- [Advanced Forward Artillery Unit - Three] -
The echoes of machine gun fire carry through the air from a far-off distance. The sky is filled with explosions and black clouds as flak bursts around swarming drakes and a squadron of fighters that are dog-fighting over a faraway battlefield. But the distant echoes of horrific war seem almost foreign and unimportant right here and now, as a group of soldiers run past each other, reloading the large gun — all with juvenile smiles on their faces as they work in tangent motion together. They’re a team of well-practiced, professional artillery gunners.
Singing fills the air between the gaps.
“FIRE!” shouts the artillery officer.
A single thundering crack fills the air, a heavy recoil of an entrenched artillery howitzer fracturing the ambiance like shattering glass as an individual 105mm shell is violently lobbed through the extended barrel with loving precision, off toward the horizon with the hopes to erase it.
A man opens the howitzer’s breach, throwing the old casing out onto a heap and catching the next shell thrown his way by another soldier. He shoves it into the howitzer’s loader before slamming the hatch shut. The men next to him, standing next to the howitzer’s base, turn two separate cranks, one for the rotation and one for the height of the gun, as they adjust to new firing-coordinates that are given through by the officer.
The loader tries to hold back his laughter as he sings on the rest of the tune in the rhythm of a shanty.
“Walked to the door of the baker’s daughter,
Sh’fell down the stoop - there I caught her,
Asked my name, she did not daudle -
- I’said I'm Maraconie!” calls the man, pointing at the munitions carrier, who throws him another shell that he, with a saunter, sets into the gun.
Next to him shouts the officer over his voice. “FIRE!”
The howitzer blasts out with a hell-scream, firing a shell into the distance. A single thundering echo rattles off across the world as the whistling shell flies like a banshee, screaming through the night. “Adjust coordinates,” orders the officer.
The munitions carrier, who had been pointed to by the prior man, grabs a shell from a stack of glowing metal ammunition that is stockpiled and ready for them. He looks down at the inscriptions on the casing for a second before sauntering over to the massive gun with a swagger.
“Then I strolled to the market - there I met her,
Th’candlemaker’s sister, better -
Asked my name and If I'd wed her,
- I’said I'm Visalaele!” he sings, throwing the next shell across the gap to the loader, who catches it and shoves it into the breach, slamming the hatch shut.
“FIRE!” calls the officer, watching the distance with a pair of binoculars. The howitzer hammers out again, launching a new shell toward the battlefield. “Adjust. Latitude, one. East, four.”
“Adjusting!” confirms a man on the gun as the singing ammunition carrier points to a woman sitting at a table and hunched over an artillery shell. She is a priestess of the holy-church and is wearing the typical off-white robes of her profession, together with some uniform extensions, like a standard issue cap and some armbands. Despite her attempts to focus on her work, she has a deeply annoyed expression painted solidly below her oxidized raspberry-brown hair, which is cut into a shoulder-length regulation bob. Her gray eyes attempt to focus on her work. She’s been assigned to the artillery unit to enchant their shells with holy-magic, augmenting them with powerful explosive attributes and greater precision.
Looking over her shoulder for a second at the singing man pointing at her, she turns back to her table. “I’m not going to do it,” she says plainly, rolling her eyes as she hunkers down over a shell, inscribing it with a sacred prayer. “I’m not some crass sailor,” she argues. “Pick someone else to sing your dumb song,” she says.
The artillery unit has its own little strange comradery that has developed. Since many of them used to be naval gunners on the old sailing fleets of the dead world, they’ve developed a very specific working routine that they have carried over into their new duties as artillerymen. She’s just been glued into their group by the powers that be, so she finds herself out of place often with their seaman’s mannerisms and quirks.
Shaking her head to herself, she works in silence, listening to the distant battlefield and thinking about how long ago the past feels. In that old world, before all of this, she was responsible for enchanting magical items back at the city’s grand cathedral. It was dignified, desirable, and productive work. Those were better days.
