Chapter 17: SECO

Alnus Settlement

When put together, the combined armament of Alnus Settlement's MPs and Carol's group amounted to two rifles, two shotguns, eighteen handguns, and four Toyota High Mobility Vehicles. No grenades, no missile launchers, and no access to air support.

As a result, Carol felt more like she was watching a police barricade than a military fortification while she watched Takagi, two USAF guards, and nineteen Japanese MPs take up positions behind the trucks. From her spot on the second floor of a building overlooking the position, Carol knew in her gut that if the approaching enemy reached the barricade, it would end poorly for the defenders.

The monster finally came to a halt thirty meters from the barricade. In the dim light of the path between the settlement and the base, Carol could just barely make out the shape of what looked like a giant spider, which halted and seemed to observe them with gleaming black eyes. Beside Carol, Greta shrank away from the window. "That's Xeronth of the Abyss," the girl said. "I've… I've heard stories… the second Emperor once sent fifty knights to kill it, and the only one that escaped died of his wounds after telling the tale."

There was a hissing noise from the spider as it rose onto its hind legs, then it threw itself forward, spraying a fine liquid at the barricades. Schumer was one of the ones hit, and he toppled over backwards, swatting at what was now clearly acid as it burned into the side of his face. "FIRE!" Takagi screamed, and the men at the barricades let loose with a volley of bullets.

At thirty meters, the handguns and shotguns were only so effective, and even then, the spider raced out of the way and fired a second spray.

How many clips do the MPs have? Carol wondered. It couldn't be much, and when they ran out, the spider would have them all.

What they needed was some real firepower. What they needed was—

BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

The spider disappeared under a barrage of 7.62x51mm NATO rounds that, in a fraction of a second, had chewed up the monster and everything around it in a five-meter radius. A buzz and a roar later, and the site was swept up in the downwash of a US Air Force Pave Hawk which orbited once, giving the door gunner on the GAU-17/A time to survey the scene, then settled down in the open space before the barricade. One of the airmen aboard rushed off and over to Schumer, prompting Foster to look up from his position and wave Carol down.

As he stabilized the Technical Sergeant, the airmen introduced himself to Carol as Master Sergeant Jones, Pararescue, and added, "I'm the one who smacked you in the head a few nights back. Sorry about that, ma'am."

"You also saved us tonight, so we'll call it even," Carol said.

"Good. I don't know what this guy got sprayed with, but I don't usually carry antitoxins. Mullan wants your whole group back on base, and I need to get Schumer to a field hospital. Carol, Greta, Specialist Takagi, keep down and follow my lead. Foster, help me out with this!"

The skies above Alnus

The 4th Combat Group response team was composed of two dozen helicopters: six Cobras, ten Hueys, and eight Chinooks, all of which opened fire in deadly concert, bathing Giselle's forces below in the hellish orange light of tracer fire and missile explosions.

From his seat in the lead Huey, Colonel Kengun scowled down at the field of battle. Ishihara was a decent commander, but it was clear that the 5th Combat Group had failed to regain the initiative, and ultimately it had been the Americans that had taken up the slack. That much had been clear from the moment that he had heard the southern drawl of the USAF Combat Controller on the airwaves.

That did not matter now. His soldiers and pilots crushed whole armies at Italica and Sadera, had struck the killing blow to the dragons at Mt. Tube, and would win again here. The Colonel picked up his radio set and called out to his counterpart on the ground. "Ishihara, mind sending me a worthy target or two?"

"The golems are resistant to tank rounds, and if you have any ideas for the lava monster, I'll take them!"

Kengun grinned and keyed the frequency for a specific helicopter. "Lieutenant," he called. "I have some targets for your little blue friend."

One of the chinooks skated into position and opened its rear hatch. From within, Lelei la Leleina brandished her magic staff. There was a blinding glow, and a lance of energy rammed into one of the golems below, fracturing it into pieces.

With the pressure diverted, the surviving helicopters of the 5th, the American HH-60Gs, and the pair of F-4 Phantoms turned their weapons on every valid target South of Alnus. Together, the combined might of the JSDF and USAF cut a path of steel and fire through Hardy's army.

The Second Battle of Alnus Hill ended twenty minutes later as the last enemy, the lava monster, was forced back into the ground by magical water jets from Lelei and a pair of JASDF P-15 Oshkosh fire trucks.

Two hundred meters outside of Alnus

As the Humvee took Mullan through the South part of the base, he couldn't believe the chaos around him.

JSDF medics and USAF pararescuemen tended to the injured, and there seemed to be a lot of them. Some were being loaded into military ambulances and rushed back to the far side of the Gate, others were being stabilized in place. Some, Mullan noted, had been covered in a sheet or tarp, acknowledging that there was no longer anything left to rush.

