now fails to see any justice in being attacked in turn. They are now dead set to not let anyone to leave devastated Moscow, as it's "where they belong".
  • When the expedition reaches Moscow, it turns out that the people there are generally no better than the people from suburb. There are fascists and islamists who continues cleansing, stalkers (who are more like marauders) who tries to remain neutral with everyone (even with aforementioned fascists) and the now-extinct group of military which sealed itself away from "bastards" (cannibalistic mutants also known as morlocks), only to go insane and turn into more morlocks themselves. Confederates (another group of military) seems to be better — as is, the only dark detail shown is them using Child Soldiers — but even that is understandable given that they are at war with so many villainous factions who do not respect the customs of war (like deliberately targeting medics).
  • Disgusting scene in metro in Nicolai's nightmare shows how low humans can fall when trying to save their skin, how they can backstab everyone to get their only chance, and how pathetic they can be if they realise that their chances are low.
  • Why so many people are against the expedition and wants to prevent it? Some grew accustomed to the new life and don't want to change back, even if it would be for the better; they would rather maintain the status quo, however cruel. Some now lives by the new ideals, and would rather doom the world than let someone other than themselves to save it. And some just wants to keep their freedom — the freedom to Rape, Pillage, and Burn.
  • Origin of morlocks. There was an experimental psychotronic weapon (nicknamed "miracle generators"), which was used on people in metro in attempt to pacify them and prevent chaos; as can be expected, it backfired: few people gained some unnatural abilities, while most degenerated into cannibalistic zombie-like monsters, which are now known as morlocks. Man-eater explains it as the "miracle generators" affecting our subconsciousness, and that those whose dark side is inherently more powerful, would degenerate; the others would prevail... for some time, as our internal evil never gives up and always seeks the chance to take over.
  • Lazar mentions one case in New-York metro, when the guy fell on the rails, and not only no one bothered to help him, but everyone rushed to record it on video, which was then uploaded on YouTube and accumulated thousands of watches over an hour. Then some channel paid a large sum for the best-quality recording, so they can broadcast it. The argument gets used against Lazar himself, however, as he didn't save the guy, either; he fails to defend himself.
• Humans Are Warriors: Deconstructed; whenever humans sees something, they always think how to use it for war; it started with rocks, and ended with nuclear power and HAARP.
• Hypocrite:
  • Invoked by Basov when Yuri, immediately after calling him out on wishing death to the USA for destruction of Russia (despite whole world being screwed, not just those two), asks him for nuclear weapons to destroy HAARP. Yuri explains to him that it's matter of life and death, for the whole humanity, as HAARP may destroy the planet itself unless shut down, and they would have no second chance.
  • When Pentisilea tries to call Man-eater out on insulting the memory of Irina Listopad, Ilya points out that the amazons don't bother to even maintain her grave.
  • Muslim faction in Siberia refused to accept Turpal (a Chechen) as he's "not true muslim" (basing it on his ethnicity). He points that one of them has a tattoo with naked chick on his shoulder (a major "no-no"). They didn't bother with defending, and just refused to accept him, stating that "Russians wouldn't negotiate with us if we have Chechen in our ranks"; ironically, the faction which did accept him (after saving him from wild dogs) consists of mostly Russians.
• Hypocritical Humour: Varyag comments on Tibbets' plane being little, pretty and clearly peaceful, not intended for war. Nicolai with sad smile says that they're gonna turn it into nuclear bomber.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming:
  • The novel opens with "the prologue after an epilogue", to set up right away that the story is set After the End.
  • The epilogue is named "there would be no epilogue", to set up that it's not the end — it's a beginning.
  • Chapters set in Alaska are named in English rather than Russian. The chapter during which the heroes actually crosses the border has a number as the chapter name, which can be read in either way.
• I'm a Humanitarian:
  • People of Vislyaevo descended into cannibalism, and, to sustain themselves, started raiding the other settlements (taking not only "fresh meat", but also women to reproduce with). They were eventually wiped out in their entirety, sparing not even children.
  • There are, or at least were, cannibals in Balkans.
  • The hunter artel "Three Pigs" is actually a cover for cannibal society. It should be noted that while people born before the war (like Oligarch or Elephant) fully understand what they're doing and why it's bad, the same can't be said about children who grew up later; they just don't know that the life may be different, and are afraid of the outside world.
  • In Alaska, the expedition gets attacked by the group of cannibals, but manages to fight back, not in the last turn because the attackers are completely pathetic, being horribly underequipped, underfed and just sick half-wildmen. Later turns out that those are local morlocks (named "manimals").
• Inspirationally Disadvantaged: Wheelchair-bound blind and completely grey-haired girl Tabitha who nonetheless never loses hope is always friendly is used as the symbol of hope for better tomorrow; at least, Nicolai sees her so, and meeting her strengthens his resolve.
• I Surrender, Suckers:
  • When Timofey and Varyag don't get along, Timofey tries to force Varyag and his followers to give up their weapons and geiger counter. Varyag seemingly agrees... and then grabs his sword and slices Timofey's head, after which he quickly finishes off his partner Dybetsky.
  • Varyag finds abandoned American submarine, and reads a captain's log. It states that there was a mutiny, as the captain was against firing the nukes from it. Not wanting bloodshed, the captain offered to play a football match instead; whoever wins, would do as they please. The captain lost... and then, exploiting the winners thinking that he's gonna submit, gunned them down and deserted with his supporters.
• It Can Think: Despite what can be assumed, morlocks are not dumb, and are actually quite cunning when it comes to hunting (up to and including putting pipes into wheels to stop the car). They are also not blind, their sight just works differently. Those who underestimates them, usually ends up their prey. The same goes for molochites (essentially, another variant of morlocks, but created intentionally), who already learned how to produce food and even use guns (albeit poorly, for now), and slowly trains their bodies to adapt to cold; and Alaskian "manimals", who only start degrading after few generations, but older ones still know how to use weapons and tools, and under hypnosis, can even be interrogated.
• In Your Nature to Destroy Yourselves: Lazar says that it's in humanity's nature to act self-destructively, and by shutting down HAARP and averting extinction, Nicolai may make things worse, by giving a chance to survive and spread around to the dangerous animal which just can't control its instincts and slowly destroys its habitat. This speech gives Nicolai the much-needed boost in confidence, as he understands what makes him Human, and people like Lazar "animals".
• It's Not You, It's My Enemies: While with Nordica, Man-eater just tries to avoid her, to Lena he tells directly that it's a very bad idea to fall in love with someone like him, so he has to keep distance — for the others' safety. It happens shortly before his Heroic Sacrifice.
• It Has Been an Honor: Knowing that it's the last time they see each other, Morgan Rayamn and Varyag tells each other that it was an honour to meet someone so noble. Ultimately, however, Varyag survives, as Nicolai hijacks the plane and performs Heroic Sacrifice himself.
• Jerkass: Pirate accuses Nicolai and Vyacheslav of being freeloaders (nevermind that they were ordered to not participate in cleaning up the rubble and instead concentrate on preparations to upcoming expedition), and calls Vyacheslav (an orphan) "bastard". He does that absolutely unprovoked.
• Just Before the End: There are couple of flashback chapters (narrated by Vladimir Vasnetsov) which are set shortly before and during the nuclear war.
• Let's You and Him Fight: According to Lazar, both Lynch and Hornet wants to start conflict between Guardians and expedition; but Lynch is rooting for Guardians, while Hornet wants to start the war, so he can access to Guardians' tech, by either imprisoning them, or killing and reverse-engineering their chips. Neither wants HAARP to be destroyed.
• Karmic Death:
  • Large portion of important officials (and later oligarchs) chose to hide in underground bunkers (connected to metro), receiving information about the upcoming apocalypse two weeks in advance, but only bothering with saving their lives and their property. In a cruel twist, Moscow wasn't hit by the missiles — the explosions happened underground, and those officials and oligarchs were amongst the first casualties.
  • When McMilan gets called on making jokes about nuclear war, he says that he believes that if humanity is vile enough to start a nuclear war, it deserves dying from it.
  • Invoked by Tibbets, who says that it's karmic that he, a nuclear bomber who contributed to apocalypse, would die in a nuclear blast to save the world.
  • One of the people who raped Junior's mother later encounters Junior himself and tries to rape him, too, only to get his throat sliced with a shard of broken toilet, and then eaten (by this point, Junior already started turning into morlock).
• Karma Houdini:
  • Subverted with Babylon administrator; when Man-eater misses the chance to kill him (he's in his to-kill list, which includes people like Irina Listopad or Oligarch), it seems that a villain getting away, but later Svyatogor explains that the guy was put in the list by his enemies, and is actually (relatively) innocent.
  • Donald Hornet never suffers any repercussions for his actions.
• Kill It with Fire:
  • Man-eater sabotages "Three Pigs" artel's sun battery in such a way that putting any light on it would set a whole building ablaze, killing everyone inside.
  • When captive starts showing symptoms of bubonic plague (extremely fast-developing plague), the "raiders" don't even bother with treating him, and just burn him with a flamethrower. They then use the same flamethrower to kill a massive swarm of rats rushing from the building which Chernoviks used as a base (and which is likely the source of that plague).
  • The Brotherhood decides to just wipe out the rat nest near Ekaterinburg, by filling it up with poisonous gas first, and then with napalm, to ensure that rats wouldn't try to return to the city.
  • Nicolai kills one of Guardians by damaging his backpack with fuel, which, on contact with red-hot machine gun, sets ablaze; it fails to cause damage, but gives Nicolai a chance to pour some still-burning fuel into snorkel of his gas mask (which he damaged during the previous, futile attempt to kill him with a knife), and then put that snorkel into still-burning fuel, burning the Guardian alive.
• Kill It with Water: The plan how to wipe out the Gau Legion involves tricking them into attacking the New Republic, in all force, and then blow up the ice near the dam, killing them with massive wave of ice-cold water (whoever survives the wave itself, would freeze to death anyway. It works, but at the cost of Man-eater's life... or, at least, so it seems until the epilogue.
• Knight Templar: Nicolai believes that people who sincerely believes that they're doing despicable things for the "good cause" are even more dangerous than any selfish people: the latter are dumb, cowardly and predictable, while those would go any mile and do everything necessary.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Vladimir Vasnetsov believes that his wife cheating on him with everything that moves, from his boss to boss' driver (and being a bitch in general), and his sixteen years-old daughter sleeping with a criminal boss is his karma for "stealing" the woman from his brother; said brother and his friend both now having healthy relationship and normal children (respectively, brother has three years-old son Nicolai, and friend has sixteen years-old daughter who's interested in studying, and a little son) only convinces him further.
• Last Disrespects: Man-eater briefly visits the grave of Irina Listopad, goes berserk and smashes the cross which marks her grave. Completely out-of-nowhere action at first, it becomes more clear why he does that once their backstory gets revealed.
• Last Request: Varyag asks Rayman to take care of Nicolai and Vyacheslav once he nukes HAARP, as the locals may try to lynch them. He not only agrees to do that, but promises that, if it comes to this, he would sacrifice himself for their safety. Both then says that it was an honour to know each other.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
  • One of the messages on the wall says "Dmitri, you were wrong; no one survived in metro", signed by Artyom, is clearly a reference to Dmitri Glukhovsky and his Metro 2033 novel (and its protagonist, Artyom), but later we would meet a character actually called Artyom who indeed was in Moscow at some point, before getting disillusioned with it and moving to the other place. There's also another message directed towards someone named "Suren", likely referring to the author himself, Suren Tsormudyan, but whether this one has in-universe meaning as well or not, is unknown.
  • During Nicolai's fewer dream while he's in coma, he sees a man reading the book with title... "There would be no second chance". It's when he questions whether all his life was real, or just a dream.
• Leave No Survivors:
  • Denizens of Vislyaevo, a village to the south-east from Nadezhdinsk, became cannibals and started raiding their neighbours for "food"... and women: for whatever reason, along with cannibalism, they also gained hyperactive libido. The large battle team was sent to deal with them, including artillery, and the village was destroyed. The people who participated in the operation prefer to not speak about it, but rumours says that it was ordered to kill all survivors, down to and including children, as cannibals can not be spared.
  • Even when panicking Gau starts surrendering, the republicans keeps shooting them, not even bothering with taking prisoners. It's hard to blame them.
• Leeroy Jenkins:
  • In Moscow, Nicolai, while standing on guard, hears the woman screaming for help, and, despite being supposed to stay on guard (and having zero knowledge of his surrounding), rushes to help her, without warning anyone. Not only he fails to save that woman, his adventure leads to bandits learning that he visited metro, which would make half of the city going after expedition's heads, and indirectly leads to Mikhail Dybetsky's and his family's deaths by the hands of aforementioned bandits.
