Area Six, May, a.t.b. 2015
The sun hung high in the sky, shining down upon the open, grassy field that was soon to be littered with the bullet-ridden corpses of many thousands of soldiers; and yet, from the west, there came a collection of dark thunderheads, looming like an omen and crawling towards them on the strong eastwards wind that swept in from the Andes, pushing even the lowest of grasses nearly horizontal at irregular intervals. The cool air that the gusts brought in was certainly appreciated, but once the rain began to pour, this would go from a battle to an unholy slog. Justine considered it good fortune all the same: it would mire the army they were here to intercept far more than the 588th's smaller, and therefore more mobile, forces.
She'd chosen her ground as best she could: the course of the treacherous Río Inírida ran only a few dozen kilometres north of their position, forming a natural barrier that would take time for the enemy to ford, and even then not all at once, and the Río Vaupés formed the same sort of natural barrier to the west and to the south-west of their chosen battleground, which was set at a point of equidistance between the two rivers and in a prime position to catch out anyone who might attempt to circle around the river to flank them. Her soldiers had, with the assistance of some of the Knightmares that weren't part of the combat-capable corps, and had subsequently been converted to aid with heavy labour, dug trenches and earthworks around where the battle lines were most likely to form, and in three layers. Her Geass would make it possible for her men to pick their way across the field when retreating from one layer of defences to the next, and so she'd given the order to coat the ground beneath the enemy's approach vectors with chaos mines taken from the rebels' own supply convoys, and now the munitions coated that ground so totally that it was entirely impassable, even by luck, unless those who attempted to pass were under Justine's Geass, and so knew exactly where not to step. She'd even had them buried at different depths, so that there was variation in what amount of weight would cause which mine to explode where: infantry might sprint without fear across a stretch of ground that would annihilate any Knightmares that attempted to cross the same bit of territory.
To take advantage of this, the tanks and the APCs that had brought them here had been parked to be used as makeshift artillery, and they'd made nests that bristled with the barrels of anti-materiel rifles—also stolen with care from the rebels, she noted with some humour—and heavy machine guns. The Knightmares had been split up into three groups of three hundred, and she'd placed each detachment under the command of a different pair of her friends (Hecate and Liliana, Jeremiah and Odette, and Marika and Villetta), while the remaining one hundred would remain near the central defensive position; there she'd stationed Sif to to aid in directing the battle, alongside Lindelle, whose medical knowledge would help Sif assess the nature of any chemical agents the rebellion might have brought to the field, while also priming her to have a place to attend to whatever wounded casualties the 588th would assuredly accrue over the course of the battle.
Lisa, as their most versatile sharpshooter, had no command save her own, and instructions to fire on her targets at her own discretion, and Justine had tasked Yennefer to accompany her in case she ran the risk of getting caught out; and last, but not least, Suzaku and Justine, being without contest the best devicers the 588th Irregulars could bring to bear, would operate at their own discretion—the knowledge that Justine was the only one who had even a prayer of keeping up with Suzaku while she was under the effect of her Geass had silenced Jeremiah's objections preemptively, with Justine having recently taken it upon herself to try to explain to her gallant knight the necessity of the seemingly reckless courses of action she'd decided upon.
They'd taken advantage of their superior mobility, along with the fact that they didn't have to pass a mountain range to get where they were, to arrive at the site of the battle five days before Hecate's estimate of their arrival, courtesy of her avian companions, and that had allowed them to set all of this up, with the aid of an extra day or two for rest. Justine might have been caught in a less-than-ideal situation, but she'd have been damned if she didn't work to make up the difference as best she could, stacking the deck as high in her favour as possible. And while in the ordinary course of events, she would have had to consider the possibility of the enemy simply routing around her to go after a target behind her back, she knew for a fact that there wasn't a ghost of a chance that the rebel leader would refuse to give battle even so.
In retrospect, it ought to have been obvious that, more than merely starving the rebellion of many of its key resources, raiding the rebel supply convoys and subsequently making them disappear without even a hint of the 588th's presence through the judicious application of asymmetry and guerilla tactics would have caused a great deal of infighting among the upper echelons of the rebellion—not for the first time, she felt quite ridiculous for not having foreseen such an obvious eventuality herself, and she'd marked it down as yet another example of why Juliette's talent for intrigue and politics was so critically necessary—and if the High Eunuchs, whose aversion to genuine risk was the stuff of legend, had thrown support behind the rebel leadership, then they had almost certainly already been fractious enough at the start that Luoyang had not considered them to be at risk of ever forming a stable, credible polity. After all, it would have been one hell of a backfire if their meddling in order to weaken Britannia wound up creating yet another power that could potentially prove a hindrance to the Chinese Federation's interests.
That made it quite obvious, then, what the rebel leader sought to accomplish here, what he thought to gain from forcing this battle.
It was a clever plan, Justine had to give him that much; whoever the leader of the rebellion was, she had clearly underestimated him. And it would likely work, too—if he was smart, he would pin as many of the causes of the infighting amongst the rebels upon her as he credibly could, with the added benefit that all of it was, in fact, her doing, more likely than not, which gave him a narrative to use. If he wiped the 588th out here, he would be able to bind the loyalty of his would-be vassals to him even more tightly in the wake of the battle than he might have managed in the aftermath of almost any other engagement the rebels could have chosen—and given how much force he had committed to this fight, he was almost certainly desperate for that kind of solution to his coalition's overall lack of cohesion. It was enough force, even, that were she anyone other than who she was, even the advantage conferred upon her by the ability to choose her ground and have his army come to her would be all but meaningless; there was, after all, no degree of genius that could make up for a simple lack of war potential, as the doctrine went.
Unfortunately for him, she was herself—she was Justine vi Britannia, leader of the 588th Irregulars. And it was incumbent upon her, as well as her friends and comrades, to make every correct choice her foe had made at every juncture come to nothing more than ashes in his proverbial mouth.
She stood at the foot of her black Knightmare, having elected not to don her normal suit, and thus having chosen to wear her usual black clothes and coat instead—her 'regalia', as she'd heard it called in passing, and she had found herself chortling at the unexpected accuracy of the term; for indeed, this outfit was her regalia of war, to the extent that it was anything at all—with the Murasama hanging from her hip. She had made certain that the ballistic scabbard was fully loaded already, after warming up, forcing food down her throat, and essentially seeing to just about everything she'd need in order to be ready to face the day ahead; she'd even deigned to grant herself an indulgence, making herself up as a means of finding a way to centre herself ahead of what was certain to be an unholy mess of an engagement. She'd run out of even the most selfish of things she could think to do with her hands, and now she stood and looked out across the field as the wind caught her coat and sent its tails fluttering and flapping in the gust, the points of her high collar snapping across her face, and her hair getting carried aloft by the gales that coursed across the otherwise picturesque, sunny field; Satanael was perched upon her right pauldron, and in the face of the rising wind, she sidled closer to Justine, using her head as shelter against the heavy gusts.
"I sincerely hope you haven't spoiled your appetite," she remarked to the raven suddenly. "You're certain to have a feast ahead of you regardless of this battle's result, after all, and I can't help but think that it would be quite the shame to waste it, no?"
Satanael gave a low cry and fluttered one wing, making her extreme displeasure at Justine's choice of gallows humour unmistakably evident; and Justine chuckled ruefully with a brief shake of her head. "It's nice to know that you care. And I mean that sincerely."
"She ain't the only one," Suzaku called out as she approached Justine from behind, her arrival startling Satanael off of Justine's shoulder and off in search of the next useful perch she could find. "What's all this I'm hearin' about you not wearin' your normal suit?"
Justine sighed. "As I told Jeremiah when he took issue with it. If at any point during this battle, I'm in a position where I'm in need of the normal suit's protection, the situation has likely already deteriorated past the point where my wearing a normal suit alone would have resolved it."
Suzaku sighed heavily, and chuckled fondly as she came to Justine's side, her arms stretched above her head—she wore her own normal suit, and a black duster was draped over it, partially concealing her twin vibroblades hanging from her hip. "Ya know, ya might have a point there, and all, but I still don't like it any more than Jeremiah does."
"Then the two of you are more than welcome to use your frustration with my choices as bonding material. I give you both my blessing," Justine replied, a bit more sharply than she'd meant to.
"Don't be a bitch," Suzaku admonished. "He's your bodyguard, I'm your bestie. We're allowed to be concerned about ya."
"You're right," sighed Justine, shaking her head more vigorously this time. "I suppose I'm just a bit on edge right now. My apologies."
"Don't sweat it," the brunette refused with a dismissive gesture. "And for the record, ya gotta know that this whole mess ain't your fault."
"I said that I would choose our engagements with care—I swore it, Suzaku—and then my decisions landed us where we are right now," said Justine. She chuckled. "From where I'm standing, I must confess, I'm having quite a difficult time seeing how it isn't me who's at fault for bringing all this down upon our heads like so much rain…"
"We're facin' a dude who ain't an idiot," Suzaku scolded gently. "And he's got way more shit than we've got, even after we went nickin' most of his shit. Him musclin' us into a corner was a question of when, not if. And really, at the end of the day, it's thanks to you, Justine, and your decisions that we've got a shot in the fuckin' dark of musclin' our way outta said corner in the first place. And for the record, ya did choose our scraps with care. It's just that this time, all the options ya had to choose from were pretty shit, if I'm bein' real with ya. And there ain't no way around the fact that that's just gonna happen from time to time. Shit sucks, sure, but it ain't no one's fault—least of all yours. So for fuck's sake, Justine, lighten up on yourself, or I'll be tellin' Mills when we get back home, ya got me?"
Justine barked out a startled laugh, the catharsis ripping its own way free of her, and leaving mirth in its absence. "Thank you, Suzaku. I think I needed to hear that…"
"Yeah, no shit," the brunette scoffed. "I'd be a pretty shit bestie if I didn't know that."
"Perish the thought," chuckled Justine, turning her head to look Suzaku up and down. "I don't think I could have asked for better, to be quite frank."
"Bitchin'," said Suzaku, giving herself a celebratory fist-pump that had Justine's shoulders shaking with mirth all over again. "But yeah, I actually came out here to tell ya that all the prep work's done, and that Takane-chan's spotted the bozos, says they'll be here within the hour. If you were plannin' on givin' everyone a speech or a pep talk or whatever, now's the time to do it."
"Hmph. So it is," Justine agreed. "I suppose I'd best be getting to it, then. And Suzaku…don't die."
"Right back atcha," Suzaku replied with a wink, and a genuine, fond smile.
With those well-wishes between them, Suzaku turned away to amble over to where she'd left her white-and-gold Knightmare last, and Justine, herself, turned to regard her own mount with a critical eye. She knew its internal workings as well as she knew her own name, by this point—she'd personally led the project to retrofit her friends' Knightmares with Gloucester components, after all, and she'd double and triple checked the work that had been done, to the point where she knew that even if she had another two weeks to work on nothing but that, she wouldn't be able to find a point at which her work could feasibly be improved; and so it was with a sense of absolute confidence that she raised her leg, placing her foot into the stirrup, and triggered the winch to lift her up to the cockpit block. She slid seamlessly from the stirrup into the extended chair, though it took a bit for her to manoeuvre her vibroblade into a position that didn't obstruct her, and she then toggled the slide to close the cockpit, with her inside; with the darkness now all around her, she took a deep, lingering breath, before she pulled the key from an inside pocket of her coat, and slid said key into the proper port.
The monitor came to life in a flash of bright light, prompting her to enter the proper passcode for the unit—C-T-O-5-Q-T-A-E, her memory immediately supplied—and once the on-board computer display acknowledged her credentials in a flash of verification, the operating system booted up, and the screens all around her sprang to life, filling with camera footage, environmental data from her factsphere sensor, and the calibrations of her heads-up display as the machine readied itself for imminent operation. She smiled at the fruits of her labour all around her, and her hands settled upon the control yokes with practised ease, her landspinners deploying behind her at the tap of a button, and her black-and-gold Sutherland variant rose from its kneeling position, standing tall and ready.
