The Beowulf hurled itself forward. Mud, barbed wire, nor the fallen bodies of its kin could hope to slow it down. Bullets did nothing to it. If it could feel pain, rifle rounds were nothing more to him than insect bites. Nothing mattered - not even his body coming apart could delay him - but that scent right now rushing into his snout. Hot, heavy, and reeking of sweat, the smell of pure undiluted fear reduced his mind into a molten sludge and sent him into a frenzy. Everything in its body demanded more of it. Nothing but death could stop him from seizing his prey and maybe not even then.
It leaped over a ditch filled to the brim with dead Grimm. A Creep next to it triggered a mine and vanished in a flurry of mud and flames. Shrapnel shredded his flank and blinded its right eye. It didn't matter. It only needed one to see the little meat forms frantically and hopelessly trying to stop him. Futile. It was only a few more bounds away. It settled on the one that emanated the most despair. He desperately tried to wield a weapon that refused to obey him. He was young. The youngest always yielded the most fruit.
In the last few seconds, the boy noticed it. The Beowolf saw how his eyes widened and his jaw dropped open in a scream that he would never finish, and rejoiced.
A silver flash. Searing pain. Falling. Suddenly, it was on the ground amongst bullet casings and pools of blood. It couldn't feel anything, even its rage had abandoned it and left only a dull numbness. A pair of black boots stepped into its vision. It tried desperately to snap at it but it couldn't move.
The last thing he heard was one word, "Disgusting," before the world was swallowed up by the dark and all returned to its dark mistress.
Sommel watched the decapitated skull of Beowulf began to crumble into black dust with a certain satisfaction as he ground his boot on it. It was only a shame that it died so fast.
"Eyes," Sommel turned to look at Verdant, now paler than snow and still crouched down on the firestep. "You have the privilege of having two of them unlike me. Use them."
Verdant got up, his legs on the verge of giving out. Death had passed him by mere inches. He grabbed his Galesburg off the firestep and ejected out the jammed round. He even banged the chamber against the ledge to be sure it was clear before he braced his rifle against the parapet. Just like he had practiced. But Brother's sake, he could still barely see anything in the dark. The rest of the Guard now flooding into the trench and firing but be firing blind, he reasoned, nobody could see further than their outstretched hand in no-man's-land in his light.
"Come on boys! The one with the most stripes on their barrels gets a round at Yellowhollow on me!" cried a familiar voice right next to him on the firestep. He started when he realized it was Mostyn, a little more mud-caked and soot-covered than the last time but other than a few cuts and bruises seemed to be intact with even a dirty grin.
He had lugged the Dustmaster autocannon, something that was forty-five kilograms easily without its tripod, without so much as a sweat, and now mounted it against the parapet. He racked the side bolt back and then depressed the trigger, letting loose a terrifying and deafening deluge of lead right into the ranks of the charging Grimm. Every round fired shook Verdant's diaphragm and he saw the devastation they caused, the explosive shells crippling Grimm by creating a massive red crater in their flanks or ripping their bodies asunder.
Mostyn whooped in glee as he swept it side to side, like a great scythe harvesting the empty souls of the foe.
But one Beowulf had snuck and ducked right under the sweeping tracers of Mostyn's autocannon, dodging in between or shrugging off small arms fire that pelted at it. It searched for the brightest and loudest spot on the frontline. With a shrill howl, it spotted Mostyn and charged straight for him.
It was coming up on his blind spot. Only Verdant spotted it at the last moment and managed to struggle off a single shot that thumped deep into its hind thigh and caused it to stumble for several steps before it righted itself again. He was about to fire another shot or call out a warning but he realized there would be no time for either, it was almost on them.
Then a 45mm explosive shell flew into its gaping maw and down its throat. For a moment it stopped, confused, then the delayed charge inside popped it like a pus-infected blister. Gore and debris fell back to the earth in a light drizzle.
"You can thank me later," Arras said dryly as she snapped open the break-action of her grenade launcher and slotted in a new round. She looked a little worse for wear than Mostyn, her right eye was blackened and her lip badly cut open alongside a big purple bruise on the side of her face that did not compliment her already unpleasant expression.
She noticed Verdant staring at her. "Not. A. Word."
He furiously nodded.
And true to his word he never said anything until his dying days.
She lifted her grenade launcher again and with a pneumatic twang spat out another fat round.
"I call this one Mr. Yellow." She muttered, making a grin that exposed a freshly chipped tooth.
The shell detonated in mid-air, and torrential rain of liquid fire cascaded around a wide area and drenched the Grimm mass. It heaved and buckled as Grimm, panicked by the sudden flames, thrashed and trampled to get out of the way. Seemingly immune to most things on Remnant, the fire was one of the things that seemed to still be able to strike at least some hesitation into their black hearts. And humanity excelled in the ways of fire, to say the least.
"We won't be able to hold them," Mostyn yelled as he continued to fire the light autocannon. "With the supply depots back and our rear cut in half, we'll run out of ammo long before they run out of bodies. You know what that means."
"We'll be down to our bayonets and fists," Arras added through gritted teeth. Another shell was thumped out that impacted right into the center of another group.
Verdant felt the blood drain from his face. Even despite having fought this war for as long as they could remember, humanity had never been able to best the Grimm in close-quarter combat. Even in days of yore where men fought with sword and board, they could never come close to beating those beasts of black who possessed hulking crushing mass whose very eyes glowed with malice. In an army made of hundreds of millions, only the grenadiers could hope to stand a chance. And it required an entire squad even to face a single one of their kind.
Only one warrior on Remnant could truly fight them.
The Huntsmen.
But there were none of them here today.