  • While Varyag rushing to help once he hears a scream, only to run into ambush is dumb by itself, Yuri and Andrey makes it worse by rushing with them, too, instead of waiting for Man-eater, which leads to them all getting captured, and Andrey later getting killed. They gets called out on it.
  • When Nicolai contacts Lev Chernov about his brother's death (by itself extremely idiotic decision, as pointed by Man-eater), it enrages Lev so much, he rushes to kill Nicolai... and gets killed along with all his forces by the timely reinforcements from "raiders".
• Lethally Stupid: After battle against Chernoviks, Man-eater tells Nicolai that his idea to call Lev Chernov over radio and tell that his brother was killed was extremely idiotic decision which only worked in their favour due to sheer blind luck: Lev blindly rushed to punish Nicolai with his entire army, and Brotherhood, which decided to help after all, just bombarded them all with "Buratinos" when they gathered together.
• Let's Get Dangerous!:
  • Shortly before attack on the Babylon, Nicolai acknowledges who his father was, and that he has to be like him. He stops acting like a moron and participates in defence, actually killing many vandals.
  • When Lazar gives him speech about humans' sapience being a curse, and HAARP wiping us out being preferable to continued existence, Nicolai sees it as a reflection of his own doubts he felt for so long, and realises how really pathetic they were all this time. He tells Lazar that his mindset sucks, and that he just got the confidence he lacked in that the HAARP must be destroyed.
• Like Brother and Sister: In Ekaterinburg, Man-eater tells Nicolai that he indeed loves Nordica... like a sister; but her feelings for him are different. This hints at the true reason why he was against taking her into expedition.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: At one point, when trying to use radio in the plane, the expedition hears very deep and sinister "HAARP!" in it; it never gets confirmed whether it's indeed some dark omen, or just stress-induced play of imagination.
• Made a Slave:
  • Holy Jihad practices slavery; Yuri and Andrey were their slaves for four years before they were freed.
  • Discussed regarding the Brotherhood (which occasionally enslaves their enemies); Varyag is vehemently against slavery and accuses the Brotherhood of hypocrisy (with them talking so much about "brotherhood" and new society of equals they want to build), while Peresvet defends them using slave labor, stating that firstly, those have food, shelter and protection, which is more than many free people have now, and secondly, Varyag has no idea how those people ended up in such position (for most of them, it was a mercy on the Brotherhood's side), implying that there's some dark backstory behind them (we already know that "raiders" constantly fighting with worst of the worst of humanity — some of which were encountered before). Man-eater takes more neutral position, asking what's better — being well-fed slave, or starving free man, clearly pointing that many people would choose slavery and think it as a good deal, though later he also makes negative comments on Brotherhood's usage of slaves.
• Make It Look Like an Accident: Originally, Hornet planned to put Lynch on trial, but after nuking HAARP, there's a high chance that the number of his supporters would increase (right when they're about to fight the Guardians, who would have no choice but to attack); so, instead he orders one of his subordinates to kill Lynch, and pass it as him being accidentally killed during escape attempt; his faction would collapse without him. He also suggests to kill Madlen, as she's utterly useless, and no one's willing to feed her from their portion.
• Malicious Slander: Inverted; Lazar intentionally exaggerates Nicolai's and Varyag's heroism during battle with Guardians to make them look better and gain more support for the cause (in which he now believes).
• Master Race:
  • Gau propaganda includes calling Gau a "master race" (with non-Europeoids being suspiciously dismissed as "mutants").
  • When Varyag hears the radio transmission from Hope City which is warning about "manimals", he explains the term to Vyacheslav as "savages and cannibals". Vyacheslav, in his typical hatred to wards Americans, interprets it as Americans dismissing everyone else as "savages" on regular basis. Varyag disagrees with him, insisting that Hope City is a symbol of just that — the new hope for better future for them all, but Vyacheslav refuses to listen.
    Vyacheslav: Savages. Of course. Everyone's savage for them. Firstly, Indians were savages on their land. Then Black slaves were savages, too. Then the Japanese, whom they gifted with a nuclear bombing. Then Vietnamese, Serbs, Iraqis, Iranians, Russians. Everyone's savage, only they're are beloved by Jesus and chosen by God to bring the light of democracy to savages by burning their cities. So, Varyag, fuck them with their radioshow. Why you bother to look for them on the map? Why we need it?
• Meet the New Boss: Wind highly doubts that Boar would be better than the old administrator: while he's certainly smarter, he likely would employ the same methods of controlling the people under him: illusion of freedom, outside threat, and controlled vices, up to and including drugs, to make people distracted from the reality.
• Mercy Kill: Man-eater killing Bee was merciful; she was already zombified by psi-wolf.
• Might Makes Right: Discussed. Man-eater states that, in some way, society became better after the nuclear war: it wiped out many negative aspects of old life, like zombifying influence of television, and make people more sincere and less prone to lie, even if it manifests in "survival of the fittest" mentality. Varyag, naturally, disagrees.
  Man-eater: I'm satisfied. I'm fine with our time. Few people. No consumption. Only survival. No individualism, as it equals death. Even lone wolves like you and me are tied to someone. No this damned TV with deceptive news, pseudo-documentalists, the muzzles of elites I'm fed up with, the shows corrupting the youth and other bullshit. No shitty glamour lyrical whining. The evolution had shaken off all this crap. This is the time of the strong. Like you and me, Varyag. If someone acts badly, you don't wait for government to act. Don't call police, who doesn't want to deal with your problems. Don't whine on injustice in kitchen talks and don't complain into the European Court of damn Human Rights. You take a gun, and shoot those who're in wrong. Justice in its primeval form, uncorrupted by civilisation.
  Varyag: And if someone decides that it's you who's in wrong?
  Man-eater: This is the world of equality. Let them take a gun and come to me. You know how many people like that there were? I lost the count. But where they are now? And I'm still alive. This means, I'm right.
  Varyag: Questionable logic.
  Man-eater: Yes. But it works. It just works.
• A Million Is a Statistic: Discussed. It's stated that people who launched missiles weren't some horrible psychopaths, they were not much better or worse than the other humans, but they were operating with statistics, faceless and nameless numbers; it's hard to empathise with those. He states that this is just how humans works.
  Svyatogor: How is it, to kill so many people? It's numbers. Statistics. Graphics and schemes. Estimated casualties. Acceptable casualties. Those are actual official terms. Measures of civilised society. But behind these dry and unbiased reports someone's real fates and lives. [...] Generals were talking about losses. Medical or permanent, when it wasn't about their sons. Dead soldiers are little more than a "cargo 200".^note  "Cargo 200" is Russian military slang for killed; "cargo 300" means heavily wounded Deaths of civilians is merely unpleasant and unavoidable result. The people, the crowd, the humans are abstract, unless it's your mother, daughter, father, son, sister, brother... Because those are others' sisters, fathers, loved ones.
• The Millstone: Before the war, the secret list of people was created (politics, officers, oligarchs, journalists, activists, artists), listing the people who may be very dangerous during the war time, who would only contribute to reinforce the chaos further. After the war, some secret group (later revealed to call itself "Artel") decided to act and wipe out everyone on that list to increase the chance for survival of the humanity's remnants (not before investigating their activities, to exclude those put there for selfish and petty reasons). The people on the list, in general, were the ones who have learned about the upcoming war before the nukes dropped — and chose to save their skin rather than help their country. Only few people from this list are known, amongst them cannibal "Oligarch".
• Misplaced Wildlife: Early in the part one, a polar bear shows up near Nadezhdinsk (a city to the south from Moscow, which is nowhere near Arctic either). Though, given that even twenty years after the nuclear war, the nuclear winter is still ongoing, it's not as absurd as it could be.
• Missed Him by That Much: While exploring Arkaim bunker, Nicolai confirms that the tall machine gunner who'd saved him in Moscow metro was, indeed, his father. He starts insisting on dropping everything and going back, and Man-eater has to use his morlock powers to calm him down and then knocks him out, after which Ilya faints from exhaustion.
• Mission from God: Lynch tries to appeal to USA having some "god-granted mission" as the reason why they must do as he wants. Hornet isn't impressed.
  Donald Hornet: God-granted mission? Do you have a signed by god directive, stating all aspects of this special mission in our country? When monkey runs out of arguments, it starts throwing shit. And you start screaming about mission from god.
• Mistaken Nationality: Tibbets' crew included Santana (Puerto-Rican) and McMilan (Scottish); when McMilan teases Santana for him being slow and calls him "Mexican arse", Santana gets offended and calls him "Irish asshole", which offends McMilan. The two continues insulting each other (McMilan ignores correction about nationality, Santana makes "skirt" joke instead) until Tibbets tells them to quit it.
• Mr. Exposition: Noise (a gatekeeper in Babylon) explains how things works in the town.
• The Mole: Nicolai suggests to join Chernoviks to learn where they stores the vehicles they need to clean up around the plane, and steal them. The plan gets cancelled when they learn how Chernoviks are recruiting new members.
• Moon-Landing Hoax: Foreman thinks that it's possible that Americans falsified (manned) moon-landing; before they reach the Moon, they have to cross Van Allen belt, which requires making the ship radiation-proof. That's how he realises the true purpose of the expedition's moon-rover.
• Moral Myopia: Timofey is perfectly fine with attacking convoys with refugees from Moscow, robbing and killing them, cause it's the "vengeance" for them "robbing the whole country for many years", so it's only fair to rob them in turn (and shoot them dead). He fails to see anything wrong with it, and calls the military out on wiping out two villages with artillery in retaliation — even when directly called out on this.
• More Expendable Than You: Nicolai puts Varyag to sleep via chloroform (some remained after Man-eater), and steals the plane to destroy HAARP by himself. Varyag awakes too late to stop him.
• More Hero than Thou: Varyag insists on flying to HAARP and bombing it (likely perishing in process), not only because he's a pilot (though he explained how to use the plane to Nicolai), but also because he's much older than Nicolai and Vyacheslav, and has no family to return to, while they're young and have the future ahead.
  Nicolai: But you would die! The plane is slow! You have no chance to outrun the explosion!
  Varyag: Who processed the chances? It's only estimation. But even if it's not... We're not talking about the chances of the one who'd drop the bomb. We're talking about the second chance for all humanity. For the whole Earth. This chance is why we came here. No, this isn't a second chance. The first and only one. There would be no second chance. This one... The cost doesn't matter. This is why the people from Confederation sacrificed their lives. The Foreman's guardsmen. Andrey and Yuri. Ilya Crest... The destiny demands another sacrifice... And I would make it... [...] I'm an old lone man. I've lived a life. But you, kids, should have the future. It wouldn't be easy and careless. But I know that you'd make it and walk your way with dignity. But for that, this path should exist. And for that, I must fly and drop the bomb.
• Motivational Lie: Varyag is at risk of falling to his death into a crack in the ice. He lies to Nicolai and Vyacheslav (whom he ordered to not go any closer) that he would be fine; in truth, if he somehow survives the fall, he would slowly die in an inescapable death trap, and he knows it. Fortunately, he manages to make it out alive.
• Mushroom Samba: Nicolai, while drunk on moonshine, sees hallucinations, which, beside the recurring things, like Rana (who's angry at him for whatever reason), sees Nordica and her psi-wolf, as well as the machine gunner from metro. He later realises that those aren't real.
• My God, What Have I Done?: When running away after killing Timofey and Dybetsky, Nicolai shoots at someone pursuing them, only to then realise that he just killed Timofey's sick daughter Rana. Even knowing that she was armed and intended to kill them, he feels regret over doing it (her wanting to kill them over Varyag killing her father does not help matter). Varyag talks him out of it, by explaining that they're fighting to give a new hope to the whole world, but some people can not and do not want to understand it, they only see the opportunity to gain something here and now, for themselves alone, at the cost of the others. Had he knew about those people being like this, he would've avoided them, sparing their lives, but he didn't, and thus they had to fight for survival.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Hammer comments on Man-eater's unwise choice of nickname: in the wrong company, it can be mistaken for him being an actual cannibal, and killed without bothering with confirming.
• Near-Rape Experience: Vyacheslav, still angry at Bee for beating him up and killing Andrey (her own father!), finally snaps and tries to rape her as "vengeance", exploiting her being in zombie-like state after attack by psi-wolves. Nicolai (his own brother) gets so angry, they nearly starts fighting. Then Man-eater comes in... and reveals that he absolutely despises rapists, after which he actually does kick Vyacheslav's ass. Even Vyacheslav himself later feels fear and disgust towards what he nearly did, feeling that he snapped and almost became a monster.
