(Written by Krieg.)
-Author's Note-
I have always been interested in the idea of what happens behind-the-scenes of anything major in terms of a plot, such as a war or a political struggle. Sometimes, the best of stories are not between the major players, but rather, the ones affected by it the most. This short story covers that issue, taking place in the first years of the Archdemon War.
-WARNING!-
Vivid description of gore and violence, be wary those with a weak stomach or a faint heart/Also, 1st and 3rd person narratives. Spooky!
~~~
The clock on the wall gave the ominous ticking and marching of time in this isolated room, one lone light dangling above a small, steel table. Within the room, dust and grime were etched onto the walls and flooring, stressing the lack of a use of such room, often more direct solutions preferred by the Coalition. Within the room, a lone figure impatiently sat, leaning back in her seat, holding her head high up for any of those observing to see. The figure in question sat a female, aged in her early 30s, dressed out in military fatigues and nearly bald. Scars littered her face and skin, along with a nasty burnmark covering the right side of her forehead.
A loud buzzer echoed within the room, and slowly, yet surely, a black-cloaked, white bird-masked doctor of sorts eagerly entered the room. With an almost childish joy in approach, the medieval doctor nearly pranced onto the other side of the table, plopping down a black medical purse that looked like it was on the verge of being ripped apart from within. Rubbing his white-gloved hands together, the doctor reached up to stroke the tip of his beak, as if it were his chin.
"So you must be one of ze survivors...Mmm? You have been...through a lot, yes?"
His words were slow and quiet, often breaking irregularly, yet having an eerily calm and relaxing sensation with his Germanic tone. Receiving only silence, the medical staff of the Coalition could only shake his head, leaning back in his chair. Looking almost challenged, although it was hard to tell with the mask, the healer extended his arms out slowly.
"My name is Dr. Corvus, I see that the lovely nurse...has taken your vitals. Ah, yes, most excellent, most excellent. I am here to zee your mind and, ah, physical state. I will be taking notes and seeing what treatments will, ahh, work and not work. Hopefully later, ah, in this...err, diagnosis, yes, diagnosis, that we will get better. Now before I start my treatments we, ah, must tackle this err...plague of your mind. My, ah, benefactors if you will have requested a personal record of your account on the, well, unfortunate accident."
The silence still reigned between the two, but now the aged woman glanced over at the doctor, a mixture of fear and resentment in her eyes. Not many had survived after the Incident, and those that did were barely in a state to be alive at this point. Truly and honestly, she was one of the few left that could detail the story, vital details in the effort to win this upcoming war. Abruptly, the woman spoke, her voice low, ragged, deep, and above all else, broken.
"Celine. My name is Celine."
"Ah yes, of course, most beautiful name. Wonderful. N-Now, Celine, I need you to give me a record of the accident..."
A sigh escaped the aged woman's lips, a veteran to the Coalition crossing her arms over her chest, a simple soldier being confronted with the horrible ghosts of the past. She wasn't a special individual, she was far from a hero, just one gear in a giant machine, not too unlike Dr. Corvus himself. No songs will be sung about her plight, no plays or games will be enacted for her glory, no, Celine would live and die, recognized only to her duty and her duty alone.
"It happened on Ash...."
---
"We departed from Outpost Delta supposedly at the break of dawn, but the air and the sky still looked dark and damp. We marched out of the Outpost, most of the civilians and settlers just beginning to awaken, merchants and cooks and tailors getting up to start another day. Recon scouts that had been up all night probably shooting critters got spooked by what they called a mass movement heading towards the trenches we dug out about half a click east of Delta. From there, the 545th regiment, myself included, made their way to investigate.
We had attacks from the Archdemon before, but we thought nothing of it. Between the Crossed and the Suffering, we beat their undead, rotting asses back to whatever hell they end up spawning from. I'm pretty sure my whole time stationed on Ash, that snowy goddamn wasteland, I saw only two of my brothers-in-arms take wounds, one of which was a causality. So, all things considered, I didn't take this seriously, none of us did- I still remember Jerolt in the back mocking Colonel Huey, talking like some constipated elder high on whatever narcotics the multiverse had to offer.
In hindsight, we shouldn't of been laughing along with him.
