Tanlon sat at the bottom of a trench and daydreamed of heroic knights fighting the evil Dark Lords of old. When he was at the academy, such thoughts pervaded his mind whenever he needed to escape from the monotony of a boring study or the extreme stress of a physical conditioning exercise from their school commandant. There was one time they had run sprints back and forth so many times across the field that Tanlon had been struck with shivering and vomiting afterward, but those times were like looking at photos of another man's life as he stood watch with Haylock and two other men.
“I think there is something wrong with my foot,” Mad complained.
“Well, let me see it then,” the final trooper of their quartet said, a tall fellow, Snell, ordered. They were from a different regiment than Haylock and Tanlon, but they were there for the same reason, putting their noses where they did not belong.
Tanlon still cursed his stupidity for following the regimental commander into the cave and becoming the first target of his wrath, but he reckoned that his luck was not as bad as Mad’s when he saw the fellow’s foot. There was a blister on the man’s heel, as there was on every trooper’s feet thanks to their shoddy, cheap boots, but the skin around the heel leading to the top of the foot was red too. If that was not a clear enough sign of infection, the white exudate coming from the open blister surely was.
Snell cursed in his country dialect and started rummaging in his rucksack, "I told you to keep it clean, but you've got more of a head for cheese than you do sense."
“Speaking of, tell us the story of the cheese again, bud,” Haylock tossed his last personal antiseptic stick to Snell, “I think Tan was taking a leak when you told it.”
The two frontier soldiers stopped their bickering to thank him and as he applied the curative lotion to his friend's foot, Snell spoke, "Not like it's as exciting as you capital boys experienced, right on the emperor's own doorstep, I swear, but alright then. You know those big blocks of nutrient cheese they served at lunch.”
“I do,” Tanlon pretended to shiver, "they put that plastic-tasting junk on everything."
"Hey, I liked that plastic-tasting junk," Mad laughed.
“And that’s where the story begins,” Snell said. “This guy would eat as much of the blue stuff that he could get. Practically begged me every meal to give him my slice.”
“Is that why you’re so skinny?” Haylock mocked.
Snell made the requisite joke about Haylock’s mother and as he was also required to do, Haylock pretended to be mad and the two boys wrestled in the fire pit. Snell was struggling to keep Haylock in a bear hug when Tanlon kicked them both with a chorus of harsh whispers.
“Stop you two, someone is coming.”
It was of course the ornery Tamil, Snell and Mad’s company commander, now serving as the second in command of the combined forces of Paradise Hill. Snell and Mad had told them immediately why they were also sent to daily sentry duty at the very perimeter of the Imperial and Yabanchi lines: it had been a prank of course. When they were on their jump ship, the two had been assigned to Tamil’s company and the Midder had immediately lain into them about the sloppiness of their uniforms. They had been given extra duty, specifically mess duty, on top of preparing to jump with the rest of their regiment when they had the bright idea to get a little revenge. Being the food connoisseur that he is, Mad knew what spices and artificial flavorings especially "energized" the bowels. So naturally Tamil's food had an extra heaping of it. Their company commander was so sick that their company had to be moved from the fourth wave, all the way to the thirtieth wave in the back. Snell had proudly proclaimed that they had saved the company from death when he rehashed the story, but Tamil seemed to think otherwise.
The unfortunate thing was that in carrying out his wrath on the two men of Regiment 3, Tanlon and Haylock were caught in the crossfire.
The officer crouched down by their fire pit, sleeves rolled up as he liked to do and he asked, “I hope you boys are doing fine out here. You’re doing a real good job.”
The man was hardly more than a year or two older than them, but just because he had a couple more jumps under his belt, he felt like he could look down at them. Yet discipline and training kept them from mouthing off at him and they all politely thanked him for the compliment.
“You’re doing such a great job, I think that you should stay here another night. I feel safer when men like you are watching out for us.” The wretch started to slink away, waving over his shoulder when Tanlon called out to him, “Sir, we need stronger medicine for Mad.” The officer stopped and looked at Tanlon and then at Mad’s foot. “Is that so?”
