AN: Meant to have this out last week. Wrote a chapter that had too much a time skip between chapter 7 so it felt odd, ended up writing something earlier that went soooo long that I split it into... thirds or so. This is the first third.
God Complex
Journey
August 15, 1922
Adelheid von Schugel
You request for additional funding has been denied.
The board reviewed your proposal and found the same issues as your previous one, namely that it was identical to the proposal we had already denied. Any further attempts to bypass the appeals system will not be tolerated, nor will your attempts to use your budget as your personal slush fund.
On the subject of your budget,
Until you increase safety measures to an appropriate level and submit your yearly operation budget for approval of the Logistics Office you will not be receiving any additional manpower or funding, you will simply have to make do with what you already have. If you had bothered to input safety protocols in the first place, your staffing shortages would never have happened.
And per our previous letters, you will need to submit all your backlogged paperwork before funding can be granted. This includes your 1918, 1919, 1920, 1921, and 1922 operating budgets.
If I recall your last excuse, you misplaced them sometime around Christmas. I have no doubt that the last eight months were more than enough time for a man of your obvious capabilities to finish a simple bit of administrative work.
From the desk of Lieutenant Colonel Saul Wexler.
Logistics Office, Berun.
PS. The Military Police asked me to remind you that bringing prostitutes into secure military facilities is frowned upon and your ability to approve civilian visits to secure buildings has been revoked until further notice.
Trudging the 12 miles to Lund in full kit through the pouring rain was a pain in the ass.
You might be thinking, "But Tanya, doesn't railroad run to Lund?" Why yes it does. And that train was currently sitting at the bottom of a lake alongside the bridge it went over. So, while we could take the train north, we would have a pretty sudden stop midway there.
Which meant we got to walk.
And I was a four-foot-tall girl with short god damned legs.
Not even counting the extra miles we had to travel just to get out of the gods damned maze the city of Malvo had become in the last week of war, it was far too much walking.
The good General von Ludwig did not want me, the lone mage attached to his group moving towards the front, to fly ahead and leave him without any magic support. What good a single mage would be against any group large enough to get past the front lines and to us, I had no idea, but he insisted I fall in line and march like common infantry.
The slurs he tossed my way might have had something to do with it. The man hated me as soon as he heard my last name.
Which was odd, usually it takes longer for someone to hate me.
Entire sections of the city were cordoned off because a flight of bombers supported by mages snuck through in the dead of night and collapsed some buildings and damaged bridges. Army engineers didn't want anyone in or around the damaged structures until one of them could check to make sure they wouldn't collapse on you in your sleep. A good idea, in my opinion, but there were simply too many locations for too few engineers to fix in a timely manner.
And it wasn't like we had a map of what areas were passable. We only learned which roads and bridges were closed when we reached them and got turned away by whoever was in charge of cleaning up that zone. And let me say, marching is slow, turning around a bunch of Army grunts and trucks and Kampfwagens and horses and whatever other shit we were dragging with us in narrow city streets was next to impossible. Our tracked vehicles trying and failing to turn around without clipping buildings probably caused more damage than the nights raids.
You could have marked our path through the city by following the trail of destroyed streetlamps and building corners we left in our wake.
Turned out our shitty first generation Kampfwagens had one hell of a turning radius and next to no visibility. Both things that anyone outside the development team could have told you just by looking at them. They were basically giant angular rectangles on undersized tracks and looked more like metal bricks with guns sticking out than modern military technology.
So needless to say, we spent much of the day lost, walking in circles trying to escape this city.
It was hard to complain though. Especially when we were marching past hordes of civilians that were still awaiting treatment for injuries or had their homes destroyed overnight. Children wandered around with parents, adults covered in bandages dug through rubble of what used to be their life to find anything salvageable.
It was bad. I could hear some of the infantry getting angry. "How dare the Entente attack us and pointlessly harm our people?" They must have thought. Even as non-mages their anger tainted the ambient mana that flowed through them with an indescribable aroma. Like the smell of ozone, or that sensation of the hairs on your arms standing on end all at once.
Describing mana is difficult. It's like waxing poetic about a rainbow to the blind. There's just an inherent inability to comprehend the sensation.
The unexploded ordinance that was left buried in the rubble waiting for some poor bastard to find it was even worse than the unstable buildings. Cleaning up and looking for bodies takes ages when the very real threat of your shovel knocking loose a primed detonator and blowing you to bits is hanging over your head.
