The appearance of Zou Mei served to rally the retreating Restorationists. Many now turned and stood their ground, digging in with their weapons, while some even turned back and charged again. Zou Mei herself, red sparks flowing through her, went right for Reed, magnetizing iron towards her hands to form makeshift claws. She swiped at Reed with the strength and razor-sharpness of a lion; Reed was once again the slower fighter and could only backpedal and block the unrelenting attacks.
The tanks rallied, too. As steam billowed from their exhaust pipes, they resumed their march against the train, still stuck in place, while Restorationists followed up behind it. The seeming total victory for the marines had turned back into a slugfest. Isaac, Babs, and a squadron of conventional marines had been charging across open clearing to finish off the routed enemy, but they now found themselves under a hail of bullets. Babs slid across the dirt and threw up several gusts of winds, moving her hands in fierce motions while letting out sharp whistles. Her makeshift defense reflected the incoming bullets, knocking them harmlessly into the ground.
They weren’t too far from the train, so Isaac gritted his teeth from the assault and yelled back to Derry for orders.
“Just heard from the radio - close air support will be here in ten!” Derry yelled back. “Until then, we stand our ground. Echo 6, support Cultivator 3 in relieving Reed and destroying the tanks! Echo 4, set up covering fire at the boulder and destroyed tank!”
“By her sword!” the marines cheered out in unison and immediately got to work. The machine gunner on the neighboring boxcar relayed the order down the train - less than a minute later, the members of Echo 4 squadron had slipped out of the their flatcar and sprinted towards the boulder. Echo 6 squadron was already with Cultivator 3 squadron (aka, Squad 3). As her face turned red from exertion, Babs marched forward, keeping the wind going. The shield deflected anything thrown at them - but that was because only small arm fire had attacked them. A tank now lumbered towards them, angling its turret with ominous groaning.
“Think you can stop that?” Isaac asked.
Babs let out a pained chuckle and directed the group forward. The tank ahead stopped moving, having locked onto its target. Right as it fired, Babs let the shield go and the group dove into a crater blown into the dirt by earlier tank attacks. The shell passed by overhead, exploding several yards behind them. Isaac’s teeth shook and dirt rained down him.
The machine gun at the boulder opened up, taking down several Restorationists advancing toward the crater. The lead tank now turned its attention towards the boulder, giving the group in the crater just the tiniest hint of breathing room.
“We got three targets - the cultivator, the first tank, and the second tank,” the ranking Sergeant barked out, paying no attention to the dirt falling onto his helmet. “Morang, can you take out a tank on your own?”
Babs reluctantly shook her head. “My wind would just be like waves crashing against rocks. It would just bounce off the armor, even if I tried to concentrate it.”
“Spallacio, you take out that first tank,” the Sergeant ordered instead. “It’s heading toward the boulder so it’s distracted. Nichols, Eason, take the grenades and take out the other tank. Morang, go help the Reed. The rest of us will remain here and lay down covering fire!”
That brought out another round of “By her sword!” Isaac, as overwhelming as everything felt, couldn’t help but mix excitement into the flurry of emotion. There was no time for anything besides doing what needed to be done. He had never yelled out a battle cry before under the heat of combat; he had never been this close to death.
But right when he stepped out of the crater, one of marines’ arms disappeared into a spray of red mist, and that took all the exhilaration out of everything. War wasn’t a game. Yet they needed to win nonetheless.
Isaac sprinted across the grass, bullets occasionally smacking into the dirt around him, but the continuous wave of marine gunfire from the train, the boulder, and the crater kept the Restorationists from getting close to him. Up ahead, the tank lumbered on, another blast from its turret taking out a chunk of boulder. This was probably the first time the tank had ever been used in combat - its gears screamed from overuse while oil slicks littered the ground behind it, mixing with the red streams and path of corpses. At one point, Isaac had no choice but step across bodies to make it to the tank. The tattered flesh felt soft beneath his shoes.
