Vanguard funerals were small and simple affairs. Everyone on the island was there for a singular purpose. They had already died once. And while fatalism was heavily discouraged, returning to the light was seen as natural--something to welcome without fear or remorse. Not one Rifle emerged from Project Helsing's gate with any delusion of having a second lease on life or an opportunity to right old wrongs. They returned to save humanity's future and, somewhere in that process, eventually return to the light.
There were no official procedures for burying the dead, other than that cremation was mandatory. Afterward, the ashes of the deceased would be scattered into the wind. From dust they came, and to dust they would return. Yet, there were still rituals. Although everyone in the Vanguard had renounced their national ties, culture remained. When the dead were laid to rest, various rituals would be performed as requested by the deceased. These ranged from Viking funerals, where the departed were set aflame in a boat on the water, to more eccentric Christians who wished their ashes to be spread from a high cliff before a cross.
Rifle Second-Class Sarah Kinger was the only Rifle to die in the Los Angeles operation. Her ashes were placed in a small wooden boat in a secluded cavern that opened directly to the ocean. Despite being American through and through, the Freikorpsman had requested a Viking funeral in her will—but without "any of that pussy arrow nonsense." She wanted her remains to be hit with a small-diameter napalm bomb as the boat floated out to sea.
Perelli stood alongside several other solemn individuals as the boat drifted on the outgoing tide, slowly pulled into the midday sunlight. It had taken weeks for his ribs and eye to heal properly, and even now, his eye still carried a phantom itch. Medical staff told him he was lucky—the coagulated blood that had seeped into it could have caused permanent damage. Instead, he’d regained full 20/20 vision.
As he watched his former squadmate float into the next realm—or rather, back to it—he didn’t feel lucky. He felt responsible. More than responsible, he felt guilty. He hadn’t known Kinger well. She was abrasive, the type of person who was hard to approach. He wished he had tried, but it simply hadn’t occurred to him. He was a professional. She was a professional. They both understood the job they had signed up for, and that was the end of it. The Vanguard wasn’t the AEF or the Army. They didn’t need to be friends. His first mission with the Freikorps had taught him to keep a metaphorical arm’s length from everyone after Chief Scrimps and Heerman were killed by the spawn.
Next to him stood a large man in the same dress-blue uniform, though his muscular physique dwarfed Perelli’s. The man bore the patch of an Assault Trooper on his right arm—crossed rifle cartridges superimposed on a shield.
The man spoke, his voice low, with an accent Perelli couldn’t place. “How did you know her?”
Perelli was caught off guard. The ceremony had been silent until now. “I was her squadmate, and later squadleader, in the Freikorps,” he replied.
“I was her Platoon Chief when she was with the 5th Motorized—the Hole Punchers.”
“She was a good soldier,” Perelli said, unsure what else to offer.
“Was it at least worth it?” the Assault Trooper asked, pivoting to look at him.
“Worth what?”
“Whatever you guys were after.”
Perelli hesitated. “It wasn’t,” he admitted, unwilling to lie. “ISR said the mission was a success, but we failed. We failed to take out the target before it could threaten the team. Her death was... unnecessary.”
The larger man didn’t lash out or react angrily. Instead, he drew in a deep breath and exhaled. “War never changes.”
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A string of bright orange buoys bobbed in the waves of the South Pacific. Every so often, the buoys were jarred and sent flying into the air by massive plumes of water caused by 18-inch artillery shells. Shells of all kinds from semi-guided armor-piercing, high-explosive, and even canister shot landed around them. Some missed by hundreds of feet, while others hit dead on. On the bridge of the sky-carrier Coup de Grâce, the captain stood behind his fire-control team, observing as they conducted gunnery practice with the ship’s massive cannons.
The ship had spent considerable time in drydock having its special weapon repaired and improved. Hopefully, it wouldn’t melt the hull next time they fired it. In the meantime, the crew needed training. Their skills had atrophied while the ship was dirtside, and the captain assessed that his team’s performance was middling at best. They weren’t bad, but there was significant room for improvement.
A phone-talker, equipped with a sound-powered set, spoke into his transmitter and then raised his arm to get the captain’s attention. “Captain, CIPTRAN,” he pronounced it Sip-Tran, “requests permission to perform their evolutions as briefed.”
“Very well,” the captain said, not taking his attention away from the gunnery team. “Prep a SEAR bird, just in case.”
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Perelli was a dead man walking. The Commander's Induction Program was no ordinary officer training pipeline. It began with a two-day classroom section, a relentless firehose of knowledge, protocols, and leadership discipline blasted at the trainees nonstop. This was a feature of the program, not a bug. The rationale was simple: in a combat environment, officers would naturally be bombarded with information to the point of sensory overload.