It took us only twenty minutes for our entire regiment, one-thousand strong, to reach the trenches. Now the first sign that this whole situation was absolutely fucked was the lack of anyone there, not to mention most of the radio equipment left there looked scorched and fried. The little campfires in and around the trenches were still burning, meaning that whatever swooped in just now did so fast. It didn't exactly help that our colonel, bless the old geezer, was about to have an aneurysm from barking orders to those poor bastard lieutenants around him. So, we gathered everything we could, from weapons all the way down to personal letters and playing cards. At this point, all of us felt like something wasn't right, like we were walking right into the trap of an enemy we sorely, sorely underestimated.
BBRRRRWWWWWW!
I tell you what, I never heard something so fucking frightening in my entire life. To this day, I still can't describe it, sounding like some mixture of a whale and a deep siren. It spooked the hell out of all of us, with had our division leaders demanding us to form our firing lines, ranks of two, one man kneeling in front, the other man standing behind him. Imagine two ranks of a thousand men, standing just in front of the trenches, looking down in the small valley below of woodlands as far as the eye could see. I could still remember my Bushmaster rattling in my hands, not sure if it was the cold or the fear.
Before I talk...I have to tell you, we were not equipped to deal with this bullshit. We were taught from our very first day of training how to deal with the Crossed and the Suffering, at best a Warden and some typical human targets. You know how much spare ammunition we got on patrols like this? Two extra magazine. Only two extra fucking magazines not counting the supplies back at the Outpost. We wore a combat vests that could hold fourteen magazines, but no, the command thought we only needed two. It didn't help either that we had only four fucking gunners and a single rocket launcher, just one, out of whole damn regiment.
Yeah, sure, if we was on some high-target planet that was urbanized and whatnot, command we give us more guns and ammunition. But they figured that the Archdemon would just be so stupid to only use at best those braindead abominations and nothing more. That is how wars are lost, doctor, it isn't about how much strength you have it matters how quick you can adapt and how quick you can get out of your own arrogant ass. If we had even a fraction of the equipment we had back then, maybe, just maybe...we would of stood a chance."
---
"It was the Deacons we saw first, or whatever the hell those science-geeks call 'em. Imagine looking below and seeing a forest being blazed, not to see fire, but the glow in their lone, red eyes. They must of stood at least twelve feet tall, their skin looking like bark, hell, I think I even recall hearing some of my comrades jokingly call 'em "Burning Trees". Although, once we started to open fire, all jokes, even from Jerolt, were long gone.
We took our first volley against them, three rounds from a thousand guns pumped into those slow, huge, hulking thugs. Not a single one of them fell, and I swear I saw all three of my rounds go into one of em', their skin just eating it like shooting a piece of dead log. By this point, many of us were beginning to feel a little nervous, some of the more prideful of us even wondered if we would have to retreat. Ever since the boys upstairs revised our formations and firing, we won ever time over and over. How could we, after tackling with this Archdemon for years, be suddenly beaten back?
Our officers ordered the gunners and one lone rocketeer to take pockshots at the Arbiters, and for a brief moment, I thought we were just overreacting. Explosives and high-caliber machine guns seemed to do the trick, knocking down the first wave of them, their bodies blazing in fire dying, falling against the snowy earth, steam rising from the mesh of fire and ice below. We even had the high ground, the classic one-two punch of any military victory.
We thought that, until we looked up.
Right up under our own fucking noses, we saw humanoid figures dart below, malnourished and deformed, their eyes gouged and bodies twisted. Using the Arbiters as bait whilst we regained our posture, they lifted their weapons, some of us squinting to see what it was over all the dust, snow, and fire blazing about. As soon as I saw it, however, I knew damn well what those...things were holding.
Bows.
In an instant, their arrows shot up, blanketing the sky in sickening meshes of gore and green. Never before had I seen arrows like that, looking truly out of hell, the tips of them coated in some hideous, green, acidic bile burned into the fleshy, pink, unnatural tip. A chunk of the men and women standing up were hit by them, and to this day I can hear them screaming. The tips were drenched in some sort of bile, seeping into the target, burning and killing them alive. I swore some of the tips exploded in the air, spewing acid on our men. Even though, all things considered, most of the regiment was still up and active, the sight of seeing our own men and women die slowly was enough to almost break us right there. I heard the geeks call em' Bile Archers, and for once, I agreed with em' on the whole naming business.