• Never Found the Body: When Lena gives Nicolai well-deserved slapping for sabotaging her chances to romance Ilya just before his death, Nicolai tells her that no one had seen the body, and it means, she still has a chance to find him alive; she just has to try. He turns out to be right.
• Never My Fault:
  • According to Man-eater, humanity in general is prone to drop the guilt for its screwups on anyone and anything but itself. It's why humans never learn on their mistakes.
    Man-eater [shows Nicolai a cigarette pack]: Here. Look. Written in a large font: "Smoking hurts your health". On another side, it has: "Smoking leads to cancer". Humans are still smoking. I smoke. Your Varyag is smoking. Or, I remember, they used to show road accidents on TV, quite a lot. A car runs on high speed and crashes into something. The driver's face splats on a front window like a carrot on a grater. But hell, humans are still running and crashing. A man hammers a nail, and he seems to understand that he may hit his thumb. But doesn't think about it until he hits it. And then he screams. He hates the nail, the hammer, the plank he tried to nail, and that bitch of a wife who asked to hammer that nail. But not himself. Human ego and unbound idiocy are worse than nuclear weaponry. By itself, nothing truly matters, be it a cigarette, a car or a damn atomic bomb. But in the hands of a human...
  • Nicolai asks the God why children have to suffer for adults nuking the world. His split personality playfully replies to him, but then goes serious and says that attempt to shift the blame on God is just running away from responsibility.
    Voice: You're given the hands to hold a fork and spoon, and teeth to chew your food. Or someone should chew it for you, and put it into your mouth? But they may just eat it themselves instead, and you would starve. You got the mind to find the God in you and grow up bliss inside, instead of waiting for it coming from outside. But you? So why you're blaming God for what happened to the children? Was it God who did this to them? Aren't the people did this? Aren't the people to blame here? Why you always look for someone else to blame yet refuse to see the fault in yourself? [...] If the God is indeed inside everyone, then maybe you should ask the question about children to every human? Why didn't they protect the children, and leaved them nothing but suffering, cold and hunger? Only diseases and death. [...] You should ask everyone. Why children? What's their fault?
• New Era Speech: Titos Gau gives the speech to his followers (actually a regular procedure, used as part of brainwashing routine) about why they're the "superior race", and everyone else are trash to be swept and forgotten. Its effect at least partially relies on Titos' own mind-control abilities. Due to their general insanity, and Titos' mind control abilities, the speech turns its listeners into complete beasts, screaming and even copulating right between all the people.
• Newspeak: Vandals mismatches syllables in all words, in attempts to "destroy and rebuild" old language, cause they want to leave no trace of the old world, however small. They also adds the (common at the time of writing) internet slang into the mix, making it even more confusing.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • Nicolai has a "brilliant" idea of going on a rescue mission in the middle of the night (he saw a girl being abducted by monsters), without warning anyone, despite being supposed to stay on guard (and already knowing how dangerous the metro is). Not only he fails to save anyone, he also alerts the bandits, as visiting the metro is extreme taboo, punishable by death, and he accidentally leaved a trace; now, bandits blatantly rackets the expedition in return for silence, demanding their weapons and fuel.
  • When four different groups comes to Confederates and demands the expedition members being given over to them (or else), three of them (the fourth group are bandits, who're here due to suffering casualties after racket going badly) shows interest in stopping the expedition due to "only true believers being worthy of such mission" (islamists), the cataclysm "ensuing natural selection of the master race" (fascists) and cataclysm being "sacred hell on Earth" (cultists). The sole way they could've learned about it is through Mikhail Dybetsky. While Vyacheslav jumps to conclusion that he ratted them out, Nicolai sees much easier explanation: the bandits did search the ruins and found Dybetsky and his family, after which they tortured them for information, which then leaked to the other factions. So, by failing to stop the running away bandit, they screwed over the guy who actually did help them without asking anything in return. After the battle, that assumption gets confirmed when the stalkers finds three tortured corpses, which Varyag identifies as Mikhail and his family.
  • Rather than staying on guard and not going anywhere (like Man-eater told him), Varyag rushes on rescue when he hears a young girl screaming for help. It turns out to be a trap, and everyone gets captured, as they follows him (including Yuri and Andrey, who were supposed to stay in moon rover). This leads to a chain of events which ends with Andrey being killed. To be fair to Varyag, Man-eater's warning was way too vague, so he had no idea what the danger they're looking for, which is a problem in its own right.
  • During attempt to capture one of "chernoviks" for interrogation, Vyacheslav kicks the already lying guy in the face, to suppress him. As he was already injured, all it achieves is to finish him off. Man-eater was not amused.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Lynch's attempt to shut up Deladier only resulted in more people learning about his position, and sparked a civil war in Hope City, which Lynch ultimately lose.
• Nicknaming the Enemy:
  • People from Moscow calls the settlements of raiders from suburb "the roach den".
  • Morlocks in Moscow metro are often called "bastards".
  • Nicolai frequently sees rather surreal nightmares involving Rana (a girl whom he'd killed, even if in self-defence); they can't be simply dismissed as nightmares, as many things "Rana" tells him aren't supposed to be known to Nicolai, so this can't be explained as his mind making them up.
  • Entire fifteenth chapter of the first novel is dedicated to Nicolai's nightmare about the time before the catastrophe — and that the people were just as vile even back then, quite deserving all that happened to them then and is happening to them now. When he awakes, it turns out that he was in coma for three days.
  • Shortly before departure from New Republic, Nicolai sees surreal nightmare about HAARP and its monstrous "guardians". It happens long before Nicolai learns about actual Guardians, albeit those ends up being humans in cybernetic armour, with their "monstrosity" hiding inside them.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Junior says that he wishes to become Wolverine when he grows up. When told that he already wishes to become a firefighter like his dad, he says that he can be both.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: When Leafs Fall gang captures the expedition, they cruelly beats up Vyacheslav when notices his cards with naked women, and only stops from outright killing him when the others manages to distract them.
• No Longer with Us: Inverted. Hammer says that he has nobody to talk with since his sons have "departed". When asked where they departed, he says "in the better world". He explains how they've died in the next chapter.
• Noone Could Survive That: It gets stated that Man-eater had no chance to survive his tank submerging into ice-cold river which then got frozen again, no matter if his tank is amphibious or not. Yet later Nicolais sees the dreams about some person trying to warm up after going out from ice-cold water, which the epilogue confirms being about Ilya.
• Not Quite Dead:
  • Andrey's daughter Uliana turns out to be alive after all... ending up in the gang of Straw Feminist amazons.
  • The epilogue confirms that Man-eater somehow survived; he successfully reaches Nadezhdinsk afterwards.
• "Not So Different" Remark: After hearing that military in Moscow calls people who survived in metro "bastards" and refuses to let them out, killing whoever tries to escape, he remembers how the people from suburb with whom they had conflict earlier, who used eerily similar rhetoric and methods towards people of Moscow, and thinks that it's like some vicious cycle — and that it once again would end in unneeded massacre.
• Not So Invincible After All: The Guardians gets set up as The Dreaded, almost invincible force. They indeed show up armed with heavy machine guns and equipped with exoskeletons, and effortlessly mop the floor with negotiators. But Nicolai uses his savviness to kill one of them with a knife, take his gun and gun down one and wound another (who then gets killed by grenade, thrown by Deladier). Another one gets pushed onto ground by Varyag, who then finds a weak spot and slices his throat. That leaves only one (who just had his weapon damaged), who, while takes no damaged from bullets, still loses balance, and gets promptly beaten to death. This promptly breaks the myth about them being invincible, and gives a hope that, once they go on offensive, there would be chance to fight back.
• Nuke 'em: Defied by Man-eater; he refuses to take any backup nukes specifically to not give the expedition temptation to use some when they run into problems, as he believes that the world had enough. When Vyacheslav, without provocation, reminds him that he was one of those who pushed the button, Ilya head-butts him and gives the speech about why he wouldn't let it happen again precisely because he once did so.
  Man-eater: Yes. I pushed the button. I wasn't the first. But it no longer matters. I pushed the button. And this is why I say, no more bombs. Because I know how it was. Because I feel how the souls of innocent victims of this madness which pushed me to this choice are surrounding me, like a hurricane. I never forget about my responsibility, not even for a moment. And I have to bear that burden; not you, kiddo. And that's why I have the right to say. No more bombs. Only one, like unavoidable evil. Only in a case there would be no other way to destroy HAARP. Not for the sake of destruction, but for the sake of life. Only one bomb, and no choice. No temptation. No explosions, neither in my country, nor in any other, never again. Because this is our planet. And there would be no another one. And no another chance. [...] There can be no such situation when you can't solve the problem without a nuclear weapon. Everything contradicting this statement is just consequence of the humans being weak and dumb. We shouldn't be weak. And it's time to get smarter.
• Off with His Head!: Nicolai beheads Titos Gau, and brings his head to the Foreman.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Nicolai sees the large amount of fallen trees, and notices that they're all facing the same direction. Then realisation hits in, and he understands that the only thing which can cause them lie like this is the nuclear blast, which means — he's not far away from the epicentre.
  • Soon after dealing with the "Three Pigs" artel, Yuri learns that the weather continues deteriorating due to HAARP influence, and their current location would be hit with cyclone which would lower the temperature by three times — and it's already -30 degrees Celsius... Fortunately, the moon rover withstands such cold. Then, he tells even worse news: the combination of the nuclear war and HAARP provokes volcanic activity, and not just anywhere, but specifically around Yellowstone... It's possible that it would stop before the Yellowstone itself explodes, especially if they finish their mission quickly, but if it would not, then it's The End of the World as We Know It.
  • The moon rover nearly falls into a massive crater (it's presumed that there was Kirov once). For whatever reason, detectors shows that temperature here is anomalously warm (it should be -40, but it's -15). Ilya checks with a geiger counter, and everyone realises that they're better run: his detector scales up to 1000 roentgens — and it's still off the scale...
  • When investigating a forward base of Chernoviks, Varyag sees fleas; in combination with the weird symptoms shown by captive, he realises: this place is infested with plague! Then they hears the rats — thousands of rats...
  • Titos Gau, when Nicolai tracks him down, senses his pursuer, and realises that it's not just another morlock, but specifically someone related by blood to the person who single-handedly wiped out Titos' first attempt at creating his empire back at Moscow, Vladimir Vasnetsov. He's not happy with the revelation. The attempt to at least bribe Nicolai fails, too.
  • In Alaska, Varyag finds crushed Russian atomic bomber. He finds a torn apart leg, some dried out blood, and a medkit. Then the checks the medkit, and realises that it was for anti-radiation drugs. Then he checks the Geiger counter, and realises that they're better run, and run fast.
  • In Tibbets' flashback, a young lieutenant Colman panics when he hears that they're gonna nuke eastern Russia, as he knows that Russians have enough nukes to "trash all planets from Mercury to Pluto" — and he's worrying about his girl at Honolulu. Santana tries to comfort him, saying that it's possible that Hawaii would be spared, and it's him who has to worry (his mom is in Las-Vegas, and there's an air base there), but gets promptly reminded that on Hawaii, there's Pearl-Harbor. McMilan just makes fun at his situation (he's the only one who has no one to care about; he just broke up with his bitch of girlfriend), telling that his girl should tell the nukes "aloha".
• Once More, with Clarity: The fragment of diary quoted in "prologue" reappears much later, this time, actually discovered in-story, and revealed to belong to Nicolai Vasnetsov Sr; it's also slightly longer.
• Only Sane Man: While the bunker in Moscow was busy descending into madness, one person (remaining sane despite everything) continued trying to make contact with outside world for five years. He was the only person with whom cosmonauts were able to talk, until eventually the contact was lost for unknown reason. Much later it gets revealed that it was Vladimir Vasnetsov, Nicolai's uncle, who's still fighting the morlocks in metro.
• Open Mouth, Insert Foot:
  • When Andrey and Yuri run into Infernis (a cult of Antichrist worshippers), they were mistaken for hell messengers. Andrey made a mistake of correcting them and saying that they came from the sky, while demons supposedly live underground. Cue the angry cultists trying to kill them.
