Less than five minutes had passed since Sommel made the first kill of the night when they reached the frontline proper.
Not that much of the frontline was left in the first place.
A procession of wounded and battered streamed by them as the pair got closer and closer. Some had the strength to walk, others had to be carried on stretchers or supported by their comrades, some were borne on makeshift shell-carrier barrows.
A triage station had been set up in an empty grouping of open-air mortar pits where the injured that couldn't be moved for the moment were being treated.
The sterilization situation was absolutely abysmal. Blood, pus, piss, and shit had accumulated into pools where some of the wounded had been forced to writhe in since there were no more rooms. Rats crawled freely and even nibbled on some of the still living, drawn to the overpowering stench of rotting flesh.
Many were so drenched in mud or smeared with blood it was impossible to distinguish rank or regiment or even gender.
Verdant spotted Harrier in the crowd. The poor Faunus had fought against the entire world trying to get a Guard medical commission, starting out as cannon fodder while his human colleagues effortlessly passed straight through, and it was all for this. To see dear friends suffer and die while their innards slipped through his soiled gloves, it was maddening. Yet, he continued his work, tears carving paths through the dirt on his face. He screamed in rage until his voice broke, for boiled water and for his patients to wake up or he would personally drag their souls from the afterlife.
Still, the brave efforts of the doctor couldn't save everybody. For every man trained in medicine, there were twenty wounded. This left most just waiting and begging for death, but the corpsman code would not allow it.
He had no idea that the human form could be so mutilated and warped yet still be able to draw breath. Indeed, death would be a mercy to many of them. He fought back a wave of bile as he passed by a cot with a soldier folded in half with her snapped spine puncturing out her back, a corpsman trying to stop the bleeding. He failed in the end when he realized that her eyes were still following him.
"Maidens…" he gasped, wiping the vomit off his chin. At what point did the humanity of the corpsmen become inhumane? When did mercy become cruelty? When did help become harm? "Why?" was all he could say.
"Because Grimm," Sommel said coldly. "Look upon this, Volkov, and commit to memory forever. This is the suffering that the Archenemy can wreak... indiscriminate, ruthless, savage. They don't care who they hurt, be it a man who had done no wrong his whole life or a woman who is all her children have left in this world. This is why we must fight and kill every single one of those disgusting black-furred abominations."
His fist clenched tight around the revolver's grip until his leather gloves creaked.
They passed out of the triage station into the wreckage that was the fire-line. Artillery had collapsed many passageways and exposed deep concrete bunker's to the open air, little left of their inhabitants save bloody pulps. Blazing fires blocked off many sections and were beginning to spread to others.
Already on the fritz since yesterday, the pumps had been the first to go when the bombardment began. Without anything to drain away the torrential rainfall Verdant and Sommel quickly found themselves wading through a flooded alley, the soupy mud coming up to waist-height, alongside a platoon from the 9th Tunnel Rats.
The Mistralians had been on their way back to the rear barracks when the first shells landed. Poor bastards had been on the open road when a salvo that had overshot the frontline landed right in their midst. Two-thirds the regiment atomized or shredded in the space of a few seconds. Those that could still stand and fight were ralied by the officers that had survived to return back to the front. A call had to be made: ten more kilometers of exposed ground until they were out of range from the guns or to turn around and dive right into the pits of hell where they at least stood a chance in the shelter of the trenches.
Bad call it turned out. Just an hour ago they had been four thousand strong in the morning, now these thirty-two men were all that was left from that proud regiment.
"Reinforcement are trying to get in," Their highest commanding officer, a Lieutenant Snow, explained as he held his rifle above his head to keep it dry. "But that damn frag-storm is creeping back in a curtain wall. Ain't nothing bigger than a housefly having the slightest chance of getting through."
"We're on our own then?" Verdant asked.
"Seems that way," Sommel responded. "At least for the next hour or two. The Grimm may claim fire superiority in this sector for now, but not even our cursed enemy can maintain a blockade of this scale, for this long."
Verdant gulped. "That means…"
"In those two hours, the Grimm will be throwing everything they have at us." Sommel completed.
"Brother, there'll be tens of thousands of them!"
"Yes, there'll be hundreds of thousands of them, and we'll butcher every single one of them." Sommel said.
Verdant didn't dare say anything more until they were out of the flooded section and back on dry land. Snow and his mob split off to the west where hopefully some ammo depots had remained intact and they could re-stock before the battle truly began. Verdant bid them farewell. He would have wished them luck but something in him felt that it wouldn't make a difference.
There was no such thing as luck here.
Turning, it took the pair another fifty meters of convoluted trench way until they reached the fire trenches. The first sight that met them was a corpse lying face down on the ground, its back shredded open by shrapnel, and boots stepping on it like it was a floor carpet. Any soldier that could stand and hold a rifle had run out of their little dugouts the moment that the bombardment had ended for the frontline, hampered all the way by the random drizzles of shells and trains of wounded as Sommel and Verdant had been.
