Somewhere around the city of Aquarius, an army of 100 soldiers of the Liberation Army marched forward, grim, determined, and mostly silent, even as the blue magic energy bullets of the enemy’s artillery fell among them.

The Major had more than enough men to storm the park where the dwarves had set up their artillery firing positions, which was good, damn good, because his tanks were the first things to vanish.

Every devastator his men had planned to use for cover, every tank that was to be their fire support and the very tip of the spear, even other armored vehicles, were going up in flames so fast that men were choosing to hoof it over waiting for their turn to burn.

The fire of the dwarves was disgustingly accurate, with the only breaks in their attacks coming from those vanishing moments when the civilian buildings obstructed their firing arcs. The Major had hundreds of men, and he had been supported by a quarter as many tanks, but at some point in their long march towards the foe, they had become a target priority, one which only swelled, drawing more and more of the enemy’s guns in the process.

He had wanted to call for air support, either to hasten their approach or otherwise harass the firing positions, but apparently, the mech warriors of the Iron Kingdom doubled as the elves’ flying warriors, and they were not alone as multiple Orcs with rocket packs were also fighting in the skies. Reports even stated that some had surprisingly taken down some of the deployed fighters by veering into the sky.

Suffice it to say, the Navy had their own hands full. Even a tactical navy bombardment was out of the question for the time being, with the ships from the dwarves and the Orcs engaged with their own form of trouble.

He had wanted to wait for the shock drops and tactical squads from the Archangel Unit to arrive, to wreak havoc on the foe's lines even as they advanced, but the word had come in, and the Archangel Unit had their own problems and objectives.

They could not guarantee a drop on his battlefield. He had requested artillery support, but their artillery turrets and other defensive emplacements had been badly mauled, their vehicle depots raided, and their remaining artillery capacity was being used to hold the enemy’s assault on the center plaza.

In dire fear and fury, he had demanded some kind of support, even from the 19th Black Armored Division, something to help his men cover the distance without eating death all the way. But what he received, and was made to be grateful for, was far less than he needed, and nowhere near what he wanted.

Command had promised them a vague but potent number of reinforcements, but made no commitment on their arrival.

Fortunately, he did receive something more substantial.

A Men of Stone.

While he was glad to receive anything, what was unfortunate is that Men of Stone had many failings compared to most of them as they forgot to code this Men of Stone to be able to shield his men or provide any kind of value until the battle was properly met.

Large as it was, at least it was capable of dodging and moving around the incoming volleys and had survived up until now. But now, he had no tanks, almost no armored support at all beside this useless walking statue. His column was messy, disorganized, running in places, marching in others, always under fire.

He himself was marching with them, having abandoned his tank eight minutes before its destruction. Most of the other officers had followed suit while the ones who had not were dead. He flinched as heat scalded his skin. Several meters away, another magic energy impacted the road, scattering men and body parts in a red cascade that fell like grim rain over the marching soldiers around him.

The sight made him grin, something he regretted a moment later, spitting blood and growling, gritting his now red teeth. In truth, the fire falling among his forces was more showy than anything else, killing only five or six men per impact, nothing compared to the numbers he was bringing with him.

Most of the enemy artillery was either focusing on the tanks further back in his line, those tanks in the other two columns he had created when they had been forced to choose an approach, or on the main battle happening much farther away. Even so, just one man being pulverized and thrown into the air could cause a shower, and this was more than that.

Finally, relief as the shadow of one of the largest civilian buildings on their path passed over him and the front of his marching force, and they halted to recover and regroup their formations. Men wiped gore from their uniforms, shook soot from equipment, screamed into their hands, and became sick, tossing up where they stood.

The Major did not drop or rest, fearing that he would not be able to recover if he dropped any of his own fronts. While it was acceptable for his men to show their weakness, at least now while they could, it was not acceptable for him, now more than ever. Instead, he waved his radio crew forward and took one of their headsets for himself.

“Column Beta, Column Gamma, do you copy? Over,” he said.

[This is Column Beta to Column Alpha. We are about to make the final approach over our bridge. Over,] came the first response.

[This is Column Gamma to Column Alpha. We copy. We are also ready to make the charge, on your command—] The voice was cut off suddenly.

“Column Gamma? Column Gamma, repeat last transmission. Over,” he said.

No response.

“Column Beta, do you have a visual on Column Gamma? Over.”

Again, nothing. But he could hear the radio working... What had happened? Was he somehow being jammed? Had they been attacked? The more he thought about it, the more it made sense.

According to the map he read, the park could only be openly approached by three bridges. But luckily, just before each approach was a large commercial building, something the artillery was unable or unwilling to fire into, providing a place to gather in relative safety before the approach itself. If he were in command of the defense, this would be a prime spot for an ambush.

But then why had the others been attacked, and his group not? The others had arrived first, but if his location was also primed for a trap, why hadn’t it been sprung?

He looked around, and the reason hit him hard. His column was still gathering, regrouping. The enemy was going to hit hard, with something massive! But what?! Where? He looked, eyes scanning the road, the sky, the buildings...