Prospective officers were expected to sink or swim. If you couldn’t handle being overwhelmed with information in an air-conditioned classroom, you weren’t fit to lead with lead flying overhead. Those who managed to retain the veritable bible’s worth of knowledge thrown at them could advance to more practical applications.
The next phase consisted of a week of increasingly intense kill-house and shooting drills. However, the focus wasn’t on shooting quickly and accurately. Instead, trainees were graded on their ability to command a simulated unit, ranging from squad to platoon sizes, composed of Kilo-class combat frames. Scenarios went far beyond simple "eliminate the enemy" exercises. The frames simulated hard to navigate situations involving incompetent NCOs, undisciplined rank-and-file soldiers, casualties in the chain of command, and even operating in communications-denied environments where the fog of war was as thick as mud.
There were no breaks, and Perelli spent more time in armor than out of it. The final two days of training moved aboard the sky-carrier Coup de Grâce for "enhanced interrogation training." This wasn’t about conducting interrogations but being subjected to them—testing their ability to resist and protect sensitive classified material. Over the past 40 hours, Perelli had been waterboarded, mildly electrocuted, kicked in the balls, and aeronautically keelhauled. (This involved tying the subject's feet together, attaching them to a long rope, and dangling them upside down out the door of a Foxhound.) Finally, they were allowed to sleep, or so they thought.
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Conveniently, the order to rack out coincided with the ship's gunnery drills. Their quarters were strategically located next to the main ammunition carousel for the 18-inch guns. While the dull thud of the guns firing was tolerable, the incessant clatter of the loading mechanism, ejecting, dumping, loading, and shuffling shells, reverberated through the deck like thousands of hammer blows. After a miserable eight hours of failed attempts at sleep, they were gathered in the bowels of the ship at the belly hangar used for VTOL launch and recovery.
The instructors had the 25 of them stand along the struts that separated individual launch and recovery clamps. With a slightly droopy posture, but nonetheless sharp attention to detail, Perelli could tell that they were in a surprise. He exchanged glances with another Rifle to his right, Chief Rifle Chayton Red Hawk. Red Hawk was a tall and thin Sioux native, but was as smart as a whip. The two had grown familiar over the course of the training program. Red Hawk helped Perelli understand some basics that he had never been introduced to in his time as a lower rank-and-file. Perelli presence in the program was an R1C was authorized, but unusual. Everyone around him was a non-commissioned officer.
"I think we’re in for a real treat,” Red Hawk muttered, his voice dry as the desert. He adjusted his armor straps casually, glancing at the instructors gathering at the front of the hangar. He was clearly as tired as Perelli but his voice carried no mention of it. “Any bets on how they’ll try to kill us this time?”
Perelli rubbed his tired eyes and gave a weak chuckle. “I, ah, Dunno. Something worse than hanging us out the side of a Foxhound, I’m guessing.” He nodded toward the instructors. “I just hope they don’t want to try free-diving with weights.”
Before Red Hawk could reply, a sharp voice cut through the hangar like a whip crack.
“Alright, listen up!”
The speaker stepped forward—a wiry, battle-hardened lieutenant with scars etched across his face and a hard, calculating gaze. His name tape read Van Tran. Everything about him screamed authority, from his iron-stiff posture to the deliberate way he lit a cigarette, taking a long drag.
“I’m Lieutenant Tran,” he began, his voice carrying an accent that bore faint traces of his Vietnamese heritage. “And if you think you’ve had it rough so far, let me make one thing clear: you haven’t even started suffering yet.”
Tran let the statement hang for a moment, his dark eyes scanning the gathered trainees like a predator sizing up its prey. It was particularly indimidating coming from a man that stood at 5'7, but had rippling muscles like a panther.
“Today’s exercise is about teamwork,” he continued, pacing slowly. “And by ‘teamwork,’ I mean figuring out how to survive when everything—and I mean everything—wants to kill you.”
He gestured to the floor beneath their feet.
“In a moment, the hangar doors are going to open, and you’re going to drop straight into the ocean. Your objective is simple: swim to that island.” He jabbed a finger toward a monitor showing a live feed of a small, rugged island surrounded by choppy waters. “Once there, you’ll conduct a reconnaissance of the jungle and the mountain at its center. Minimal resources. No comms. No air cover. You only resource is the man next to you. You will move, you will observe, and you will report.”
Tran’s lips curled into a humorless smile.
“Oh, and one more thing: this isn’t a pleasure cruise. The ocean’s rough, the currents are strong, and the sharks? They are hungry.”