The howitzer doesn’t fire.
“…You gotta, Berries,” argues the munitions carrier quietly, leaning in her way and sounding confused. “I picked you.”
‘Berries’, being the colloquial nickname they have given her, shakes her head. “I am an ordained priestess of the highest powers, a faithful servant of heaven,” she remarks sharply. “I am happy to work together with you day and night; however, please keep me separate from your tasteless, touch-starved games.”
“…Tasteless?” asks a man from the side of the gun, holding onto the rotational valve. “Hey. Come on, Berries. We can’t keep firing unless you do it too,” argues the soldier from a few meters away.
“That doesn’t even make sense!” snaps the priestess, looking back over her shoulder at the small unit of a handful of artillery soldiers who, quite honestly, do actually look confounded at the arising situation. It’s as if this is something that has never happened before, and they weren’t quite sure what to do. “Just load the gun and pick someone else!” she argues, gesturing to the man holding a ready shell.
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The soldier just behind her looks down at the waiting shell in his hands and then over to the man standing by the howitzer’s breach, who just shrugs. “I… I can’t, Sister,” says the soldier after a moment, sounding very sincere in that. “Not until you say the verse and pick someone else. Them’s regulations.”
“Those are not regulations!” she argues, getting louder. She snaps her head back. “Captain! Tell your men to get in line!” she protests, looking at the unit captain, who lowers his binoculars to look at them all.
“SOLDIER!” barks the unit leader, at first to her smug satisfaction, until he points his hand her way. “SING THE SONG!”
She looks taken aback. “But -”
“- THAT’S AN ORDER!” he affirms loudly, his expression making clear that this isn’t a game as he cuts her protest off.
The priestess stands there, her eye twitching as she looks at the men. The man holding the shell next to her shrugs softly. “Its… it’s regulations, Sister,” he explains with a nervously-confused sincerity in his eyes.
“That doesn’t even - Whatever!” she groans loudly in exasperation, sitting back down at the table and holding her face in her hands as she looks down at the live munitions inches below her, wondering if the gods will have mercy and detonate the round this very second.
— They do not.
“Berries!” screams the captain, pointing at the distant battlefield. “Our men need fire support! People are dying!” shouts the officer as she sits there, sweating. “Sing the damn song, or I’ll have you sent to the mines for dereliction of duty!”
“FINE!” she yells, slamming her palms on the table. The shell rattles and starts rolling, stopping only when she pushes it back in anger, scratching a groove into the wood with the back of the brass casing.
She grits her teeth, taking in a deep hissing breath through them before lovelessly chanting out a few words she’s had to hear a thousand times before today already.
“Climbed to the steeple, where she rung out,
A priestess, and the word she sung out -,”
Berries exhales, looking back behind herself. “Really?” she asks.
The soldier standing there with the shell in his arms nods, looking back nervously at the captain.
“Heaven’s sake…” she mutters.
“- Asked my name and if I’m devout,
- I’said I’m Father Baily,” recites the priestess as quietly as she can, scrunching her eyes closed in embarrassment. The rest of the crew cheers as she points at the next random body she can see in order to escape the game as quickly as possible.
“FIRE!” commands the officer, the fresh shell launching off toward the distant war zone. The young soldier behind her slaps her on the back. “Thanks, Berries,” says the man, taking another shell from her completed stack as a man behind them on the gun sings his verse. “Sorry. Didn’t know you had a bad singing voice,” he says apologetically.
“Huh? What? No, I don’t - Hey!” she complains, spinning after him as he carries the next shell away back to the gun. “I was in the choir for ten years, I- why am I even arguing?” she bemoans, throwing her hat onto the back of the table and pulling at her hair in frustration for a moment before returning to work.
“FIRE!”
The howitzer lobs a fresh shell toward the horizon.
----------------------------------------
- [Ruby Squadron, Ruby One] -
“IT’S ON MY TAIL!” screams the man’s voice over the radio that is filled with crackling hiss, not from static but from the chorus of machine-gun-fire that hails through the air above and below.
