Abandon what is imminent, to save what is important.
Blood ran dry on the floor of the command tent. Neruz flipped through documents like cash; records of communications and codebooks sparkled like gold in his eyes. He'd always found that paper and ink were far better conversational partners than real people—the latter would oftentimes change their minds, which made them even worse liars than the written word. He wanted to enjoy a good fact or a good lie, leaving no space in between, nor even time to let the spoken word drift away.
He sat fire to the command tent, adding to the fury of the night. Combat raged all around him as he escaped with evidence and confirmation. These precious documents sung about it: the link between the uprising in Samarin, and the Azerkali Civil War.
He followed a retreating squad from the Azerkali-Parasol border resistance forces all the way back to their camp—though, showing up in the middle of the night after a tense encounter was not the best of ideas, as such tense people fired several shots in his direction just because he brushed against a few bushes. Shouting profanities in Azerkali, followed by the codeword, helped to establish some familiarity. There had been better ways to go about this, but Neruz lacked time.
And in the spirit of lacking time, he barged into the resistance's command tent, interrupting the argument between the two commanders and the breakdown of their interpreter. Here and now, his crafted identity had to be sacrificed, operational security be damned.
He threw his family's Dagger-and-Sword Crest on the desk. Few things could have been more important than the loss of a significant portion of the resistance's forces, but the two commanders recognized this Crest as one of those things—proof and status of nobility and absolute loyalty to the Crown of Azerkal. The fact that he was, at the same time, a Parasol agent, only led to the interpretation that he was a double agent whose primary loyalty lay with the Crown. The Parasol commander frowned, while the Azerkali commander almost prostrated himself in deferrence.
"Rajo largo, necesito," he requested.
The Azerkali commander quickly returned Neruz his Crest with a bow, before pointing at a mark on the map. Neruz nodded, turning about and leaving.
"Wait," the Parasol commander called, "I can't just ignore this."
Neruz stopped, almost snapping his fingers as he remembered something. "Everyone in this room is bound to secrecy. The Crown of Azerkal and General Paladin are in agreement in this one matter," he said, repeating it in both languages for everyone to comprehend.
The prerequisite paygrade for this threat level having risen, both commanders reached a tacit agreement—This man was never here.
Neruz hurried for the closest long-range communications outpost on the Azerkali side of the border, sprinting where he could, and climbing up cliffs instead of taking the long way. It was a sleepy hill guarded by a moderate contingent of royalists. The fighting never reached here. When Neruz appeared, heaving and drenched in sweat, the sentries on duty almost forgot how to properly raise a challenge. They almost did, until Neruz flashed his Crest. He picked up a recruit and told him to tell his CO to prepare for a long-range transmission.
Dragging his legs his way up the hill to the transmitter, the camp all around him suddenly woke up, bewildered by his presence. The commanding officer received him, saluting with caffeine-buzzed hands. Neruz lazily saluted everyone off and ushered everyone out of the communications tent, growling in low-intensity profanities and threats of being sworn to secrecy. He recalled two transmission frequencies and their unique encryption keys, sending to each the same message:
"SHADOW FALLS ON WINTER CASTLE. HASTE."
That facility was not a mere derelict cradle that had once held and awoken a part of the sleeping armies of Parasol. Records of the apocalypse also slept there—as comprehensive it was enough to defeat it, just the same as it was to revive it.
The barricades of Samarin roared with gunfire. The castle thundered with cannonfire. The rebels controlled three-fourths of the city, and were apt to gain more ground. Amidst all of that, General Paladin, cooped up in a bunker with his general staff, received an urgent communique. Paladin's heart skipped a beat. Nothing mattered more than the issue he was about to issue: "Send B Company to capture and hold Cryo 6"—an order that would almost cost them the city. B Company loaded up on their vehicles and rode out of the Western Gate under heavy fire from the rooftops. Aerial drone surveillance found a convoy of Parasol-modeled vehicles coming from the south—flying the wrong flags. Paladin gritted his teeth, and ordered B Company to avoid contact. His forces had lost strength, while the opposition gained it in excess. At this rate, the opposition would bring up heavier weapons, and even the castle could fall—but such a thing was a small price to pay in exchange for Cryo 6.
