[Corporal Fritzel]
- Seventh Forward Assault -
A crash fills the air as a hammer of water batters against the metal siding of the boat, rising and falling in the wake. A salty, day-lit spray flies over the raised, sharp metal walls of the transport boat. Beneath his feet, the vibrating vessel rises and falls in the surf. The heavy engine’s consistently violently filthy drumming shakes up through his bones. A black smoke rises out of the exhaust behind the ship, trailing behind them like a flag in the sea breeze. The air is filled with roars, dulled explosions, and gunfire hammering out on the outside of their metal shell.
Fritzel reaches up, holding his mesh-covered helmet against his head. The smell of petroleum-based anti-corrosive slop fills the salty air. The rifles of the two-dozen soldiers crammed into this metal vessel are coated in such thick layering that they look almost like the shine of a fish’s scales. Their waxed-gray uniforms are pockmarked with droplets of water that drip down the fabric’s exterior, pooling around many boots that have nowhere to shuffle because of the lack of space as they’re pressed one against the other.
“Landing in thirty!” calls a voice from the metal cabin behind them. A dark-elven soldier has popped out of a metal hatch from the landing ship’s cramped coffin of a cabin and looks down at them all standing in the open bay below her. Two dozen soldiers turn back to look at the woman. She shakes her head. “Good luck, boys! You’ll need it,” says the dark-elf, almost dismissively, before she retreats back into her shelter. The hatch closes noisily behind her, the metal exterior making a point of locking itself firmly shut.
The expanse over their heads is cut apart by a squadron of fighter planes arcing through the air, flying in tight formation. A moment later, there’s a chain of roars as several dozen machine-guns batter down from above, slicing through an unseen position along their destination.
“Prepare shields!” instructs a man’s voice from down next to him, the sergeant raising his voice to be heard of the loudening anarchy. One after the other, a group of squad chaplains standing at the front of the formation begin to channel energy into their hands.
“What are our orders, sir?” asks a soldier. He’s a younger man, just recently entering adulthood, and he started active service last month.
The sergeant knocks on the man’s helmet. “Your orders are to follow me until I’m sick of you, Pitchowski!”
“Sir!” replies Pitchowski, awkwardly trying to salute but accidentally hitting the man next to him while doing so because of the cramped space.
“Twenty seconds!” calls a voice. Behind them, an orange lamp lights up and begins to spin inside its glass housing, muddied and scratched by debris and salt from multiple other landings.
Soldiers begin to line up, facing forward. “Ready your rifles!” orders the sergeant. The landing ship leaves the water for a moment as it hits a particularly large wave, only to crash down a moment later. A spray of water flies out to all sides. A siren behind them begins to scream in a repeating pulse. Then, from the nearby distance just outside their boat, behind them and ahead of them, come the same sounds from dozens of other landing crafts.
“Ten seconds!” calls the dark-elf’s voice over the intercom, blasting out through the crackling speaker behind them.
The front of the landing craft begins to glow as the priests create a unified front-facing magical shield along the opening bay ramp of the landing boat.
“I always wanted to see the ocean,” says a man next to Fritzel, laughing quietly to himself. A few soldiers shoot him a nervous glance before looking back at the door.
“Five seconds!”
The alarm screams. The boat rocks, half of them stumbling over themselves and into each other as they make contact with the shore. The angled, rectangular craft cuts into what feels like soft sand. Heavy winches begin to work, and grinding fills the air as sand-filled joints begin to crunch apart. A hammering strikes against the lowering metal door, as if fists were trying to batter it down from the outside. The boat, despite being beached, shakes violently like the chattering of teeth as fire lights up everything. The metal landing bay door drops immediately. Watching it causes the same gut-wrenching feeling one might have when experiencing a sudden sensation of falling while lying in bed in Fritzel’s guts.
The beachhead visible through the gaps between bodies, visible behind the glowing magical shield that is being battered with spells and explosions from the other side, is a cratered landscape. Deep pits cover the sand, which is filled with surging ocean foam and floating bodies. Fire crawls perplexingly over the glassy sand that has been melted and coagulated in many places, and it shimmers like ruby mirror glass as eviscerated bodies crawl and scream over the hard surfaces as around them land barrages from all directions. Gunfire and artillery make contact with the beachhead, with rocks and debris flying out of hills as the world is chipped away piece by piece by the chisel of war. Planes buzz overhead. He’s not sure if there isn’t one less than before. He’s also not sure why he’s noticing that at a time like this. Deeply unnatural screams fill the air with the intensity of a howling banshee; they claw into his brain.
