Post 10: Situation Normal
[Spoiler= "Winning Vote"]
[x]Part One: Joining the Expedition.
-[x] Tanya will:
-[x] Join the campaign and…
-[x] Operate as an independent mage attached to army HQ (+2 favor with cousin)
-[x] Squad 1 (Aisha + 3 Rank 11s) will:
-[x] Join the campaign and…
-[x] Be under Tanya's direct command.
-[x] Squad 2 (Sasha + 3 Rank 11s) will:
-[x] Join the campaign and…
-[x] Be under Tanya's direct command.
-[x] Squad 3 (Alus + 3 Rank 10s) will:
-[x] Join the campaign and…
-[x] Be under Tanya's direct command.
-[x] Reserves (2 Rank 9s) will:
-[x] Join the campaign and…
-[x] Be under Tanya's direct command.
[x] Part Two: What's through the Gate?
-[x] Canon: Modern Japan. (Normal)
[/Spoiler]
4/1/687 - 5/10/687 of the Imperial Calendar (Age 15 years).
Meeting Marius was an unexpected pleasure. You were all prepared for him to be a spoiled brat, coddled and soft. Instead you were met with an impressive young man who had obviously trained hard to improve both his body and mind. Witty, intelligent, hardworking, willing to listen to his more experienced subordinates; he reminded you of the better officers from your past life.
He was the living example of how nobility can work, how the lifelong expenditure of resources for top level training and inculcation of command ability can craft truly impressive specimens. He was ambitious, sure, but no one ever accomplishes anything without ambition. Perhaps best of all, he was very favorably inclined towards you, but not in a creepy way.
Unfortunately, his command was less impressive, stacked with fellow young sons of nobility and people of political rather than military talent. His XO, a career "soldier" was the sort of toadying political officer you despised, though the man knew well enough to toady up to you. He had filled the command ranks of the infantry with political appointees, few of whom could do something so basic as keeping up with the march even when they themselves were mounted on horses. Thankfully the infantry themselves were professional, but bad leadership is like a cancer; it grows to twist everything it's attached to.
The cavalry at least were competently led. Those officers who went into it tended to have much more of a martial background from their family, and were to a man more competent and better trained. The quality of the cavalry was merely average, but since cavalry is an "elite" branch, an average cavalryman tends to stack up against a professional footman.
Unfortunately for Marius, he did not manage to get any mages together to support his formation.
After a few days march, you joined up with the greater army. Four regular legions had gathered along with three times as many auxiliary and mercenaries for a total force of just under ninety thousand.
The top commander or Legate Pro Praetor, Quintus Julius, was a competent man. Unfortunately, he had recently been appointed to lead his legion, the Ninth, when the Emperor had seen how unacceptably pathetic that force had become. It was a total clusterfuck. Parade troop training priorities, patronage, corruption, and political infighting wracked the officers, while the men had grown wild, poorly disciplined and disobedient. Julius, a trusted companion of the Emperor in his younger years, was appointed to try and get it back into shape, and when the Emperor was looking for a general to command the invasion beyond the gate the man was tapped for leadership.
The other legions varied. The second highest ranking legate, Aresius Crassus was relatively young for his position, and renowned for his tactical and strategic acumen. His legion, the Twelfth, was full of crack veterans. The third legate was about as competent as Julius, a solid professional soldier, but his legion, the Seventeenth, was merely average. Meanwhile the fourth legate, commanding the Fourth, was below par, a relative of the governor-slash-duke of a province, but the legion itself was solid.
As for the additional elements, the monster and creature contingent was nothing impressive. Mostly filled with orcs and goblins, it was arrow fodder rather than the crushing hammer full of trolls, giants, and other top tier beasts that you'd prefer.
The aerial contingent was relatively full strength for the regular legions, unusual but a nice surprise. There were about three hundred and sixty of them all told, about evenly split between wyverns, griffins and pegasi.
The artillery contingent was lighter than you would have liked, nor was it particularly large. The lighter weapons would suffice against barbarian wooden hill forts and the like, but a properly dug in force with fixed artillery emplacements would be a hard nut to crack without you and the other mages.
