This is based on the Fin De Siècle / Hearts and Minds Battle for Earth.
I sincerely hope you enjoy, read to the end and understand.
They joined, knowing that they would one day stand among the Earth's most powerful fighting force. They joined, knowing that one day they would grow and make a difference in a way they never thought possible, knowing that their actions would be revered in the annals of history for all time.
Their names would be on the wall, their image being the one to inspire another.
Soldiers, heroes.
Loved by all, defenders of good.
Standing tall. Standing proud.
Today they stood at the precipice of the Harbinger of Death, beneath the black jackboot of the one with the white hair. They kneeled at the base of the Bunker Hill Memorial and in the pupils of their enemy.
Their bodies, one by one, joined together by a cacophony of futile gunfire and pained cries, all sliding along the edge of her broadsword, a trail of life slipping onto its blade as they choked on themselves. One by one.
Soldiers.
The snow was stained like a twisted cherry snow-cone, weapons and bones snapped like twigs and their flag patches ground to dust, flying with the snow through the blistering cold wind.
It wasn't a matter of fighting hard. It was a matter of willpower. A matter of love. But it was never enough.
Their names were nothing, their images forgotten with the swipe of a sword.
The wall had fallen, and history was already written.
Some heroes.
On the first day there was silence.
The guns, streets and people were as cold as the ice surrounding them. Cold, cold to the point of freezing.
It all seemed to freeze, time and space. It was surreal, like dreaming in another body. Earth was cold, and Boston's breath wafed into the air like another useless wave of mist.
The streets were dead, but Boston was alive. This was 2017. January, Earth.
Today.
Men in camouflage trudged down streets, weaving legs between cars and the debris of buildings. Legs wrapped in two layers of clothes, the feeling of constraint around their bodies matched only by that of the warmth they received.
Some wore goggles, others wore bandanas. Face masks were a necessity few had, and the cheeks of those without masks were blood red. The wind bit exposed skin with merciless fangs of frostbite, unburied bodies a testament to nature's innate ferocity.
Brick buildings, tall skyscrapers, all shrouded in white. Each building a danger; the possibility of monsters taking refuge in them made it impossible to safely evacuate people to the harbor.
The patrol was made up of six men. Tired, cold and afraid, they refused to raise their weapons at every sudden sound as they did yesterday. Or the day before yesterday, or the day before that, when there were still seven.
The dogoos would run at them.
If they were to die, they would see it coming. Paranoia led to fatigue, and fatigue led to death in Boston. In this cold, everything led to death.
They were Bravo squad, first platoon. Their patrol route took them from Bunker Hill Community College to the Bunker Hill memorial, the place where their platoon took up shelter. No one knew what type of monsters were in the Financial District, but when Alpha squad checked, they just… disappeared. No radio checkup, no contact report, just lost in the cold.
The fear of being caught by a pack of ravenous fenrirs became an afterthought in the winter. The cold was their enemy, the lack of communication was their enemy, getting lost was their enemy. The city was a tomb, and the local National Guard detachment knew it.
They were the Twenty-First, the Clattering 21st National Guard Battalion, aptly nicknamed because of the winter that they faced today.
For the 21st, an evacuation was going to be impossible without clear skies and a solid link of communication with somewhere safer.
Somewhere… safer...
If it was bad here, in the United States, where would be safer? What place could possibly be better off than here?
That question plagued the mind of Staff Sergeant Darron Kilman, the man with enough stripes to be responsible for the deaths of his friends. With a hand shielding his exposed eyes, he stepped over a backpack covered in snow. The rest of his men, all five of them, marched in his footsteps, sidestepping around an abandoned truck and ducking under a fallen telephone pole.
The lights on a traffic light flickered as they passed under it, a relic of the past they all longed for so, so much.
Walking was short and tiring, but the clothes and gear were necessities. The group paused, filing in behind their leader.
Darron stood in the center of a four-way intersection. He looked to his left and saw the Boston common, all the leafless trees painted white from a recent snowfall. Darron looked to his right and saw dozens of frozen cars piled up behind a truck collision. Must've been the ice, he thought.