Not yet, though… Justine thought, as if the Knightmare could hear her thoughts, as if it was a being in its own right, and would be by those thoughts soothed. There's just one more thing we need to do, first…
Her black Knightmare, brought to life twice over by her own hands, hummed in anticipation under those hands, and all around her, a seven-point-five metric tonne steed of tungsten alloy and sakuradite, like a mounted lancer of old…and gently, gently, she coaxed it forth, proceeding sedately through their defences, the best they could have managed with the resources they had to hand, until she reached the field where her comrades and subordinates stood, awaiting her orders. Ranks upon ranks of hollow people made soldiers, warriors, her army, four thousand strong, every last one of them clad in their new combat armour that was black as pitch, with closed-face helms bearing a single polarised lens in the shape of a broad horizontal band donned, stared at her in silent, attentive vigil; and surrounding them, there stood all one thousand of their Knightmares, with their cockpit blocks open and their devicers standing to receive her, arranged into the groups of three hundred and one hundred into which she'd organised them for the upcoming sortie—the armoured knights positioned in defence of the valiant infantrymen who made up the backbone of the 558th. It pleased Justine to see it, truly—the Britannian commoners she commanded making common cause with the Sixes they had all seen blossom into exceptional soldiers in their own right—and while she had known that the reality of their reliance upon each other as brethren-in-arms would assuredly come to spark a sense of camaraderie between them that she hoped might some day form the foundation of a better, kinder world, this sight, which was a validation of her fondest, most closely-held beliefs and hopes, reaffirmed to her that those beliefs, those ideals, that people could come together in bonds of brotherhood, could conquer their hatred and fear and be kind to one another, were more than the foolish dreamings of a naïve royal brat who had never truly known the cruelty of the real world, as Marianne had once derided her.
This is where it begins, Justine couldn't help but think to herself with a fierce sense of pride, as she reached up to place her fingertips upon the central ruby of her silver collar, that dream of a better world I might once have given up on, and a part of myself along with it… Oh, darling, if only you could have been here to see it… But perhaps that is well. Once we prevail here, we'll have plenty of time to see it again…together…
Her mind made up, she popped the hatch on her cockpit, and slid out along with her seat; then, she planted one boot upon the rim of the block of grey metal, standing as tall as her devicers, her soldiers, and her friends in the midst of the driving wind, and with a stolen look towards Suzaku, who nodded back with an encouraging grin, Justine took a deep breath, and let the mantle of hoarfrost settle about her heart, sickly green flame that burned colder than the void above racing through her body. Summer may be the season of war, but winter is in my blood, and I am of winter wrought…
I am not like them.
I am a dragon.
"My warriors," she called out, letting her voice rise just enough to project all across the field; and at once she felt it, the undivided attention of every fighting man and woman who was prepared to fight and to die in the name of the dream she had promised them—in her name, even. It was a heady weight, but it was one she bore gladly; heavy is the head that wears the crown, as the saying went, and though she was herself bereft of such adornment, she also had no need of it. These people knew who she was—they had seen her, and they had known her, as a leader and a saviour, a comrade and protector, and they might come to know her as any number of other things before the end… She refused to patronise them with the insinuation that they needed a reminder, that they might forget who she was, any more than she did. "We have led our foes on quite the merry chase, have we not? We have starved them, we have deprived them, and we have bled them, on half a hundred forgotten fields and ignominious forest hollows. They come now before us, in their pomp and their arrogance, and they think to demand restitution of us. Restitution, of us! Truly, it is a world of wonder, that such insolence can exist within it, such impudence and gall.
"I will not enumerate their crimes for you. I will not insult you with the implication that you do not know them, that their trespasses do not haunt your dreams, that so many of you do not bear the evidence of their misdeeds branded into your skin, numbers drawn in blue ink, like livestock. I will not deride the truth of all that they have stolen from you with the simplicity of a list of names," she continued, every word that passed through her lips drawing the mantle closer around her, hardening the frost and coaxing the flames to ever-greater heights. "What they have done is unspeakable, and so I shall not excuse it by giving it voice. In the eyes of His Imperial Majesty, sitting indolent upon his throne in Pendragon, their sole wrongdoing is possessed of a simple name: rebellion. His Majesty cares only that he has been defied, that those under his power have dared to challenge his supreme authority, and when he commanded that I come here, it was his intention that here is where I should perish, at the hands of his convenient foes."
Justine paused for a moment, allowing that admittance to sink in before she went any further. She held to her vow dearly even now (or perhaps, especially now), that she would never ask that any subject of hers fight and die on false pretences, for reasons they did not fully understand. If she was going to ask them to put their lives on the line for her, if she was going to command them to kill and die, then the very least she owed them was the full and unvarnished truth, as near as she could tell it. "But I am none too eager to allow their evil to pass without judgement. What was done to you, what you suffered in Jatai and Coxim, in Ascensión and Cáceres and Pirapora, cannot and shall not go unanswered. There will be retribution for all that they have done—for all the ills that they have perpetuated—and that reckoning begins today.
"Steel your hearts, my warriors—screw your courage to the sticking-place! For now your foe stands arraigned before you!" she declared, and as if on cue, Satanael fluttered up and alighted upon her pauldron again, preening herself before the increasingly invigorated, albeit silent and attentive, crowd. "And though they have come to us in force, though they preen and posture among themselves even now—though they have convinced themselves that they have vanquished us already—should you stay the course, should you fight like demons, unfaltering, indefatigable, dauntless, as I well know you can, then by sundown, we will have exacted the first of the blood-price for their wickedness, the weregild of their excess, from out of their wretched hides. Show no mercy, for you shall receive none! Retreat is surrender—hesitation is defeat!
"And for those of you who are, like my friends, your commanders, children of Britannia in one way or another, let us show them just how much the divine right of the aristocracy is worth, show them just how superior their blood truly is as we spill it upon the dirt! Soak the land with the price of their folly, with the price of all they have taken, both from yourselves, and from your brethren-in-arms whom they sought to exterminate in full." She paused, took another deep breath, and drew the Murasama from her side, lifting its scarlet blade aloft to catch the rays of the sun, and thus glint the colour of fresh blood and hellish flame. The gales kicked up again, and so she proclaimed with strength, heedless of how it might carry, "Hear me! Two rivers run abreast of us, to the north and to the west, my warriors, and I would have you glut them both with the blood and offal of our foe! Leave none alive! Wipe their wretched existence from the field, scour it from the face of the earth, that they might never again come to raise a hand in domination of those whom they claimed to protect! Kill them all! For if there is but one wisdom my lord father has ever spoken, it is that any peace that is not secured by the utter eradication of your foe is but a temporary ceasefire. And so do I ask of you all, then, in my name as Justine vi Britannia, to venture forth upon this field in common cause and shared purpose, as comrades and battle-brethren, and reap this peace, a true and lasting peace, so that it may persist forevermore. What say you?!"
And perhaps it was well that they were so few in number, for the roaring fervour with which all five thousand of them cheered would have deafened her otherwise.
With the blazing brilliance of her fighting spirit echoed by the burning, searing sensation that was the herald of her brand bursting to life, a bird spreading its wings in her left eye, Justine let herself grin, releasing every ounce of fierce pride, cold fury, and vengeful bloodlust she felt to be writ plain in the baring of her fangs; she lowered her vibroblade, then, that livid slash of scarlet, and as if the Murasama was a maestro's baton and not instead a tool of violence, the cheering of her comrades waned into silence once more, that her words might once again be heard.
"Very well then, my warriors. Let us teach them the meaning of war!"
"I don't like this…"
Santa Anna scoffed. It was said that men who sold their courage often had none for themselves, and Qujappat seemed determined to prove that aphorism correct. He could, of course, understand the point that the mercenary was making, and even why he would have made it in the first place: Princess Justine was, if Li Xingke's testimony was to be believed (and he did not seem a man prone to deception—or, at the very least, no more so than his shifty-eyed kind were generally held to be), a brilliant young woman with quite the ominous reputation in certain circles, the kind who was certain to be the pride and joy of any highborn family, perhaps the very image of what one might consider the 'perfect heiress', and she truly couldn't have chosen better ground for her to meet them on.
The land was nestled between two major rivers, the closer of which being known for its treacherous rapids, and while she hadn't chosen particularly high ground, with there not being all that much of it to go around in this area, she had a wide expanse of territory behind her, and would likely be able to flee as she pleased before they could properly manoeuvre to stop her—even in the modern day, after all, getting armies across a river was almost invariably a time-consuming process. He saw, from the data gathered by his Gloucester's factsphere sensor, that she had even taken the time to set up earthworks and trenches, and she'd done so in the style of ancient Constantinople, three layers deep, and if she'd had an army of even half his warhost's number, he would have felt much more grim about his chances of victory. Even a quarter as much would have been enough to give him significant pause; but everything he could see, and indeed the fact that she'd gotten here so far ahead of his own armies, made him sceptical that she could bring even a fifth of that aforementioned troublesome quarter to bear against them, and as the doctrine went, there was no degree of genius that could really compensate for a simple lack of war potential.
Realistically, Princess Justine had no hope of victory. And even if she did, in fact, have any number of nasty tricks up her (likely) lace-cuffed sleeve to wield against them, they had brought along a failsafe.
"That's why we've brought the Death of Empires along with us," Santa Anna remarked to the man over his Gloucester's communications system, through which he could contact every vassal he had on the field, as well as the mercenary, whose ten thousand Zilkstani murderers were said to be worth their weight in gold thrice over, and Li Xingke, who had chosen to observe the battle as it unfolded from the safety of Santa Anna's personal G-1 Base, claimed by right of conquest from the late viceroy. And while usually, he would have chalked Li Xingke's reluctance to partake in the sortie as simply the overcautious nature of a homeland whose most famous military and architectural achievement was a kilometres-long millennia-old wall, having seen the sorts of death-traps the Chinese Federation expected its devicers to pilot, and heard of them from the horse's mouth, as it were, Santa Anna for once didn't think it would be particularly fair of him to begrudge the man his caution, hard-won as it likely was. "Any sort of chicanery the princess might have managed to concoct in preparation for this engagement will come to naught against it. Unless, that is, you have something you wish to tell us regarding the veracity of your claims surrounding it…"
Qujappat scoffed, his video image, imposed upon the screen of Santa Anna's Gloucester, cocking a bemused eyebrow. "The container's contents are legitimate, that much I can guarantee you."
"Then we have nothing to worry about, now do we?" Santa Anna countered.
The mercenary merely shrugged, his affect insouciant nearly to the point of insolence. "You're the man in charge."
"Just follow my orders," Santa Anna huffed impatiently. There was just something about Qujappat, something that Santa Anna had tried and failed to put into words for quite some time now (because it was almost never the result of the same behaviour twice), that was incredibly exhausting to have to deal with; but he hadn't been chosen as the leader of the sort of coalition Los Peninsulares was without knowing how to put utility and practicality ahead of interpersonal abrasion, and the fact remained that even if it should come to pass that the Immortals weren't ultimately necessary in the battle to come, they were still likely to play a crucial part in the battle against the actual suppression force that was sure to arrive soon, and so even now, Qujappat remained as indispensable as he had been since the day of his arrival.
The mercenary nodded, and then closed the video window, leaving Santa Anna blessedly alone with his thoughts for a few stolen moments before it was finally time to sally forth.
He took a deep, bracing breath, and did his best to contain himself—that the solution to the problem of his vassals' ruinous infighting was right there in his grasp, just across the river and a few klicks ahead… He was wary of things that seemed too good to be true—habitually so, in fact, as all Britannian scions, both Homeland and provincial, were trained to be—and yet, no matter how he looked at this situation, there was no apparent price to be run for this simple victory. If he was gullible enough for piety, he might have given some thought to the prospect of this situation being a sign of potential divine intervention, that the Heavens themselves were on his side, and the side of his vassals; as it stood, however, he could only chalk it up as a stroke of inordinately good luck. And hopefully, my good fortune will hold until the battle's end…
Santa Anna reached out and took hold of his Gloucester's control yokes in both hands—he was not a particularly proficient devicer, and of course it would have been safer for him to be commanding from the bridge of his G-1, but the success of what he sought to do here, with the aftermath of this battle, would rely heavily upon the quality of the narrative he could spin out of the events of the engagement; and while some might have considered it tantamount to blasphemy, to speak well of the Great Enemy, Napoleon, the fact of the matter was that Napoleon, above all others in the age of Britannia, had demonstrated to the entire world just how potent the image of a general who commanded from the front, who fought alongside their troops, truly was, not just for the sake of morale, but for the sake of loyalty and so many other things besides.