A few Restorationists had kept pace with the tank and avoided the suppressing fire. When they noticed Isaac, one mounted his rifle on the tank and fired while the other two charged with hatchets. Isaac’s response came automatically at this point - he fired off an electric charge that blasted away the mounted rifle and then bobbed and weaved his way through the hatchet-men. Superpowered fists shut both of them down, their hatchets flying away as Isaac reached the tank. The rebel formerly behind the mounted rifle tried a new approach - stabbing Isaac with a long knife. Isaac guided his opponent’s fist down into his own thigh. The man groaned and crumpled, leaving Isaac alone with the tank.
The tank had closed in on the boulder and its turret was now aimed squarely at the marines behind it. In just a few more seconds, they’d be turned into chunks of meat. Isaac scrambled onto the tank, looking for the hatch inside. Fortunately, since the whole thing was makeshift, the hatch was little more than a manhole cover. Red lights screamed as Isaac punched straight through the manhole; once his fist made it through the metal, energy surged as he fired off an electric charge into the interior of the tank. In the movies, tanks always exploded when struck like that, but Isaac’s attack had blasted the men instead. The tank stopped moving; no shells came out.
Some of the marines from behind the boulder peeled away, taking up advance positions at Isaac’s tank and the one destroyed by the bazooka earlier. A marine dropped a grenade inside Isaac's tank for good measure, then joined Isaac in slipping to its side for cover. Heat and smoke billowed out through the destroyed hatch; three tanks were down, and the marines now controlled a decent portion of the battlefield.
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While the marines laid down more covering fire, Isaac went ahead to help Reed and Babs. He frowned; Babs was busy holding another cultivator at bay, this one armed with a long staff, while Reed moved sluggishly against Zou Mei. Reluctantly, Isaac decided to trust in Babs and instead went to help Reed. He arrived a moment too late.
Zou Mei had an angry red gash across her thigh through the fabric of her yellow qipao. Reed must’ve slashed her earlier, but Zou Mei showed no signs of slowing down. The striking of iron claws against metal sword sent out sparks and sharp shrieks. When an errant explosion made Reed stumble, Zou Mei got to her side and pressed the advantage, reserving the magnetism in one of her hands and launching the iron as projectiles. Reed narrowly avoided them, but she fell backwards; the side of her faced briefly skimmed an oil slick as she avoided Zou Mei’s next strike.
Between the earlier fate of Zola and Reed nearly dying from dripping water at the hands of Panama, the sight of oil leaking down her face made Isaac’s stomach churn. He was so tantalizingly close - he fired off an electric charge, but it fell too short, creating an explosion of dirt behind Zou Mei that Isaac sprinted right through.
When he emerged on the other side, Reed deflected Zou Mei’s remaining claw upwards towards her face. She leaned backwards, but Zou Mei simply snapped her fingers. The friction between the iron created the tiniest of sparks that leapt from her fingers and onto Reed’s temple.
Isaac’s heart sank. Whether it was Reed’s screams or the image of half her face catching on fire, he couldn’t tell. Reed immediately collapsed into a dry patch of grass, rolling her head against the dying fields of yellow; she held onto her sword throughout it all. When Zou Mei went for the kill, Isaac sent another charge, but he wouldn’t make it in time.
And then a blast of wind knocked Zou Mei away. Leaving the bloody corpse of her former opponent behind her, Babs sent wave after wave of wind against Zou Mei. The Restorationist gave ground, backing away, taking Babs with her. Isaac wanted to help, but Reed was burning alive in front of his very eyes.
He slid next to her and took off his greatcoat. With ragged breaths, he patted his coat against her face to snuff the flames. Her vocal chords sounded shot now; all she let out was whimpers. Isaac struggled to put the flames out while not hitting her too hard. The flames needed to go out right now, but if his hands moved too shakily or violently he would only hurt her more. The heat on his face felt excruciating; he couldn’t imagine what it felt like for Reed.
