This scene contains graphic violence and death.

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52nd of the Aster’s Gloom, 2030 D.C.E

City of Rangda — Rangda University, Main Street

After the Research Library fell into their hands, Sergeant Chadgura’s platoon finally had the chance to converge with the 2nd Company’s advance force. Thus the assault on main street and the university began in earnest. Machete raised into the air, pistol in hand, Chadgura and two dozen men and women joined over a hundred fresh troops from the barracks, who had taken the less direct route to the University. Regrouping into a three-tiered, arrow-shaped column, the force left main street and pressed their advantage.

Men and women rushed through the streets in groups of six to twelve, keeping several meters of distance between themselves and the nearest fire team. Light gunfire fell over them as the vanguard crested the hill from the Research Library to the Main Street and came into view of the enemy defenses. At the edges of the seething mass a few people peeled away, wounded, killed; but there was not near enough gunfire to stop them all.

Over the rising and falling terrain of the inner campus, built on a series of small rolling hills, the 8th Division had been in the midst of constructing a series of defenses, but they could not buy enough time to do more than raise a few tiers of waist-high sandbags. Few of the defenses had large guns and those that did could not fire them properly at the ranges they were being engaged in. A few submachine guns and a bulk of rifles provided the defense with its killing power.  From afar, stray mortar rounds soared over the column and landed, sporadically, almost everywhere that there was not a mass of men to kill.

Battalion Commander Burundi’s choice of a spread formation paid dividends on Main.

Through the plumes of dust from the mortars and the beam-like lines of tracer fire the Motor Rifle Shuuja bobbed and weaved, dashing from cover to cover like a flock of mice, a sea of individual movements impossible for the defenders to accurately discern. Dashing squadrons knitted a sporadic pattern with their boots on the street and road. One squadron leaped from around the corner, to a streetlight, to a tree, to the shadow of a hill; a second and third ran across open road, then on the ditch, then behind a bus stop bench.

Meanwhile a fifth and sixth followed the first; a seventh took a different path entirely. All of these men and women ran across the same stretch of roads and streets and despite the saturation of targets, the defenders could not seem to do but the most minor damage.

Within this perfectly executed chaos Chadgura and her allies closed to less than a hundred meters within moments. Behind them, light machine gunners used the marginally higher ground on the sides of the main street and within captured buildings to pepper the defenders with covering fire for their comrades. Submachine gunners marched briskly while firing their guns. Riflemen and women ran forward, took a knee or dropped to the floor when resistance presented itself, took choice shots with their guns, and ran forward again. Chadgura took with her a core of twelve men and women from Green Squadron.

Dashing along the edge of the column, her squadron made for a sandbag defense set high up on a nearby hill, in front of a chemistry building overlooking the main street. Though the ground was only a few meters higher than the surroundings, this hilltop was long and broad and could be followed almost to the end of Main Street, giving a commanding position throughout. The 8th Division had thoroughly failed to take advantage of it.

In seconds it seemed, despite the rounds flashing past their cheeks and flanks, and the mortars falling two rounds a minute across the column, Chadgura was upon the sandbags.

She saw a wall of perplexed faces in front of her, and she vaulted over it.

One foot hit dirt and propelled the second up onto the wall, and over it. She swung her machete as she came down; her blade sliced the face of a machine gunner and threw him back in agony. Behind her, riflemen and women vaulted the wall and put bayonet and knife to the bewildered defenders, who watched the charge like lost cattle on the road.

Cries of surrender quickly followed.

Chadgura had the surrendering and wounded enemies disarmed and tied to lamp posts nearby, but she would not linger among them. Around her the column was moving, and she was compelled to move too. Her lungs were growing raw enough to feel; her heart was pumping like never before. Her mind was blissfully clear. She was fighting; and she was fighting back the tears and the anger and shock and the confusion and abandonment–

She marched on, signaling for her troops to follow her along the hill.

All of them stood in awe of her energy; clearly running ragged, they still kept up.

Across the street, along the road, the sandbag defenses were toppled one by one.

From Chadgura’s vantage, Muhimu Shimba soon became visible.

Main Street opened up into a broad, forested park. All of the streets seemed to converge on this central position. Even the hills all seemed to descend into the park. There were no more sandbag defenses, no more fortifications or even any visible combat troops. There were only desolate streets in a vaguely diamond pattern around an empty square park.

“Sergeant Chadgura!”

On the radio came the voice of Captain Shakti, recently arrived with the 2nd Company.

His presence meant that there was a link in the chain of commander higher than her.

“Yes sir?” She asked, awaiting orders.

“March along the hill two lengths behind the column for flank security!” He said.

“Understood sir.”

As the main bulk of the column, now led by the 2nd Company, marched into Muhimu Shimba to rout the Lion Battalion, Chadgura and her troops waited for their comrades to march the two lengths ahead. Chadgura ambled carefully over the far edge of the long hilltop, standing on the descending slope and kneeling. She withdrew her binoculars.

“Sir, we should be wary of Lion reserve units. Back in the city proper they hid tanks that almost attacked our exposed rear, had we marched any faster past them.” She advised.

“Copy that. Keep an eye out for us.” Captain Shakti replied.

Chadgura raised the binoculars to her eyes. Her fingers were drumming on them and her hands as a whole were shaking. She could feel everything catching up and she did not want it. She had been running fast enough to avoid everything, but she could feel it crack.

She scanned her lenses over the forest, over the connecting roads.

Nothing. Captain Shakti’s column exited the main street.

She scanned over the buildings standing sentinel on all sides across the park.

Nothing. Captain Shakti’s column stepped into the park lands, dozens of men and women moving from an organized march to a triumphant charge, running with abandon.

She scanned beyond Muhimu Shimba, wondering what terrain lay ahead.

Nothing–

Before her lenses could pick it up, she felt the rumbling and saw the flashes at the edge of her physical vision. Blaring red, between where her eyes barely met the rubber padding.

Chadgura threw her binoculars down and saw the smoke and the upturned earth.

All along the edge and center of the park, a series of explosions had gone off.

Dirt and smoke hung thick in the air, obscuring half the column, while the other half stood dazed and unsure. Chadgura’s troops gasped and exchanged glances and raised weapons.

From the wood came several charging figures.

“Cavalry! Captain Shakti–”

Chadgura cried out, as much as her voice would allow.

There was no response.

Horse-mounted, metal-armored cavalry in the dozens, with thick masks and flashing sabers and pistols and dragoon rifles ran suddenly out of the forest and rushed through the column’s spearhead, trampling through the cloud and around the flanks and engaging the confused center of the mass. Two other groups emerged, bypassing the center and moving to encircle the assembled force. Warhorses pounded men away at the command of their masters, and sabers flashed and pistols blared against the column’s flanks. Shuuja fell back from the horsemen and ran into one another, confused and corralled into a tight, ineffective mass without command and without sense of the enemy’s movement.

So penned-in was the column that they dared not shoot for fear of hitting an ally.

Effective leadership could have guided a tactical retreat and then a counterattack.

It seemed all the leadership had charged into the minefield without hesitation.

“On me!”

Chadgura stowed her weapons, raised a fist and her squadron followed her down the hill.

She too was running without hesitation.

“Faruk, hang back and provide covering fire, everyone else, engage on signal!”

At her instructions, the Danava machine gunner attached to her squadron hung back, deployed his bipod and kept to the hill, lying on his belly. Private Ngebe, the other automatic gunner, followed Chadgura closely. Her submachine gun was no good from the hill. Everyone else ran at their sides in an indistinct mass of long bayonet rifles.

They hit the bottom of the hill running, crossed the street and ran into the park.

Chadgura signaled, focusing on the left flank cavalry nearest to her. There were at least twenty horses and as many men dead ahead harrying the 2nd Company’s central group.

All had their backs turned, too focused on kettling the disordered column.

“Attack!”She said, raising a hand as if to conduct fire like a band.

Soon as she shouted, both into the radio headset and to her surroundings, Faruk opened fire from the hill. His first volley struck a pair of horses, and they collided with one another in the throes of death, violently crushing their riders. Chadgura stopped, took a knee, and behind her, all of the rest of her squadron joined Faruk in shooting.

Over Chadgura’s head a few dozen rounds went flying into the broad heads and round rumps of a half-dozen horses, killing and crippling them and sending their riders flying and falling and rolling off their mounts. Several of the enemy cavalrymen turned their mounts around and acquired Chadgura and Green Squadron as targets, but the damage had already been done. On the left flank of 2nd Company’s column, the pressure lessened.

Like a floodgate, the men and women of the 2nd Company came rushing out of the kettle.

Once dominant in the melee, the cavalrymen found themselves now overwhelmed. Their wall along the sides of the column was broken and the kettle separated into individuals quickly overrun and isolated from the mutual support of nearby warhorses. Single riders now fended off four or five Shuuja with renewed vigor and a grave willingness to kill.

Bayonets dug into the necks and heads of horses and into the legs and guts of their riders.

Knives and machetes swung at dismounted men, whose steel armor could protect their chests from small arms fire but not from having their knees and elbows and necks cut almost off. Cavalry sabers swung back, but did little against the overwhelming tide.

Once space allowed it, gunfire resumed from the center of the column.

Riders fell clean off horses as close-range rifle shots blasted open their armor.

Chadgura’s squadron moved ahead, helping to pick riders off from outside the throng.

The Sergeant peeled herself from the battle and switched the frequency of her radio.

“Broadcasting on the Company wave; is there an officer standing out there?”

There was no immediate response. She turned the dial to call Battalion command.

“Commander Burundi, 1st and 2nd Company’s have suffered critical–”

“TRAITOR!”

Chadgura looked up from the radio box at her hip in confusion.

“Traitor?”

She could hardly believe that anybody on this Aer could consider her such a thing.

Then she spotted the source of those words.

Ahead of her, a warhorse had broken suddenly from the melee.

Its rider, armored and faceless behind a gas mask, dismounted.

He flung off his very long, antiquated dragoon rifle and withdrew from his belt a saber.

Before Chadgura could raise her pistol to him the man was upon her.

Swinging his saber, he forced Chadgura back. In avoiding him, she dropped the weapon.

Carelessly her arm unplugged her radio before Command could respond.

Shouting a battle cry, the rider lifted his saber.

Chadgura pulled her machete from her belt and intercepted his next swing.

Both blades clashed and held.

Chadgura pushed back, but the rider was undaunted.

He stepped back in, swinging left and right.

Chadgura was not trained in swordfighting, not like an old style cavalry man would have been. She knew to swing and to stab to kill riflemen in close quarters, but the masked rider swung his sword with a fluidity and precision she could not match. He threw and shifted his weight expertly with every swing, like the shots of a tank seeking a weakness in the armor, forcing her to guard and driving her back step by step with every clash.

She could not think, the fighting was too close, and happening too fast.

She tried to take each blow individually but the clashes felt like a storm of metal.

Once more the saber bore down and once more she guarded.

It felt like the millionth blow they exchanged, but it was different.

She guarded too high.

There was a flash of movement from below and his boot struck her below the hip.

Chadgura staggered back. The Rider drew forward.

“Sergeant!”

Private Ngebe appeared a dozen meters removed from the battle.

Her sharp little eyes flashed with recognition. She raised her submachine gun.

At once the cavalryman swung around and threw a knife from his belt.

Private Ngebe loosed a burst of shots that flew past the rider as his knife dug into her rib.

She cried out, dropped her gun, and then she fell, bleeding, sobbing, vulnerable.

Chadgura saw her hit the floor and could hardly believe the sight.