The squad pushes forward into motion, the bodies behind him pressing the bodies ahead of him forward. Fritzel holds his rifle, not having the space to aim it just yet, as tightly as he can, as he has nothing else to hold onto.
A flag waves at the front of the boat. Soldiers begin to rush out. “GO! GO! G-”
— The world fills with thunder. Fritzel tumbles, with people screaming all around him. The force of a massive explosion sends the landing craft to its side, the magical shield cracks in half and bodies — some also in half — fly in all directions. He spirals through the air, his helmet cracking against the side of the landing craft next to them as his boat is turned over on its side. Tumbling down, he crashes through the water; his sense of orientation is fully lost. Fritzel’s head spins, his eyes scanning the deep-blue as he sinks. Other bodies float around him, tattered and shredded.
Shapes move through the water next to them — monsters. Massive, long-snouted animals like the amalgamation of alligators and sharks fill the red ocean water, gorging themselves on meat of all kinds. A shadow moves his way, and Fritzel is in panic as he tries to kick himself afloat — drowning. Four yellow eyes, attached to a scaled, bumpy maw, float his way and then become detached, floating apart from the predator’s body on long stalks that let the monster view past its obstructing tooth-filled snout.
The water glows alight, a shock wave blasting out in all directions. An explosion hits the surface of the ocean above them, sending pressure down in terrifying force.
Fritzel tumbles one way from the blast, the creature the other. A second later, he finds his fingers clawing into deep, wet sand as he drags himself out of the ocean, gasping for air and spitting out bloody saltwater. His vision burns, and his blurred eyes look around himself as he tries to reorient. From behind him comes screaming as people splash and flail, many being dragged under the water by the biting monsters that are happy to pull both living and dead below the surface. From the inside of the overturned landing boat’s cabin comes a hammering sound from someone trying to be heard. A few soldiers are trying to open the hatch, but it’s been melted by the blast and cooled by ocean water. Hundreds of soldiers run around in all directions, storming up the beach with rifles in hand and establishing firing positions behind magical shields and metal barriers. They are trying to roll up toward Tango, but the thick wheels keep getting stuck in the silty, mushy sand that seems to swallow one much more greedily than had been expected.
From the top of the hill, where castle walls sit, manned by monstrosities of tooth and claw, come barrages after barrages of spells fired down at the landing force. Fireballs and jagged daggers of ice, arcs of lightning jump from man to man, and manifested tornadoes storm across the defensive line and throw the fortifications off. Down from above stream thousands of monsters, goblins and minotaurs, nagas and demons, creatures of every make and mark storm down into the machine-gun fire coming from forward attack positions and are blasted apart by light combat tanks that have pushed out of landing crafts. Their treads have gotten stuck in the sand, so instead they’re acting as stationary turrets with limited firing angles.
A hand grabs him, yanking him up to his feet. “FRITZEL! GO!” yells the sergeant, throwing him forward. There’s a loud roar that fills the air. Fritzel stumbles, running as fast as he can as instinct takes over. All around him, the ground is peppered with arrows and magical fragmentations; sand flies through the air, intermingling with the smoke of grenades that only provide brief cover from enemy sight. The soldier screams, running as fast as he can up the incline toward a dune, and dives down, looking back behind himself. The sergeant is gone, his upper half is fully vaporized, and his disconnected legs fall over into the water. A second later, a long snout reaches out of the sea and pulls what’s left back into the murk.
Hyperventilating, Fritzel holds his helmet, his hands covered in petroleum grease and blood that have intermingled and smeared. He spins around, lifting his rifle over the dune and aiming down the sight, which is shaking from side to side as if a spirit were trying to yank the gun out of his hands. Not sure who’s screaming anymore or if he’s one of them, Fritzel aims at a shape and pulls the trigger. A crack cuts through him. A body falls down in the distance. He sways the rifle and pulls again. Another crack, another shape on the distant ridge, falls over — this one ducking from his misfire rather than taking a hit.
Fritzel swears, firing one shot after the other, until he attracts attention and the spray of counter-fire from above starts to wander his way.
He ducks down onto his belly, crawling alongside the length of the shallow ridge that is catching one arc of fire after the other for him, until he reaches the smoldering, burnt out shell of a destroyed tank and gasps for air as he reloads his rifle. Looking around himself, he doesn’t see anybody from his squad anymore. Other squads run up the beachhead.