If he, if Santa Anna, meant to oppose the remote and supercilious aristocracy of the Homeland—to represent to them the true strength and fortitude of the provincial nobility, the forgotten, prodigal blood of the Holy Britannian Empire, then perhaps there was in fact no better way to accomplish that, he'd thought to himself, than for him and his vassals to take to the field themselves, and thus send a message, not just to Pendragon, but also to the world at large in so doing.
With that in mind, he switched his comm channel to broadcast to all of his vassals-turned-generals, and indeed, through the speaker systems of the fourteen G-1 Bases accompanying them on to the masses of infantry and devicers and tank crews that they had taken a great deal of care to assemble here. He had given his speech already, and all that remained was to give the command for battle to be joined.
And so he did.
"Begin the operation," Santa Anna instructed. "Let the crossing commence."
A former Chief General of the Imperial Army some century or so ago had once said, 'Any plan that consists of more than three steps is not a plan; it is wishful thinking'; and in observance of that, their tactics were to be kept as simple and fool-proof as possible. There were entire libraries full of treatises that spoke in detail of how a numerically inferior force might prevail against a far stronger army, after all, and if the young woman who was Santa Anna's foe du jour was even half so dangerous in her cunning as Li Xingke had professed to believe she might be, they had to assume that she had consulted every last such volume in her quest for triumph—and that meant that they could ill-afford to put their fighting strength at risk with an unnecessarily elaborate scheme that was guaranteed to introduce multiple new and avoidable failure points that his opponent would almost assuredly pick apart with care otherwise, ludicrously outnumbered or no. It was perhaps a trite aphorism to refer to the Battle of Thermopylae as an example of how troublesome even the most meagre-seeming forces could be once they were backed into a corner, but it remained nonetheless among the most broadly-applicable instances of such.
An army in excess of two hundred thousand was a slow, lumbering thing by its nature, the speed by which it could be moved to action only ever considered swift in the most relative of terms; from a seething state of stillness, then, the first clumps of infantry trudged down the banks of the river, and at a waist-high ford did they begin to wade across to the opposite bank, hundreds of rifles held high above hundreds of identical close-faced helmets, their appearances differing only in the colours of their lords displayed on the utilitarian armoured plating. Then came the first few Knightmares, clusters of fifth-generation Sutherlands that were noted for their broad, non-specific tactical applicability, the gel-filled wheels of their landspinners sinking perilously into the heavy black muck of the river-bed, but not enough to impede their progress.
Santa Anna sighed in relief, consciously loosening his death-grip on his Gloucester's control yokes. The crossing had begun without issue, proving that the princess had not put something nasty into the river itself, an agent that might corrode them, or explosives to sweep the ford away… He shook off his paranoia, the creeping dread he did his best to ignore that Li Xingke had planted into his mind, resting at the base of his neck, and rolled his shoulders to loosen up. As the commoner idiom went: 'so far, so good.'
BOOM! BOO-BOO-BOOM! BOO-BOOM! BOOM!
There came a groaning, a shearing of metal, bright orange and pink flashes of combustion; when he blinked and looked again, his jaw hanging in slackened shock, Santa Anna found himself watching his men scrambling across the river like mired minnows in a desperate vain attempt to avoid the falling wreckage of smoking, ruined Sutherlands. Every Knightmare that had begun to cross was reduced to an expensive heap of slag in the blink of an eye, suffering devastating damage so quickly that the devicers' fail-safe ejection mechanisms hadn't had time to fire—and now they, and the infantrymen who were unfortunate enough to get caught underneath the debris and crushed, were all dead.
"A-an anti-materiel rifle…! From this distance?!" came the shrill cries of terror over the commlink from his more veteran vassals—survivors of the Emblem of Blood and Charles zi Britannia's wars, who'd witnessed enough of this sort of damage's like that they could identify it at a glance. And indeed, at that proclamation, Santa Anna snapped into action, scanning the battlefield with his factsphere sensor as well as his Knightmare's camera systems, only for all of them to come up blank for kilometres around, until at last they came upon Princess Justine's position. If this had been the result of anti-materiel rifle fire, then Santa Anna was forced to admit that his panicking vassals were well-founded in their anxiety—from as far away as it should have been possible to fire off that shot, all the evidence he could gather told him there was not a single indication that there was anything present.
To Santa Anna's mind, the message was clear. If they tried to put their machines of war, their tanks and their Knightmares, across the river, it would all get picked off with impunity. The crossing would bleed them, and Princess Justine intended to make sure that they were bled heavily before even reaching her lines in any kind of state, let alone intact. And so, although it may well have been considered a premature move, Santa Anna put his finger on the proverbial scale, opening his comm and saying into it, "Calm down, all of you, and keep your wits about you. We're moving to the secondary plan, effective immediately."
He winced even as he said it; the secondary plan had really only one other step to it, but it was the very worst kind of step, the sort where a well-aimed strike could bite deep into his army's proverbial belly. It was a contingency the likes of which he'd really rather not have had to use, and given the fact that if he tried to retreat, or to go around her, not only would that accomplish nothing, given that the aristocrats this land belonged to were among those he was currently addressing, but it would also land him directly into an even worse position strategically than he would have been if he'd elected not to send any forces against her in the first place: thus, given the fact that this first plan was untenable, on a tactical, and more prominently, a strategic level, Princess Justine had effectively just forced his hand, even as she lashed them together.
It was not a pleasant sensation to contend with.
He spared a glance at his vassals' faces, the ones that had popped up on his comms unit right after that display of destructive potential on the princess's part, and he could see writ large upon Qujappat's face the selfsame reservations, misgivings, and acknowledgements that were then flashing through Santa Anna's mind. Truly, unless he wanted to put his head down and push on through in a headlong bull-charge, where they could, and almost certainly would, fall prey to any number of the princess's wiles, the solution before him, however flawed and imperfect and perilous it may well have been, was nonetheless the very best alternative battle-plan that he, or indeed any highborn tactician he could have called upon, had to hand.
Every Knightmare that had been preparing to make the crossing retreated from that position; but the next clumps of infantry were made to advance nonetheless, supported by the rolling, outmoded E.U. tanks, from the days before the advent of Knightmare Frames and Europe's adoption of the Panzer-Hummel, that his vassals and allies had secured from some of the more impoverished member-states who were looking to auction off their surplus armaments as discreetly as possible; their treads rolled into the water, their enormous and heavy turrets sweeping slowly back and forth as they began the amphibious crossing. And while to the infantry, Santa Anna imagined it must have seemed that they were being amply supported, all of his vassals knew the choice of deployment for exactly what it was: shedding their excess weight.
After all, it wasn't as if any tank, no matter how advanced or robust, could ever hope to match a Knightmare Frame for mobility, and mobility was what they now found themselves in most dire need of.
Manipulating the control yokes, Santa Anna shifted his Gloucester forward, taking up the lance that he'd chosen to wield for this battle (a marksman he was not), and turned sharply, heading directly towards the west of their position, along the river bank to where the tributary finally subsided, and as he went, all of the Knightmares they could bring to bear, including the strange quadrupedal Zilkhstani machines that the mercenaries favoured, formed up alongside him. Their contingency plan, risky though it was, remained as simple as they could feasibly make it: the Río Inírida, being a tributary of a larger river, did not proceed all the way to the mountains to the north and west of them, and there was a gap of land between it and the Río Vaupés that would allow their Knightmares to avoid having to ford the river entirely. This gap of land was the goal they shot for: splitting up the Knightmares from the outmoded vehicles and infantry, so that the infantry and the tanks that supported them could make the crossing under less oppressive long-range fire, with their lower profiles presenting much smaller targets, their much faster, more mobile Knightmares now sought to round the river and link up with their other forces, with the side-benefit of the manoeuvre acting to divide enemy firing lines, as well.
But it was because of this that they had to be quick: if they were too slow, the infantry and the tanks would be cut to ribbons, no matter how small their targets were, given that that was the sort of engagement that Knightmares had initially been designed for in the first place. And as soon as the initial waves of foot soldiers mounted the southern bank at last, followed in short order by gunmetal-grey tanks streaming water off of their squat, armoured forms, harrying, long-range fire began barking out from the far side of the field in steady streams, illustrating the critical necessity of the devicers' haste in perhaps the most harrowing of possible manners.
Santa Anna kept one ear turned towards the string of commands and information flowing into and out of his G-1, intending as he was to keep track of the infantry's progress as best he could. Under fire as they were from the very first, he listened as the troops and the tanks began to rush forward into a headlong advance as quickly as they could; then came a stream of updates, that this tank had been lost, that that one had blown up and taken a squad of soldiers along with it, harsh, steep losses that they had anticipated in nature, but by no means in scale.
Within moments, the armoured divisions they were pushing across the river were getting wiped out almost as quickly as they were crossing, and it was as if every sharpshooter under the princess's command not only knew precisely where to aim to pierce the tanks' armour without issue, but also could manage to land those difficult shots seemingly without fail.
That was when the first of the infantry entered the minefield.
KRA-KOOM! The eruption peaked the microphone before subsiding into static—the officer who'd been speaking in frenzied, hurried tones had been wiped from the earth mid-sentence. And then a tank went out, and then a cluster of them, and another cluster of infantry, not all at once but in staggered explosions, followed by the harsh, barking rat-tat-tat-tat of machine gun fire as their panicked, headlong charge of an advance finally came into the enemy nests' maximum range.
That madwoman…! Santa Anna thought in alarm. The crazy bitch has the entire battlefield mined to Hell and back! How on Earth does she mean to have her Knightmares fight, then, if a single wrong move is going to be enough to shred them?!
"They're chaos mines, my lords!" came a frenzied voice, as another tank was reduced to slag, and it was enough to reassure Santa Anna that he had made the correct decision in switching to their contingency plan off the bat. Fragmentation mines were dangerous enough, but chaos mines as an armament had been purpose-built to rip through even a Knightmare Frame's tungsten armour like so much butter. Clearly, we have somehow managed to underestimate Princess Justine's ruthlessness… That she's so willing to put her own devicers at risk with such reckless abandon…!
He felt vindicated, too, that he'd insisted upon bringing such a sizeable force—nearly half of their, or rather his, entire fighting strength—to this battle along with him; because regardless of how quickly his men were being slaughtered, and no matter how unerringly accurate the enemy sharpshooters and machine gunners were, the fact remained that a mine could only explode once, and then it was spent. Their advance was checked, nearly stalled, but he'd brought enough bodies to this that his strike force was able to weather the withering onslaught of ordinance and keep pushing forwards, shaken soldiers nonetheless clambering over the corpses of their fellows, bodies reduced to bullet-riddled pulp and featureless piles of gore, getting a little closer to the enemy trenches before being likewise slaughtered or rendered into a smoking crater of shredded and flash-fried human flesh, and thus bringing the front lines of his nearly two hundred thousand troops that much closer to their rifles' maximum effective range.
Santa Anna formed the tip of the proverbial spear, and so his Gloucester was the very first of their number to clear the curve around the end of the river; then came Qujappat, and then as a pair came Cortés and de la Mancha, alike in their desire for vengeance, and more and more of them flooded around that bend to spread out and take full advantage of their available area to tear across those kilometres of open field and join up with their bleeding forces. They turned south-east, aiming for the trenches, to help the infantry clear them out and take them for themselves, and as they did so, Santa Anna called out over his comms, "Do not allow yourselves to get separated! That's what she wants! Form up, and stay together!"