In spite of the cities small size and population compared to Berun the place felt a thousand times as crowded. Refugees were pouring in from the outlying northern towns in droves and packing into every nook and cranny they could find. Combined with the influx of army personnel passing through and the town was filled to bursting. It looked like the normal population had been doubled almost overnight.
It might have. It was the only Empire city on the peninsula that was too large to consider evacuating the civilian population. With the military clogging all ways in and out the rest of the refugees pretty much ended up stuck here with nowhere else to go.
We did eventually find a way out that didn't involve crashing the Kampfwagens through buildings to make a new path, though we ended up having to exit through the south rather than the east.
But once we got out of the city, we were met with the next obstacle of our journey.
The roads.
They were beyond horrible.
My first trip north it didn't matter, it was still peacetime and my commanding officer wasn't an ass so I simply flew with my comrades. Road quality doesn't matter much when you are 600 feet in the air and can move as the crow flies.
Only a week into the war and the poorly maintained dirt roads of Scandia were deteriorating to the point where it would be more accurate to call them mud tracks rather than roads.
They were designed and used almost purely by civilians, and civilians on foot at that. Nowhere near wide enough for an army company to march efficiently. At times the roads were little more than paths that winded through the forests between towns and narrowed to the point where the trucks and Kampfwagens couldn't squeeze through without us cutting down trees to widen the way.
The tracked vehicles tore the packed dirt up so as we marched north our footsteps mixed the dirt and standing water into a slurry of mud. Combined with the narrow paths and you couldn't even walk around the ensuing mud holes.
It seemed like every twenty feet or so something would breakdown and stall the line. A Kampfwagen would throw a track, a truck would get stuck in the mud, or a horse would kick someone in the chest and we would have to stop to fix it.
And the good General made sure I got to help solve every one of those problems.
"You are a mage", he said to me, a soft smile on his face that didn't hide the distaste in his eyes, "we don't have time to bring in equipment to lift the truck out of the mud. You will do it. That's an order."
And into the waste deep mud I went. Physical augments meant for fighting and enduring the rigors of aerial maneuvers were put to use levering the back wheels of a 10,000-pound truck out of a deep hole in the road. I swear I could hear my vertebrae popping when I heaved it out of the rut.
Twenty minutes later he found me again, a track was thrown and pins broken that needed replacement.
The crew could have done it, of course, they were trained to do so in any condition.
But if they did the work then little Tanya Degurechaff, the abandoned child of a Russy whore if the good General was to be believed, wouldn't be the one doing it.
That's how the day went. Neck deep in mud. Hammering pins into tracks with my bare hands instead of a mallet. Lifting thousands of pounds out of the cloying mud. Blasting trees out of the way where the road was too thin through the forests. Lifting fallen crates of artillery shells back into their carts.
Menial labor.
Other people's menial labor, even.
All because the good General didn't like that my parents or grandparents were Russ.
It was nothing new. I didn't understand it when I was just a brat in the orphanage with no friends but being picked on because I had ancestors that I had never met had come from the wrong country was a common enough occurrence.
Kids were cruel sometimes.
But a general should know better. Should be better.
General von Ludwig might have been my superior, but he was the first one I did not have an ounce of respect for.
I spent that first night angry as I had ever been. But unlike all those other times, I was angry at someone I could do nothing about. I couldn't blast him to ash with my rifle, or pound him into a bloody paste with my fists.
He was my commanding officer. I had to listen to him.
The next day was as bad as the first, worse even because I was tired from the previous day's work. Sections of soldiers would leave the group every so often as we reached the areas they were to be stationed so I had less and less help as the day went on, especially since it seemed every one of the horrible vehicles that were constantly stuck in mud were going the full distance with the General. At least on the second night I managed to weave a spell to trick my brain into falling asleep immediately rather than stay up trying not to cry in frustration at how angry I was.
Third day was better. I think the good General finally got tired of playing with me. That or he had a schedule to meet and he couldn't keep slowing everything down just to fuck with me.
Halfway through the day we finally reached Lund, the good Generals final destination.
It was a nice town. Decently sized for Scandia, meaning pathetically small compared to Berun.
Nice cathedral though. Shame it had a giant hole in the roof where someone hit it with a bomb.
