Tank Operator Strivel

The world around him rumbles as he cranks the lever forward, his foot pushing down on a thick, metal pedal with a mis-manufactured rubber lining that has begun to melt from the sweltering heat inside of the growling machine.

It gets hot as all hell when the hatch is closed.

Watching the world through a metal slit not far from his face, the dripping wet man in uniform pants, but without a shirt at this point, focuses on the commands coming over the radio at the same time as updates come from the nearby tanks of the armored arrowhead formation that he’s driving at the left wingtip of in a heavy forward-assault platform tank.

“Speed, full,” barks the tank commander’s voice over the local radio in his left ear at the same time as a woman’s voice enters the headset’s broadcast on his right side, passing information on to command. Through the gap of the tank window, Strivel watches as a gray stone mountain in the distance comes closer and closer by the minute.

— It’s moving.

Strivel, the tank’s driver, watches, honestly somewhat in awe, as, on the horizon, a shape lumbers across the alien landscape with such incredible scale and size that it seems truly impossible for it to be moving at all. It is a creature — a monster — a golem, the size of which is not quite that of the world tree but still terrifyingly large. It wanders with slow, heavy steps that he can feel shaking the seat of his already dangerously vibrating tank, even at this distance. The golem is a gargantuan thing that is made out of natural stone. It is so large that trees of full size and stature grow from its shoulders in small groves. Water runs down the titan’s back and sides in falls. As a whole, the golem is vaguely shaped like a person, but only in the loosest sense of the phrase.

- [Ancient Colossus] -

An ancient construct of raw magic and primal elements of the world that have coalesced together in the form of a giant among giants. Said to be one of the first kinds of life ever created by the gods, these ancient entities now roam the spirit world, having never been allowed their hayday in the mortal realm as they were deemed too destructive and dangerous for the rest of life, simply because of its incredible mountain-rivaling-size.

It is large enough to harbor an entire ecosystems on its body.

Entity: Construct Rank: SSS+ Element: None Type: Ancient Remnant

It must be an incredible amount of raw magic that is present here to hold a monster of this size together like this.

“Garuda, this is Keiko, Forward Heavy One,” affirms the woman’s voice strongly over the radio in a tone of clear defiance over the hissing static in the background that tries to swallow her words. She’s the captain of this armored column. The repeating battering of rumbling anvil-thunder claps in the distance behind her calm inflection. “Tango super-heavy contact at initial grouping position alpha. I repeat, Tango super-heavy. Golem classification. We are engaging,” she says, her voice moving in through his right ear. There is a long hiss of static for a moment, together with some analog chirping in the background that signals the broadcast has been relayed over several antennas, back all the way to the main command center.

“Affirmative, Forward Heavy,” replies a crackling voice from the very distant shore. The signal from command is weakened, having traveled over a series of relay antennas placed by forward scouts to reach them out here. “Sending air support. Hold steady.”

“Negative, Garuda,” replies the column captain. “We are engaging with a positive outlook.”

A moment later, there’s a squawk, signaling a change of vocal direction in her message. She’s not talking to command anymore, but now to the rest of them in the tanks. “Forward Heavy, split formation. Four quarters, circular. Focus fire on target’s right-lower-center-mass.”

In the span of a few seconds, the radio squawks wordlessly a dozen times as the local tank commanders of the formation each confirm their reception of the order. Getting ready for the command, Strivel lowers their speed.

“Forward left, thirty,” calls his tank commander, the man sitting behind him in the same machine, just next to the gunner’s and loader’s positions. Looking through a periscope, the commander begins to set up the numbers. “Turret, rotate right, forty-seven. Hold. Raise angle — sixteen.”

A mechanical whirring makes audible the turning of the tank’s turret, the elongated 76mm barrel swiveling to the right in contrast with the body of the tank that is moving to the left as they begin to diverge the formation. The tank column has split into four groups that are beginning to drive a circle around the castle-sized giant. His group is driving on the far outer left of the enclosing formation.

“Target is in focus,” affirms the gunner.

“Shell loaded!” confirms the loaders, slamming the barrel’s lower hatch shut and spinning a locking cylinder.

Strivel looks in the mirrors, watching as the other tanks in his segment of the column all follow the same pattern. It’s like they’re a swarm of insects, unified in the same actions and commands — like a hive.

The rumbling grows louder and louder as the engine and the golem both roar in passive existence. Another step by the moving giant shakes the world. There is an audible sound, something akin to a rockslide collapsing down from a cliff and onto a singing whale, as the titanous monster slowly begins to turn, having noticed them approaching it. Embedded in its distant head are hollow, glowing eyes made out of gemstones that begin to scan over the intruders, as if trying to identify what they are.

