Ground Operations Commander Garuda - M.S.V., C.L. - ‘Breathless Chaplain’ -
“Commander, there’s more of them,” reports the human standing next to her. Gardua, the ground operations commander, stands there on deck with her hands behind her back as she looks down from the bridge at the white creature standing on deck on one leg. “Pathfinders and assault operators are finding them across the board.”
“What are they?” asks Garuda, her already always narrowed eyes pressing down into viper-thin slits that match the tightness of her pulled-back hair, stretching her forehead out taut enough to flatten the lines across it. “Tango?”
The reporting officer shakes his head. “They aren’t aggressive toward our forces. Our best guess is that they’re natives.”
Around the bridge of the command ship, sailing along the coast of the mainland continent they’ve invaded, several officers run around back and forth as they string together commands and orders from frontal operations across the board as circumstances change.
“Commander!” calls a man from the back. “Eastern heavy armor is requesting reinforcements. They’ve pushed into a dragon’s lair. It’s bad. Heavy causalities.”
All across the room, radio operators are pulling and pushing cables and plugs as they consistently rewire communications as new relays are added on the front lines. Another woman calls in, pulling her headset off halfway. “Commander! Airborne Assault Five is reporting a successful operation. Heavy native presence in the area. Requesting orders as to how to proceed.”
Natives? In the spirit world?
“They seem rather unusual, but they’re advanced enough to build cities and communicate,” reports her junior officer. “What do we do with them?”
Garuda stares at the white entity standing down on deck as it switches legs to stand on the other one.
“The safest thing is to wipe them out like anything else,” says Garuda. “We’re better off cleaning the board. I don’t know what these things are, and I don’t want them behind my men.”
“Ma’am. That’s inadvisable,” notes the junior advisor, receiving a glare cold enough to freeze death at his questioning of her decision. He lifts his hands and lowers his voice. “…Some of the more religious soldiers are calling them ‘angels’.” He looks around the room, leaning in toward Garuda. “Violence against them would risk dissent from the Holy-Church.”
“You mean those traitorous cultists who almost killed my city?” she asks very loudly. Several people from around the bridge look their way before returning back to their tasks.
Garuda turns to look at the advisor and then back at the strange birdlike creature that hardly seems like a dignified or noble thing. If anything, it reminds her of some inebriated pigeon. This is what the church considers a divine entity? Laughable. “Order all units to view them as potential hostiles,” she instructs. “Engage lethally if necessary. Find out what they are, and find me one who can talk.” She turns around, walking past him down the metal walkway of the bridge. “Tell Eastern Heavy to fall back. Air support is on the way,” she orders to one operator. The commander looks down at the map on the table, looking at the pin that represents their airborne assault over a large village. Next to it is a deep forest, separating them from their next target — some kind of unknown structure. “Airborne Five is to proceed to target.”
“Ma’am!” resounds a collage of voices around the room.
That forest…
Garuda looks at the map, watching the pins surrounding the forest. Airborne operations, heavy armor, and all manner of units are moving around it, as advised by their fairy scouts — all of whom reported some very odd things about those woods.
But Tango has some sort of structure in it that she can’t leave standing behind their lines. Whatever it is, it has to go.
Reaching over, she grabs the airborne marker with a ‘five’ on it and slides it closer toward the trees.
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Airborne Operator Urmel
His boot kicks the red corpse of some kind of imp, turning it over onto its back.
A second later, there’s a loud crack as his rifle fires a single shot. The red body spasms, floundering once in response to the bullet that ruptures through its skull as he dead-checks another one.
Fire rages all around them as buildings burn. Urmel rests his gun against his chest as he walks over to the next one, kicking its head to the side before aiming his rifle.
— A pair of yellow eyes opens.
The gunshot strikes out, breaking through the demon, the bullet fragmenting inside its skull, and nailing it to the ashen mud below them.
He moves on to the next one, as around him move dozens of soldiers.
His eyes look down at a new body. This one is one of the different ones. Lying there on its front, a lanky, alabaster frame — doesn’t move an inch. Urmel stares at it and then looks up and to the side at a group of them being hustled together by the other soldiers — survivors. These creatures aren’t demons — not any that he’s ever seen or heard of. They aren’t aggressive either, seeming more fearful and passive than anything else. Some of them are decently intelligent, but there is a language barrier.