It was the final blow to her shaking edifice.

Something in her rose, hot and swelling, and it overflowed.

Her mind became a cracked mirror, reflecting a million half-thoughts.

She was the traitor?

That was what he thought — and then he did this?

All of them, the 8th Division– they had hurt her, hurt Ngebe, hurt–

Gulab–

She said she wouldn’t let her get in danger–

She wanted to protect her and yet–

Her eye started to twitch. She felt her eyelids forced very open, too open, more open than they had ever been, she had worn the same droopy expression on her face for years now and it was all breaking. Tears streamed down her face. Her teeth grit as if of their own accord. She could not but gnash them in her mouth. Her whole body tensed and bristled.

All of the feelings that she had never had, even before she consented to be conditioned by the KVW, all of the anger that was directed away, all of the sadness that was pushed down deep, all of the things that were a nuisance to feel, that were uncouth to feel, that were unbecoming of a girl who should have been dutiful, polite, straight-laced and perfect–

All of it exploded out of her in a scream of sorrow and anger that pushed the air.

The Rider stumbled back suddenly as if the scream had a physical force.

Chadgura grabbed hold of the machete with both hands, thrust forward and swung.

Between the mask and the man’s collar the blade struck, caught for an instant, and sliced.

The Rider’s head went tumbling backwards off his body.

Chadgura dropped her machete.

She clapped her hands fast and hard for several seconds.

She then clapped them against her own head.

Turning away from the battle, Chadgura rushed to Private Ngebe’s side. Kneeling, she lifted the little woman up into her arms and checked her wound. It was bleeding terribly.

“Gul– Ngebe, you will be fine.” Chadgura said.

Her eyes would not stop weeping. Everything she said sounded like a plea.

Ahead of her the battle died down. People stepped away from dead horses and butchered men and looked around as if in a daze. In the park the smoke had long cleared. Comrades started helping the wounded away from the front. Judging by the craters throughout the park, there were indeed mines or bombs buried there that had disrupted the attack.

It was something they should have known, but they thought the Lion Battalion beaten.

Behind her, the reserve troops started to move in, little by little.

Someone pulled her away from Private Ngebe, and pulled her away to safety, to be treated.

Chadgura sat on the ground.

She could not really conceptualize the directions so well anymore.

But she knew when she heard the noise that it was coming from deeper in the park.

It was a loud, singular report.

Followed by several smaller ones.

Columns of dirt and broken asphalt rose up where the shells impacted.

From deep in the wood appeared trundling hulk on a set of massive tracks.

At its sides, several dozen men with yellow sashes over their uniforms and submachine guns in their hands covered the tank’s flanks. They took a knee at the edge of the wood as the machine moved ahead of them and into the open, easily crushing bushes and dislodging the trunks of years-old, fallen trees and other debris of Muhimu Shimba.

Five turrets aimed at the column, two in front, two on the rear, and one large central gun.

Facing them, the multi-turreted tank looked larger than an elephant.

Everyone in the column froze.

“Traitors to Ayvarta!” called out a voice, seemingly from inside the tank. “You struggle against the invincible Lion battalion in vain. Our conviction is iron, and we will resist the aggression of Solstice with all of our strength. Our deep reserves have you surrounded as we speak. You have fallen for our trap! Surrender now and the Jotun will spare your lives! We have artillery, we have automatic fire support, we have armor– you have nothing!”

Chadgura cast her tearful eyes around the area.

She could not see any new enemy troops moving in to surround them.

Nevertheless she saw fear building in the eyes of the people around her.

None of them understood, in the middle of this confused, exhausting battle, that there was such a thing as bluffing and that an enemy could appear to present more strength than what was actually available to them. Sporadic mortar fire, the bombs in the park, the cavalry attack, and now the tank and the elite Lion Platoon infantry group. These were just illusions of power. Inexperienced or demoralized infantry exaggerated them.

Captain Shakti would have told them to hold, that they had the true advantage.

They had reserves, they had support from Umaru and Forest Park.

They had the Right Hand of Death, Madiha Nakar.

Someone could have told them to mow down the Lions and swarm the tank.

But Captain Shakti and the other leadership seemed to be incapacitated, or dead.

And Battalion command might not yet have received a single report of what transpired.

Chadgura’s radio was still disconnected.

Perhaps that was Badir The Lionheart’s plan all along.

Perhaps those bombs were meant for reckless, glory-seeking officers of a victorious unit.

Perhaps that suicidal cavalry attack meant to decapitate their great serpent of a column.

Kill field leadership, then inflict shock. An old tactic from the days of phalanxes.

It had worked. Now Chadgura was the only officer left.

Her hand went to her radio, but she felt a deep exhaustion, a great weakness.

For the first time in her life she was overwhelmed with emotion.

Gulab had left her side, and she felt such a great sorrow it was hard to fight.

It almost felt pointless; she could not protect anyone.

All of her training and conditioning seemed to have gone away entirely.

Had she been able to see her own face she would have seen those red rings around her eyes flickering and fading and breaking like her own composure. She could feel them doing so.

Each of the turrets on the Jotun began to turn to seek a different target. It turned partially to its side, facing four of its turrets to the column and leaving one guarding its rear. Two turrets seemed to have small guns, two had 45mm cannons, and the central gun appeared to boast a short-barreled howitzer. It was much more firepower than most tanks boasted.

One volley from the Jotun could do significant damage to infantry in the open.

Several could perhaps rout the column in the state it was in.

“Traitors, you have my pity and mercy! I will give you a minute to drop your weapons–”

Chadgura reconnected her radio, and found the little strength she needed to switch waves.

She hit upon a voice suddenly.

“Firing Smoke round!”

There was a split second difference between the cry on the radio and the report.

Chadgura heard a gun go off from behind them on the hill.

A shell flew across the park and struck the Jotun dead-on, exploding in front of its turret.

Thick, white and gray smoke expanded into a cloud across the front of the tank.

“Everybody fall back somewhere safe!”

Atop the hill she had previously ran down from, Chadgura saw Harmony there.

And as the tank neared, she saw a figure standing on the tank’s engine block, with her arms over the turret, manipulating a very long rifle that seemed stuck to the turret roof.

Chadgura scrambled again for her radio.

“Gulab, no! Retreat immediately!” Chadgura cried out.

“I’m not letting anyone else die on my account, Charvi! Especially not you!”

Gulab raised a hand as Harmony rushed past the column to engage the Jotun.

“I’ll kill anyone who threatens you, who threatens us and what we stand for, and who we are!” she cried out over the radio. “I’ll trounce them! I don’t care what that makes me!”

Her voice was deeply affected, as if she had been weeping as much as Chadgura too.

Chadgura was speechless.

She could only watch as the person she loved raced into harm’s way.

Ahead of them the smoke began to disperse, and the unharmed Jotun trundled forward.

“So be it! Taste the sword of the Lionheart, faithless dogs!” Badir cried from within it.

Harmony did not break from its path.

Within an instant, they were destined to collide.

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This scene contains graphic violence, death, attempted violence and endangerment of a child, psychological trauma, violence toward an animal, and fleeting emotional abuse and misgendering. It is not necessary to read it; but it contains backstory. Click here to skip.

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Xxnd of the Hazel’s Frost, 20xx D.C.E

Kucha Mountain Range — Dhoruba Peak

In their ignorance they called them Rock Bears. There was precious little bear to them.

What the people of the Kucha hunted was a monster. Veins full of cold blood that cared not for the cold, hidden under hard, jagged skin like a coat of organic stone. When infuriated the veins pumped red with some ethereal force, some leftover magic from the ancient times that still sparked in their dense bodies. Long, slitted eyes appraised prey from the side of a wide, tapered head. Long, tough forearms supported a broad trunk and thick, powerful hind legs perpetually curled as if to spring. And spring it did; launching itself from its hind legs, kicking behind it a storm of snow, the Rock Bear took off into the air.

Catching a tree with its long arms, it spun over the hunters, avoiding several gunshots.

Coming out of the spin, the beast pounced upon a man hind legs first and crushed him.

Cruel claws unfurled from its thick, boulder-like fists and sliced the corpse viciously.

Rifle bullets and shotgun shells rang out within the mountain forest of Dhoruba.

Flat-headed slugs bounced off the armor of the beast, but the sharp 7.62 mm rounds of the bundu rifle penetrated at close range. Blood spurted from wounds on the monster’s shoulder, blooming wherever a bullet caught. Across its body the patchwork of glowing veins flashed, severed in places where wounds and blood obscured the luminescent shell.

Setting its fists back on the ground, the Rock Bear leaped into the middle of the hunters.

Enduring a second volley from a half-dozen guns, the monster seized a man each in its fists, lifted them into the air with ease and bashed them together like the toys of a callous child, beating and beating them to twisted mush. Its perpetually crooked mouth slipped a few centimeters to bare teeth, giving the monster the appearance of a malevolent grin.

There was too much blood flying in the buffeting, snowy wind, too many cries echoing through the wood, and too much of a beast in sight, for the child to have remained calm.

From the child’s mouth came a primal screech. Legs pounded and feet rushed with sudden abandon. Into the wood the child fled. There was no sense of direction, no purpose to the flight, save to escape, save not to see. Callously the men had brought the child to become one of their own, to see the horrors that lay in the dark corners of the world. At the sight of the beast that had become the eternal enemy of their tribe, the Child now refused.

Tears streamed down the Child’s face, nearly freezing in the cold. Behind their back the bear-headed hood of their cloak flapped. Wind that had seemed such an impediment to the climb to Dhobura now offered no resistance to the Child’s flight. There were screams, left behind, but they could sound no louder than the screams in the child’s own head.

“Come back, Gulab!” shouted a familiar voice. Another set of running footsteps.

Gulab could not stop. Her body would not allow it. As if in response she screamed again.

At once the Rock Bear’s head turned deep into the woods where the child had fled.

Its killer instinct piqued by the unmistakable sound of prey, it charged after the child.

Forelegs sprang, and the long forearms struck the ground knuckles first, carving up the snow and pulling the body forward. Its running gait was streamlined despite its ungainly assortment of limbs. Faster than any being its size had a right to be, the Rock Bear leaped over ditches, kicked off trees, swung from branches and navigated jagged rock and ice.

Within seconds it was clearing enough forest to make up for the minutes Gulab had run.

Gulab felt the monster bearing down on her, felt the stomping steps, the shattering of trees, the disruption of the incoming winds, blocked as they were by the fleshy hulk.

She turned her head over her shoulder, grit her teeth, and saw the shadow near.

Crying and screaming for help she dropped to the ground and the beast swept over.

The Rock Bear struck clean through a nearby tree.

Blood from the monster’s seeping wounds rained over Gulab as the beast passed her.

From her coat, she withdrew a small revolver pistol and raised it in shaking hands.

She sat up, pushing herself back on the snow and kicking her legs frantically to try to escape, while keeping her wildly shaking weapon arm trained on the monster ahead.

In her mind her father’s words struck blows that shook her to her core.

“Man up already! Stop crying so much! Stop complaining! Do as you’re told!”

She felt him chastising her even as the monster hit the forest floor, as it turned around to face her, as it neared, as its jaw unhinged and its long, forked tongue snaked in and out.

“Aren’t you strong? You’re a son of the Chief! You rule over this mountain!”

His voice continued to yell at her. She saw his face contorted in disgust at the state of her.

In the small, hatefully glowing eyes of the monster, Gulab saw her fate.

Her death would be her own fault.

It would not even be her death, it would be his, but it would still be her fault.

