Chapter 136 – Straight Shot

  “In major science news, the International Space Exploration Coordination Group has located one of the other planets in our realm. This discovery is celebrated by a certain demographic as the primary inhabitants of that world are several species of beast-kin, including cat-girls. While the space organizations inform us that the planet is over a dozen lightyears away, the enthusiasts remain optimistic of interplanetary travel outside of the portal phenomena.” – News broadcast from the BBC.

  It turned out the feeder trench that went toward the rear lines of the frogmen side of the dual-rift was a pretty busy roadway. A roadway that the agents were now forced to deal with after being spotted almost immediately.

  “MOVING!” Jade shouted as she bounded past Kristi and into the next bunker.

  The dragoness pinned her trigger to the rear, suppressing the far end of the trench while Jade and Gus rushed into the subterranean room they had just cleared with well-aimed grenades. As soon as the two werewolves made it, Kurt and Sierra popped a couple 40mm grenades into the far side of the trench, trying to clear out the intersection that was likely swarming with the gangly monsters.

  BOOM! Another round of whatever artillery was nearby was fired out over their heads. Kurt briefly wondered if they were being purposefully ignored or if they were within the minimum range of the artillery. He was hoping that it was the range issue because they were really gaining some unwanted attention.

  Kristi let off on her trigger after Jade and Gus threw a couple frags into the next bunker across the trench from them. She had to pick back up a moment later when a dozen of the gangly monsters rushed out and fired pot shots at them. They were quickly dispatched by the rest of Kurt’s people after they stepped out in the open.

  When Jade and Gus began suppressing the far end of the trench again, Kurt and the rest rushed up to take the next bunker that had just been vacated. They had been working their way down this trench line in this fashion for the past two hours.

  The feeder trench turned out to be a long and slightly curving earthwork with a series of underground bunkers along the length. Every twenty yards there was another opening to a bunker or whatever they were supposed to be. Every bunker was filled with eight to twelve of the lanky frogmen.

  It had been a grueling slog, and everyone was getting tired of repeating the same process over and over as they got closer to whatever cannon was being fired. It was only when the far end of the trench terminated in a T-junction that they felt like any progress was being made. Now they were within a hundred yards of that intersection but facing heavy resistance.

  Kurt had taken a round to the thigh which had snapped his femur like a twig and blew out a tennis ball size chunk from the back side of his leg. It had taken his regeneration a full minute to seal it back up to where he could use the leg again. Connor had been even less fortunate, getting a face full of spall from multiple impacts to his armor. He looked like someone had taken a blowtorch to his chin and neck from how blackened with lead it had become after mixing with his blood and the dust.

  Those weren’t the only injuries, however. Almost everyone had taken a hit at one point or another, the trench being far too constricting to maneuver much. Kristi had lost a finger half an hour prior and was still in the process of growing it back. Val had somehow managed to get a leg full of lead spall but didn’t take the bullet since it glanced off of Jade’s armor first. Kristi’s barriers could only cover so much of the trench if they expected to be able to fire themselves.

  Kurt had been worried when he heard her cry out. He remembered the time she had taken a shot to the hip and was put out of action for the day because of her slower healing. Thankfully, it seemed her brush with a goddess and her own divine accumulations had come with a little better natural regeneration.

  “FRAG OUT!” Kurt called as he and Val tossed their grenades into the next bunker. This time nobody came rushing out but the twin blasts caused a spray of blood and body parts to paint the trench wall across from it. The frog men were many things, but durable was not one of them.

  Kristi began suppressing the far end of the trench again as Sierra and De’Nath sprinted to the opening. Kurt saw a couple flashes of light in the darkened interior before they both popped out of the opening, Sierra missing a part of her cheek and ear.

  “Last push!” Jade yelled from her bunker opening. “Frags forward or launchers?”

  “Both!” Kurt yelled back. He pulled out his Milkor again and topped it off, winding the cylinder and replacing two spent grenades. He waited until he got eyes on everyone and saw they were ready before he launched all six rounds into the far wall of the intersection.

  That intersection should have taken some serious abuse, but they had found it to be surprisingly resilient. In fact, all the walls seemed to be nearly impervious. He blamed it on more rift-fuckery but was thankful that all their explosives seemed to be highly effective since they couldn’t cause craters.

  He heard the thump-thump-thump of Val’s launcher and a one from Connor. They all staggered their shots naturally and utterly suppressed the intersection while the rest of the team put frag grenades into the two wings of the trench by lobbing them over the top. A couple exploded above the trench but there were still three on each side that went off within the walls.