Speaking of mages, that was fairly shameful. Your unit was a sizeable fraction of all the army's mages, and an even greater portion of the combat mage force; you were appointed as an Auxiliary Cohort Prefect. Unfortunately despite the low number of mages and the fact that your own company was the largest individually controlled unit, Julius' magical advisor was appointed to be the Mage Prefect. Fairly old and never the best mage, Marcus Pontius was nonetheless a genius when it came to organizing and commanding magical assets.
You're not sure if you were happy about that or not. Because of the paucity of magical resources, he spent much of his time micromanaging you with direct orders. It would have been much easier for you to disregard him if the orders didn't always make sense. Nor did he particularly approve of you specifically. Not because of your adorableness, but mostly because you were young, female, and had a bunch of child soldiers with you. It was nice of him to disapprove in the abstract, but annoying to have to deal with.
Legate Julius was taking the invasion seriously, and placed Crassus as commander of the van. You weren't sure if that was a good or bad thing; it might have been best for Crassus to take the rearguard in case you needed a senior commander to organize the retreat when Being X's surprise finally dropped. But Crassus and his men were certainly the best bet for an actual victory.
The attack organization was solid. A wave of the greenskins would be sent in first to trip any traps and break up defensive lines, followed by Crassus' legion to establish a beachhead. Areas for pre and post processing prisoners and captives were planned for, and thought given as to how to keep troops moving in and captives moving out. Given the width of the gate and average movement speed of a double-timing legion, it would take about ten minutes for each legion to cross, with that time doubling for when the captives would be coming out on the other side.
Following Crassus' legion, Julius and his command group (including you) would transit followed in turn by Julius' legion. Apparently it was an issue of personal honor; you thought it was an issue that would doubtless much up the orderly transit of troops after Julius' incompetent troops fucked up their march.
Following Julius' troops would come the 17th, then the bulk of the mercenaries. Assuming, of course, that conditions didn't change overmuch.
Then the rituals were complete, the Gate opened, the invasion begun.
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The first troops to go through the Gate were stunned. A ten story stone tower was tall to them, and suddenly they were surrounded by massive edifices of steel and glass and concrete. But the greenskins were too stupid to be impressed for long. Spotting crowds of defenseless civilians, they charged, their officers barely keeping them controlled enough to take captives and keep moving.
On their heels, Crassus' veteran Twelfth Legionnaires split up, marching down the streets, breaking into buildings and securing their beachhead. They were uneasy at the situation. The massive edifices, bright fabrics, expanses of glass, perfect roads, horseless metal carriages and soft citizens spoke to a rich district of a mighty city, likely served by a great many mages. But they did their duty.
The Japanese, tourists and visitors and inhabitants of Ginza, Tokyo, were in shock. Out of nowhere an army of rampaging historical reenactors had emerged. Most stayed still, possibly screaming, as they were taken captive by the barbarians.
The police were quick to organize to the emergency. Hundreds of patrol cars and thousands of police on foot were hastily ordered to the region. But until then, those few police on the scene were easily overwhelmed. They might carry pistols, but very few had ever used them. They were trained to first fire a warning shot, then to shoot to wound. Against organized soldiers used to bloody melee, used to taking casualties, it was far too little. And then their ammunition ran out, and a bleak situation became even bleaker.
As the number of captives clubbed down with spear buts and the flats of blades climbed into the thousands, the Saderan troops began herding them back to be tied and eventually chivied back through the gate. The Twelfth had pushed more than half their men through with the rest streaming through in fine speed, and the two and a half thousand infantry and cavalry easily outnumbered the few defenders.
But the Tokyo police were rallying. Their twelve hundred patrol cars were sent in fully loaded with police and extra ammunition. Firing lines were established of police standing shoulder to shoulder, ready to repel any charge by the antiquely equipped attackers. Safe zones allowed the civilians to flee, time for their escape bought by riot squads which engaged wooden shields and spears and swords with their plastic riot shields and batons.
Unremarked in the chaos of the time, a young JGSDF officer heroically rescued civilians and brought them to safety with one of the largest police groups to organize. Near the Imperial Palace, formed around a core of anti-terror special police equipped with flash-bangs and submachine guns, this group guarded one of Japan's greatest monuments and a massive collection of tourists.
