Chương 16: Arc 0 - Chapter 16 - Consequences

As the molten metal rained down, Lieutenant Frost's eyes lit up. She moved through it like water finding gaps between rocks—fluid, precise, every step and lean threading the needle between scorching pellets that should have been impossible to track, let alone dodge.

'She's not reacting to them at all, is she? She's somehow… reading it or something?' Thea thought as she watched in silent awe. Captain Ionheart's grip tightened on his weapon. The surprise assault hadn't slowed the Lieutenant down for a single step, and from the way his posture shifted, he clearly knew how bad that was.

'I need to find an opening,' Thea thought, scanning from the trench.' There has to be something I can—' She stopped.' No. No, there isn't.' She'd already proven that much with her earlier attempt. She kept watching anyway—if some cosmic coincidence handed her an opening she was still absolutely going to take it, of course—but mostly, she just couldn't look away.

The Lieutenant seemingly spotted a gap in the captain's defences at that exact moment and lunged —one powerful, armoured fist driving toward him with frightening speed.

He got the shield up in time, barely, and the impact that followed wasn't so much a sound as a physical event. A visible shockwave kicked up dirt and debris across a wide radius around them, and for a moment the two of them just pushed against each other, neither giving an inch. Then the captain suddenly dropped his bulky gun. It hit the ground with a thunderous crash and sank several centimetres into the soil from its own weight.

His hand went to the side of his armour and came back with a chainsword, already revving, and he brought it down hard toward her incoming fist. The Lieutenant pulled her fist back just far enough to let the whirring teeth miss, then drove it into his shield anyway. She used the rebound deliberately—converting it into a backflip that carried her about ten metres clear of him, landing clean.

"Playing dirty, huh?" She dropped into a low stance, both hands going to her boots and coming back up with two serrated combat knives that looked brutal even by the standards of everything else on this battlefield.

"Not that I expected much else from a freak." The manic grin hadn't left her face once. She went for him again—fast, relentless, knives cutting the air in tight arcs. The Captain met her with a guttural roar and swung the chainsword to intercept, and the sound of metal on metal rang out across no man's land in a continuous, crackling burst of sparks.

'I can't even follow all of this…!' Thea tracked as much as she could from the trench, but the speed of the exchange was beyond anything she had a real reference point for. The two of them were operating at a level that made the rest of the battle feel like it was happening in a different category entirely. She realized at the corner of her attention, that she wasn't the only one who'd stopped. The fighting had died out across a radius of five or six hundred metres in every direction.

Soldiers and Marines on both sides stood at their positions and watched in silence, weapons lowered, the duel pulling every pair of eyes on that stretch of battlefield like gravity. Strike, parry, counter. All accompanied by a torrent of sparks. Another shockwave. The two of them moved through it all like they were the only things on the planet that mattered right now.

The captain tried to push her back with a flurry of chainsword swings, but the Lieutenant danced around every single one, her knives finding their angles like she'd already mapped out the whole sequence before it started.

'She knows she's winning,' Thea thought, watching the Lieutenant's eyes—that predatory gleam hadn't wavered since the fighting had started in earnest, only intensified. The Lieutenant abruptly twisted mid-air at an angle that didn't look physically achievable, slipped clean through the Captain's guard, and left two deep gashes across his jet-black armour in passing. The captain howled—pain and fury together, if Thea had to guess—and stumbled back, his chainsword arm dropping for just a moment.

She didn't give him even a moment. The Lieutenant pressed forward without any pause, driving him back step by step with a relentless chain of attacks. The Captain was visibly struggling to keep up now, and the giant shield—such a major asset earlier—had turned into dead weight, slowing his footwork at the worst possible time. In what looked more like frustration than strategy, he hurled it at her. She sidestepped, grabbed the edge with both hands mid-dodge, spun with the momentum, and flung it straight back.

'Oh—!' The Captain certainly hadn't seen that move coming. The shield hit him square in the midsection with a thunderous crash, caving in a wide dent and spiderwebbing cracks across the surrounding armour. The impact launched him several metres backward—but he somehow found his feet on the way down, sliding to a stop rather than falling flat into the dirt. A brief silence settled over their stretch of no man's land.

"Ha…" The Captain straightened slowly.