The buildings! There, adhered to the side of the buildings, a strange looking armored vehicle stood silent, unnoticed in their altitude and angles, only visible from here, and only when looking back the way they had come.

His mind was frenzied. What should he do? What could he do without creating a panic?!

“Heavy weapons teams! Set down, arm!” he called. “Take cover! Into this structure! Prepare for an assault by the enemy!”

Men turned to heed him, and sergeants and other officers repeated his orders, but no one had caught on yet, not any but the most canny, who began looking around.

“Heavy weapons teams, aim there!” he yelled, as the men who had just sat down paused in confusion, wondering if they should run for cover or stay on their weapons. They followed his aiming hand in a vague direction and quickly spotted their targets.

They began to fire cannons, missile launchers, and more, beginning a stuttering first volley as the Liberation soldiers began to dash for the huge structure which had been shielding them from the artillery.

And then everything became hell. The enemy tanks adhering to the side of the tall buildings opened fire, and the doors and windows of the huge building the soldiers were fleeing towards flew open, revealing massed groups of dwarven troopers who had been ready and waiting all along.

"Blast 'em!" one of them roared, and the dwarves let loose a rain of scything blue death from their positions.

The Major suddenly found himself caught in the crossfire that was surely consuming his other two columns even then! His men were faltering, they were floundering! They were dying! He grabbed his comms, activated it, raising it to his lips, and nearly deafened himself with the sound.

“Raghh! Men! To me! To me!” he roared. His men did as instructed, beginning to gather.

“Affix bayonets!” he ordered. Those who had not already done so now locked the various wicked blades to the muzzles of their AF-1 “Magelocks” and automatic rifles.

“As one! For the People’s Empire! Charge!” the Major screamed as he brought free his AF-2 “Magespitter” from the Spatial Ring at his finger and dropped the mic, charging first, but quickly followed by over hundreds of roaring human warriors.

Together, they drove into the rain of blue bolts with desperation and fury, born of the will to survive, not as a race, not as an Empire, but as men, individually, and together, for just the next few moments.

He was in the lead for a while, but then a shot took him in the left thigh, the center of his chest, and the side of his head.

His mithril armor absorbed most of the first two shots, jerking and jostling him with the high-speed, magical energy impacts, but he felt a fifth of his face slough off, and horrendous pain blossomed there.

His speed faltered, and while he was not trampled, he was overtaken by the men around him, who, in turn, took the next volley of magic blaster fire, some of which had been destined for him, he was certain.

But the Major did not cease his charge, did not surrender to the pain eating his vision and filling his mind. Instead, he channeled it into a scream of defiance and kept his legs pumping, even as a magic bolt took the hat off his head, and even as a shot fired from a window far above cracked the mithril armor on his right shoulder. He drove on and on until, suddenly, he was there.

His men had formed a ring of the dead around the window that was his target, the dwarven troops stationed there armed with rotating magic cannons that spat blue death in wide volleys that only grew inescapably tight as he neared.

The Major used his free hand to yank his first grenade off his belt, bringing it to the thumb of his hand, which was still holding the Magic rifles, to pull the pin before lobbing it and leaping forward behind the mound of the dead.

The dwarven troops still fired, and their strafing shots caught his left leg and shin, blowing the mithril armor there away and burning him, but leaving him intact.

The same could not be said for his enemies, as the frag sailed into the wide window they were using to fire from. The dwarves scrambled to escape it, but not only were they weighed down by their large magic guns, but the Major had not stopped his assault, snagging and tossing more grenades from the corpses, clearing the window seconds later of anything that could still fight back.

His men found him and pulled him to his feet, others charging ahead and into the window, the same thing happening all around them as the dwarves either withdrew or were overrun by one method or another.

Cursing, spitting, and gratefully taking a shot of something which killed his pain, the Major followed his men into the building, still much more a sergeant than a commander.

The place had been some kind of market, a center of commerce with stalls and storefronts lining the walls of huge, open chambers of various shapes and designs, walkways always leading between them, matching the theme of the room. He moved through several and soon found himself fighting inside a luminous white, oval room, large enough to fit two Mobile Tank Fortresses, one on top of the other, its volume honeycombed with intersecting paths and bridges.

The walkways in question were of an odd design, in his mind, made to look like railless, guardless paths of light. In reality, the paths did have guards, solid barriers that rose about waist-high on either side, invisible unless touched by something, revealing smooth white ceramic.

He and his men, as well as their foes, used these for cover and found them oddly sturdy, though they became permanently visible in a wide radius whenever they were struck by magic blasters, bullets, or magic shots.

The near-invisible nature of the paths, and the layers upon layers of bridges above and below where he was fighting, led to a chaotic battlefield where the Major could only guess whether the shots he would take would actually fly to their targets or if they would be suddenly intercepted by yet another previously unseen barrier.

The room had been designed to look like a heavenly art gallery, but doing battle in it was like fighting in a Goddamned fun house!

