April 8th, 1925 – Imperial Capital Berun – Central Headquarters of the Imperial Army

Brigadier General Hans von Zettour sat alone in his office, and pondered the state of the Empire.

Their great victory over the Legadonian Entente had been marred by the successful escape of the nation's Navy, which had slipped by the Imperial Navy's cordon and promptly joined up with the Francois Republic. Combined with the exile of two Councilors, one in Francois and the other in Albion, the most fervent Entente nationalists had plenty of reasons to resist the Empire's occupation of their country. The government-in-exile had called for 'all faithful citizens of the Fatherland to fight back against Imperial oppression', as if their nation hadn't been the ones to start the war that had set Europa ablaze in the first place.

Thankfully, there hadn't been any serious incidents so far, but the years spent by the Legadonian government using patriotic rhetoric to hide their own ineptitude had left a mark. It would've been much better if the Navy'd done its one important job since the start of the Great War. Zettour knew he was being too harsh : keeping watch over an entire sea was all but impossible, and the Legadonian Navy was far more experienced than the Empire's, due to their respective countries' geographies.

The Western front had been a bloody mess since the start of the Republic's surprise attack, and things had only gotten worse as the conflict dragged on. Thousand upon thousand of Imperial soldiers had died, and dozens of aerial mages had been thrown into the grinder in a desperate effort to buy time. Only with the Entente taken care of had the Empire been free to focus the bulk of its power on its old rival, the Francois Republic, finally stopping their advance and beginning to push back.

Now at last, the Empire was on the offensive, having forced the Republic troops out of its lands and continued onward, seizing much territory, albeit at a monstrous cost in lives and materiel. Unfortunately, the Republic now enjoyed the benefit of shorter supply lines, meaning that the cost of every meter of ground had inflated to even more grotesque heights.

There had been several pointed suggestions over the last few months that they ignore the Major's recommendations and order Division Y to deploy Projekt K on the Rhine front. Zettour had shut them down immediately. If Tanya Degurechaff believed something was too dangerous, then it was too dangerous. He'd seen the request forms she'd sent : the girl (and she was still a girl, God help them, she was only eleven years old) wasn't squeamish, that was certain. Having read for himself the interrogation reports of captured Dacian soldiers who had managed to survive the calamity that had befallen their nation's ill-prepared army, the Brigadier General shuddered at the thought of unleashing such horror again anywhere, let alone close to Imperial soldiers.

Fortunately, the Major had been quick to offer alternatives. Zettour's old friend Rudersdorf had been very impressed with her strategic insight when they'd worked together in the Northern front. Under her leadership, Division Y hadn't just provided the Empire with the Wunderwaffen, going far beyond all but the most delirious of expectations anyone had for the secret group. Degurechaff had made sure to research the tactical applications of each of the Projekte.

Zettour was still grasping with how much of a paradigm shift Projekt U would represent in the long run – aerial mages that couldn't be detected by conventional magical radars and could fight in close-quarters to devastating effect ? That alone would have been worth all the money and manpower poured into Division Y and more.

Really, Division Y as a whole was an incredibly profitable investment for the Empire, providing weapons of such awesome power and potency with what was, in the grand scheme of things, a mere rounding error of the Imperial Army's total operating budget. Completely unlike Elenium Arms, which had consumed even more resources in their pursuit of multi-core orbal technology, only to end in disaster. Almost the entire Kruskos Army Air Corps Testing Lab, both facilities and personnel, had been lost in the cataclysmic explosion of the Type-95's final test.

According to the few survivors, Dr Schugel, the head of the project, had grown incensed when his superiors had decided to cut his funding due to nobody managing to make his quad-core computing orb work, and forced through one final test where he'd disabled most of the safeties on the device for reasons nobody really understood. The resulting detonation had been seen all the way to Berun, and it had taken a lot of work to convince the population that this wasn't anything to worry about, just … what had been the excuse they had used again ? Zettour couldn't quite recall. Something about a faulty artillery shell, insinuating the source of the light had been much closer than it had actually been ? Well, it hardly mattered.