Even at her age Gulab painfully understood this.

She could win at chess all she wanted. She could boast all she wanted. She could make up any amount of tall tales for the village girls. She could grow and braid her hair all she wanted. She could play dress up and cry and practice her high voice all she wanted. But this was what she would be judged for, what was real. Everything else was fake.

Her finger could not pull the trigger. Slowly the monster advanced.

The Rock Bear did not understand how much Gulab wished nobody had to kill it.

How much the men of the village fighting it was pointless, wasteful, a shameful act of violence as much upon themselves as against the beast. She wished she had the words to say that, she wished he had the words to say that, maybe they would listen if he said it. They wanted her to be him but even when she tried to speak as him none of it mattered.

At first she was the little child without a hair on her face who talked big about hunting and fighting and chess to make up for a difference in size, in conviction, in capacity for the casual violence of men and lacking the signifiers of their strength and dominance.

Now she was a nuisance, a shame. Now the gods frowned on her transgressions.

And maybe when this creature ate her they would all cheer instead of mourn.

Her eyes fixed upon the monster’s eyes.

One big, grey and brown, heavily bloodied fist curled to strike.

Gulab did not wince. Perhaps her tears had frozen her eyes open.

Down came the hand, launching both a punch and a swipe at once.

“Gulab!”

From behind her, a shotgun slug severed one of the digits as it closed.

The Rock Bear cried out and swung its arm into the air in pain.

Gulab felt an arm scoop her up.

“You’ll be alright Gulab! I’ve got you!”

Grandfather, shotgun in one hand, child in the other. Gulab was speechless.

The Rock Bear set its hateful slitted eyes on him and swept its arm.

Gulab screamed. Grandfather leaped.

His feet went clean over the monster’s arm.

Grandfather flicked his arm, popping open the breech of his shotgun.

“Gulab, load it!”

They hit the ground again.

Gulab seized a shell from her grandfather’s pocket and pressed it into position.

Grandfather flicked his wrist again, closing the gun. Gulab cocked it.

The Rock Bear roared. Grandfather aimed and fired with one hand.

From the end of the barrel came a spray of buckshot.

On the exposed red flesh of the inside of its mouth erupted a dozen gushing wounds.

Grandfather flicked again.

“Gulab!”

Nodding, she grabbed another shell–

Out of nowhere came that bloody, flying fist, faster than ever.

Grandfather went flying. Gulab fell from his protective embrace and hit the snow again.

“Grandpa!” she cried.

The Rock Bear turned into its swing, putting the bulk of its scaly back to her.

Somewhere in front, obscured by the pouncing beast, Grandfather cried and squirmed.

She saw the monster’s arms go up, and down, and she saw blood splashing but not the whole of what was happening. She felt a sense of alarm that made her arms move quickly.

From the floor she seized her revolver.

Without thinking she pulled the trigger once, twice.

“Stop it! Leave him alone!”

Sparks flew off the monster’s back as the bullets struck it. It was like shooting metal.

“Stop it! Just die! Just die!”

Gulab cried out viciously, shooting and shooting. She went through her whole revolver, effortlessly reloaded it from a prepared cylinder, snapped it closed and raised it again.

“JUST DIE!”

This fight was no longer wasteful, and the creature was no longer harmless and invaded. It was the aggressor, it was the monster, and she had to kill it. She had to kill it because it was killing grandfather and she could not allow that, she would not allow that. Nobody in her village had to die, nobody had to hurt, and she felt then she would kill anyone, destroy anything, maim and torture and burn and rip apart alive any creature to save–

At that instant, she felt something snap in the environment, snap in her weapon.

Her last bullet exploded out of the gun as if pushed out of it.

There was a surreal cry that exploded from her mouth along with the bullet.

Through the monster’s neck, into its brain and out into the heavens went the lead.

The Rock Bear’s violence left it completely. Its arms went limp. Its legs buckled.

Finally given peace, the beast ceased to glow and to scream and to thrash.

All of its mass fell forward like a tree snapped at the trunk.

It fell, bloody and maimed and lifeless, over Grandfather.

Gulab fell too. She fell back, eyes full of tears, uncomprehending of everything.

What had happened?

Where had all of that come from?

Where was Grandfather? She did not understand. Her little heart beat fiercely.

She searched herself for answers, curled up in a little ball in the snow.

In her mind those final few moments would play out over and over, perhaps forever.

Grandfather, the only person who believed her, who believed in her. In her.

Where was he? Who had made him leave?

Was it her?

She did not know then that the Chief’s answer, her father’s answer would be–

“Grandfather died because he was a weak man. But you were strong, Gulab.”

She would never believe that. That her tall tales were simultaneously true and false.

It simply could not be. Whatever had happened on that peak, nobody understood it.

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This scene contains violence and death.

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City of Rangda — University Avenue, Earlier

“Caelia, was that really–”

Danielle stood dumbfounded at the doorway to the squadron’s impromptu stronghold, watching as dozens of shells fell from the sky over the heads of the 8th Division’s cavalry.

She had thought she would watch a hundred men come tear her to pieces, her heart filled with regrets and desires that were so agonizingly close and so devastatingly far, and yet–

Seemingly a hundred black plumes of smoke billowed up from the earth over the course of a minute, consuming men and destroying weapons and raging with the sharp flashes of an inner fire. Horses fell forward hind over head, sent spiraling into the ground, dead and broken, by the explosions. Men fell apart and dropped on their faces and flew into the air as if attacked by an invisible reaper. Red trails came down from the sky and partitioned it a hundred ways, creating a webwork that traced each explosion to a shooter far, far away.

Of course, it was not Caelia who took these shots, but she had summoned them.

In so doing, it made Danielle ascribe that power to her, and she stood in awe of it.

“Danielle, you copy?”

Caelia’s voice sounded over the radio, cutting the silence of the pockmarked battlefield.

Danielle raised her hand to her headset, a little smile dawning on her dazed face.

“Yes ma’am. Thank you for the save there.”

“Nah, that wasn’t me. That was a comrade half a city away, I guess.”

Danielle heard the voice both through her microphone and in the vicinity.

She turned around from the door and found Caelia walking into the room with a small smile on her face and a large radio box attached to her hip belt and vest by leather straps. She unplugged herself from it and acknowledged her partner, making eye contact across a room of hunkered-down riflemen and women in mild shock. Danielle almost considered running at her and giving her a hug, but she thought that might have been too awkward.

Also, she might have had to step on some people to get to her anyway.

Instead they shared a little smile from afar, savoring at least that little bit across the personal distance they faced. Unable to cross it, and yet, Danielle thought, not alone.

For now, it was enough that they were alive and supporting one another.

Everything else could be put on a friendly hold for the moment.

With the 8th Division counter-attack on University Avenue repelled, reinforcements began to move up from the positions on the lower street. Green and Yellow Squadron arrived and personally began to aid with the wounded. There were promises of ambulances and supply trucks over the radio. Ammunition was desperately needed. Harmony was nearly out of high caliber ordnance and had gone through most of its 7.62mm rounds.

Other people were tending to the important things. Danielle felt restless.

Caelia stood off to one side and talked to various incoming squadron-level officers in turn about what happened. She looked put-upon by the attention, and Danielle wanted to say a comforting word, but she felt like she would have been nothing but a pest in this situation. She was just a driver and mechanic. She thought she could hardly be considered a soldier. She hadn’t done anything to protect anyone when the 8th Division counterattacked.

All she had done was stand around like a fool and pray everything would be fine.

Danielle did not want to intrude or become a distraction to Caelia, so she stepped out back, where Harmony had been hidden from that nasty Orc once dominating the upper street.

The Orc was now a wreck, but Harmony had not come out of it unharmed.

Throughout the day she had taken some abuse. There were pits where armor-piercing machine gun rounds had been used against it, to minimal but visible effect. There was one mean dent on Danielle’s hatch, where a BKV bullet nearly punched through. It would have turned her head to pulp on a successful penetration. On its side, Harmony had a small slash mark where an exploding penetrator had nearly hit them. It detonated prematurely.

Sighing, Danielle walked around the side of the tank and lifted open the storage space.

She withdrew her welding gas tanks and a welding torch, as well as the spare track links from inside the storage space. From her own pack she withdrew a welding mask — she often kept it handy as a makeshift helmet. Sliding the gas tanks around Harmony’s side, she connected the hose to the welding torch and climbed up onto the front of the tank.

Setting a track link up against the wound on her front hatch, Danielle started up the torch and put down her mask. She put the fire to the metal link, welding it against the hull to patch up the pockmark. Soon her hatch was more or less reliably armored again, with the metal link covering up the front-center of it, right where her face would be behind it.

Satisfied with this arrangement, she picked out another track link, hopped off the side of the tank and began to weld the link to the long flank wound. Link by link, she nearly built a third makeshift track burnt flat against the side armor of the tank. In this fashion she covered up the dent and more or less restored the integrity of Harmony’s weak flank.

Mechanical work was almost soothing. Danielle was not especially good at it and she knew it. She did not consider herself especially good at anything, but in mechanics she had a very basic understanding; she could fix the tank tracks, tune-up the engine, and do simple weld jobs, but she was no engineer. However, like casual tank driving, it was something that she could become consumed by when she had to do it. When she was focused on these tasks, the world turned on its axis all around her with great ease, and time simply passed.

Two things assisted her focus. One was her fascination with tanks. Working on Harmony was a joy because Harmony was a tank. She was a new tank; a kind of tank that was not in her books. A tank built for two, with a 45mm gun, decent armor for a lightweight vehicle, decent speed, and a unique engine and turret layout. Harmony was a very novel machine. And everything Danielle did to Harmony made it more her own and less anyone else’s.

A close second, or perhaps a phantom first, was her storied, special friend, Caelia Suessen.

Danielle wanted desperately to protect Caelia, to keep her safe, to carry her through the duties both of them had, for their own reasons, taken on, and been thrust together into. She had no weapons; Caelia had all the weapons. Danielle’s weapons were her steering sticks and her mechanical tools. These track links were a weapon to protect Caelia.

With that in mind, Danielle could not help but to focus, to become consumed by work.

It was work worth doing, work that needed doing. Work that made her feel valuable.

And so it was work that she continued doing with a single-minded purpose.

Track links and torch in hand, she had one last armor vulnerability to patch.

Climbing on the tank, Danielle absentmindedly started to work on the turret.

She set a track link up against a deformed portion of the gun mantlet.

She raised her torch.

“Having fun up there?”

Startled, Danielle slashed a careless but shallow burn mark across Harmony’s mantlet.

“Oh no!”

Behind her, Caelia stood on her tiptoes with her hands over her mouth.

Danielle quickly regained control of her tools, and cursed herself for looking foolish.

She shut off the torch, pulled up her mask and smiled innocently.

“Hujambo! I’m just getting the tank ready. How did things go back there?”

Caelia shook her head, fists to her hips. “It’s a mess honestly. Sergeant Chadgura should be here soon. Now that the way is clear, we should be getting more reinforcements.”

“Will we get more ammo? Because that’s what we need.”

“I know.” Caelia shrugged. “We don’t have priority for ammo apparently. It is what it is.”

Danielle shook her head. “I guess the tank battalion’s getting it all.”

“I guess. I don’t know.”

Caelia’s head dipped a little. Danielle felt a strong urge to lift her chin up.

Had she been anywhere near her, she would have — and called her cute, too!

In her dreams anyway — she hadn’t the courage for it.

Instead she rubbed her hands awkwardly on her welding torch.