You transited through the Gate with the rest of the general's bodyguard group and were immediately taken aback. You recognized this. Modern day Japan, a bit more advanced than what you knew but not much.
Oh, fuck. Oh, that absolute fucking goddamned evil, twisted, fuck! That bastard X! What the hell were you and your men supposed to do against a modern military? What would happen when the Americans got involved?
In the entire army there were only perhaps twenty individuals that might be able to challenge a good armored personnel carrier; as for those capable of taking on a tank from the front, that's a narrow list which included only you. Your Storm-Hawks weren't ready to take on Apache gunships, for god's sake!
You were still stunned as Legate Julius was presented with first captives, a group of beautiful young Japanese women who had been out shopping. As Crassus reported to Julius, you were hardly paying attention, trying to think of how to formulate your request to scout, your argument warning them of danger. You heard a gap in their conversation.
"Sir, permission to scout the enemy?" you asked. Crassus and Julius looked at you fondly.
"What, you heard about how easily these foes fall, and wanted some loot for yourself, eh Tanya?" Julius teased in his somewhat grandfatherly manner before looking at Pontius who shook his head. "But no, I think it's more useful to keep you in reserve in case we meet any strong mages or other threats emerge."
"Sir, that's not it at all!" you protested. "I just –"
"Prefect Longina!" Pontius snapped. "Come over here."
"Yes sir!" you replied, grimacing. These damned primitives were going to get you all fucked up the ass when the Japanese and American air support and armor arrived.
"Prefect, you do not interrupt a report from a legate to the commanding general," he snarled quietly. "Get your shit together, and if your superiors tell you to wait, you wait! Understood?"
"Yes, sir," you answered.
"Good."
Well, at least you had the chance to hear all the reports as they came in, you thought. Over the next five minutes more detachments came back surrounding massive bands of newly captured Japanese and tourists destined for slavery if they weren't recaptured by your enemies.
As the initial wave of Japanese responders met with the growing swell of Imperial legionnaires, more and more police were killed by volleys of heavy arrows and javelins. Gaps opened up in the police lines, and groups were overwhelmed and captured or killed.
The Japanese Imperial Palace was holding strong. It was not really a priority target for attack save for the fact that there were defenders there, and a fight draws soldiers like flies to honey. But it was a priority position for defense, with both walls and a core of trained fighters. And so it held, and a young Japanese officer began coordinating with the reinforcements incoming from the bases at Zama and Yokota.
Soon enough reports came back to the Imperial command about the widespread use of guns, which the legionnaires believed to be a sort of magic. Again you requested permission to scout, and this time it was given. You rocketed into the air, trailed by your company of mages.
From what you could tell, the Empire was doing too well. It would be difficult to convince them to retreat, and the quick-moving Japanese response would find it all too easy to surround the forward Imperial elements, inviting a defeat in detail with no possibility of retreat. You returned back to the command post.
"Sir, reporting!" you said. "Enemy forces have widely deployed magical devices or mages across all fronts. I advise that we pull back to a more defensive posture. We can bring in archers to attack from range while establishing defenses in case of a counter-attack and preparing for a retreat if necessary." You doubted they'd listen, but you had to try.
"I had heard that you exhibited much greater courage in the North, Prefect Longina," Crassus said disapprovingly.
"Sir, my own company are more than a match for these locals. But there are fifteen of us. Even if we're each worth a hundred of the enemy, I estimate we're already facing that many. And that's just from what the enemy had on hand. What happens when their army arrives?" you asked rhetorically.
"I don't believe that to be the case. Look around; this must be a noble district, or perhaps the center of their mages. The enemy are likely their equivalent of the Emperor's guard, or the Sages. In which case it's far better to attack now than to let them get organized, and then once we've broken through we can conquer to our glory," Crassus rejoined.
"I don't believe you're correct. I think these are the equivalent of their urban cohorts, city guardsmen."
"I believe that Crassus has the more convincing argument," Julius ruled. You grimaced.