Schugel had apparently been so confident it would work this time that he'd been standing right next to ground zero, meaning there hadn't been a scrap of his body left to be found. When compared to the stringent safety protocols Major Degurechaff insisted all of Division Y's researchers follow, there just wasn't any comparison. Hopefully she'd be able to get some use out of the Elenium research notes and prototypes Zettour had sent to Castle Schwartzstein. He knew Division Y had worked with orbal technology before, in fact their entire incredible success was due to that Denkmaschine they'd cobbled together in order to implement Degurechaff's theories. He'd also looked into transferring the budget of Elenium labs over to them, but by the time he got to it most of the money had already been reassigned. The leftovers still represented a significant sum, though.

It was shameful, how much the entire nation relied on Degurechaff. All the might of the Empire at their disposal, and they still needed to ask an eleven-years old girl and the organization she had built from the scraps and refuse they had thrown together to help fighting their wars. Of course, Zettour would never cheapen the skill, bravery and sacrifices of the soldiers fighting on the frontlines : if failure there was, then it rested solely on them at Central Headquarters.

And now, they were going to ask for her assistance once more. On his desk, surrounded by other documents, was the latest telegraph he'd received from Castle Schwartzstein. It was the response Major Degurechaff had sent to his request for the assistance of Division Y in the West. Like most communications from Degurechaff, it was short and to the point. She was informing him that, she was personally going to the Rhine, accompanied by most instances of Projekt U and all those of Projekt W – few as the latter were, and asking for his authorization to deploy them.

Projekt W … Zettour remembered reading the specs for that particular branch of Division Y's work. As the one responsible for the Division at Central Command, he was regularly briefed on each of the ongoing Projekte. The documents were brought in by a grim-faced soldier who watched as they were set ablaze once the Brigadier General was done reading them, but his memory was as sharp as ever, and he remembered their contents clearly. Projekt W would certainly be useful on the muddy, bloody battlefields of the Rhine, of this he was certain.

Sat on his chair, Hans von Zettour smiled bitterly and, as he ratified the authorization documents to be sent back to Castle Schwartzstein, whispered a prayer for the Francois soldiers who were about to meet the creations of Division Y.

May God have mercy on their souls, for the Untoten and Werwölfe certainly won't.

April 15th, 1925 – The Rhine Front

Lieutenant Schwarkopf couldn't believe his own eyes as he stared at the woman standing at the side of Major von Degurechaff. At first, he'd thought his one remaining eye was playing tricks on him in the poor illumination of the trenches at night-time, but no, there was no mistake.

He'd seen her die. It had been mercifully quick by this awful war's standards : a sniper bullet to the heart during a moment's inattention, and the mage rookie had been dead before she hit the mud. Even a grisly veteran like himself had felt a twinge of sorrow at the passing of such a young woman, as well as bitterness at the wastefulness of it all. He knew she'd been conscripted because of her high magical aptitude, but what was the point of mandatory mage conscription if they got killed like that ? At that rate, it would be better to stop the conscription and spend the resources wasted on training the conscripts before sending them off to die on actual, proper training for the volunteers.

He hadn't voiced these thoughts aloud, of course, morale being already far too shaky among his men despite their best efforts to keep a smile on their faces. Instead, he'd signed Serebryakov's death notice and sent her body home, thinking that at least her family would have something to bury, which was sadly a rarity for soldiers who fell in the Rhine.

And yet, here she was, standing before him in a uniform he'd never seen before, with a small smile on her face that told him she'd also recognized him.

"Is something wrong, Visha ?" asked the diminutive Major (Schwarkopf had needed to double-check her rank insignia before his brain would accept what his eye was telling him) who stood next to the resurrected rookie at the head of the score of intimidating soldiers who had just arrived at the forward operation base where Schwarkopf's mages were based.

"Nothing's wrong, Major," answered Serebryakov. "I used to serve alongside Lieutenant Schwarkopf before my transfer to Division Y, that's all."

"Ah, I see. I'm sure you have questions, Lieutenant, but I'm afraid the answers are classified."

"I … I understand." He most certainly didn't, but he also didn't want to annoy someone associated with the miracle weapons that had crushed Dacia an Legadonia, even if part of him did feel annoyed that the Rhine hadn't received any Wunderwaffe support of its own earlier. "I was told you were going to spearhead a night attack on the enemy trenches ?"