They were haggard, exhausted, and some badly injured, but still, they began to man the emplacements and leap onto the fire trench. Everyone knew what was thundering their way right now and knew what would happen if the Grimm achieved close combat. The fate of tens of thousands would be decided in the first ten minutes of this night. Already they were letting loose occasional shots at whatever looked like movement in the darkness of no-man's-land.
"You men!" Verdant started as Sommel suddenly shouted with a booming authority towards a dazed group of arriving Atlesians from the 997th who were just standing around, taking up space. Their once clean white-grey ceramic molded body plate that they had boasted loudly of when they arrived in Vale had now been sullied by a thick layer of mud and gore. Now they looked no different from their fellow soldiers who they had mocked the poor appearance of. "Your idleness while your comrades prepare for war is already cause for your honours of your once-proud regiment to be stripped from your battle-standards. The 997th faced Grimm hordes outnumbering them a thousand to one at the Battle of Hill Seven-Three and what did they do? Did they run, did they hide and wait for the end to come? No! They picked up their rifles and fought bitterly against impossible odds, eventually standing on a heap of Archenemy corpses once seventy thousand strong. Now you place the sacrifices of your regimental peers at risk with your cowardice. What you do next is up to you."
The leading point man stammered for a second in fear, then shock, before he found his voice again. "W-we'll move at once, sir."
"Good, make the foe pay in the name of Atlas."
The point man turned to his men. "What the fuck are you pussies doing milling about? Get your hands off your asses. Warm it all up. I want everything you got. Come on you apes, you wanna live forever?"
"Urrra!" Responded their earth-shaking cry. Like a tide wave, the Guardians of Atlas rushed forward and manned the firesteps in the same spirit that their fathers and grandfathers had on the bastion walls of Mantle. They would not disappoint.
"Captain!"
Sergeant Meng came barreling out of nowhere and almost knocked Verdant over. He snapped a quick salute before he continued on. "Sir, all the soldiers in the company are already on the firestep and are ready for the word once the Grimm gets close enough. Our own Artillery is starting to pull its act together and will fire at any targets when they get into the kill zones."
"Your initiative in my absence is excellent as always, Zure. What about our spotlights? Can we get them on?"
"Unfortunately no, sir. Shrapnel and fragments have broken the bulbs of most before we could get them underground and anyway the power lines are cut. Emergency energy generators still working wouldn't be able to keep them on long anyway."
"Good, how about the flanks? How sound do you think they are?"
"We got the 997th to the right covering our asscheeks."
"Met some of them just now. Decent, stalwart. We can trust them to hold and if they withdraw it'll be in an orderly manner. The left?"
"Not as fortunate, sir. It's a clusterfuck over that. Mangled and broken regiments from all over the place since that section's a hub. Tried to raise their commanding officer only to find that I got a trio of jokers each claiming to be in control."
"Damn. Alright, who can we spare?"
"Only Basil's Third Platoon. They're still on the way from the rear and I can divert them if you want."
"Do that. Tell them their premier duty is not to only support our right flank but tell us when it's about to break. We can at least have some advanced warning before it gives way."
"I'll do it at once." He waved over Samone who was carrying a heavy radio-set with an extended antenna and quickly relayed the orders to her. As she worked to get a connection, Meng turned to Sommel. "Permission to ask a question candidly, sir.
"Granted. Get on with it."
"What the hell took you so long to get here? Where were you? Could have used this when shit began to hit the fan."
Sommel chuckled softly. "Candid indeed. Where to begin, Zure? I was in the rear trying to arrange transportation for when we were to return to Yellowhollow tomorrow. In hindsight, I should have had someone else do it for me. A man of my rank has more to worry about than herding drivers and cargo trucks."
"Sounds to me that you need to get an assistant sir. Keep telling you that, it's a wonder you've made it this long."
"Perhaps... if we make this night. If."
"Don't worry, sir. I'll make sure we survive just so I don't have to do your laundry for you again." Meng jested with a smile, quite despite the rather grim situation.
Peering through night-vision scopes, designated marksmen across the line shouted that contacts were approaching just at the edge of their vision. No further than seven hundred meters. They were coming.
"My dear sergeant, though I am quite amused we will have to continue this conversation at a better time," Sommel growled. Meng nodded and went racing down the trench, hurling insults at anyone too slow.
"Onto the line, trooper," he said to Verdant, "Thus war has once more come to our lands and so falls to us the duty to butcher every single one of blasphemous filth."
Verdant frantically stumbled up the firestep and found himself cramped shoulder to shoulder with fellow soldiers from all over, all with grim-set faces. He braced his rifle against the parapet, his heart punching so hard against his ribs that he felt that his chest was going to explode. The drizzle from above was cold and sharp against his face.