"Very well, sir. In that case, may I have permission to proceed to the front and engage the enemy to relieve pressure from our men?" you requested.
"Granted. Good-" Your shield shuddered, then again and again.
*Bang! Bang! Bang!* you heard as the sniper rounds impacted. What was worse was that they were targeting you rather than the generals.
"Snipers! Protectores, protect your legates!" you snapped as the officers were surrounded by men with massive shields. "Storm-Hawks, climb evasive!" you cried as more fire came in. Your shields could easily take it, but high powered armor penetrating rounds could kill lightly armored vehicles; your boys and girls were not well enough protected to be unconcerned. In a starburst of movement and visual decoys your company scattered, rocketing upwards.
You came to a stop about six thousand feet up, shivering and laughing at the rush of being shot at once more. Your spear came up, pointing at the side of a building some half-kilometer distant from the command post, where the fire originated from, and a lance of magical energy poured forth. It impacted the side of the building with a massive explosion, which was followed by the side of the building collapsing and smashing onto the ground. You sighed in pleasure, a wide and disturbing smile on your face.
"Storm-Hawks, this is our battlefield. Regardless of whether the opponents are mage or mundane, or the divines themselves, their fate was sealed the moment they thought to raise their hands against us. We will annihilate them without thought. Such is the mission I entrust to you," you said in a brief speech reminiscent to one you had given in your previous life. You could see your troops steadying, supported by your absolute conviction and power.
Looking around, you saw a concentration of enemy combatants, their greys and blues dark forming a dark line against the grass in front of the Japanese Imperial palace. Scattered corpses totaling at least a century of Legionnaires showed how effective their defense had been. You saw a turmae of cavalry preparing to charge them around a building's corner, two centuries of infantry in testudo formation prepared to follow. They even had a quartet of ogres armed with massive mauls and axes; doubtless they were hoping to break the defenders and crack open the palace.
A worthy goal. You grinned, and pointed your spear at the enemy's formation.
"Reserves, try and keep the legates alive. Focus on your shields. Go!" you ordered, and they went. A large part of it was the fact they were simply less powerful, and would slow down your unit. Speed is life to an aerial mage.
Then you continued with your attack plan.
"Company, form column by squad! We will approach the flank and strafe the enemy formation. Pass at one hundred feet, and remember to keep your shields up. Follow me!"
And with that, you swept out, curving to come in at the defenders' flank to maximize effectiveness. You passed over the line of defenders at effectively point blank range, a flurry of your explosive spells detonating like grenades amongst them. Other explosive spells and rapidly fired mana bolts followed from your trailing troops. Using a vision spell to look back over your shoulder, you saw that your company had absolutely shredded the defenders. A few were injured; the vast majority were dead.
As the company swept up, leaving the cover of the lower-lying buildings, you spotted a sight that made you pale. A pair of fighters. You had come up on their flank, and they weren't in a position to hit you or you them until after they turned about.
You saw as they pulled tight, high-g turns, coming about towards your group of mages. It looked like they were armed with sidewinders and hadn't managed a missile lock on your merely human heat sources, and so had chosen to go with a gun-run.
You rapidly pulled up spells you'd barely practiced and had last really used a lifetime ago, trying to get a lock on the jets at a long enough range to be effective. You didn't manage it, their maneuvers enough to dodge the rounds you fired and your homing too weak against their evasions.
"Evasive scatter!" you screamed to your troops who burst in all directions, dozens of visual decoys making targeting you even harder. It proved sufficient against the jets, and though a pair of decoys were hit none of your troops were injured. As the jets passed by a flurry of fire came from your Storm-Hawks, hitting one of the enemy's wings. Damaged but not downed the jet retreated from the combat zone while his wing-man turned off to engage wyverns in a different zone of the battlefield.
You took a moment to appreciate your luck and survival, then signaled your soldiers to reformed. After all, you had a battle to win.
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On the ground, a groaning Japanese man in his early thirties picked himself up off the ground. He had been lucky. He was hit by one of the first explosions, but any shrapnel was caught by his neighbor and he was merely thrown a few meters away. Temporarily stunned, he managed to avoid being a target from any of the other attackers.