It was around this time that all hell started to unravel, with what the rest, myself included, started to openly free and begin to fire down the hill. We started to cut em' down good, at least the Bile Archers, with the Arbiters advancing slowly and slowly. Soon, those little figures down the hill didn't look so little anymore, entrenching themselves into the base of the hill, marching along the trenches. Volleys of arrows kept coming down, our officers trying to reorganize the formation to prevent causalities. Eventually, we gave up the land overlooking the hill, making a tactical withdraw to the land just behind the trenches. We figured that the archers would have to climb on the top of the hill, and there, we could easily gun em' down, like we do with the shambling Crossed and Suffering we are so used to.
With probably I said a quarter of the men either wounded or dead, most of us, even I, was shaken up to hell. We had never seen an enemy like this before, we didn't even know the Archdemon was capable of hosting something as horrific and strange as this. We thought we were the baddest, toughest shit on the block, on the frontier of the Coalition, fighting off zombie hordes like it was nothing and getting a good pay out of it. But now, we were fighting a real, actual war, with real, actual combatants, not those braindead nutjobs that just rave about wanting to mutilate you for four hours. These were creatures and things with tactics, with a fucking gameplan to send us running back all the way to the Coalition Headquarters.
And you know what, it worked.
Most of us had already spent half of our ammo in the initial fray, waiting for the Deacons or Bile Archers to keep their advance so that we could gun them down on a level field. There was one final trump card the Archdemon used on us, something I swore I never would of seen in my life. We heard it a near mile away, but above all the gunfire and screams, we couldn't place our minds together to figure out what it was exactly. Every report I seen says it doesn't exist, but damnit it, I was there...I saw it before my fucking eyes and I still can't believe it.
We saw cavalry.
Legions of the demonic bastards, the horsemen on them stitched to their horses, feathery, artificial wings upon their backs. I heard nicknames of them being called "Hell's Hussars", and truth be told, it fitted them well. They dove galloped, leaped and navigated through the lines of lines of trenches, any sort of close, precise, exact shots from our rifles becoming a blur and mess. Years of training fucking threw themselves out the window, even I didn't know what to do, seeing them coming closer and closer, wielding lances looking like their were the sharpen fleshy bones of a giant. Some of them even wielded great machetes of sorts, usually the bigger ones, hacking eagerly at the air to chop and cut us down. So, naturally, I did what any sane woman would do in her position...
I turned around and began to run.
Not only I, but the entire regiment broke at this point. With barely any ammo and most of us too frighten to even make out the details, we ran as fast as we could. Some of the regiment stood in formation, continuing to fire away at the charge, but we knew that they would eventually be cut down. The tactic no longer worked, the war had changed, and because of it, we all suffered for it. I remember running by our radio operative, hearing the hissing from other outposts, from Foxtrot, Beta, Alpha, Zeta, all of 'em. We were all hit at once, and we were running away like our heads were already cut off.
By the time we reached Delta, we boarded up and sealed the village, but it was too late. Nearly all of the men in our regiment were butchered by the Hussars, and the Bile Archers were freely loosening their arrows into the outpost. Acid rained from above, men and women alike being pummeled with acid, the skin melting from their bones, the flesh searing and the skies looking darker and darker with each passing day. I swear to this day when I gazed behind me, only the rivers of blood and viscera were all that I could see left, not individual bodies. It was all just one disgusting color of red, with shades of violence and pure hell coating it.
It was nearing sunset when they finally broke through the walls, at this point, what few survivors, myself included, were escorted onto gunships evacuating what they could. Not all civilians made it on boards, and I still remember just looking as a family gazed in horror behind them, seeing the legions of that fucking Archdemon grinning ear-to-ear with a new plaything to gore and dismember. Entire ecosystems, entire fuckin' biomes were set ablaze, all life purged and destroyed, like a planet being glassed slowly and painfully
By the end of the day, the planet Ash lived up to it's name, and to this day, I still think the planet is burning. I don't know how many we lost, and to be honest, I don't want to know. I was on the few that came back that wasn't either in pieces or on the verge of dying, and to be honest...sometimes I wish I did die on there. Now all I see is all this young boys and girls running about chanting "Remember the Ash" like some disgusting rally for the Coalition. There is nothing patriotic or unifying about this, and to this day, I think it was one of the worse defeats in this damn war we were faced with.