Havoc fills the air, and he looks up, staring at the strafing fighter planes that make another pass. They drop a series of shells down onto the ground in a long line along the beach, and he expects a massive eruption to fill the anarchy, but instead a long hissing comes to ear. He looks around the tank.
Smoke covers the beach, streaming out of an array of shells that had been dropped from above by the planes.
“Move! Move!” yells a voice from the side, and Fritzel watches as a dozen squads make their press onward, running through the fresh smoke cover. Hundreds of soldiers run up the beachhead through the smoke, pushing forward shields as they go and win ground.
Gritting his teeth, Fritzel jams the magazine into his rifle and runs after them, mixing in with a random group as they run forward. His eyes scan the squad around him for identifiers, but he finds too many. A sharpshooter from Mirror-Alpha, a field medic from the second infantry, and a burned tank crewman with only a pistol from the forward heavy armor landing troupe. Everywhere he looks, he sees people, but never more than one or two who belong to the same group. Everything has been fractured apart. The plan is fucked. Ranking men are few and far between, doing their best to hold the patchwork together as they take control of every warm body in the reach of their voices.
— A snarling face jumps out at him.
Fritzel pulls the trigger without thinking about it. The goblin’s skull blasts apart, divided into two halves above its crooked nose. Black blood sprays over his eyes, blinding him as he stumbles forward, wiping his face with one hand. A second later, he flies forward; another explosion sends him tumbling. Fritzel rolls several times, unaware of himself doing so, as he’s already picked himself up again and kept running, his body operating on nothing more than base instinct and animal logic.
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A short, waist-high stone wall comes up, and he jumps over it, tumbling on the other side.
Crawling, he manages to get up and run toward the end of the line. The cliff.
Fritzel presses his back against it, looking behind him at the way he came, scanning the shoreline. Out on the water sit large vessels — ships of war that batter the coast with artillery fire. The shore is covered in empty landing boats, with more and more coming from the ocean. The sands are covered in screaming flesh, so much of it that it looks like the entire sea line has become a howling golem of amalgamated blood and sinew. Hands crawl detached from bodies, and voices howl detached from life.
“Sir! Sir!” calls a voice, a pair of hands shaking him back to reality. Fritzel looks, his wide, burning eyes staring at the faces around him. Others have made it this far, too. “What do we do?!” screams the man.
Fritzel isn’t sure why he’s asking him, of all people. He’s only a corporal.
His eyes wander over the insignias on their tattered field jackets, scanning their badges. They’re all even lower-ranking than he is. One after the other, bodies make it to the end of the line, their wide, haunted eyes showing that they left their souls behind somewhere on the shore during the way up.
He looks around, seeing a man with a massive metal pack. Fritzel reaches over, yanking the radio receiver from the operator’s load. “This is Corporal Fritzel! Seventh Forward Assault!” yells the desperate man into the radio, his words carrying out over the backpack’s antenna to the cruisers out on the ocean. “We’re at the beachhead! We need orders!” he yells, his voice backgrounded by explosions and gunfire.
The radio crackles, hissing with white noise for a time.
“Copy, S.F.A., this is Garuda,” replies the vessel. “What is your status?”
Fritzel looks around himself at the men who are pulling themselves together. “I have eight men, mixed condition,” he replies. “We’re…” He leans out, looking up at the enemy fortifications overhead. “We’re beneath tower three.”
There’s chatter on the other end. “Copy, S.F.A.,” replies Garuda. “Enemy anti-air has been established on the tower. We need that gone. Neutralize it.”
Fritzel looks at the receiver in disbelief. “We’re just eight people! We can’t do that!”
"Understood, S.F.A.,” replies Garuda. “Feel free to swim back then. Otherwise, we need the air clear to get you out of there.”
Fritzel slams the receiver back into the backpack, the operator recoiling as he swears out loud from the depths of his soul. Fritzel looks at the group that has made it to this corner. “You heard command!” he barks, not even sure where he’s getting this energy from. “Let’s fucking go!”
Fritzel grabs his rifle, yanking another man to his feet. “Sir! Sir, I don’t want t-!”
A fist cracks the man’s face, Fritzel’s hand hanging in the air afterward. “Move, soldier!” he commands, the struck man moving after the others as they begin to climb up the hill toward a small side door that leads up the fortifications.
One of them, holding a grenade ready, grabs the handle. “BREACH!” he shouts and kicks the door in, throwing the grenade into the room, where several confused faces look their way.
An explosion blasts out before the eight men storm inside and begin to fight their way up the tower.
