"I hate to do this, I hope you understand."

Reciting a couple of self-defence lessons from ages ago, I swiftly brought my knee to my assailant's stomach, before twisting my elbow and impacting her chest, aiming for her solar plexus. Clearly I couldn't see very well after being blinded, because she didn't collapse from being winded, so to finish the job, I quickly kicked my right leg across both of hers, sending her face into the dirt. Then, I hastily kicked away her flashlight, and ran for it.

I was never one to hurt a girl, but after her friends came rushing over, some of them guys, I knew it was time to leave.

I'd travelled a long way from my vehicle, though it would be better if we were near. Their command tank was in a very vulnerable spot right now, vulnerable enough that engaging it would not be a bad move, especially since it's the command vehicle. That being my intent, I let my legs carry me as quick as the wind, flying a good few hundred metres before almost literally diving once more into the commander's cupola, the tank hidden in a very sharp ditch.

"Fire them up, time to prove ourselves!"

My driver, Dennis, immediately set the engine ablaze. I felt the reverberation of the roar and rumble in my fingertips as I clutched the edges of my cupola, before a great kick of acceleration sent us forwards. Usually, we weren't a tank to even head towards engagement, let alone fight, but the quicker we moved, the more likely we could win the match with a quick duel right here and now.

When David and Oliver decided that I would head south of the encirclement and roam around the forest on foot, I thought that assignment was swell. I'd be able to see all kinds of creatures on my own without being disturbed, since it was the forest. And I did see and document all kinds of findings to be published later, certainly.

But the biggest find was just now. I never would have thought that the enemy command vehicle would be hiding out here, covered head to toe in bushes and green paint, with all their equipment outside the vehicle, and a small heated gas stove boiling water next to it.

Hastily, I yelled at my loader to check the radio, and make sure my message would go straight to command. Even though really this radio was the wrong radio for the tank, we managed to cram a No.19 set in here. It was on the A set.

"Ollie, David, command M14/41 spotted. Just in the trees here unprotected, crew outside the tank but alerted. If we move fast, we can take them out."

Not caring for radio discipline, I said the situation as was. I already knew they'd give the kill order, so I yelled at Dennis to boot it, as he quickly continually shifted the gears, and I bellowed directions.

I rubbed my eyes and looked hard. My gaze had to be strong to pierce every tree, bush, leaf, branch, and all other elements of foliage to see even just a glimpse of light. I was of course out of the vehicle so I could see, the visibility this Cruiser was given is horrendous, with commander viewports only to the front and back. What was in reality probably only a good minute as we steered out and around the ditch in the forest felt like an age, people would probably have thought me mental and mad if they saw my frantic eyes darting across the forest.

Of course, within no real time at all did I find the enemy. The lighting they provided was quite adequate to see, even if they were in the midst of putting it out. Ahead of me, around 250 metres away in the forest, was the foe. Getting towards them to a point where my gunner could have a good shot though would be a tricky task, as woodlands were remarkably difficult for armour to navigate.

My gunner also told me no shot. Figures.

"Dennis, get me point blank, within spitting distance of that bushed up box. I want a perfect single shot on that thing."

Dennis, always quick with the sticks, hastily drove us directly towards the command vehicle, swerving amongst the trees and drifting the vehicle in ways that I wasn't even sure were possible. Even if we faced it from the front, we would be able to destroy it with one shot. I was confident. I knew only the basics of tanks, just enough to be able to identify them, but what I saw did not look like peak military technology and more like something cooked up by some underfunded war department on a low embezzled budget.

Though, to their credit, they did manage to pack up all that equipment in an insane amount of time. By the time we were around 100 metres away, with still quite the amount of trees and foliage obscuring a good shot (consider that the gunsight placement on the vehicle made forest combat almost impossible), the hatches on the enemy tank all began to close. The light was gone by now, but we had all grown accustomed to the dark by this point, and were also close enough that we could make out the irregular shape of the tank.

The exhaust of the foe began to flare up, with smoke puffing all the way out, as it began to move. The repercussions of their hasty movement however, left a lot of the foliage on their tank, having moved significantly, and by the time they began to accelerate, it all fell off and onto the forest floor. My gunner shouted visual confirmation, but still no shot. We needed to get closer.

By this time, they also knew roughly where we were, and turned to face us. Did I actually want a stand up engagement? Our vehicle had very little combat training, with all crew members being specifically geared up for pure reconnaissance. We didn't often fight, since our gun was not the most combat-capable. But in this situation, we had no choice but to fight.

