The coolest part about being a magical girl? Well… I guess the coolest part is how I can get shot in the gut, lose half my internal organs, and still crush a squid's head with one hand.
-Captain Isabel Inouye, A Company, 22nd Regiment, 6th Magical Division , 1st Army Group of the Mekong
It's always really odd fighting with a magical girl on the battlenet. If you're lucky, they're at least twenty and know what they're doing, but they still sound like they've just started puberty.
-Sergeant Rebecca Smith, 3rd Platoon, D Company, 8th Regiment, 2nd Magical Division, 3rd Army Group of the Yangtze
Emma's good mood persisted until she reached a point one hundred meters distant from Cluster 14. Emma came to an abrupt halt as a line in the sand appeared in front of her.
It was a series of bodies, sprayed backwards as if tossed by some immense hand.
Emma's breath hitched as she saw the unit insignia. They were all members of Third Platoon.
By now Emma's limbs were recovered enough for her to run forward and slide to her knees in the mud, double checking that yes, it was her command that lay there.
"Oh no," Emma whispered. Behind her, she realized, were the planting posts of a field deployable ablative fortification. They had been twisted and warped by an explosion, probably a suicide drone or missile. The ruined wreck of an IFV was nearby, slewed to the right to provide cover. Emma could see more bodies behind it.
Goddess, it had been a slaughter.
Emma walked forward slowly, now finding squid dead lying here and there, punched through with holes. They were greatly outnumbered by human bodies, mixed between the 24th Regiment's remnants and Emma's platoon.
From the way the IFVs were positioned, Ingrid had evidently tried to hold the line here, to buy the remainder of the division time to pull back. In her mind's eye, Emma watched the vehicles flying forward, spitting autocannon and being met with a barrage of missile fire. Those that survived the impact disgorged their compliment of troops and began to rain fire on the enemy, but….
Emma paused and kicked over one of the squid dead. The rear shoulder plate was emblazoned with a familiar symbol.
Shock Troopers.
Emma grit her teeth and closed her eyes tightly. It had taken her and Rene nearly to exhaustion to fight off three squad's worth of Shock Troopers in the last sim she'd been in. Heavy armor and energy shields made each of the squid's elite assault troops equivalent to a small tank.
For the first time since she had contracted, the cold weight of guilt settled into Emma's stomach.
They had needed her. They had needed her firepower. She was the most effective distraction in the company, an AOE fighter that could suppress half a kilometer of infantry if she so wished. She shouldn't have tallied in the battlefield. She should have withdrawn as quickly as possible. If she hadn't— if she had just—
A deep, stilling breath. No. No. She… she had screwed up. She had screwed up very, very badly. But she would get through this. It was… it was just like in football. If you made a bad call, you rolled with the consequences and learned from them. She could not let her mind go down the rabbit hole. To do so would make her fade from regret and guilt. Poor repayment for the blood shed by Third Platoon and the 24th Regiment.
There was nothing more to do but keep walking.
Emma counted three lines of resistance before she got to the Cluster proper. Each was strewn with dead, the last of a desperate gamble to distract and buy time. From the looks of it, the action had done its job. The wide planted steps of a cephalopod heavy tank, converted for the slushy earth, tramped past her as she walked. Blast craters of baked earth, rendered back into mud by the rain, scattered across the front of the hills.
Emma paused beside the hulk of one of the tanks. Its form was immense, taking up three times as much space as Emma's apartment on Earth. The rear of the tank fountained outwards as if something had burst out of it. Emma looked through to the fist sized hole in the front. Such was the effect of an anti-tank railgun.
Other weapons had been employed to startling effect. Here, a tank lay gutted by a powerful hand-held laser system. There, mines and rockets had blasted another to oblivion. The face of the hill was ashen from lasers and high explosives. Team B-4's position had been… over there, to her right.
Emma hovered indecisively beside the shattered tank. Morbid curiosity pushed her towards B-4's assigned emplacement. Intellectually though, she knew they had to be dead. The sheer carnage she had seen bode poorly for anyone. And avoiding people she knew would dull the guilt.
A beat. The rain pattered on the alloy of the tank. More explosions, from the continuing attack on Helsinberg, rumbled in form the distance.