"That is correct. These fine gentlemen will open the way, but they can hardly hold ground by themselves. We'll be imposing on you and the rest of the forces in this outpost to actually advance the line after it has been cleared of the Francois soldiers."

Schwarkopf had trouble imagining how so few men could accomplish that, but he'd heard the stories of what had happened on the other theatres where the Wunderwaffen had been deployed.

"What will the signal for our advance be ?"

The Major smiled, and the Lieutenant felt a shiver down his spine.

"Oh, trust me, Lieutenant Schwarkopf. You will know it when you hear it."

Mud. Rain. Blood. Pain.

He is laying on the ground, his body torn apart by shrapnel. His leg – where is his leg ? He wants to ask, but he can't speak. His lower jaw is gone : he sees the pearly white of his teeth slowly sinking into the mud where it fell. He has to take it, has to put it back on, but he can't.

Hands reach out to him, pull him out of the mud, carry him back to safety, to healing that can never hope to undo the damage. In that moment, he both loves and hates the men carrying him, risking their own lives in doing so. Why, oh why couldn't they just leave him to die ?

He is alive. Alive, but crippled, never to recover, never to be anything more than a drain on the Empire's strained resources. The drugs coursing through his bloodstream are the only thing keeping him from contorting in agony, but even through the fog they place on his mind a question still dominates his thoughts. Why ? Why even live in such a state ?

Cold blue eyes look down at him from within a too-young face. Unlike those of everyone else, there is no pity in them, only thoughtful consideration.

"You have a choice to make," she tells him, her words cutting through the drug-induced haze. "You can either die as painlessly as we can make it, or you can go through even greater pain for a chance to serve the Fatherland once more."

How ? How can someone like him possibly be of use ? Has he not given enough already ?

"Of course," she continues, "I don't expect you to work for nothing. If you choose to serve and survive, I expect you to make a full recovery. Yes, including recovering the parts of yourself you lost."

She smiles. It is the smile of the Devil, offering him his heart's desire for his soul.

"So ? What do you say ?"

What kind of choice is that ? Of course he accepts. Even a glimmer of hope is more than he ever thought he'd ever get.

Days, weeks of preparation follow, all blending together. Complex patterns are drawn on what remains of his flesh, carefully working around the scars that cover so much of it. Then it happens, under the light of the full moon. He does not see much, too busy fighting not to scream : they have cut him off painkillers and flushed his system to ensure his mind is clear, and the agony is beyond words.

There is more pain to come, just as she promised there would be. The Rite of Union scours what remains of his body, but he's used to suffering now. The pressure on his mind is more difficult, but the thought of healing pushes him to endure.

He sees beyond the world, a glimpse of things that he'll forever struggle to remember, and be obscurely relieved for it. In the infinite darkness, something takes notice of his presence. It looks at him – judging, evaluating – and then it seems to approve.

He is one, then he is two, then he is one again, but not quite the same as he was before.

He opens his eyes and breathes, then realizes his lower jaw is back. He looks down, and sees that his missing leg is there too. The blue-eyed girl is there too, looking down at him approvingly.

"So, you made it. Congratulations. How do you feel, Warren Grantz ?"

"Grantz ?"

"Grantz !"

Grantz snapped to attention by reflex as the Major's voice pulled him out of the flashback the sight of the Rhine front had caused him. The head of Division Y was looking up at him with a frown, and despite towering above her Grantz felt very, very small in that moment. Fortunately, she must have found whatever she was looking for, because she nodded approvingly.

"I know bringing you back here isn't pleasant," she told him. "But you need to confront your trauma to move beyond it. And after all, things will be different this time, won't they ?"

He nodded. They most certainly would be, he was sure of it. "Yes, Major !"

"Good. Now, listen up, everyone ! Our comrades of the Western Army have fought in this hell for months. It is time for us to do our part to bring this nightmare to an end. You all know your orders, so I won't waste any time repeating them. Projekt U, deploy !"

The Untoten silently took to the air, with only Serebryakov remaining on the ground to make sure nothing happened to the Major. Their position was supposed to be safe from Republican bombardment, but as Grantz knew all too well, safety was an illusion in the Rhine.