Both of them grew quiet for a moment.

“Um, need any help?” Caelia asked.

Danielle blinked. Usually it was she who broke the awkward silence first.

Taking this as a sign of enthusiasm from Caelia, Danielled perked up.

“Yes! Hand me those track links when I tell you!”

Caelia nodded, and approached the pile of track links Danielled had left on the hull.

“Do these help stop penetrations at all?” She asked.

“They’re one centimeter thick, and our glacis armor is 3.5 centimeters thick. So if you think about it we’re adding an extra quarter armor in patches.” Danielle said excitedly.

Caelia whistled and smiled. “You’re really into these things aren’t you?”

“Well, you know.” Danielle scratched her curly black hair awkwardly.

“Yes, I do know!” Caelia replied, sweeping a bit of her own loose hair behind her ear.

They stared for a moment with little awkward smiles.

Caelia then quietly picked up one of the links and handed it to Danielle.

Danielle reached down to pick it up, and as her fingers entwined around the metal link she found the hand coming closer, and the attached young woman closer still.

Caelia climbed up atop the tank’s front and held the link in place.

She was standing right beside Danielle. They were so close!

Danielle felt the cloth strap on one of her partner’s belt pouches brush against her.

Her face grew a little hot.

“It’s easier this way. Weld it tight now.” Caelia said.

Caelia pressed a little against her. Her warmth could be felt through her bodysuit.

Danielle purged her thoughts and forced herself stiffly toward the turret.

She started the torch, her neck and back tingling with an awkward, delicious sensation.

She put the fire to the metal, and before the first sparks flew by she was startled again.

This time it was by an odd sound at a strange pitch, deep and disaffected but oddly loud.

“Gulab!”

Caelia turned over her shoulder. Danielle shut off and set down her torch.

Sergeant Chadgura arrived at Red Squadron’s impromptu FOB and immediately fixated on the row of wounded lying wrapped in green blankets in the back of the room. Healthy soldiers made way for her as she rushed across the room and knelt next to the gently groaning body of the Corporal, eyes shut, lying against a corner of the room, breathing roughly. One of the medics in attendance stood just off to the side, averting his eyes.

“We should go in.” Danielle said, putting down her torch.

“I guess.” Caelia replied, dipping her head down again.

Together they climbed down from the tank and headed back inside the building.

Sergeant Chadgura stood over the unconscious Corporal Kajari without expression in her face. She mumbled something. She was staring intently, her hand was subtly shaking, and her movements were very stiff and labored. Danielle found it plain to see that she was agitated, though she knew Sergeant Chadgura was not one to allow such things to show.

When she turned around to face Caelia, Danielle thought she saw a flash of anguish, as though there were a second face beneath the Sergeant’s skin that cried out for release.

“What happened?” She asked.

Her tone of voice was a touch louder than normal, but sounded as unaffected as ever.

Caelia shook her head and sighed. “Red Squadron took a barricade and a tank shot it out from up the street. She got hit by fragments. All her wounds are surface level and the medic removed the shards, but the shock might’ve concussed her. We don’t know.”

Chadgura held her hands vaguely in front of her but no further.

“How long has she been like this?”

“Minutes, really. Maybe a half hour.” Caelia said. She turned to the medic.

At their side, a man with a red cross armband on his uniform cowered.

“Sorry ma’am.” the medic said sheepishly. “There’s not much I or anyone can do for her right now, but it’s also not safe to transport her either. Shaking her up too much might upset her condition. She’s not going to bleed out and her breathing is stable, so she is well alive. Whether she’ll wake up in the same condition as before is too early to tell.”

Chadgura quickly replied. “Will she wake up?”

Both Caelia and the medic cowered further.

“I,” the medic stammered, “I’m sorry, I should rephrase, I don’t know if she will–”

Chadgura turned around and walked out of the door without another word to the medic.

At the doorway into the FOB Chadgura spoke loudly and forcefully, as much as her demeanor would allow and as if to the room and not to any individual soldier in it.

“Red Squadron will enter reserve. I will advance with the rest.”

She stepped past the threshold of the door and disappeared behind the exterior walls.

Danielle, Caelia and the medic stood in place, still frozen by the Sergeant’s departure.

Everyone watched the door as if anything more would come through it.

Danielle broke free of her trance and sidled up to Caelia, resting her head against her.

Caelia made no movement but to sigh and stare at the door wistfully.

Behind them, Corporal Kajari moaned, trapped in some agony unknown to all of them.

She was visibly in a bad way. Her honey-brown skin was slightly discolored. Her long hair, once wrapped in a neat braid, was disheveled. Her soft, slender face was in turmoil, her jaw set, her eyes shut hard, sweat rolling down her brow and cheeks.

Danielle wondered whether she felt anything in that sleep.

She hoped that Sergeant Chadgura could at least be close to her in those fitful dreams.

---

Read The Previous Part || Read The Next Part

This chapter contains violence and death.

---

52nd of the Aster’s Gloom, 2030 D.C.E

Tambwe Dominance, City of Rangda — University Avenue, North Rangda

Standing atop the tenements, Gulab had an incredible view of the surroundings. It was as if the morning sun cast light on the streets and roofs solely to highlight Rangda for her.

“What do you see from up there?” Charvi asked over the radio.

Gulab pulled up the microphone speaker attached to her headset.

“It’s not a mountaintop view, but it’s pretty spiffy.” Gulab replied.

Raising her binoculars, she could see far north across the remaining battlefield. Following the northern road, from behind the lower tenement where Harmony had scored its final victories against the Goblins, it was a straight shot to the heart of Rangda University.

Gulab could see the cluster of research buildings dotting the hilly University terrain in the northwest, the great three-winged library like an upside-down ‘T’ facing her from the northeast, and beyond both, the wooded central park of Muhimu Shimba, accessible by a winding main street crossing between the shadows of each landmark.

All that separated her from the core of the University was one long, flat road flanked by broad streets decorated with trees and sculptures and busts, and housing in blocks various shops, art houses, fashion boutiques, and modern co-ops that catered to the younger, worldly university students. University Avenue was a strip of low-lying buildings widely spaced out, each built to a standardized format with glass fronts framed between stuccoed columns, concrete bodies, flat roofs, each no taller than two stories.

Behind each side of the strip was a back street flanked by the thicker urbanization.

Though there was decent cover in and around the buildings, the enemy was far better entrenched. Tiered defenses dominated the landscape, composed of sandbags and guns split into three large ranks at the edge, center and end of University Avenue. She tried to count the men and women in and around the area but there were simply too many. There must have been two or three squadrons of infantry holding down every sandbag line.

There were likely more riflemen hiding in the buildings as well.

“Looks like we’ve got our work cut out for us.” Gulab said to a waiting Charvi.

“How many do you see?”

“I can’t really count heads from this far up, Charvi.”

“Okay. Estimate.”

Gulab coughed. “More than I’d want to see.”

There was a heavy pause on the other end of the line, and a short clap.

“We’ve got reinforcements and supplies incoming. You can come back down now.”

“What if I like it up here? Maybe I wanna stay.” Gulab teased.

She heard a clapping noise over the radio and giggled.

Humor was a balm in perilous times.

On a lark, she raised her binoculars one more time before leaving and looked at the line.

She felt a dark impetus to examine the green uniforms.

It was still hard to believe it was her own people whom she was fighting.

Some part of her accepted it, but another kept confronting it again and again.

Why were they fighting her?

What had she done; what had she chosen; what did they have against her?

She asked about herself, and she asked about Colonel Nakar, and Charvi, and all of them.

Weren’t they all trying to protect Ayvarta? To protect their future?

She could joke to try to keep the dark cloud at bay; joking was a quick patch on a long-bleeding wound that she felt, a wound she feared picking at. Peel off the bandages, and everything could come gushing out. It almost had before, a few times already.

She could not afford to have that happen.

She had a journey to make; a person she wanted to be.

But the reflex to reexamine her enemy did not merely serve to staunch her mind.

Just as she got her final look at them, she caught the defenders starting to move.

Gulab hailed the Sergeant over the radio in a hurry.

“Charvi! I think they’re rotating the line!”

Pushing her microphone up with one hand while holding the binoculars in the other, Gulab watched as horse riders arrived at each of the checkpoints. They brought fresh horses with them. Riders came, alerted the defenders, and set them moving. Several people started to pick up weapons and to gather around the lines. Gulab could not tell what they were doing, but all across University Avenue the defenders were in flux.

“Are you sure, Gulab?”

“Yes! Cavalry’s come in to contact them, and people are moving around.”

Again there was a pause on the radio.

“We could attack them now then.” Charvi said.

“They’re completely off their guard, the guns aren’t pointing at anything, we can clean house. We just need to move fast enough to smash through all of them.” Gulab said.

“It could be a trap.”

“If it’s a trap they’ll have to set up longer or they’ll be throwing it on their own men!”

“Also true.”

Charvi seemed to ponder the implications.

Gulab felt a twinge of excitement, a stark contrast to her formerly somber thoughts.

This was the other half of her, the hunter, the fighter, the little mountain bandit.

Her prey was showing its juicy flanks, and she wanted meat for the week.

“Come down quickly.” Charvi finally said.

Gulab hastily complied.

She gathered up a large pack she had left in corner of the building’s roof and ran down the skeletal steel step stairs descending the sides and rear of the building, yelling for Red Squadron units still searching tenement rooms on each floor to gather their things, get up and move. Her troops quickly realized it was time to go, and perhaps wanting no more of huddling dozens of meters off the ground level, they wasted no time following her.

Within minutes she and a train of 12 charged down the lobby of the tenement and out.

There they found four freshly-arrived trucks on the lawn.

Two of the trucks were infantry-carrier trucks with thin, hastily assembled metal plate walls on large beds that could carry a squadron and a heavy machine each gun or anti-tank gun each, or two infantry squadrons if the men and women did not mind being crammed in tight. Utility trucks rounded out the convoy, their own beds covered only by a canvas tarp, and likely carrying ammunition, rations and medical supplies in small crates.

From around the trucks, Charvi appeared alongside that long-haired engineer girl that Colonel Nakar was fond of, Sergeant Agni. Both of them had very similarly affect-less expressions on their faces and Gulab suppressed a laugh. She waved and walked over, joining them in what seemed to be a quick strategy session before the coming battle.

Atop a picnic table in the middle of the children’s playground, they laid down a map.

“We don’t have much time, Sergeant.” Charvi said. “We’ve got enemies mobile. If we can catch them while they’re shuffling feet we’ll have the advantage on our side.”

Sergeant Agni nodded her head. “I merely wanted to let you know that I supplied Shaumian’s northwestern thrust an hour ago. He will link up with you at the University, but any regrouping will have to be done past Avenue. I sincerely doubt he will arrive in time to cut off the retreat you might cause if you attack Avenue right now.”

“That’s ok! We’ll cut it off ourselves!” Gulab said, raising a fist.

Charvi and Agni stared at her for a moment before returning to their deliberations.

Charvi almost looked like she wanted to smile. Maybe Gulab was imagining it.

“What about Sergeant Krima?” She asked.

Agni shook her head. “Still in reserve. We do not want to expend our forces too quickly.”

“Understood.” Chadgura said. “Then I must seek this advantage now, Sergeant.”

“Yes. You will need speed. We can use my trucks to lift your advance force.” Agni said.

“I would appreciate it.” Charvi replied. She turned to Gulab with a slightly darkened face. “Harmony will have to lead the attack, and dangerous as it is, I need someone with them who has seen the layout of the Avenue and can direct their fire. Can you ride desant?”