With a sigh, Emma turned right.
The walk towards Team B-4's assigned position was difficult.
Emma nearly turned back twice and dragged her feet the whole way. She desperately needed to see what had happened to the effusive team, but dreaded what she would find. Logic pulled her one way, emotion pulled her the other. It was like walking on razor wire. It didn't matter how or where she walked, because the wire would still cut her feet.
The question was whether or not emotional suppression would kick in, Emma mused. Sometimes, it didn't work for a girl, but sometimes it managed to to prevent them from burning their gem. It was an unanticipated problem that they were apparently working on in the Prometheus and Zeus Institutes. Maybe Ayumi could tell her more.
Emma paused at a shattered IFV, picking through its remnants for… something. Maybe something could be picked out of the wreckage. She did know that the communications hub was at the front of the vehicle. Perhaps, if it was undamaged, she could find something useful. Besides, it was always better to be prepared, right?
The interior of the IFV was scorched with fire, the occupants having bailed out cleanly but their equipment destroyed. From the looks of it, this had once been an LMG team's vehicle. Emma found no serviceable weaponry as she picked through the wreckage. The comm-hub was scalded and warped, shut and rendered un-openable by the fire.
There was a screaming of metal-on-metal as Emma shoved the blade of her halberd into the side and pushed. With a snap, the access panel popped off, bouncing with a loud clang into the opposite wall. Emma banished her weapon and waited, listening in case anything had heard.
All clear.
She looked inside the comm-hub. The interior was dark and shadowy, even for implant-mediated vision. Emma took the soul gem decoy out of her hair and placed it inside for light.
"Oh, that's fantastic," she breathed, delighted at her find. The comms-hub was burnt and scorched near the access panel, the heat penetrating through the metal and insulation. However, the interior, where the more important equipment was stored, was relatively intact. Carefully, Emma reached in and pulled out an almost-pristine data transmitter, it's interface ports entirely functional.
That was the most important part. Emma's TacComp and implants were definitely malfunctioning, probably as a result of her body's catatonic state earlier. She wasn't sure if they were physically broken, or if they had merely shutdown and never rebooted. But with the vastness of software installed on these transmitters, maintenance was easiest conducted via VR linkup. This worked both ways, and Emma would be able to self-diagnostic if she could find VR cables to link with the transmitter.
The most likely place to find that would be in her command bunker.
Emma placed her prize into her backpack and took a deep breath. There was no longer any reason for her to delay. Working implants and the ability to feed and obtain data were a top priority, especially if the increasing frequency of explosions in the distance was anything to go by. She needed to move on, quickly, and get herself back to full capacity.
Apprehensively, Emma set off at a jog towards Team B-4's position.
Somehow, the position Team B-4 had occupied was almost completely unblemished. Emma took this as a good sign. Her visit earlier had been at the staging area, at the base of the hill. Here, at the top, B-4 had occupied a pillbox overlooking the plain below. The pillbox was accessed from the staging area via a sheltered stairwell, with branching offshoots that went into power generators, water and food supply, and a dry latrine.
Apart from a few chips of missing concrete here and there, the pillbox had apparently been overlooked. Emma shimmied herself in through the opening. The floor was littered with discarded missile tubes and powerpacks. Emma let her spirits rise a bit. It seemed impossible for the pillbox to have gone unnoticed, but the room was clean of ammunition, implying that whoever had been here had retreated under their own power.
A short hall way went out and to her right. The steps were a little steep, but Emma was feeling a lot better from when she'd first woken up. The small generator was offline, clearly blown up with a sabotaging charge. A few spent power packs were there too. B-4 had probably paused to perform maintenance.
Emma continued descending. She paused at food and water storage and stuffed as many packaged rations as she could fit into her backpack. Technically outdated, the rations were still produced for cases of emergency. The squid never ate them unless they were trapped, which was a rare enough occurrence.
Emma also clipped a water bottle onto the side of her pack. She could fill it later when she finished the bottle. Emma's modified digestive system could handle impurities and toxins in the water, though it would be best for her tastebuds if she could find a relatively clean source to refill it.