Urmel watches as a corporal stands there, scratching his head, as he tries to transcribe some words down into a tome. In front of him is one of the creatures, tall and unnaturally pale like a ghost, with yellow, massive eyes. This one seems coherent and intelligent, but others of the species are almost… animalistic in their presentation of social intelligence. They seem like a mixed bag.
He lets go of his gun, letting it hang from the strap around his shoulder, as he reaches into his pouch and lights a cigarette.
“You really think they’re angels?” asks a voice next to him as he draws out an exhalation.
Urmel turns his head, looking at the elven woman that he recognizes. She’s the one to whom he gave his last cigarette before the jump. He looks down at the freshly lit glow in his fingers and then back at her, marveling at her timing. “I don’t know,” says Urmel, taking another draw as he watches an airborne priestess showing her holy-magic to some of the creatures, who then present her magic of one and the same mark as they begin healing the wounded.
“I always figured they’d be more… I don’t know… graceful?” she says, her hands resting in the loops around her belt pouch. She stares at them for a while.
Urmel stares for a while, smoking his cigarette as around them crack the odd gunshots now and then. “’And ye shall know not my good servants, for they will move amongst the people as grim children and as laughing men. As birds they will slither, and as snakes they will fly,’” recites the soldier, quoting from holy scripture. He hands her the half-burnt cigarette, blowing out a throatful of smoke. “’- Man will never know when he is with his own brothers of flesh, or with my faithful servants who skulk in the bodies of kin, so that he might never feel sanctuary to foster wickedness.’” Urmel checks his magazine, reslotting it. “The Book of Passage, ten-seventeen.”
The elven woman looks at him with a raised eyebrow as he keeps walking, moving to the next corpse. “- Hey!” she calls after him. Urmel looks back, watching as she raises the cigarette an inch his way. “One more of these, and you’re obligated to marry me, you know.”
“I don’t think that’s in scripture,” remarks Urmel, kicking over the next demon. Its head is half missing already.
He aims at the heart instead, the body spasming as black blood sprays out in all directions.
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There is one prime target in the spirit world that all assault operations are focusing on, from what he’s gathered. In the center of the landmass, there seems to be some kind of inverted structure — a tower. From what the military scryers have been able to see, that seems to be the prime energy focal point of the spirit world. Everything seems to coalesce together there.
But getting there is a mess of a thing. It doesn’t matter what angle you come in at; there’s always something in the way. Fortresses filled with demons, ancient, obscure structures, and impossible landscapes that are beyond puzzling to navigate with a military force. What this adds up to is that they can’t just push a single spear toward the heart of the enemy. They need to make a road, and in order to do that, they need to get rid of a lot of the esoteric shit that’s in the way.
Below Urmel comes a steady, slow vibration as the treaded vehicle rumbles across the terrain, one of a half dozen. Calling it a vehicle is generous, but it beats walking. The packrat is a small, meter and a half long light vehicle that looks like a motorcycle and a truck crashed together. It has one tire at the motorcycle-like front end, and the small truck bed back is propelled by one wide tread. Packrats are light enough to drop with an airplane, which makes them a great accompaniment for his people. With legs dangling off the sides, five people can sit on the back end back-to-back if its empty — two on each side with one facing backward. Or just one or two bodies if there are supplies loaded in.
- [Packrat] - An ultralight, mobile squad vehicle platform. It's singular front wheel and wide rear tread are powered by a watercooled four-cylinder inline engine. Capable of dragging a trailer behind itself, the packrat is ideal for light supply operations in difficult terrain, as well as carrying cumbersome emplacement and anti-tank weaponry. With no cargo and only a driver, it can reach speeds of up to 70km/h in ideal conditions. However, with a load and poor terrain, this will be drastically reduced. However, the vehicle will remain viable thanks to its robustly simple design and thick treads.
Urmel watches the forest around them as they roll into it.
A fraction of the troop stayed behind in the attacked village they landed in to establish a forward position. The rest of them are on track and on plan to push toward some sort of obscure fortification inside the forest. Command doesn’t know what it is, so it’s their job to blow it up and make sure it isn’t a problem later on.
----------------------------------------
Hours have passed.