  • Vyacheslav can't keep his mouth shut while Oligarch describes his sellout "ideology", and insults him. Man-eater has to shut him up before it causes any conflict, cause they are unarmed and surrounded by Oligarch's people. He later explains it to him and says that while he agrees that this guy is an asshole, alienating him now would be suicidal stupidity. It's one of the few times when Varyag actually sides with Ilya.
  • When extremely ugly prostitute offers herself to Ilya, and he in mocking manner tells her to leave him alone, Nicolai calls him out on being rude. Ilya tells him that niceness is overrated and he applies it where it doesn't belong anyway. Then another prostitute approaches (less ugly, albeit missing some teeth), and Nicolai (in misguided attempt to imitate Ilya) sends her away in outright insulting manner, which provokes conflict between Varyag and the pimp, which only stops when patrol arrives, and agrees to shrug it off just this time due to pimp's bad reputation. Varyag then tells Nicolai that he's better just sit and say nothing, do nothing and don't go anywhere.
  • When Wind mentions his disabled son (he can't move, and can't talk), whom he has to care about, Nicolai asks why he didn't put him down. This understandably shocks Wind, who can't even think about offing his son, and angers Ilya.
  • When Fan Syaolun says that his daughter just died from some illness (there're many of them, both known and unknown, after the war), and that most children gets born either sick or dead, Nicolai asks why they gave birth to her, knowing that she would live in such world. Vyacheslav tries to shut him up, but he's too late. Nicolai only shuts up when Man-eater manages to switch the topic to the cause of Fan's daughter's death, and Fan, along with Yegor, goes to check whether it's indeed the plague.
  • When they barely convinces their captors in the New Republic that they're not spies and needs to meet their Foreman to talk to him, Nicolai... starts arguing with Foreman's philosophy, calling him a tyrant. Fortunately, this doesn't make him angry, plus the Foreman sees that no one's supporting Nicolai, but Nicolai gets called out on acting like this by his friends when in private.
  • The expedition (what little is left of it) meets an Aleutian hunter Joshua in Alaska, who may give them a direction towards Hope City. Varyag (clumsily, as he's not native speaker) tries to explain what he wants from him. Then Vyacheslav starts talking — in Russian — which scares the hunter, who now thinks that he just met the enemies who're wanting to hurt him. Varyag tries to calm him down, while Vyacheslav, despite repeated orders to just shut the hell up, continues intervening and scaring the guy further, ultimately resulting in him running away. Vyacheslav refuses to acknowledge being at fault there.
  • When Varyag, Nicolai and Vyacheslav gets taken into custody in Hope City, Vyacheslav creates the problems out of nowhere when he calls one of the captors (a black guy) "negro"^note  There's no established cultural taboo on the word in Russia, which is obviously the only word the black guy understands from his speech, and reacts negatively. Varyag tries to make Vyacheslav stop, but accidentally says the same word, with the same results. Fortunately, another, more reasonable man (coincidentally, also black) steps in and resolves the conflict. Then Varyag manages to finally explain to Vyacheslav that here, this word is treated as an insult.
• Origins Episode: Chapter 27 opens with flashback to how the War happened for Tibbets; the chapter itself is named after his plane, "Great Inquisitor".
• Pay Evil unto Evil:
  • Vislyayevo village was wiped out in its entirety, sparing not even children. It's hard to feel sorry for them, given that those were cannibals and rapists.
  • Back when Axai and his friends were still students, a girl from their course was raped by a group of Caucasians, so cruelly, she had to do an operation which made her unable to have children. They retaliated by finding them and beating to the point that one of rapists died in reanimation. They were never caught, and believe that they did the right thing; no one tries to disagree.
  • On Ilya's insistence, instead of executing surviving Chernoviks, they gets enslaved — but "raiders" treats them so badly, it disgusts both Nicolai and Ilya, no matter how "karmic" it may look.
  • During the war, the Foreman captured some of the people who've defected to the enemy and sold out important information (like position of the missiles, which was used; or personal information of all local military), and killed them; coincidentally, they were the family of Titos Gau, who was a traitor himself all the way back then.
• Peaceful in Death: Nicolai notices that after death, Junior's eyes no longer resembles that of insane animal; those are calm eyes of the man who's fulfilled his purpose and died in peace.
  Nicolai: Forgive us, Junior. I know, you wanted to become a superhero who saved the world. You have become. Because we're alive thanks to you. And if we're alive, then this world still has a chance to be saved...
• Pet the Dog: Ilya "Man-eater" Crest acts like a jerk most of the time, but he has some moments when he shows that he's still a human.
  • Man-eater volunteers to help with burying Andrey and Uliana, despite never being the friend with him.
  • When Ilya sees Nicolai with a teddybear he found in the crashed train, instead of laughing at him, he just says that no need to excuse himself (it would "offend" the bear), and gives Nicolai a nail and threads to fix its leg (which is about to tear off). At no point he makes fun of him, or shows that he sees it as weird or funny. When Vyacheslav comes in and starts mocking Nicolai for it, Nicolai reminds him about his now-dead girlfriend Alyona who until very death had kept a doll, and asks why he never laughed at her. Ilya sides with Nicolai, and even explains why Nicolai feels that lonely now, so he needs the teddybear as emotional crunch. After that scene, Nicolai tells him that he doesn't consider Ilya to be an "evil morlock", even if the others do. This is where their friendship starts.
  • When Rita starts showing interest to Man-eater (bordering on potential Rescue Romance), completely ignoring that Nicolai was helping, too, Nicolai starts feeling jealousy and... anger, as Man-eater previously was the one insisting that they shouldn't take women into expedition (exactly to avoid that kind of situation). Man-eater, sensing what his friend feels, tells Rita that the only reason why they found her was Nicolai's insistence on checking up the other rooms, while he was planning to just blow this place up. This redirects Rita's attention to thanking Nicolai, and defuses the situation. They then explains to her how to escape, and reminds her to take three other surviving women on her way back.
• Poor Communication Kills:
  • While en route towards Moscow, the expedition gets stopped by a sentinel called Dybetsky, who asks Varyag who they are. Varyag tries to explain that they're "searchers". When Dybetsky fails to understand what it means and Varyag tries to explain, he asks whether they're stalkers, which confuses Varyag, as he's unfamiliar with the term. Dybetsky then asks where they're going, and Varyag says that they're from the south and going towards Moscow. Dybetsky instantly jumps to conclusion that they're stalkers from Moscow (the two factions are at war), and starts shooting. Only appearance of Dybetsky's partner, Timofey Brazhnik, allows to defuse the situation, when he actually bothers to negotiate. Unfortunately, it only solves the conflict temporarily.
  • Because stalkers don't bother to explain what's going on until after putting the guns at Nicolai, it nearly results in shootout. Only then they explains that Nicolai was hit by the psi-attack by one of the local mutants, psi-wolf, and they feared that he might've become a zombie.
  • Nicolai and Vyacheslav makes a mistake of shooting the same guy simultaneously instead of picking targets, which allows one bandit to escape and alert the rest, which causes a lot of problems out of nowhere.
  • Before leaving, Man-eater doesn't bother with explaining that "Leaf fall" they should avoid is the name of a gang. This results in entire team being captured in his absence (due to running into a trap), forcing Ilya to save them. To be fair to Man-eater, he did tell them to just sit quiet and wait for him, which they disobeyed, albeit him telling this piece of information wouldn't have hurt either.
• Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure:
  • Varyag recognises "It's A Wonderful World" song when it plays over radio. Vyacheslav asks him what's it, and gets told that it's Louis Armstrong; he then asks him whether it's the same guy who was on the moon, mixing him up with Neil Armstrong.
  • Varyag removes respirator and protective glasses from a manimal; he has sickly pale skin, blackness around the eyes and black lips. Varyag jokes that they killed Marilyn Manson; Vyacheslav fails to understand what he means.
• Portmanteau: Molochites, from the words "malachite" (Ural is well-known for gems) and "moloch" (actually from the word "morlock"); they are the mutants, vaguely resembling bears, but actually sapient.
• Pre-Sacrifice Final Goodbye: Just before his Heroic Sacrifice, Man-eater addresses Nicolai the last time, and gives him his belongings. That's when Nicolai realises that he just heard his friend for the first time, and it's already too late to stop him.
• Prisoner's Dilemma: Discussed. When Nicolai tells Varyag that Ilya Crest was on a submarine which fired nuclear missiles (in fact, it was him specifically who'd fired them), and earlier set up nuclear bombs in other country during one of his operations, Varyag tells him that it was already a war, and he did as he should — something that the captain whom Man-eater killed didn't. Sure, in the perfect world, no one is gonna fight, no one is gonna kill and fire missiles, but the world isn't perfect, and the ones who were supposed to prevent the war — the politicians — chose not to. When the war is already ongoing, not firing missiles, not exploding the bombs allows the enemy to fire more missiles and explode more bombs, ultimately killing more people than if you just did your duty. Nicolai still disagrees, saying that because everyone thought that their choice doesn't matter, cause everyone else would fire anyway, so there's no point to be the one who doesn't, ultimately, everyone has fired the bombs and destroyed the world. However, after ending the discussion, Nicolai starts rethinking previous situations where people (Varyag, him, Confederates, Man-eater) have made a choice to kill — and comes to conclusion that all those deaths were unavoidable, cause otherwise, there would've been only more deaths, as the people spared would've just used the chance to murder them instead.
• Prophecy Twist: A blind old man has warned Nicolai that Ilya "Man-eater" can be doomed by "Lena". Nicolai assumed that he's meaning a woman called Lena, but turns out that it was about the river Lena. He realises it just before Man-eater blows the charges manually, dooming himself to die alongside Gau Legion in subsequent mini-tsunami.
• Rape, Pillage, and Burn:
  • Cannibals from Vislyaevo have no other ways to sustain themselves than raid the other communities for resources, women and human meat. They eventually angered the people of Nadezhdinsk enough to get wiped out, entirely, up to and including children.
  • In Siberia, there's a group which calls themselves "vandals". Their main shtick is their obsession with wiping out everything that has to do with old world, from buildings and art, to clothes and names, to even language. For obvious reasons, they depends on destroying the other communities to obtain everything.
• Real After All:
  • There's a legend about tall machine gunner walking around Moscow metro and gunning down morlocks. Nicolai actually sees him during his brief visit. Much later he learns that it was his uncle.
  • After countless rumours about "raiders", one is more insane than another, the expedition actually meets them on Ural; turns out that many of such legends are intentionally cultivated by themselves.
  • Lazar sounds like half-insane Conspiracy Theorist with typical "they're planning to install chips in us!" scaremongering. Then turns out that he actually worked on those chips, and they're used in the Guardians' equipment (the Guardians are just humans in power armour, similar to what's used by the Brotherhood).
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  • Man-eater starts telling Pentisilea why she's a scum and deserves to die. She manages to redirect fire back at him, by reminding him about his role in the nuclear war (clearly being aware of his past — possibly, from Irina Listopad).
  • Nicolai tries to call Ilya out on killing Uliana. Man-eater, in turn, reminds him how he'd killed Rana, and tells that while he had killed a zombie, an enemy and the killer of their friend (she was Uliana... in some other life), Nicolai had killed an innocent cripple who only tried to avenge her father, who was literally only person in her horrible life who cared about her in at least some way.
  • When patrol officer attacks Nicolai and his friends over not working on cleaning up the mess (ignoring the fact that defenders had won thanks to them, while said officer didn't participate at all), Nicolai calls him out.
    Nicolai: Listen to me, pal. I was shot by the snipers. I was shot by the grenadiers. Hundreds of guns were aimed at me. And I was tearing apart your enemies with bare hands, defending your Babylon. You want to scare me with your bullshit? Better tell me, pal, why the hell your sentinels are sleeping on their posts? Why I was the first one to notice the vandal attack? Why I was the first one to fight? Why, while your guys were busy crapping themselves, only my friends came up with an idea to bring in a tank to a crossroad and fight like their home and their families are here? And you now dare to blame me for something?
  • When the expedition decides that they can't rely on the Brotherhood (and don't like them much in general), Nicolai tells them what he thinks about them — and they have nothing to counter it.
    Nicolai: I'm glad that my father didn't stay with you! I wouldn't have forgiven him for such cowardice. Not that he can be like you! You've forgotten about honour and valour, duty and loyalty! And that beyond your imagined paradise, there's the real world!
  • Man-eater gives lengthy speech to the prisoners whom he just freed from chernovik custody, telling them why their inability to cooperate is the main reason for their problems. It works.