And you know what is the saddest thing about it? It could of been prevented, it could of been stopped. With a few more men and better equipment, we coulda kicked that medieval hell back whimpering to the feet of that Demon, but no, we watched and watched as that entire world burned to a crisp. But, of course, when this war is over, nobody will care or remember about this, they'll go back, they'll think the Coalition is so fuckin' grand, and they'll talk about all the heroes and valor that was achieved. So when I heard kids saying "Remember the Ash", I know that the moment this is all done and over, nobody is going to give a shit about what happened...
Nobody but me and the rest of the survivors."
---
The interview came to a close, the doctor frantically writing away at the rest of the notes. Giving a brief bow to Celine, the bird-masked doctor stroked at his peak, looking up at the scarred soldier before awkwardly coughing. Adjusting his cloak, the doctor fidgeted about, his profession in relaxing and treating people, usually of PTSD, but Celine seemed to be more affect with hostility to the Coalition rather than the trauma of her own experiences. Putting down his clipboard, the Germanic doctor tapped his fingers together, looking straight ahead at Celine.
"Ah, uh, see. Thank you Miss Celine for s-sharing this vital information. Your service t-to the Coalition is highly v-valued, although I sense you are undergo much stress, yes, much stress indeed. I f-feel in my professional opinion you are using the t-trauma of your events as anger, a-and manifesting your anger against the Coalition. Thus, I will recommend a healthy dosage o...err..."
Dr. Corvus would not be able to finish, Celine arising from her seat and walking past the man. Grabbing a handle of the door, Celine gave an almost mocking bow, spite in her face and resentment at the futility of this supposed medical care the Coalition had sent out for her. At one point, Celine considered the doctor highly, and in possible hindsight, her future words may be a bit harsh. But, all things considered, Celine had enough of the Coalition, of the wars, of everything and anything that involved with him. Just like others, she wanted out, and with that, she pulled the door handle to leave the room, parting with one lone phrase of goodbye.
"Fuck you, good doctor."
-Author's Note-
I have always been interested in the idea of what happens behind-the-scenes of anything major in terms of a plot, such as a war or a political struggle. Sometimes, the best of stories are not between the major players, but rather, the ones affected by it the most. This short story covers that issue, taking place in the first years of the Archdemon War.
-WARNING!-
Vivid description of gore and violence, be wary those with a weak stomach or a faint heart/Also, 1st and 3rd person narratives. Spooky!
~~~
The clock on the wall gave the ominous ticking and marching of time in this isolated room, one lone light dangling above a small, steel table. Within the room, dust and grime were etched onto the walls and flooring, stressing the lack of a use of such room, often more direct solutions preferred by the Coalition. Within the room, a lone figure impatiently sat, leaning back in her seat, holding her head high up for any of those observing to see. The figure in question sat a female, aged in her early 30s, dressed out in military fatigues and nearly bald. Scars littered her face and skin, along with a nasty burnmark covering the right side of her forehead.
A loud buzzer echoed within the room, and slowly, yet surely, a black-cloaked, white bird-masked doctor of sorts eagerly entered the room. With an almost childish joy in approach, the medieval doctor nearly pranced onto the other side of the table, plopping down a black medical purse that looked like it was on the verge of being ripped apart from within. Rubbing his white-gloved hands together, the doctor reached up to stroke the tip of his beak, as if it were his chin.
"So you must be one of ze survivors...Mmm? You have been...through a lot, yes?"
His words were slow and quiet, often breaking irregularly, yet having an eerily calm and relaxing sensation with his Germanic tone. Receiving only silence, the medical staff of the Coalition could only shake his head, leaning back in his chair. Looking almost challenged, although it was hard to tell with the mask, the healer extended his arms out slowly.
"My name is Dr. Corvus, I see that the lovely nurse...has taken your vitals. Ah, yes, most excellent, most excellent. I am here to zee your mind and, ah, physical state. I will be taking notes and seeing what treatments will, ahh, work and not work. Hopefully later, ah, in this...err, diagnosis, yes, diagnosis, that we will get better. Now before I start my treatments we, ah, must tackle this err...plague of your mind. My, ah, benefactors if you will have requested a personal record of your account on the, well, unfortunate accident."