Crunching of snow. Footsteps.
"Kilman," One of his men, the autorifleman, stood behind him. With concern in his voice, easily discernible over the whistling wind, he spoke. "You good?"
"Yeah." Darron Kilman was slow to respond, but nodded after a moment. "Yeah, I'm good."
Behind his mask, the autorifleman sighed. The soldier glanced off to his right, then back towards the park. "You came here often?"
Sergeant Kilman smirked, thinking to himself. "I'd try to find time, take my kids out to go ice skating. Never got around to doing it more than once, though."
"No regrets, not now."
The squad leader solemnly nodded, squeezing his eyes shut. The air felt like nothing, the pain was in his chest.
"You said you taught history, right?" The autorifleman asked, and Darron nodded again. "Hmm… what will you say to your students when this all blows over? I mean, there's got to be a light at the end of this tunnel. I know I'll be telling my kids about who awesome I was. You saw how I gunned down those dogoos yesterday, right?"
The autorifleman chuckled to himself, glancing at his M249 light machine gun. Sergeant Kilman sighed.
"I saw. And, well," Darron thought of what to say, thinking of his class. He wondered how many would be alive to come to school by next year. "I'd probably tell them the truth. And keep in mind," Kilman turned to face his friend. "We're all out here. My class is out here. Your kids, maybe you'll get to tell them about this. I just want to think about tomorrow, keep my mind here. In reality."
"Reality, huh." The autorifleman sighed, gazing at the windows of forgotten houses. "Blue gumdrops don't fit the memo, but I'll go with it. It's real."
Darron's soldier finished with a sense of finality, thinking back to the day before yesterday. Private Evans, his name was. Evans was killed. Jumped when no one was looking, jumped when they thought the apartment was clear. Reality, it seemed, had a cruel way of making itself clear.
"Kids." The grenadier interjected, stepping in front of Darron. "We still got a half hour of walking to do. If your conversation gets another one of us killed, it's not on me." With a frown growing on his face, he snapped his body downrange. "It's not on me."
Not on me.
The words echoed through Staff Sergeant Darron Kilman's head as he lowered his arms to his side. Falling back into a walking rhythm, Darron's mind kept trailing back to Evans.
Everyone was going to die eventually, he thought.
The men gathered at the base of the Bunker Hill Memorial. The Hill itself was bald, surrounded by houses. It was a refuge of space in the center of town, a mound that lifted your head above the rooftops.
The white obelisk, stretching high over their heads, commemorated the battle of Bunker Hill.
It was a part of the Revolutionary War, the War of Independence, the American Revolution. Wars went by many names, and Darron hoped that he'd teach all of them to his own kids someday.
Men sat with their arms crossed, deep in their foxholes. It almost looked like a graveyard, all the holes in the ground. Over a dozen, maybe more, maybe less. When Alpha disappeared, the snow piled in the holes and made them sinkholes, pits that made pissing during the night a pain.
Staff Sergeant Darron Kilman sat on a small crate of ammunition, protocol be damned. It was impossible to dig into the frozen ground, and digging an ammo pit was the last thing on their minds.
If they were going to hold the vantage point, they'd do it their own way. Especially when all the officers were either dead or overburdened.
The man had tried to start writing an after action report, but neither the pen nor his mind were in working order. The back of the paper was pressed against the crate, its edges threatening to flutter away in the wind.
Evans didn't feel gone, despite being gone for so long. Darron didn't even see his body.
Maybe he just didn't want to come to terms with his loss.
Maybe he just went for a piss and fell into a snow-filled foxhole. That felt a lot more reasonable than passing away. The rest of the squad was probably pulling him out now, maybe he wouldn't have to write the rest of this.
Maybe he could've acted faster, maybe he could've sent another man with him. Maybe he should've assumed the house was inhabited. Maybe he should've double checked the perimeter, given the team more time to get set for contact.
Evans would've lived.
And the paper snapped in his grasp, taken by the cold. The paper took off, flying over his men in the holes and past the Bunker Hill Memorial. It was gone, a hunk of white lost in an ocean of white.
His hands were empty as the pen slipped from his grasp.