"I admit, I underestimated you, Lieutenant Frost. I wasn't expecting to encounter someone like you in this Emperor-forsaken corner of this barren planet. Your abilities are far beyond what I thought possible here. You must be pushing the upper limits of what the System allows for this one, no?"

"Well, you know what they say," the Lieutenant replied, her tone syrup-sweet.

"A proper lady never shares her statistical improvements, System score, or System-sanctioned Abilities… or something like that. Pretty sure someone said that at some point…" The Captain's fists clenched.

"Enough of this!" he roared, and an energy field pulsed out from him in a visible wave—the cracked and dented sections of his armour beginning to glow a deep, ominous colour.

"I'll show you the might of the 37th Legion!" His chainsword screamed back to life and he came at her again, each swing faster and heavier than before. The Lieutenant's movements shifted—still in control, but tighter now, more deliberate, as if she had started focusing on her every action. She was now visibly working for every counter instead of finding them for free.

'Is she okay?' Thea's grip on her rifle tightened without her thinking about it.' She's still moving fine, but—is she getting pushed back?' It was almost impossible to tell from her location. There was something almost mesmerising about watching her even under pressure, every movement precise enough to look graceful even when it was visibly barely in time. The sparks from their weapons flared across no man's land in bright, violent bursts, and not a single soldier on either side had resumed fighting.

The whole front was simply watching their fight in stunned silence.

Suddenly, the Lieutenant's foot came up in a sharp kick that caught the chainsword at just the right angle—sending it spinning out of the Captain's grip and up into the air. She followed it immediately with a tight, rapid sequence of knife strikes, each one finding a weak point in his armour like she'd had the map of them memorised from the start. The Captain staggered back and dropped to his knees, blood seeping from multiple wounds, mechanically-distorted breath heavy and laboured.

He kept his head up though, even from the ground, and his echoing voice carried one last time across the battlefield.

"Though you may have bested me in this fight, don't think you've won the Battlefield, whelp. The Stellar Republic will never yield to the likes of you. Mark my words, Lieutenant—the consequences of your arrogance will doom you and the rest of your Marines." Lieutenant Frost drove both knives into his helmet in one clean, fluid motion, pushing him flat. She let go of the handles as he went down, leaving them embedded in the helmet as his body slumped still.

Then she turned toward the UHF trenches, flashed a peace sign with her right hand, and threw a wink in Thea's direction that was so uncharacteristically cute it almost didn't register. The cheer that went up from thousands of Marines hit like a physical wave. Thea was already cheering with them when it hit her. A pang of dread—sharp, immediate and ice-cold —punched straight through her chest without warning.

'Something is wrong!' Her eyes snapped to the Lieutenant, still standing in the middle of no man's land." Get Dow—!" She tried to yell, then the sound cut out. White. You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author. The explosion came from the Captain's body and swallowed everything. The shockwave didn't travel so much as it simply arrived —flattening everything in its expanding radius in an instant. The ground lurched violently beneath Thea's feet.

The heat reached the trench in less than a second. Anyone who hadn't dropped below the trench wall in time was simply gone, vaporised as cleanly as if they'd stepped in front of a plasma beam. The shockwave that followed picked Thea up from the trench floor she had hastily ducked down towards and threw her. She was in the air for more than three seconds before the ground finally came up and hit her.

Her body didn't stop there, however—it bounced, once, twice, again, each impact punctuated by sounds she felt more than heard: The unmistakably wet crunches of bones snapping again and again. She finally skidded to a stop roughly fifty metres past the twelfth trench line, face-down in the red-brown dirt. She was still, somehow, conscious. She wasn't sure yet if that was a good thing. Every part of her was screaming.

Breathing had become a specific, targeted nightmare—' broken ribs, definitely broken ribs, at least a few' —and each shallow inhale felt like the bones were making the decision personally. Slowly, Thea turned her head. The white light from the blast was fading, leaving behind a distinct spot in her vision where she had looked at it the instant before trying to duck away from it all.

In its place, a massive mushroom cloud climbed above the battlefield, marking what used to be the hill where the Captain and the Lieutenant had fought. The landscape beneath it—the no man's land, the positions on both sides, all of it —had been scraped into a desolate, featureless wasteland. The crater where the Captain had fallen was massive —a raw, gouged wound in the hillside that had taken both trench lines with it out to roughly three hundred metres in every direction.