However, whilst we continued to drive forwards, it seemed that we still did not encounter them. Did they actually turn away and drive away from us? I couldn't hear their engine due to how loud ours was, and the smoke from their initial acceleration overcoming inertia was long gone too. The tall tank disappeared amongst the trees and just vanished.

Maybe they went to our left, or our right, or maybe they just moved a little, or into some defensive foxhole they dug. But no matter where I looked, no matter how much foliage my gaze pierced, I could not make out the shape of any sort of vehicle.

Even as my loader fired tracer into the wood, I could not make out the shape of any target with the illumination. Argh, bad idea, now they knew where we were. Hastily, our turret turned to fire in a different direction, then another, and another, but we couldn't see them. It looked like they might have pulled a fast one on us.

Then the sky was set ablaze.

A great ball of (for only a second) blinding light appeared followed by the sound of cracking only seconds later. The world around me lit up. The forests turned from the darkest of blacks, to the lightest of greens highlighted by the white and yellow flash of the light above me.

A flare had been fired, though it was unclear who fired it. For a moment, I looked up into the sky, just above and to my right where the star had just burst into view. It was also somewhat behind me, as I generally contorted my body to take a squinting look at it, though not by much as our turret made an almost right angle to the tank's starboard. Effectively, the flare had lit up far behind our tank. Looked like it was from the hill where the heavies had been taken out. Those heavies might have lit it, unless David's raid was successful.

I actually had no idea what happened the past few hours, being away from my tank and all. Yeah I carried my microphone with me, but I just did reporting. I could not afford to have the headset get captured and let the enemy listen into communications. But I would assume that Oliver managed to bait the heavies and David managed to take their position by storm. Or maybe that didn't happen, and a great set of light was needed in order to be able to storm it? Perhaps that was why an entirely new set of gunfire had erupted?

Just as these questions raced through my head though, my eyes naturally drew closer and closer to the ground, before I was given perhaps the greatest heart attack of my life.

"DENNIS! RIGHT! HARD FUCKING RIGHT!"

A shell whizzed past the turret, decapitating the tree behind me. A large thud accompanied by the rustling of leaves followed, as the head of the tree collided with another, sending various branches of various kinds to the ground. With our vehicle having made such an evasive manoeuvre, we also ended up smacking into a tree, and shaking off all the rain from the midday from the leaves, with much of it landing directly on me. That cold wet sensation probably was what really woke me back up after the hypnotic effects of the flare. That, paired with the sudden shock of seeing the 47mm wide end of a gun barrel pointed at me, and the horrible sensation of a collision with a tree shaking my body violently, certainly made me realise that this fight was not so easy to take anymore. We drove past them.

"PUT THE GUN ON THEM! FIRE!"

Our own dinky little pop gun let out a whimpering bang, with a small flash and a small amount of smoke. The shot naturally flew straight into a tree which couldn't have been predicted by my gunner, looking at the target from their sights, which couldn't distinguish what was and what wasn't obstructing the gunbarrel. The crosshair was probably directly on the M14 for all I knew, but that didn't matter.

"BOOT IT!"

As our steel box jolted forwards once more, another shot came flying straight past us, slamming into another tree, with the collision resulting in an explosion sending the top of the tree hurtling to the ground. As someone in love with nature, it pained me to see battles like this one occur at all, where natural life is taken out for the sake of our sport. But that's how we humans are, I suppose. And I can't really say anything, can I, after how many more missed shots I ordered as we began to charge into the vehicle.

I braced myself, as Dennis with vigour navigated every turn to lose the least speed we could, making sure that not a single shell hit us, nor did he let us hit a single tree. I felt the screaming of the tracks and the roaring of the engines, but just as keenly, I felt my lungs losing their air as my heart rate skyrocketed. Up to my ears, the throbbing pulse was all too keenly felt, as I breathed in and out faster than the pecks of a woodpecker.

Their rear was towards us. It seemed they wanted to get away from us, but where would they go? They would not be able to outpace the immensely superior speed of the Cruiser , and with a new set of flares flying over, they would not be able to hide either.

We hastily closed the distance, as their firing died down. We kept up the heat, sending shell after shell. Our loading speed did not slow, we may be starved of combat experience but we certainly weren't starved of strength. Eventually, we managed to get to a point where we could reliably call it point blank, even in the forest.