"What the fuck," second lieutenant Yoji Itami complained while picking up a submachine gun from an anti-terrorism task force member who wouldn't be needing it again, slung it over his shoulder and began filling his pockets and waistband with magazines from the man's tactical vest.
"Genre-crossing bastards," he continued. "First legionnaires and monsters, and now fucking magical girls and boys? How is that even fair?" He looked around, and saw a few other lucky survivors start to stagger to their feet or crawl back to their positions.
Honestly, when this whole thing started he thought he was dreaming. Although a member of the JGSDF, he was a massive otaku. The same that drove him to join the army drove his obsession; boredom, a search for fulfilment.
Out of college, wanted to be fulfilled. So he got married. Then he realized that he was really looking for an interesting life, a bit of excitement and meaning. And so he joined the JGSDF, but that was boring. Too easy, too simple, not engaging enough. He thought, maybe if I do something more extreme, then I'll be interested?
And so he wheedled and poked and blackmailed his superior to suggest him for Ranger training. But even that wasn't really enough. Anime and manga didn't really fill the hole, but they made him forget it for a while.
As an otaku, a popular theme in light novels and the like is modern versus fantasy. As a member of the military, he couldn't help but fantasize about it a bit. Just a bit. Only enough that it was a recurring dream he had once a month or so. But more than enough that when it actually happened he thought he might have been asleep. Even when he knew he wasn't, knew that the bodies were real, the threats were real, he felt like he should have been dreaming.
But standing them, submachine gun in hand, amongst the corpses and injured, he knew he wasn't. Which was why he knew how fucked he was as the first cavalrymen rounded the building less than a hundred meters away.
"Fuck," he muttered. Then, louder, "Aim for the horses! Aim for the fucking horses! On my command!" he screamed at the other survivors. He picked up another submachine gun.
Dual wielding was a fucking joke. Oh, a lot of soldiers would try it sometime during training if their officers weren't paying enough attention. As something of a shameless slacker who didn't care about his reputation and an officer himself, Itami had done so. But when the targets were a few dozen meters away, and filled the street shoulder to shoulder, and between horse and rider represented a few meters of height for the target, well. Then the joke became a little more biting.
The horses began to move forwards. At forty meters, he gave the command.
"Fire!"
The resulting sound and weight of fire was pathetic compared to what they had managed before. Still, firing two weapons on full automatic was more than enough to get his blood pumping. He swept across the formation and back before the guns ceased firing, locked open with no more bullets to feed. He dropped the left hand gun to the sound of screaming horses and men; the assault had crashed into their bullets and been thrown back.
Releasing the magazine and inserting another before letting the bolt shoot forward and fill the chamber with another round, he brought the submachine gun up to his shoulder and aimed down the sights. The cavalry were no longer a threat and had been turned into a screaming, flailing mess of dead and injured and panicked horses and men. But over that mess he could see rank after rank of armored infantry advancing.
He lined the sights up with the face of a soldier in slightly nicer armor with a different helmet, and fired. The enemy dropped. He switched target, and fired. And fired. And fired.
He switched magazines when he needed to. Eventually the surviving enemies broke and ran. He had run out of proper targets, ones that were a threat, and so he switched to shooting the injured horses whose screams offended his ears, the enemy that had been merely knocked over who were foolish enough to rise and make targets of themselves again.
And then he ran out of threats entirely. He and that rag-tag band of defenders, that group that just didn't know to stop when they should have been dead, had done it. They'd held.
"Sir, what's so funny?" a new reinforcement asked. Itami didn't know what the man was talking about until the man pointed at Itami's face. Itami brought one shaking hand up to feel his face. It bore a massive, disturbing smile.
He only realized it after, but as he fought at the edge of death, he had never felt so alive.
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For a few minutes, you flitted about the battlefield like a demonic hummingbird, spreading death and destruction in your wake. The Imperial attack had bogged down. Disorganization, the need to clear huge buildings, soldiers grabbing loot, the massive number of captives to process and the resistance of the Japanese officers had broken up the assault. Crassus' men were good enough to keep going despite all that, but Julius' weren't, and without sufficient support the advance faltered.