Beyond that, the destruction thinned but didn't stop, traceable for almost a kilometre out on either side as both forces scrambled to get some kind of grip on what had just happened.

'Where's Lieutenant Frost?' The thought surfaced and wouldn't leave, but her vision was already starting to blur at the edges and she couldn't do much about it from flat on her back in no man's land. The calls and commands of officers trying to restore order filtered through the ringing in her ears like sounds coming from somewhere deep, deep underwater. Somewhere behind her, she could hear medical teams moving out. At some point, they reached her, and things got blurry fast.

She registered hands—careful, quick, yet distinctly practised—and the sharp hiss of a spray-on bandage, and then a needle, and then a warmth that spread from the injection site outward and quietly began turning the screaming in her body down to something more manageable.

'Oh. That's better. That's much, much better…' She felt herself lifted onto a stretcher without being asked, and then they were moving, navigating the wrecked terrain back toward the trench line. She couldn't follow much after that. Her vision kept sliding. The ringing in her ears turned everything into muffled noise—voices, movement, the distant sounds of the battlefield trying to restart itself—none of it landing clearly.

She understood in a vague, disconnected way that she'd been brought somewhere underground, and that hands were still moving over her, pulling away shattered pieces of armour, carefully working the crumpled remains of her helmet away from her head. Then something cold touched her neck, close to her windpipe. A small prick. And the—' Oh'—Ice. It was moving through her chest like it had somewhere specific to be.

She felt it travel through her airways, dissolving whatever was blocking them as it went, and the repair that followed was almost stranger than the damage had been—torn things knitting back together, the bone-shrapnel daggers in her chest pulling out one by one. Her first deep breath came out shaky. The second was easier. By the third, her vision had cleared enough to actually take in where she was. A dugout, reinforced, converted into a field hospital.

The walls were bare red-brown dirt lined with shelves of medical supplies. Stretchers occupied most of the floor space, wounded Marines on most of them, monitoring equipment humming steadily nearby. The medics moved between them all without pause, the tension in the room the quiet kind that came from people who had too much work to do to waste energy on literally anything else.

'I'm alive…?' She stared up at the ceiling for a moment.' Still in one piece. Well, mostly.' Having addressed her most critical injuries, the medical team had seemingly decided to proceed to the next steps of Thea's recovery plan. They carefully applied regenerative nanogel to her broken bones and lacerations, which would accelerate the healing process and minimise scarring.

They also fitted her with an exoskeleton-like brace to support her fractured ribs and spine, providing her with a semblance of stability as her body healed.

One of the medics produced another syringe—golden liquid this time, she noted—and injected it directly into her chest, close to her heart. It hit like a switch being thrown. Every part of her lit up at once, warm, sharp and immediate, and when she moved her arms experimentally they responded like nothing had happened to them at all.

'Ten minutes ago I had broken ribs.' She flexed her fingers.' Ten minutes ago I couldn't even breathe.' The medic who'd led her treatment pulled his mask down enough for a brief smile that didn't quite reach his eyes.

"You're good to go, Private. Get out there and give 'em the Emperor's greeting. Our forces are still reeling from the explosion and we need every able body we can get. Those freaks are likely to recover before we do—they're the ones that planned all this, after all." He paused.

"Your weapon was a broken mess from your tumble—left it out there. You'll need to scavenge something, but with the casualties around here you shouldn't have much trouble. Now get the fuck out of here. We need the damn bed." Thea sat there for a moment after he turned away.

'Ten minutes.' That was all it had taken to put her back together from injuries that, by any standard she'd grown up with, would have meant months of recovery—if recovery was possible at all. She got up slowly, half-expecting her body to remind her it wasn't actually fine. It didn't.

'I have spent more time lying broken somewhere in this simulation than I have actually fighting,' she thought, a bit grimly, as she made her way toward the exit.

'I am getting absolutely sick of being a damn punching bag!' She found a standard-issue laser assault rifle and a small bandolier of energy cells on a fallen marine in the trench—quick scavenge, no time wasted on checking the body for anything more—and took her place at the front of the line next to half a dozen other Marines, twenty minutes after the explosion. The medic had called it exactly right. One look beyond the trench made that abundantly clear.