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[Pilot]
Level: 100 ♂ Human
The engine of the Kestrel roars, the sharp wings cutting the air as he passes over the beach, pulling down on the trigger. A resounding jangling of metal fills the air; the vibrations of the quad machine guns that shake the light, hollow frame of the plane rush into Pilot’s body like the hammering of hearts. “Tango! Tango!” calls a voice over the radio. “I’m taking ground fire!” screams a man through the speaker, barely audible in his headset over the howl of war.
“DIVERT!” yells a voice over the receiver. Pilot yanks the stick, the Kestrel spinning sideways in a forward arc as fairy-lights blast past them and up toward the sky. Anti-air projectiles cut through their formation. His hand grabs the throttle, and he pushes it forward, the plane soaring over the anarchy below. Up above him and to his right divert the other planes, beginning a complicated dance to avoid the anti-air fire that Tango has begun to establish now mid-assault.
His cockpit lights up. Screaming and whistling fill the air as stray fire rips through the Kestrel’s cabin. “Garuda!” calls a voice into the radio. “This is Harpy-Three. We have enemy flak in position!”
“Roger, Harpy,” replies forward command. “Pull back until enemy anti-air has been disabl-“
The broadcast is interrupted by a scream. Pilot watches in the mirroring glass of the cockpit as a burning plane, missing a wing, spirals down out of the air in a violent tumble. The man lets out an incoherent howl.
A second later, he’s cut off, and a secondary explosion within the cockpit sends him launching up and into the sky. A parachute deploys. The emergency ejection mechanism seems to have activated perfectly. It’s one of Caretaker’s ideas. She got it after watching mushrooms spore for a few nights. The other kestrel crashes down behind the enemy fortifications, a massive explosion cratering the ground below as the payload is detonated by the secondary charges that are laid inside the cockpit. The ejected pilot parachutes down.
— Pilot yanks on the controls, the Kestrel steering off at a sharp turn as he diverts, flying above the ground sideways, his wing tip cutting through the smoke that hangs over the shoreline. His eyes scan the silhouettes of hundreds of bodies running up the beach as, through the roof of his cabin window, several planes draw back toward the ocean, where they’re out of reach from enemy anti-air fire.
But, so is he down here.
“Harpy-One, fall back into formation!” calls Garuda over the radio.
Pilot yanks on the controls, pulling the stick up. The Kestrel does a sideways loop, its tilted wing cutting over the tops of the landing boats as he returns around the way he just came. “Negative, Garuda,” replies Pilot, straightening his wings out and lowering his speed.
Down here, he’s flying below the flak tower. He’s out of range of conventional anti-air fire this low.
A wave of monsters pours down the beach from an opening in a gate toward the fresh landing craft, thousands of creatures streaming toward fresh bodies and rifles.
His hand grabs the mechanism for the plane’s bomb bay, and he yanks the control lever. The belly of the airplane opens up, several cluster munitions falling down toward the ground and exploding in mid-air, sending down hundreds of miniature explosive ordinances onto the bodies below. A wave of starbursts ruptures through the mass of flesh.
“- GIVE ME THAT!” yells a voice over the radio, causing him to flinch. On the other end of the receiver, people are arguing amongst themselves. “PILOT!” shouts Caretaker’s voice furiously over the radio. He flinches, wincing with one eye, as her voice shrieks into his ear. Pilot looks in the mirror as he flies down the shore. “You get your butt back here, RIGHT NOW!” shouts the dryad at him.
While he is very willing to ignore high command, his wife-to-be unfortunately has clear seniority over him.
Pilot looks in the mirror, watching as the wave of soldiers pushes up the beach through the dead monsters he leaves in his wake.
He begins to grab the receiver to confirm.
— The Kestrel lurches out of his control, sparks flying through the cabin. Pilot yanks the stick, smoke filling the plane. A hole shoots clean through the dash, leaving the radio a smoldering mess.
The man looks around himself at the many signals the plane is trying to give him, all of which are as clear a message as a slap to the face during a wild date — that is to say, confusing. However, the smoke and the fire burning inches from his hands make things a little more obvious.
Pilot pulls on the controls, diverting the plane up as hard as he can to get out of the way of enemy ground fire.
His hand drops down to the lower-right side of the cockpit, grabbing hold of the release for the séance drive.
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[Corporal Fritzel]
- Seventh Forward Assault -
The tower shakes, with outside barrages striking it again and again from their own forces.
“Clear!” yells the assault gunner, his barrel hissing as he sweeps the room full of tattered corpses.