  Kurt dropped his Milkor back into his ring and rushed the intersection with Kristi right behind him. He saw a transparent barrier shimmer a couple feet ahead of him as they ran, not that they took any incoming fire. Still, they crossed the remaining distance in a flash and barely stopped before over-running the edge of their trench and into the intersection.

  Kurt went right and Kristi went left, each covering a gore filled passage and firing a few shots at the writhing bodies strewn along the floor. Val popped up just behind him a moment later, crouching and extending out to add her gun to the trench line.

  “Bunker. Short Hall!” Kristi yelled and was immediately supported by Sierra as she popped up with an already prepped frag and pitched it into the open doorway of the bunker. It exploded a moment later to the chorus of hissing screams.

  Gus and Jade rushed the room and Kurt heard the muffled thump of their suppressed rifles before they came back out and joined the rest of the team in the intersection. “Check.” Jade called out and soon after the replies came rolling back.

  Staying posted on the now empty trench, Kurt listened to each person report on ammo and injuries.

  “Ten mags. Twelve forties, five frags. Low on energy here. I think I might have lost half my leg at one point.” Connor said.

  Sierra muttered something about her face before responding. “Eleven mags. Three Frags.”

  “Five magazines. No frags.”

  Jade’s squad ran through their supplies and cross loaded their remaining ammunition. Kurt tossed out a bunch of emergency rations that were loaded with a staggering amount of calories. Everyone quickly scarfed them down before relieving Kurt’s team from where they held security.

  Kurt did a quick check of his ring and the ready pouches on his equipment. “I got twenty six magazines for this rifle, fourteen frags, three forties left.” He took a bite of his own emergency ration bar and looked to Val.

  “Eighteen mags, five grenades and six more rounds of forty.” Val replied while sipping at a bottle of water.

  Kristi went next and said the unthinkable. “I-I’m out of ammo…” she detached the ammo box from her machinegun and stared in bewilderment.

  They stared at her, absolutely dumbfounded at that statement. Finally, Kurt was able to ask for details. “Wait, like completely black on ammo?”

  Shaking her belt box, Kristi held it out to him. “I have 63 rounds left.” Her eyes went distant for a moment as her lips formed a frown. “Well, not quite.”

  “What do you mean not quite? You said that you used all… what did you have in there? 5000 rounds?” Val was looking skeptical.

  “6000.” Kristi answered before putting the magical belt box back on her gun and getting it ready to fire. “But we have this one too. It’s just we haven’t used this one for obvious reasons.”

  From her ring, Kristi produced the larger version of her favorite machinegun. Where she had been using a 5.56 version of the LAMG, she was now holding the second one that Kurt had ordered from Renee, the 7.62.

  “Oh.” Kurt muttered and winced.

  “Yeah.”

  “And that’s all you got left?” Val asked.

  “Mhm. Unless you think the 12 gauge is better.” Kristi pressed her thumb to the rune on the much larger ammo box. “I have another 4000 rounds in this one. It has a slower rate of fire though so it should last longer.”

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  Kurt didn’t mind the extra penetration from the bigger round, he didn’t even care about the extra cost since he was reimbursed by the Order. What he did mind was that he hadn’t developed a silencer for that gun yet.

  “This is gonna be loud.” He sighed, looking at the narrow trench they stood in. “Well, fuck it. Nothing to do but do it.” They got back on their feet and took their positions, ready once again to push down the trench line.

  *****

  “What the actual fuck is that thing?” Kurt wondered aloud as he looked into the hundred-yard-wide pit before them. He had followed the pull from one of the rift cores to this location and was not exactly shocked at what he saw, but it was more than he expected.

  “Some kind of big-ass mortar.” Jade offered from his left as she peered over his shoulder.

  BOOM. The gun fired, recoiling along an inverted ramp as a plume of flame and smoke erupted from three-foot-wide bore. As soon as it fired, it reset into its original position mostly through gravity. It was then swarmed by dozens of the lanky monsters they had been fighting for hours.

  A scaffold was pushed into position just in front of the barrel and a crane began moving on a gantry, sliding along a rail system to grab a massive, blunt nosed shell and swing it into place. While the crane was getting a shell, a team of monsters dragged a sled along the scaffolding with what looked like several comically large wheels of cheese but were actually the powder charge. They pushed the powder bags into the bore, one by one, stacking three atop each other.

  The powder handlers quickly moved out of the way while the crane began lowering the projectile and another crew guided the base past the muzzle. Once it was partway in, the entire barrel tipped mostly straight up so the projectile was dangling above it. In unison, two of the creatures yanked on opposing lanyards and the claw like pincers that was holding the projectile popped loose, dropping it down the barrel.