Luckily for your Imperials, the Japanese weren't faring any better. Contrary orders from a command which was rapidly losing control of the mounting crisis, patrol cars leaving for the front without sufficient loads of officers or bullets, traffic jams and limited reinforcements meant that the police simply couldn't hold. Not in the face of your aerial assaults and bombing runs. Here and there key units holding the perimeter broke and retreated, or were killed or captured. The solid ring of police limiting the Imperials became a sieve, and civilians too stupid to keep running after they crossed into "safety" paid the price.
The one exception proved to be that damned palace. Somehow the extremely few survivors of your initial attack had rallied and inflicted enough casualties on the attacking force that the police could keep their position intact until reinforcement arrived. New Imperial attackers arrived only to be cut down by automatic fire.
You were just preparing to go back and deal with them once and for all when you heard it. The *whoop, whoop, whoop* sound of helicopters, the screaming chainsaw sound of miniguns, the jackhammers of machineguns and autocannon, the *whoosh-boom!* of rockets. Enemy reinforcements had arrived, and they'd brought the heavy bruisers into this dustup. It was time to GTFO.
You were lucky enough that the helicopters didn't come up on your ass. They were flying low, keeping at or below roof level, and so you hadn't spotted them until after they arrived and started chewing up the Imperial army.
"Rally up! Squads, overlap shields and fall back to the Gate!" Hopefully by keeping to a few tight formations the shields would be strong enough to take a few seconds of machinegun fire if needed. You launched the retreat-signal flares up into the sky which denoted an overwhelming enemy and would hopefully keep the Imperial losses lower than they otherwise might be.
You led the way, keeping low and going slow enough to scout lest you lead your small company into a formation of helicopters' guns.
The initial helicopter attack had been flawless and crushing. Imperial infantry had been cut to pieces and were routing. Transport Black-Hawks had landed or allowed the infantry they were carrying to rope down. Gunships had reaped a brutal accounting, and it was obvious that observers were in contact with naval ships as their cannon rained down artillery shells near the Gate.
The only saving grace was that the dismounted infantry were making their way in towards the Gate; it seemed as if the enemy commander hadn't wanted to cut off all retreat and force the Empire to fight like cornered rats. Still, the advance was far too fast and you had to hurry lest you be cut off or ambushed.
A few blocks away from the intersection where the Gate was, it finally happened. A convoy of helicopters came up over the buildings and down right behind your formation.
"Squatter by squad, fall back and rally on the other side of the Gate!" you ordered, then turned to face the helicopters. You knew you were good enough to face helicopters, especially if they hadn't prepared to engage a master aerial mage as opposed to other helicopters or ground targets.
You made eye contact with the lead pilot, pointing your spear at the gunship. As the cannon tracked upwards, you fired an explosive spell into the cockpit. The helicopter crumpled and as it began to fall you rocketed forwards and upwards. Looping in the air so that you were upside down, you extended a blade projection and ran it across the next helicopter's blades before bringing the spear to point forwards towards the third helicopter in line and putting a split armor-penetrating mana bolt through the pilot and copilot's skulls. The third helicopter crashed sideways into a building as an explosive spell finished the fourth.
"Hahahahaha!" you laughed, madly. "Are you watching, Being X! Are you entertained yet!" you screamed to the heavens before zooming off. There were more helicopters to kill, after all, and you wanted your men to retreat to safety.
Ten minutes and nearly twenty helicopters later, and it was time to leave. They were actively hunting you at this point, and the surviving Imperials were mostly through the Gate. You'd already had to duck patrolling jets a few times. Worse, the helicopters might decide to try and seize the Gate, trapping you. Worst of all, your mana was running low.
In the end, it turned out to be a bit of a race between the troops trying to block the Gate and you, but you were faster. They took a few potshots, launched some rockets, but between your speed, cornering and visual decoys you got through unscathed.