In the audience chamber of the Crown of Azerkal, a messenger, coated in gunpowder and soot, knelt at the foot of the unpainted and cracked concrete steps that led up to the throne. A fine wire mesh divided the Queen from her subjects—and obscured her surprise. From surprise, her visage twisted into contempt. "Take the fastest border forces and eliminate the rogues"—surely, such an order would leave a gap in their defenses and tempt the federalists to attack, which was not to speak of surely gaining the contempt of Parasol for violating their territory. To make the order herself, however, and not to use a mouthpiece, only meant that there was some profound reason, something that was a matter-of-fact beyond her generals' understanding, that was potentially worth even the cost of the war.
Although the Allied Cities of Parasol and the Kingdom of Azerkal stood apart, they were the same of mind—Inheritors of the same accord. Between the Parasol Corporation's Board of Directors and all of the Old World's governments, the secret of the apocalypse was made known, and those governments who survived, or merely transformed, still knew the locations of Parasol's laboratories, who once labored to bring the apocalypse to a standstill.
By tacit agreement, those facilities that could not be easily destroyed were hidden, shadowed by agents under every nation's employ, and any who wished to revive those facilities were marked an enemy of humanity.
* * *
Frill followed the road the convoy had used. It was a familiar road, and perhaps she had a guess to Jack's whereabouts. Ravager seemed more interested in Jack—so Jack's trailed, she followed.
She arrived at a checkpoint. Its blockhouse was just a simple box fort made from logs, and its base was fortified with stone. There was a dead Parasol militiaman by the blockhouse's door, riddled by bullets. His coffee was still quite warm.
A man came out of the blockhouse's door, wearing a Parasol militia uniform.
"Ah. Frill."
She looked down at the body then at Singer again.
"Wasn't me!"
"Enemy?"
"Prol'ly? From last night? Didn' think I'd see a truck in my lifetime, so yea, it's prol'ly them!"
Singer's carefree attitude was a bit laughable. Perhaps, it was because he wasn't there to witness the slaughter of her people—twice, now.
"Ya alone?"
Frill nodded. Singer already figured what happened.
"Well—ya wan' me t'walk with ya?"
Frill nodded. Accompanying someone was all he had ever done in life. He had a guess that this might be the last time he could exercise his supposed profession—the war's spilled out of Azerkal's borders, and Samarin itself was burning. There wasn't another city until another 50 kilometers from Samarin. It was doubtful whether he could survive long enough to get there.
He'd been walking with people for a long time. A lot of them walked like how Frill walked—like it was the last leg of their journey, and that their suffering would finally end. S'a shame—he thought. He couldn't voice his pity, nor was he sure whether he should pity her.
Well, there was one assignment that he could fulfill right now.
He took out a locket and gave it to Frill. He had snatched it from Jack right before his own escape. It was somewhat of a bad habit—telling himself that at least something of that person should escape with him.
This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.
In that locket was an image of Frill herself.
Her hand refused to open it. She already knew whose it was. Instead, she grasped it. Her gait took on a heavy burden.
* * *
Jack's breathing—was he breathing?
Something about him floated about.
He dreamt of nothing—felt nothing.
Yet something… was digging into his chest.
Ravager watched on as the lab technician extracted secrets from Jack's body. He felt nothing about it. He's killed many people before, some personally. Some of them begged for mercy, while others died standing. In contrast, this was just like watching a dissection—a medical exercise. The man in the glass tube was, in his eyes, already dead. He was a stranger with whom he had a few exchanges with, someone no better than the bartender. Well, he might have actually liked that bartender from back then better than whoever this was.
They called him "Jack"—such a plain name. That probably wasn't even his real name.
Well, anyway, he was practically dead. Even so, Jack's body was restrained and contained inside a surgical capsule, capped by ballistic glass. The technician did not make direct contact with the body. The robotic tools inside the capsule would deal with all of that, and finally, extract whatever it was the Reorganization was looking for.
The telephone on the desk rang. Ravager picked it up.
"Enemy units ETA 30 minutes, sir."
"Alright. Hold and defend for one hour."
"Yes, sir."
Having competent subordinates was one of life's luxuries. Ordering them to die was its own sort of hell. Even if those subordinates didn't have a problem with it, he himself had every complaint to lodge.
Though, he crossed the Rubicon a long time ago.