Urmel reads from his scripture, flipping the page of the tiny booklet. It’s a marvel of human ingenuity. Before all of this began, books were tediously large things that had to be written by hand. But the war hero Pilot developed some sort of program that Urmel doesn’t quite understand the nature of, but now books are ‘printed’ with a stamping technique, allowing them to be much smaller and produced much more quickly. The holy scriptures were one of the first books to be copied a hundred times over. The church insisted on it being done before the assault.
What a marvel.
“— I think I want to go back to running an adventuring guild,” says a voice from next to him as the others continue their conversation.
“Now that’s something I haven’t heard in a long time,” mutters a man. “You ran the counter?”
“Yeah,” replies the first soldier. “Back in the east, by the green dungeon.”
“No shit?” asks another man sitting on their packrat. “My cousin used to dive the dungeon there.”
“Can you imagine going into a dungeon with a pistol?” asks the man. “How different is that from what it used to be? Fuckin’ daggers and shit,” he laughs. “It’s gonna be a hard sell for the magic academies to get new students when the war is over.”
“The magic academies are out of business, I think. Every dripping, sweaty F-rank adventurer is going to start out with a carbine to hunt goblins,” he laughs. The others laugh with him.
Urmel flips the page.
The old world is dead and gone. Even once they win the war and ‘life gets back to normal’, it never really will be what it was before. In this year, it has all changed too much. Guns, machines, industrial production — the days of dungeon crawling and adventurers are over. The first time after the world heals and a dungeon-core rears its head out of the ground, it won’t take until midnight until a heavy armored column stampedes it back down into the dirt or some fairy throws a fire-bomb into the dungeon-gate. Magic is useful, but in the face of a screaming steel engine, a sweaty pair of enchanted leather boots really do seem less amazing, don’t they?
“What about you, Urmel?” asks the man with his back against Urmel’s, both of them leaning against each other. “What’re you going to do when it’s over?”
Urmel thinks for a moment, looking around the forest. The canopy is odd. The trees all seem bent and angled, like they were leaning over them to create a tunnel — like the extended claws of a hungry thing waiting to grab them. “I don’t know,” he replies plainly, looking back down at his scripture.
“Oh, come on,” nudges the elf next to him. “What did you do back before?”
“Nothing much,” replies Urmel, shaking his head.
“I used to be an adventurer too,” she laughs, shoulder nudging him. “I can still remember it. Getting filthy every day for a few scrap Obols that just barely paid for my bed at the guild.” She sighs, almost fondly. “I was miserable, but now I miss it in a weird way.” She shrugs. “I guess at the time I didn’t really see it, though. Back then, I wanted to do anything to just… not be an adventurer anymore. Get enough money to get a normal job. Tailoring or whatever. Fuck.” She sighs, staring up at the trees hanging over their heads. “Now I just wanna go back to crawling in the mud and hunting slimes.”
“Life is like that,” remarks Urmel, turning his head for a moment to look at the other packrats driving after them. “You never know what you have until it’s gone.”
The man behind him pushes against Urmel’s back. “Is that also in your fancy book?” he laughs.
Urmel looks at him and then down again, flipping a few pages in silence for a moment. “’And the men of that day will weep bitter tears, for upon receiving their revelation from Heaven, they will yearn for the simple torments of hard childhoods.’ The Book of Promises, four-seven.” Urmel closes the book again.
A long exhalation comes from his left. “Sheesh… you know, religion was always too depressing for me,” sighs the elf next to him.
The packrat’s engine grumbles beneath the vehicle’s bed as they navigate through the forest, which is a mixture of trees in all manner of incoherent fashion. Needle trees bow down over them like a witch’s claws, and many branched oaks and leafy trees spread themselves out wide, as if creating a wall on either side of the path they’re on. Mushrooms grow from the bark of many of them, but they always seem to do their best to avoid touching the ground, and the ground itself moves in many places as fallen shrubbery is carried away on the backs of fat insects.
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Urmel’s breath floats in front of him, trailing as they move.
It’s getting cold.
“It’s getting cold,” remarks the elf to his side, stealing his thought. “What the hell is up with this place?” she asks, looking around the area as the trees become more and more barren by the moment. The ground becomes steadily harder. The air becomes steadily colder. It’s like they’re driving into winter.