Cut off from support in the middle of the largest Grimm assault in nearly eighty years…
Verdant fired and fired blindly into the dark. His heart was racing. His hands were shaking. His vision was turning blurry. From sweat or tears, he couldn't tell. Were his shots going wide or hitting into the black mass? He had no idea in the darkness. It was just a robotic process of depressing the trigger again and again at anything that moved in front of him.
"This is going to be close," Sommel commented calmly as if this was nothing but a usual day in the Guard. He slammed the cylinder back into the receiver of his revolver and blasted several shots into the mass of charging Grimm, a thrashing mess of black and white crashing up towards them like a tidal wave.
Mostyn was solely focused on his Dustmaster as he continued to make sure that the belt of bullets fed cleanly into the gluttonous machine. A sweep of a barrel and Verdant saw an entire group of Grimm barely a stone's throw from the edge of the trench suddenly disappear in volcanic spurts of mud and body parts. "Doesn't matter if it's close or not," he grunted through gritted teeth as he nursed the massive machine gun, "Just need to make it."
Even despite the hammerfall of lead, the Guard were pouring into the ranks of the Grimm they didn't even seem to be slowing down one bit. The ditches were being filled with their rapidly crumbling corpses, the razor wire tore down with fang and flesh no matter the pain, and the minefield cleared by their own. The one that Sommel had crushed with his boots soon wouldn't be the first to reach their lines tonight.
Verdant was determined not to be the one that just stood around and watched others do his work for him. He was a member of the Guard for Brother's sake! The greatest army to ever march on the surface of Remnant. Their banners covered entire victory avenues and the very march of their feet quaked the earth. So many damn heroes came from their ranks. And Verdant knew he wanted to be one of them. He would be one of them!
Or else he had broken the heart of his mother for no reason.
He gritted his teeth and searched with his barrel for some damn target out in the wastes. He took in deep breaths. Remember your training, he reminded himself, remember what the Drill-Master taught you. Aim. Fire. Kill. Reset.
The Galesburg's iron sights settled on a Creep dragging itself through a bundle of wire illuminated by the fires of a burning hellhole. The razor edges caught on its fur. The razor wire dug deep into its flesh yet it continued to thrash madly in an attempt to escape. Nobody else seemed to have noticed it in their frantic firing. But he did.
Aim.
The recoil jolted hard against his shoulder with a force that surprised him. He re-aligned the sights and cursed when he saw that his shot had gone far wide. It was now struggling and thrashing so hard against the wire that it looked like it was having a grand mal seizure. Verdant held back his breath as he saw strips of its skin begin to slowly tear off its body, tendrils of elastic black meat trying to drag its scalp back but each slowly snapping one by one as it exposed its bone underneath. He swore he could hear its growls and whines over the deafening gunshots and screams. It wasn't in pain because of its wounds. It was in pain because it couldn't kill.
Verdant felt his hands tremble as he brought the rifle back up again, settling his sights square on the head.
Aim. Fire.
The second shot cracked its bone-skull wide open. Something grey spilled out with black fluid now dribbling down the side of its snarling head.
It still wasn't dead. It wasn't dead.
Verdant froze. Everything went numb.
Half its skull was gone. Almost its entire jaw had been torn off. Almost entirely skinned. Everything in natural law screamed at Verdant that it should not be alive. It should not still be raging and trying to escape its prison of wire. Grimm were animals, beasts, unholy creatures of the night that the Guard was meant to vanquish. The natural laws the two brothers set down demanded that it should die. Dust to dust. Ashes to ashes.
It should be dead! He wanted just to shriek. He quickly aimed again, fighting the tremble in his hands that was causing the sights to jump all over the place. It settled on where the heart of the creep should be. Destroy the heart and the creature dies. At least that was what nature demanded of all living things.
Aim. Fire. Kill?
His shoulder snapped back from the recoil. The force nearly knocked him off his feet. Nitrate and sulfur from the wafting gunsmoke burned its way up his nostrils almost forcing tears to his eyes. Blinking he looked at his target. Dead center, a sucking hole in its barrel chest where he had surely rendered its heart into a bleeding mess of tissue.
It shouldn't be dead, he was certain, it had to be.
Yet it wasn't.
It wasn't dead.
Verdant didn't quite know what happened next. All he could register as the world of gunshots and flashing lights disappeared as just the Creep and him, a void of formless black between the both of them. And it was shrinking. And the Creep was coming closer. What was left of its head turned upwards and its remaining eye met his. The eye was a deep red. A deep swirling red from which Verdant suddenly felt a great blast of heat emanating. The heat was damp and suffocating to an unbearable degree as he felt sweat instantly break out across his forehead. It was boring into him, into his flesh. He could feel it, something worming its way into his chest and it ground everything in its path into a paste. It was in his rapidly beating heart about to consume it in its eternal hunger for human flesh.
Verdant thought he screamed. He thought he raised his rifle and started pumping the trigger. He felt his shoulder jerk back and forth. There should have been the roaring sound and the blinding light from his barrel.
But he heard nothing save the drum-beat of the gunshots and saw the muted flashes like a dying flashlight.
He could only recall later that he had been screaming the entire time.
Aim. Fire.
Aim? Fire.
Fire.
Fire.
Fire.
Fire.
Fire.
A/n: Hey sorry for taking so long to get Chapter 7 out. With recent happenings I've had trouble honestly finding the motivation to continue this fic and for almost a year I didn't touch the keyboard to update it. But with the recent publishing of the new show I found myself drawn back to the fandom with a desire to write. I really hope that I didn't keep you folks waiting too long and I hope you can give me some feedback so I can work out the fact I'm a little bit rusty for not writing since what feels like forever.