Der Anfang

Der Anfang — "the beginning" — is Vanguard Zombies’ launch experiment: a ruined Stalingrad hub in March 1944 whose portals feed timed objective arenas cut from Merville, a Paris hotel and the Shi No Numa spawn hut, difficulty climbing with every completion. It is also a prequel: the story runs a year before Die Maschine, with the SS unit Die Wahrheit and its leader Wolfram Von List raising the dead through the artifact of Kortifex the Deathless.

Fountains, not machines

There are no perk machines: five Demonic Fountains pour their effects in four escalating tiers, and the Altar of Covenants spends Sacrificial Hearts — earned per objective — on randomized weapon Covenants. Each operator binds to a Dark Aether entity through an artifact: Saraxis’s Energy Mine, Bellekar’s Aether Shroud, Inviktor’s Ring of Fire, Norticus’s Frost Blast.

Objectives, not quests

Launch shipped three objective types — Blitz, Harvest, Transmit — with Purge, the Void and Sacrifice arriving across the seasons, and exfil whenever nerve runs out. There was no main quest at launch, only a later Prologue Quest; the mode’s first true quest waited for the Shi No Numa rebuild. The distress call that starts everything comes from Gabriel Krafft — the demonologist whose long story ends, decades later, in a Black Ops 6 castle.