There’s a rummaging as several people pull out scarves and ponchos from their rucksacks to keep themselves warm with. They didn’t pack much, given the nature of their airborne insertion.
“Isn’t Heaven supposed to be paradise?” she asks dryly, side-eyeing him as she wraps a scarf around her neck and lower face. Urmel doesn’t reply, simply watching the world slowly become more and more devoid of color. It fades into white and gray the further they push in toward their final destination. It’s like they’re driving from sprint straight into winter. Urmel leans forward, looking past her and straight ahead as off on the horizon, a structure of sorts comes into sight.
“Spirit world isn’t just Heaven,” he explains, checking his gun’s magazine and then sliding it back in. “Driver.”
The man steering the vehicle looks back his way and then stops the machine. Slowly behind them, the rest of the column slows to a halt, and everyone starts to dismount. Urmel looks up onward at the spire-like structure they’re approaching. It resembles an obelisk of sorts, with a pinhole at the top shining with a strange light.
“What’s that mean?” asks the man next to him as they divert to the side edge of the path, cautiously making their way forward. Behind them tag along the other squads. The packrats roll together in the back now.
Urmel holds his rifle ready, cautiously moving forward. He looks out of the side of his eyes at the man before gazing back down at the iron sights that are targeted toward the structure. “Hell’s also in the spirit world,” remarks Urmel rather plainly.
— This statement does little to foster comradery within the unit, as evidenced by the silence around them, broken only by the crunching of fresh snow beneath their black boots.
Urmel raises his fist, holding his gun with one hand. Everyone stops.
Nothing happens.
The man stands there quietly, his hand held in the air, as everyone looks around the area, scanning the dense tree-line with their rifles. Snow continues to fall, piling on their shoulders, illuminated by the glow of the light shining on top of the obelisk.
Slowly, Urmel lowers his hand again.
— The ground beneath them quakes, a ripple moving through the dense forest, causing the trees to rise and fall as if they were water on a cresting wave. Wood snaps and breaks, the roots untethering and ripping in many places from the sudden jolt. People fall over, stumbling and panicking. Urmel falls forward, catching himself on his palms, and then looks up at the obelisk.
One pulse after the other blasts out of it in all directions, the air shimmering with each wave that tangibly washes over them with powerful gales. Equipment flies in all directions, together with people and a couple packrats. The light on top of the obelisk glimmers, leaking out toward the ground as rays of the shine wind down the structure’s body like serpents, pressing into the ground at its base.
And then, a moment later, the light turns black and shatters.
A dozen black needles shoot out of the soil, pressing up toward the unusual sky. Then a dozen more.
— Invasions.
This damn thing is an invasion engine. This structure is what creates the passageways to his world.
“GET ON THE RADIO!” orders Urmel, looking back behind himself at the man, who is scrambling back to the packrat closest to them. A few soldiers are around it, grabbing hold of the machine and the antenna sticking out of its back, trying to get it to not flip over with every pulse from the obelisk.
Out from the black columns, hundreds of yellow eyes shine alight.
— Demons.
“Tango!” calls Urmel, not having a chance to pull his trigger before a fresh shockwave sends him flying back together with everyone else, metal and broken trees blasting in all directions as black silhouettes stream out in the aftermath.
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Ground Operations Commander Garuda - M.S.V., C.L. - ‘Breathless Chaplain’ -
“Ma’am,” reports a radio coordinator. “Airbourne Five is in a mess,” she says, holding her headset against one ear and then looking out toward the bridge with the other. “They’re reporting an enemy ambush.”
Commander Garuda stands there, staring down at the map. “The structure?”
The operator fumbles for a second, listening back into her headset. “Critical enemy infrastructure, ma’am,” reports the operator. “Reports are showing us it’s responsible for creating the invasion needles.”
“Good. Tell Airbourne Five to proceed.”
“Ma’am, I think they need support. It sounds bad,” remarks the operator.
“Should we send more planes?” asks an officer at the table, reaching down to grab a statuette of some planes and divert it.
Garuda snaps out, grabbing his hand. “I need those planes where they are now,” she says, looking at the original mission the flight crew was on.
“Ma’am -” starts the radio operator.
Garuda narrows her eyes, glaring at the radio operator. “Did Airbourne Five ask for support?”