BOOM! BOOM-BOOM!
Then Cortés's Gloucester erupted into flame right behind him, the concussive force of it enough to shake Santa Anna's own Knightmare; the falling wreckage tripped up de la Mancha beside him, and as the Sutherland he'd chosen to pilot began to careen to the ground as its legs and its landspinners were at once swept out from under it, that, too, exploded, alongside a second Gloucester right behind him.
Neither Santa Anna, nor any of the other noblemen, had the chance to react to the suddenness of the destruction, or indeed the deaths of three of their own; at once, the bark of gunfire, of assault rifles that had been designed to be wielded by Knightmares, filled the air with sound as the thunderclap gunshots of the still-undiscovered sharpshooter began to subside in the wake of the death that they had reaped.
"Enemy Knightmares bearing in from the south!" declared Qujappat, his nerves clearly shaken, but doing his best to keep it under control nonetheless. As expected of a professional. "A few hundred, at least! They're headed straight for us!"
Santa Anna whipped his Gloucester around, his knuckles white on the yokes, his teeth ground into each other against the gees of the sudden turn, his ox-like heart thundering in his ears as sweat rolled down into his eyes, stinging; he spared the fraction of a moment it took to wipe his brow before seizing the yokes once again, and immediately he spotted their welcoming party—a few hundred, as Qujappat had said, with standard-issue armaments for all but the two Knightmares in the front. Painted crimson and violet, the two whose weapons differed were moving considerably faster than the rest of their fellows, peeling ahead more and more as they accelerated, charging towards them at full tilt…!
Adrenaline flooded his body to the point where it felt like he had more of it than blood, and with a jerk of the yokes, Santa Anna managed to avoid the crimson Knightmare's line of fire just barely, such that the bullets hit one of his own devicers behind him, wrecking the unit's left arm.
"All units, engage!" Santa Anna cried, and the Zilkhstani Knightmares returned fire.
Crimson and Violet wove out of the way with the grace of figure-skaters, their advance continuing almost entirety uninterrupted; Violet fired back with constrained bursts, while Crimson poured on a furious storm of bullets that forced his vassals and their retinues of devicers to scatter, especially as the enemy's standard KMFs echoed with rolling burst volleys of their own. It was all that they could do to fire back even as they scattered, and when Santa Anna witnessed Crimson's rifle click empty, only for the devicer to pivot into a pirouette, stowing the rifle and brandishing an EM jousting lance with both hands as they swung back around to continue their charge, he knew for a fact that these devicers were on a level above anything he could've brought to bear against them.
He brought his own lance about even so.
"My retinue, focus your fire upon the crimson Knightmare!" he ordered; and indeed, the devicers he had brought to the war effort from his estate closed ranks around him, firing at the charging lancer.
Crimson reacted almost before the firing began; the Knightmare wove its way back as it strafed, and then its slash harkens lashed out, crashing into one of the gunners. With an adder's speed and a level of unit performance that was clearly superior to what an unmodified Sutherland should have been capable of, the crimson Knightmare struck for the sudden blind spot it had pried apart in the midst of the cluster of gunfire, and skewered its wayinto the thick of their sudden guarding formation.
Santa Anna didn't have the attention to spare for the similarly-inspired handling with which Violet swapped from ranged to mêlée combat, induction-heated sword sinking into a different cluster of devicers; Crimson swung and stabbed and wove with lance and slash harken and hellish fury, cutting his retinue into pieces with savage elegance, and indeed the entire Knightmare detachment Crimson and Violet led fought like demons from Hell, pinning down, picking apart, and handily laying waste to more than thrice their number. They broke apart, did both forces, as duelling clusters formed (as they admittedly tended to do) between four or five of Santa Anna's own against two or three enemy Knightmares, and only the Zilkhstani Ghedo Vakkas seemed to be having any amount of success at all in even so much as pressuring the enemy's devicers in their unmarked Sutherlands—which made some sense, given that they were perhaps the most veteran force upon the field—but even then, the crimson and violet Knightmares were occupying maybe ten to twelve of his devicers at a time on their own, and certainly not because no new friendly devicers joined in to try and put them down.
Not to mention, every moment it took them to fight off the Knightmares here was another moment that the tanks and the infantry across the field from them spent getting mowed down by machine guns and otherwise bled like stuck pigs; and as he, his vassals, their retinues, and the four hundred Ghedo Vakkas of the Immortals fought here, they began to spread apart, the battle between opposing Knightmares beginning to split wide and separate. In every way, this was the exact scenario Santa Anna had wanted to avoid—he needed to regain some measure of control over this deteriorating situation, and quickly.
Thinking fast, Santa Anna made a snap decision, and contacted the one person whom he could trust to be able to help.
"Qujappat!" he called, and the Zilkhstani commander's head snapped towards him, insouciant brow furrowed mightily and layered thick with clammy perspiration, though the augmented reality headset that was necessary to pilot his foreign-made Knightmare obstructed Santa Anna's view of the mercenary's eyes. "We need to deal with the crimson and the violet Knightmares. Violet first. On me!"
"Agreed," said Qujappat, nodding, and moments later, a certain dark green Ghedo Vakka variant disengaged from a fight across the field, and made a bee-line for the violet Knightmare.
Santa Anna closed the comm window, and brought his lance to bear; he muttered an apology that would forever go unheard to the bright-eyed boys and girls who had come to fight in his name, whom he was now leaving at the crimson Knightmare's seemingly nonexistent mercy, and disengaged, crossing the field as best he could as he wove jerkily around a dozen smaller engagements in the search to bring down at least one of the two aces (for aces they clearly were) who were making an utter mess of his plans.
When he got there, Qujappat had already begun to lay down a steady hail of suppressing fire from his attached armaments, engaging the squat, quadrupedal structure of his sturdily-built, heavily-armoured command unit to its utmost extent, shifting this way and that omni-directionally as he peppered the violet Knightmare with bullets, even as it carved its way through Gloucester and Sutherland alike with no further effort than it took to command the unit to swing its sword. They had it dead to rights, isolated, pinned down and occupied, and surrounded on all sides—and it fell to Santa Anna to deliver the finishing blow.
Santa Anna would hardly consider himself much of a devicer, but that much, at least, he could do.
He readied his lance until it was well and truly couched, awaiting an opportunity; then, the moment the violet Knightmare turned its back to him entirely, he spotted it.
With a full-throated battle-cry, he charged headlong into the violet Knightmare's back…!
THUD!
Santa Anna blinked. He looked down at his status indicator, flooding his monitor with flashing red symbols, and a silhouette without an arm.
SHRRRK!
Something slammed into him from behind, and every indicator turned as crimson as the Knightmare he'd left…behind…him…
Oh. Oh, dear…
A mighty yank nearly sent his face smashing into the screen, and he grit his teeth against the way it forced his neck to snap forth while his spine was jerked back. He braced himself against the twist that came with it, the thing that the indicators said had gone through his chassis being pulled out of it; and before he knew it, the face of the crimson Knightmare filled his viewfinder—and whoever the devicer in its cockpit was, he could feel them glaring at him.
Then, the Knightmare's fist smashed into his armless Gloucester's faceplate, crushing his factsphere sensor in the process, and Santa Anna regained enough control over his body to reach both hands beneath the seat and trigger the fail-safe ejection levers without a moment's hesitation.
He was braced, and yet still he grimaced against the whiplashing sensation of the rockets firing, his cockpit escaping just in time to avoid what would have been a fatal blow—the crimson Knightmare's lance stabbing into the Gloucester's chest, right where the cockpit block would have been, and then through.
Though the gees promised pain and the shearing howl of the gales that heralded the darkening front of a thunderstorm filled his ears as the ejection mechanism propelled him further back and higher up, Santa Anna made a point to observe the situation from a bird's eye view while he could—and then the horror of the situation made itself known to him.
The crimson Knightmare was retreating, and the violet Knightmare stuck close by it, while the rest of the enemy Sutherlands made to disengage and retreat; and while his vassals did their best to force them to remain engaged, another detachment of enemy Sutherlands, led by a different pair of aces, their units blue and grey, slammed into the side of their attempted prolonged engagement. The lines buckled and came apart like so much tissue paper, and in the splintering chaos, the initial detachment slipped away.
But it was when he turned towards the infantry's side of the battle that he began to understand how truly dire their situation was.
The first layer of trenches had been overrun, and its occupants, the enemy's infantry in their armour that was black as pitch, were retreating in good order to bolster the second layer's defences, thus revealing the ground over which they tread to be pristine and unmined…
…Until the Immortals, who had taken minimal casualties in comparison to the rest of the army on the advance (because of course they had), spurred themselves forth, mounting the sides of the trenches in an orderly fashion, and then at last beginning to make the mad dash across the way.
The subsequent detonation of the chaos mines, buried just as thickly under the ground between the first and second layers of trenches as with the preceding stretch, seared his eyes with its brightness.
Santa Anna tried to think of a miracle that would salvage this disaster—but only one image sprang into his mind's eye, and stubbornly it stayed there, stuck fast:
The desiccated paw of a monkey, with a single finger furled.
This is, without a doubt, the single biggest clusterfuck I've ever been in…! Swaile Qujappat thought as he spat out a curse, gritting his teeth as he laboured to coax even a little bit of extra speed from his customised Ghedo Vakka, the roar of gunfire so loud in his ears as he desperately ran through ammunition that he knew they would be ringing for hours after he got out of this alive—if he got out of this alive. His eye itched with the impulse to use his Geass, to try and manufacture a situation where he could easily slip away from this mounting disaster, and live to fight another day, but he bit down on that impulse hard.
Swaile Qujappat might well have been an honourless scoundrel, and all variations thereupon (he'd had quite a number of them thrown his way over the course of his career), but there was in fact one thing he refused to be, one thing that he considered to be very much over the line he refused to cross: Swaile would never be the sort of scumsucker who would abandon the boys under his command to die for his survival.
Every street rat and footpad who'd ever called the slums of Gralbahd their home, every fatherless bastard and motherless weasel, knew the code, that the gang's loyalty is owed to their leader, and the leader owes their loyalty to the gang. He hadn't risen half so high in the world, not even with the dormant brand that was burning a hole in the back of his eye, that he'd forgotten that; and while his name might have been destined to die in ignominy, the man himself would be fucked if he didn't go down with his ship.
Not to mention, it wasn't as if his Geass was actually able to function without first establishing a link through direct eye contact. So there was also that minor detail.
One thing was for damn sure, though: this whole ordeal reeked of Geass. There was no way that an infantry force of more than single digits could pick their way across a friendly minefield without triggering one, not even by accident, that didn't include 'Geass' stamped in big red letters all over its surface. A good chunk of his boys had gotten shredded into pulp by armour-piercing shrapnel because they knew this; they were under strict orders never to risk themselves more than necessary, and so when they'd witnessed those black-armoured bastards retreating in good order across the field without so much as a whiff of a charge, it had seemed entirely obvious that there weren't any more 'special surprises' they'd have to worry about. He understood the thought process that must have taken place even as he cursed out the reality, that there had been chaos mines buried under that almost three kilometre stretch of open ground between the first layer and the next, and that his boys had absolutely taken the brunt of the resulting shitstorm.