  • Nicolai reacts extremely hostile to the Foreman, calling him "tyrant" to his face; fortunately, the Foreman doesn't take offence, seeing him as just immature (unlike his followers). Later, Man-eater calls Nicolai out, saying that it's another case of his pride: Nicolai grew to view himself as messiah (even if it was Ilya himself who called him that, ironically), and locals "suddenly" refusing to worship him and reacting to uninvited guests during wartime with suspicion irritates him, hence this behaviour. He says that had the locals actually embraced him as their hero, he wouldn't give a crap about local regime, and says that people like this are the ones who becomes the true tyrants.
  • When Nicolai sees the disabled children in Alaska, with tons of radiation-induced defects varying from minor to debilitating, and interprets being shown this as attempt to guilt-trip him (those are the results of a nuclear war, in which USA and Russia were on the opposite sides), he reacts aggressively and tries to give Ilya-like lecture about humans wrecking their health for years, but never acknowledging this until now, very angrily and very rudely. Fortunately, no one understands him, and then Varyag steps in to shut him up.
• Recognizable by Sound: Ever since the first attack by psi-wolf which Nicolai suffered in Moscow, his hallucinations starts with signature sound of rusty teeter-totter. He eventually catches on.
• Red Herring:
  • There are clues that machine gunner in metro was Man-eater, but it turns out to be another guy (Ilya actually met him once, and was nearly killed); there were also speculations that he might be Nicolai Vasnetsov Sr, which also gets disproven. Much later he gets all but confirmed to be Nicolai's uncle Vladimir.
  • In-universe, the USA actively spreads up false rumours and theories to conceal their real activities behind so thick layers of lies and bullshit that self-respecting people soon stops bothering with digging further. Area 51 and UFO are amongst most popular covers, and Collider gets mentioned as another one. And HAARP was surrounded by so many myths that no one managed to discover its true purpose before the war.
• Red Sky, Take Warning: HAARP turns sky red in its area of effect, as sinister reminder about it slowly destroying the planet, as well as a mark of the lethal zone around it which would kill any intruder.
• The Remnant:
  • One Russian atomic boat, and one American carrier chose to unite after realising that the war has ended and they have no one to trust but each other.
  • The people in bunker in Moscow are what's remained of the old government and their army. It's unclear whether they're still alive, though, as the last time time they had any contact with anyone was fifteen yeas ago, and by that point, most of the bunker descended into madness.
  • Confederation is the faction uniting what's left of various armed forces in Moscow — the army, the police and cossacks.
  • The New Republic was created by the remnants of a military regiment stationed there, led not by actual high-ranking officers (who chose to backstab them), but by the local foreman, who was the only one who ever cared about their well-being, and became their leader when the world went to hell.
  • "The Guardians" are the Private Military Contractors once charged with protecting HAARP. They're still following their old orders.
• Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves: After Turpo fakes his defection to kill one of Chernoviks' officer (Hog) and buy the rest the time to react (at the cost of his life, another guy who volunteered to join the Chernoviks (genuinely) tries to run towards the bandits in hope for protection, but they, expecting him to pull off something similar, just guns him down.
• Rodents of Unusual Size:
  • Rats near Nadezhdinsk have mutated; they're larger, better withstands cold (due to longer fur, shorter and larger tails, and bigger noses), lives in the large network of tunnels they dig up in the forest, and hunts in packs on dogs, humans and even young moose.
  • Rats in Ekaterinburg are huge (meter-long, without tail), and spreads extremely lethal mutated plague. Fortunately, they were exiled to the old mine. Unfortunately, the only thing which keeps them there is a psi-emitter, which only one old man knows how to use. They seemingly gets exterminated by the Brotherhood once it becomes clear that they can't be contained there.
• Rousing Speech: Just before facing Gau Legion in battle, the Foreman gives the speech to his men about that they're not fighting just for their lives, they're fighting for their homeland, against those who came to take it away and enslave them. It has the same unifying effect as what Titos Gau has told before to his Legion, but without any mind control involved — because his people sincerely believes in their leader and their cause.
• Rule of Symbolism:
  • The story starts in the city called "Nadezhdinsk"; "Nadezhda" means "hope" in Russian. The name is rather symbolic, in more ways than one, especially given that hope (or lack of thereof) is one of the central themes:
    • The city was spared a nuclear strike, despite having a military garrison, allowing the people living there to survive the nuclear war in relative safety and still have some hope for survival in the future, albeit it slowly dies, as the people there are dying (from more than nine thousand at the beginning, to seven and half hundred people now, twenty years after).
    • It's from where the heroes starts their journey, in desperate attempt to give the world another chance. In the end, the hope finally reaches it when the spring comes.
    • Close to the HAARP, there's the Hope City — the town, the name of which literally makes it American Nadezhdinsk. The symbolism gets pointed out by Varyag.
  • Ilya's original callsign, "Achilles", fits his backstory quite well:
    • Like namesake hero, Ilya was nearly invulnerable, save for one weakness (an "Achilles heel") — his love to Irina Listopad. He'd killed her, and abandoned the name afterwards — fittingly, as he no longer has that weakness.
    • One of the myths about Achilles says that he only realised that he loves the queen of amazons when he killed her; it matches him killing the one he loved (coincidentally, also a queen of amazons). That one is outright pointed out by Ilya.
    • Pentisilea chose her name after the queen of amazons, unaware that she was killed by Achilles who stabbed her in the neck with his spear. Man-eater (who used to be known as "Achilles" some time ago) kills her by stabbing in the neck with knife. Though, unlike the mythos, he feels nothing but disdain towards her (he loved her predecessor, coincidentally also killed by him).
  • Nicolai meets a girl named Tabitha, who's also suffering from innate radiation-caused disabilities, just like Rana ("Wound" in Russian) before her. Then turns out that she was nicknamed... Wound. She calls him "saviour", and Nicolai feels that it's not a coincidence (Rana constantly talks with him about his mission in his sleep, and Man-eater used to call him "Blissful"), and wonders whether she's a seer (some of the locals believes that she actually is).
• Sadistic Choice: Uliana has to choose: whether she kills her father, or she herself gets killed by Pentisilea. Her own father begs her to shoot if it's the only way she can survive herself. She shoots, and seemingly gets irreversibly indoctrinated by her Evil Mentor.
• Sand Worm: Huge mutant worms which moves under snow and ambushes their prey, impaling it with their "beaks". Unlike the normal fauna, its origin can't be traced to any pre-war animal, and is speculated to be related to chemical industry near Novomoscowsk, which, in combination with radiation, gave birth to some really bizarre nastiness. However, later it gets revealed that they're the product of genetic enginery, and based on some species of cold-resistant worms, which then likely mutated further due to exposure to radiation. They went extinct once the endless winter finally died out.
• Sanity Slippage:
  • Before deciding to return, the cosmonauts were able to contact with survivors from some bunker in Moscow. Judging from that transmission, people in the bunker were... not exactly sane, to say the least. And as the time went on, it slowly became worse, until the connection was lost entirely. Later it gets explained that their madness was a result of psychotronic weapon, and the sole sane guy with radio was Vladimir Vasnetsov, Nicolai's uncle.
    Andrey Makarov: As much as I can tell, the people in the bunker were not exactly sane. And with each session it was becoming more and more apparent. Many of them have leaved families behind. Some even went nuts due to what happened. Some due to reverting the rockets from already burning Moscow to yet unharmed Kaluga. I think, they feared all those who're not in the bunker. Who are outside. Believed them to be mutants or something. Or that they wanted to pay back for failing to protect Moscow, and destroying Kaluga by themselves. As much as I can tell from voice, they'd drunk a lot. Likely mixing alcohol with some strong drugs from military medkits. Sometimes, we heard prayers. Someone tried to beg the God. Like if He can hear them better through the secret radio. Some have trying to say something, only to snap into hysterical crying. Sometimes, some people turned on the radio just to start laughing into it. We were able to talk to only one of them. The others were scaring us with their madness...
  • Nicolai was always weird, but in Babylon he notices that he's weirdly angry and aggressive, and understands that it's a first sign of him succumbing and becoming a morlock.
  • Soon after battle with Guardians, Nicolai starts seeing hallucinations of some dog-like monsters from his dream attacking them, and screams for others to go, while he would "hold them off". He has to be snapped out of it by Varyag after he wastes entire clip on firing into air. Nicolai realises that he's growing insane due to HAARP affecting his mind. He thinks that, given enough time, he may turn into morlock completely.
• Savage Wolf: Wolves (now called "lupuses") have survived near Nadezhdinsk, and now hunts on any prey they can find. They ceased to hunt in packs (in fact, two wolves can't live together without turning on each other), now being closer to wolverines in their behaviour. At least one of the cities to the north also has lupuses, but those did not abandon pack tactic, and thus are much more dangerous; there're even rumours that they can hypnotise their prey, which later gets confirmed when the expedition reaches Moscow, where all wolves are now like this.
• Saying Too Much: When Philippe suddenly joins the camp of those insisting on HAARP being dangerous, Judge Lynch tries to defend it by insisting that it's the protection from "Last Ivan", the Russian nuclear submarine which (somehow) still hides under ice, ready to launch the nuclear strike on Alaska as soon as they let their guard down and disable HAARP (even twenty years after the nuclear war). When Hornet says that such submarines don't exist, Lynch snaps at him and screams that CIA failed to predict that the Russians would still have enough strength to strike back when nuked... He suddenly shuts up, realising what he just said, but Raymond pushes him further: he spent twenty years insisting that the Russians hit America first, but now just confirmed that it was a lie! Lynch tries to defend himself by stating that it was simply a faux pas (he has no means to know such information for real!), but then he gets pushed about the "Last Ivan", about which he somehow knows, despite something like that being supposed to be the enemy's top-secret weapon.
• The Scapegoat:
  • After the nuclear war, the people outside of societies controlled by the military tend to put the blame for everything what happened on any militaries, regardless of whether they (or even their branches) had anything to do with nuclear strikes.
    • In western Russia, particularly hated are the people from missile defence regiments: some hates them for failing to protect Moscow, some for the fact that said failed attempt resulted in Kaluga being nuked by the missile intended for (already screwed) Moscow; no one cares that they did this by accident.
    • Pilots are common target: people sees them as participants in the nuclear massacre, not giving a crap about on which side they were; in particular, in Alaska, other pilots from John Tibbets' crew were lynched by an angry mob.
  • People from Moscow suburb hates all people from Moscow, to the point that they're fine with attacking and killing convoys with refugees and taking their goods, seeing it as "justice". They blames the entire population for the corruption of oligarchs and government (because of whom, the people from outside of major cities constantly struggles with extreme poverty), failing to see that common people never see the money they have supposedly "stolen".
    • Two surviving members of Tibbets' crew, McMilan and Logan, were lynched once by the angry mob, for whom the fact that they were the crew of a nuclear bomber was enough of excuse, and doesn't matter on which side they were.
  • People in Moscow can't agree on just one target to blame for their problems:
    • They are tend to put the blame for collapse of the old society on the elders.
    • In the early days, there were massive ethnic cleansing, as attempt to find someone who may be scapegoated and killed to "let steam out". Some people, called by umbrella term "fascists", continues doing it even now, with each group having their own "kill on sight" targets.
    • After the war, the people related to those who died during 1993 uprising (killed by police and outright mercenaries) have gathered all officials they could find (universally — some low-rank average joes who were too unlucky to get the clerk job before the war), and executed them for the things which happened twenty years before the war, and to which they were unrelated at all.
  • Various all-female "amazon" groups in general don't like men much, but Leaf Fall group led by Pentiselea goes a step further and puts the blame for all evil in the humanity's history on males, down to and including nuclear war, and decides that they no longer have the right to live (and can only be used for procreation).
  • When Yuri shoots himself in the head, Varyag puts his frustration on Nicolai, who was supposed to watch over him; Ilya calms him down and tells that it was impossible to predict or prevent, cause he had more than enough time to prepare, and it takes only few seconds to grab the gun and fire.
  • When Vyacheslave learns that Tibbets is a former pilot of nuclear bomber, he reacts very aggressively, seeing him as living personification of everything bad happening to him and his country, and has to be stopped from attacking. Tibbets reacts with understanding, as he knows what and why he's feeling. Tibbets did nuke Russian Far-East, but he never was in European part of Russia.
  • Both Lynch and Madlen insists on killing Varyag, Nicolai and Vyacheslav as "the enemies" (Madlen even calls them "war criminals", despite how little sense it makes), not caring that they've nothing to do with the people who ordered or performed nuclear strikes. This makes Nicolai realise that, had he survived the battle against Gau, Man-eater would've refused to follow them to Alaska, knowing that if anyone learns his story, it would compromise their mission. Madlen insists on killing at least Varyag, as he has military background, but Tibbets defends him, stating that he's an interceptor, not bomber; his role was to stop bombers, not bombing himself. When he also says that he would rather call him friend than enemy, Madlen tries to accuse him of "betrayal".