There isn’t much flair to it at all. A calm, nearly passive voice comes over the radio’s right receiver as the column captain gives her order. “Engage,” she says in a sterile voice, followed within a breadth of a second by the hammering of church bells as a dozen heavy armored vehicles bring the gospel of man to the spirit world. Dragon’s fire blasts from solid steel barrels as a coordinated barrage of shells hurtles toward a lower-right hip the size of a township.

Fire and shrapnel blast out in all directions as a massive, unified explosion reaches toward the sky. The golem roars and falters, with immediate clouds of black smoke obscuring its torso. Flocks of strange birds fly away from its shoulders, creating clouds above it as they begin to circle.

Strivel holds the course steady as behind him comes a flurry of orders, the tank commander ordering a reloading and repositioning of the tank’s main cannon as they continue to move. So that the sustained fire they’re letting out on the enemy continues to hammer into the same position.

“Fire.”

A second barrage blasts free as the golem tries to stamp down on one of the tanks, only to be blasted back by the shockwave of another unified battery. Boulders crumble and break away. It turns, trying to get another tank. But another strike hits it. It refocuses. Another barrage hits it. The overwhelmed titan stumbles and then begins to arc to the side.

“Full speed. Reunite formation. Direction, north,” orders the column captain. “Turrets, rear.”

Without ever stopping, the column of tanks finishes its circle around the golem, forming a broad line formation as they drive away from the enemy with their turrets facing to the rear behind them.

“Fire.”

They leave a trail of smoke in their wake, the tanks and the world shaking as the final barrage strikes into the same-exact spot they had been targeting one last time. A daisy-chain of explosions carries across the breaking and fractured leg of the stone giant as the tanks roll off toward their actual mission target. The super-heavy lets out a long, prolonged groan, the world filled with hammering and crackling as the stones of its body collapse together. The broken leg gives out, and in a second, an entire mountain begins to collapse in on itself as it falls over. Stone hands reach out, flailing and trying to grab on to anything to stop its fall, but there is nothing but air for the titan to grasp at, and it breaks together into a heap that strews over the landscape. It collapses. The world shakes, a cloud of dust creating a wall in the air that separates the tanks from the landing zone as they roll forward, their turrets rotating back to a forward-ready position in unison with a collective whirring.

Strivel watches in the mirror as a pair of glowing gemstone eyes shine through the smoke and then begin to fade away into the distance.

“Garuda, this is Forward Heavy Keiko. Tango Super-heavy unit has been terminated. Moving to the objective. No losses,” hisses the right receiver of his headset.

Command responds over the radio. “Confirmed, Forward Heavy. Proceed. Watch your fire. Sabotage operation units are already in position at enemy fortifications to deactivate anti-armor fortifications.”

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Pilot - M.S.V., C.L. - ‘Breathless Chaplain’ -

“Stay with me a while,” asks the woman’s voice, the softness of the worried tone carrying down the contrastingly cold metal corridors. Her words bounce across the grated floors, until eventually vanishing away into the grinding, whirring mechanisms beneath their feet. Caretaker holds Pilot’s hand with both of hers, looking up at him.

His face covered in scars and burns from the skirmishes of the war that never ends, his eyes filled with sights of the same, look past the ghosts within his visions to stare at her as they stand there together in the odd-side corridor of the capital ship. Pilot closes his fingers, squeezing her hands. “I only have a moment,” he replies, smiling and then looking off to the side. “They need me out there,” explains the man, knowing that she understands as much. “Just a little more. We’re so close,” he says, stepping in a step closer toward her. “We can end this whole mess,” he explains, his other hand resting on her shoulder. “We can eliminate Tango and put an end to everything. We can have peace.”

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Caretaker opens her mouth to say something but then falls silent again, lowering her head for a moment. Her antlers come close to the metal walls and loose piping, and Pilot reaches up to slide his hand in between them and the metal interior of the ship so she doesn’t get caught somewhere.

After a second of that, she looks back up and grabs his arm, pulling his hand down onto her stomach. “Right now, I need you here,” explains the dryad. “Pilot. This is all so fast,” says Caretaker, studying him. “Life changed so quickly. I know you’re not scared of all of this, but I am,” she says. “Every day I wake up wondering if I’m going to have to melt a machine gun’s barrel or have something try to rip me open, or if you’re going to just not come back one day and I’ll have to do this alone. Every day is so… different from the life I knew.” She steps forward toward him, their bodies pressed together. Caretaker lets go of his hand and gestures around them to the boats and to the sign directing down to the armory. Her tone picks up pace rapidly. “This metal, this place, this is all your world, Pilot. I don’t like it here,” says the world tree dryad. “I can barely keep myself alive before, let alone the world tree, and now I have to…” She slows her rambling, trailing off as she looks down at her rounded mid-section. “Now I have to protect even more things, and I don’t-“

“- Okay,” says Pilot, cutting her off very simply mid-rant.

“…Huh?” Caretaker looks back up at him.