122 motorized troops from General Paladin's B Company came in from the north, while 389 horse riders from the Azerkali Guard's 5th Riders came in from the south. Ravager's own men only numbered at 86. As long as he held the facility for an hour, the Reorganization's aerial troops would arrive and claim what they considered theirs. Until then, they would squeeze as much as they could out of their defensive advantage.
The scouts of B Company and the 5th Riders made contact with both each other and Ravager's defenders. The two forces agreed to cooperate, under the same secret orders, and they would not rush in uncoordinated, since the defenses would definitely just cut them down. There were snipers shooting down both the 5th's and B Company's drones, and they, too, had been shooting down Ravager's drones since a while ago.
As far as information warfare went, this was the norm between this world's most modern forces.
However, Ravager was not only infamous for his massacres.
Explosions rained around the 5th Riders, spooking some of the horses. They weren't so untrained for explosives, however, which disappointed the defenders. Still, that was just the welcoming salvo. Wherever the horses went, mortar shells got dropped right on top of them. Some of the shells hit the trees, exploding and spraying wooden splinters to become fragmentary death rain. It was as if the defenders knew in real-time where they were.
Except, they didn't.
Gunfire erupted all across Ravager's southern defensive positions. It was as if the Riders' momentum wasn't even stunted, as if the Riders simply got up from their dead horses and charged onwards regardless.
Though many of their horses were dead, their riders did not go down with them. A woman followed closely behind the Riders, advising their commander with seemingly-nonsense acts—like instructing most of the Riders to dismount, and to use the unmounted horses as a ruse to confuse the enemy's senses. Although it was a guess, she gambled well; the wireless microphones scattered all throughout the battlefield fed the defenders with the sound and trampling of lies and deceit.
A battle cry rose from one flank, followed by several explosions—the Riders' grenadiers assaulted a shallow trench, filling it with grenades, buckshot, and bayonets, to which Ravager's men responded with their own grenades and pre-sighted mortar fire, halting the assault there. In other places, the Riders were caught in killzones between the defenders' hidden positions, marking fields of death with Azerkal's fallen, further inviting the fanatical, militant nobility of Azerkal to come and stake their honor—only to die.
But to die in vain, they refused to do. Each person who fell guaranteed that two others would live. They would cross into enemy fire to distract it away from their comrades. They would charge bayonet-first into a foxhole to even just panic the defenders. Even in their last breaths, they would lock eyes with their enemy and crawl towards them, knife in hand and hell to pay.
It was hell for the defenders, and a dream-like blur of mortality for the Riders.
To the north, the members of B Company weren't so eager to die, nor to scream a battlecry. For them, the only battlecry they needed was overwhelming firepower.
Thick smoke weaved through the forest, while little camo men walked with steady, unerring step. The first shot came from the defenders, and it hit one of the soldiers square in the chest. His buddy pulled him back behind a tree while the rest of his squad leisurely returned fire, keeping to single shots. The bullet cracked his chestplate, and maybe a rib, but he was alive.
For this operation, Paladin instructed them to spare no munitions. The moment their machine gunners laid a straight line of tracer bullets into the enemy, they launched two grenades into the end of the line. The moment someone put a laser on-target, they dropped another two grenades at the end of the rainbow. The moment there was red smoke, every single squad with line-of-sight to it would drop a grenade into that pot of gold. Their slow march of exploding death blended into the defenders' own mortar shells, and one too many times did both sides mistakenly call out friendly fire. For both B Company and Ravager's defenders alike, they were constantly showered by shrapnel and wooden splinters, unknowing of when and where the next shell or grenade would land. Snipers and booby traps prevented B Company from advancing any deeper, and together with the persistent mortar fire, they were accruing casualties at a steady pace. Whether or not they would outlast the defenders was only a matter of time—and munitions.
Ravager's mortar crews on the roof of Cryo 6 dropped shells on both the Riders and B Company. Their crews, four soldiers to one such weapon, fed tail-finned, grenade-like bombs through the top of a meter-long tube. It slid down, and, with a thump strong enough to force the firing crew to keep their heads down and their ears cupped, the bomb flew up a high arc, and came down steeply onto its target. Amongst all of the defenders' implements, these light artillery systems—four of them in their account—were their tendrils that reached out and stabbed their opponent from an unstoppable angle. That their shells would occasionally hit the tops of trees, and turn living wood into fragmentary death, only bolstered their effectiveness at suppressing the enemy assault. In fact, these mortars were the sole reason why their tiny force could withstand a concerted attack from an enemy over five times their number.
