* The Anathema invade.
* The Legions deploy.
* Fresh Material is Harvested, Refined, and Tempered.
* The Legions withdraw.
* The surviving Material withdraws.
* The Anathema invade.
-- The Cycle.
***
With a grunt, the Commandant yanked the Bole's head back, exposing its armoured throat for a fraction of a second before it could recover. It was enough time for the exhausted soldier to stab his Kineblade, pulsing with the power of his Gift, through the metallic scales covering the creature.
The knife punctured with a screech of metal on metal, followed quickly by the hiss of meat hitting a hot grill.
The Commandant channelled more of his Gift into his blade and, with a final grunt, ripped it through the rest of the creature's throat, scattering more smoking scales, meat and ichor across the already blood-soaked field.
The victor quickly released his hold on the creature and retreated out of the way of its six flailing limbs with razor-sharp claws. The battle was over, with most of its head and primary brain being cooked by the energy he had channelled burning into the creature. Still, the Anathema were notoriously stubborn in admitting defeat. Many untried soldiers were killed after they won because they didn't have the patience to wait for the creature's lesser brains to finally accept their deaths.
Breathing heavily, the Commandant scanned the immediate area for additional threats. Finding no obvious ones, he was finally able to spare the time to give his helmet's heads-up display the needed attention to get a better sense of the battlefield.
The battle from start to finish hadn't even taken an hour, but it had been one of the most brutally intense fights they had been in since the Legion's deployment. The blood-drenched tale was told by the fact that out of the full Legion he had started with, less than three dozen of his soldiers' runes showed them still standing. A glance at the runes depicting their fortifications also indicated that they had been damaged to the point of being useless.
All the survivors' runes displayed significant armour damage, and more than a few flashed with indicators signifying wounds that exceeded the average soldier's abilities to recover from themselves.
He suppressed a weary sigh. It hadn't taken him more than a moment to see that the runes marking the Legion's medical specialists were all dark. So unless the critically injured's natural healing and armour's integrated trauma kits succeeded in stabilizing them, he'd lose at least nine more.
"Take care of the wounded and the dead. Then retreat to Kappa. Abandonment protocol and deploy the mobile comms relay."
His order was a mere formality; the Ninety-Second Legion had been composed primarily of veterans fighting with him for over a decade. They knew him and his adherence to the Legion's Vade Mecum. Many of the able-bodied had already started preparing to enact the abandonment protocols within moments of the last of the Anathema being finished off.
Setting up and breaking down the mobile comms relay would take precious time. Still, the Anathema had been obstructing long-range communication for almost a week before they finally attacked. He needed to be updated on the other Legions' situations and their quadrants now that their jammer Forms had been destroyed.
With a final cursory check of those around him, the Commandant left his men and women to their work and retraced the path of devastation the battle had cut across the small rural town.
The exhausted soldier found his discarded sidearm fifteen meters from the Bole's corpse. The reliable Impaler had taken a beating when the Bole had destroyed his Kinesword, and he'd used the handgun to deflect his opponent's talons. The firearm's composite metal casing showed deep gouges in its side, and with a glance, the soldier knew it wouldn't fire again.
The Commandant holstered it anyway. It'd been with him for more cycles than he cared to remember, and maybe one of the Techs could still fix it.
He stepped over the shattered pieces of his Kinesword -there would be no fixing that- and continued to follow the path of destruction.
After a few minutes, and over two hundred meters of burnt-out rubble, shredded pieces of armour, blood, gore and mangled body parts, he found what he was looking for.
He knelt next to the still-smouldering body of his Second.
Like him, she was wearing a Mark XVII command armour. The pearly white and grey colouring of the Ninety-Second Legion of his own armour was scorched, scratched, and marred by battle damage and covered in bodily fluids. With the armour's sloped alloy plates, overlapping scale joints, and mimetic fibres, it was the best protection outside a transport, tank, or mecha a soldier could hope for. Except it hadn't been enough against a Gekal's sustained assault.
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Very few things were.
"You have served well, Agna.
Your sacrifice has made Thuis safer.
Your vigil is over. Rest now.
I will take what you have offered and stand in your stead."
The ritual words didn't help him constrain his tears as he removed what was left of her shattered helmet. She had been with him for nineteen years. Since they had been Joined in the same Cluster, she had been his unflappable Second, loyal friend, and eventually lover.
A look of surprise was frozen on her blood-spattered face.
She'd pulled off so many improbable last-second survivals over the years that she probably hadn't expected this one to fail. Still, her bloodstained expression also had a sense of peace that had never been there before.
"Your vigil is over. Rest now.