• Schmuck Bait: In Moscow, the expedition sees a man hanged by islamists, and Nicolai insists that they should take him off; he gets talked out of it, as Varyag says that whoever did this may be waiting in ambush to take them out. Soon they see how dogs who tries to drag a corpse lying nearby, only for it to explode, after which it gets pointed that recently, islamists started booby-trapping corpses, as a trap for their enemies.
• The Scottish Trope: Madlen insists that directly mentioning the Guardians is "forbidden", as if it would cause something bad. No one takes her seriously.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: When the battle goes south, Titos Gau tries to escape on a helicopter, to start anew in another settlement, where he would brainwash the people and create a new Legion. The plan fails, because Nicolai finds him first.
• Sdrawkcab Name: In Nicolai's Nightmare Sequences, Rana often pronounces the word "human" backwards, referring to how the world of the living and world of the dead are mirroring each other, and how humans have their own dark reflections, which shows their true selves — their dark selves.
• Shaped Like Itself: When asked what "spindrift clouds" are like, Varyag can only say that they're... "spindrift".
• Shoot the Dog:
  • Discussed regarding nuclear war. Nicolai, when he learns about Man-eater being the guy who launched the nukes from one of the submarines, tells about this to Varyag... and Varyag says that Man-eater was right. He states that preventing the war was up to politicians, who failed their mission. But once the war started, it was Ilya's duty as a military to do what's ordered and fire — because if he wouldn't, the nukes he was supposed to fire wouldn't hit the air base, the command centre, the nuke silos, etc, turning five nukes he didn't fire into hundred fired by the enemy, who certainly wouldn't have such qualms. Ilya, who has enchanced senses due to being a morlock, comes out and joins the discussion, stating pretty much the same thing, while also stating that he knows that what he did is horrible and he hates himself for it, but he believes that by not doing it, he would've made the situation worse.
  • The Foreman insists that using Nicolai without him knowing was necessary: the only chance to deal with Gau was to trick them into believing that defection is genuine, and make them panic over revelation about the nuclear bomb and follow into the trap. If Nicolai and others would've known about the plan, they would've refused to cooperate, wasting the only chance — and the expedition also needs it, cause only Gau have the fuel they need.
  • A captain of one American submarine refused to fire nukes, which nearly sparked mutiny. Instead, a football match was suggested to decide whether nukes would be fired, or not (as both sides are roughly equal in numbers). The anti-nukes side lost, but then just gunned the winners down and deserted.
    Nicolai: So, to stop violence, one should use violence?
    Varyag: The question of the millennium.
• Shout-Out:
  • Multiple references towards Metro 2033 (fittingly, cause There Would Be No Second Chance was originally intended to be set in its setting):
    • Snow Leopard used to be a fan of unspecified books about post-apocalyptic Moscow metro before the nukes hit. Those books are all but explicitly stated to be the "Metro 2033 Universe" series, the expanded universe of the original Metro 2033 novel.
    • When visiting the cosmonauts' old house, it has many messages on the wall. One of them is from Artyom (highly implied to be Wind), who addresses Dmitri, saying that he was wrong, and no one had survived in metro; Artyom is the protagonist of original Metro 2033 novel (and its video game adaptations).
    • The girl whom Nicolai meets in Babylon reads a book about the post-apocalyptic world, where people only survived in one city's metro, and now besieged by mutants. Description matches Metro 2033.
  • The underground cannibals living in the Moscow metro are called morlocks; the name was explicitly taken from The Time Machine, in-universe.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: When Nicolai corners him, Titos Gau tries to tell him why they two are superior to other humans, and should unite to conquer them, arguing that the homeland had betrayed them first, so it's only natural to strike back. Nicolai counters all his "arguments", and tells him why he sucks. Then he flat-out tells him that he doesn't give a crap about his arguments at all, as all that matters is that because of him, his friend has died. Then he chops him with an axe.
  Nicolai: You got it wrong, Titos. You mistook political system and homeland. Mistook vileness and conscience. Honour and filth. Mistook a cheap whore with own mother. The ones like you have betrayed and sold out the army positions. The ones like you have sold out the radio and optics. The ones like you have backstabbed their people and made them into slaves and livestock. The ones like you have nothing except for their own skin. But they want more. They want it all. The beasts like you are the ones to blame for everything.
• Silly Rabbit, Cynicism Is for Losers!: Nicolai's cynicism and "why bother, we're doomed" mindset clashes with the other members of their expedition, as well as other people they meets:
  • Varyag tells Nicolai that it's inevitable that many humans don't care about anyone but themselves, and that their mission is too important to risk it by sparing those who are trying to kill them. But when Nicolai questions the necessity of saving the world at all if humans are like this, Varyag says that not all humans are; and if they find even one good man or woman on their way, it means that it's already not for nothing. He also tells him that his ability to feel sorry for having to kill is actually a good thing, as it means that he's still a human.
  • When Nicolai starts questioning Fan why he gave birth to a baby if he knows that it's almost doomed to be sick and have short and filled with pain life, neither Fan nor Man-eater reacts well:
    • Fan gives Nicolai a speech about important to leave some legacy after yourself: if you don't produce the next generation, once you die, your bloodline dies with you. Yegor just asks whether Nicolai has some mental issues, and Varyag flatly says "yes".
      Fan: But... Why live then? Why we all live? [...] When time comes, we would die and leave nothing after us? Leave nobody after us? Humans would all died out, and that's all? [...] Why to live then? Survive for longer and die? That's our fate?
    • Man-eater just tells Nicolai what he thinks about his "philosophy" (which actually snaps Nicolai out of it):
      Nicolai: Am I not right? Am I not right?! Why give birth to suffering and pain?! Why?!
      Man-eater: Why we want to destroy the HAARP? Because this is hope and that same "ghost of a chance"! This is a fight of life against the death! This is a triumph of life over the death!
      Nicolai: But it's the death which is triumphing!
      Man-eater: This is only your perception! Only what you want to see! You're just weak, admit it! And just shoot yourself in the head and calm down!
  • Man-eater, in private, gives Nicolai a lengthy lecture about why they should never give up and that Nicolai's defeatism is the result of him relying only on cold rational logic, which sees inevitability of death as the "proof" that life is pointless. If they prevail and destroy the HAARP, then, regardless of what happens to humanity, there would be a chance for life itself — as it always finds a way; as example, he tells a story how he visited Pripyat before the war, and found that its nature actually started recovering, which deeply affected his worldview.
• Skewed Priorities:
  • General Basov still can't leave the past behind, and it affects how he sees things; he's opposed by the cosmonauts Andrey Makarov and Yuri Alexeev, who thinks that the people like Basov are the ones who caused the war.
    • Andrey sees the crew of a Russian submarine and American carrier uniting as the sign that not all hope is lost for humanity, as it can set aside prior hatred and unite for survival. General Basov sees only treason. This time, Yuri gets angry and just shows him the photos of devastated planet.
    • After hearing how screwed up the rest of the world is... general Basov asks who did the first strike, and whether Russia managed to "properly" retaliate. Again, he gets called out on this: with nuclear war screwing over the whole humanity, such things as revenge no longer matters!
  • Man-eater calls Svyatogor out on not providing his men or special suits, pointing that if the expedition fails to destroy HAARP, the Brotherhood's war with molochites would no longer matter. Svyatogor counters it by stating that this war would continue even after destruction of HAARP, and if they lose here, molochites would finish what was started by the nuclear war and then HAARP — wipe out humans.
  • When going to take a hidden plane, the expedition and "raiders" finds the traces of unknown two people being there, on skis; they then finds that one of them had died after hitting a booby-trap, and his partner run away in fear — but not before taking the skis. One of the "raiders" points that panic often works like this, and mentions how the day when bombs fell, one guy, instead of going to the shelter, run to clean up his face and wash teeth, stating that it's his last chance, ignoring all attempts to calm him down; he didn't make it to the shelter in time.
• Smurfette Principle: Subverted; it seems that Nordica would go with the expedition, becoming the sole female member of the team, but she refuses, saying that she has to care about two old people whom she had "adopted", plus, you know, Achilles is too big for moon rover. Additionally, Man-eater says against taking her, claiming that woman in the male-only team is the receipt for disaster: there would be conflicts, cause everyone would instinctively see her as "his" and envy the rest (and this is the reason why seamen don't let women on board, not them being "weak").
• So Happy Together: Vyacheslav was in love with a girl named Alyona, and hoped to some day to start a family together. She had died in the HAARP-induced earthquake. Due to expedition being gathered in a rush, he only gets the time to mourn her when they makes the stop in Moscow.
• Stopped Caring: Besides despair being one of the central themes, some characters states it as their main reason to refuse doing something:
  • Mikhail Dybetsky outright tells that he doesn't see any reason to bother with saving humanity at this point, as heroism never pays for itself, while the whole situation is entirely humanity's own fault. While helping someone on a local level is fine, he's not interested in something large-scale.
  • The cosmonauts decides to stay in Moscow rather than going towards Alaska to destroy HAARP, cause they see no reason to keep fighting after losing the only people they cared about; they would rather stay here, where the ashes of their families are buried. They do continue with the expedition when it goes into conflict with bandits, as they're not that desperate to risk dealing with them.
• Straw Feminist: Amongst the other groups, Moscow has several all-female gangs (so-called "Amazons"). They have varying opinions on men, but generally, males better avoid them. One of the worst of them is the gang of Leaf Fall, which sees males as disposable partners for procreation at best. Their hatred of males goes to really absurd levels (owning it to their current leader, Pentisilea).
• Suddenly Shouting: Yezhov goes from calm, gentle and almost friendly, yet threatening tone to screaming, slapping and acting openly hostile without warning.
• Suicide Mission: Raymon points that Varyag has no chance to make it back live once it gets revealed that he plans to use a nuclear bomb, whatever noble his cause is. He only tells that he knows. Raymon tries to tell how shocked he's by this sacrifice, and Nicolai snaps at him, saying that it's time to start caring about something other than own skin, or the world is doomed.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: The end of eternal winter didn't miraculously make the life for people in Nadezhdinsk easier; quite the opposite, in fact, as people have to readapt on the go: sudden change in climate always brings problems, and ruins the established way of life, requiring re-adaptation. Ice melting caused flood, which killed many people; then that flood dried up, and now there're swamps and dirty lakes with infections in them — infections likes warm. Without snow, there's no an easy way to gather water, as aforementioned swamps and lakes don't provide nearly as much. The snow worms died out, but got replaced by the other fauna which migrated in search for prey.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: When Nicolai stops acting like a moron after Man-eater's supposed death, Vyacheslav takes this role instead — complete with inability to keep his mouth shut when needed, "why bother struggling if life sucks" mentality and stupid recklessness. Nicolai lampshades this (amongst them, lupuses with mind-control powers).
  Nicolai: Strange to hear this from you, Slavik. Usually, this defeatist emotional crap goes from me.
• Take a Third Option:
  • With four factions at once demanding to handle over the expedition members to them, each being hostile to the Confederation (and to each other), the Confederates decides to just reject all four demands (and maybe provoke infighting). It backfires.
  • Lynch's group argues for keeping HAARP running, Varyag insists that it must be destroyed. Raymon's group instead suggests to go and negotiate with Guardians, so they can decide what to do next, with which Deladier (a member of Lynch's group) agrees, thus leaving Lycnh and Madlen outvoted. Later Raymon reveals that he still believes that HAARP must be shut down (in fact, it shouldn't have been launched), but stating this directly would've caused more harm than good.
• Taking Up the Mantle:
  • It's heavily implied that Nicolai Vasnetsov Sr. at some point replaced his brother Vladimir as the guy who's cleaning up Moscow metro from morlocks: besides them both being members of Artel, it's known that at some point, the metro machine gunner had disappeared, only to reappear several years later and resume his activities.
  • When Nicolai tracks down Titos Gau after Man-eater's death when fighting the Gau Legion, he introduces himself as "Blissful Nicolai Vasnetsov". When Titos points that it's rather long, he tells him that he can call him "Man-eater". The chapter is even called "Succession". He indeed "adopts" some of Ilya's traits from now on.