That B Company opted to leave their own mortars for the benefit of the defense of Samarin Castle was an oversight on their part.
Cryo 6's roof was vast, to say the least, and out-of-sight of the surrounding forest. The mortar crews had fortified their position with sandbags, rubble, and furniture, and kept some counter-snipers on guard, just in case a daredevil climbed up a tree and tried sniping them from there. On the other hand, B Company was much too far to fire grenades with any precision against them. Their grenade launchers were simply far too unstable as a platform.
Despite this, an explosion hit the roof.
It was a small explosion, much like a hand grenade, and it was far from any of the mortar crews. However, the fact was that they were being fired upon by some sort of artillery. As professional as they were, they remained calm and assessed the direction of the incoming shells. After a few seconds, there was another explosion, landing 30 meters from one of the crews—though they were protected by their hastened fortifications, this was dangerously close. That parts of their barricades were chipped off in the blast indicated that they were being hit by fragmentation grenades. If any of those grenades were to detonate in mid-air, they'll easily have wounded on their hands.
Even after five such hits against the roof of Cryo 6, none of their spotters could find the source of the bombardment, not by sound nor by sight. Moreover, the precision at which they were receiving the attack implied that the source was within 200 meters of their position, which made absolutely no sense—none of the enemy had even come within 400 meters of the facility. It certainly would be foolish to sneak behind enemy lines and set up an artillery system inside enemy territory. Had that been the case, they would have heard the weapon being fired well before its munitions struck them.
That artillery system, however, was Singer.
He pulled the pin and carefully sleeved the hand grenade inside a can, which kept the grenade's lever from popping out—its fuze would not yet light, and Singer would not need to praise Heaven for luck. He helicoptered the can over his head with his left hand, then with a slight heave, he allowed the sling to unfurl to its full length.
His sling extended to its full two meters' length. No longer could he use just one arm to swing the sling—he pirouetted his whole body around, allowing the world to spin around him. His experience in drama school—3 years of it—taught him how to pirouette without losing his sense of direction. Like a ballet dancer, his head remained fixed in a certain direction, towards the roof of Cryo 6, and when his body rotated far enough, his head snapped around and reacquired the target just as easily.
At two meters long, the sling was no longer a quiet weapon. The air oscillated deeply with each turn, and the noise could be heard up to 50 meters away. The mere sound of it, however, did not draw attention—the air diluted by the reverberations of gunfire and explosions meandering around the forest.
With a loud but brief whisp, he loosed the grenade—the bottom of the can, nothing more than a leather flap, lost its tension and opened willingly for the grenade's momentum. Not far in the grenade's flight, its lever snapped away, and the fuze in its bowels spurred alight as it arced above the trees and landed in the midst of a mortar crew.
Singer looked down at the five "talking sticks" that Frill had left him. From her hidden vantage point up in the trees, she noted that one of the four mortars were obliterated. She yanked on a thin string, and Singer saw that the stick for "Good" fell down. He propped it back up and readied the next grenade.
It was weird that Jack had carried out a party case of hand grenades back when they first escaped the facility. Good thing Singer remembered where he buried it.
Losing that one mortar had severely weakened Ravager's northern defenses. B Company, mistakened but convinced that the enemy mortars had nearly run out of ammunition, pushed for a more determined assault.
Not long after, the northern defenders faltered, and Ravager gave the order to retreat to a tighter defensive position inside Cryo 6 itself. This placed B Company's grenade launchers within range of Cryo 6, and they promptly pummeled the roof almost endlessly, forcing the mortar crews to abandon their artillery. Without mortar support, the southern defenders suffered heavier losses during their retreat as the Riders chased them down in a high of vengeance and glory. Taking advantage of the chaos, Neruz and a handful of Parasol commandos infiltrated the facility.
The fighting carried over in the weaving corridors of Cryo 6, where Ravager fumed at his superiors' mistake—and the appearance of a third enemy unbound by reason. Even he recognized that this enemy took precedence over something like awakening his infected son from cold sleep. Perhaps, one day, his son could awaken to a more peaceful time, even if he, himself, wouldn't be there to see it.
Never mind the Reorganization. They wouldn't entirely trust Ravager, anyway. The bastards probably had their own agent in the facility the whole time. Said bastards screwed up somewhere—he was sure—and now he had to clean it up on his own.