So, this Princess Justine, or someone in her service, must bear a brand of their own, Swaile thought to himself, even as he grit his teeth against the g-force of sending his Ghedo Vakka into yet another strafing power-slide that whipped at his neck and nearly sent his head smashing into the wall of the cockpit. There were four enemy Sutherlands currently chasing him and firing at him—they'd already smashed through the majority of the Britannian rebel forces Swaile was meant to be helping, and had isolated him from most of the rest of his boys in their own units—but even though the quartet was freakishly good at fighting together, never leaving him an ounce of breathing room, this hadn't been the first time he'd been pressured this hard by numerically superior opponents. It might have been a while, but any Gralbahd guttersnipe knew that the striker who rose high enough to have laurels to rest on would rest there eternally; he knew his way around a scrap even now, and he'd never allowed himself to forget what it meant to be the runt in a dog-fight. With all four of his unit's leg-mounted machine guns roaring, peppering his opponents, and both of the cannons mounted on its shoulders discharging regularly, he flipped a switch on his control yokes, and swerved hard to buy himself some time. Some kind of psychic steroid…? Shared precognition…? Either way, if any of us mean to survive this mess, I need to figure out who this Geass-user is, and take them out, pronto. But first, I need to get some time to assess…
His headset let out a piercing, whining beep as the augmented reality system acquired targets on all four of the Sutherlands that were dogging him, and without a moment's hesitation, he depressed the trigger. The extra bulk of his custom Knightmare wasn't only armoured plating, after all: twin hatches mounted upon his unit's back popped open, and the concealed rocket launchers fired, four homing missiles shooting up in graceful arcs to twist towards the gunmetal-coloured Sutherlands.
He closed his eyes against the flash of the missiles finding their targets, and when he let them open, blinking dark spots from his eyes, he spotted four cockpit blocks flying off into the distance.
"Tch! Score one for it being some form of precognition," he hissed in sharp displeasure; and while, in the ordinary course, he would have lived up to his reputation as a scoundrel by shooting down those four with another hail of homing missiles, he had neither the time nor the ammunition to spare on that. The fact remained that that was four fewer devicers the enemy could use against his boys and the pompous pricks he had been paid to fight for today, and that would have to be enough. He had far, far bigger fish to fry.
The four he had destroyed were by no means the only enemy Knightmares that now lay in smoking pieces across the field, but the contrast between that number, their cockpit blocks empty as far as he could see, and the number of his downed allies, most of whom had been destroyed before they got the chance to eject, could hardly have been more stark. And that gap was widening: where before there had been two or three of their allies to every wrecked enemy Knightmare, now it was more like four or five. It was clear to Swaile that, regardless of the influence of Geass, the tactician who had laid out the enemy's battle plan had a true flair for ingenuity: they had split what Knightmares they had into groups that were each too big to ignore on their own, and were now rotating said groups out regularly, letting the original group circle back to their own camp for rest and resupply, before redeploying themselves to relieve the second detachment after them. This sort of hit-and-run hammerblow tactic was the exact sort of warfare the Ghedo Vakka had been designed for, but only on the offence; they were faring significantly worse on the defence, with the enemy's rotation keeping them under constant, punishing pressure, their nerves fraying, their energy fillers draining at an alarming rate, and their equipment beginning to fail under the strain of prolonged, pitched battle.
It was a grim irony, Swaile appreciated, that the very qualities that made the Ghedo Vakka so ideal a machine to engage in this sort of warfare offensively were exactly what made them especially vulnerable to that doctrine being wielded against them.
It was immediately clear to Swaile that they needed to disengage and regroup, just as it was every bit as clear that their allies were being cut to ribbons, and the Immortals along with them. If they stood and fought, they would certainly die most honourable deaths.
Thankfully for both him and the Immortals, Swaile Qujappat was far from an honourable man.
Knowing that lingering was tantamount to suicide, Swaile sped his Knightmare away from the four wrecked Sutherlands, and as he went, the rocket launchers receding into the back of the Ghedo Vakka once more, he opened a new commlink channel to his still-living devicers. Immediately, and without asking for a head-count he knew would only burden him with emotional weight that he couldn't afford to carry right now, he ordered, "All units, disengage at once, and head east-by-northeast! We're regrouping!"
"What about the Brits, sir?!" one of his remaining devicers asked, the man yelling to make himself heard above the clamour of combat.
"Leave 'em!" Swaile replied simply. "Their deaths will cover our withdrawal! If we stand and fight, we'll just be shredded along with 'em! We get paid on this job by winning battles, boys,not by babysitting a bunch of upjumped aristocrats while they play soldier!"
His boys chuckled, some in relief, some rueful, and moved to follow his orders.
Another comm window dinged open next to his head, and judging from the affronted tone that the person on the other side began with, Swaile knew it had to be from one of the Britannian noblemen's fancy 'G-1 Bases,' as they called them. "Mercenary! You were not given orders to disengage!"
"Sorry, whoever-you-are, but the High Eunuchs didn't pay us anywhere near enough to stand there and die with you lot," Swaile replied glibly, smirking through his sour sweat and bitter stress. "And we've got to think of our reputation! Surely you of all people can understand that."
The laughter of his boys as they left the Brits to their fate was a balm to his frayed spirit, as was the wordless, strangled sound of outrage that came from whoever the pencil-pushing lackey was who made the call that they were now mocking. "Li Xingke, please, command these rabble back into line!"
Swaile could hear Xingke's shrug in his voice, and it made his smirk transform into a full-on grin; while neither Swaile nor Xingke would go so far as to call the other 'friend', to be certain, they'd run in the same circles and bumped shoulders for long enough that they were on a first-name basis almost as a point of necessity by now—so it was safe to say, Xingke knew what Swaile was about. "I'm not authorised to increase the amount Luoyang is paying him for this contract. Past that, there's nothing I can do."
"But you…?! Fine!" the stiff-in-the-making exclaimed. "We'll double your pay!"
"Oh, really? Well, isn't that sweet of you," Swaile mocked sceptically. He'd been around this outfit, and in this business, for too long to buy that load of bullshit. "Tell you what, when you prove to me and my boys that you lot are actually good for that kind of price hike, then we'll talk about us turning ourselves around and throwing our lives away. Now, how's that sound?"
"You…you foreigner scum! When His Majesty Santa Anna returns—!" And then Swaile cut off the link, setting his system to block any attempts for the Brits to hail him until he told it not to.
"Well, looks like I got Bingo," said another of his boys, and the laugh that seized them all was one that not even Swaile could effectively manage to shake off—both at the hilarity of the timing, and the idea that their employers were regularly so unoriginal in their derisive comments that the Immortals had made a game out of the most common and tired epithets; after all, the fact that they were the best in the business by no means meant that they were well-liked, even by some of their own countrymen (particularly the sort to have grown up in the lap of the greatest luxuries the Land of Warriors could provide).
"Alright, boys, pack it in," Swaile ordered as his own laughter subsided. "Look sharp! We've got a battle to salvage…"
"Can this battle even be salvaged, sir?"
"It's our reputation that's on the line if it can't be," Swaile shrugged. "Still, it's not as if we've got a way of knowing until we try, eh?"
"True enough, sir," said Bingo-boy; but then, with a far less lighthearted tone, he asked, "Though, is anyone else getting the feeling that this was too easy? I mean, even with letting the Brits die in our place, it isn't like there's a chance the enemy hasn't caught onto the fact that we're not there with 'em anymore…"
That thought certainly put a damper on things. Swaile frowned; that was actually a decent point…
One of the other boys suggested, weakly, "Maybe they think we retreated?"
Swaile shook his head; the sort of person who'd thought to set up that ambush wouldn't have been dumb enough to come to that conclusion without ample verification, especially not now that they'd put ten, twenty klicks in between themselves and the Brits, pushing their units up to their top speed in an attempt to win free. There weren't even any Knightmares tailing them, and soon they'd be in a position to support the advancing infantry with impunity.
All of a sudden, the words of Zilkhstan's beloved Generalissimo wandered into Swaile's mind. If a skilled enemy is making an obvious error, it is in truth nothing of the sort…
"Enemy contact, sir! GYAH—!"
Swaile whirled his Knightmare around, and barked into the commlink, "Everyone! Form up on me, and prepare to engage! Weapons hold!"
That done, he took in the area behind him, and blinked away surprise—the unit who had called out the contact was a mangled ruin, with a Knightmare-sized sword of Britannian make, a 'heatsabre,' thrown clear through it with a monumental level of force, piercing through the armour of the cockpit. It had cut the feed, and Swaile couldn't see any way for the pilot not to have died instantly. And then he looked off to the side, in his periphery—two Sutherland variants dashed towards them with every bit of the headlong speed of a bullet, one painted stark white, the other jet black, each wielding a heatsabre of their own. Swaile took a moment to bite back a curse—two aces, traversing the battlefield unsupported? He wouldn't be remotely surprised if these two were in fact the deadliest combatants the enemy could bring to the field, and the fact that both were clearly equipped for close-quarters combat was enough to tell him that if they let either ace into mêlée range, let alone both, they were in for a bad time (to put it lightly).
"Keep your distance! Engage them at range, separate them, surround them, and destroy them," the veteran mercenary captain ordered, his words clipped, his tone clear, his hands tightening about the yokes of his Knightmare to a white-knuckle grip, before he took a deep breath and forced himself to relax. Letting himself tense up would be like reaching for his neck while someone was strangling him: it was a reflexive response that was in reality the single least helpful course of action one could take. "And whatever you do, do not, under any circumstances,let them get close enough to use their heatsabres!"
"Yes, sir!" his boys replied obediently, while just a ways away, the white Knightmare sped up as it approached the ruin of his latest downed devicer, drawing the heatsabre from the wreckage as it passed and dual-wielding both of its induction swords. To keep his nerves stable, Swaile did a quick head count: of the initial one thousand, the cycling ambush had whittled away around one-third: six hundred forty-three of the Immortals now stood arrayed against two new aces of technically unknown capability, and who were more likely than not under the effect of the same Geass that had led so many of his own infantry to their deaths.
On paper, their advantage was so overwhelming that it was ludicrous.
The question was, why didn't Swaile feel that way…?
What was it about these two that made them brazen enough to engage around half of their enemy's total remaining Knightmare Frames on their own?
"Well, well, well," came a woman's voice from out of the white Knightmare's speakers—honestly, Swaile had never before considered that a voice could be described as 'swaggering' until now, and it was a realisation that so thoroughly caught him off-guard that he categorically refused to unpack its implications. That, and the tone of the woman's voice was the sort he'd heard out of the lips of brothel-whores, breathy in a way that suggested arousal—and he doubly wanted nothing to do with the implications of that in this context. "All this, just for li'l ol' me? Ya really shouldn't have…"
The black Knightmare came forth, then, and engaged its own speakers—this, too, was a woman's voice, and the cold, calm, menacing tone of that voice, in contrast, belied its clear musicality. "The devicer corps of the Immortals, I take it? The Kingdom of Zilkhstan's finest professional soldiers…"
Swaile found himself barking out a startled laugh. That one was a first—that anyone spoke of them with a degree of respect that wasn't at least begrudging, if not entirely nonexistent. Just for that, he came to the decision that he would humour the strange women, and snapped on his own speakers. "That we are. Though I'm sorry to say, I don't really see how that's relevant, given the situation."
"We have no quarrel with you, and nor does the Holy Britannian Empire," the black Knightmare's pilot said, and as she came closer, Swaile couldn't help but notice the irregular construction of her offhand arm—he wasn't sure just what was hidden there, but he made a mental note to keep an eye on it, when this conversation eventually broke down and came to blows. "And so I shall give you all an offer of mercy that I will never extend to your employers, and nor again to yourselves should you choose to stand with them: stand down right now, quit the field, and return to Zilkhstan immediately. Upon my authority as Justine vi Britannia, Fourth Princess of the Realm and commander of the 558th Irregulars who were tasked with the suppression of this rebellion, I can promise clemency to any of you who do so. Your reputation will take a hit, true, but not one so great as it will suffer should you choose to stand and fight—and you and your men can live to do battle another day, instead of dying pointlessly, bodies littered upon a foreign field for the sake of someone else's war."
Swaile barked out a second laugh, this one so sudden that it actually provoked a bit of a coughing fit before he got it under control again. "Oh, dear, that's the second time you've caught me off my guard. I don't think anyone's ever made that offer before—most people don't care to think twice about the lives of us humble hired guns."
"Most people would think that it is the way of the world that you 'humble hired guns' should bleed for another's cause and another's coin—that your lot are to be considered disposable—and that it being the way of the world therefore makes it just," the woman who was apparently the princess Xingke had spoken of with such wariness, and the enemy commander besides, said flatly. "I should hope that it is evident that I disagree with that line of thought, such as it is, in the strongest of possible terms."