Overall, though, it seemed like B-4 had managed a clean getaway.
Further down the steps. Emma found the first evidence of a casualty: a discarded pauldron. It was inscribed with "Magnusson", and had a wide patch burnt out of the bottom corner. Magnusson had been hit then. Perhaps a sniper, at extreme range? They had waited till here to treat him for some reason. Or maybe the sniper had been what pushed them out?
Emma wasn't sure. There wasn't enough information. She continued down the steps, glad to be out of the rain for a bit, though she'd be back in it soon enough.
The bottom of the steps led to a barred, alloy door. It was locked from the inside, and frozen shut due to the lack of power. Unless she blasted the door open, Emma wasn't going to get out this way.
Well, maybe, if she…. Emma pried open the security system's casing where it was mounted on the wall. A bit of fiddling with the wires, and she had her data transmitter wired in. There was just enough power stored in the transmitter's capacitors, used for high power transmissions and as backup power to the device, to activate the security system.
With a beep, the door opened. Emma grinned. Her implants were working then. She let the transmitter hang from the wires, they'd be fine for a bit, and went to wedge her halberd into the door mechanism. As soon as the wires were unplugged, the door would try to close. Her halberd should delay it long enough for her to jump through.
Emma took a deep breath and counted from three. As soon as she reached one, she powered the transmitter off and yanked the wires out. Her halberd shrieked as it gouged into the door frame, but did its job. Emma was through to the other side and into the rain easily, the door slamming shut behind her as she dismissed the halberd.
Emma now stood in the staging area, once again being soaked. She blew a strand of hair from her mouth and contemplated the area. To the side were tire tracks. Another good sign. Emma put the transmitter back into her backpack and kept walking, following the tracks. If they led out and around the hills, towards the rearward lines, then maybe…?
Her heart stuttered. The tracks first curved outwards, but then quickly curved back in and headed towards the command bunker. Emma followed the path with increasing trepidation. Here, now, she found corpses. Surprisingly, few of them were human. Most of them were cephalopod, and many wore the insignia unique to the Shock Troopers. Huge holes gaped in their torsos.
Ah. Anti-armor. B-4 must have realized Ingrid was in distress and come to her aid. Emma couldn't remember exactly what B-4 was loaded out with, but she was willing to bet they'd had the same sort of explosive flechettes she did.
Emma paused to look over the shallow valley formed by the cluster's peaks. It seemed like this trail of dead was the only real evidence of humans doing much of any damage. The rest of the position seemed either abandoned or—
The rest of her thought went uncompleted as she saw a pair of IFVs parked in front of the command bunker. Or rather, the remains of two. One them had bodies lying around it. With a sinking heart, Emma broke out into a run. There were few teams she had ended up knowing well, but—
Oh no.
Emma dropped to her knees besides Magnusson's mangled corpse. The body had been blasted to pieces by, it looked like a shotgun. Melon sized chunks were missing, the only identifier the strip on the new pauldron. Emma felt a her heart seize painfully. She hadn't known him very long, but Magnusson had been the friendliest soldier she'd met in her short career.
Was this what it would be like forever? Would she always feel this way about the people under her command? It wasn't clear which scared her more, the prospect of feeling this pain again, or the prospect of becoming dulled to it.
Emma carefully unclasped Magnusson's helmet. His eyes were wide and staring, glazed over with death. The rain wet them as she stared. They appeared to glimmer with tears, the water spilling down across his face. Emma solemnly reached out and pinched the eyelids shut, before pulling Magnusson's ID Chip from its slot in the collar of his armor and placing it in a pocket of her backpack. These weren't always recoverable. Each one was valuable.
Emma worked her way around the IFV. Shun and Reynolds lay behind the vehicle. Shun had been the victim of a sniper, his entire head and neck vaporized, the ID chip burnt away. Reynolds was in better shape, his body merely shot once and his neck snapped. A sidearm was clutched in his hand.
Eyes stinging, Emma placed Reynolds' ID Chip into her backpack, then turned to the entrance of the command bunker. The door had been blown away.
The inside was an abattoir.