I broke off from the main group there and continued on my lonesome. My orders were essentially to go to a set of special coordinates with no real information along with it. Presumably I would find my new platoon or perhaps just a single member there to lead me to the rest. It wasn't like the Rhine front, where you were put under a higher up under a higher up under another higher up that sectioned off an entire area of the trenches under their authority. You would have, say, a 10 mile section under the command of a general, and his direct underlings each took 2 miles of that and you worked under them in one of those little chunks.
Things were played more fast and loose up north.
I reached the destination around eight in the evening, around the time the sun starts doing that weird thing where it goes to the horizon and just sits there for hours on end until it gets bored and decides to finish setting. It was an inconspicuous spot, just another random bit of forest a few miles out of town.
"You're late" a woman's voice said from behind me.
I spun around and aimed my rifle at the voice. A blonde woman in standard Empire mage gear bar the grey cloth mask covering her lower face was standing in the branches of a tree, arms crossed and staring down at me. She must be who I was supposed to meet. I let my rifle fall to be caught by its sling.
"The General bade me not to fly ahead" I responded, "It delayed me by several days."
She grunted in affirmation. I suppose my excuse was good enough.
"Degurechaff, correct?"
I nodded.
"Now that our final member has arrived, we can get on our way."
The colors of her form faded and she blew away like a light mist. I twirled around, looking for anywhere she could have possibly gone.
"Illusion detection is an important skill. You have a lot to learn."
A pulse of foreign mana enveloped me and the illusion broke.
Mages surrounded me on all sides. Four of them including the woman. All in Empire gear and identical facial coverings.
"If you can't detect such a simple spell then you won't survive long. We have a lot of remedial training to do."
AN: Welcome to the bottom!
As I said, meant to have this out on the... 15th or so. That chapter will now be either 10 or 11 depending on how the rest of this bit of writing paces itself. Wanted to have this chunk but it ended up so damn long that it was paced like multiple chapters glued poorly together, figured I would get this first section out and then work on the rest rather than keep delaying the entire thing. Next chapter will either be introductions to the team and their new base by itself with killing and murdering as a back half, or separate chapters depending on how long it runs. I find the longer my chapters go the more I just zone out and vomit crap onto a page so I'm trying to cut my sections at around 2k words each unless its impossible to do so.
Oh, and the team are OC's. Didn't want to bother juggling other characters and as far as I know we don't know many mages names outside the 203rd. What I am trying to do is essentially have actual plot arcs, which the original LN and Anime and stuff dont really have when you remove the Being X shenanigan's.
Think that's about all I had to say, onto the reviews!
Chronolocked: Yeah its always so odd seeing her slaughter people and then be like, "Oh how horrible that I am incredibly skilled at this job I apparently don't want". And when it comes to Being X, it certainly wont exist as it does in Youjo Senki where it mostly exists to fuck with Tanya, it might come into play as a more typical "Ooooh pray to god and get powers" type of thing, but it itself wont be malicious towards her in the same way.
ThatRabidPotato: No clue why I thought it had mountains, lol. And yeah, the war timeline diverges almost immediately. I'm going for more of a solid war with the Baltics before France gets involved the following year. I'll be playing with the idea that France didn't get involved until the Empires strategy shifted from defense and pushing away Legadonia to annexing it fully. Going to have Tanya stick up north through the 23/24 winter and into spring/summer, at which point the Empire gets overzealous and France enters the war. I want her to be more experienced before going west. Plus if I recall there is a bit of an odd time skip where its like, "First I'm in Norden, then I am in the Rhine like... a year later without much setup." that I want to avoid. Some moments like getting the type 95 will be combined with the War College so I dont have her leaving the war behind two times in a three year span.
Gremlin Jack: In my limited research it was shocking how many soldiers in ww1 and ww2 died during embarking/disembarking ships. Turned out people in the early 1900s didn't swim very well at all. And I'm pretty much making her somewhere between a creepy child and a psychopath. She is capable of caring, just doesn't know what to do about it.
Krahe99: thats the goal. Kind of toeing the line between going full psycho and not, because I have another story where the MC is a complete lunatic serial killer, lol.
DisconnectedRealityRR: Japan has plenty of reason in the 20's to dislike the west, and because their was no ww1 Japan didn't get to join the allies side and take all of the central powers pacific holdings. They still have the same issue of no resources and expansionist ideals that led them to being in ww2, but without the stop gap ww1 provided means they will start things earlier. Plus America is too strong to have on the board without getting them sidetracked somehow, so they need a distraction.
Sebasthebutler: thank you!
ReaderOfTheInternet: O=W=O