The silence still reigned between the two, but now the aged woman glanced over at the doctor, a mixture of fear and resentment in her eyes. Not many had survived after the Incident, and those that did were barely in a state to be alive at this point. Truly and honestly, she was one of the few left that could detail the story, vital details in the effort to win this upcoming war. Abruptly, the woman spoke, her voice low, ragged, deep, and above all else, broken.
"Celine. My name is Celine."
"Ah yes, of course, most beautiful name. Wonderful. N-Now, Celine, I need you to give me a record of the accident..."
A sigh escaped the aged woman's lips, a veteran to the Coalition crossing her arms over her chest, a simple soldier being confronted with the horrible ghosts of the past. She wasn't a special individual, she was far from a hero, just one gear in a giant machine, not too unlike Dr. Corvus himself. No songs will be sung about her plight, no plays or games will be enacted for her glory, no, Celine would live and die, recognized only to her duty and her duty alone.
"It happened on Ash...."
---
"We departed from Outpost Delta supposedly at the break of dawn, but the air and the sky still looked dark and damp. We marched out of the Outpost, most of the civilians and settlers just beginning to awaken, merchants and cooks and tailors getting up to start another day. Recon scouts that had been up all night probably shooting critters got spooked by what they called a mass movement heading towards the trenches we dug out about half a click east of Delta. From there, the 545th regiment, myself included, made their way to investigate.
We had attacks from the Archdemon before, but we thought nothing of it. Between the Crossed and the Suffering, we beat their undead, rotting asses back to whatever hell they end up spawning from. I'm pretty sure my whole time stationed on Ash, that snowy goddamn wasteland, I saw only two of my brothers-in-arms take wounds, one of which was a causality. So, all things considered, I didn't take this seriously, none of us did- I still remember Jerolt in the back mocking Colonel Huey, talking like some constipated elder high on whatever narcotics the multiverse had to offer.
In hindsight, we shouldn't of been laughing along with him.
It took us only twenty minutes for our entire regiment, one-thousand strong, to reach the trenches. Now the first sign that this whole situation was absolutely fucked was the lack of anyone there, not to mention most of the radio equipment left there looked scorched and fried. The little campfires in and around the trenches were still burning, meaning that whatever swooped in just now did so fast. It didn't exactly help that our colonel, bless the old geezer, was about to have an aneurysm from barking orders to those poor bastard lieutenants around him. So, we gathered everything we could, from weapons all the way down to personal letters and playing cards. At this point, all of us felt like something wasn't right, like we were walking right into the trap of an enemy we sorely, sorely underestimated.
BBRRRRWWWWWW!
I tell you what, I never heard something so fucking frightening in my entire life. To this day, I still can't describe it, sounding like some mixture of a whale and a deep siren. It spooked the hell out of all of us, with had our division leaders demanding us to form our firing lines, ranks of two, one man kneeling in front, the other man standing behind him. Imagine two ranks of a thousand men, standing just in front of the trenches, looking down in the small valley below of woodlands as far as the eye could see. I could still remember my Bushmaster rattling in my hands, not sure if it was the cold or the fear.
Before I talk...I have to tell you, we were not equipped to deal with this bullshit. We were taught from our very first day of training how to deal with the Crossed and the Suffering, at best a Warden and some typical human targets. You know how much spare ammunition we got on patrols like this? Two extra magazine. Only two extra fucking magazines not counting the supplies back at the Outpost. We wore a combat vests that could hold fourteen magazines, but no, the command thought we only needed two. It didn't help either that we had only four fucking gunners and a single rocket launcher, just one, out of whole damn regiment.
Yeah, sure, if we was on some high-target planet that was urbanized and whatnot, command we give us more guns and ammunition. But they figured that the Archdemon would just be so stupid to only use at best those braindead abominations and nothing more. That is how wars are lost, doctor, it isn't about how much strength you have it matters how quick you can adapt and how quick you can get out of your own arrogant ass. If we had even a fraction of the equipment we had back then, maybe, just maybe...we would of stood a chance."