Fritzel climbs up the staircase of the tower, grabbing a stick grenade from his belt as he reaches the top and hurtling it over the railing onto the platform. A fireball and screams fill the air a moment later, before he runs up with the others behind him as they clear the remaining bodies with a few well placed shots. Fritzel grabs a flag from his rucksack, only noticing now as he yanks it out that the tattered scrap of a bag and it are covered in holes, burns, and rips.
Atop the tower is a broken construct that looks like a catapult made out of bones and sinew. Latched onto it is a dead goblin, burned and pierced by shrapnel from the grenade.
“Garuda!” he calls into the radio, grabbing the receiver from the operator’s backpack. “Come in!” he calls, running to the edge of the tower.
— A meteor shoots up toward the sky, brushing within touch. Fritzel stumbles back, lifting his head to follow the sight of the airplane that ascends at such a sharp, straight angle that it looks to be defying gravity itself. Wind and smoke blow past him and over the tower. “Tower three is clear. We’ve taken it,” he says, lowering the receiver and watching the plane.
“Hey, isn’t that…?” asks the medic next to him, the squad watching the plane rise higher and higher in an upward spiral.
The air behind the slowing plane begins to light up, as several flak towers, all at the same time — still manned — begin to fire on the last plane in the sky.
“It’s him,” says Fritzel, watching the fire streak toward the plane like a serpent chasing a mouse. “The Black Bird.”
And then he isn’t sure exactly what happens next. But the plane does something that his mind doesn’t expect it to do.
The air around it seems to come apart, like the threads of an unraveling sweater. It becomes loose and soft in a way that his eyes can see, but his mind doesn’t quite get. It’s like a blanket being stretched so far that the fabric becomes thin, and it’s possible to see between the individual threads as they have come so far apart. It still holds together, but only just barely.
And then, the plane launches up with a crack so deafening and loud that the entire war-zone is hammered down by it, like a dragon’s roar. The sky above them ripples and waves. The anti-air explosions are pressed away like a repelled attacker.
The shock wave runs along the beach, with several towers and fortifications just below where the plane had been rising, crumbling together in an instant. Thousands of monsters, thousands of screaming, gnashing, biting things, are crushed and flattened by the pressure of the blast the vanished plane had left behind itself in only an inkling of a second.
The flag in his hands blasts outwardly as he holds it up in the air to show the assault that the tower has been taken, and they can stop blasting it to pieces while he’s standing on the damn thing. They fasten it to the edge of the ramparts.
The banner of the people of the world tree flies proudly through the air. He looks down over the beach, watching hundreds of people move up it as more and more boats land on the unnatural shores of this place they’ve arrived at.
By the thousands, men with black boots tread the soil of the spirit world, having come from a place that is always nearby but never within touch — the material world. The real world.
One by one, signal flares shoot up into the sky from sections all across the beach, as signal members display the completion of their objectives. One by one, formations begin to gather into whole collections. Hundreds of them light up the sky like new stars, hanging far too low to be natural. The gunfire becomes less, and the screaming becomes less. Landing medical teams disperse, as priests and field-medics gather the wounded and do what they can. Again, the beach begins to glow with magical light.
“Copy S.F.A,” says a voice over the radio operator’s backpack. “Status?”
Fritzel looks at his men and then back toward the beach. “We have it,” says the man, his eyes and body covered from head to toe in blood and ash. “We have it all.” He lowers the receiver and turns his head to look the other way, toward the strange world that lies on the other side of their landing. “…Orders?”
“Affirmative, S.F.A,” replies Garuda. “We’re taking the rest of it too.”
The corporal’s eyes scan the horizon behind them, together with the rest of his patchwork squad. Mountains hang upside down in the air, hovering over chasms. Waterfalls the size of nations stream down many of them like a veiling curtain. Trees and crystals grow together, as if naturally interwoven, and meadows rise and fall like the waves of the ocean just behind them. Between the strange landscape, the silhouettes of dragons weave together with the flying shapes of demons and monsters that retreat back to the heartlands.
Humanity and its brothers are finally pushing back against the monsters of the night. They’re no longer sitting by as the invasions hammer down against the world.
Now, they’re the ones invading.
Behind them on the horizon, warships drift out of a great, white needle that juts through the violently disturbed sea. Humans, elves, orcs, dwarves, fairies, and the many kin of other ilk pour through, all wearing the same uniforms, all holding the same rifles, and all wearing the same black boots that press down onto the conquered clay of the spirit-world.
The counter-offensive has begun.