Surprised no-one's beaten me to the punch here, 'cause this feels worth talking about.

Synopsis:
spoilers:
10 years ago, Abigail Brand is...somewhere in deep shadow, fighting a large humanoid named Ord. She kills him, and a digitized voice lectures her on her rebellious streak before consigning her to defend the Shield for the rest of her life. She welcomes the decision.

In the present, Brand is woken by Leah, one of the 'Hel-Rangers' (those who fight deeper into the south to break attack waves before they reach the Shield) and Leonardo Da Vinci, who warns of scouting robots detecting a fresh assault. Along with Leah, Leonardo, Lady Katherine of Bishop, Miss-sorry-Ms. America Chavez, a geomancy-fluent Ben Grimm and some of the Endless Summers legion, Brand goes to deal with this assault, finding it to be the Giant-Ant-Men, a self-replicating man-sized bug army created when a Phalanx-infected Hank Pym thought he could reprogram the zombie horde to attack the Ultrons.

After the battle, Brand and Leah have a talk about their respective lost loves, Henry McCoy and Illyana Rasputin. Illyana disappeared on Hel-Ranger duty a week previous and Leah is convinced she can still find her. This pleases Kang the Conqueror, who's angling to take Leah's second-in-command position. He's very confident. Brand attempts to dissuade him by telling of the last time the Shield failed: thirty years ago, it was broken in seven separate places, and the regions to the North were overrun by undead, Ultrons and Annihilus' drones, until they reached the borders of Doomstadt...then Doom teleported them all back down south and rebuilt the wall with barely a flex of his godly power. Brand is an orphan from one of the regions destroyed in that incident.

In mid-argument, Kang's wrist computer starts bleeping, heralding the arrival of...also Kang, the same one but from the near future. He's dying, but before he vanishes he apologizes to Brand and warns her that Thanos has doomed them all.

The last page spells it out - Time before the fall of the Shield: 20 days and counting.
end of spoilers

Initial thoughts:
- This is a pretty odd issue. There's a lot of solid character work for Abigail Brand, but there's a lot of other cast members who are barely introduced (they will presumably be important down the line) and while there's some big splash pages the after-the-fact narration robs the battles of their intensity. This isn't a war book about fighting, this is about the slow dread between all the death.
- Said splash pages are mostly handled by different art teams. I'm very partial to the Giant-Ant-Men one by James Stokoe. If you haven't read his Godzilla: The Half-Century War miniseries from IDW, do yourself a favour.
- The rest of the pages are by Filipe Andrade. His work here has an odd, almost painterly inks/colours job on it (compared to his Captain Marvel issues for example) that gives things a dreamlike haze that's curiously fitting.
- I have no idea what the hell is going on in that prologue. Anyone know?
- Interesting to note how deep the Battleworld brain conditioning goes. We know from the main Secret Wars series that Battleworld is only 8 years old, yet Brand has memories of its existence stretching back over 3 decades.
- That ending, though. I'm gonna go ahead and assume this is actively a spoiler for things to come in Secret Wars proper - granted, something more than a few of us had guessed was coming, but seeing it mentioned here makes the reality really hit home.