He did miss the ability to fly under his own power that he'd enjoyed as an aerial mage. The Rite of Union had crippled his mana reserves, leaving him barely able to use a few cantrips even with a computing orb's assistance. The researchers thought that sacrifice had made him more likely to survive the process, though they didn't exactly have enough data to be certain. In truth, Grantz didn't really care all that much. Flying had been nice, but being able to walk on his own two legs again would have been worth the cost even without all the other advantages he'd gained.

And now, under the Major's command, it was time to wield these gifts in the Fatherland's defense.

"By my authority as the Director of Division Y, and with the authorization of the Imperial Army Headquarters, I declare the first field deployment of Projekt Werwolf officially started." Her solemn gaze swept over them, and she pointed in the direction of the enemy trenches. "Go. Hunt. Kill."

Grantz closed his eyes and called for the part of him that hadn't been there when he had still been wholly human, but was as integral now that he'd become a Werwolf (or, as he'd heard some of the researchers refer to him and the others based on the Rite of Union's formal name, a Tager) as the ones he'd been born with.

He heard the gasps of shock from the Lieutenant and his men as they saw the transformation. Despite the Projekt's name, Grantz knew they looked nothing like wolves, and the transformation wasn't anything like shown in fiction. Their bodies didn't grow and twist into their new shape : instead, flesh materialized around them out of thin air, appearing to cover them like armor, except once the transformation was complete (a process which only took a single breath) there wasn't a human underneath. Even with their regeneration, testing that had been painful, and the Major had made sure those who had volunteered to check had been rewarded with double rations for an entire week.

Each Werwolf was over two meters tall, and almost impossible to tell apart for normal people (although the Major always seemed to know). Their bodies were covered in a flesh-colored carapace, with their thick necks looking like flayed muscle but much, much more resilient. Their hands now had four wicked claws capable of tearing through metal instead of fingers. As for their heads, they were the stuff of nightmares : four pure-white eyes granted them unparalleled perception of their surroundings, an orb was set in their forehead that, to a mage's sense, was crackling with energy. Their mouth was an insectoid thing that vaguely resembled a beak if you didn't look at it too closely or too long.

They were monsters, this Grantz knew, even if it didn't make him recoil. According to the Major, there was a mental component to the Rite of Union : the reason why none of the Werwölfe ever freaked out at what they had become was the same they could use their transformed bodies and supernatural abilities without needing to re-learn how to operate a body so different from their own, or that Grantz hadn't needed to re-learn how to use his human body after regrowing his lost limb and all the muscle mass he'd lost while wasting away.

He could feel the others in his mind, a mental link that bound them together as pack. They were all ready, and eager for battle, just like Grantz was. That was another change : before, he'd been terrified of combat, even if he'd put on a brave face so that he could do his duty to the Empire. Now all he felt was excitement. He had worried about what it meant, but the Major had assured him it didn't make him any different from most of the war maniacs in the ranks of the Imperial Army, and so far she hadn't seen anything that would prevent him and the others from operating in civilian society, unlike the Untoten and most of the other living creations of Division Y.

With their transformation complete, the pack leapt over the barricades and raced across the no-man's-land. The darkness of night was no obstacle to them : their eyes saw as if in bright daylight, with a clarity that far surpassed any human's vision. They moved fast, far faster than any human soldier could have over the ravaged earth.

The first screams rose as the Untoten plunged down on the enemy positions, taking them completely by surprise. The machine gun emplacements were ripped to shreds, making sure that the only weapons that might be able to put the supersoldiers down were out of the fight. The Untoten moved with a careful economy of movement, not using the full inhuman strength Grantz knew they were capable of : against purely human, non-mage opponents, there was no need for them to waste blood. His ears picked up orders being shouted, as the defenders responded to the sudden assault on their position. Foreigners and invaders they might be, but the men inside those trenches had survived in the Rhine : they were veterans one and all, and they reacted swiftly.

Then the Werwölfe's charge hit the Republican trenches, and the massacre really started.

April 19th, 1925 – Francois Rhine Front Military Headquarters

The high command of the Republican army met in a grim mood.