The woman on the console opens her mouth for a second and then closes it. “…No, but -” she gestures at the headset that isn’t producing any sounds other than static. “The line went dead before they -”
Garuda lifts a hand, quieting her. “Then we don’t have the resources for them,” she says, looking down at the mark on the map where they ought to be. “Prepare a long-range rocket barrage. Full saturation,” she instructs.
The officer next to her looks around the room and then leans over to Garuda. “Commander… we can’t just sacrifice men like this. We don’t have the numbers.”
Garuda stares at the map. “If they’re in trouble, they can run away before the rockets get there. I’m not jeopardizing this mission, officer,” she remarks. “Besides, we have more men because of our new special project back home. But we only have one world. I want that thing gone. Rockets.”
He stands up uneasily, looking around the room, and then salutes. “Ma’am!” replies the man, running to send down the order.
Admiral Ankerman, standing on the bridge, looks her way. “Are you sure?” asks the old man.
Garuda doesn’t bother looking his way. “You keep your eyes on the water, Admiral,” says Garuda, picking up the Airbourne Five marker and setting it to the side of the table. “The ground is mine to worry about.”
Movement comes from nearby, and a sudden muttering fills the room.
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Airborne Operator Urmel
Gunfire cracks out, smoke being swallowed by the snow-laden forest. The gray tufts coming from steaming barrels dance like ghosts in the tree line as scattered fire cascades in toward the mass of bodies streaming out of the black needles. They’re demons. Yellow eyes adorn the corrupted, broken, and swollen bodies of a mixture of many species and make. Things that were once human, elf, or pseudo-angelic inhabitants of this world stream out by the hundreds.
Dual heavy machine gun emplacements, mounted on the back of two packrats, open a continuous stream of fire into the enemy lines as the soldiers try to recollect. Spells explode everywhere as fireballs and blasts of lightning streak through the air. Trees catch fire and splinter, sending bark and dead wood blasting in all directions like the shrapnel from fragmentation grenades. Urmel dives, falling behind an overturned packrat as the ground just on the other side erupts. Fire arcs over the top as he covers his head, before popping up a second later and firing several bursts from his assault rifle into the mess of tango. Bodies fall over one after the other, but more streak to fill their place within seconds as the tide crushes down the road their way — held only at bay by the machine guns that unload into a wall of freshly fallen corpses strewing across the street. Demons climb over the twitching, spasming dead, only to be struck by continuous gunfire as they try to summit the top of the heaps. Silhouettes begin streaking toward the sides of the forest, the trees almost seeming to make way for the enemy, but not for them.
— To his right, he sees an opening in the forest emerge.
It only takes a second before a hand rips something off of his belt. A hand tears one of his stick grenades from his collection, pulling the cap and hurtling the rod toward the forest. “GRENADE!” screams a voice next to him.
Urmel and several others drop down as the forest explodes. Wet screams and red mush fly through the air, together with scorched wood.
“Come on!” yells the man next to him, pulling Urmel to his feet as the two of them run back toward the emplacements. “We need to-”
An orange light fills the air for a fraction of a second. A loud pop breaks through Urmel’s head as he’s flung forward, tumbling over his side. He lifts his head, looking at the man who had just dug him out, still spasming from the lightning bolt that struck him directly in his back. His head splits open at the top, smoldering, and he falls over.
Urmel crawls back, pulling aiming his gun and emptying the magazine as several demons jump over the broken packrat. A fresh barrage of gunfire mixes in with his spray, the bodies being peppered by bullets and falling apart into an indiscriminate heap. Urmel crawls over onto his front and then kicks himself up, running down the way together with several others as screams and chaotic noise fill the air. It’s anarchy. The man, feeling the heat on his back, runs and tackles the man ahead of him down to the ground. Over the two of them flies a fireball straight into one of the packrats with the heavy machine gun. The flames hit the fuel tank and the entire thing goes up in a second, the gunner flying off into the distance, a wash of flames blasting over everyone nearby.
The paratrooper, not stopping for a second, scrambles back to his feet, looking behind him at the horde leaking through the fresh opening and then through the second one. The second machine gun stops shooting, the barrel is smoldering red from superheating.