Swaile blinked at that, more than a little gobsmacked by what he'd just heard. "…Xingke had a lot to say about you, but he didn't mention you were an idealist… Somehow, I'd expected that 'the woman who, at the age of eleven, brought the Empire of Japan to its knees' would be a lot more ruthless…"
"Ruthlessness has its merits," the princess allowed. "But if it is not wielded in the service of a goal, it becomes nothing more than a self-serving exercise in pointless sadism. And really, if we who shed blood, and whose blood in turn is shed, cannot aspire to an ideal, then what is the nature of conflict other than an amorphous mass of suffering ponderously circling the drain?"
"I wouldn't know," Swaile replied with an insouciant shrug. "Wouldn't exactly say that I'm much of a philosopher, myself. You don't have much use for it when you grow up on the streets, having to steal and kill to survive. Didn't have much use for high-minded pampered noble concepts like what is 'just' and 'merciful,' either, to tell you the truth. You got big and strong, and you just took what you wanted; or, you got clever and swiped it from under the nose of people bigger than you. So sadly, I'll have to decline your no doubt generous offer, princess…"
"…Then let the record show that I gave you your chance," the princess said, her voice cold like the night winds across the desert dunes, as she re-engaged her heatsabre, and directed the point of its curved, single-edged blade towards him and his boys. "And let none forget it."
"You boys better show me a good time, now, y'hear~?" the white Knightmare's pilot remarked, but it was difficult to tell if it was meant as flirtation or as a warning. "If any of you dipshits so much as think of leavin' me all high 'n' dry, you can bet your asses I'll be takin' it outta your hides…!"
Swaile smirked against his internal misgivings, that this woman, Princess Justine, was so confident in her and her partner's abilities that she'd offered them clemency, and hadn't seemed particularly bothered by their refusal to stand down and quit the field in peace; all the same, he knew for a fact that all he could do now was give the order, and hope against hope that he wasn't making the gigantic mistake that Princess Justine clearly seemed to think he was. "It's time for us to earn our pay, boys!Surround them, and wait for my command…!"
At once, his boys broke off, forming groups of three as they swung out wide, seeking to engage at mid-range so that their full weapon complements could come into play—and yet, even as they surrounded the two aces (and really, that was another point of oddity—it was vanishingly rare to see a commander on the front lines who could handle themselves there, who also didn't rise up to their position from the ranks), neither the princess nor her companion in the white Knightmare seemed to be particularly bothered by the encirclement forming around them. It made Swaile's eyes narrow in suspicion; something was clearly off, beyond all the oddities his senses could observe. What's your game, then, princess…?
"Any rules?" the devicer in the white Knightmare prompted.
"One point per normal unit," said the princess. "If it's a custom unit, five points; the commander is worth ten."
"Fuck yeah," the white Knightmare's pilot proclaimed, brandishing her twin heatsabres.
"On the count of three," said the princess in the black-and-gold Sutherland. "Three… Two…"
"Weapons free!" Swaile barked out. "Open fire!"
"One."
"RIP AND TEAR!" the white Knightmare's pilot roared in glee; and even over the cacophony of cannon and machine gun fire, it shook Swaile to his core—doubly so when the white Knightmare charged, taking advantage of the fact that she was the target to swerve and strafe towards their firing clusters, set up in an encircling chequerboard formation as they were. The black Knightmare instead retreated a bit, as the princess dodged and wove through the oncoming fire with all the inhuman grace of an asp, but Swaile did not have the luxury of paying attention to her—the white Knightmare dodged not only the roaring gunfire, but even evaded the slash harkens sent its way, as well, all without losing even a sliver of her momentum on the charge, full speed ahead.
Swaile winced at the thought of that, at the way the sudden shifting of directions at full speed sent a devicer's head flying this way and that, with the potential for causing permanent damage—the probable origin for the conventional wisdom of bleeding speed when one strafes and dodges, to the point where the quality that separated the neophytes from the merely skilled from the true aces was how little speed could be lost while evading, rather than if they were able to avoid losing speed at all—but the recklessness of the charge worked to her advantage. The layering of the encirclement came at the cost of a slight reduction in how quickly the Ghedo Vakkas could retreat—so slight that ordinarily, it wouldn't matter.
This time, however, it seemed to matter quite a bit.
Swaile laid down his own fire while this happened, but it was a bit on auto-pilot—she'd gotten into his lines, and with both heatsabres flashing, each stroke a pure expression of lethal savagery, she laid them to waste, carving a cluster into useless chunks of metal before moving onto the next, while the ones further back did their best to put more distance between her and them, and to keep pouring on the gunfire.
The black Knightmare, too, had pierced their lines, though not nearly so savagely, the princess ably putting her slash harkens to use even while avoiding the Immortals' own slash harkens with a level of deft precision and economy of motion that made Swaile's best devicers look like fumbling invalids in contrast. Wherever her heatsabre fell, another Ghedo Vakka was rent asunder with a single two-handed blow, and it was a small mercy indeed that she actually retreated again to gain distance whenever the amount of fire on her position began to layer itself too thickly for proper evasion, thus keeping her own Knightmare almost immaculate—the white Sutherland, in contrast, only ever advanced, evading just enough to ensure that the only damage the clearly custom unit took was cosmetic, and while those kinds of pits and dings from stray shots that could be soaked would certainly begin to add up before too long, the challenge would be Swaile keeping enough of his boys alive for long enough to capitalise on that.
Shesthaal, you miserable sack of pomp and pretence, Swaile thought with a curse, it's a sure sign of how thoroughly this situation has gone to shit that I've finally found some use for all that stupid noble garbage you insisted upon beating into my head…
Swaile, as a rule, vastly preferred engaging at range to getting up close and personal—only an idiot would think to bring a sword to a gunfight, after all—but as this utterly fucked situation developed further, it became increasingly clear to him that he had no real choice in the matter.
Just as he'd done before, with the four Sutherlands who'd worked to corner him, he swapped from his cockpit's normal configuration and switched on the targeting system for his rocket launchers, his eyes flitting this way and that across the battlefield as the little reticles searched for contacts that lacked the IFF transponder the system recognised—it landed upon them, and locked, two reticles per Knightmare, and at once, he fired his missiles as the target lock beeped.
The armour on his Knightmare's shoulders and back opened up once again, and four missiles shot forth from beneath them, arcing high and homing in on their locked-in targets.
Immediately, Princess Justine reacted, her black Sutherland surging forth and cleaving through one Knightmare after another, burying herself deep into their firing lines as the missiles pursued her—and after she passed, his boys did their best to fill in the gap left by her passage, to turn about and fire upon her; but once both missiles Swaile had fired corrected course to run in parallel, and they sped past a newly-formed bunched-up cluster of firing Ghedo Vakkas, their devicers scrambling to account for the destruction of the sudden charge that would have seemed in any other circumstance like an attempt to break the encirclement and escape, the princess turned and fired one of her two chest-mounted slash harkens, striking one missile and triggering a mid-air detonation. The first's detonation triggered the second missile's, too, and all the Knightmares in that sudden and temporary cluster were struck with the full force of both explosions, either killing or disabling most of them instantly.
Swaile didn't waste the time or the mental effort to attempt to track what became of his missiles that were directed at the white Knightmare, too, now that the display he'd just witnessed made him certain that the other devicer would have shrugged it off every bit as easily; instead, he grit his teeth, and charged forth through the smoke, guns blazing, cannons roaring, chasing the black Knightmare through all the mangled wreckage she had made of the men under his command. As expected, she dodged and wove just as deftly as she had before, if not more so—more than once as he pursued her, she used one of his own as a shield, with the attempt to put her down devolving into a chaotic fracas of friendly fire as his remaining devicers did their best to help him as he passed—but he kept pressure on her, never allowing her to choose her engagements, never granting her a moment's breathing room, hoping against hope that if he kept this up for long enough, if he was relentless enough, then maybe, maybe he could cause this freakishly skilled devicer, this royal brat with what seemed like a killer instinct the likes of which he'd never encountered in all his career before this, to slip up, to make a mistake.
It was a long shot, but after evading two homing missiles that had been fired upon her when she'd had her back turned, when she was practically guaranteed to have been taken unawares, he was starting to think that that was the only chance they had.
Their merry chase passed as an adrenaline-fuelled blur for Swaile, at once somehow both brief and interminable: the closest thing he had to a reliable sense of time relied upon him noticing and keeping tabs on how both aces were steadily whittling away at their numbers, both in the rapid depletion of the aid that came to his side whenever he passed, and in the growing number of Knightmares that he could only ever have described as 'mauled' that littered the field around them, with only the white Knightmare's psychotic cackling accompanying them through the patches of sudden (relative) quiet.
One thing he did know, however, was that he was running low on ammunition: both machine guns mounted on his unit's forelegs had clicked to empty, and so the machine guns on the hindlegs had to make up the difference, while he had only a third of his ammunition left for the shoulder-mounted cannons. Not to mention the fact that he'd gone from the ongoing hammer-blows to the west that were now beginning to mop up what few rebel Britannian Knightmares remained directly into this disaster of a duel with no time to resupply in between resulted in his energy filler running dangerously low, and it seemed entirely likely to him that he would lose this duel through sheer force of attrition if he kept on like this.
Think, Swaile, think! How do we get a leg up on this…? he asked himself, his internal tone just shy of a delirious frenzy—and then, out of the corner of his eye, he spotted it.
The white Knightmare, of course…
The dual-wielding Sutherland was in a rough state—even from here, Swaile could quite clearly see that it had been pushed to its limit, both in terms of unit performance and durability. Its slash harkens were mangled beyond any form of utility, it was down an arm, its armour plating was so dented that it teetered on the verge of failing entirely; and yet even still, he watched for a moment as that one remaining arm continued to raise its heatsabre high, and bring death wherever it fell.
An idealist, are you, your highness? Swaile thought to himself with a resurrected smirk, as he went once again from his standard cockpit configuration back into the targeting mode for his rocket launchers. He kept the pressure up with his cannon fire and with the hindleg-mounted machine-guns, but he broke off his pursuit for just long enough to turn and powerslide, acquiring his target even as his landspinners ran black furrows into the cratered land, and all four reticles converged at last upon a single point. Well, let's see if you're willing to be a martyr, too…
BEEP!
He grinned as the missiles left their tubes. Bingo…
All four missiles ascended rapidly into the air, arcing, and homing in on the battered, faltering, and failing white Knightmare, whose devicer was too far immersed in butchering the boys Swaile had fought alongside for practically his entire adult life (if not longer, in the case of some of them) to notice and take evasive action in time.
"SUZAKU—!" the princess shrieked, speeding past her last position and towards her friend with a monomaniacal level of determined focus. The slash harken she'd used against the last pair of missiles shot forth, eliminating one that had yet to converge with the rest and destroying the already-compromised blade of the slash harken in the process, and even as Swaile prowled in her wake, opportunist that he was, he found himself watching with the peculiar fascination of an ambush predator as this damage seemed only to embolden her, sending her faster, further…
The next slash harken destroyed two of the remaining three, and was lost in the process. But it was the fourth and final missile that seemed certain to reach its mark—and it was this one that Princess Justine positioned herself in front of, before slashing out with her heatsabre…!
Swaile let out a low whistle, even as he closed his eyes against the flash; in all his years as a merc, he'd never seen anything half so insane as an enemy commander cutting down a missile mid-flight—which was insane enough without the fact that this mind-boggling stunt had been performed to save her friend's life, endangering her own in the process.
"JUSTINE!" the berserker bitch in the white Knightmare cried out a moment later, turning to her friend's ruin of a unit, and then to the sky, where the princess's ejected cockpit flew higher and higher into the sky, away from the fray. The remaining custom Sutherland made a move as if to pursue her friend and commander as said cockpit continued to gain distance, but quick, courageous thinking from the few of his boys who yet remained—perhaps two hundred of them, all told, if there were even that many—pinned the crazy bitch down under a hail of gun and cannonfire, keeping her in place. "GRAH—! Fuckin' weaklings! GET THE FUCK OUTTA MY WAY!"