"Yes sir, I think it's infected," Mad replied.
“Hmm, it looks a little red, but there are men in worse shape than you. Put your shoe back on and rub some sand in it.”
Tanlon was glad he was wearing a mask, as his face would have betrayed the shock and horror at Tamil’s callousness. As it was, he dared to speak up, “Please sir, I think it will get worse before it gets better.”
The Midder stopped and stared, whether he was simply looking at him or trying to stare him down, Tanlon could not tell, but eventually, he replied, "I will see what I can do." And he stalked off to inspect the other forward positions. Snell popped Haylock on the shoulder and the two laughed off their fight, the steam blown away by the camaraderie of shared misery. They all knew that nothing would be sent their way to help Mad’s foot, so rather than think about their inhuman foe watching them from the slopes of their mountain bunkers, the men came up with insults for Tamil and his attitude.
It was whispered between them that Tamil must be one of the vat-born, for why else was he so cold and emotionless, but none of them knew if they were vat-born either. No soldier in the Imperial Reserves knew his beginnings.
It was strange to Tanlon, how similar, how banal the time passed in that hole with the others. In his fantasies about war, when he was still a cadet in the academy, he imagined slaying foemen left and right with machine guns in one hand and a bloody sword in the other. Yet even the previous day, with the assaults from the Yabanchi, more time was spent on waiting for one moment to the next, the past put behind them and the future forgotten. None of them had wives, children, or parents that they remembered. The state had seen to that when it started the academies and bred whole generations of soldiers for the future wars her generals imagined.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Beyond the present moment of the laughter in their trench, nothing else existed for them, and they were content with that.
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Nighttime on Paradise was dark. There were no moons in the sky to illuminate the ground below, just an endless sea of stars in the black. The gas masks had a useful function to lend their wearer some visibility in the inky blackness, but it was not much. It was not until new stars, brighter than any natural light, grew in the sky that the men saw any semblance of vision.
All four of them knew those so-called stars by sight, the days spent on Paradise having familiarized them with their fatal light, and each man hit the bottom of their firepit, praying whether he was religious or not.
The first volley of the Yabanchi artillery sailed high over their heads and into the darkness beyond their line, hopefully not striking any of their men, but Tanlon did not want to take a bet on that. In the bright light of the plasma mortar rounds, Tanlon saw the mountain they were watching come to life. The entire surface of it looked like an ant hive had been kicked over and the tidal wave of bodies was so numerous that he thought for a moment that it might have been an avalanche. The roar of machine guns at other positions told him otherwise, as they spat fifteen hundred rounds per minute at the oncoming horde. Snell and Mad were the ones closest to their weapon emplacement, so they had the duty to begin firing their pit's machine gun, lobbing melted lead downrange at the screamers.
“Tanlon!" Haylock pushed his shoulder, "Help me get some ammunition ready for when they are through!" That broke Tanlon out of his haze and he took his shovel, using the edge of it, to pry underneath the ammo case lid. A satisfying crunch of plastic screws breaking under the pressure revealed the contents of more rounds for their machine gun and as he was about to carry the contents over to the others, Tanlon noticed the shell-covered ground at the bottom of the pit start to shift. He thought it was just the movement of so many spent cartridges avalanching at once, but his watching paid off when a pale, six-fingered hand emerged from the sand and shells, grasping for something to hold onto.
“Yabanchi!” Tanlon screamed, dropping the ammo he was holding, and armed only with his shovel, he started whacking the hand with the edge of its blade. The effect was gruesomely effective, as Tanlon’s strikes quickly mashed the hand into unrecognizable bits, but another hand had already burst out of the ground and grabbed Mad by his foot. The soldier screamed in a high pitch and stopped firing the machine gun. His attempts to dislodge the hand were fruitless as with the added leverage, the Yabanchi screamer that was burrowing from underneath them was able to half pull its upper body out of the ground and begin to throw wild blows at them.