The two of them fall into cover. “Thanks, man!” pants the soldier next to Urmel, clutching his chest as he looks around the area. He points down the street, toward the back packrat. “Go!” he instructs, checking his rifle and then turning around the corner. “I’ll give you cov-!”
It only takes a fraction of a second, and half of the man is gone. Urmel stands there, looking as the smoldering left half of the soldier flops down onto the snow, the other half simply missing.
Metal clambers down all around the ground. Urmel looks down as across the street fly a half dozen metal grenades, thrown in unison, each marked with a white band.
Smoke.
A hiss fills the air, and smoke pours out of the grenades, rising up to the sky and creating a massive wall straight across the road.
Taking his chest, Urmel says his prayers and bolts through the smoke wall. Bodies bump into bodies. Yellow eyes flash together with red in all directions as the colors, smells, and noises of warfare become indistinguishable from one another in the haze. The smoke burns his eyes and throat as he pummels through it, pistol in hand, as he stumbles directly into a massive back. A pair of yellow eyes turn his way, looking down at him only long enough to see the crack of gunfire from his standard issue sidearm. Before the body can fall over, Urmel’s already grabbed it, thrown it over, and continues running past it and out of the smoke.
For a second, he looks behind himself, staring at the only thing there is available to see — the radiant, clear shine from the top of the obolisk, which cuts through the smoke like ghosts moving through a crypt wall.
Bullets fly wildly all around him, together with fire and magic, and Urmel just runs as shapes turn into all matter of different shapes to his left and right.
He doesn’t know how, but he breaks through the smoke, coming out on the other side and straight into the barrel of a rifle. Urmel yanks the barrel out of the way just in time, a scorching heat washing over his fingers, his head spinning, and his ear ringing as the bullet blasts out of the gun that he had yanked to the side in the last second, firing right next to his head instead of at it. “WATCH YOUR FIRE!” yells Urmel, his vision spinning as he shoves the soldier back.
“Sorry! Sorry!” shouts the man, stumbling as he aims back at the smoke, firing into it.
“URMEL!” yells a voice from the side. Urmel turns, looking at his squadmate, the elf. She’s down on the ground, her back pressed to an overturned packrat, as the ground on the other side of the vehicle craters with fire. He drops down next to her, panting for breath as he slides away his empty magazine, slotting in a fresh one from his belt. It gets jammed. He yanks it out, clearing out some mud, before reslotting it.
“We’re outnumbered!” she yells at him, raising her voice to be heard over the chaos of warfare as a bundle of fragmentation grenades explodes nearby, filling the air with wretched crying and screaming.
“What did command say?” asks Urmel.
She shakes her head. “Fucking command didn’t reply. We got cut off!” she explains, covering her large ears a second later as a massive explosion rings out to the side as another packrat goes up into the air.
“Fuck’s sake,” mutters Urmel, looking around himself for anything useful. He reaches into his pouch, checking his personal radio. It’s broken. The man throws it to the side. His cigarettes fall out of his pocket, scattering around them. He looks around himself, glancing at the back of their overturned packrat and then over her way, as the two of them get the same idea as they stare at a large crate fastened to the vehicle’s bed and then at each other.
“…You think?” she asks, crawling over him to unfasten the straps at the top of the crate with her supply key. Urmel leans back against the vehicle, looking to the side as the soldier next to them is blasted away and sent flying.
“I’ll leave the thinking to the gods,” says Urmel, hearing steps coming their way from the other side of the vehicle. “I don’t have time for it,” he finishes, looking up.
The ratchet straps open. The metal crate thuds down to the ground. Urmel rolls her legs off of him and then jumps up, the assault rifle shaking in his hands as the metal rattles, empty casings flying out by the second as a collage of bodies ahead of him spasm and splatter apart. From left to right, he sways the gun, knocking over one body after the other with a collection of ten bursts before the magazine is empty. He drops it out, slapping in a fresh one as he fires into the dissipating smoke, most of which has been blown away by explosions and magic.
Fuck.
Hundreds of bodies are moving their way, coming in from the obelisk that shines down at the end of the road. Demons seem to just endlessly be pouring out, the sparse gunfire that’s left not even being close enough to stop them as they stampede over the corpses of endless dead, turning them into a paste together with the red snow.
There’s too many of them.