• Taking You with Me:
  • Captain Guslyakov gets mortally wounded by unknown worm-like mutant which ambushed him from the snow. Knowing that he's doomed, he grabs two grenades and explodes them, killing himself and wounding the worm. Unfortunately, the mutant survives, and has to be put down by the rest of the team.
  • Boris Kretchetov blew up himself in Balkans to deal with a mob of cannibals, who were buried in ensuing avalanche.
  • Invoked by Ilya when patrol gets particularly aggressive, as he puts out a grenade without a ring, and dares them to shoot him. Later turns out that grenade was a training dummy; he had found one in a tank while using it.
  • In Alaska, when Vyacheslav gets seriously injured (to the point he may die), and Varyag gets into trouble on the way to Hope City, Nicolai addresses the planet, knowing it can hear him, saying that if any of his friends dies again, he would abandon the mission and just explode the nuke right there, in the forest, dooming the planet to die, torn apart by HAARP.
• Tempting Fate:
  • Man-eater chose specific escape route from Moscow, knowing that there are too many mutants to be attacked by humans (which he believes to be worse). Varyag reacts badly, and, when Ilya assures him that everything would be fine, asks him what would they would do if something breaks in their moon rover. Cue moon rover getting stuck, requiring manual repair — outside. Then the moon rover gets attacked by morlocks. Then someone starts shooting, despite all Man-eater's claims.
    Man-eater: Okay, just don't beat me all at once.
  • Nicolai replies to Vyacheslav's paranoia regarding Joshua by saying that he can't possible catch up with them, as he has only skis, while they're on moon-rover. Cue Joshua revealing that he has dogs-pulled sleds, on which he promptly escapes. Though Varyag points that it still wouldn't give him much of advantage.
• And Then What?: In Alaska, Vyacheslav finally breaks and questions what's the point of their expedition, and how they're gonna live once it's done. He beleives that they can save humanity, but they can't change humanity, and that the melted ice would just flood the planet. Varyag insists that they're saving the planet itself, as it's a choice between a ghost of a chance and no chance, while Nicolai gets surprised to see it from usually optimistic Vyacheslav, saying that typically it's him who says such "defeatist crap".
  Vyacheslav: Imagine what Yuri and Andrey felt when, fifteen years later, came back home? And saw that there's no home. Nothing. [...] What cosmonauts felt when they made it? Do you know what I feel now, when I made it?! I feel that my leg is hurt like hell! What I want to eat! And that I smell like urine! Is it normal?! That's how people should live?!
  Varyag: What's wrong with you, Slavik? Calm down...
  Vyacheslav: All my life, I felt that living is possible. Even in such conditions. The nuclear winter, so what. We're alive. And so, we can live. As long as we have a goal in life. And then it would be beautiful, even in the stinky dirty basement. And we had that goal. [...] Life is beautiful when it has a purpose. But I'd say, it's all a bullshit... Why the cosmonauts have died? Because they've reached their goal. Did what they aimed to. And got disappointed. And that's it. The lift just lost its purpose. [...] So, we made it. So, we came to agreement with the locals. We would explode the HAARP. And then what? That's all? We'd die like the cosmonauts, from the disappointment? Because HAARP destruction wouldn't bring us paradise. And people wouldn't stop tearing each other apart. We would change nothing. Maybe, even make things worse...
• Third-Person Flashback: At multiple points, Nicolai relives the past events (specifically, of others' past) as if he witnesses them himself:
  • When entering metro, Nicolai sees a vision of it being nuked twenty years ago. He has no idea why he's seeing those, especially since he never was in metro in his entire life, and thus isn't supposed to know how things looked.
  • When exploring Arkaim, Nicolai sees his father and two other people, Dmitri Ermakov and Gleb Lodzinsky, exploring the Arkaim bunker. That's how he learns that it's the place where snow worms and molochites were created.
  • Nicolai learns Junior's backstory by witnessing his life this way. He uses it to awake his sleeping memory, which later saves his and his friends' lives.
• Throw-Away Country:
  • We get some background mentions of the other countries visited by Andrey and Yuri during their journey, which were wiped out by the nuclear strikes; while India managed to survive and even avoid descending into barbarism, many others were not so lucky:
    • In what was Pakistan once, now three factions are fighting for control: the Holy Jihad (Always Chaotic Evil zealots), the Islamic brotherhood (refugees from Iran, benevolent faction which tries to restore civilisation and build a new, peaceful society), and so-called Shaitan-Legion, which is actually the united remnants of the crew from Russian submarine and American carrier. The latter two later united against Jihad, seemingly putting an end to it.
    • The only European region out of those which Andrey and Yuri have visited with any survivors found was Balkans. And those were cannibals whom they only destroyed due to Heroic Sacrifice of their third comrade, who tag along from Shaitan-Legion.
    • Large areas in the Middle East literally collapsed underground; Andrey presumes that it's due to aggressive oil mining creating massive empty areas beneath the earth. The areas which didn't collapse due to still having oil deposits, now burning non-stop. Out of specific countries, he mentions Turkey, which now has enormous abyss on its territory, deep enough that when he tried to throw a rock, he didn't hear it hitting the bottom.
    • Some bright head had an idea of dropping a nitrogen bomb into Black Sea. The result was that water evaporated, allowing all the toxins in its depths to go out and poison the nearby areas. No life survived there.
  • The Chinese guy Fan Syaolun, whom the expedition saves from pursuing Chernoviks, tells that shortly before the war, China was hit by some epidemic of unknown new virus, most likely artificial, as it targeted nearly universally only Chinese, with others rarely catching it (and of those who did anyway, most survived), while for Chinese it was extremely lethal. The suspects are the USA, Russia — or China itself (Varyag suspects that it might've been a botched attempt to release something benevolent); now, it's no longer possible to say for sure, not that anyone cares. The guy himself knows little, as he was only seven years-old when the war has happened, he was in Russia with parents.
• Time Skip: Epilogue happens 1,5 months after the end of the final chapter; by this time, the ice already started melting.
• Title Drop:
  • The phrase "there would be no second chance" frequently shows up in the novel, particularly towards the end. Of note:
    • Yuri says that "there would be no second chance" when he asks general Basov in assisting with preparations for expedition to Alaska.
    • Shortly before his Heroic Sacrifice, Nicolai finishes his father's notebook with his own words, with the phrase being one of the last words he writes.
    • The phrase ends the novel.
  • During Nicolai's fewer dream while he's in coma, he sees a man reading a book... titled "There would be no second chance".
  • Part two of novel has the words "hell is already there" both as the writing which Nicolai leaves on the wall during infiltration on Chernoviks' base, and as one of the chapters' title.
  • Chapter 27 is called "Great Inquisitor"; it's the name of Tibbets' bomber, and, besides mention of it during flashback at beginning of the chapter, Tibbets would use the phrase to describe himself as part of his speech about Varyag being his Good Counterpart.
• Together in Death:
  • Yuri insists on burying Andrey and his daughter Uliana together; it's the only way they can ever be together...
  • In his final vision, Nicolai sees that Andrey finally reunited with his wife and daughter. In the same vision, he also sees Junior with his parents, all three are happy (with Junior once again being human). Nicolai himself hopes that after death, he would stay with Rana.
• Token Heroic Orc: Man-eater states that he's (technically) a morlock, but he's not a "bastard" morlock: while most people, when morlockified, gets consumed by their inner evil, some manages to resist and preserve humanity, him including. Even they would turn into "bastard" morlocks as soon as they let their guard down, as the evil never dies, only lays low.
• Too Awesome to Use: In-Universe; Man-eater deliberately refuses to take any backup nukes, specifically to discourage any "we have spare bombs, so can use one to kill those guys" thoughts — as this world has suffered enough. Vyacheslav tries to disagree, which provokes Ilya to explode at him with a speech why he's against idea to use the nuke at all if they can handle the problem without it.
  Man-eater: Temptation. What is temptation? So, let's assume that we have not one, but two bombs. Three. And then? On our way, we would meet various other assholes, like cannibals, bandits, molochites, vandals... And everyone would feel temptation. It's so easy to get rid of the enemies by incinerating them. With zero efforts. Without wasting energy and ammo. We just have to step away and explode it. Isn't it so?
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • Nicolai hears a woman screaming in the middle of the night (while standing on guard), and, without warning anyone, goes into metro to investigate (knowing how dangerous it is). He fails to save anyone and barely manages to get away himself, while also receiving (thankfully minor) radiation poisoning. He deservedly gets called a moron by Varyag.
  • Despite being told to stay in the cage and do not look on what's going on in the room (soon afterwards, the base gets attacked by psi-wolves), Vyacheslav still tries (and gets called out on his dangerous idiocy); Nicolai does the same. Thankfully for him, it's when Man-eater started finishing off the wolves, so he avoids being zombified.
  • Despite being told to not interfere, Nicolai tries to "help" and throws a grenade into a house where Yuri, Varyag and Man-eater are; but he throws it so poorly, it ricochets back to him, and he only survives because Varyag goes out and throws the grenade away (risking it blowing up in his hand) — and starts kicking him while angrily calling him out on his idiocy. Man-eater calms Varyag down, but then says that had Varyag not started kicking him, he would've done that himself.
  • Babylonians didn't bother to prepare for possible counterattack from vandals. Their raid had wiped out vandal base (along with their families), and yet they didn't expect them to attack (Ilya points out that it's the only option vandals have left; conquering Babylon is a "do or die" task for them, plus, now it's personal for them). And the people who were supposed to stay on watch and alert defenders were either lazy, cowardly or both. The sole reason why siege fails is due to Varyag's team fighting on the frontline, with the help from few sane and competent denizens and guests, like Boar or amazons.
  • When Nicolai tells the first Gau he meets, Weynard, that he was just brought there and dropped by republicans, with Gau agitational poster, Weynard tells him to never say that version anywhere it can be heard: it marks him as blatant attempt to send a spy, which would lead to his execution; he instead gives him a cover story about how he escaped on his own.
• Too Good for Exploiters: Two different characters states that reason why humanity is so slow in seeking alternative energy sources is the combination of monopolists' greed and simple laziness.
  • The New Republic uses experimental nitrogen-based power plant; they receive nitrogen right from the water. The Foreman explains that the technology was ready long ago, but implementation was vetoed by the people profiting from traditional energy sources. Now they're gone, so people are free to do as they please.
  • Lazar says that locals don't support him in looking for the other energy sources than HAARP, as they don't need them now, and "tomorrow" would be tomorrow. He also mentions oil: everyone knew that it's gonna run out, but right now, there's enough, and that's all they care about.
• Too Much Information: Timofey starts going into details about his daughter's health problems (down to and including how her blood issues affects menstruation); Dybetsky calls him out on it, as they were about to eat.
• To the Pain: Downplayed; Yezhov doesn't describe the torture he's about to inflict, but shows his tools in such a way that Nicolai would see them all and imagine all the horrors by himself. Idea is to try and break him through terror alone.
• Translation Convention: The chapters set in Alaska mostly have locals talking in English when in presence of Varyag, Nicolai and Vyacheslav (to convey how alien it sounds for them); but when there's a translator nearby, or when they talks to each other, their dialogues gets written in Russian instead.
• Two Lines, No Waiting: There's a side plot about backstory of Nicolai's family — his uncle Vladimir from the bunker in Moscow, and his father, who'd disappeared seven years ago.
• Uncertain Doom: We never find out whether Dmitri Ermakov survived his wounds, or not.
• Ungrateful Bastard: A patrol officer yells on Nicolai for not working on cleaning up the mess after siege, completely ignoring the fact that it's thanks to Nicolai and his friends, the Babylon even survived at all.
• Verbal Backpedaling: Timofey says that all people from Moscow should be fed to pigs, then adds that they actually do have pigs here (coincidentally, pigs were also stolen from people from Moscow). Varyag says that he'd noticed (clearly meaning Timofey and other people from the settlement), but when Timofey asks how, he says that it's because he saw Timofey eating pork.
• Villain Has a Point: While Lynch's intentions aren't good, he makes valid points about consequences of shutting down HAARP; without it, there would be no electricity, and no Guardians, and without Guardians, there would be no force capable of holding humanimals at bay. And the only proof they have are the photos brought by some Russians who're yet to prove that they're trustworthy. Even his vocal opponent Raymond agrees with those arguments; if they gonna do something so drastic as destroy HAARP, they must find more solid proof — by talking with Guardians.