---
"It was the Deacons we saw first, or whatever the hell those science-geeks call 'em. Imagine looking below and seeing a forest being blazed, not to see fire, but the glow in their lone, red eyes. They must of stood at least twelve feet tall, their skin looking like bark, hell, I think I even recall hearing some of my comrades jokingly call 'em "Burning Trees". Although, once we started to open fire, all jokes, even from Jerolt, were long gone.
We took our first volley against them, three rounds from a thousand guns pumped into those slow, huge, hulking thugs. Not a single one of them fell, and I swear I saw all three of my rounds go into one of em', their skin just eating it like shooting a piece of dead log. By this point, many of us were beginning to feel a little nervous, some of the more prideful of us even wondered if we would have to retreat. Ever since the boys upstairs revised our formations and firing, we won ever time over and over. How could we, after tackling with this Archdemon for years, be suddenly beaten back?
Our officers ordered the gunners and one lone rocketeer to take pockshots at the Arbiters, and for a brief moment, I thought we were just overreacting. Explosives and high-caliber machine guns seemed to do the trick, knocking down the first wave of them, their bodies blazing in fire dying, falling against the snowy earth, steam rising from the mesh of fire and ice below. We even had the high ground, the classic one-two punch of any military victory.
We thought that, until we looked up.
Right up under our own fucking noses, we saw humanoid figures dart below, malnourished and deformed, their eyes gouged and bodies twisted. Using the Arbiters as bait whilst we regained our posture, they lifted their weapons, some of us squinting to see what it was over all the dust, snow, and fire blazing about. As soon as I saw it, however, I knew damn well what those...things were holding.
Bows.
In an instant, their arrows shot up, blanketing the sky in sickening meshes of gore and green. Never before had I seen arrows like that, looking truly out of hell, the tips of them coated in some hideous, green, acidic bile burned into the fleshy, pink, unnatural tip. A chunk of the men and women standing up were hit by them, and to this day I can hear them screaming. The tips were drenched in some sort of bile, seeping into the target, burning and killing them alive. I swore some of the tips exploded in the air, spewing acid on our men. Even though, all things considered, most of the regiment was still up and active, the sight of seeing our own men and women die slowly was enough to almost break us right there. I heard the geeks call em' Bile Archers, and for once, I agreed with em' on the whole naming business.
It was around this time that all hell started to unravel, with what the rest, myself included, started to openly free and begin to fire down the hill. We started to cut em' down good, at least the Bile Archers, with the Arbiters advancing slowly and slowly. Soon, those little figures down the hill didn't look so little anymore, entrenching themselves into the base of the hill, marching along the trenches. Volleys of arrows kept coming down, our officers trying to reorganize the formation to prevent causalities. Eventually, we gave up the land overlooking the hill, making a tactical withdraw to the land just behind the trenches. We figured that the archers would have to climb on the top of the hill, and there, we could easily gun em' down, like we do with the shambling Crossed and Suffering we are so used to.
With probably I said a quarter of the men either wounded or dead, most of us, even I, was shaken up to hell. We had never seen an enemy like this before, we didn't even know the Archdemon was capable of hosting something as horrific and strange as this. We thought we were the baddest, toughest shit on the block, on the frontier of the Coalition, fighting off zombie hordes like it was nothing and getting a good pay out of it. But now, we were fighting a real, actual war, with real, actual combatants, not those braindead nutjobs that just rave about wanting to mutilate you for four hours. These were creatures and things with tactics, with a fucking gameplan to send us running back all the way to the Coalition Headquarters.
And you know what, it worked.
Most of us had already spent half of our ammo in the initial fray, waiting for the Deacons or Bile Archers to keep their advance so that we could gun them down on a level field. There was one final trump card the Archdemon used on us, something I swore I never would of seen in my life. We heard it a near mile away, but above all the gunfire and screams, we couldn't place our minds together to figure out what it was exactly. Every report I seen says it doesn't exist, but damnit it, I was there...I saw it before my fucking eyes and I still can't believe it.
We saw cavalry.
Legions of the demonic bastards, the horsemen on them stitched to their horses, feathery, artificial wings upon their backs. I heard nicknames of them being called "Hell's Hussars", and truth be told, it fitted them well. They dove galloped, leaped and navigated through the lines of lines of trenches, any sort of close, precise, exact shots from our rifles becoming a blur and mess. Years of training fucking threw themselves out the window, even I didn't know what to do, seeing them coming closer and closer, wielding lances looking like their were the sharpen fleshy bones of a giant. Some of them even wielded great machetes of sorts, usually the bigger ones, hacking eagerly at the air to chop and cut us down. So, naturally, I did what any sane woman would do in her position...