“Of course I can.” Gulab said.

“Alright. I must go organize our the remaining squads. Red and Green will follow you.”

Charvi seemed to not want to say another word on the matter. Perhaps she feared she might take back her decision. After all she had already objected to endangering Gulab before. But sometimes it was necessary to jump into the fray; and no one was more eager to do so than Gulab. She was practically brimming with excitement in the toes of her feet.

She had discovered the enemy’s weakness; this would be her battle.

She, Gulab, would be making a difference.

And she could not allow herself to let down the people counting on her. Not in this hunt.

Saluting both the sergeants, Gulab took her leave. From the tenement lobby, Red Squadron saw her moving and began to follow along with their weapons at the ready.

On the road north, behind a repurposed sandbag wall where a few of Blue Squadron’s soldiers manned an anti-tank gun and a machine gun stolen from the 8th Division, Harmony sat guard over the entry to University Avenue. Atop the turret, the upper half of Caelia Suessen watched the road through binoculars. Around the tank, Gulab finally caught sight of the elusive Private Danielle Santos, a slender and slight girl with a frizzy head of black hair and big glasses, just a touch shorter and darker in complexion than her superior. Upon being stopped, she visibly shook a little and gave an awkward salute.

“What’s the damage on our friend here?” Gulab asked.

Caelia put down her binoculars and looked down from over the turret.

Danielle briefly stared at her as if seeking reassurance, then addressed Gulab.

“Um, not much. I was just tightening the road wheels and the track, it got a little slack.”

“You took a few shots, didn’t you?” Gulab asked.

“It was all on the turret front.”

Danielle pointed to the bulging armor around the gun. Two big dents scarred the armor.

“We’ve got sixty millimeters of armor there. No Goblin will crack it.”

She started to sound more confident. Tank minutia might have been her strong point.

Gulab smiled. “I’ll take your word for it. Mind having me as a passenger again?”

Danielle blinked. “Um–”

“Not at all.” Caelia interjected. “Climb up, Corporal.”

“One second.”

At the feet of the tank, Gulab dropped the large bag that she had been carrying and unfurled the contents. The Norgler she had disabled at that horrid intersection fell out in three pieces, barrel, bipod and the rest. Several belts of ammunition also dropped out of the sack. Danielle and Caelia watched as Gulab quickly reassembled the gun, the former wide eyed, the latter stoic. Gulab stuck the barrel back into place and fastened it. She tossed the bipod away, and threw the ammunition over her shoulder. Supporting it via an improvised leather shoulder-strap made of a pouch belt, Gulab hefted the Norgler.

“How’s it look?” She asked, grinning as she loaded in a belt.

“It looks like it’s going to vomit a stuck round into your face.” Caelia replied bluntly.

Danielle stared dejectedly at the formerly evil weapon, as if nervous in its presence.

Norglers had quickly become a symbol of fear for them all over the past month.

Gulab would count on this; she would use it.

“It’s just a gun, it’s not surgery or anything. I’ll be fine.” Gulab said.

“I don’t know.” Caelia said, glancing at her shoes.

“Corporal Kajari has done some weird things in the past, so I guess, it will work out.”

Danielle patted Caelia in the back, smiling nervously.

“Okay.” Caelia replied dejectedly. “Climb aboard then.”

“I can’t. Not like this anyway. Help me up.” Gulab said.

It was impossible for her to climb aboard with all of the equipment she was carrying.

And she was not keen to take it all off and throw it on individually.

That might have resulted in the Norgler finally falling completely apart.

Caelia and Danielle, heaving many a sigh, had to pick the Corporal up by her legs, while Gulab supported herself on their shoulders, and together they lifted her. Several Red squaddies stood in confusion as the trio struggled. Gulab banged the Norgler on Danielle’s head more than once, and the iron sight fell off as she smashed the weapon against Harmony’s turret. Eventually they managed to get Gulab atop the rear of the tank.

There she quickly knelt, raising the Norgler over the turret, unsupported without its bipod. For footing, she stuck her ankle through an iron loop meant for tow ropes, and wound her leather strap around the antennae mount for the Kobold, near Caelia’s hatch.

Once at her onerous position, Gulab winked at the tankers with a smile.

“That looks like a bad time.” Caelia sighed.

Danielle shook her head and marched toward her front hatch.

Gulab’s ankle started to hurt and she barely had a grip on the Norgler.

But she ignored both those minor annoyances.

Her radio sounded. “Gulab, can you hear me? Are you in position?”

“Yes ma’am!” Gulab replied.

Charvi ran her through the situation as everyone formed up.

Behind Harmony, two of Sergeant Agni’s infantry-carrier trucks formed the rear of a spearhead formation. Red Squadron climbed aboard one, while the recently arrived Green Squadron occupied the other. Yellow, Blue and the fresh Purple squadron would follow on foot, with a small rearguard trailing slowly behind. Red and Green would dismount near battle and leave their trucks behind while Harmony engaged the first sandbags.

“Are you ready?” Charvi asked.

“Yup!” Gulab shouted. She banged her fist atop Harmony’s turret. “Get going!”

Beneath her, Gulab felt the tank start shaking as the engine started.

“Gulab, please be careful.” Charvi said.

“I’m invincible! You’ll see!”

With a quick clap, Charvi’s voice quieted.

Gulab heard the distinctive sound of tracks, and pressed herself against the turret.

Holding the Norgler with both hands, she readied herself as the tank picked up speed.

“Hold on tight Corporal, we’re going in fast!” Danielle said.

She seemed a lot more upbeat over the radio than in person.

Gulab felt a jolt in her stomach. “How fast?”

“As fast as Tank Commander Suessen likes!” Danielle cheerily added.

“How fast is that?” Gulab pressed her.

“Pretty fast.” Caelia added.

Within the next few seconds, Harmony began to pick up a prodigious speed.

Gulab held on much more tightly.

---

 

City of Rangda, Streets of Northeast Rangda

So strong was Lieutenant Munira’s voice that bad audio did nothing to diminish her cry.

“Comrades, we are taking Umaru park! After the initial salvo, we charge! Show no fear to the craven enemy! We have the utmost superiority over them, tactically and morally!”

On nearby vehicles, Adesh saw fists raised into the air in excitement, and heard shouts.

That necessary salvo mentioned by the Lieutenant would end up being the responsibility of the Chimera self-propelled guns. No other artillery was ready to deploy. Adesh peeked his head around the sloped armor of the gun casemate, scanning his surroundings.

Slow and steady, their Chimera was in motion. Their three-gun unit of Chimeras trailed behind a large column of soldiers on motorcycles and on foot. More Chimeras followed, but the bulk of the column was composed of sleek motorcycles. Some of the motorcycles towed mortars behind them, and lagged along the edges of the column, while others had Khroda machine guns affixed to the side-car that they could shoot. Those had proven useful in the last roadblock, which had been budged aside with minimal effort of the column. Now they were slightly uphill from their next objective, which was in sight.

Atop the hill, the Chimeras halted. They were not that high above the target. Ahead of them the road descended maybe a dozen meters and expanded around a small woodland park. Ditches had been cut around the park to prevent the entry of tanks, and a triangle formation of trenches chock-full of men and women defending the approaches. Machine guns and mortars were visible in special mesh-netted foxholes behind the trenches.

Umaru was the hinge between Rangda University and Forest Park, directly connected to the main avenues and roadways running along Northern and Eastern Rangda. Adesh understood as much just from looking at the map. His eyes naturally drew a line between each of the main, circled objectives, forming a triangle. One of the triangle’s sides ran right through Umaru. It was a prime spot to support attacks on the two linked areas.

As the column reorganized in preparation for the attack, all of the men in ordinary motorcycles dismounted them and hid them in buildings and around alleys. Only the motorcycles with machine gun sidecars remained mounted. Mortar-carrying bikes were parked near the Chimeras, and their tubes were deployed by the riders and passengers.

There were at least fifty or sixty men and women from the few dozen ordinary bikes who were loading up with weapons and ammunition and making preparations to fight on foot.

“Can’t they fight in their bikes? Wouldn’t it be safer?” Adesh asked.

“Too exposed.” Nnenia replied, in her trademark fashion.

“She’s right.” Eshe said. “They don’t have any armor on those things, and no matter how fast they go they could run into gunfire and die if they don’t have cover or armor.”

“Makes sense.” Adesh said. He felt stupid for asking.

Behind the three of them, Sergeant Rahani sat against the rear armor, whistling.

“How are you holding up?” He asked.

“Me?” Adesh asked back.

“Yes, you.” Rahani said. He smiled. “You look concerned.”

Adesh scratched his hair. “I recall that we’re not supposed to fight from atop hills.”

This was not his chief concern, though it was written in their fighting manuals that they should use the sides of hills for cover and not fight directly atop them. Doing so would expose them to enemy artillery and air attacks. Higher elevation had to be used sparingly.

Sergeant Rahani giggled.

“We’re in an urban environment, so unfortunately the hillsides are all occupied by buildings. We can’t really fight well in the blocks, so we have to stick to the roads.”

He reached out and patted Adesh on the side.

Adesh thought that the Sergeant must have known something else was bothering him, but he did not pry, and Adesh was thankful for it. In reality, Adesh’s concerns were greater than what could be covered by a tactical manual. Rolling in his head was a mixture of anger and guilt and trepidation and shock all of which individually fed into the others.

Above all, he wanted to believe in Colonel Nakar. She was a hero; she was their hero!

He wanted to believe in his friends too. He wanted to protect them, to be with them.

He supposed that the 8th Division had their own heroes who they followed, too, and their own friends they needed to protect. It was easier to see this with them than with Nocht.

To him Nocht were demons; thinking of them summoned an anger and a fear quite different from what he felt for the 8th Division. Nocht were not human. But the 8th Division were his own people and he was so confused, so torn. It was hard to deal with.

Looking around himself he saw Nnenia’s stoic affect, Rahani’s warmth and Eshe’s gallant confidence and he wondered if they were torn up inside too. He did not want to ask them. He did not want to become a burden to them, to trouble them.

Instead he kept the turmoil inside, and faced forward again.

Lieutenant Munira came on the radio.

“We will begin with a twenty-gun salute to our wayward friends! May the light of Diyam deliver them. All Self-Propelled Guns fire a ten-shell rolling barrage on mark!”

Adesh checked his optical equipment. He had instruments to measure distance and orientation of his target, to adjust gun elevation to a fine degree, as well as ordinary sights for direct fire. Using his map, which had been hand-gridded by the artillery section computing team, he adjusted the direction and elevation of the gun to fire on the park. Nnenia turned the wheels and performed the mechanical adjustment; Kufu drove the vehicle as a whole and begrudgingly turned it in the directions Adesh called out.

For the rolling barrage he would shift elevation a set amount after each shot.

Just as he was nearly done with his preparations, the Lieutenant’s voice sounded anew.

“Fire Mission, TRP 68493. Fire for effect! Mark!”

Sergeant Rahani got on his own radio and called the two other Chimeras in the platoon.

Eshe looked at his watch and then helped Nnenia load the gun with a 76mm shell.

Finally Adesh pulled the lever and discharged the ordnance.

He felt the great thundering force of the gun as the shell soared skyward.

Off into the morning sky the red tracer joined over a dozen other shells.

Adesh quickly turned to his long-range periscoping sight.