Beyond the walls was even worse. The twisted and broken bodies of an array of monsters littered the field, ranging from plastered ants to crumbled golems. Off to the west, he could see the mangled corpse of the Ice Dragon, where a small group of JSDF soldiers had gathered to take a picture.

He had seen pictures of the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the violence there had never been quite so… dense? In a world of precision-guided bombs and localized firefights, the way that the dead and the damaged seemed to pile up in clear sight, yet litter the entire field, was like something out of Cold War Korea, or a WWII beachhead. It was a different kind of fighting, one usually associated with old Soviet styles: if you cannot bury your enemy with bullets, burry them with bodies.

The Humvee whisked him partway across the field to where a collection of vehicles made a tight circle about a tank. As they pulled up, Mullan could hear shrill sobbing coming from the middle of the group.

Inside, Mullan found Hazama, leaning stoically against one of the Toyota HMVs as he smoked a cigarette and stared at the tank across from him. The Type 74 tank looked like it had bulldozed its way through a Texas slaughterhouse, seeing as the front of the vehicle was covered in a drying sheet of gore, and the main gun was bent, as if a second tank had been dropped on it earlier that night. Its crew sat atop it, seemingly deaf to the cries coming from below.

A woman appeared trapped under the left tank tread, both legs completely crushed and the upward slope of the returning track pinning her hips into place. From the headlights of the other vehicles, Mullan could see that her once-fine white dress and blue-skinned face were as splattered with blood as the vehicle she was pinned beneath. She let out another groan as she tried to pick her upper body up to see the new arrival, but ultimately collapsed, either out of exhaustion or pain.

"Colonel!" Hazama said, approaching Mullan with a polite grin. "I would like to introduce you to Ms. Giselle, the Apostle of Hardy and leader of the foul army that attacked us tonight."

"You'll pay for this!" Giselle shouted up at them, "Slanderers of the gods, degenerates! A miserable fate awaits all who oppose Hardy's—ahhh!"

She winced and collapsed again. "I know that Apostles regenerate quickly, but is this really necessary?" Mullan asked. "Can't we lock her up somewhere?"

Hazama said a few words to the tank crew. One of the crew members replied, prompting the other three to smirk at the comment. "Tank Commander Nakano says that it serves her right for commanding a golem to damage his gun," Hazama translated. "He also says that he regrets that it only took five attempts to pin her this way—apparently, the other ways allowed her to tear loose or did not permit her to speak."

"Do you plan on doing anything with her?" Mullan asked.

"Not I, no. My superior, General Nomura, will decide if it's better to hold onto her, and where to keep her if we decide to do that."

A lower-ranking officer approached Hazama with a clipboard and offered it to him, causing Hazama to stop and his smile to fade. Mullan shifted around behind the General and glanced over his shoulder at the notes. He had never been handed one of these himself, but the format was familiar.

K.I.A. 71

D.O.W. 8

W.I.A. 53

Mullan had poked through recent Japanese military history before the deployment through the Gate and, ultimately, found that the JSDF had been in precisely one firefight between the end of WWII, and the beginning of operations at Alnus. In other words, Japan hadn't lost a single man to enemy action since 1945.

"Nana-ju-kyu," Hazama said, his voice barely a whisper. Seventy-nine.

Realizing what was going on, Giselle began to laugh. "A pittance!" she roared. "And that's nothing, for there's more to come! More of your men will die, General, and this time, we will seize your base, and the city beyond the Gate if we must! We shall fulfill Hardy's demands and close the Gate, no matter what it takes!"

Hazama lowered the clipboard and crouched down next to the Apostle. "What do you mean?" he said.

"What you saw was merely the first wave," Giselle chortled. "One of twelve, and the smallest at that. The next arrives in an hour, you should flee while you still live."

The General stood and heaved a deep breath. Mullan could see the lines in his face the weariness, as the greying soldier slowly looked over to him. The Colonel could see the pain there… and a cold fire starting to burn.

Don't you dare! Mullan thought, and exclaimed, "Let me contact Okinawa! The 31st MEU is ready to go, and has been waiting for the order to deploy since the Ginza incident."

"There won't be enough time," Hazama hissed.

"Then let me call—"

"One hour, Colonel, Mullan. One. You know what must be done."

"But a city full of civilians—"

"I DON'TCARE!" Hazama roared. "It's not your country, Mullan. Would you allow another September 11? I will not permit another Ginza, and I will NOT permit Hardy to touch another of my men. Councilwoman Kouhara wanted decisive action? She will have it!"

The General strode over to his waiting HMV and stated, "I suggest that you get to your launch platform, Colonel. You should be receiving a call shortly."