In the last three days, the Empire had advanced nearly as much as it had during the entire last three months. Given the ceaseless back-and-forth that was trench warfare, often over mere scores of meters of ground, that wasn't as disastrous as it might seem, but it was still a very worrying trend. And the territorial losses were nothing compared to the casualties and damage to morale that accompanied them. Division Y, that mysterious branch of the Imperial warmachine responsible for the utter destruction of the Dacian Army and the fall of the Legadonian Entente, whose name the Republic only knew thanks to the secret dispatches from the Allied Kingdom, had come to the Rhine and begun to work its foul devilry.

Sunset had become a harbinger of horror for the Francois troops dwelling in the trenches. The mysterious hunters who had so decisively crushed the aerial mage corps in the north had been let loose on the Rhine front, and there was seemingly nothing that could stop them. Even the elite mage company that had been assembled for the specific purpose of taking down the Empire's Named mages (and who had done so with commendable success for several months) had been wiped out without scoring a single kill in return.

The only thing the Republic had achieved was to obtain descriptions of what had previously been entirely unseen foes, though the rumors of masked, faceless hunters that now circulated as a result were yet another blow to morale. In response, they had started to withdraw all their mages from the frontline during the night, leaving them in heavily-defended locales deep behind their lines. It had crippled their response time to enemy incursions (the Empire hadn't wasted any time in taking advantage once they'd realized what the Republic was doing), but the alternative was a lot of dead mages with nothing to show for it.

The debate as to why the Empire only deployed such an incredible weapon as stealth aerial mages during the night was still raging, with theories ranging from the relatively plausible (a new method of casting vulnerable to sunlight) to the wildly fantastic (the Empire having made a bargain with an ancient vampire who had turned their mages in exchange for the blood of virgins, though that one had been the work of a clearly overworked analyst trying and failing to lighten the mood). But the nocturnal mage-hunters weren't the reason for this meeting. No, that dubious honor belonged to the other strain of terrors unleashed by the Empire on the Republic's valiant defenders. Since its first deployment, all high command had to rely on were the terrified stories of traumatized soldiers who had managed to escape the trenches, ranting about inhuman monsters who cut through armor and shrugged off bullets like raindrops. Now, however, they had proper intel to examine.

By sheer luck, one of the mages who had died during the first Imperial breakthrough had dropped his computing orb only slightly cracked, and a quick-witted soldier had managed to recover it while fleeing from the slaughter. The orb contained a recording of the Imperial attack, though due to its condition it had taken several days of frantic activity to extract the information contained within. Given how pale the technicians who had handed them the record had been, none of the officers present were looking forward to watching it themselves, but it was the least they owed to the brave men who had perished to this latest Imperial perfidy.

The projector stuttered into life, and the record began to play. It had been heavily cut and edited, much of the original footage being useless. But the few scenes that were left were still edifying to say the least.

Monsters. That was the only word to describe the horrors that emerged from the no-man's-land to attack the trench where the orb's mage had been stationed. Seeing them on the screen, the officers couldn't blame the defunct mage for ignoring safety protocols and activating his orb instead of staying dark to avoid detection by the Empire's magical radars. Really, the fact he had the presence of mind of activating his orb's recording function at all was worthy of commendation.

The monsters tore through the trench, completely ignoring the panicked gunfire of the defenders. Long blades grew out of their upper limbs that cut through human skin, flesh and bone like a hot knife through butter.

The scene shifted to show a tank stopped in its tracks as one of the monsters smashed into it. Its claws tore through its metal plating, and then into the terrified crew.

Then another mage launched a magic attack at one of the beasts, rising in the air out of its reach. A blast of energy burst out of its forehead, tore through the mage's protective shell and slammed into his chest, instantly reducing him to a gory, smoking mess.

A nest of black tentacles exploded out of another monster's chest, reaching several meters ahead of it in a cone that ripped half a dozen Republican soldiers to pieces. Horrifically, those were the lucky ones, as the tentacles wrapped around one of the survivors and pulled him back toward the living nightmare. The orbal recording captured the full terror in the man's scream as he was dragged into the source of the tentacles, vanishing along with them, nothing left to mark his doom except for that recording.

The final scene was just an image of the ground as the orb fell, its carrier dead but still running on its last sparks of mana. But the sound was still coming through : a horrific, inhuman howling coming out of multiple throats. It was, the generals felt in their hearts, the sound of the end, of despair and damnation come to devour them all. It was the death knell of the Republic and all it fought for, proudly proclaimed by its harbingers.