He laid eyes on the park in time to watch the first shells land on the exterior trenches. In quick succession the individual shells struck the ground with a great clamor. There were terrible fiery flashes, and dust and smoke blew up in front of the trenches, sending sandbags flying and cutting great gouges into the soft soil. It was hard to tell which shell had been his until his brain recalled the exact calculations he had done. Judging by the effects, he had put his shell right on the lower edge of the park, as he had wanted.

Before the smoke could even begin to settle the guns were ready for the second shot.

“You’re doing great, my beautiful crew!” Rahani called out. “Adesh, calculations!”

He was already planning to say it. He knew what to do.

“Shift five degrees up!” Adesh called out.

Nnenia nodded and turned the elevation lever, raising the cannon the few degrees needed, while Eshe loaded the gun. Sergeant Rahani relayed the adjustments to the other guns. It was hectic. For Adesh it felt like everyone was talking at once. Even Nnenia’s panting and Eshe’s grunting vocalizations as he hefted the gun felt like input he needed to hear.

Shutting his eyes and breathing in deep, he tried to focus his thoughts.

Immediately after loading the shell, Eshe checked his watch again.

“Adesh, fire!”

Almost mindlessly, Adesh pulled the shooting lever. He then looked through the sight.

His own Chimera had been the fastest to reload. Adesh heard his own gun cry out first, almost alone for a second before the rest of the vehicles opened fire. All around him Adesh heard and felt the succession of gun reports from the other vehicles in the battery, stirring in the pit of his stomach. Even the Chimeras far across the street rattled him.

They were twenty in all, all of whom were firing together. It was noisy and rumbling.

Through the sight, Adesh watched the second wave of shells hitting ground. Several of the trenches suffered direct hits, sending pillars of dirt and human debris flying from between the slits in the earth. Small fires trailed through the grass as 76mm shells hit mortar holes and supply pits dug in and around the trenches. Adesh’s own shell crashed through the foremost trench, just a little too far right, collapsing the edges of the hole.

Smoke and fire and dust formed a cloud around Umaru park. Adesh could hardly see green through it anymore. He could hardly see undisturbed ground around the edges of the park. Slowly and methodically they were stomping on every meter of dirt. He saw shadows through the fog, men and women fleeing the trenches for the forest.

He swung his sight up a touch and scanned for new targets. Then he spotted it.

Directly behind that trench was a large, dug-in gun pit getting ready to counter-fire.

It was hidden beneath a camouflage tarp, but with the barrel now poking out the front of the hole and highly elevated, it was clear that this was a 122mm gun, ready to shoot.

One shot from that would kill everyone he loved here.

He felt a thrashing in his heart, but he could not panic. He couldn’t even call a warning.

His mind was working faster than the time around him. He just had to stop the gun.

Knowing where his shot hit in the trench, Adesh quickly calculated hitting the gun pit.

Closing his eyes, he could still see it. Eerily, he thought he knew when it would shoot.

It was as if with his eyes closed a different sense, a powerful sense, took over for them.

Something greater than vision guided him. A strange intuition, working in milliseconds.

He had precious little time left.

“Traverse left, ten degrees, and then three elevation!” Adesh called out. “Hurry!”

“I’m goin’, I’m goin.” Kufu’s irritable voice responded.

At once the Chimera shifted its bulk.

Adesh looked through his angle sights. “Correct traverse, one degree right, Nnenia!”

“Yes!”

Nnenia nodded her head. After adjusting the elevation, she used a lever to shift the gun itself. While it was limited to perhaps five degrees in any direction, far less than the range of movement available by moving the vehicle as a whole, the gun’s traverse could be much more quickly and minutely adjusted than the facing of the entire tank. In short order Nnenia had the gun facing exactly where Adesh wanted. Eshe loaded.

He checked his watch and nodded to Adesh. He was the commander, so he had to call the shots, but it was clear that everyone was on top of the action. He didn’t need to shout.

Silently, Adesh pulled the lever and prayed.

Through the sights, he briefly spotted a pair of artillery crew rushing shells out from the woods to the camouflaged gun behind the trench. They had run into the open in time to be crushed by the third barrage of shells, rolling in deeper and deeper into the park.

The shelling now completely bypassed the trenches and began to fall into the wood and around the second tier of defenses. Adesh watched as his shell landed directly atop the dug-in gun before it could fire back at the Chimeras. Multiple detonations followed like the bursts of a firecracker rope. Behind the camouflaged netting and the pit walls the gun’s ammunition was burning and blowing up and belching black smoke into the air.

Those two people Adesh had seen had simply disappeared. Whatever was left with them was buried in the shellholes somewhere. He felt momentarily both sick and glad. But he couldn’t peel himself away. His mind floated up a message, a message he needed to hear.

They were only three shells into a ten shell barrage. He had to complete the fire mission.

Lieutenant Munira needed him to; Nnenia, Eshe and Rahani needed him to.

It was clear to him, however, that when the infantry marched in, they would find little resistance left in Umaru park. He didn’t even need the fourth shell’s hit location to calculate that particular fact. Such was the power of an artillery battery that could run to any location and launch a fire mission fully under its own power. Back at the camps in rural Adjar, when he first learned gunnery, such a thing seemed unimaginable to anyone.

Modern war was falling right over the heads of the antiquated 8th Division.

It brought the guilt, the anger, the stress, and the sheer awe back to Adesh’s mind.

But he resolved to complete the mission. He calculated for that fourth shell.

---

 

City of Rangda, University Avenue

Orange-tinged in the morning light, the defenses at University Avenue looked static, peaceful, unprepared amid routine personnel rotation for the death swooping close.

“Hang on tight!” Danielle shouted over the radio.

Gulab could not have clung more tightly, and yet the ride was no more safe.

As the enemy line came clearly into view, Harmony sped up to its maximum speed.

At home on the roads, the Kobold accelerated to fifty kilometers per hour.

Gulab saw the faces of the enemy soldiers darken, incredulous, as they spotted the tank and trucks barreling toward their suddenly unprepared defenses. Horses stood out in the open, and there were many men and women loitering around the sandbags waiting for orders to regroup or retreat or transfer. Several guns lay abandoned during the shuffle, and when Harmony charged into combat range there were many soldiers out of cover.

The Kobold’s crew wasted no time engaging.

“Firing High Explosive!” Caelia shouted.

Gulab heard a loud report and saw the gun flash ahead.

She felt the turret shake, and it almost caused her to slip back on it. Pressing the Norgler up against the turret, she managed to hook the empty bipod mount against the handle on Caelia’s hatch, and in so doing, just barely maintained her grip on the firearm.

Some 500 meters ahead the shell slammed into the middle of the sandbag wall and displaced several layers of fortification. Alarmed, 8th Division soldiers ran every which way around the first sandbag wall. Horses fled from the flash and noise of the tank gun. Gunners rushed back to weapons that were aiming at haphazard directions or completely dismantled for transport. Caelia gave them no respite. Directly after firing its explosive shell, Harmony’s turret screeched with automatic gunfire, its coaxial Khroda machine gun spitting out thick lines of furious red tracers that crashed wildly across the sandbags.

“Corporal, you brought that thing out for a reason, open fire!” Private Suessen shouted.

“Sure thing pal! Here goes nothing!” Gulab responded.

Without any idea of what to expect, she held down the trigger on the Norgler.

Kicking and screaming were the immediate effects.

Then came a rate of fire too intense to be real.

She had never fired a Norgler; Gulab had only been on the receiving end. Shooting it felt like becoming acquainted with the monster anew. Operating the weapon felt like wrangling a thrashing boar. From the moment she held down the trigger the weapon seemed to feel compelled to drag in all of the belt on her shoulder, pushing what felt like hundreds of rounds through its barrel. Livid green tracers soared in long, horrifically quick bursts, ending only when Gulab’s finger swung off the trigger by accident and resuming immediately as she pressed down again. Smoke wafted up from the barrel’s frontal cone, and the sides of the gun flashed red through slits cut along its length.

That familiar infernal sawing noise punctuated the moment.

Gulab struggled to hold the weapon in place, and her gunfire swept and sliced from street to street and across the front and over the top of the sandbag defenses. Bullets went flying in seemingly every direction ahead of the hurtling light tank. Small traces of dust kicked up wherever she hit from the sheer velocity of the rounds; part of the sandbag wall became so saturated with her gunfire that it seemed a small cloud of smoke formed there.

She had little control, and yet, the endless screeching and the strong kick and the sheer volume of bullets produced an intoxicating effect that brought a sick grin to Gulab’s face.

Why hadn’t she stolen one of these before? They were incredible!

Like any Norgler attack the effect was immediate. Under this loud, incessant barrage and with a tank speeding toward them gaining over ten meters a second, the defenders panicked. Several fled the sandbag wall, while others hid ineffectively. Every head, every gun, every limb, hid away from the shower of lead. Resistance from the first tier of defenses ceased entirely as the tank descended on them. In seconds Harmony closed in.

“Hold on Corporal!” Danielle called again.

Gulab ducked her head behind the turret as Harmony plowed through the sandbags.

Shrugging aside the defense, sending sandbags and chunks of wooden crate and pieces of metal flying out from under and around its tracks, the tank barely slowed as it crushed a machine gun and its operator underfoot and finally penetrated inside University Avenue.

Danielle hit the brake; Gulab slammed roughly into the turret.

Her crazed Norgler dropped clumsily to the side of the turret, and the strap nearly pulled her shoulder out of place as she half-fell off the sloped rear of the Kobold tank.

“Hey, watch it!” Gulab cried out.

Behind her, the trucks braked harshly to a stop, and disgorged dozens of her comrades.

Submachine guns and rifles to their shoulders, they charged past her into battle.

Grumbling, Gulab tugged on her shoulder strap until it lifted from the antennae mount.

So released, she slid farther down the engine cover, almost dropping from the tank entirely. Climbing back on, she crouched around the side of the turret, atop the ventilation grating, grabbing hold of the Norgler once more. She pulled open the top, and reloaded the machine gun with one of her belts. This time she hooked herself to a turret foothold.

“How’s–”

Before Gulab could even start her sentence Caelia was already shouting into the radio.

“There’s an engineer in that building– CABLE CHARGE! Fall back!”

Harmony reversed, turned its turret and opened machine gun fire on a distant building.

It was too late to stop the trap.

Across the road in front of them a dozen explosions went off all at once.

Gulab almost thought it was artillery. But the blasts came from underground.

Huge columns of dust and smoke blew in from cracks in the earth as the road several meters behind the first sandbag wall collapsed into the sewer below, forming a ditch almost five meters deep in an instant. The wound cut right across the front of their advance, stretching from one side of the street the other, across the road, and even collapsing the street corners around the nearest buildings on University Avenue.

Harmony was far back enough that it received only dust and chunks of hard road tar.

Red and Green squadron troops fell back from the blasts, some wounded by the shock. Gulab saw nobody fall into the ditch, but the squadrons broke up as comrades converged on the wounded and pulled them back around the tank. Nobody was attacking anymore.

Before the dust even settled there were tracer rounds flying in from behind the cloud.

“Caelia, we can’t drive over that, get around it!” Gulab shouted.

“Danielle!” Caelia shouted in turn.

“I’m on it, I’m on it!”

Harmony lurched back suddenly in reverse, swung itself around, and turned to face the glass maw of a nearby fashion boutique just a few meters back from the sandbags.

“Hold on tight!”

“You keep saying that but it never helps–”

Gulab’s shouting turned to incoherent screaming as Harmony hurtled suddenly into the street and shot its gun into the store. There were a series of rough bumping noises as the road wheels experienced the elevation shift from the road and the ditch to the street level, and then a storm of glass and soft stuccoed brick as they went crashing through the front.