I turned around and began to run.
Not only I, but the entire regiment broke at this point. With barely any ammo and most of us too frighten to even make out the details, we ran as fast as we could. Some of the regiment stood in formation, continuing to fire away at the charge, but we knew that they would eventually be cut down. The tactic no longer worked, the war had changed, and because of it, we all suffered for it. I remember running by our radio operative, hearing the hissing from other outposts, from Foxtrot, Beta, Alpha, Zeta, all of 'em. We were all hit at once, and we were running away like our heads were already cut off.
By the time we reached Delta, we boarded up and sealed the village, but it was too late. Nearly all of the men in our regiment were butchered by the Hussars, and the Bile Archers were freely loosening their arrows into the outpost. Acid rained from above, men and women alike being pummeled with acid, the skin melting from their bones, the flesh searing and the skies looking darker and darker with each passing day. I swear to this day when I gazed behind me, only the rivers of blood and viscera were all that I could see left, not individual bodies. It was all just one disgusting color of red, with shades of violence and pure hell coating it.
It was nearing sunset when they finally broke through the walls, at this point, what few survivors, myself included, were escorted onto gunships evacuating what they could. Not all civilians made it on boards, and I still remember just looking as a family gazed in horror behind them, seeing the legions of that fucking Archdemon grinning ear-to-ear with a new plaything to gore and dismember. Entire ecosystems, entire fuckin' biomes were set ablaze, all life purged and destroyed, like a planet being glassed slowly and painfully
By the end of the day, the planet Ash lived up to it's name, and to this day, I still think the planet is burning. I don't know how many we lost, and to be honest, I don't want to know. I was on the few that came back that wasn't either in pieces or on the verge of dying, and to be honest...sometimes I wish I did die on there. Now all I see is all this young boys and girls running about chanting "Remember the Ash" like some disgusting rally for the Coalition. There is nothing patriotic or unifying about this, and to this day, I think it was one of the worse defeats in this damn war we were faced with.
And you know what is the saddest thing about it? It could of been prevented, it could of been stopped. With a few more men and better equipment, we coulda kicked that medieval hell back whimpering to the feet of that Demon, but no, we watched and watched as that entire world burned to a crisp. But, of course, when this war is over, nobody will care or remember about this, they'll go back, they'll think the Coalition is so fuckin' grand, and they'll talk about all the heroes and valor that was achieved. So when I heard kids saying "Remember the Ash", I know that the moment this is all done and over, nobody is going to give a shit about what happened...
Nobody but me and the rest of the survivors."
---
The interview came to a close, the doctor frantically writing away at the rest of the notes. Giving a brief bow to Celine, the bird-masked doctor stroked at his peak, looking up at the scarred soldier before awkwardly coughing. Adjusting his cloak, the doctor fidgeted about, his profession in relaxing and treating people, usually of PTSD, but Celine seemed to be more affect with hostility to the Coalition rather than the trauma of her own experiences. Putting down his clipboard, the Germanic doctor tapped his fingers together, looking straight ahead at Celine.
"Ah, uh, see. Thank you Miss Celine for s-sharing this vital information. Your service t-to the Coalition is highly v-valued, although I sense you are undergo much stress, yes, much stress indeed. I f-feel in my professional opinion you are using the t-trauma of your events as anger, a-and manifesting your anger against the Coalition. Thus, I will recommend a healthy dosage o...err..."
Dr. Corvus would not be able to finish, Celine arising from her seat and walking past the man. Grabbing a handle of the door, Celine gave an almost mocking bow, spite in her face and resentment at the futility of this supposed medical care the Coalition had sent out for her. At one point, Celine considered the doctor highly, and in possible hindsight, her future words may be a bit harsh. But, all things considered, Celine had enough of the Coalition, of the wars, of everything and anything that involved with him. Just like others, she wanted out, and with that, she pulled the door handle to leave the room, parting with one lone phrase of goodbye.
"Fuck you, good doctor."