The projector's audio speaker sparked and fizzed as it tried and failed to play the sound, eventually breaking down entirely, smoke rising from the apparatus.

As the film ended, a horrified silence held the room in its grasp, only eventually broken by a single, whispered prayer :

"God help us all … The Imperials have unleashed devils upon the Rhine …"

April 21st, 1925 – Imperial rear base on the Rhine Front

When I had been assigned to Division Y, I had been ecstatic at the thought of avoiding being sent to the frontlines. That joy had been tarnished when I'd realized it would be my job to keep the madmen under my command from destroying the world with the eldritch horrors my own crackpot theory had handed to them, but the notion of not being anywhere anyone could shoot at me had still been a consolation, meagre as it had been.

And yet, somehow I had ended up visiting each of the three fronts of the Great War in person. Nobody had shot at me, and I hadn't shot anyone directly either (though I wasn't enough of a hypocrite to ignore my own responsibility in what I had let loose upon the world), but I was still certain Being X was laughing his ass off at my predicament, the self-righteous prick.

Well, at least I hadn't needed to revisit the frontlines in person since that first night when I had let the Untoten and Werwölfe loose upon the Republic. After the first testing had been a success, I had withdrawn to a more secure location with Visha at my side, receiving daily reports from Castle Schwartzstein and coordinating with the rest of the Imperial warmachine.

That latter activity was necessary because, of course, twenty supersoldiers weren't going to win the war on their own. That would be ridiculous, unless we actually created a Superman-level soldier, in which case we'd still need to demonstrate their abilities to force the enemy to surrender out of sheer futility while also making sure the godling in question didn't go rogue and doom us all. The supersoldiers of Division Y were all but unstoppable against mages, infantry and even tanks, but they were defenceless against planes or artillery. But as the spearhead of the rest of the Imperial Army, moving in synch with the Empire's own Air Force and artillery corps ? Now that was another story. In the last week, we'd settled into something of a routine : the Untoten and Werwölfe advanced during the night to clear the next Francois defense line, then the conventional Imperial troops followed suit to occupy and fortify the trenches in order to hold them during the day. Rinse and repeat.

Even if the Francois decided to be completely ruthless and shell their own trenches during our nocturnal assaults, it would only slow our advance. The Untoten couldn't use the same barrier spells normal aerial mages could to shield against artillery bombardment, but they could give advance warning to the Werwölfe. Nothing short of a direct impact would kill a Werwolf, and they would recover from anything that didn't kill them in mere moments (that regeneration was truly incredible), so they should be able to exit the bombarded area. It was doubtful the Francois would go that far in any case : in the strange, blood-soaked mindset of trench warfare, there was no sin greater than deliberately shelling your own positions while they were still occupied by your troops. The fact any Francois trench with Werwölfe in it was already lost was irrelevant : the Republican artillerists would still balk at the order, I had been assured of that.

Unfortunately, real war wasn't like a video game, where you could exploit the computer's AI indefinitely and it would keep making the same mistakes over and over. The Empire's enemies were thinking, intelligent people, and they would adapt to our unconventional assets eventually. I struggled to think of how the Republic could react, but I was genre-savvy enough to know that the moment I thought we were invincible was the moment everything would go to hell. Desperation made people consider actions that I, as a sane and rational individual, couldn't imagine, a fact that had been impressed upon me in the last moments of my previous life.

One of the things that worried me the most was the optics of the whole situation. While the testimonies of the Dacian survivors had been dismissed or suppressed, and the Untoten could be explained as elite mages using unknown techniques so long as nobody saw them feeding, there was no explaining away the monstrous nature of Projekt W, which was ironic given that its instances were probably the ones most able to fit in human society. Even with their level of lethality, there had been survivors of their raids who had managed to escape after seeing them, and eventually Republican high command would start taking their reports of monsters seriously. Sure, the first few reports would be discounted as stress-caused hallucinations, but sooner or later the evidence would become impossible to deny.