  Everything was retracted then, moving out of the way as the entire mortar was rotated on a turnstile while a crew looked through some sort of sight. A monster ran over to the base of the cannon and hooked up a lanyard, leaving it to trail as he took one end back behind a wall. There was some sort of signal that went through the gathered monsters, making them all duck and Kurt saw the lanyard suddenly go taught.

  BOOM. Then the process started over again.

  “I count forty of them working the pit.” Kurt said after sliding back along the trench to where the others were waiting.

  “And another thirty on the parapet along the trench lines around it.” Val added as she suddenly materialized within the group. “I didn’t get a good look or a full count, but it also seemed they are fighting the bugs since most were shooting over the top.”

  Kurt briefly wondered if they would pull back to defend the artillery but couldn’t quite determine what they would do since rift monsters didn’t always act normal. The underground elves being a prime example.

  “Ok, let’s set up as best we can along this line and that side trench Val explored. I say we pop one of those powder bags with a forty to kick things off and then see how it goes from there.” He outlined a rough plan. “I can’t imagine that they will do anything besides try to attack us by a swarm tactic like we have always seen.”

  “At least they can be suppressed.” Kristi said and hefted her machinegun.

  Jade shrugged. “If they weren’t, then they would be easy to take out as they run into your bullets.”

  Kristi thought about that for a second before nodding. “Good point. But regardless. If we can get them in a choke point, then we can hit them with frags.”

  “We only have six left in total.” Kurt reminded her. “And you are down to what, two thousand rounds?”

  “Oh, only two thousand rounds.” Connor muttered while moving his magazines around on his belt and brushing some sand off his pistol. “Oh, what ever would we do with two gun teams worth of ammo.”

  De’Nath snorted. “I wish I had an ammo box like that, then I would go back to a belt fed.”

  “I can make that happen.” Kurt told him. “But first we need to deal with this bullshit.”

  They talked through their hasty plan, making a few decisions and getting their people set as best they could before things kicked off. They would have a few people in the next feeder trench, using it as cover and to secure it in case the other monsters came their way. Slightly behind that was another bunker where a few more would be posted up, using its doorway as cover. Kristi would be holding down the fort from behind a bend in the trench line where she could suppress the entire length of the trench and would be covered up by one of Val’s illusions and her own barriers.

  Connor ended up drawing the short straw and would be the one to kick things off. He had a single shot launcher and would be targeting one of the powder bags after the next shot. After setting it off, he was to run like a mad man, drawing the enemy toward him as he retreated toward the others. It went mostly to plan… at least the first part.

  When Connor fired the launcher, he just flattened himself out, getting low behind the solid half wall of a balcony that ran around the mortar pit. His round flew true, striking one of the powder bags on its side and detonating it in a spectacular fashion.

  That bag then set off the two next to it… and apparently the ones stacked around the base of the pit. Those ones went up in a pseudo airburst, shaking the ground and in turn setting off the actual projectiles sitting nearby which hadn’t had fuses put in them.

  Poor Connor could do little in the way of standing up and was forced to scramble on his belly back toward the rest of the squad. The ground shook and gouts of flame, shrapnel and concussive pressure washed down the trench, picking him up bodily and flinging him the fifty yards past the bunker and another twenty where he slid to a stop after Kristi reached out and grabbed him before he hit the wall.

  “Did he live?” Kurt asked Kristi and Val via the implant because his ears drums were regenerating from the pressure wave rupturing them. He had been watching the first part of the mayhem from the feeder trench and was still hit by blast pressure even after ducking behind cover.

  Val responded a moment later. “Yeah, but he probably wishes he didn’t.”

  Kurt risked a look back down the trench and saw that Kristi was tending to the young werewolf and stuffing a ration bar in his mouth while her barrier shimmered over them, occasionally flaring from falling debris. He waved to Jade and signaled for her to push to the edge of the pit that was sporting a brand new mushroom cloud.

  Halfway to the edge of the mortar pit, his ears regenerated with a pop followed by a ringing then blessed clearness. He had to work his jaw then plugged his nose before blowing to release the sudden pressure build up. When he reached the edge, he saw that there wasn’t much left beside the barrel and baseplate of the giant mortar. Everything else had been utterly destroyed and there wasn’t any sign of life, or almost none.

  He could hear noises echoing and looked around for a source but found none. “Jade, we are gonna peek over the top. See if you can eyeball that shooting.” He backtracked over to the trench and stepped up on the firing step, putting just enough of his head up for his eyes to clear the parapet while Jade mirrored him on the other side.

  The blowing sand obscured much of the barren landscape, but not to the thermal overlay enchanted on his glasses. The scene before him was chaotic to say the least. Some of the debris from the mortar pit was now out on the flat plains of no-mans land, smoldering and in some cases completely ablaze.