Suddenly, the two men at his side screamed as blue magic bolts from behind them struck them down.

The Major leapt forward and tossed his smoke grenade, dropping to his hands and knees and crawling as they blind-fired after him, making for a bend in the path and thereby putting the waist-high barrier between himself and them.

As the smoke cleared, he could see how he had been outflanked.

The damned bearded midgets had dropped down from a higher platform and had hit him and the men behind him with an ambush.

They spotted him and fired, and he sneered as their shots hit the invisible barrier, and he vanished behind a suddenly revealed wall of pale but blackening ceramic.

He popped up and started getting his own shots off, but he was just as hindered as they were, and he felt like he had been chewed up by an Orc, his body a mess of aches and imprecision.

They were moving up as they shot at him, trying to catch him dead to rights and out in the open. He grit his teeth, slinging the AF-2 Magic rifle he had been using and drawing his pistol and his last grenade.

This grenade, however, is a new one recently invented, in which he pulled the pin on the thing and pitched it directly at the advancing troopers.

The wounded major then watched the sphere adhere itself to ceramic with some unseen technology, the gyroscopic, shaped charge within spinning to face the surface before detonating.

He would have preferred to use a frag for this, as those grenades were made for armor penetration and did not have a great spread.

Still, it did its job, blowing open a segment of the walkway's barrier, killing one of the dwarves, and exposing the others. He popped up again, firing with his pistol, the dwarven troopers so close as to keep its limited power effective. He had downed one with the grenade, and now two with his pistol, before the three that remained were on him, charging the rest of the distance.

“Oh, fuck!” the Major groaned, shooting and stumbling as he took even more shots.

His chest plate cracked and hissed, his left arm cooked, and his right leg lost its strength as a small hail of magic blue bolts chased him to the ground.

He dropped both of his pistol and AF-2 rifle to the floor and reached for a combat knife at his hip, tugging at it, but suddenly found himself looking up at the three dwarves above him, one of them raising the butt of his magic musket to begin bashing.

The Major raised his arm to brace, and as the dwarves were about to bash him to death…

Thud!!

Without warning, something dropped behind the dwarves, a shape in black, hitting the ground with a heavy thud.

The dwarves spun with their magic muskets out, and the Major craned his neck to see what had happened.

It was a body, a human soldier in black, having fallen from above.

Thump!

Crack!

All of a sudden, another one fell not too far from them, the soldier groaning, leg clearly broken. The dwarves turned back to the Major, intent on finishing him before more corpses fell on them, but the offending dwarves never got as far as striking.

One dwarf’s bucket-like helmet, complete with the head inside, came flying right off his shoulders.

The other dwarves reacted quickly, but not quickly enough as the long barrels of their magic muskets made them too unwieldy to use in such close quarters.

It was the first "corpse," no corpse at all, the soldier having risen silently and attacked viciously.

The Major’s eyes bulged as he watched the soldier, dressed in a black clothing and armor, his face hidden in a large dark intimidating mask, lunge.

He lashed out at the second dwarf, swiping with his weapon, an axe of all things, and cut one of the dwarven trooper’s arms off at the elbow, following that up with a hard chop into the dwarf’s skull, ending him.

That was when the Major actually saw what weapon the soldier was using.

No axe at all, but a... shovel?!

The soldier yanked his shovel out of the dead dwarf’s skull and helmet, but would have been gunned down by the third dwarf had he not been gunned down first by the other soldier, who was sitting up, ignoring his obviously broken leg as he riddled the white-clad dwarven warrior with bullets from his automatic shotgun at close range.

Two more soldiers dropped with hard thumps, though the enemy was gone, and the rest came down on more sensible rappels as the Major was helped to his feet.

He looked up and whistled at the height the others were coming from, looking at the soldier who had helped him up, and wondering how he himself was still standing after a fall like that.

The Major was barely shocked to find someone he saw as extremely controversial.

General Trese, the second-in-command of the 19th Black Armored Division, a paramilitary faction filled with insane ultranationalist people coming down on her own rappel, her blood streaked grin more alive than ever before.

This was hell, and she was thoroughly enjoying it. “Finally, I’m glad to find a commanding officer who isn't a corpse,” she said, disconnecting from her rope and walking over to him.

“I am elated to report that the enemy is in full retreat. The fighting now is mostly in those packets that we managed to corner and cut off. This structure is ours,” she said.

He nodded grimly. “Yes, ours, to be our grave. Forgive me for saying so, but this is no victory, General. Our back is broken, our armor is alone, exposed, and destroyed, and what is left of us is packed into this building. As soon as the enemy finishes their withdrawal, I doubt they will leave it standing. They got what they wanted from this ambush, our approach is... blunted,” he said.

“But not halted,” Trese added.

He thought for a moment and then nodded. “How many men do you bring?” he asked.

She grinned more widely. “Thousands,” she said.

“And are they all as fearless and insane as this one?” he asked, clapping the soldier who had saved him.

Trese chuckled darkly, “More than that.”