"Fuck."
The middle of the night was deathly dark. Not a single light flickered in a window, not a single light danced in the streets.
Ever so faintly the outline of buildings shimmered on the edge of the hill, standing tall like titans. They taunted Bravo, teasing them like a monster under the bed. The unknown was deadly, lurking, obscured by the darkness like fog.
"Fuck. Fuck. Fuck."
The Anti-Tank soldier, on guard from his foxhole, grimaced at specks of light flashing and crashing off in the distance. The sound came later, reverberating off houses and shaking snow from tree branches.
"What…" The grenadier groaned, stirring from within the same hole.
His hands were cold. His face was stiff. His sweat froze in his hair.
"The whole damn 21st is awake. They're kicking something in the city." The soldier with the rocket launcher muttered, terror in his eyes.
"Go the fuck to sleep." The man curled in a ball shifted, loosening snow from the edge of the hole. "They'll deal with it. Probably flying whales. Nothing to be alarmed of."
"Sure…" The guard trembled. There was no way to know for sure. There was no way to know if they were winning or not; the radios were dead. His pupils reflected the fire, the tracers and the tears.
"Sleep."
The morning detonated with an earthquake pounding the houses the trees the monolith, the men shook they stirred they screamed.
Fire, snow, white, shells, blue, shouts, clash, bang, grinding and churning and grinding and collapsing, power came down faster than light.
The world imploded as artillery reacted with snow, limbs of the crying, limbs of the fathers, weapons of the heroes, blood on the rafters and then some.
The monument crackled and shook, quivered and quaked. Thunder, roar of gunfire, shouts of searing flames.
Darron's face melted as he pushed his nose into the snow, dirt slamming into his backside.
His foxhole was a target, the monument was an anthill, someone had a flamethrower.
And it stopped.
No whistling, no pounding, no heart-beating, no nothing.
The Staff Sergeant opened his eyes to the desperate cries of mortally wounded friends. Crying like children.
He himself to his feet, tripped, lifted himself up again, feeling the blood rush from his head, and collapsed against the side of his hole.
He blinked, frozen water gluing his eyes together.
He saw a hand in front of him, lodged in the snow.
Darron quivered as he stretched an arm over, nearly slipping once more. His heart skipped a beat when he pulled a palm out of the snow.
He woke to a nightmare, and when he saw his friends he saw bodies, snow and dirt and mud and broken dreams sprinkled on top like cherries on a twisted milkshake.
He gasped, slipping into his hole.
Darron didn't want to get up. His eyes were open, he saw nothing. His ears were open, and he heard the helpless and the maimed.
His rifle was stuck in the snow, barrel stuffed into the side of the hill.
With both hands the Sergeant reached to pull it, and it came out with a pop, half the foxhole collapsing onto his legs.
Darron dragged his legs out of the snow, thinking of Evans.
"C-contact!"
Someone conscious enough to hold a weapon screamed at the top of their lungs, scratchy and hoarse.
The sound of an M240 spitting and kicking deafened the History Teacher, whose head spun round and round.
"I see 'em! Edge of the hill, coming up between the tall oak and the cafe!"
"Fucker's setting up on the second floor of the red building, see him!?"
The machine gun's familiar pounding came to a halt, and voices could be heard in the distance. Who was the enemy? Not monsters, but humans?
"No, negative! I- I'm loading the gun, dude, gimme that!"
Darron desperately shook his head, gripping his weapon with both hands. He leaned against the edge of his foxhole, feeling rounds whizz past his ears and collide with the monument.
Snow puffed up like a smokescreen as rounds splattered against the ground around him. He raised his weapon, propping it against the edge of his hole.
He lined up the sights, searching for someone to throw his hatred against. Who was he fighting? Who attacked him and his friends? Who wanted him to die?
"I'm set, fucking die!"
The buzzing and pounding of steady machine gun fire erupted once more, music to Darron's ears.
The squad leader shook as he braced his knees. Darron grappled a grenade, fumbling with it as he hastily peeked over the edge of his hole.
Almost a dozen people in black, all black, shot at him. He didn't get a good look at where they were, only that they wanted him dead.