The last flames finally flickered out. Isaac held her in his arms; she felt far too light and far too soft. She sniffled a few times, then gazed up at Isaac. There was simply a bubbling redness where half of her face should’ve been.
“Did they get my good side?” she mumbled.
Isaac tore off the sleeve of his greatcoat and wrapped it around her head. “You don’t have a good side.”
Reed chuckled. “You’re such a bastard. For that, you’ll have to carry me back.”
He would’ve had to carry her either way. When he hoisted her over her shoulders, he found two more disheartening sights.
First, Zou Mei had Babs tied up with some sort of industrial razor wire. Babs had her finger extended, trying to snap it off to activate the |Whirlwind Reaper|, but the wire held both her arms at bay. Using magnetism, Zou Mei continued to tighten the wire, locking Babs’ legs together, and then raised her arms. Like she was flicking away an annoying fly, the Restorationist simply used her magnetism to fling Babs towards the forest. With a weak whistle, Babs managed to cushion her fall, but took a hard landing. There was enough distance between her and Zou Mei that the wires loosened, which was a good sign, but Isaac still had the second disheartening sight.
Nichols and Eason had failed to take down the last tank. Their corpses were sprawled out in the grass; the beast now had Isaac and Reed firmly in its sights; time slowed down. Isaac could see the slight rise of orange in the turret as the shell began to fire. For some reason, facing down that lone tank amid a field corpses, he thought of the time he went to the movies with all his friends and comrades earlier that autumn.
There was a guitar wail right as the tank fired.
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Isaac awoke. He first thought it was hours later, but the tank had only moved a few feet away. Believing its job was done with the cultivator, it turned and now joined Zou Mei in the last Restorationist charge towards the train. Zou Mei had sliced off pieces of the earlier destroyed tanks and now dragged them behind her using magnetism; whenever gunfire came her away, she used them as her own makeshift shields. When she got to the crater, she dropped a giant shard of metal onto them. Blood sprayed the upturned dirt around it.
His ears kept ringing. Reed laid unconscious next to him, the sword still in her hand. There was a new crater a few yards away; he sort of remembered a sound wave knocking the shell slightly of course, but everything felt hazy. In a daze, he checked Reed’s pulse. When it was still beating, he resolved to come back when he completed his mission.
Isaac couldn’t hear anything, and when he felt his face, his hand came away covered in red. But he could still see, and his brain still sort of worked - it would take a lot to do in a brain expert like him, after all. His legs still worked, too, as did his arms. Even his cultivation was still there. So was the tank, who was now rumbling towards the train. It launched a shell that made no sound, but Isaac saw the resulting explosion just feet from the train, rocking Derry’s flatcar, temporarily knocking out the machine guns there. This let Zou Mei continue her advance; she simply bypassed the men at the boulder.
The Restorationists at the tank noticed Isaac’s approach. In a sense of deja vu, they moved to meet him. Isaac blasted through a man’s head with an electric charge, but the energy made him fall to his knees. The rebel’s pistol fell near Isaac; he rolled forward, scooping it up, firing off-target shots that made the other rebels hesitate. A cloud of steam emerged from the tank, covering the squadron protecting it; when the smoke disappeared, they now littered the ground around Isaac. He picked himself back up, punched through the manhole hatch, and let another blast rip.
The tank came to a halt. Isaac slipped off the machine and fell to the grass. The sky had never seemed this gray before. He reached upwards to grasp it in his hand, but he remained tethered to the ground.
He then looked around the battlefield. Over a hundred bodies and the smoking carcasses of tanks now littered the formerly empty clearing. The battle should’ve been over, but Zou Mei was a one-man army. Isaac’s hearing slowly returned; the first thing that punctured the seeming invisible film over his ears was Derry’s screams for his men to keep fighting.
Isaac would’ve loved to keep sitting there. But he had a job to do, people to save, and an opponent to stop, so he stood back up and kept going.