The Stellar Republic had been ready for the blast in a way the UHF simply hadn't been—their forces were already moving, regrouped and coordinated, pressing forward through no man's land with a speed and efficiency that made the UHF's scattered response look utterly ragged by comparison. The crater where Thea's squad had been positioned was now a wide-open attack vector with nothing to defend it, and the Stellar Republic was already flooding through the gap.

The UHF's return fire was sparse and disorganised, coming from the few positions that had managed to pull themselves back together in time. It very clearly wasn't enough. The eleventh trench line buckled under the pressure and fell, position by position, the defence collapsing faster than it could be reinforced. The tide of the battle rolled forward, pushing directly toward the twelfth line where Thea was now standing.

Between the two trench lines, what was left of the UHF's forward defence was trying desperately to fall back. Some Marines made it—stumbling into the twelfth line's trenches with the hollow, wrung-out look of people who'd barely made the cut. A lot of others didn't, cut down by the pursuing fire before they covered even half the distance. Thea watched it unfold from the trench and felt the weight of what was coming settle over her.

'They planned this from the start.' The Captain's last words drifted back to her—his warning about arrogance, the theatrical speech, all of it.' He wasn't just being dramatic for the sake of things... He was stalling. Buying time for the trap to be in position.' Could the Lieutenant have stopped it? Maybe. With her speed, her strength—maybe she could have moved the body far enough, fast enough, if she'd known what to look for. But nobody had known. How could they have?

There was no way to anticipate a bomb like this built into a human body, rigged to go off on death, powerful enough to erase three hundred metres of fortified trench line in every direction.

'That's not exactly something you plan a counter for.' She couldn't help feeling a hollow kind of dread at the thought of where the Lieutenant was now. She pushed it aside quickly.

'Focus. She can handle herself. You cannot.' The Stellar Republic's willingness to wire their own Captain as a suicide bomb wasn't something Thea had a clean framework for. On a purely logical level she understood it—winning was the point, and they'd extracted a massive tactical advantage from one death. On every other level, however, it completely turned her stomach. The contempt for their own Soldiers' lives implied by that tactic was something she found genuinely difficult to sit with.

'Is that just what war looks like when you can duplicate Soldiers indefinitely? Does a life stop meaning anything when you can just print another one…?' She didn't have an answer, and the eleventh trench line was now fully occupied by Stellar Republic forces, reorganising with the efficient calm of an army that had gotten exactly what it wanted, when it had wanted it.

Thea tightened her grip on the unfamiliar rifle in her hands and kept her eyes on the no man's land between the two lines, readying herself for the upcoming slaughter… Five tense minutes passed. The ranks around Thea slowly filled—Marines from the eleventh line who'd made it back, others still moving stiffly from the field hospital, and fresh bodies coming up through the tunnels from the rez-pods and resupply stations deeper in HQ. All of them slotting into position, weapons up, waiting.

'About two hundred of us,' Thea estimated, scanning the line.' Maybe a bit more.' A lot fewer than the eleventh line had fielded, and everyone in the trench seemed to know it. The tension was a different quality than what she'd felt earlier—tighter, quieter, the kind that came from people who understood exactly what was coming and didn't have the luxury of pretending otherwise. The eleventh line had been the priority hold.

The UHF had poured the majority of their resources into keeping the Stellar Republic there, because the twelfth line didn't have the same natural advantages—no elevation, no locational edge to offset the numbers. Holding it was naturally going to be harder, so they had tried to make sure they didn't get into this situation—which had ultimately failed.

'And now we're still having to do it, but with a crater where our best fortifications used to be.' That thought marked the grim start of the final part of the assault, as the Stellar Republic's lines surged forward. They came over the top of the eleventh trench all at once—a singular, unspeakable mass of bodies pouring into no man's land that stopped looking like individual Soldiers almost immediately and started looking like a tide.

'There are so many of them…!' The UHF line opened up. The noise hit like a wall—screams, explosions, the crack of ballistic fire, the sharp hiss of lasers cutting through flesh. A crimson mist rose across the no man's land as the front ranks of the Stellar Republic charge collapsed under the first volley, then the second.

'It's not enough,' Thea could tell immediately, as the changes in the Stellar Republic's movement from before the volleys and after, simply did not seem to make a difference. The mass just kept coming. Soldiers fell and the gap closed behind them instantly, the advance not even slowing, the sheer weight of numbers absorbing everything the UHF line threw at it and pushing forward regardless.

'It's not going to be enough…'