Bodies were stacked up like firewood. At the end, a spray of black soot and the remnants of a tripod revealed that one of the heavy weapons fire teams had pulled back with the command team, laying down murderous suppressive fire until their ammunition had run dry. Emma could see empty crates from where she picked her way through the piled cephalopod dead. Without suppressive fire, one of the squid must have gotten a missile shot in.
She hadn't known the heavy weapons teams very well, and she suddenly regretted it. Seeing B-4 dead was like being stabbed in the chest, but it seemed… disrespectful to have never gotten to known someone in life. Emma could only bow solemnly at the incinerated bodies in the atrium, thanking them for their service.
The door to the operations room had been blown off as well. Emma felt a sense of deja vu as she stepped inside. The tables, heavy and armored, were the only main difference. They had been placed into a rough barricade across the hallway to the electronics room. A single squid, its head lolling at an impossible angle, lay in front. Off to the left, Ingrid's consoles had been riddled with shrapnel, but were otherwise intact. There, to the left, had been where Beckett and Han had waited while Emma paced.
Emma shut her eyes. Tears squeezed their way out anyway. There was no way this ended well.
Just over the barriers, Emma found Han. Her helmet has been blown away from a close range shotgun blast. This hadn't killed her. A hole blasted through her abdomen, wide enough for Emma to climb through, had done that. She had died with a twisted grimace of rage on her face.
Emma wasn't sure if the Goddess did anything for non-contracted, but she hoped that She did. Nobody should die like this.
With a shuddering sigh, Emma climbed over the barrier, taking care not to step on Han's body. The ten feet to the electronics room felt like ten thousand miles. Emma had to consciously force herself to walk forward. The hallway turned sharply left.
Emma stepped into the shattered remnants of the electronics room.
…It had been an expected end. Emma felt like she had been punched in the gut anyway. Slowly, she sank to her knees. Everyone… everyone was dead. Beckett lay, hacked open by a bayonet. The squid who had killed him was sprawled across Beckett, gaping hole in its torso belying how Beckett had managed to run the squid through as he died. The members of Team C-4 were scattered across the floor, blown apart by explosives or by close range shotgun bursts.
The cephalopod dead were few, but notable. Where a soldier had managed to close to CQC, armor-mounted melee and explosive weapons had done their job. Here was a squid's limb, hacked cleanly off, its owner's remains strewn across the console behind it from a small rocket burying itself in the chest cavity, then exploding. Over there, a cephalopod was cleanly beheaded, and another one was blackened from electrical discharge.
It had… it had been a fitting end. Somehow, Third Platoon had put up a strong enough fight to draw the attention of the cephalopod attack. Somehow, in the face of overwhelming odds, in the face of a platoon of tanks bearing down on them, they had managed to wound the enemy advance.
In a corner of the room was Ingrid. She had died just like all the others, body riddled with shrapnel from a grenade. Emma pulled herself to her feet and went to each of the bodies to collect ID chips, making her way towards the Warrant Officer.
Emma sat down heavily beside Ingrid's body. The ID chips were a pastel blue. It was supposed to be symbolic, somehow, but Emma didn't remember why. She deposited the chips into her backpack.
Guilt and shame crashed over her. It… it wasn't supposed to end like this. Not for Third Platoon. They had deserved better. They deserved to have their old commander, back before they had been pulled away to deploy in Samsara. They didn't deserve… her. A green, newbie magical girl who didn't know what she was doing and was to arrogant to realize she was screwing up.
"I'm sorry," Emma whispered. Only ghosts heard her.
Listlessly, Emma fished her soul gem out and stared at it. It was heavily clouded, barely giving any light and getting dimmer by the second. With a snort, Emma let it drop with a clink, then sagged sideways.
What was it she had said earlier? "Learn and move forward"? What a joke. What hope did she have to accomplish anything? This was the merest sentimentality, a child's prayer to a Goddess of dubious existence. Who would look out for a failure like her?
Slowly, Emma slipped to the floor, tears tracking down her face as she curled in on herself. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut, shutting out what little she could see in the dim light of her soul gem decoys.
The only sound was that of her breathing.
It was wet.
An immense pressure pushed against her. Emma tried to breath. All she inhaled was water.
Choking, Emma sank into infinite blackness.