Outside the Alnus FOB Field Hospital

Foster's eyes widened and he raced over to Carol, who was comforting Greta outside of the medical center. "It's Mullan," he told her, handing over his radio set. "He says it's urgent."

Carol gave him a confused look and keyed the radio. "Yes, Colonel?" she said.

"Per our agreed upon policy," Mullan said. "I'm letting you know that there will be a rocket launching in one hour."

The woman was on her feet instantly, gripping the handset tightly as she replied, "What!? But there's over a hundred thousand—"

"I know about the fucking civilians," Mullan spat. "Hazama's convinced that more waves from Hardy are on the way, and that her end target is the Gate and Tokyo. Giselle says that Hardy's plan is to close the Gate, and the fact that Hazama refused was why they attacked to begin with. Regardless, my superiors will likely assume that Hardy's influence on Earth's skies makes the US a potential target. They will order me to launch."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because you're the one person here not under orders, and you're a scientist. If you have a good scientific way to achieve an identical effect against Hardy without slaughtering a city's worth of families, or a valid reason as to why this attack won't work, I need to know now."

But I'm a rocket scientist, she thought, not an intelligence officer or a weapons engineer.

"I don't know!" Carol cried, lifting a palm to her forehead, "I know as much as you do!"

A pause, then, Mullan, his voice grave, said, "Heaven help us both."

Carol let the handset fall from her hands and dropped to the dirt. Greta rushed to her side, begging to know what was wrong.

"Something awful is about to happen, and I don't know what to do," Carol said, her voice low and on the verge of tears. All that knowledge on space, on astronomy, all of it was functionally useless here. Mullan had depended on her for a way out, and now a hundred thousand innocents in Bellnahgo were going to die. "I'm—I'm sorry, Greta, I—"

But Greta placed a hand on her mouth to stop her, then turned the scientist in place before getting down on her knees next to her. She placed her hands together and asked Carol, "Do you remember the words?"

And that was when Carol noticed that they were facing into the wind. "We're going to pray?" she asked.

Greta cocked her head. "In your world, isn't it what you do when you can't do anything else?"

The statement wasn't false, but Carol had never done anything like this before. Not to this degree. Not since she was very, very young. She placed her hands together and closed her eyes.

"Goddess of Study, La, the one that dwells"

And here I am, praying to a god of Falmart, just as Mullan is about to go nuke one, Carol thought, I must be going insane.

"Between all words and speech and life that's shown,"

Who am I even talking to, anyway. Hardy might listen to these things, but does La? What if La's on Hardy's side? What if she's not and wants to see Hardy die as much as Hazama does?

"Who grants the means to let us drive away"

Why must all of Falmart be so militant? Didn't the Japanese come here to end all that? Or are we all here to add our own flavor of bloodshed.

"The shrouds which swathe the sum of what is known."

Were it so easy… but if someone was going to show me what to do, they would have appeared by now, wouldn't they? What if there's nothing else to learn? What if blowing up Bellnahgo is the only option?

"I thank thee for thy studying technique"

People are about to die, and I'm PRAYING.

"And granting me the knowledge which I earn."

If only the lecture at the Pentagon had covered 'How to stop a nuclear war' instead of Unstable. SR-Phizons. What a waste of time.

"Open my mind to those who wish to teach,"

And now it's all for nothing. Greta was an adorable lecturer too. I would have liked to have seen her present the mapping results. Such a shame about the Sakura satellite.

Carol stopped, the last word becoming stuck in her head. Satellite. The satellite. The satellite that exploded when it hit the distortion in the sky.

"And show me ways to grow—"

"OH SHIT!" Carol leapt to her feet. "The satellite exploded first."

Now she had caught Takagi's attention. The JSDF specialist walked up to her and responded with a classic Japanese "Ehhhhhh?"

The satellite exploded first, before the alarms had gone off and Giselle announced her intention to attack. There hadn't been any reason to destroy the satellite yet. For that matter, the distortions had been noticed by Flat and Shirai long before there had been any satellite to destroy, or any space program in the Special Region that could launch one.

This opened an interesting possibility: What if the distortions were NOT caused by Hardy?

Yet, that went completely against Yanagida's dossier on the trip to Bellnahgo. If the report's claims on the space distortions were untrue, then what if the rest of the report was wrong? What if they had mischaracterized the whole attack? What if the nuke didn't solve the problem? What if they were about to kill a hundred thousand people over nothing?

Only one person knew for sure. Only one person had reported to Yanagida in the first place.

Only one person could help her now.

Carol faced Takagi and said, "Where is Itami Youji?"

Author's Note:

Based on the response for prior chapters, my current plan is to release Chapters 18 and 19 at the same time. This means that it may take a little longer for both, but as a result you will get the full climax all at once.