Pilot nods to her once, giving his best equivalent to a smile. It seems that this, too, is a learned skill that he needs to adjust to. “I’ll stay with you,” he affirms. “They can manage one mission without me.”

Caretaker exhales the long breath she had been holding in, her shoulders slowly dropping together. She leans her head forward, resting her forehead on his chest. Out of the sides of his eyes, Pilot eyes the antlers on either side of his face, as the ship beneath them crests up and down over the waves of the ocean.

He holds her, rubbing her back for a while as they stand there in the corridor.

“I don’t think I like the ocean,” says Caretaker quietly, receiving a pat on the back for her suffering. “It’s pretty, but this is making me sick,” she remarks.

His hand strokes behind her shoulders. “Did you know that ocean water is full of salt?” he asks.

Caretaker’s head pulls back, and she looks up at him, somewhat green in the face. “Really?” she asks excitedly, and he nods. “Can we drink it?”

“Well… I wouldn’t,” he replies, wincing playfully with one eye open.

Caretaker’s face falls into an annoyed pout. “Why even tell me then?” she asks, sighing. She turns around. Pilot ducks out of the way, her antlers just missing him.

“So what do you want to do?” he asks, as she grabs his hand and pulls him along.

“Nothing,” she replies. “Can we just sit quietly in our room together and do nothing at all?” she asks. “I’d really like that.”

Pilot lets her pull him along. “I don’t think I’m good at that,” he explains. “I like to keep busy.”

“…Don’t I know it?” sighs Caretaker, rolling her eyes. She looks back over her shoulder at him, causing him to lean back an inch to dodge her antlers again. Her hand opens a metal hatch on a cabin door. “But we’ll work on it for a while,” she encourages, opening their room.

“Best I can offer is a moment,” he replies, before she drags him inside.

“How about a lifetime?” she asks, tilting her head as she smiles his way.

— Her antler’s squish his hand between them and the door frame, Pilot having reached out to stop her from striking her head on the metal.

“That’s a long time.” Pilot thinks about it for a minute, stroking his chin. “I can give you… ten. No. Fifteen minutes,” he offers in counter, nodding once. “How about it?”

His joke and acknowledgment of her flirtation go unappreciated, as evidenced by the slamming of the door of their cabin behind him.

But, for ten or fifteen minutes, he does manage to successfully do nothing at all, even as the war that never ends roars all around them. A soldier’s skill sets often do not carry over well to a heart for anything soft, gentle, caring, or of the classification of creatures known commonly as ‘people’. They aim, instead, to land within the graces of havoc and hellfire.

Unfortunately for him, he, like an idiot, has found and accepted love.

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Airbourne Operator Urmel Low-Altitude Military Transport Airframe - 'Gooney Bird'

Urmel’s cigarette lights up, sparks from the dense metal lighter flying through the thin air as the flame dances and fights for its delicate breath of life like a desperate firefly, only to be smothered out by the metal lid flicking back closed shut. The last of them dance past his eyes, staring out straight ahead at the man strapped to the metal wall opposite him. The other soldier’s body is shaking either as a result of terror or because of the two massive supercharged engines on either side of the massive plane.

“Gooney Bird’s flying in hot,” says a voice over the plane’s intercom as a trail of smoke wafts up toward it. “Ninety seconds.”

He exhales a puff of smoke, tapping his cigarette to get rid of some of the ash. He turns his head, looking at the black-haired elven woman sitting next to him who has done nothing else for the last five minutes except repeat the same swear over and over under her breath. Her hands are gripping her shoulder straps like vices, her boots pressing down so firmly against the airframe that her rubber soles have been compressed nearly flat. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck -”

Urmel gets up, undoing his safety straps with one hand. He reaches the cigarette over to her, as he strides past the two rows of some fourteen people each, all of them dressed in the same fatigues and most in the same pale expressions. Reaching out, he grabs a pack from the rack, strapping himself in.

“Sixty seconds,” calls the pilot’s voice over the intercom back into the cabin.

Everyone starts getting ready. Urmel looks at the swearing elf, who has pulled on the cigarette so tightly with a single-breathed draw that the flame has burned all the way down to her fingers.

“Who do you think it’s going to be?” asks Urmel, standing next to her as he looks at the back of the plane, at a slanted wall.

She looks up at him as Urmel turns his head around, his arm drifting across the plane as he slowly points toward different people, his finger finally landing on one of the soldiers. “I’m calling him.” His finger points at a sturdy-framed man with a sharp nose.

“It doesn’t have to be anybody!” she replies, wincing and jumping up as the burning cigarette catches her finger. She fusses, wiping the tears out of her eyes as she runs to grab a pack from the wall.

It always has to be somebody.