Swaile saluted their sacrifice—but they had a real chance, now, of actually pulling a win out of this meat grinder of a mess, if they could manage to capture the enemy commander and force her to surrender; and with this goal in mind, Swaile set off on the ejected cockpit's trail, determined to track the princess down and end this unmitigated Hell of a battle at long last.
Then, the impossible happened.
The situation got worse.
It was difficult to miss the silver bullet that flew high above the battlefield, in a straight line from a G-1 Base's rocket launcher tubes—one of their many point-defence configurations, he'd learned—and the knowledge of what was in that silver bullet, after having travelled halfway across the world with it in tow, made the detonation of its lustrous casing high above the field impossible to mistake for anything else.
"Santa Anna…you stupid, insane bastard," Swaile swore, as he came to a stop and stared up at the sky, and at the ghostly white particles that fell from the cloud-darkened, thundering sky like individual flakes of snow. "You actually went and used it, you miserable, spiteful, misbegotten son of a whore…"
Because Swaile knew exactly what these particles were. He'd been briefed on them, and on exactly why it was the worst-case scenario if he saw even one of them, with painstaking thoroughness for several hours before either Xingke or he had been entrusted with the warhead's transportation.
This was the Death of Empires. A doomsday weapon, the functioning mechanisms of which not even the greatest scientists Luoyang could command were able to decipher. The site from which each such particle had been carefully, perilously gathered, which had once been a member-state of Europia United by the name of Egypt, was now known only as the Dead Zone, because whatever this stuff was, it killed any and everything it touched, down to the microbial level.
And the madman had just deployed it upon the countryside he sought to rule.
Swaile turned his gaze from the sky, and returned to chasing down Princess Justine with a heavier heart than he'd ever thought he'd have to carry. Every indicator he had told him that it was already too late for his men, too late for him, too late for any of them—but for all his talk of being the most dishonourable of scoundrels, and for all the pride he'd taken in the notoriety of his disrepute, to lay down and accept his oncoming death simply wasn't in his nature.
He'd complete this, his final contract—and while it might not mean anything to anyone but him, it would allow him to join his fallen comrades on the other side with a clever quip and a clean conscience.
She was falling.
It was strange, this time—for in this moment, unlike the times before, she knew herself as Justine, and she knew that she was dreaming.
She fell even still.
Beneath her was arrayed her foe, she knew—a decisive battle, a final stand, where her people, the Northern Kingdom, fought off a horde of enthralled barbarians and twisted monstrosities that answered to ever more ancient horrors, the thrice-damned legacy of the First Imperium. The snow was thick upon the ground, and this far north, the black snow-clouds were so thick that the sun did not rise—and yet, beneath her, on the ground below, her comrades, faceless but recogniseable, stood firm, and stood fast. And were they southrons, were her warriors to be stood arrayed against any other foe that might menace those softer, brighter lands, such splendid courage and relentless determination would already have won them the day.
And yet against this foe, whose host seemed without number, without end, they were being ground down, the poverty of their lands, of their harsh, grim, and unforgiving kingdom, damning them, as spears splintered and swords shattered, and archers reached for arrows that were not there. Their magicians did their best, valiantly weaving gouts of flame and whips of lightning, but it was not enough—they were being overrun, and all the staunch resilience of their dauntless spirits would come to naught, unless something was done, and quickly.
Thus, she fell.
And as she fell, she changed.
It was a peculiar sensation, like relieving a muscle she'd forgotten existed, a stiffness she had not noticed subsiding and laying bare the tension of her body. Flesh and sinew, bone and blood, they all began to warp and change with a galvanising relief, the sweet, aching pleasure of standing and stretching after hours spent seated. The mantle of calm and cold and hoarfrost drew itself closer about her, and it became her flesh, the armour of both body and soul, the sickly green flame in her blood flowing into her core…
You were never of their number, though you clad yourself in their skin.
But that is well, for you are not like them.
You are a dragon.
And as a dragon, Justine caught the wind beneath her wings, and roared…
She awoke in a flash, and all at once, her body jolting itself alert. Immediately, she recalled all that had happened, and thus deduced where she was—in her ejected cockpit, fallen to the earth.
First order of business was to check her eye—and indeed, it yet burned, perhaps even brighter than before, so her unconscious state had not gotten anyone killed for lack of her Geass. That was well.
The second order of business had her planting her foot against the emergency hatch of her ejected cockpit, kicking at the obstruction once, twice, thrice, and it gave way with a shearing of metal, letting her free of the pod that had almost certainly saved her life. She grabbed the Murasama, loath as she was to let herself forget it, and climbed her way out of the ejection pod, into the bleak grey of the skies above, which seemed to be…snowing? Unless she'd somehow gotten very far afield of anywhere within the maximum distance of her cockpit's ejection thrusters and wound up in the Andes, then snowfall at this time of year ought to have been an impossibility—and while the driving wind that came with the thunderstorm she had spotted before battle was joined, which seemed to have finally arrived, certainly made it much cooler, the effect was not so profound that snow would be a consideration. A bit of hail, perhaps, but she was certain that none of the highly-specific weather conditions were present to enable the falling of the little flakes of ice crystal…
She looked around herself, and took in once again the clamour of battle (though it was reduced by quite a significant margin to what it ought to have been), and the pockmarked state of the field that she had spent several days layering thick with buried chaos mines. So she hadn't been flung into the Andes, which was admittedly something of a relief—but then, how on Earth was it snowing, of all things?
That wasn't an immediate concern, however—right now, her primary priority was recovery, and somehow managing to survive on her own for long enough for someone to retrieve her. Just to be safe, she reached into her coat and pulled forth Friede's gift to her, from their meeting during the Imperial Opera Company's production of Der Freischütz, on that unseasonably cold spring night now three years past: a semi-automatic pistol that had been custom-ordered from the Mauser Company, with the distinctive box magazine of an antique C96, but otherwise wholly modern functionality. She'd never had cause to use it, but she figured that today had already had enough of her taking risks, necessary or otherwise, without her also refusing to make ample use of what she still thought of as her dedicated holdout weapon, even now that she had her claws to rely upon.
In summary, Justine had made it out of that encounter with her best friend alive and with her in one piece, and she fully intended for both to remain that way.
Actually, now that she was no longer primarily concerned with assessing her own condition, what at first had been a passing observation became an increasingly unmistakable truth: her Geass had grown in strength to the point where it was immediately tangible. She could feel her warriors from far away, as well as their relative situations with a modicum of accuracy, enough to tell that the weight of the sheer numbers the rebellion had brought to the field proved enough that her soldiers were struggling to hold the third and final layer of defensive trenches—even if they had managed to bleed the enemy infantry to the point that ninety-five percent of their number were corpses on the field, the 588th Irregulars still would have been outnumbered two to one. But as time went on, and her Geass redoubled its potency, her warriors were actually beginning to push back against the enemy's suicidal advance—and it also became increasingly clear that whatever it was that was falling from the sky, it was not in any way, shape, or form snow.
There were bodies littered across the way directly within her field of vision, lumped together with the smoking wreckage of old E.U. tanks scattered across the ground, and as she watched, the particles that descended from on high landed upon these bodies and desiccated them within moments. The fact that she was herself spared from any harm was something of a mystery, but she'd long since learned to trust in her instincts not to lead her astray, and right now, they were telling her that there was no cause for her to be at all concerned about it—not for herself, nor for anyone she cared about, down to the lowest-ranked of the foot soldiers she had brought to the field. Thus, resolved to wait, she leaned herself back against the pod, taking a half-seat upon its upturned rim, and propped up the Murasama beside her.
A familiar cry had Justine looking up into the sky, and she found herself grinning as the newest of her companions, Satanael, swooped down from the murky darkness of the clouds and flew straight for her. She lifted her left arm, for it was in the right that she held the gun, and caught the ponderously large black bird upon the back of her hand, before bringing that hand, and the bird perched upon it, slowly and gently up to her face. "Satanael! I must confess, I wasn't expecting you along for a little while longer…"
The raven puffed herself up, spread her wings, and mimed flapping them once, before dipping her head down twice. She was using multiple distinct gestures to construct a sentence instead of encapsulating an entire idea in a single combination of motions, which made Justine glow with pride—it was a large step closer to the independent formulation of speech, which was the goal—before she actually deciphered what was meant. You were in danger. I was worried.
"Well, that's very sweet of you, pet, but as you can see, I'm fit as a fiddle," she assured her raven, moving forward just a bit to bump the tip of her nose against Satanael's black beak in a show of affection. But then her instincts alerted her, and she looked up, past the carrion bird, to spot a green Knightmare that was by this point rather familiar en route towards her. "Unfortunately, Mama isn't quite done working yet, I'm afraid. You'll have to run along for a bit. I'll call for you when it's time to return, alright?"
Satanael's caw in response was an unmistakable sound of displeasure, but there was acceptance in the resigned combination of the hitching of her shoulders and the tightening talons that gripped Justine's hand, so Justine wasn't particularly concerned about her companion's defiance. She turned back to the bird fully and nuzzled against the black beak once more, before she stretched her left arm out again, and sent her raven skyward with a deft, graceful flick of her wrist that boosted her aloft.
Sparing a moment to watch her raven's progress skyward, Justine considered, only semi-seriously, how well the 10mm rounds that fed her Mauser would fare against the mercenary commander's armoured Knightmare. Laughing the thought away ruefully, she spared enough thought for a half-formed apology to the weapon that would remain unused before putting it back into the concealed holster that had been sewn into her coat, plucking the Murasama from where she'd put it down, and fixing the ballistic scabbard back onto her hip, where it belonged. Then, so armed, she stepped forth, planted her feet in the earth, and lifted her chin to regard the approaching mercenary as he'd chosen to be regarded: a creature beneath her, not an enemy, but an obstacle to be vanquished.
The green Ghedo Vakka slid to a stop, its cannons trained upon her, and its rear machine guns now fixing what targeting systems they had on her position. This, too, was beneath her; the mantle of hoarfrost rose to adorn her seemingly of its own volition, for the first time coming to her before she thought to call for it. It was thicker, now—the hide of a greater beast, the scales of a dragon, formed wholly of ice—and her heart chilled from within, the cold green flame from her vision, from her speech, and from every moment of her indignation and righteous fury from the death of Marianne to now, lingering as a steady presence, kindled in her breast. The sickly green flame did not burn her, of course, as it is not the way of fire to burn its own, but it hungered—oh, how it hungered.
"Princess Justine, I presume," the sellsword addressed her from within the confines of his cockpit, his voice carried forth upon his Knightmare's speaker system. His tone was as sardonic as it was insolent, in a way that provoked amusement and not outrage—his was the lot of the hound that barked and snapped, but would never think to presume beyond his station, to grasp beyond the measure of his reach—and were this any other circumstance, Justine could easily imagine that she might come to enjoy the man, in the way of a ruler beholding her fool.
As it stood, however, he had rejected her mercy, and so she would grant him no quarter.
"You presume correctly," she pronounced with a measured nod, for it would not do for her to be at all ungracious—the man was already due for execution, after all, and so any amount of vitriol or hostility would have been wasted upon him. "And you are the man who rejected my offer of mercy. I do hope that you are aware of what you have brought down upon you—for the sake of your comrades, if not yourself."
"Mercy?" the mercenary scoffed incredulously."Just in case you somehow haven't noticed, your highness, it's raining death out here."
Justine gave an insouciant shrug, and smirked sharply. "For you."
"…I'll leave the question of how you aren't dead yet to the eggheads at the High Order of Farlaf," the man decided, prompting Justine to cock her brow in intrigue, and memorise that name for the sake of future investigation. "For now, I'm just going to call it a feature of your Geass, somehow. But that doesn't mean you're immune to bullets."