The four men each had a shovel in hand and began to strike back at the flailing limbs and biting maw of their foe. Four shovels coming towards its face at once, was too much for the beast and it tried covering its face with its bloodied arms, but the soldiers were relentless and did not stop until the screamer was pasted back into the bloody mud that it had come from. Once that was completed, they stood around the body, panting, but the howls of the oncoming horde gave them no time to celebrate. Mad got back on the gun and Snell assisted, they fired into the dark where only the tumbling of vague shapes let them know their fire was effective. Tanlon kept up the steady delivery of more ammunition to his mates, but for the rest of the night, he kept at least one eye on the ground beneath them.
Explosions tore through the dark, land mines that they had placed in a field around the camp. Their light momentarily lit up the charging foe, pale bodies scrambling over one another past the shrapnel and bullets laying into them. Their eyes glinted in the flashes of light, like cat eyes.
A gun emplacement that was only a few hundred feet in front of their own suddenly stopped its barking, the sound replaced by men's screams joining those of the monsters. The remaining gunners did not think for a second of running into the fray of limbs and lead to save their comrades, there was not much they could do, but each man pressing a firing stud pressed a little harder, pushing the enemy back lest they meet the same fate.
The morning eventually came a few hours after they finally stopped firing the machine gun, the last echo of the screamers having long been silenced. None of the four men had slept during the night, not least of which was Snell. The tall soldier had a hand still gripped on the weapon emplacement and the other was on his lap, trembling. Mad made a joke that none of them laughed at and Haylock nudged Tanlon, nodding his head toward the edge of their firepit. Tanlon joined him in looking over the lip and was momentarily confused. He expected to see bodies, but the reality of last night’s carnage was far worse than he expected.
What his eyes first took for sand dunes were piles of Yabanchi bodies. Thousands of them, twisted in various death throes on top of each other. The pale, muscular creatures had been crawling over their own dead, heedless of dying themselves. If they had advanced only a few hundred more feet…Tanlon slumped back into the pit, the sound of bullet casings tinkled as he sat on them.
A shadow cast over them and the men gazed at Tamil as he stared back at them, arms crossed. Hundreds of other men from their regiments pushed past their position and stepped into the killing field. They traveled in teams of four, occasionally bayoneting a twitching body, the cleanup crew to ensure that every last Yabanchi was dead.
“Get your hand off that weapon trooper,” Tamil growled at Snell, yet it did not seem like the man heard him, instead continuing to grip the weapon and mumble something under his breath.
“Did you hear me?” Tamil knelt by Snell, “Our men are in your field of fire. Take your hand off.”
Snell continued to ignore the officer until Tamil tried to forcibly remove his hand. The tall soldier sprang with a cry and tried striking Tamil, but Mad had been keeping a wary eye on his friend and snagged him from under the arms, holding him back.
“Sorry, sir, it’s been a long night,” Mad muttered after Snell stopped thrashing and sagged in his arms.
Tamil stood up from where he had fallen on his rear and swiped at the dirt on his trousers, “Why yes, of course. You’ve all done fine work.” He took something out of his pocket and tossed it at Mad. The object tumbled among the shells, an advanced antibiotic stick, and the officer spoke pointing at Snell, “Another squad is coming to relieve you soon. Get some rest, especially you. Tomorrow we’re going to assault that hill and every man will be needed.”
Snell was sobbing, his tears muffled by his mask, yet he was not the only one who felt that way. Tanlon stared at the mountain ahead, now silent again, but aware of its evil vitality. Underneath those craggy rocks and caves, another army of Yabanchi screamers and nameless horrors awaited. The multitude they had slain the night before was but a probe, the fringe of a greater horde. The coming days would be the real crucible and Tanlon could not help but wonder if they were ready.
Tanlon's Stats
Strength 10 Constitution 10 Reaction 10 Authority 8 Mana 0/0 Special Abilities None