"Hey, on the right! Like four of 'em, they're rushing at us with swords! Fuckin- Fucking swords!"
Darron peeked over the edge of the hold, his gloved hands caked in sweat. He instantly spotted the assailants, all four of them trudging through the snow at speeds he never thought were possible. They were so fast… almost inhumanly so.
"I can't get a shot-" The autorifleman stammered, gritting his teeth as he lifted his finger off the trigger. "Orientation fucked. I'd have to relocate…"
Screw it… Darron cursed internally, pulling the pin on the grenade, the cold orb feeling heavy in his hands.
"Frag out!"
Heaving the grenade around, he lobbed it into the snow with a shout.
Seconds passed, and Darron pulled himself back into his foxhole. He grasped for his weapon, bringing it close to his chest.
The grenade exploded, nearly deafening the man. He winced, shielding his eyes from a spray of blood. The sick, musky red ooze splattered across everything, the snow, his weapon, his uniform, his gloves, his friends, the boxes and the monument.
Darron heard gurgling, the wretched sound coming from over the hole. Immediately, acting on instinct, the soldier threw his rifle over the edge, feeling the force of the stock press against his shoulder.
Without thinking, he saw the eyes of a black-clad woman and lined up the sights. With his eyes open wide, he let the barrel meet the fighter's forehead.
"F- for Lady Bla-"
The gun fired, and the recoil bucked at his shoulder. Tensing up his arms and throwing his face into a terrible scowl of anger, Darron fired again. And again. And again and again and again and again.
His weapon clicked, empty.
Shaking, he opened his eyes for real. He saw for real, he saw the person he killed and he ducked down, thinking of what to do next.
Sergeant Darron Kilman pulled out another magazine from his chest rig, letting his current one fall to the snow. He shoved the metal into its slot, hearing a click. Feeling his gun jolt forwards with another click, he knew the loading cycle was finished.
He breathed.
Fog hugged his face, fog faded into the air. His arms were alert, his mind fully immersed in combat.
Now he had to organize the living and keep them that way. It was his job, it was what the patch on his shoulder implored him to do. So it was what he was going to do.
Keep his friends alive. Never another Evans. For the kids back home, for the city and the people who needed his love. He'd do his job, he'd do his job, he'd do his job.
At least, that's what he told himself.
"Lady Black Heart, welcome to Boston."
Commander Lee-Fi, a General of Lastation, stood at ease beside a jet-black tank. Black Heart stepped forwards, hands on her hips.
The two stood on a highway raised above the ground, giving them a good view of a large portion of the river. Further down the highway was a massive bridge that stretched across the icy Charles River, and even further was the center of Boston.
The city looked beautiful in this lightening, especially with the snowfall in such a serene pattern.
"I take it you have everything under control?" The Goddess asked, analyzing her strange surroundings. Although this wasn't her first time touching down on Earth, this was her first time in such a large city.
"Of course." The Martial Arts Master bowed, her two long braids swinging down to her sides as she stood back up. "In fact, it could be said that things are moving too quickly, but we still hold the initiative."
"Hmph." Noire crossed her arms, her long white hair caught by the wind. "Please elaborate. I need to know everything important."
"Well…" Lee-Fi started, taking a deep breath. The tank behind her croaked to life, engine humming and double-barrels warming up. "The local National Guard detachment is scattered, and we have their center in a complete rout. They've fallen back to the other end of this river, the Charles River, and all but one of the bridges have been blown. Armored sections from the 4th Airborne are crossing it as we speak."
Black Heart nodded in satisfaction. Things were going well, minus those setbacks. "Anything else I should know about?"
The General smirked. "These men are no match for us. Their weapons are pitiful, communication nonexistent, and their numbers even worse. They fight like cowards, refusing a straight fight and instead fighting from a distance or from the shadows. No match for us, rest assured." Lee-Fi was a bit disheartened to know how sad the defenders of this new world really were. She was hoping for some sort of struggle, maybe even a worthy opponent.
As it turns out, they were nothing in comparison to even the lowest-leveled Gamindustrian. Depressing, really.