Urmel watches her go, shrugging to himself before looking back at the slanted wall. The necklace of the icon of the Holy-Church jangles around his neck. An alarm starts blaring in the plane. A red light begins to strobe, the spinning glow reflecting over the drab metal surfaces, painting the mouse gray uniforms into a muddy brack. Ruby light reflects off of his talisman.

“Thirty seconds,” calls the pilot as everyone lines up in two lines next to each other.

The first man on the second line, standing next to Urmel, looks over his way. “How can you still believe in that crap?” asks the soldier, turning back to the door. “After everything that’s happened?”

The lines begin to form, as everyone adjusts their straps and gets in position.

Urmel looks down, pulling out the magazine from his compact assault rifle to look inside for a second to see if it’s full. The weapon is a special light modification for airborne soldiers, featuring a denser and shorter design that makes it easy to stow and strap away. The stacked 7.63x25mm rounds inside, filled to the brim, indicate that he’s ready. He slots the magazine back in, looking at the other man as a whirring around them begins to louden the ambiance. “How can I not?” asks Urmel.

{Normal Quality}[Hollow Frame Compact Assault Rifle {7.63×25mm}] A gas-operated selective fire automatic rifle with a rotating bolt, redesigned as a special purpose weapon for airborne operations. It has a compact weight, made possible by reducing the barrel length, thinning the material of the frame, and hollowing out the stock. As such, it is seen as less durable and more susceptible to damage and malfunction. It is capable of firing up to 750 rounds per minute at a muzzle velocity of 740m effectively up to 600m in ideal conditions. Ammunition is fed through a 20 round detachable box magazine. Weight: 3.79kg Value: —

“Ten seconds!” calls the pilot.

The slanted wall, the ramp of the plane, begins to open mid-flight. Behind it comes to light the oddly colored underworld sky of many colors. Urmel looks at the world beyond the plane they’re lined up inside, affixing his short rifle to its harness. His eyes, filled with smoke from the slaughters and battlefields he’s trampled his way across to make it this far, find the sky to be cloudy, despite its unnatural clarity. The clouds take the shape of screaming faces. “Before the war, I was just a man.”

“Five seconds!”

His eyes, wide, stare at the clouds that almost seem to be chasing the massive plane, like dragons arching through the sky in their wake. “But now, the gods have made me an angel of their wrath.”

— Someone snorts.

Urmel shoots a glance back at the laughing man, lifting a finger. “I change my vote. It’s going to be you, heretic,” affirms the soldier. The pointed-at man stares blankly.

“…Huh?” asks the perplexed man.

The alarm changes tone.

Urmel looks forward, stepping the same way and then stepping again with his arms held out to the sides as he grasps at the strings of fate. He is a man of faith, a man of the sky. He is a man who, when he dies, doesn’t need a grave any more glamorous than the exact spot he lands on. Burials of ceremony are things for the people of the old world, they are for the men of that old world.

With spread arms, he hurtles down toward the new world below, to which he belongs. Behind him, file out others one after the other in measured distances as the paratroopers flow out of the transport over the target zone.

— But not just from his plane.

Paratroopers fall down all across the horizon, as men and women in uniform crest toward the world now, as did once the servants of heaven in distant times, to which their present actions are now a reflection. Hundreds of plumes, like mushrooms bursting from the ground, appear in the air as he drops in free fall. Parachutes contrast the explosions that fill the air with debris and smoke. Urmel hurtles down, his body twisting through a black cloud of a fireball that had erupted seconds below him, scorching black ash clinging to him as he streaks down toward the identified demon stronghold below, what looks like a township of some sort — but of mortal make and mark. Like the rest of the landscape, it’s distorted and mis-designed. It’s like a cave-dwelling architect had been trying to understand the concept of a village, making something vaguely akin to a verbal description of something he had never actually seen with his own eyes.

— Men honor the gods not by undertaking the things of mortals but by instead walking in the same steps the divine has taken.

War against evil is the primacy of all commandments.

Urmel rips his parachute’s cord, the fabric releasing from his pack and pluming out above him. With one hand, he grabs his parachute’s gliding director, the other holding the small caliber assault rifle and firing down potshots toward the ground, scattering Tango forces and anti-air positions.

And, sure enough, for only a flash of a second, he sees a human form hurtling down past him faster than he can look.

It always has to be somebody.

Their parachutes are notoriously unreliable. Every so often, one just doesn’t open at all, for whatever reason, or it fails to deploy. It’s not often enough that it’s a mission-hindering problem, but it's common enough that everyone knows it could be them today.

— If not for the grace of heaven.

Urmel lifts his rifle, aiming down the sights at a blob of something that’s alive below him, and pulls the trigger. Not long after, his black boots land down on top of the corpse.

It’s a… person? No. It's something like a person. It isn't human. What the hell is this thing? The soldier studies the odd, alabaster body for a second, until something new moves on his periphery.

Urmel spins, aiming and pulling the trigger.