"You know," Justine began, shifting her position to place a contemplative hand upon her chin in an act of pantomime, looking speculatively up at the thunder-clouds to complete the image. "I don't actually believe I've ever given that possibility a thorough battery of tests before. But, all the same, I suppose I really should thank you for confirming my suspicions—that you are aware of the existence of Geass seems to suggest that the so-called High Order of Farlaf is in some way affiliated with the practice, and the immortals that perpetuate it. It certainly bears more exhaustive scrutiny at a later date."
"Well, unless you want to find out the hard way, here and now, you're going to surrender," the man claimed, and Justine let the pantomime slip, shaking her head and chuckling in wistful mirth as she stood with arms akimbo, her right hand right above the trigger-guard through her coat.
"While I'm quite flattered, honestly, I'm afraid I simply must decline," she replied, accompanying the return of her sharp smirk with a saucy wink for good measure. "I'm a married woman, you see, and I have little enough interest in men besides. Sorry about that."
The man was silent for a few moments thereafter, wholly and entirely gobsmacked. Then, he gave a heavy sigh, and asked, "Could you please take this a little more seriously?"
"Would that be your final wish, perchance?" she rejoined, turning one side a bit further towards the man in his Knightmare—ballistic-assisted iai or no, the greater the centripetal force she could put behind her arm, the better.
"Let me rephrase," the man attempted, one final time, and frankly, Justine was a bit shocked that he had yet to make good on his ultimatum—perhaps shooting a (relatively speaking, from his perspective) unarmed woman was beyond the bounds of even the mercenary's…well, mercenary moral compass. She'd have to get used to others from other nations having similarly backwards ideas, she knew, but she certainly wouldn't hesitate to punish the presumption here and now. "Unless you want me to pump your body full of ordinance, your highness, you're going to lay down whatever weapons you're carrying on your person, and you're going to come with me, quietly."
"Oh, am I, now?" Justine mocked, as she slipped her leg out further behind her in a wide sweep, and lowered her body to assume the proper stance. "Well, then, mercenary! I invite you to try your hand at this 'ordinance' business, and see where that gets you. But, just as a friendly word of advice, from one combatant to another? You'd best not miss…"
Lightning struck in a blinding flash. Thunder clapped with the force of a cannon.
The rear pair of machine guns spun up immediately, and began to spit out a heady hail of bullets; but Justine had been deflecting their like since she was a child and possessed of only a mere fraction of her current skill level. It was child's play to draw the Murasama and immediately begin deflecting, cutting the ammunition out of the air as she began to charge forth through the oncoming flood. She strafed this way and that, as the mercenary's Knightmare retreated to give its cannons a hope at getting a bead on her; but they were built to engage with objects of a certain height, and so when they roared, they did so in vain.
When the cannons failed and the machine guns spent themselves, slash harkens lashed forth from out of the unit's arms, where a Britannian Knightmare's hands otherwise would have been—for this reason did she evade them instead of ascend, for they would not have allowed her to mount the unit the way that a Sutherland's slash harkens had enabled her in the past; and her movements were far and away too swift, Justine imagined, for whatever aiming system the captain of the Immortals had installed to manage his missiles to allow him a target lock onto such a comparatively small object.
With his machine guns clicking empty, and with him fresh out of other options that might have allowed for him to secure her, the mercenary commander elected to employ one of the oldest tactics in the book, and charged her head-on, seeking to use his unit's quadrupedal configuration to run her over; and in any other case, against any other opponent, this alternative solution might well have worked.
It was a pity that he wasn't facing any other opponent.
Justine quickly sheathed her vibroblade, braced herself, and leapt—!
The impact of slamming against the tempered tungsten of the armoured leg just about drove the air out of Justine's lungs, but her bared claws held fast through her gloves, as before; and as before, she took a breath, dug in, and hauled.
To his credit, it didn't take the man long to realise the broad strokes of what had just occurred; his piloting abruptly became much more erratic, his goal shifting from running her over to shaking her loose, throwing her to the ground and away from his unit. The lurching and pitching and shifting, once again to the man's credit, did work to sling her this way and that in a fashion that guaranteed she'd be nursing a few of her less well-liked bruises in a few days' time, but the grip her claws had upon the metal as it sank into the angled surface and gained purchase was not so flimsy as to be shaken free in such a manner—she climbed all the same.
It was a bit taller than a Britannian Knightmare typically was, Justine's current quarry, but the fact that its construction was so compact worked to her advantage—it made the Ghedo Vakka far easier for her to scale than a Sutherland's more humanoid shape—and as she pulled herself up, it didn't take her long to come face-to-face with the factsphere sensor the unit used as a head. She winked directly into it once more with the same smirk as before, and then formed a blade with one hand and struck it dead-on.
The metal parted around her claws without any real resistance, and now that she'd blinded the unit, the socket used to house the sensor gave her ample purchase to free her hands, draw her blade and stab it down into the roof of the Zilkhstani Knightmare, carving a hole into it so that she could regard the devicer inside directly. After putting up such a valiant fight, the least she could give him was a quick, clean death.
Sheathing the Murasama once again to free her hands, she pried the piece of the roof she'd just cut out of his cockpit free, and looked down into it to finally regard the mercenary commander inside—!
Suzaku…? she thought, but the image of her best friend that was inexplicably positioned within the cockpit wavered in the face of her scepticism, as if it was struggling to maintain its composition. At once, she understood what was going on, and she closed her eyes, shook her head, and let herself utter the word in her mind (perhaps fittingly) like a curse as she dispelled the effect with a sharp burst of her willpower. Geass… Right, then. Change of plans.
She opened her eyes to find a Near Eastern man in a turban, smirking up at her in vicious triumph, the brand of Geass burning in his right eye—and the sheer audacity inherent to this display of flagrant deception irked her. So, when she reached into the cockpit and grabbed him by the neck of his blue jacket, she took a vindictive pleasure in watching his expression morph into confusion, and then into terror. The taste of the man's fear was euphorically bitter upon her tongue, and she savoured it sweetly with a grin and a playfully chiding tone, as she informed him, "Oh, dear—I'm afraid you must have been under some sort of misconception! You see, there's one thing you failed to account for:
"A Geass of that level simply doesn't work on me."
With that, she lifted him out of his seat and away from his discarded headset, dragging him up with both hands even as he began to wriggle and squirm in a blind panic. His protests were an unintelligible babble at first, but it took him only a moment before he found his tongue, and his words along with them.
"No, no, no, no!" he cried, shaking his head vehemently, hitting her arms and kicking out with his legs as his eyes shot wide. She felt a renewed thrust of his Geass into her mind, but she knew it for what it was, and brushed it off like it was little more than a particularly bothersome insect. "Please, no, don't…! I beg you, please, have mercy! PLEASE!"
"I offered you mercy once before, mercenary," she reminded the man, her tone sickly sweet. "Did I not? I offered you my mercy, and what did you do? You spat in my face. That you would dare to think, first to threaten my best friend, and then to cloak yourself in her image, shamelessly, with your cheap parlour tricks, only then to think to beg me for mercy…? Why, you must be a glutton for punishment!"
He shook his head deliriously, his eyes wide, his skin ashen, his sweat clammy and sour…
Euphoria.
"I told you that my mercy was a one-time offer, dear boy," she reminded him once again, her grip shifting to hold his throat in one hand so that her other could reach out and bop a mocking finger upon the tip of his nose. "And since you're clearly so keen on making things worse for yourself…well, let's just say that, between you and me? I'm more than happy to oblige."
The mercenary's throat was firmly within her grasp, and so with one hand, she lifted him high into the air above her, just as the first fat droplet of warm rainwater crashed down upon her face. Then another, and another, combining with the white particles from before into a heady deluge. And while the water hit Justine's skin harmlessly, leaving her feeling even a bit rejuvenated in its passage, as though the fatigue of the day's battle was being shriven from her and washed away with the rain, the mercenary was not nearly so fortunate.
His shriek of pain as the first droplet hit him, sizzling upon contact and burning its way through his flesh, fascinated Justine. The next one burned another track, and then another, and it seemed that far from acclimating to the pain, the mercenary's agony heightened and redoubled upon itself with each new-fallen droplet of tainted rain, to the point where his body thrashed regardless of his intentions, his hands flew up to her grip upon his throat in useless scrabbling, and she was given a front-row seat to watch as the water stripped the flesh and the muscle and the sinew from his hands. He screamed so loud and so high that he began to choke upon it, and a moment later he spat a thick, salty glob of his own blood onto her face as his vocal cords ruptured under the strain.
The rainwater washed the blood from her face—and still she watched, unflinching, transfixed.
There was a sentiment she had come across in her more idle readings, a particularly noble idea of what was just—if perhaps a bit naïve, in a way: if you would take a man's life, you owe it to him to look into his eyes and hear his final words. And if you cannot bear to do that, then perhaps the man does not deserve to die. A ruler who hides behind paid executioners soon forgets what death is.
She doubted the author of those words would have meant for them to apply in a situation such as this, but she indulged in the strangely intimate moment of judgement all the same. She had heard his final words, and now she looked upon him as the rain flayed him, and rendered him down to the bone beneath.
When the last embers of tortured life finally left his eyes—figuratively speaking, given that by that point, his eyes were nothing more than the vacant sockets in which they'd rested—she alone bore witness.
There was naught but a skeleton that remained in her grasp when at last she cast the body aside; the rain had soaked her through to the bone, and she could immediately tell that the final lingering remnants of the fighting force that the rebellion had brought to the field had fled the opposite river-bank, leaving their soldiers, their subjects, to suffer the same agonising death as the mercenary commander, whose name she did not know and had not cared to learn. Her contempt for them, and for their cowardice in their flight, increased substantially at that realisation—but right then, her concerns were at once both greater and more immediate than pursuit. They would retreat and they would lick their wounds all the way back to Panama City, so now that the battle was officially won, she needed to get back to camp, assemble her friends, and hammer out a strategy that would be usable with their limited resources to finally take the fortress.
The rebellion and its leaders would be warier of her now than they had been, and so she knew that it would be quite the task, with the variety of tricks the enemy would fall for having narrowed by quite the considerable margin, now that they knew how she punished even the most rudimentary of risk-taking. There was hardly a moment to waste, if she wished for her warhost to pull forth the same miraculous victory a second time.
As if summoned by the thought, a familiar white Knightmare pulled ahead through the thick sheets of falling rain. Much of its armour had been sundered and stripped, exposing servomotors and non-critical circuitry to the open air, it was missing an arm, and its head was dented in, with the Sutherland's faceplate scarred into uselessness and the finned crest at the back having been sheared free entirely; but for all that Justine immediately came to the conclusion that not even her skills would be sufficient to return the unit to a combat-ready state, it was still moving, and by the looks of it, the remaining arm still functioned to some degree—given the circumstances, Justine felt as if it was fair to say that Suzaku had come away from the fray she'd left her in far better than anyone had any right to expect, Geass-enhanced skills or no.
The white Knightmare came to an unhappy stop before her, kneeling and placing its hand upon the ground, and a moment later, the cockpit popped open to reveal her best friend, sitting prettily, if a bit frazzled, in the pilot seat as it slid out. Suzaku grinned at her in relief, and Justine returned the sentiment without a second thought—the brunette ran a hand through her chestnut mane, which now hung unbound, and joked, "Heya there, stranger. You goin' my way?"
Justine laughed, shaking her head, and leapt down from the slumped form of the Ghedo Vakka. "I just so happen to be. And would you look at that—here you are, right on time."
Suzaku just about incapacitated herself with life-affirming laughter as she sat there, exposed to the wind and rain, and once she had regained enough of her composure to speak intelligibly, she pointed to the remaining hand of her trashed Sutherland. "Hop on. I'm fuckin' starvin' over here!"
"I suppose you must be," Justine chuckled aloud as she strode towards the lowered hand. "Let's get a move on."
"Roger, roger," Suzaku replied, toggling the seat to slide right back into the cockpit and closing the hatch behind her.
Justine hopped nimbly into the white Sutherland's palm, holding herself steady as the Knightmare rose, and lifted her aloft—then, they were off, returning to the encampment in triumph.