Fancy lace gowns and fur scarves and silk pantyhose flew into the air as the tank ground through the mannequins, over the counter, burst through the back, the structure weakened by the high explosive shell. Out in the rear parking lot, surrounded by palm trees planted on ornate raised brick beds framing the blacktop, Harmony turned around again and ran along the back street, parallel to the road was barred to them. There were palm trees flanking them as far as the eye could see and the back street was tighter than the main road, but all the same buildings and the same destination was ahead of them.

Gulab was so in shock throughout this maneuver she forgot to call her troops.

Ducking behind the turret, with one hand on the norgler and another on mic, she hailed.

“Red Squadron!” Gulab shouted, her hair whipping in the wind as Harmony soared. “Run through the clothes shop and follow us! Green Squadron, hold the rear sandbag wall!”

“Firing Armor-Piercing High Explosive!” Caelia suddenly shouted.

“YOU’RE WHAT?”

Gulab peeked her head around the turret again in confusion.

In the ensuing chaos, she just barely spotted an armored car running in from around the buildings ahead, in time for the Kobold’s 45mm gun plant a shell through its top-heavy machine gun turret and burst half the vehicle open like a tin can under pressure. As if still alive under its own power the car turned clumsily toward them, catching on fire.

At seemingly a hundred kilometers per hour, screaming fast, the car rushed for them.

Danielle gasped into the radio. “Um! Hang on! We’re ramming or something!”

“Ramming?” Caelia shouted.

Gulab rushed behind the turret again with a panicked gasp.

She felt the wind rush past, and a surge of hot air.

She heard leaves rustle and brick crack and sift.

She distinctly did not feel or hear herself die screaming as a car flew over them.

Danielle breathed deep on the radio. “Phew! It missed us. Are you ok corporal?”

Gulab tentatively peeked around the turret again, and found a gap in the line of palm trees. It indicated where the armored car had veered away from them, lost control, chopped through a raised bed and slammed through the side of a nondescript building.

“No. I think I died.” Gulab said in exasperation.

“Rest in peace.” Caelia jokingly replied.

Harmony slowed to a less reckless pace, calmly bypassing several buildings, and then angled itself around a Civil Canteen. Edging around a corner and back into the main road, the tankers and Gulab caught sight of the second tier of the enemy’s defenses, slowly regrouping. Behind them, Red Squadron’s ten remaining soldiers ran through the gouged-out clothing shop and into the back street, and hurried to catch up.

Gulab waved them over. “Red, we’re about to attack, hurry.”

“Corporal, tell us when we’re formed up.” Caelia said.

“I will.” Gulab replied, keeping an eye on her troops.

Meanwhile the tankers called each other on the open line.

“Caelia, do you want to go fast or steady?” Danielle asked.

“Keep it steady this time.”

“Oh? Not fast? My my, how unlike you.”

Caelia sighed, a bit wistful. “Well. I don’t know–”

“I was just teasing! I support you wanting to go slow sometimes.”

“Thank you. It’s silly, but that means a lot to me.”

Gulab blinked at the tanker’s rapport, and crouched beside the turret.

Around the corner she saw gunfire being traded.

Tracers flew from both sides of the ditch. Green Squadron was holding down the end of University Avenue, while the 8th Division’s defenders on the second tier, in the middle of the Avenue, clustered around their sandbags for cover. There were men and women retreating from the gun battle, perhaps to organize a defense of the backstreet now that the tank had, in their eyes, disappeared from the main road. Gulab didn’t know.

She did know the defense still looked to be in disarray. There were guns abandoned along the sides of the road and left unmanned on the line itself. Defenders fought on with rifles and light Danava machine guns instead of with their Khrodas and AT guns and mortars. They were in a mind to retreat; perhaps this wasn’t a troop rotation at all. Maybe they had been getting ready to vacate the line. Maybe a little push was all they needed to rout.

Gulab was more than happy to provide that push.

Soon as her Red Squadron formed up behind the tank, Gulab nodded to them.

At once, they nodded back, submachine guns and rifles in hand.

“Tankies, get moving!”

“Yes ma’am!” Caelia and Danielle said at once.

Harmony let out a furious shout from its engine and steadily took the corner.

Gulab pointed the Norgler in the general direction of the enemy line and held it down.

She was almost on her belly and the gun was almost controllable.

From the barrel cone a shower of green tracers fell savagely on the sandbag wall. Caught unawares, a pair of machine gunners shooting over the fortifications were hit about the shoulders and face and collapsed behind the wall. Riflemen all along the line ducked for cover as Caelia joined the attack, her turret-mounted Khroda supplementing the Norgler’s gunfire. Red and green tracers flashed together in the air, laying down suppressing fire.

Around the tank’s sides, Red Squadron advanced diligently, split into five on the right and five on the left. Submachine gun fire peppered the defenders, keeping them off their machine guns. Harmony’s turret roared once more, and behind the line a mortar went up in pieces. Like an arrow plunging into a breast, they advanced from the corner, into the road, and diagonally up against the second sandbag wall. Retaliatory fire bounced off the tank. Not one grenade was thrown. More and more defenders huddled rather than fight.

It didn’t take much more of this punishment for the 8th Division to retreat.

As Gulab suspected, the defenders broke and tumbled out from behind the sandbags, amid the gunfire, unable to take any more. Several were cut down almost by accident by the sheer volume of automatic fire bearing down on their line. Dozens of people seemed to pop up as if from out of nowhere, running for their lives from behind the contested walls.

Red Squadron left the side of the tank and formed up on the opposite side of the sandbags.

Gulab dropped off the side of Harmony as it maneuvered itself behind the wall, and ran up. She slid to a crouch behind the sandbags, taking the same position as her own troops.

“Green Squadron, hold fire and get ready to move up! Red Squadron, slap the abandoned Khrodas around and use them!” Gulab shouted. She was unused to giving tactical orders, but it was not a responsibility she resented. It was a natural order to give now.

All along the wall there were weapons ripe for the taking. Red Squadron fighters turned Khrodas once facing south toward the north, targeting the final line and the runners. Two intact machine guns and, surprisingly, a small mortar, were captured immediately, and soon employed in this way. Ammunition for them was plentiful on the other side of the wall, and it was all grabbed and pulled over the sandbags to their side and employed.

In less than a minute they had their own defensive line set up, and it was their turn to fight from a strongpoint. Stolen Khroda guns flashed red tracers up the streets. Light mortar shells soared overhead and fell around the third line of defense. Gulab pulled up her binoculars and saw men and horses vaulting over the final line, and others congregating behind it. There was only a third of University Avenue left to go.

She felt a surge of pride and power and accomplishment. She had helped this happen.

Absentmindedly pulling back the charging handle on the Norgler, readying to fight, Gulab found herself unfortunately dry of ammunition. No more belts, no more sawing.

“Oh shit. I’m gonna miss this stupid thing.” She lamented.

Gulab dropped the Norgler on the floor and peered over the sandbags, searching the 8th Division’s abandoned side of the wall for a familiar discarded rifle or submachine gun.

Before finding any weapons, she saw the flash, and the next instant, the fire.

She was struck by a power that took the world from her in a split second.

From across the Avenue a shell came smashing into the sandbag wall, just six or seven meters away. Gulab felt the heat, briefly, and a surge of force that pushed her back onto the road and off the sandbags. As she fell back, she saw the fragments come flying like a cloud of knives, fast, like hundreds of needle-shaped bullets from one single smoking cannon. Across her cheek, around her arms, into her hip, she felt the chunks go slicing.

She was frozen in that moment, as if she could see the individual pieces of metal go flying, and she thought to move this way or that as if that decision could affect anything, and perhaps she did; perhaps she avoided death then. It was impossible to confirm, it was a dreamlike state, a suspension of a moment that should have been imperceptible.

Then the moment passed, paradoxically long enough and much too brief.

She was no longer suspended, and time was cruelly flowing.

Gulab hit the ground hard. She found the world shaking and eerily silent, and she was deafened and numb. Her vision swam. She saw the warm yellow and blue sky swirling like the froth atop a fancy coffee drink and thought she could not move. But slowly, though she knew not the time it took, the pain started to return. Everything was hurting.

“Pull the Corporal away!” shouted a squaddie, “pull her away now! Into the building!”

A woman nearby was shouting. “Shit, it’s an Orc! We got an Orc coming!”

“Since when do Orcs have guns that big?” A man replied. Gulab felt herself dragged.

“It’s got a seventy-six, how the heck did they mount that on an Orc!”

Everyone around her was shouting. Everyone one the radio was shouting too.

Caelia’s voice on the radio was firm. “Firing Armor-Piercing High Explosive!”

Gulab thought she saw the flash of the gun at the corner of her eyes.

Then a greater flash as a larger, redder tracer that went flying past the tank.

It exploded far behind them in a plume of fire. Gulab saw it as she was taken away.

“Crap, that would’ve wrecked us. Danielle, back off! We can’t fight it head-on!”

Harmony came briefly into her field of view as it retreated quickly around the corner.

More voices on the radio, some too sharp, some too soft, she could barely register–

“Danielle, keep hidden, I’m going out–”

“Caelia, wait. What are you doing?”

“We need to call in artillery. I’ll grab the shooting table and map from Corporal Kajari. Then, I guess, I’m going to duck out of this building, and have a really terrible time.”

“Please be careful.”

“I’ll be fine, I think. I hope.”

“Well wishes.”

Gulab felt all the voices starting to converge and the world go darker.

She saw a roof, sliding over her head, and a half-dozen faces.

Private Suessen was the last one before everything fell away to shadow.

“You’re going to be ok, Corporal.”

---

City of Rangda, Umaru Park

A hundred 76mm shells and something on the order of fifty 82mm mortar rounds had fallen on Umaru Park, and that had been enough almost to wipe it from the map. Trees splintered and burned and had to be put out. Through the gouges in the earth one could trace lines from the edge of the park right to its center, almost like a star pattern with many arms. It was as if a perfect stencil, a flawless artillery dispersion chart, like the ones Adesh had drawn for practice in camp, had been superimposed right on the park.

There was nothing left but corpses, stirred earth, blood and water from broken underground pipes and smashed fountains, turning the soil to mud. Intermittent patches of grass looked eerie amid the wasteland. Not much of the little park wood was left. Perhaps three or four stubborn trees, their crowns mostly burnt or smashed off.

It was a scene as if from a nightmare, but it was real, and Adesh had helped cause it.

And yet it stirred little emotion in him. He sat on the track of the Chimera, parked along one of the roads framing the park, waiting for further orders, with a head that was mostly clear. He felt like he was daydreaming on the border to Adjar again, just staring up at the wide open skies without aim or ambition. There was bustle around him. Motorcycle infantry stood guard around the approaches, and a security detail from the rear arrived to help clean up bodies and to pick through the area for survivors, supplies, anything.

“You okay?”

Nnenia leaned down from the side of the Chimera. Atop the vehicle, Eshe was talking with Rahani, perhaps about what responsibilities being an artillery officer entailed.

“Are you?” She asked again.

“I’m fine.” Adesh said. “Maybe too fine.”

“Too fine?”

Adesh smiled. Even the smile felt strange. “Nnenia, how do you deal with this? I don’t know whether I’m going insane by stressing about it or going insane because I accept it. My head feels really empty right now. And my heart’s all a mess of emotions.”

“I’ve dealt with worse.”

“I can’t imagine there’s worse.”