Coming through the Gate, you entered a scene of chaos. Crassus had survived, as had Julius, but their commands were savaged, and there were hundreds of injured soldiers scattered about the place. Senior officers were having screaming matches, while others were trying to build some organization, get troops formed up around the gate,
Looking around for your troops you found them. A bit more scuffed up than you'd last seen them, sitting on ammunition cans marked 5.56 or 9mm Ammunition, 1200 rounds and one crate marked Grenades, M67, 40 count that made you pale. In the center of their formation were two longer crates, likely used to store rifles or other guns, and on top of that was a machinegun. Judging from the arm it was mounted on, one of your bloodthirsty little magpies had likely cut it off the helicopter before absconding with the thing.
You hurried over as you saw them poking the thing.
"Attention!" you shouted, and they all snapped to their feet.
"What's the first rule with strange artifacts?" you asked menacingly. Aisha, who certainly knew better and was in command during your absence paled.
"Don't touch them, Milady!" she shouted out.
"Good. So why the fuck are you poking it!" you shouted.
""No excuse, Milady!"" they replied in a ragged chorus.
"Alright. I'll excuse it just this once as a post-combat mistake. Don't do it again," you glowered. "As it stands, that box there is full of metal apples which explode, and that steel rod you were poking can throw bits of metal faster than the speed of sound. I want you to establish a guard around this material until I can examine it. That said, well done. You all made it back alive, and you secured potentially critical artifacts in the process." You let them preen for a bit then continued. "Aisha, you're in charge until I get back."
"Yes, Milady," she called out as you turned on your heel and went to go make sense of the chaos. You pulled aside a staff officer, one of the adjutants who was clever enough to pay attention to what was going on and wise enough to fear you despite your appearance..
"Protectore Sabinus, what's been going on?" you asked.
"Ah, Prefect Longina," he said, saluting. "It's um, well a disaster. The enemy's magical devices were so strong. We lost far too many men. Initial estimates are that the Ninth has lost four out of five men beyond the gate; at least a quarter of those that remain are moderately injured or worse. The Twelfth fared better. At least two in three men survived. From what I can tell, we have you to thank for that; there have been numerous accounts of you and your retainers destroying the flying wagons or pushing back the enemy on the ground long enough to allow a retreat."
"So what, that's five and half thousand dead or captured and another twelve hundred or so injured?" you estimated with a grimace.
"That's right, Prefect."
"And how many slaves did a Legion of Empire's finest buy?" you asked as he winced.
"About five thousand."
"Fuck. Well, that's done with at least. What are we doing to prepare?" You could tell from the expression on his face the news was anything but good. "No. Don't tell me. The officers who didn't see the enemy don't believe it. They want to attack through the Gate." You could from the way he flinched that you were right. At least the Japanese, or rather the American Helicopter Battalion, didn't push through the Gate while this clusterfuck was ongoing.
The way you see it, there are five priorities.
First, seeing that the captives aren't mistreated, because there is no surer way of pissing off a modern nation than to enslave and rape its citizens in mass.
Second, attempting to open diplomatic negotiations, though that may be hard without speaking Japanese. Unless you can find a way to hide the source of your knowledge? You could probably take a captive, put your hand on their head, knock them out with a bit of a lightshow before using medimagic to knock yourself out, then wake up "having learnt" Japanese. It might leave Pontius a bit suspicious, but the common folk would definitely buy it and the mages would have nothing more than suspicions. On the other hand, a protracted negotiation with a lack of language might be just the thing to drag the situation out and give you longer before an invasion. Assuming, of course, that the Japanese were ok with that.
Third, the Gate needed to be fortified. And against tanks. That would take a bit of doing; thankfully you'd at least seen armored warfare back in your previous life, and knew what anti-tank ditches should look like.
Fourth, you need as many mages at the Gate as possible yesterday. They're the only thing the Empire has that stands a chance against modern armor.
Fifth, and less important than the others, you need to take inventory of just what it is that your kids managed to loot, and figure out what to do with it. Guns aren't casting focuses, but they would make it far, far easier to create guns as casting focuses. Basically you'd have to carve a few runes on the barrel and replace the stock, parts of the body and barrel shroud with enchanted wood and silver inlays.
You figure that you can oversee your first priority, give detailed instructions for the second, some advice for the third, and help select who takes care of the fourth. As a note, your political capital is limited, as is the possible reactions to your advice.