  Mixed in with the thermal signature of the fires were the tall forms of the trench faring rift monsters. All of them were fighting like mad men, stabbing scorpions and each other alike with bayonet and using rifles like clubs when those broke. Still, they were being encircled by scorpions, some of which looked much bigger than the first ones he had seen.

  “Fuck. Core broke.” Kurt said as he ducked back down. “We need to move now. Kristi!”

  “What?” She called back, having just set a very scorched and still steaming Connor on the firing step and handing him a small vial with a blue liquid inside.

  “Core broke and the bugs are taking over.” Kurt said and recognized the bottle as a ‘mana potion’ as Sam had described it. “We need to start culling them back and pushing for their core.” He could feel the other core now, no longer in balance with the one that had been somewhere in the mortar pit. Its power was growing and he felt a vacuum like pull as ambient mana began to move in counter point to the constant winds.

  “Wellllll shiiiiiitt.” She swore before looking down at Connor, who was now regrowing his hair. “Drink up, we got shit to do.”

  “Fucking easy for you to say, you weren’t just a human bowling ball on an empty lane.” He grumbled before knocking back the rest of the vial and making a face.

  “What, taste bad?” Kurt asked.

  “Fucking disgusting. It tastes like apple juice.”

  “What’s wrong with apple juice?”

  Connor stood up and summoned his rifle from his storage ring. “Look, I just don’t like it. It has nothing to do with that’s the only thing I was allowed to drink in the mornings before school for eighteen years either.”

  A minute later they were all scrambling over the edge of the parapet, setting foot on the wind whipped landscape for the first time since entering the rift. They immediately formed a skirmish line and ran up to the front, keeping tight to make sure they didn’t have any gaps that the now shockingly large scorpions could exploit. The creatures were blessedly slow to maneuver, however, turning about slowly and moving at no more than a walking pace.

  BRRRRRRRRRRT. A gout of flame lit the now purple half-light as Kristi hip fired her machinegun, using the sling and bipod to keep it level. Kurt could see her IR laser designator flickering slightly, dancing under the recoil of the 7.62 NATO round.

  Kurt fired into the writing mass of chitin with his own rifle, using short bursts and targeting the reflective eyes of the scorpions. For every one that he put down, another immediately took its place as the monsters shifted to focus on them.

  The werewolf squad put on a good showing, getting on line and taking a knee to place shots at the face level of the monsters. It was a good strategy that even made misses lethal. But they encountered the same problem that the humanoid monsters had in the end, numbers.

  Thankfully, the tide wasn’t endless and they could see the back line of the monsters. Oddly, they seemed to stay on the surface, not going in the trenches and instead navigating around them. Still, despite seeing the end, the path to get there was a long one.

  They ended up having to give ground after creating a wall of dead bugs that was covering the rest. Slowly they backed up, shuffling a few steps for every empty magazine they let fall to the ground.

  “BLACK!” Jade cried, then stowed her rifle and drew her pistol.

  “HEADS UP.” Kristi yelled, and quickly ran over to the team leader, dropping her TP9 and a dozen magazines in her hands before rocketing back to her spot in the line.

  Unfortunately, that wasn’t the last time someone ran dry on ammunition. Frags were thrown early, using the clustered enemy to cause massive amounts of damage. The 40s went next, hitting the back lines, trying to disrupt anything they could.

  Kristi ran completely dry on her machinegun, she switched to her shotgun, quickly expending her magazines to little effect despite every shot putting down a bug. After her bolt locked open on her last mag, she sighed explosively, her nostrils flaring as she drew her knife. “I need some shaft.”

  Kurt had been watching out of the corner of his eye as he saw a poleaxe appear in Kristi’s hand and the edge began to shimmer. He had already run dry on his 5.56 rifle and the 300 blackout, just his ten millimeter left… And the slide locked back two rounds later.

  He stowed the pistol and drew his own knife. “That’s not a knife.”

  He looked down the line and saw that many of the werewolves had already drawn their weapons, some of which were in the shape of swords while others held a longer pole arm. He shared a look with Jade as she set the butt of her billhook on the ground.

  “Progenitor Squad!” She yelled over the chittering and clicking of the scorpions. Kurt wasn’t sure where she got that name but wasn’t about to say anything about it. The rest of her squad turned and looked at her, the last one, Gus finally stowing his rifle and pulling out his own boar spear.

  Jade looked at Kurt and he nodded after seeing resolute expressions from Val and Kristi. She turned back to her troops a moment later. “We stand.” She said and took a half step forward, sinking into the stance she had learned from the Templar tutors. Everyone else followed her example as the first of the scorpions came withing range.