I will take what you have offered and stand in your stead." The Commandant whispered again, allowing his tears to flow while he cradled Agna's cooling corpse. He owed her those few minutes and so much more, but all too quickly, a quiet beep from her armour told him his time to mourn was over.
After a steadying breath, he retracted his faceplate over the sides of his helmet with a flick of his eyes. He kissed his Second's bloody brow and then mechanically completed the Legion's ancient death rituals to reluctantly send her on her way.
It took a few more minutes, but all that was left after his constant companion and her armour had dissolved was a reddish acidic liquid that bubbled on the cracked asphalt.
She was free now.
But he was not.
With another flick of his eyes and his helmet closed again, and by the time he returned to his feet, he was the professional soldier again. A tiny rune in his HUD told him the long-range comms had been set up, and the connection looked stable. So, focussing on the Rune, the Commandant opened a comm channel.
"This is Commandant Stein," he started without preamble, "Rho has held but cannot repulse another assault. Survivors of Ninety-Two are moving to Kappa on foot. None of our Bines survived. All transport inopprabale. We will need medical support and transport as soon as possible."
"Good to hear your voice, Commandant. When the Eyes reported a Gekal, we gave up on your Legion's survival. I'll redirect B Seventy-One to intercept. Their eta is one sixty-four minutes. We have nothing else in the area, Sir. " The communications officer sounded exhausted.
"I understand." And he did. A Gekal was an Anathema Kaiju Form and could effortlessly decimate a legion without mechas. It was only due to Agna's sacrifice that almost a third of them survived. With no survivors expected, there had been no need for medical personnel or transports to be sent to get themselves uselessly slaughtered.
"What is the situation in the other quadrants?"
"Sending update package now, Sir."
"Give me the most important things now."
"Yes, Sir. We've been overrun across the board, Sir. Iota, Mu, Nu, Upsilon, and Phi have been lost. All surviving Legions are retreating to their fallback sectors. You're the only Commandant to report in, Sir. Commandant Bergen has been confirmed K.I.A and Commandant Laat was in Upsilon and hasn't reported in since yesterday."
As tired as she was, the communications officer sounded relieved to be able to report and receive orders from the upper echelon again.
The Anathema's unprecedented push had hit the entire defensive line, with dozens of hidden upper-echelon Forms suddenly appearing and overrunning their defences at precisely their most vulnerable points. Their dire straights showed when the map displayed in Stein's HUD was updated with the current status of the deployed Legions.
They had lost or were in the process of abandoning most of their frontline fortifications. It took only a few moments for the Commandant to see where things were going; with all the Legion forces they had lost and what the Anathema was throwing at them, the secondary fortifications wouldn't hold either.
His almost two decades on the line told him that the tertiary defences that were only partially built wouldn't be enough to stem this horde even if the secondary fortifications fought to the last soldier to buy time to complete the construction.
"Have the Harvesters been dispatched?"
"Yes, Commandant. Commandant Bergen ordered fifty-thousand harvested from Rho Forty-Three with eighty per cent successful Joining protocols before he was killed."
Stein looked at the map again; they were being pushed harder than they'd been since he'd been a wet-behind-the-ears captain.
A mere forty-thousand freshly Joined wouldn't be enough to hold anything; they'd be no more than a slight inconvenience to flatten on the way.
"That's not enough," Stein muttered after reviewing the predictions still updating in his HUD.
The estimates Bergen based his orders on were optimistic. Borderline wishful thinking even. The Commandant re-ran the math and then changed Bergen's final orders. The old man had always tried to keep the harvesting to a minimum, but they simply didn't have the time to Join the Harvested with his typical cautious approach.
"Amend Harvester orders. Harvest one million total, integration with speed. No Joining survival rate requirements. Reduce integration and training time to ten per cent nominal. No training survival rate requirements."
With those words, Commandant Stein had just condemned half a million people to death. Anywhere between thirty and fifty per cent would survive the Joining process; the rest would die during it.
The ones lucky enough to live through the integration wouldn't have it much better, either. The usual integration and training time for the newly Joined would be condensed into an impossible timeframe, breaking and killing even more of the survivors than usual. Moreover, the minimal training would leave all who endured it woefully under-equipped to survive the meatgrinder they would be thrown into. Stein would be surprised if more than half made it through the training. And all of those would fall against the Anathema.
But with a quarter of a million freshly Joined, the Legions would have a roadblock instead of a speedbump to put in the Anathema's path, even with the minimal supplies that could be spared for them.
"Confirmed Commandant, relaying orders to Harvester captains as follows:
'Harvest material for a million integrations at speed.
No integration survival requirements.
Material integration and training time reduced to nine days total before deployment.
No training survival requirements.'"