A murmur rippled through the group, quickly silenced by Tran’s glare.
“You’ll figure it out,” he said coldly. “Or you won’t. Either way, we’ll know who’s got what it takes to lead.”
With that, Tran stepped back and barked an order. “Open the doors!”
The hangar floor shuddered, and with a deep mechanical groan, the massive bay doors beneath them began to part. A blast of salt air and the deafening roar of the ocean filled the space as the trainees looked down at the churning waves far below.
Perelli’s stomach twisted.
“You ready for this, Chief?” he muttered, tightening the straps of his armor, more out of habit than necessity.
“I think I would like to have words with my Lieutenant back in the armored corps,” Red Hawk replied, a grim stiffness to his jaw as he examined the water below.
“Drop!” Tran’s voice rang out, and before Perelli could brace himself, the floor beneath him gave way.
The world became a blur of wind, salt and sea spray as Perelli plummeted toward the ocean. He wasn't dive qualified, but he knew the basics. He clutched his arms together against his chest and kept his body and legs straight, with a slight bend at the waist to minimize impact witht eh water. The impact was still a shock, the cold water of the South Pacific engulfing him like an unwelcome blanket. He kicked hard, breaking the surface with a gasp. Around him, the others were emerging, coughing and sputtering as the waves churned around them. Even though their ballistic masks and helmets kept the water out, it was hard to fight the innate human relax to hold you breath when submerged.
The island loomed in the distance—a jagged silhouette against the horizon. There were no lights but the Moon that illuminated it.
“Let’s move!” Red Hawk shouted, already cutting through the water with powerful strokes. A chemlight on the back of helmet marked him. Perelli quickly activated his and fell in line.
Perelli grit his teeth and swam after him. Every muscle burned, but he forced himself onward, the island growing larger with each stroke.
As the group battled the relentless current, Perelli glanced over his shoulder at the sky-carrier Coup de Grâce, a hulking shadow against the sky, its massive guns still firing in the distance.
This was hell—but if he made it through, he’d earn the right to call himself an officer. Probably.
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On the way in they formed a V formation, with each man an arms reach from the other and guided by the dim green glow of the chemlight abreast of him. They rode the surf in, their swim coming to a stop on a dark sandy beach. The transition from constant swimming to walking was difficult. Perelli felt like his legs weighed 20 pounds more than they should.
The formation stocked up the beach on their bellies, crawling up to a line of dense jungle. Their briefing had been minimal. There was no established chain of command, no clue what they would be looking for, no intel and no organization. As they concealed themselves in the cover provided by the trees, it became apparent to Perelli that that was the goal of this exercise: to see if they would break from the mass confusion and end up competing with each other.
The Freikorpsman watched as the NCOs began to break into whispered discussions. There was clearly an attempt to remedy these defects, but it was taking too long. they had been on the beach for 1 minutes and thirty-seven seconds. Far too long. If there was a watchful enemy nearby, they'd be easy pickings.
He crept through the brush towards the largest gathering. A group, including Red Hawk, were gathered around a makeshift map drawn in the sand. They were discussing priorities and a pan, but it was heavily disjointed. Nobody was fighting, but they were all making their voices heard and trying to vouche for their own ideas. It was devolving into leadership by democracy. Perelli was perturbed by the lack of action. He knew he had to do something, but was slightly fearful of speaking up. He was the lowest rank here. But he was also the only special warfare operator. All plans crucially relied on violence of action without a moments respite. They were now 2 minutes into respite. In the spec-war community that was a long enough time for an operation to bog down and come dangerously close to a mission kill. He decided to take the risk.
"This is all unviable." He said, loud enough to make sure he was heard and mustered his best authoritative tone. "We break up into 5 teams of 5 with numerical designation." He pointed at the map, "Chief Hancock will lead team one, Red Hawk team two and Zhao team three. That will be our main force. We will thrust North in a wide V towards the mountain. We are comms denied so callouts every 5 minutes. Designate one man as a runner for your team." He paused and looked a them to make sure they understood. "Teams four and five will be lead by Rozvenski and Carlton. You will take the flanks. Proceed east and west respectively. You will operate independently of the main force and proceed to opposite sides of the mountain. We don't know what's out there, so you're primary is pulling security. Recon passively, not actively. If you come into contact, fall back to the main force." He focused on everyone. "I will be with team one."
All around looked at him. For a moment, he was unsure if he had miscalculated, but he was sure not to show it. Instead, he gave each of them a determined look. After a tense second, they began to comply.
"You heard him." Chief Red Hawk said, "Pick your men and fill your squads. Let's move out!"