"Good. Maybe we'll be able to wrap up this battle within the next day or two. Maybe even less, if I use more than a fraction of Lastation's power." Black Heart affirmed with glee. "Now-"
An explosion, far off in the distance, nearly threw Noire off her feet. Raising an eyebrow in curiosity, she glanced in its direction. The explosion appears to have come from the base of an obelisk in the distance, maybe a monument of some sort.
"What was that?" The CPU asked, feeling herself get impatient.
"Just a firefight, my Lady. Elements of the 4th are staying back to deal with the stragglers, we came across what appears to be a small staging point for the enemy. They should be dealt with within the hour."
With a frown, Noire huffed. "That's too long. We need all our forces to concentrate on one area, not be spread out like this." The Goddess glanced back at the Commander. "I will return in five minutes. Time me."
"Wait, Lady Black Hear-"
With a triumphant crash, Lee-Fi was cut off with the force of a leaping Goddess, and the CPU of Lastation already nothing but a speck of black in the sky.
The Lastation native sighed, closing her eyes.
She wasn't worrying about her CPU, no, she was more concerned about how much of a mess she was going to leave in her wake.
With that, Lee-Fi turned back towards the city. She breathed in the air of Earth, exhaling it as her own.
She felt good.
This was a good day, after all.
After circling above for a moment, Noire dived down towards the hill, gripping her sword out in front of her eyes.
The distance was closed in an instant, her body slamming into the snow with an inhuman force strength. Snow blasted into the sky, masking her entire form as the Bunker Hill Memorial shook, cracks forming along its length.
Feeling her body surge with power, the Goddess darted out from the cloud of snow. With a catastrophic swing, her sword tore apart a man. Ignoring the meager strain on her arm muscles, she acquired a new target and swung again, this time cutting through the thickly packed snow with ease.
A pinkish haze of snow and human love scattered through the air, giving a new ambiance to the setting. Noire felt something tickle her back, and saw a man with a machine gun firing at her.
He was screaming as she near-teleported before him, her blade tearing through his mangled chest as she raised his body before the sun. His weapon slipped to the snow, his hands, through pained cries, bleeding with riveting, mind numbing pain as they tried to hold his body from slipping down further.
The Goddess leveled her weapon and promptly kicked him off, the soldier's chest splitting from the torso while Noire fiendishly acquired a new target.
The thrill of combat, akin to fighting fodder like dogoos, encompassed her body from her head to the tips of her toes. The Harbinger of Death saw the fear in her enemies eyes, slashing and cutting and swinging and killing, but her enemies did not explode in a spray of pixels and light.
The last man was dead, and the Goddess of Lastation, revered by all, lie suspended in mid air above the foxholes.
She was victorious, again.
She breathed, smiling at her companions down the length of the hill. Some cheered her name, others merely stood in awe at their own excellence.
Noire looked down and felt nothing as she slain lay against the toppled morass of the Bunker Hill Memorial. It must have collapsed during the chaos without the CPU even being aware of it.
Bricks, stones, gravel, all sorts of building materials lie in a line down the side of the hill.
Snow had begun to settle once more, the red mist sprinkling across the white and staining both her hair and the snow. It wasn't an uncommon sight, but conflict between Gamindustrians were few and far in between. It was a whole new experience to see the cacophony of her handiwork, praised by both her followers and her peers, the other CPUs.
The Goddess of Lastation bore red hair once she ran a hand through it, and when she looked down at her palms she saw the color of love in an entirely new light.
This was true power. This was something extraordinary, a whole new thrill. Victory, but with a color. Gone was the pixels and the light, now there was a color. A color.
Red.
Associated with victory, her specialty.
This was a victory. One piece of the Battle of Boston. One fraction of what was about to commence.
If this was the Invasion of Earth, if this was the liberation of a world and the beginning of a whole new era, this was not something she was going to oppose. Especially not with such a new palette of colors, backgrounds and battles to dominate. As the Goddess of Lastation, and by extension the Goddess of Victory, she would fight until the ultimate victory.
With or without Neptune and the others, if it came down to that.
Right?
...Right?