— A heavy weight rests on his shoulder. Urmel turns his head, looking at the long metal tube of the recoilless rifle she’s braced on him. “Got a light?” asks the elf, one of his fallen cigarette’s in her mouth as she hands him a single armor piercing rocket from the crate that he slides into the tube’s front.
Urmel grabs the tube with both hands, turning its angle straight down the road, aiming it through a hole in the crawling, screaming mass of teeth and claws directly down the way. “- Just the light of heaven in my heart; may it guide my hands,” says Urmel, his hand pressing down on the latch on the top of the tube. A hissing fills the air, and a second later, a plume of fire and smoke launches out straight from the tube, the two of them stumbling as the rocket fires out of the launcher. The streak of metal spirals down the way, wildly flying as the rocket — by the grace of God alone — flies through the holes between bodies, above and below raised arms and claws, past a corpse that is flung through the air and barrels straight toward the obelisk behind the army of demons.
An explosion crests the distance, another pulse blasting out in all directions. Fire crackles, crawling up the white structure like a rot as something on its foundation breaks. The ground quakes, rumbling, and it begins to collapse. A thousand yellow eyes turn toward it as it begins to fall over like a felled tree.
“No, see, I was making a joke because of what I said earlier, and, you know,” starts the elf, the two of them lowering the rifle and then looking at each other. “With the third cig… and I meant that we could - ah, forget it,” she sighs, waving him off and dropping the spent tube down to the empty crate.
Urmel stares at her and then shakes his head. “No. I heard you,” he replies, as the two of them watch the structure collapse in on itself, falling over. Demons scatter in all directions as a massive stone shadow looms over their way as it falls over. “I’m just traditional. I don’t believe it’s appropriate for a woman to ask a man for his hand.” She raises an eyebrow as the two of them watch the tower collapse, crushing over a mass of demons. Rubble and smoke fly in all directions; the forest seems to shudder. The trees almost feel like they themselves are recoiling from the collapse of the tower.
“…Really?” she asks, at first surprised but then conceding. Urmel nods. “Huh,” she mutters, not really taken aback, as if this should have been obvious to her.
A thousand bodies are crushed. A final shockwave quakes out over the world, and then, barring the few odd cries and screams of crushed things, everything begins to go quiet.
Urmel picks up his rifle, ties together the broken strap, and reshoulders it. Digging through his pouch, he finds nothing and then instead picks up one of the cigarettes from the ground, lighting it and taking a long draw before handing it to her. The elf with the other unlit cigarette still stuck in her lips looks at him and then smiles and rolls her eyes, taking it instead and letting hers fall down to the rest of them.
A few remaining soldiers gather up, collecting together again out of the dust. Everyone looks around themselves, trying to reestablish a headcount.
“By the way, shouldn’t I know your name?” asks Urmel.
“Oh, right,” she laughs, blowing out some smoke. The two of them look up to the sky as a roar fills the air as engines scream through the sky their way. “Waldlaub.”
Planes.
“Looks like we’re getting a ride home,” he remarks, staring up to the sky at the black plane leading the wing formation that circles over their heads. Several soldiers wave up for attention. The lead plane shakes its wings, replying that they’ve been seen.
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Half an Hour Earlier Ground Operations Commander Garuda - M.S.V., C.L. - ‘Breathless Chaplain’ -
Admiral Ankerman, standing on the bridge, looks her way. “Are you sure?” asks the old man.
Garuda doesn’t bother looking his way. “You keep your eyes on the water, Admiral,” says Garuda, picking up the Airbourne Five marker and setting it to the side of the table. “The ground is mine to worry about.”
Movement comes from nearby, and a sudden muttering fills the room.
Someone grabs Airbourne Five’s map marker from Garuda’s hand. The commander looks to her side, staring at Pilot.
“Those men belong to the sky, not the ground, commander,” says Pilot to the dark-elf, looking at her. “They’re mine. We’re going to go get them.”
He heads out of the bridge toward his plane, the console operators saluting him on his way out and then quietly sitting back down at their stations. Garuda lets out an annoyed hiss beneath her breath, glaring after the man as he leaves. She looks around the bridge.
The few people looking her way quickly glance back at their stations, not saying a word.
“Sea sure is calm today,” remarks the admiral from behind her, staring out of the window of the bridge contentedly. “A good day to be out on the water.”