And then … well. It was one thing for the Empire to wield unknown Wunderwaffen in order to defeat its enemies. It was another to be seen unleashing monsters on the battlefield. Yes, dying to a Werwolf's claws or energy blast wasn't any more painful than dying to a bullet or bleeding out from shrapnel (we weren't sure about being swallowed by the tentacles, but the Werwölfe had told us they were certain their victims died instantly). Somehow, however, I didn't think the average Francois, Albish, or American citizen would understand that point (the Russy citizens weren't a concern, since their government had absolutely zero care for their opinions). The simple existence of the Wunderwaffen was already a mixed blessing where international relations were concerned : it did make the other powers worried about Imperial expansion, while at the same time making them wary of involving themselves in the Great War.

A single picture of a Werwolf on the front-page of a credible newspaper and we might very well end up fighting a World War against every other civilized nation on the planet as their governments had no choice but to declare war or be overthrown by their own panicked populace. I was holding onto the hope that nobody would believe such a hypothetical photograph was real, but even so, the governments might still think they had no choice but to declare war to suppress the Empire or face the prospect of Hell on Earth once the evidence started piling up.

We needed to end the war before it came to that so that I could safely decommission the most dangerous Projekte and arrange the peaceful and comfortable retirement of our supersoldiers (as well as my own, of course). Allowing the Untoten to hunt freely instead of deploying them only jointly with the Werwölfe could have done the trick (air superiority was invaluable in a modern war), but that wasn't possible at the moment. Because, as it turned out, even dread horrors were constrained by logistical issues, which I found weirdly reassuring.

Current storage methods only allowed for blood to be stored for a handful of days after it was taken. The researchers working on Projekt U had developed a magical formation that kept mage blood suitable for consumption by our vampires for weeks, which was how we'd been able to use them so extensively on the Northern front. That method hadn't even involved any Mythos-related lore, just normal, sane magical research. Unfortunately, using it on a single bottle of blood took far too long for it to be used by the Empire's medical corps, who I'm sure would have been delighted. Even in my old world, blood storage had been an issue that'd yet to be solved, requiring constant blood drives in order to meet demand (and that was in peacetime : countless propaganda posters across the cities of the Empire encouraged citizens to give blood to help the troops).

I didn't believe in karma beyond the simple truths that actions had consequences and that behaving like an asshole would result in other people striking back, but it would've been nice for Division Y to produce something indisputably beneficial to Mankind.

With the option of letting Visha's kindred loose denied to us, I had spent the last few hours thinking hard on what else in Division Y's arsenal could be used to bring the war to a swift conclusion, using Visha as a springing board. I had finally found something, and after a few express encoded telegrams with Central Headquarters, permission had been granted. The details of the plan still had to be ironed out with the rest of the Western Army, but in two weeks, Projekt V would arrive in the Rhine front.

And, with any luck, the war would end soon after.

AN : I'm sure it will, Tanya. I'm sure it will.

Miracle of miracles, this chapter actually ended up shorter than the last one. I had planned a whole section of Tanya's monologue about the Werewolves VS Vampires debate back in her old world, but ended up cutting it : it just didn't fit anywhere. Also, I didn't want to spend two hours simulating a fight between an Untoten and a Werwolf, since it is unlikely to happen in the story.

The Werwölfe are Tagers from the TTRPG CthulhuTech, specifically the Phantom sub-type. You'll have to google what they look like, but keep in mind, in their setting of origin, those are the good guys. And not 40K Imperium-style "good guys" either : genuine, actual good guys, fighting evil cultists bent on ending the world. And the Phantom is perhaps the least disturbing Tager sub-type.

In my first draft, the Werwölfe were going to be Dhohanoids, which are the enemies of the Tagers in CthulhuTech and true servants of the Old Ones, wholly and completely evil. To quote the sourcebook, if the Tagers are humans who can turn into monsters, the Dhohanoids are monsters who can disguise as humans. I changed up things because I felt Tagers suited the story better.

(And yes, obviously there are rules to play an evil campaign with the player characters being Dhohanoids. To be honest, I am curious as to how you could run that kind of campaign without going parody-level of cartoonish evil to avoid being too disturbing.)

What is Projekt V ? I asked SB for suggestions on a tactical nuke equivalent, and after sorting through the veritable flood of responses, I finally found something which suited the story's needs. You'll have to wait a bit before learning the truth, however.

Well, that's all for now. I hope you enjoyed this chapter, and I look forward to your thoughts and suggestions for what comes next.

Zahariel out.