A hand that no longer could feel let its fingers brush over the intricate ridges and valleys of the hilt before it pulled forward. Titanium and tungsten scraped against its brass housing. The brilliant silver of the blade caught in the lights from the blazing fires all around. Sommel drew Durendal and lifted it aloft into the darkness, daring them to come forth. Grimm had long learned to fear its bite just as men had long learned to rejoice at its reveal.
"Rise and address, men of Remnant." Sommel bellowed out as loudly as he could. "The Archenemy is coming, and brings in its wake destruction and death. We have all seen it, at Glenn, at Oniyuri, at Eskar, and a hundred other places. I am sure many among us have lost someone we know to them. Our borders have been battered, brave men slain in the hundreds of thousands every year. I ask you, what burdens do you bear because of the Grimm? And now I ask you how much longer you will allow this to happen? How much longer will you allow the Grimm to despoil everything you hold dear? This is our chance. Our chance to stop them right here, right now. Many of us will not see the golden glow of dawn, but because of your sacrifice many others will get to feel it."
Sommel paused and looked at his feet, sheets of water sloughing off his leather cap. Then he looked up again with eyes consumed by an inferno.
"So, I ask each of you one simple thing: fight. If your rifle is empty then you have your bayonet. If your bayonets are shattered, then use your hands. If your hands are broken, fight with your feet. If your hands and feet are broken, bite with your teeth. If you find yourself without breath, fight with your spirit and the rage upon your lips. I will accept nothing less than death as an excuse to stop your slaughter of the enemy. Maybe not even then. Let your spite be your bullets, let hate be your blade, and let your complete contempt be your armor!"
"They shall not pass!" He cried out the words that every daily communique from command had ended with. Simple, to the point, and completely undoubtable and unbreakable.
"THEY SHALL NOT PASS!" The very air shook with the response. Soon distant shouts joined in as the cry spread like a det-fuse wire through the entire front. "THEY. SHALL. NOT. PASS!
The silence. Terrible silence as spotters waited for the Grimm to enter a decent range. Men shifted and coughed, not daring to say anything or even take their eyes away from the black void that was no-man's-land.
There was a great crack like a whip and flash of white that almost made Verdant throw himself to the ground with his hands over his head. For a dreadful moment, he thought that the bombardment had begun all over again.
But it was just lightning.
All across the dark sky more forks of lightning lanced down from on high as if the Gods were hurling their wrath to the earth. The sheer amount of moisture and debris created by the evening's destruction had created so much static in the air that this was inevitable from the start. It grew with frequency until it was like someone was blasting a strobe light in his face.
One struck so brightly that everything went white. Verdant blinked, seeing ghost images as his sight returned to normal. The one that followed was a little better but in its aftermath, he swore he glimpsed something. What the hell was that? He snuggled the stock of his rifle closer on his shoulder. It was probably the wreck of a truck that had floundered in the wastes during the retreat several months ago or at least something as big as one.
Another flash, a split-second snapshot revealed to him.
The truck had come closer. It also had glinting fangs.
"Oh," was all he could say before the entire world exploded into a cascade of gunfire. Rifles made boxy, hollow bangs that overlapped with the clangs of heavy chamber bolts slamming back and forth. At first, it was sporadic but as more and more reinforcements coming from the rear leaped onto the firestep, it escalated into a horizontal deluge of red-hot lead.
Autocannons mounted in foxholes chattered like monstrous sewing machines, spraying out long lines of blazing tracers. Light howitzers boomed like great drums with every report as they sent shells whistling out into no-man's-land, each creating a volcanic geyser of mud and fire.
With a squeal like a steaming kettle, dozens of shoulder-fired incendiary rockets detonated mid-air, scattering out blankets of fire dust-enhanced napalm so intense that it instantly vaporized the surrounding moisture in a flash and crackle like thousands of twigs being snapped all at once. Limbs were atomized as paws trampled on mines and tripwires.
Spotting the larger Grimm through their infrared scopes, anti-material rifles blasted deafening double cracks as their rounds created shock waves when they reached hypersonic speeds. Artillery quickly made their contribution with the deeper pneumatic twang of mortars and the occasional crump of heavy cannons, a small but vengeful response to the Grimm bombardment.
Rapidly the cacophony of firepower grew to deafening levels, crescendoing into a solid wall of crashing noise - at first disjointed notes, clanging timbre across deadly metal, sharp piercing bullets producing higher octaves - and coalescing into an orchestra of unlikely instruments
An orchestra played to the tune of pure firepower, conducted by Death itself.
Here were the instruments, and here were their musicians.
Though they couldn't see the foe, all they needed to see were the blazing tracers in their rounds suddenly disappearing in the darkness. All they needed to hear were the sharp yelps of pain from the Grimm as their bodies were ripped apart by lead. All they needed to smell was the overwhelming metallic reek of burning fire dust, singed hair, and burning flesh.
All they needed to feel was the hate boiling through their veins.