He pulls on the stick, the sleek plane arcing up toward the fractured sky, his second hand resting on the throttle that he pushes forward to rise without risking an immediate stall of his plane. His eyes look through the goggles of his flight mask, staring out of the windshield. A single yank spins the plane, its body spiraling in a barrel roll as he lines up his cross-hairs with the back of a massive, scaled monstrosity — some sort of dragon. He’s never seen anything like it.
His finger pulls down on the trigger.
— The dragon ahead of him pulls its wings together, falling in a sudden drop, causing his shots to miss.
Pulling the stick, he turns the plane, following its rapid descent. It hadn’t made the choice to drop at random; it’s chasing another fighter, who had just dropped down himself in a sudden maneuver.
The pilot lifts a hand to the in-built radio receiver in his helmet. “Leaf-Two, this is Ruby. Keep a steady course so I can assist with your bogie,” says the man calmly, looking at the plane dropping below him with a green leaf painted on the top of its wings, spinning in a spiral to avoid a stream of exhaled dragon’s fire blasting after him.
“Fuck no! Are you crazy?!” yells the man back over the radio, the sweat pouring down his face obvious in his voice. A series of swears and curses comes over the radio as the pilot adjusts his course rapidly, the edges of his wings singing black as he barely dodges the next stream of fire. “If I fly steady, I’m done for!” he explains, as if this were obvious.
Flight-name Ruby follows after the pursuit, watching as the sky around them bursts with smoke and flares in all directions. Planes and dragons fly like birds of competing swarms through a hailstorm made out of magic and bullets. All three of them dive down toward the ground. “Leaf, this is Ruby,” says the pilot calmly over his radio, watching the frantic dance below him as the other plane nosedives to the ground, shaking as its aerodynamics begin to fail from its damaged wing. “Slingshot high. Perform a waltz-maneuver,” he instructs. “I’ll take it from here.”
The second plane arcs, its nose rising up rapidly as it drops to the ground like a fallen knife, only to bounce back up toward the sky a second later in a straight line, the forward vector of which Ruby begins to intercept. He watches as the pursuing dragon nearly crashes into the ground, scraping over a huge line of fighting bodies down below with its tail and sending a cloud of debris toward the sky as it arcs up in pursuit, heading directly into where he’s lining up his cross-hairs.
Sure enough, it launches after its prey with a feverish determination, heading straight toward his recticle.
Ruby pulls the trigger of the plane’s armor-piercing machine gun array.
— His plane shakes, wobbling as something streaks past it, disrupting the air-stream and causing his shots to spray wildly away in all directions. A deep whistling cuts past him for a fraction of a second.
A random 105mm artillery shell, fired from hell knows where, cuts with a threateningly short distance just over his left wing, past his nose, and strikes directly into the rising dragon’s side. A massive fireball fills the air, with Ruby just barely managing to turn the plane and break through the side of the explosion, weaving between the dragon’s severed wing and its ruptured body as it tumbles down toward the sky.
Ruby, suddenly equally as sweaty as the other pilot, looks in his mirror and watches the creature fall before pulling back up higher into the sky.
“Hell of a shot!” calls Leaf over the radio, sounding beyond relieved. “Fucking thanks, Ruby,” he sighs. “I’m pulling back to get my wing fixed. Leaf-Two out.”
Ruby picks up the receiver, about to explain what actually happened, but then lowers the radio for a second, not sure if he can really explain it.
“See you there,” he says, hooking the radio back in and aligning his plane toward a new target that is streaking over the battlefield, melting their armored column with a breath of unnaturally hot fire.
He lines it up and takes the shot, several hundred rounds per second flying out and peppering the dragon’s scaled back. The drake spasms, almost twitching, as it is filled with holes and crashes down toward the ground, sliding along the dirt until it comes to a stop, a troop of infantry climbing over it as they force the advance forward deeper into enemy lines.