• Was Once a Man: Morlocks, Molochites, Manimals — whatever they're called in specific area, they were humans before they got affected by the psi-attacks or were used for experiments, but mutated into ugly, cannibalistic creatures. This only happens to weak-willed ones, as stronger ones preserves their sanity and human appearance, and gets psychic powers of varying strength. Known cases of this happening:
  • Those people who survived the nuking of Moscow metro, have mutated, creating the original morlocks. It's also possible that, following them going insane, the inhabitants of the bunker also turned into morlocks, only to get killed by Vladimir Vasnetsov (who has enough willpower to remain human).
  • One of particularly tragic examples is a young "manimal" Junior, whom Nicolai meets in Hope City; he manages to establish mental contact with him, and learn the story how six years-old boy Junior became a morlock after nuclear war. This contact awakes Junior's mind, and makes him cry.
• We ARE Struggling Together: Chernoviks are at war with everyone, but remains a dominant force, because their enemies simply can't unite against them. There's a faction of monarchist cossacks, who're obviously Orthodox Christians; neo-pagan national-socialists, who can't stand cossacks, as they're following the "jewish sect"; muslims who can't stand the former for being pro-Christianity and the latter for being anti-Islam (and nationalists); neo-communists, who obviously can't be in league with monarchists or nationalists, or with any religious faction. There're also the bandits (who only didn't side with Chernoviks due to their stance on criminal bosses and disrespect to "criminal laws"), and countless smaller factions whom Dietrich doesn't even bother mentioning. There was one other faction, but it only managed to unite the aforementioned ones against itself, after which the alliance promptly broke apart again. Special mention deserves monarchists and communists, who used to be one faction, but fell apart: "whites" now have artillery, and "reds" have ammo for it, but neither can make a use of them due to constantly fighting; Varyag points tragicomedy of the situation, and Man-eater later gives the representatives of those groups a long speech about why such disunity only hurts them.
• We Can Rule Together:
  • Titos Gau tries to convince Nicolai to spare him and restart another empire together; the people are dumb and barbaric, and needs mentors to guide them. Unfortunately for him, all Nicolai wants by this point is to have him dead, blaming him for both betraying his people and his homeland, and for indirectly causing Ilya's death.
  • Donald Hornet tries to convince Nicolai that they can postpone destroying HAARP and instead cooperate to gain the Guardians' technologies and weapons and work together to rebuild the USA, then help rebuild Russia. Nicolai refuses, as Hornet seeks the power for himself, and whatever civilisation he's gonna build this way would be the same as the one which caused the nuclear war to happen (not to mention, he's aware that in such "alliance", Russia would be the colony at best). Plus, they don't know how long the planet can survive HAARP activities; it very well may be already too late. When Donald tries to convince him anyway, Nicolai just asks for time to think it over, hoping to stale for time until Varyag fulfils the plan.
• Wham Episode: "Lena" chapter in the part two, which ends with Man-eater's Heroic Sacrifice in order to stop the Gau Legion. While not the first casualty of the expedition, this death devastates the friends the most. All they can do is to watch the flood, and cry.
• Wham Line: Lazar gets deservedly called out on not warning that Guardians are gonna shoot despite knowing it, and gets accused of working for them. He reveals the truth about them (that they're Private Military Contractors who only have access to all those weapons due to their chips, and it all feeds from HAARP), as well as tells that he wasn't ordered by Guardians; he was ordered by Lynch... and Hornet, who wants to claim HAARP and Guardians for himself. This explanation makes Nicolai so angry, Varyag has to stop him from killing Lazar.
  Nicolai: Why?! Why, asshole, you didn't tell us earlier?! Why?!! Why we're wasting time?! Why John, Tomas and CJ have to die?!
  Lazar: Lynch! Lynch wanted for you to be killed by Guardians, to end it all!
  Nicolai: Are you working for Lynch?! Bastard!
  Lazar: No! Hornet also wanted for Guardians to attack!
  Nicolai: What?! Why?! He's on our side!
  Lazar: He's on his own! He wants conflict with Guardians! He always wanted to claim all those bunkers and storages! He believes that by taking prisoners, he can use their chips! Or that I can restore chips from dead Guardians! Guardians are strong! But never go anywhere without their suits! That's why they have only one tactics, which is good against humanimals! But worse versus humans! Hornet thinks that he can defeat them!
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • When Axai's stalkers reveals that they're planning to inform fascists about islamists, so they would deal with them, they gets called on that, cause, instead of getting rid of those by themselves, they involves fascists, who would likely proceed with ethnic cleansing, without bothering to check who is and who isn't involved. Stalkers tries to defend their position by saying that, firstly, "fascists" aren't that bad, and secondly, stalkers are neutral and works with everyone, which helps to sustain the fragile balance of power instead of descending into another all-out war like it was in early days. Ultimately, the expedition and the stalkers seemingly parts on good terms despite Varyag initially reacting badly, but Nicolai still remains disappointed in them.
  • The old policeman Mikhail Dybetsky (unrelated to marauder Dybetsky who was killed earlier) tells the story about the gang which tried to set up their rule in that part of the city soon after the war. They gathered the women, raped them (even children!), and then dropped them into elevator shaft, right on top of burning rags, then dropped more burning rags on top of them. Only one old woman lived for just long enough to tell the story. The bandits were later destroyed by some unknown guy (he killed them all with a rocket launcher when they gathered in their "Hammer"), who afterwards offed himself once he learned that his own beloved one was amongst the victims. Yuri (who, along with Andrey, was amongst those whose wives were killed; and Andrey also had a daughter) snaps on Mikhail, blaming him on not helping; Mikhail defends himself by saying that he, along with other policemen, was besieged by the other bandits, and siege was only broken four days later when the reinforcements arrived from OMON: by that point, it was already too late.
  • After learning about the loss of their families, Yuri and Andrey decides that they wouldn't go further, and instead stay in Moscow, where ashes of their women are buried. Varyag calls them out on it, as everyone had lost someone due to the war or its consequences, but where the other people chose to fight and live on, the cosmonauts chose to give up and let the world die; it's egoistical on their part. It may be a part of the reason why they changes their minds later and escapes with everyone.
  • When Varyag sees that Confederates are using Child Soldiers (okay, they are not actually fighting, just helping with reloading, but still), he asks Man-eater to send them away, and when he refuses, says that in that case, he would rather surrender to attackers: even they have better chances to be decent people than those who forces children to fight. Man-eater disagrees, as he sees no way for Confederates to avoid it in conditions where no such thing as "non-combatant" exists.
  • Vyacheslav gets called out on not bothering to tell about seeing that someone was attacked, which results in that person being killed and his corpse taken away — despite the expedition being able to come at rescue. He defends himself by saying that the last time they tried to help, they run into the amazons (who deliberately set up an ambush for would-be recuers), which resulted in Andrey being killed.
  • When Man-eater hires a prostitute in the "Three Pigs" artel, and said prostitute shows up, looking clearly underage, everyone reacts badly when Ilya acts as if he's gonna use her, with Vyacheslav (who previously was fine with idea) outright calling him a pedophile. Ilya has to explain to Varyag that he did this solely to subtly interrogate her for information (which Nicolai confirms when he eavedrops them), and Varyag explains to Nicolai and Vyacheslav.
  • Varyag does not react well when Man-eater burns down everyone in the "Three Pigs" artel: cannibals or not, they did not try to hurt them in any way, and just were trying to survive the only way they can think of! And some of them, like that girl, just knew no other way! Man-eater counters that by saying they had chose that path deliberately, and the girl was offered to leave and try another life (by Nicolai), but refused; and that if the nuclear winter ends, the people would start to seek new territories — and the guys who are already fine with eating other humans would look on their neighbours like a snack rather than potential allies.
  • When Nicolai asks Wind why he didn't finished off his hopelessly disabled son, Ilya gets angry and calls Nicolai a fascist. However, Nicolai manages to redirect it to him via Armor-Piercing Question.
    Nicolai: But I had good intentions.
    Man-eater: Trust me, jerkass, the one who was first to press the button, also acted out of good intentions. How he viewed them. So, do you like the end result? Don't decide the others' fate for them.
  • Nicolai reacts badly to surviving Chernoviks being just executed, and tries to shame the people; it doesn't work. Then Man-eater steps in, and instead suggests to make them work out their crimes and help rebuild; it works much better, though they still gets treated poorly and shot at slightest provocation.
  • Both Man-eater and Varyag reacts very badly when they learns about Nicolai being used in gambit against Gau, without warning anyone, which nearly resulted in him getting shot, and explodes at commissar who delivers the news; Ilya only gets stopped at kicking his ass right here and now by the presence of two armed guards.
  • When the commissar insists that the operation in which Nicolai was involved against his will was necessary, Nicolai asks him what was Weynard's role in it, pointing that they treated him as expandable.
    Nicolai: What was Weynard's role in your plans?
    Foreman: He's died, right?
    Nicolai Andreyevich: Yes.
    Nicolai: What was his name?
    Foreman: Weynard. To our recon service he was known as "agent Mole".
    Nicolai: You didn't even know his name. But he had one. He had life.
  • Vyacheslav (who just can't let the past go and forgive American for nuking Russia) takes offense at Varyag and Nicolai insisting on acting nicely to Americans, while at home, they were rather liberate at shooting "their own". Varyag asks him whom he considers "his own" (bandits, cannibals, Chernovisk or Gau?), and says that if they start shooting people left and right, it would make their mission pointless, but Vyacheslav stubbornly refuses to see his point; he tries to justify it with pragmatism, but his true motivation (vengeance) is blatantly clear, and convinces no one.
  • Lazar, once it gets revealed that he knew that the Guardians are gonna shoot, understandably gets called on not warning about it. He reveals that both Lych and Hornet wanted for it to happen.
• The World Is Not Ready: Nicola Tesla quit his researches of new energy sources because he realised their destructive potential. Unfortunately, not everything was destroyed, which eventually allowed Americans to build HAARP; it was indeed capable of fixing the climate problems of the world, but they instead tried to use it as the weapon.
• Wrong Side All Along: When the expedition sees surviving vandals after siege of Babylon, Vyacheslav states that they probably chose the wrong side: vandals are miserable and only attacked after finding out that their houses were burned and their families murdered, while Babylon is inhabited by all kinds of jerks and hedonists (who only got into troubles due to not bothering to set up guard, who're now seeing them as either a tool to use for their own benefit, or problem to heir well-being to destroy.
• Xanatos Gambit: If Varyag and Vyacheslav dies fighting the Guardians, they would become the heroes, which would greatly aid in negotiations with Russia in the future. If they survives, they may aid in establishing contact. Donald Hornet would find profit in either way.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are:
  • Nordica tries to tell Man-eater that, behind that armour of cynicism and toxicity, he still has heart, and she knows it. Unfortunately, it also reminds him about his role in making the world the hell it is, as well as killing Irina Listopad, whom he loved (even if she turned monster), and he snaps at her.
  • Vyacheslav worries that he's left behind during final operation against HAARP due to being useless because of his wounded leg, and laments not making it to the end. Nicolai comforts him, saying that he didn't let them down: he made it all the way there, never chickened out, never gave up. At this point, he did everything he should've, and deserves some rest.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Yezhov was tolerated for a time being, but over time, his methods causes more and more problems, overwhelming whatever benefits he may provide in his role. Not only he puts a shadow on the Foreman by his mere existence, but he knows about the bomb, and isn't reliable enough to keep his mouth shut, as he knows that he may be punished for his past actions. That's why the Foreman uses him in his Batman Gambit against Gau.
• Your Head Asplode:
  • One of defenders of Confederate base gets beheaded when his head gets hit by a bullet from machine gun; it just explodes.
  • During the conflict with Guardians, their commander gets killed when Daladier makes lucky grenade throw, which beheads him.
• Zerg Rush:
  • Early in the part one, Nadezhdinsk gets attacked by the horde of fifty hungry wolves. It gets pointed out that them attacking in such numbers is unheard off.
  • Morlocks are cunning, but not very strong, and are cowardly. When they can't catch you by surprise, they would try to overwhelm you with massive numbers.
  • Manimals lack proper tactic, lack good weapons, lack strength or resilience, and relies on huge numbers and attempts at scaring the enemies. Varyag outright says that they're complete losers, and managed to wound Vyacheslav by sheer good luck.
• Zombie Advocate: After establishing contact with Junior, Nicolai starts insisting that morlocks (or whatever they're called in the other areas) are not beyond saving, and, if one bothers to help them, it's possible to reawake their humanity. Vyacheslav disagrees.
  Nicolai: They're humans too! But, unlike us, everything was taken away from them! They've nothing left! Absolutely nothing! We're wrong! We're destroying anything we can't understand and anything what we're afraid of!

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