However, with parallax errors being prevalent in close quarters engagement, determining if the gun was on target was as much my job as it was the one aiming. And when it fell just on the target, starved of breath I gave the order:

"SHOOT!"

A crack sounded from the barrel of our 2lb gun, and a shell was sent hurtling towards the target just in front of us, but as I gave the command, the vehicle immediately swerved to the left, with the shell knocking against their heavily angled rear and ricocheting into a large tree just next to them, giving them just more momentum to spin all the way around and shoot us. Dennis, the quick thinker, immediately hit the clutch and yanked the left stick, so that we would face them and just stop short of their shell, which grazed the front of the hull and slammed into the very same tree our shot landed in, which the full force and momentum of my vehicle then went into through a collision as we made the dodge.

This time however, the tall tin can had exhausted its remaining energy into the turn and would have to accelerate from zero to start moving again. But the tree that they had just decapitated with their shell enacted its revenge, with the top end slumping over, due to the shots and shake we gave it, and eventually colliding with the turret of the tank.

Some trees are light, as they are small and made of a very spacious and not dense wood. However, other trees can hold more tonnage than even many tanks. Whilst not quite being that heavy, the tree that the 47mm enemy gun somehow managed to destroy, fell more into the latter category.

The roof of the turret of the target visibly caved in, giving into the weight. The turret face and sides then showed visible cracks, as parts of the armour physically fell off. For a few seconds, the crew of the vehicle could be seen hastily opening hatches and bailing and running for their lives, as the large chunk of wood visibly depressed further into the M14, before finally overcoming the roof and crushing the internals.

A small explosion, probably the ammunition colliding with itself or other internal components rapidly, forced my eyes to clench and my head to duck. As I clenched my eyelids tight, the image just before they shut, froze in my mind. A warm light enraptured the M14 and from each opening of the tank, metal of some sorts came flying out, propelled by smoke and yellow lining with an eruption. I could smell the burning metal. Cold blood ran through my veins for a second, as I imagined what could have happened had the crew not been more vigilant.

I steadied my breathing, and slumped over forwards. My shoulder and back gave in. I could hear my heavy breaths.

We won the engagement. Now all that was left was chivalry.

"Are you guys good?" I asked. I couldn't imagine what they were actually thinking right now. Not only had they, the command tank, been taken out, but it happened in the dead of night, by the hand of nature. Well, technically their own hand actually. They also could have probably died, were they not very quick to react.

I tried and failed to climb out of my vehicle, it was hard with such a small hatch, and all the energy had been sapped in such an engagement.

"...I'm just happy that I'm able to resent being knocked out." The same girl who'd wrestled with me some time ago, the same girl whose shit I kicked in earlier, spoke between her breathless pants. God what must she be going through right now? I somewhat felt sorry for the way I treated her earlier, but at the same time... No, I probably still shouldn't have hit her.

"I mean, technically you're still in the fight, I guess." The flag for them had not yet come out. That might be because the systems for the flag were entirely destroyed from the collision with the tree.

"We have nothing to fight WITH anyways. All our equipment probably doesn't exist anymore anyways."

She seemed so dejected now. Earlier, whilst she was talking and eating and fighting, her eyes, voice and body in general seemed so filled with determination, filled with life. But now, she lay down on the floor staring into the dark night sky, lit by the burning wood in what was once her vehicle, and the flying stars that continued to be sent into the sky from the distant hilltop.

I mustered up my willpower and eventually managed to climb outside the tank. As I leapt out, I failed the landing and rolled around on the floor, my legs shaking. I let my crew relax and my loader reported the situation to the others, as I slowly picked myself up and walked over to the fallen commander. Then I also lay down and began to stare into the night sky.

"Want a ride later?"

"Nah, no thanks."

I tilted my head slightly to the burning wreck. What I had just witnessed, was a prime reason why these vehicles, Italian vehicles, were generally spoken out against in various western leagues. The early Italian mediums especially were known for such prevalent issues such as the armour cracking, or even literally slumping and falling off, when hit by high velocity or just heavy shells. How did that tree even collapse, these were relatively light shells? Maybe the explosive mass in their gun was just a lot?

Honestly, they probably could have won that fight too. We had the better tank, but they had the better crew. We were outfought, and just got extremely lucky. I couldn't imagine how she felt, the defeated commander of an army still in struggle.

"Now it's up to you, Tabs..." She whispered. I continued staring.

What I had just witnessed, was probably one of the most thrilling moments of my life, with an almost mortifying conclusion. I think at least, for the rest of this night, we could give ourselves a break.