Nnenia’s eyes trailed off, as if she couldn’t bear to maintain contact.

“I’ll tell you sometime.” She said.

Adesh bowed his head. He hoped he hadn’t offended her. “Alright. Sorry.”

She shook her head. “It’s ok. You have a reason to fight?”

That was perhaps the longest sentence Adesh ever heard Nnenia string.

He really did not feel like he had a good answer.

“I just want everyone to be ok.” Adesh said.

“Me too.”

“That’s all?”

‘That’s all.”

Nnenia shrugged and pulled herself back up to the Chimera.

Adesh sighed. Perhaps nobody had an answer.

It was almost frustrating. Training was fine; in fact, training felt empowering. He felt ready to fight, ready to walk alongside everyone. He didn’t feel scared of Nocht. Yes, there was some trepidation fighting the 8th Division, because they were Ayvartans too. But this felt different. He felt an overarching unease with war that he could not afford. He was a soldier. And on some level, he wanted to be. He wanted to destroy all of these bad people.

He remembered the anger he felt toward that pilot in Adjar.

He still felt that anger.

He just didn’t know exactly what to do with it; or whether it was right to feel at all.

Fighting should have been the place where he felt most at ease with these emotions.

But it was hard to subsume it all even as he did the mechanical actions of fighting.

He could ignore it, but he couldn’t make it completely go away.

And right as he was getting lost in these thoughts, he heard banging on the metal.

“Adesh, come up, you need to hear this!”

He heard Eshe’s voice, and leaped up onto the track and climbed into the compartment.

Everyone was huddled around the radio. Sergeant Rahani was trying to adjust it.

He finally seemed to turn the dials the correct way once Adesh climbed on.

Adesh donned his headset, and heard the call come in.

“–This is Tank Commander Caelia Suessen, calling for artillery support! We have a desperate situation in University Avenue! Come in! I know this is the right–”

She sounded very distressed. There was a lot of noise in the background.

Sergeant Rahani cut her off. “This is Sergeant Rahani of the 1st Self-Propelled Artillery Battery. I’ve got three guns ready to answer. Please call back with targeting data.”

As Rahani spoke to her he waved his hands toward the instruments.

Nnenia, Eshe and Adesh hastily took their places.

“Okay. Let’s see if I remember this.” Caelia took a deep breath on the radio. “Fire Mission, TRP,” she paused, and Adesh heard paper shuffling, “32917, fire for effect! Hurry!”

“Copy that.”

Sergeant Rahani signaled for Adesh, and then hailed the other two vehicles in their group.

Adesh picked up the map from the utility box inside the Chimera. He found the correct Target Registration Point. It was the end of University Avenue. Part of the TRP number was map grids, part of it was specific landmarks within the grid square coordinates that had been specifically numbered for quick prior registration. Once Adesh knew what the TRP was, he could run the math in his head to orient the tank toward the correct location.

“Kufu, swing forty degrees north-northwest. Nnenia, adjust elevation by twenty.”

Kufu, surly as usual, offered no response, but the tank started moving.

“Feeling better?” Nnenia asked.

“I’m dealing with it. Adjust elevation, please.” Adesh gently replied.

Nnenia nodded and turned the wheel.

Eshe stared at them for a moment before loading in the first shell.

“Alright, Tanker Suessen, we’re coordinating fire. Please hang on.” Rahani said.

“I’ve got no other choice!” She shouted back. Distinct rifle reports sounded near her.

Adesh felt nervous from the sounds, and from the general situation.

It was not panic; panic was for the war near one’s skin.

It was just a strange disquiet about his role.

There was a battle happening somewhere far that he was now involved in.

Her life, and that of her comrades, depended on him now.

And he could only hear her cries and the noise on the line.

Checking his instruments, he found everything aligned as it should be.

Adesh nodded to Eshe.

“Firing High Explosive!” Eshe called out.

Almost in unison, the three Chimera opened fire into the distant sky.

Adesh prayed he had done his math right.

---

 

City of Rangda, University Avenue

The 8th Division’s Lion Battalion were starting, against all odds, to attack.

Caelia could think of no other reason why she was seeing what seemed like dozens of soldiers and horses and even a tank gathering at the end of University Avenue.

Cavalry officers with swords in hand paraded around the arriving marching ranks. Dismounted fast attack troops with long, bayonet-equipped rifles formed up behind the third defensive line, taking what appeared to be a broad box formation. As the cavalry got ready to attack, the third defensive line gathered machine guns and mortars and anti-tank weaponry, and brought heavy fire down across the avenue at the former attackers.

Such was the volume of building fire that the second defensive line, captured by Red Squadron before, was completely abandoned. Red Squadron huddled inside a nearby building and Caelia crawled atop its roof, binoculars in hand, a radio at her side, praying that she was not discovered. Meanwhile Blue and Yellow squadron troops began to arrive and took up defenses behind Green, but all of them were stalled. Though they might repulse the incoming attack, it was going to be bloody unless something was done.

And the crown jewel of the enemy arsenal was that tank. It was an old Orc, antiquated compared to Harmony, but as a medium tank it was powerful in ways that mattered. Two rotund machine gun turrets on its front defended it from infantry, while a 76mm short-barreled artillery gun on its drum-like turret enabled it to lay down devastating fire on fortifications. It was an old tank, but it could still outshoot Harmony in direct combat, and was a deadly threat to the infantry while sequestered behind enemy lines.

Whenever that 76mm fired, Caelia could almost feel it under her own flesh.

Every minute or so it fired one thick, broad red tracer across the avenue.

It had hit their sandbags twice, and it had struck around Green Squadron’s wall too.

Now it was turning its turret before firing.

Caelia winced immediately upon seeing the direction of this next shot.

Bracing herself, she clung on to the roof as the building shook from a shell impact.

She heard screams under her and grit her teeth. There was nothing she could do.

“Come on, come on.” She mumbled. She was not a trained artillery observer, but she received enough cross training in it that she knew vaguely how to call for fires.

Now it was up the artillery to deliver. Holding her binoculars up, she watched with held breath as the tank’s turret continued to point their way, as the soldiers started marching, as the bulk of a spirited enemy attack began to make its deadly way down. They must have had at least a Company, and a Platoon was all that could meet them at the Avenue.

Then Caelia heard the tell-tale whistling of a shell flying overhead.

Nothing on their line had fired at her; so it was her own artillery.

Soon as she repositioned her binoculars and fixed on the enemy, she saw three large plumes of smoke rise around the tank and sandbags. It was instantaneous, as if it were not shells falling but explosives set off that were already there. Sandbags collapsed out onto the floor in front of the defensive line, and wounded soldiers shambled from the blast area in disarray, bleeding and dazed. A machine gun was silenced, a mortar blown up, and the cavalry assembling behind the defensive line started to split up for safety.

Behind the smoke the enemy Orc tank started to limp back from the craters.

“Confirmed effect on target!” Caelia called over the radio. “Adjust fire five north!”

“Acknowledged! Adjusting fire mission!” replied the pleasant but firm voice of the gun unit sergeant, Rahani. Within a few seconds he called again. “Shells going out!”

“Watching for effect on target.” Caelia called back, recalling the observer’s rote.

Almost as soon as she said this, the effect played out rather effectively on the target.

Though the shots were spread a little farther apart and the succession was much more deliberate, Caelia could not quibble with the results. She watched the first shell crash right behind the sandbags and scatter the defenders, destroying their machine guns, killing their gunners, and almost instantly relieving the pressure on Green Squadron.

One shell seemed to fall off the road, hitting nothing.

The Orc backed right into the final shell.

Like a spear fallen from heaven, it smashed through the turret roof and exploded inside the tank, ejecting its hatches, detonating the two front turrets as if in a chain reaction and setting fire to the tank. From the gun, a plume of smoke and tongues flame spilled out as if was equipped with a flamethrower rather than a cannon. It was catastrophic damage.

“Kill confirmed.” Caelia replied. “Good kills 1st Battery.”

“Any adjustments?”

Caelia was almost ready to breathe easy and call off the fire mission.

Inexplicably, the 8th Division’s Lion cavalry did not feel the same way.

With a great clamor, a united shout and raised fists, the assembled masses of the Lion battalion rushed past their defeated tank, vaulted over their crushed sandbag walls and dead gunners, and began an all-out death charge against the lower sandbag wall and against Red Squadron’s little stronghold off the road. Horses rode alongside them, spurring Lion’s fighters to action. Rifles and submachine guns flashed with the stoked fury of their wielders. A hundred men and women, it seemed, were running down.

Bullets started to whirl past Caelia, and she ducked and backed off the edge of the roof.

“Continue Fire Mission! Adjust fifteen down! We’ve got a column marching past the previous targets! I need all available guns, now, right now!” Caelia shouted.

“Acknowledged! Adjusting fire mission!”

Traces of gunfire flew out from under her, from inside the building. She briefly glanced and saw tracers from Red and Green taking small bites out of the mass, but the charge continued unabated, closing in meter by meter, undaunted by the resistance.

There were maybe eight people in fighting condition in her building and maybe twenty in the first defensive line. They could not hope to turn back an enemy this vehement.

Within the cacophony and panic, she felt the disquiet of her own heart to an ever greater extent. Her hands reached for the radio and she wanted to turn the knob, to call Danielle, to just tell her, to just admit to herself what she wanted, to throw away the fear. She, who had always known what to do with herself, what she wanted to do; how did she end up in this situation? How did she go from sound to silence in such a stark, maddening way?

Despite everything the fingers would not move over the dial. She wept. She couldn’t–

An operatic boom annihilated her every thought.

For an instant, feeling the roar of the shells, she thought they were meant for her.

Her beating heart and untouched flesh proved quickly otherwise.

It was University Avenue that was suffering this punishment.

Shells started falling from the sky like a shower of stars.

Within the fire and the smoke the charging warriors of the Lion Battalion disappeared.

Explosions swept viciously across the road and street like the successive stomping footsteps of a monster smashing and smashing away at cockroaches or ants, trailing meter by meter, a creeping barrage that saturated what felt like the entire Avenue with high explosive shells. It was only a select section, the section Caelia had called during her adjustment, but the saturation fire was so immense it seemed world ending.

Dozens of shells fell in intervals of four or five seconds each, a rate of fire that seemed impossible, inhuman. Amid the charging ranks, the blasts turned men to mush, the fragments clipped runners like an invisible tripwire, and vast swathes of humanity seemed to vaporize, there one moment and the next gone into smoke and fire.

And the sounds, oh the sounds! It was almost operatic, the rhythm, the vicious drumming of fire and force on concrete, the sifting of skyward dust falling back to earth, punctuated by the helpless, scattered reports of rifles, the almost tinny sounds of machine guns. Caelia felt like she was in a macabre orchestra. Had she done this? Was this her piece?

She had thought there were hundreds of men coming for her and her comrades.

Now it seemed that all of them were gone. That maybe they were never there.

“Kill confirmed, Tank Commander Suessen?” Rahani jovially asked. He sounded confident, despite being too far to see the handiwork of his troops. “Everything sounds mighty peaceful over there, so I hope you’re alright. We can’t do another of those.”

Surveying the devastation in shock and awe, Caelia could only call in the usual rote.

“Good kills, 1st Battery.”

Her fingers were still tempted to switch the frequency, to call Danielle and confess.

But the urgency was past. Instead, she just wanted to quietly contemplate the scene.

Her mind was still trying to turn the whole thing into music.

What would she title this piece? She had always been bad at titles.

Perhaps: “The Way Into Muhimu Shimba.”